CHICAGO—An 18-year-old man was charged with murder in the shooting death of a Chinese student near the University of Chicago’s campus after he was found carrying the gun used in the slaying, police announced Friday.
Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown said at a news conference that Alton Spann of Chicago was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, armed robbery, and two counts of unlawful use of a weapon.
It wasn’t immediately known Friday if Spann has an attorney.
Deputy Chief of Detectives Rahman Muhammad said that Shaoxiong “Dennis” Zheng, 24, was standing on a sidewalk in a residential area Tuesday afternoon in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the city’s South Side when Spann approached Zheng and robbed him at gunpoint of some of his belongings, including electronics, before shooting him in the torso and running off.
Muhammad said surveillance cameras in the area recorded Spann running toward a Black Ford Mustang that then sped away.
Using video from the city’s surveillance camera system, private residences, and the school’s cameras, the police were able to track the vehicle, which they later determined had been stolen from the nearby suburb of Markham on Nov. 3.
Students and friends of Shaoxiong “Dennis” Zheng stop by a memorial in Chicago on Nov. 10, 2021. (Madeline Kenney/Chicago Sun-Times via AP)
On the day after the shooting, Spann was spotted on the city’s North Side, carrying two guns and a key FOB from the Ford Mustang that was on the video, according to Muhammad. “The firearms was tested by the CPD lab and (one of them) was confirmed to be the gun used to kill Mr. Zheng,” he said.
Police also recovered a video of Spann selling some of Zheng’s belongings at a cellphone store, Muhammed said.
After the shooting, the University of Chicago’s president urged city officials and police to treat Chicago’s rising violence as a “public health crisis.”
In a statement, university President Paul Alivisatos, said, “The violence afflicting Chicago is on the same scale as a public health crisis and demands a commensurate response,” and that the university has been in contact with the mayor’s office, Chicago police, local aldermen and others.
There have been five slayings in Hyde Park so far this year, compared with none at the same time in 2020, as violence across Chicago has risen for two straight years, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
And according to WBBM-TV, Zheng, who graduated from the University of Hong Kong in 2019 and earned his master’s degree in statistics from the University of Chicago last summer, was the third University of Chicago student killed this year.
Cloth masks are of little use against COVID-19, according to a recently published analysis.
Federal health authorities and a slew of jurisdictions require or recommend wearing masks as a way to limit spread of the virus that causes COVID-19.
But a trio of researchers pored over the studies often cited by the officials and found they were poorly designed and offered scant evidence supporting mask usage.
Many of the studies are observational, opening them up to confounding variables, the researchers said in their analysis (pdf), which was published on Nov. 8 by the Cato Institute.
Of 16 randomized controlled trials comparing mask effectiveness to controls with no masks, 14 failed to find a statistically significant benefit, the researchers said. And of 16 quantitative meta-analyses, half showed weak evidence of mask effectiveness while the others “were equivocal or critical as to whether evidence supports a public recommendation of masks,” they added.
“The biggest takeaway is that more than 100 years of attempts to prove that masks are beneficial has produced a large volume of mostly low-quality evidence that has generally failed to demonstrate their value in most settings,” Dr. Jonathan Darrow, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“Officials mulling mask recommendations should turn their attention to interventions with larger and more certain benefits, such as vaccines. Based on the evidence currently available, masks are mostly a distraction from the important work of promoting the public health,” he added.
One widely-cited study (pdf) by mask proponents, of rural villages in Bangladesh, found that surgical masks appeared to be marginally effective in reducing symptomatic COVID-19 but that cloth masks did not, Darrow and his colleagues noted. The other real-world randomized controlled trial examining mask effectiveness, conducted in Denmark, did not find a statistically significant difference in infections between the masked and unmasked groups.
“The remainder of the available clinical evidence is primarily limited to non-randomized observational data, which are subject to confounding,” the researchers said, including accounting for other differences in behavior among those who don’t wear masks.
They did say that there is evidence masks reduce droplet dispersion, though cloth masks are unlikely to capture the particles even if worn properly.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers cannot wait for higher-quality evidence to support masking, but from an ethical standpoint, they should “refrain from portraying the evidence as stronger than it actually is,” the researchers concluded.
“The truth is that there has been only two randomized trials of masks for COVID. One was in Denmark, which showed that they might be slightly beneficial, they might be slightly harmful, we don’t really know—the confidence interval kind of crossed zero,” he said. “And then there was another study from Bangladesh where they randomized villagers to masks or no masks. And the efficacy of the masks was for reduction of COVID was something between zero and 18 percent. So either no effect or very minuscule effect.”
Some experts, though, say the existing evidence does support masking recommendations, and several reacted strongly to the new analysis.
The analysis drew some pushback, including from Kimberly Prather, director of the National Science Foundation Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Environment.
Prather noted on Twitter that researchers said masks reduce the amount of virus in the air and believed that ran counter to their conclusions.
Darrow responded by saying the amount of virus in the air was a surrogate, not a clinical endpoint.
“The amount of pathogen in air (to be inhaled) directly determines the dose. This is directly linked to risk,” Prather added. “Or can you explain how less virus in the air could be higher risk? It’s equivalent to saying that less pathogen in drinking water is higher risk so don’t filter water.”
“If the theory diverges from what you see in real life, which one do you believe?” Darrow said.
If the Republicans had stuck together in the House of Representatives, President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill would be dead.
After all, six progressive Democrats refused to lend their votes to the $1.2 trillion plan unless the Democrats’ $1.75 trillion spending bill was also passed along with it. Perhaps they could have been induced to give in later, but without their support, the bill wouldn’t have passed this time around.
Instead, 13 House Republicans broke ranks and voted with Democrats, delivering a 228-206 victory for the president and for Democrat leadership on Nov. 5. The bill had already passed the Senate in August — with 19 GOP votes, Republicans who thought they were cutting a deal precluding the Democrats from spending more on things that weren’t really “infrastructure.” (In truth, much of that spending has just been pushed to the now $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” bill.)
Appearing on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” this weekend, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz had a message for the 13 House Republicans who broke ranks: Biden’s infrastructure bill “was failing” and “they breathed life into it.”
During the interview, host Maria Bartiromo noted that the Nov. 2 elections, which saw Democrat Terry McAuliffe defeated in Virginia’s gubernatorial race and New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy nearly ousted by his Republican challenger, might have been a signal to the nation’s politicians.
“You would have thought that the Democrats saw Virginia and New Jersey as a wake-up call to slow things down,” she said, but that they’d done “the opposite.”
And then there were the Republicans: “You had an opportunity there to stop this whole agenda, but your colleagues decided not to go that path. You had 19 of your colleagues in the Senate vote for the infrastructure package, you had 13 in the House vote for the infrastructure package,” Bartiromo said.
“What exactly did that do? Now, because they did that, the path is wide open for much higher taxes for the rest of us to pay. Isn’t that true?”
Cruz said this was “exactly true, and it’s maddening.”
Do you agree with Cruz?
At least in the Senate, Cruz said, “we spent week after week at lunch yelling at each other,” with those in support of the infrastructure plan arguing it would preclude the budgetary excesses the Democrats had been promising.
“They argued, ‘If we pass this, it’ll make the other less likely to pass.’
“That never made sense to me,” Cruz said.
“The Democrats never made any agreement to that. They didn’t say, ‘We won’t pursue the Bernie Sanders budget.’ What they said is, ‘OK, we’ll take both — we’ll take $1.2 trillion here, and then we’ll take $5.5 trillion here.’ That’s what the Democrats said.”
“And I will tell you, in the House, for the House Republicans who voted for this: Joe Biden and the Democrats, their agenda was on the rails,” Cruz said. “It was failing. It was on the way to going down.
“And what those Republicans did is they breathed life into it. They gave Joe Biden a political win,” he continued.
“He’ll now go across the country touting, ‘Look at this big bipartisan win.’ And that additional momentum, unfortunately, makes it more likely that they whip their Democrats into shape and pass some multi-trillion-dollar spending bill on top of this that will include, unfortunately, trillions in new taxes. That’s what the stakes are all about. I still hope it doesn’t happen.”
The only chance it doesn’t, at this point, is if the Democrats’ spending bill continues to be blocked in the Senate by West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin, who’s been holding up the plan up at present. That said, this kind of spending can only be financed through higher taxes — which aren’t going to be staved off forever, no matter what Manchin does.
The 13 House Republicans who voted for the bill — Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Andrew Garbarino of New York, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, John Katko of New York, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, David McKinley of West Virginia, Tom Reed of New York, Chris Smith of New Jersey, Fred Upton of Michigan, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Don Young of Alaska — gave various reasons for doing so.
Malliotakis told the New York Post that the bill would “improve the safety and prosperity of communities across America and make the necessary improvements to bring our infrastructure into the 21st century.”
“For far too long, our local, state, and federal leaders have neglected to modernize New York City’s aging infrastructure to keep pace with economic and population growth,” she said.
“The funding stream we are providing today will be used by states and cities to modernize roads, highways, bridges, sewer systems, and flood resiliency projects, including right here on Staten Island and in Southern Brooklyn.”
Katko, another New York Democrat, defended his vote by saying the plan would deliver on money to his state.
“This bill is a win,” Katko wrote in a tweeted statement, telling voters the spending would deliver a “once in a generation investment in our nation’s physical infrastructure including our roads and bridges, ports and waterways, broadband networks, electrical grid, clean water systems, and airports.”
Of the 13 Republicans who voted for the bill, it’s worth noting six were from New Jersey and New York, states that saw a windfall in spending from the bill.
Another two, Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, are noted Trump critics, both are retiring from Congress, and both of whom have broken from the party on a number of issues.
What these Republicans have done is consigned the country to higher taxes and spending that inevitably will not provide the return the administration and Democrats are promising it will.
Cruz is right — they breathed life into a bill that was dead to rights and handed the Biden administration a huge win.
Like the 19 Republicans in the Senate who voted for the infrastructure plan under the pretense it would preclude more spending by the Democrats, they may come to quickly regret the move — particularly when the bill comes due.
Judicial Watch has received first-hand evidence from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department that the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt was “unjustified,” the conservative activist group announced on Nov.10.
The organization said in a statement that it has received new audio, video footage and photo records pertaining to the shooting death of Babbitt, including a cellphone video of the shooting itself, as well as a short police interview of the shooter, U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) officer, Lt. Michael Byrd.
Babbitt, 35, was among the crowd that breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, interrupting a joint session of Congress convened to certify the presidential election’s electoral votes. As she attempted to climb through a broken window into the Speaker’s Lobby, adjacent to the House chamber, she was shot by Byrd.
Babbitt, who was unarmed, was soon declared dead.
Judicial Watch obtained the material through a May 2021 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Records include a new cellphone video, which has been edited by the D.C. Police and shows officers reacting to the shooting. The footage, which is 1.27 minutes long, depicts a chaotic scene as dozens of officers walk up a stairwell and approach a group of protesters inside the building before attempting to pull some of them away. The faces of those in the video have been blurred out however their voices can be heard.
The documents also include photos of the area where Babbitt died, which show broken glass and chairs piled up in the speaker’s lobby. There are also D.C. Police photographs of Byrd, his hands, and his gun, as well as pictures of a folding knife, which was allegedly found in Babbitt’s pocket.
There is also a 16 minute 40 second audio recording of police interviewing Byrd on the day of the incident. The voices in that interview and others have been digitally altered to try to hide the identities of those involved.
Byrd had defended shooting Babbitt and claimed that he issued verbal warnings before opening fire but admitted that he did not know Babbitt was unarmed.
“She was posing a threat to the United States House of Representatives,” Byrd said on NBC in August.
“I could not fully see her hands or what was in the backpack or what the intentions are,” Byrd said. “But they had shown violence leading up to that point,” he added.
Terrell Roberts, who is representing the Babbitt family, has told The Epoch Times that the killing was “a pretty clear case of shooting an unarmed person without any legal justification.”
Last month, Judicial Watch released records from the D.C. Police showing that multiple police officers claimed they did not see a weapon in Babbitt’s hand before Byrd shot her. One officer attested that he didn’t hear any verbal commands before Byrd fired at Babbitt.
Byrd was cleared in April this year by both the Department of Justice and the agency he works for following a “thorough investigation.”
“Officials examined video footage posted on social media, statements from the officer involved and other officers and witnesses to the events, physical evidence from the scene of the shooting, and the results of an autopsy,” the DOJ said in a statement.
“Based on that investigation, officials determined that there is insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.”
Two police officers and four protesters died during and following the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
“These recordings and photos provide dramatic, first-hand evidence that the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt was unjustified,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It is disturbing that neither the Pelosi Congress nor the Biden/Garland DOJ took no action over this needless death.”
According to the Washington Free Beacon, anti-Israel activist and terrorist lawyer Huwaida Arraf has launched her campaign running for Congress as a Democrat in Michigan’s 10th District. Incumbent congresswoman, Rep. Lisa McClain (R.), told the Free Beacon that “Huwaida Arraf is a Bernie Sanders-style socialist who does not share the views of Michigan’s 10th Congressional District,” adding that “the last thing we need in Congress is another member of the Squad, and that’s exactly who she would align with if elected.”
Arraf has a long and proud history of coming to the aid of anti-Semitic terrorists, including those who have committed vicious acts of terrorism. She has repeatedly used her status as an American citizen to try to protect Palestinian terrorists. In the infamous 2010 Gaza flotilla, “which was aimed at forcing Israel to drop its blockade of goods to the terrorist-controlled Palestinian territory,” Arraf explained that her role was “to put herself forward as an American citizen to dissuade Israeli security from using force to block the ships,” which were loaded with weapons for Hamas, by repeatedly stating that she was aboard an “American flag vessel.”
The Free Beacon notes that Arraf served on the legal team for Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh who planned a terrorist attack in Jerusalem in 1969 that killed two and injured several others. Arraf helped Odeh fight to maintain her U.S. citizenship, which she received after being released in a prisoner exchange in 1980, but Odeh was deported in 2017. Arraf also aided “armed terrorists who sieged a historic church in Bethlehem and murdered at least one civilian” in 2002. Eager to “shield” the terrorists from the Israeli military, Arraf had her group of “activists” enter the church, and brought the “holed-up” terrorists food and water.
Arraf is the cofounder of the International Solidarity Movement, “which encourages anti-Israel activists to ‘direct action’ to force confrontations with Israeli forces.” According to the Free Beacon, Arraf justifies Palestinian terrorism, and wrote in a 2002 article, “Palestinian resistance must take on a variety of characteristics, both non-violent and violent.”
In her tweet launching her campaign, Arraf references her history of being “beaten, shot at, imprisoned, and hijacked at sea standing up to injustice on the global stage,” and adds that she is not afraid to fight. She might not be afraid, but with that introduction and her record, Americans should be.
Many people scratched their heads when Joe Biden picked Harris as his running mate. The media claimed it was because she was an amazing politician. It had nothing to do with her race or gender. But since entering office, the woman has not had a stellar record.
She has a worse approval than Biden. That’s probably because she has done nothing with the jobs given to her. But recently she managed to drain even more water out of the shallow end. Just see what she asked NASA… about trees.
From The Right Scoop/ Twitter:
Kamala Harris interrupts a NASA presentation to ask if NASA “can measure trees” as part of “environmental justice.” pic.twitter.com/POoArDzaGc
Kamala Harris is a very special vice president don’t you think? Special. And she asked a very special question, interrupting a NASA presentation to do it, on the issue of tree justice.
That’s right, she wanted to know if NASA can use satellites to “track” how many trees there are on a neighborhood by neighborhood level, with those neighborhoods being apportioned by race, for the sake of environmental justice.
I think it’s safe to say that “social justice” has gone too far. No longer able to find real sources of racism in America, Kamala Harris is now asking about how racist a neighborhood is—based on its trees. Harris asked NASA if they could track tree density, per neighborhood, as some form of “environmental justice.”
Because, as we all know, racists love cutting down trees in majority-black neighborhoods.
What is Harris thinking? Does she really expect us to believe that a lack of trees in a neighborhood indicates its racial makeup? Or does she have a hunch and wants NASA to prove it? But we shouldn’t be all too surprised for her to think this way.
The left casts everything in the mold of race. She is assuming that, if there are lots of trees in a neighborhood, it’s because it is made of up rich people who planted them. And, as all social justice warriors know, rich equals white. So, if there are too many trees in a neighborhood… racism!
Has this woman ever gone to Brooklyn? There are lots of trees in the city—especially in the many parks managed by both the city and private communities. There are so many trees, despite the fact that the area is very racially diverse.
She should also visit cities outside the liberal bubble, where white, black, and other races get along very well. And guess what—plenty of trees!
Maybe there is a lack of trees in some areas because urban density meant they needed to be cut down. It had nothing to do with race, just the need to build more homes and buildings?
But nobody tell Harris that—she won’t understand!
Key Takeaways:
Kamala Harris asked if NASA could track trees for “environmental justice.”
The leftist seemed to think trees indicated the racial profile of a community.
Harris tried to tie the number of trees to racism, it seems.
Last week, Boston Celtics player Enes Kanter ripped the NBA during an interview with journalist Christiane Amanpour.
Amanpour first asked Kanter if the NBA was concerned about his outspokenness regarding Communist China — citing the kerfuffle with Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey and Hong Kong.
Kanter replied that he stands “for justice and freedom” no “matter who it’s for or against,” then offered a comparison between how he was treated for speaking out against Turkey versus how he is allegedly being treated when it comes to China.
“I have been talking about all the human rights violations and injustice [happening] in Turkey for 10 years, and I did not get one phone call. I talk about China one day … I was getting a phone call once every two hours,” the basketball player said.
Kanter then told Amanpour that when he first donned his “Free Tibet” sneakers on the court in Madison Square Garden, “two guys from the NBA” approached him and said that he needed to remove his shoes. When the officials allegedly told him that he wasn’t actually breaking any rules, Kanter kept his sneakers on, and the officials apparently later apologized
“[I’m] getting ready for my citizenship test, and I’ve been studying really hard, and there’s 27 amendments, and my First Amendment is the greatest amendment, is the freedom of speech,” Kanter reportedly told the officials.
Kanter also claimed that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told him that he and the organization were supportive of the player’s comments against China.
“I don’t know how much that is true because if they were really supporting me, they would have put something out there, they … would put like some kind of statement … because I told Adam this too: our team games, the Boston Celtics games, are banned in China, and this is unacceptable just because I talk about the human rights violence that happened over there,” Kanter said to Amanpour.
Enes Kanter has become an outspoken critic of Communist China and Chinese President Xi Jinping. On Friday, the Celtics players released a video defending the sovereignty of Taiwan, to which the president of Taiwan replied with a thankful message.
.@EnesKanter says that he doesn’t care about the cost that he may face from criticizing China. But are the NBA concerned? Kanter told me he has discussed it with commissioner Adam Silver. “I told him… am I breaking any rules?”
AMANPOUR: So, you say you do not mind about the money, about the influence, about anything, but what about the NBA? They must mind … because now, as we know, the Houston Rockets official who talked about Hong Kong a couple of years ago, they pulled all NBA from Chinese state television, and now Tencent, which is the streaming device, has actually pulled you all from the streaming device — and that is a lot of money. I think they pay … more than a billion dollars to the NBA. So, what do you say about that?
KANTER: I will just tell you this: I am for justice and freedom. It doesn’t matter who it’s for or against. I remember, you know, I have been talking about all the human rights violations and injustices [happening] in Turkey for 10 years, and I did not get one phone call. I talk about China one day … I was getting a phone call once every two hours.
AMANPOUR: Who were you getting phone calls from? Is it from the NBA? Have they said anything? Because they haven’t said anything publicly about you, as far as I can gather.
KANTER: I will tell you a story. I remember, it was the first time, it was our first game actually, it was in Madison Square Garden, and I wore “Free Tibet” shoes and went out there. I remember two, right before the game, it was two guys from the NBA came up to me and said, “You have to take your shoes off. We are begging you.” And I was like, “I’m sorry, what are you talking about?” He said, “You have to take those shoes off; we are getting so many calls,” and I was like, “Is there a rule that I’m breaking by wearing these shoes?” They said “no,” then I was like, “Okay I’m … getting ready for my citizenship test, and I’ve been studying really hard, and there’s 27 amendments, and my First Amendment is the greatest amendment, is the freedom of speech.” And I’m like, I know my rights; you cannot take my rights away from me. And I was like, “I don’t care if I get fined; I’m not going to take my shoes off.” And they told me, “We are not talking about fine, we are talking about getting banned.” I’m like, “Listen, I don’t care if you — whoever is your bosses, go tell them I’m ready to get banned. If I’m breaking any rules, tell me; I’ll be the first one to follow the rules, but if I’m not breaking any rules…”
Obviously, they came and apologized in half time, and they said “Sorry,” but I was like, “I’m not breaking any rules; I’m gonna do what I’m doing.”
AMANPOUR: So, do you think the NBA, therefore, has come to a different kind of understanding of all of this? Because back when the Houston Rockets official Daryl Morey, he tweeted, all he did was tweet in support of pro-freedom and pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and the NBA didn’t back Morey.
But subsequently, in the intervening time, they have said the NBA will not put itself in a position of regulating what players, employees, and team owners say or will not say on these issues. We simply could not operate that way. So, you must be satisfied with their stance.
KANTER: Let me just tell you this first. NBA made me do this, because every time, when one of the NBA teams or the commissioner came out and speak, they say, we are encouraging our players to talk about whatever they want to talk about; we are giving the freedom to our players to talk about all the injustices happening around the world, all the human rights abuse around the world. So, they give me this right; they told me to do this, basically.
But the other thing is obviously I sit down with people from the NBA, and I even sit down with Adam Silver, and had a conversation, and I told him, Adam, listen, am I breaking any rules? Because if I’m breaking any rules, please tell me, I’ll be the first one to follow every NBA rule because NBA gave me what I have and I don’t want to break any kind of rules that you guys have put on. He said, “No, you’re not breaking any rules.” Well, I told them, is the NBA against China? Is NBA and Adam Silver and the all the organizations … all the teams and owners, are they supporting Enes Kanter? He told me, “Yes, we are supporting you against China.”
So that is one. The second thing is, you know, I don’t know how much that is true because if they were really supporting me, they would have put something out there, they … would put like some kind of statement … because I told Adam this, too: our team games, the Boston Celtics games, are banned in China, and this is unacceptable just because I talk about the human rights violence [that are happening] over there. People think I do politics; I don’t do politics. I do human rights.
AMANPOUR: I just want to make sure, you’re not saying the NBA gave you the green light to say this stuff; you’re just saying that their rules are that freedom of expression is an American right, or are you saying they specifically gave you the green light? … So not specifically, but just the general commitment to freedom of speech, right?
Top Arizona law enforcement officials say Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) is “completely absent” on public safety and border security, a situation that one police representative says “scares the hell” out of his officers.
Kelly has repeatedly criticized President Joe Biden’s lack of urgency on the southern border crisis as a record number of illegal immigrants attempt to cross into the country. For National Border Patrol Council president Brandon Judd and Arizona Police Association president Justin Harris, however, Kelly has failed to match his rhetoric with action. Both Judd and Harris said Kelly has never reached out to their respective organizations, a snub that Judd called “concerning.”
“It appears that he’ll give lip service to a topic, but then when push comes to shove, he’s right in step with his party. And we know that as far as his party goes with border security, they’re missing in action,” Judd told the Washington Free Beacon. “He’s never reached out to us, and that is what’s concerning, because we have people reaching out to us all the time on both sides of the aisle.”
Harris accused Kelly of playing politics with the border crisis as he looks to secure reelection in 2022 in a state that has soured on Biden and his policies. Just 36 percent of Arizona voters approve of the president, according to a November Civiqs survey, and 63 percent “hold the Biden administration and its policies responsible for the current immigration and border crisis,” a July Federation for American Immigration Reform poll shows. Kelly’s own approval rating has taken a 12-point hit among the state’s suburbanites, a general voting block that has already helped deliver double-digit Republican gains in Virginia and New Jersey.
“Mark Kelly scares the hell out of us, because it looks like he’s doing this for Mark Kelly,” Harris said. “My membership is scared that we’re one or two elections away from Arizona turning into a Chicago or a New York or a California. So when it comes to my association and our law enforcement communities and families, Mark Kelly scares the hell out of us.”
Kelly spokesman Jacob Peters called the Democrat a “son of two police officers” who “has been a consistent and effective advocate for Arizona’s border and law enforcement priorities.” Peters also said Kelly “looks forward” to meeting with the National Border Patrol Council in the near future. According to Peters, Kelly’s office reached out to the council “months ago” to schedule a meeting, a claim Judd disputed.
This is not the first time Kelly has reportedly ignored the National Border Patrol Council. During Kelly’s 2020 campaign, council vice president Art Del Cueto said the Democrat refused to shake his hand at a Tucson Veterans’ Day parade after Kelly identified him as “with the Border Patrol guys.” Kelly has disputed the claim.
While Kelly has looked to distance himself from Biden’s border policies, his “voting record is in lockstep” with the president, Judd said. Kelly in February voted against an amendment to protect former president Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forces most migrants to wait in Mexico before their U.S. immigration court hearing. Just months later, Kelly voted down an amendment that would have prohibited the Biden administration from canceling border wall contracts for which federal funds have already been appropriated.
A number of well-funded Republicans have entered the race to unseat Kelly in next year’s midterm elections, including Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich, tech executive Blake Masters, and solar power CEO Jim Lamon. Both Judd’s and Harris’s organizations have endorsed Lamon—for Judd, the decision stemmed from Lamon’s “regular communication” with the council.
“We sat down with Jim, we sat down with Blake Masters. From a policy standpoint, they’re both very good,” Judd said. “The difference was Jim was constantly reaching out. He would hear something in the news and say, ‘Hey, what do we need to do to fix that?’ He was very engaged on the issue of border security.”
The supposed experts shaping the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus forced their tunnel vision upon the administration, according to a former member of the White House Coronavirus Response Team.
In a new book, Dr. Scott Atlas lambastes the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx and former CDC Director Robert Redfield for refusing to look at all options.
In his book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” Atlas recounted an incident in which he wrote that he presented compelling data indicating that schools should be reopened and that children were not major factors in the spread of the virus.
Fauci and others acted as though he had never spoken, he wrote, according to excerpts published Saturday by Fox News.
“As I finished, there was silence,” Atlas wrote. “No one offered any contrary data … Zero comments from Dr. Birx. Nothing from Dr. Fauci.”
“And as always, not a single mention by Birx or Fauci about the serious harms of school closures. In my mind, this was bizarre,” he wrote.
Atlas wrote that he appeared to be the only one on the team looking at facts before forming theories.
“Why was I the only one in the room with detailed knowledge of the literature? Why was I the only one considering the data on such an important topic with a critical eye? Were the others simply accepting bottom lines and conclusions, without any analytical evaluation? Weren’t they supposed to be expert medical scientists, too? I waited,” he wrote.
When the reaction arrived, it was hostile.
Has the country lost faith in Dr. Anthony Fauci?
Birx said Atlas was “out of the mainstream” and part of a “fringe” group supporting school reopening, Atlas wrote, according to Fox.
“Meanwhile she insisted that all experts agreed with her,” Atlas wrote. “I shook my head, thinking of some of the world-class epidemiologists who agreed with me—John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—and wondered if she or Fauci had ever read a single publication by them.”
Atlas said he presented detailed data about the spread of the virus through children. Children were unlikely to spread the disease to adults, he wrote, and were themselves in little danger of catching it. In Sweden, in particular, he wrote, there were no children’s deaths from COVID-19, though schools remained open and there were no mask mandates.
“The icing on the cake was the evidence that almost all coronavirus transmission to children comes from adults, not the other way around,” Atlas wrote.
Atlas wrote that Redfield indicated that in his mind, the mountain of data was inconclusive.
“I was disgusted at Redfield’s apparent lack of knowledge, shocked at his ignoring the scientific studies that had been published from around the world,” Atlas wrote. “I looked around the room, wondering if anyone else understood the glaring incompetence on display. Clearly, [Vice President Mike] Pence needed more input.”
In excerpts published Friday by the U.K. Daily Mail, Atlas explained the root of his opposition to policies that pushed lockdowns as the magic answer to stopping the virus.
“People were dying from the virus, and the lockdown policies were not preventing the deaths,” he wrote. “The simple logic of assuming you could stop the spread of, and some said eliminate, a highly contagious virus by shutting down society after millions had been infected was worse than nonsensical.
“The idea of stopping all businesses and closing schools while quarantining healthy young people at little risk from a disease in order to protect those aged seventy and over — that is simply irrational,” he wrote.
In the book, he wrote that former President Donald Trump was being given bad advice from his top advisers.
“They had let Birx and Fauci tell governors to prolong the lockdowns and school closures and continue the severe restrictions on businesses – strategies that failed to stop the elderly from dying, failed to stop the cases, and destroyed families and sacrificed children,” he wrote, according to the Daily Mail. “The closest advisers to the president, including the VP, seemed more concerned with politics, even though the task force was putting out the wrong advice, contrary to the president’s desire to reopen schools and businesses.”
In late October, as Fox reported, Atlas accused Birx of trying to “rewrite history” during congressional testimony in which she said Trump’s advisers failed to push mask-wearing, social distancing, and other steps that could have saved lives.
Birx claimed Atlas wanted to let the virus spread to build herd immunity, regardless of the cost, a claim he denies.
“I never advised the president, the Task Force, or anyone else while in Washington to allow the virus to spread,” Atlas told Fox.
“Dozens of my writings and interviews during my Washington service explicitly called for specific mitigations, including social distancing, extra hygiene, and masks when not able to socially distance, and ‘focused protection,’ a heightened protection of those at risk, to allow a safe opening and end the public health destruction from lockdowns.”
The other day, I received the following email from Lisa Murkowski, currently Republican senator from Alaska:
“Fellow Conservative,
“Today I announced my campaign for re-election to continue representing the great state of Alaska. You’ve been there from the beginning, Fellow Conservative, and I wanted you to hear the news directly from me.
“As a born and raised Alaskan, serving my state has been the honor of a lifetime. This privilege is only possible because of fantastic supporters like you!
“This will be my toughest fight yet and it is critical that we get this campaign off to a strong start. That’s where you come in, Fellow Conservative.”
Fellow Conservative? (How many questions marks can I put after that without seeming illiterate?) Murkowski is about as conservative as Nancy Pelosi on one of her middling days. I was going to write AOC, but that would have been unfair—a tad anyway.
In 2013 the National Journal ranked Murkowski the 56th most liberal and 44th most conservative member of the Senate and it has only gotten worse since.
More recently, among many more liberal-friendly acts, the Alaska senator waffled forever on the Kavanaugh nomination, even after the most despicable smears, and then, of all things, voted to convict Donald Trump during that fiesta of the most overt leftwing partisan hackery, the second impeachment trial.
At the moment, three other candidates, all decidedly more conservative than Murkowski, have declared against her in the primary with two more, one of them being Sarah Palin, having expressed interest.
But… lest we the great unwashed forget where Lisa really stands… “Fellow Conservative” [caps. hers] appears not just the quoted three times, but five times in the brief solicitation email I received, which closes in the following manner (resist the gag reflex, please):
“I can’t thank you enough, Fellow Conservative. This will be a long and difficult road but with you by my side I know we will prevail.”
If you click on that email, it takes you directly to the familiar WinRed site that almost all conservative causes and politicians use for donations. By law the site is required to pass the money on to the individual candidate’s campaign within ten days.
You could call what Murkowski is doing attempted robbery through misrepresentation, but the larger, and more important question, is how this was allowed to happen.
According to the Washington Post, the following transpired when Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.)—chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee—appeared on “Meet the Press” Nov. 7:
“Scott reaffirmed his support for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), defying the attacks that Trump has levied against both. Trump has endorsed Murkowski’s primary challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, saying in June that Tshibaka is ‘MAGA all the way.’”
When asked if the NRSC would back Murkowski financially, Scott said “Absolutely.”
What kind of game is the Florida senator playing here? Arguments exist pro and con McConnell, who has done some things well, notably judicial nominations, but Murkowski?
Nothing is discernible for her and, as noted above, several good Republicans are running against her in the primary. Moreover, Alaska is a reliable GOP state. Trump won it comfortably in 2020.
I can only speculate what’s behind Scott’s support, but it couldn’t be more obvious that he is betraying, disdaining, alienating, ignoring—choose the word you wish—the Republican rank-and-file, who are finished with Murkowski. Ask virtually anyone. (It’s worth remembering Murkowski initially became senator through being appointed by her father, then state governor.)
This is a foolish thing to do on many levels, so the conclusion must be there is money involved for someone (or some candidate or candidates). Otherwise it makes little sense unless it’s part of a covert plot by so-called “moderate” (read: RINO) Republicans to subvert Trump. Possibly both are involved.
That this was done at a moment of maximum Republican enthusiasm after the victory in Virginia and the near-victory in Democrat stronghold New Jersey makes it all the more disturbing.
Many people wonder why Republicans lose when they are able to outdraw the Democrats on the ground, and not just at Trump rallies, in large numbers.
Perhaps it is that some of them, the leadership in particular, secretly want to lose—or to win only when their candidates are part of the Deep State/Uniparty.
That would appear to apply to Scott who should be removed from his position forthwith.
As for Murkowski, she’s probably toast anyway. The NRSC is wasting their… excuse me, your… money. I would advise you not to give them any. Pick your candidates individually and carefully.
On Nov. 12, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, signed House Bill 1508 into law a day after the one-page measure was overwhelmingly approved by both chambers of the Republican-majority state legislature. Proponents of the ban said the legislative effort was based on the demands of concerned parents.
“Our parents are seeing these types of ideas, these types of concepts in critical race theory being brought home by their children,” said Republican state Rep. Jim Kasper, one of the legislation’s sponsors, according to The Bismarck Tribune.
Unlike anti-CRT laws enacted in some other states, such as the Texas law targeting individual concepts derived from CRT, the new North Dakota law specifically mentions the ideology—which is rooted in Marxism—by its name and prohibits its incorporation into the K–12 curriculum.
Under the new law, school districts in North Dakota must ensure “factual, objective” instruction for students and “may not include instruction relating to critical race theory in any portion” of the curriculum that they require or offer. The law defines CRT as “the theory that racism is not merely the product of learned individual bias or prejudice, but that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality.”
In a statement to Fox News, Burgum said the law addresses parental concerns, while also maintaining school board autonomy.
“This bill addresses the concerns of parents while preserving the decision-making authority of local school boards to approve curriculum that is factual, objective, and aligned with state content standards,” he said.
The approval of the measure drew criticism from the North Dakota chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which claimed that the CRT ban would prevent students from having “an open and honest dialogue about America’s history.”
“This bill treats honest and frank discussions of race and its place in American history as a threat and attempts to censor classroom conversations,” the organization said in a statement. “This is particularly egregious in consideration of the North Dakota government’s turbulent history with Indigenous people who have been here since before colonization.”
The legislation comes amid outrage over CRT in K–12 education, a prominent issue in some of the nation’s recent high-profile elections. In Virginia’s gubernatorial race, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican running on an anti-CRT platform, defeated former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who insisted that CRT isn’t being taught in Virginia’s K–12 classrooms and stated that parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach their children.
Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz says Kyle Rittenhouse “should be acquitted” of killing two men and wounding a third during riots and protests last year in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and he should file defamation lawsuits against media outlets for claiming that he’s guilty of murder.
“If I were a juror, I would vote that there was reasonable doubt [and] that he did act in self-defense,” Dershowitz told Newsmax on Nov. 13.
Rittenhouse, if acquitted, should then “bring lawsuits” against corporate news outlets for articles claiming the teen engaged in “vigilante justice,” Dershowitz said.
“It’s CNN who is involved in vigilante justice. It’s The New Yorker that’s guilty of vigilante justice,” he said.
Several years ago, then-Kentucky high school student Nicholas Sandmann filed defamation suits against CNN, The Washington Post, and other outlets following accusations of racism against him after a viral video showed an encounter with a Native American activist in Washington, D.C. Last year, Sandmann ended up reaching a settlement with CNN and The Washington Post.
“The idea is to make the media accountable for deliberate and willful lies,” said Dershowitz, referring to Sandmann’s case.
Now, left-leaning media outlets “want an outcome” in the trial, Dershowitz said.
“They want a result, and if they don’t get their results—and you know this seeps through to the jury. I worry that the jury could be influenced by the fear that if they vote to acquit, they’ll be called racist and they’ll be attacked.”
Rittenhouse, 18, is charged with killing Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, in Kenosha on Aug. 25, 2020, during protests and rioting that followed a police-involved shooting. Rittenhouse has pleaded not guilty.
According to video footage of the incident, both Huber and Grosskreutz chased Rittenhouse as he was trying to run toward police after shooting Rosenbaum. Several videos and photos also show Huber hitting Rittenhouse with a skateboard, while Grosskreutz, who himself was armed with a handgun, testified last week that he thought Huber was attempting to attack Rittenhouse.
Dershowitz’s remarks come after Judge Bruce Schroeder, the presiding judge in the case, said he may allow the jury to consider several lesser charges in addition to the murder charges that prosecutors brought against Rittenhouse.
On Nov. 12, he told Rittenhouse that with the lesser charges, “you’re raising the risk of conviction, although you’re avoiding the possibility that the jury will end up compromising on the more serious crime.”
“You’re also decreasing the risk that you’ll end up with a second trial because the jury is unable to agree,” he said. Rittenhouse confirmed that he understood.
Journalist and The Gateway Pundit contributor Jacob Engels was hacked after exposing a filthy porn book in a Florida public school library.
Several weeks ago, my friend and investigative journalist Jacob Engels who often reports for the Gateway Pundit was removed with force by police during an Orange County School Board meeting in Orlando, Florida for exposing a disgusting graphic and pornographic illustrated novel being peddled to our public school children.
The video of him addressing the OCPS School Board, which was filmed by local journalist DatabattlesZ, quickly went viral after the news broke here first on The Gateway Pundit.
I have known Jacob for nearly a decade and his work exposing the political interests who orchestrated the sham trial that wrongfully convicted me in a DC federal court, had the corrupt Obama appointed judge in my case threatening him with arrest only because he dared defend me publicly and expose the epic corruption surrounding ever facet of my sham trial.
After he exposed the Orange County School Board for prividing pronographic material to minors, which is a violation of state law, left-wing activists hacked his website Central Florida Post, erased over eight years of journalism that has exposed Hillary Clinton and George Soros alike. They even left behind source code in Russian, to make it seem like Jacob’s website was built by the Russian state. This is an obvious smear tactic of the left, who tries to paint anyone who is for President Donald Trump or against the political establishment as a “foreign agent.”
During the politically motivated Mueller Investigation, I underwent the same demonic attacks on my livelihood and character, from the very same left-wing authoritarians who want to forcibly mask or vaccinate us, while allowing children to have access to graphic novels.
Jacob’s story is not uncommon. Millions of patriots are being targeted on a daily basis by Big Tech. His former hosting company even has ties to the Council on Foreign Relations, General David Petraeus, Goldman Sachs, and a host of globalist goons who hate America.
According to several internet security experts, sites like the Central Florida Post have been targeted by massive hacking operations, with no oversight or protection from the hosting company Bluehost, where Jacob’s website was formerly hosted.
Please donate to his Give Send Go today. Without outlets like The Gateway Pundit, or the Central Florida Post on a local level, we would have no idea about the criminality of the Democrats and Deep State.
The California Congressman has been a leading proponent of the Russiagate hoax, the impeachment hoax, and now the January 6th hoax. All after he met with a leading Chinese propagandist.
Rep. Adam Schiff met with a Chinese Communist Party official previously responsible for spearheading the regime’s foreign influence operations on a visit to Washington, D.C. sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation, The National Pulse can reveal.
The foundation, known as ‘CUSEF’ for short, has been flagged by the U.S. government for seeking to “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies.”
A key promoter of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and leading member of the unconstitutional January 6th committee, Rep. Schiff met with officials from the documentedChinese Communist Party-linked foreign influence group in October 2009.
Schiff recently turned his attention to former Trump campaign chief Steve Bannon, a known “China hawk,” raising questions as to whether or not the Congressman for California’s 28th Congressional district is working to neutralize critics of the Chinese Communist Party.
The China-United States Exchange Foundation’s (CUSEF) website reveals it “sponsored the visit” of Chinese Communist Party official Xu Kuangdi to the U.S., including a stop in Washington, D.C.
The former Mayor of Shanghai, Xu also served as the Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the “highest-ranking entity overseeing” China’s controversial “United Front Work Department.”
Beyond Xu’s leadership role within the United Front, his trip sponsor CUSEF functions as one of several United Front groups weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party to target American elites.
CUSEF’s website highlights Rep. Schiff as one of Xu’s key meetings during his visit to Washington, D.C.:
In Washington D.C., Professor Xu met with Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA), Congressman David Wu (D-OR) and representatives of think tanks.
The National Pulse has previously revealed how CUSEF has obtained “favorable coverage” from American journalists and former Congressmen, by offering free trips to China according to Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings. The trips function as part of CUSEF’s broader effort to “effectively disseminate positive messages to the media, key influencers and opinion leaders, and the general public” regarding the Chinese Communist Party.
Veterans Day was this past Thursday in the United States. In our neighbor to the north, Canada, it was Remembrance Day — a day commemorating the military fallen of the U.K. Commonwealth.
In one Canadian city, however, vandals decided there were a different set of “heroes” on this most solemn of days: namely, those who had received the COVID-19 vaccine.
According CTV News in Calgary, a wall of honor in Cranbrook, British Columbia, was defaced by vandals early Thursday morning. Their message: “The real heroes are the vaccinated!”
Wall of Honour vandalized with COVID-19 graffiti on Remembrance Day in Cranbrook https://t.co/VzyKWQ0JZ9
“Thankfully, the Cranbrook RCMP, Cranbrook Fire Services and City of Cranbrook staff worked together and were able to quickly remove the writings before any of our war heroes and veterans were able to see what had been written,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Const. Katie Forgeron said, according to the Cranbook Daily Townsman.
The city released a statement on their Facebook page, saying “we are beyond disappointed by the disrespectful actions of those responsible for defacing such an important monument on such an important day for all Canadians.”
Do you support vaccine mandates?
“This act does not speak to the character and values of our citizens and our community,” the statement continued.
“We are grateful to the member of the community that alerted us of the vandalism early this morning. We are extremely proud of our staff, RCMP and Fire Services members who were able to quickly remove the graffiti and allow for the Remembrance Day ceremonies to go on, and remain focused on honoring all our veterans, past and present for their selfless sacrifice.”
The vandalism came amid anti-vaccination protests in two other cities in British Columbia on Remembrance Day, according to the CBC — Kamloops and Kelowna.
**Correction: They brought their own microphone.**
“We are saddened that anyone would feel it necessary to distract from the sacrifice of our veterans and their families with political agendas. Especially on Remembrance Day,” said Val McGregor, president of the British Columbia/Yukon Command of the Royal Canadian Legion, in a statement.
Distasteful though this may be, protests against vaccination are unpleasant distractions. Graffiti on a memorial for veterans — calling the vaccinated the “real heroes” — is a direct insult to those who have served and died for Canada.
And yet, most of the CBC’s coverage was dedicated to the anti-vaccination protests.
The defacement was addressed in the second paragraph. The rest was mostly given over to what happened in Kelowna and Kamloops. In the final three paragraphs, the Cranbrook defacement was briefly sketched out.
While we don’t know the motives of the Cranbrook vandals, we know the message: Forget service members who have fought and died, those who’ve gotten an inoculation are the ones we ought to be celebrating. This is the kind of vaccine craziness we’re seeing now. To at least one person, heroism apparently isn’t service, it’s just getting a shot.
Assuming this isn’t a hoax, it’s rebarbative stuff — and something that merited far more condemnation than just the desultory mention it got from the national media in Canada. Any distraction from Remembrance Day is problematic. However, the inability to tell the difference between protests and vandalism which states the vaccinated are more heroic than veterans speaks to a different sickness entirely.
An eight-year-old Florida girl is making the system bend to her will as she defies the Palm Beach County School Board’s mask mandate.
So far, she has been suspended 38 times for failing to do as the adults tell her.
“I was really shocked by it,” said Bailey Lashell, Fiona’s mother, according to WTEN-TV. “I couldn’t believe it was all over not complying with the mask mandate.”
Fiona made a brief appearance at a board meeting to tell her school board exactly what she thinks of their rules.
“Just because I get suspended for not wearing a mask isn’t going to change my mind. You can keep suspending me. I still have the right not to wear a mask,” she said.
“It is not fair that I’m getting punished because you guys, the school board, are not following the law,” she said. “I’m still going to stand up for what I believe in.”
“I hope you all go to jail for doing this to me,” Fiona said.
She added one final thought: “Your rules suck.”
School board speech by Florida 2nd grader who was suspended 36 times for not wearing a mask: Legend 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/SjEAhuQuP8
Her mother is chronicling her daughter’s disobedience on a website named StandupforFiona, explaining how her child has been threatened with flunking second grade.
Is this nothing more than an abuse of power by supposedly responsible adults?
“Since August 31st and her first punishment of a referral and silent lunch in an office hallway, Fiona has been steadfast in her unwavering decision to not back down to tyranny and lunacy, vowing to do everything she can for every child going thru these lawless mandates,” she wrote.
“Fiona is a strong-minded and fearless young girl who was ready to conquer the world at 7. Unfortunately, the blows just seem to not stop as she was recently told after completing every assignment her teacher will provide that she is not only failing 2nd grade but that there is no way she could catch up per her teacher,” she continued.
Neither mom nor daughter seems the type to take these things lying down.
“Thankfully we realized this was as tyrannical a move from her teacher and after asking for nearly 3 weeks we received Fiona’s progression in an application known as success maker. Not only is Fiona at or meeting grade-level requirements in Math, but rather doing math work at a 4th-grade level with almost 100% mastery in most of the items calculated,” she wrote, noting that she put all the documents on the site for all to see.
“Fiona has changed her priorities a bit and is on a mission to take back, not only her rights but every American child’s constitutional rights from the tyrant school board,” her mom explained on the site.
Although in July, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order that made mask-wearing optional, in Palm Beach County masks have been mandated, although the mandate ends Monday.
“You wear it for a long time, and you breathe in all those germs,” Fiona said, according to WTEN. “You set it down at lunch and put it back on your face and breathed that all in all day long.”
“I’m doing it for other kids,” said Fiona. “Not just myself.”
“We have no problem with somebody wearing a mask,” Lashell said. “We just feel that the kids in this situation — or I guess the parents — should have been given that choice.”
Media organizations are taking aim at each other over the fake news reporting surrounding the Trump Russia dossier.
Axios, one of the leading D.C.-based corporate media outlets, has admitted that reporting surrounding the now infamous Trump-Steele dossier was “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” in an article slamming news-media colleagues for the years of fake news reporting.
“…the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid,” wrote Sara Fischer on Sunday morning, as it becomes increasingly clear to the nation’s journalistic class that not only were they willingly duped for years, but that they have made almost no efforts to correct their outright falsehoods.
Axios also reports:
Outsized coverage of the unvetted document drove a media frenzy at the start of Donald Trump’s presidency that helped drive a narrative of collusion between former President Trump and Russia.
It also helped drive an even bigger wedge between former President Trump and the press at the very beginning of his presidency.
Driving the news: In wake of the key source’s arrest and further reporting on the situation, The Washington Post on Friday corrected and removed large portions of two articles.
The article also takes aim at CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, and others:
CNN and MSNBC did not respond to requests for comment about whether they planned to revisit or correct any of their coverage around the dossier
Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn began reporting about the dossier prior to the 2016 election. Asked by Wemple whether he planned to correct the record, Corn said,” My priority has been to deal with the much larger topic of Russia’s undisputed attack and Trump’s undisputed collaboration with Moscow’s cover-up.”
Corn did not respond to a request to speak on the record with Axios.
The Wall Street Journal told Axios, “We’re aware of the serious questions raised by the allegations and continue to report and to follow the investigation closely.”
The judge presiding over the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has reportedly received a host of angry emails due to his audacious failure to treat the accused murderer with the same outraged bias as the establishment media.
That’s right — this guy has angered liberals by being an impartial judge.
Imagine that.
It’s bad enough that the media — not to mention President Joe Biden — has painted Rittenhouse as a white supremacist because he was forced to shoot three men amid violent riots that broke out following a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year.
That’s a ridiculous accusation to begin with, one that would render every small business owner who tried to prevent anyone from burning down his property in the summer of 2020 a seething racist.
What’s even more ridiculous is attacking Judge Bruce Schroeder for sticking to the basic principles of the American justice system and ensuring that Rittenhouse gets a fair trial.
Yet, according to the U.K. Daily Mail, Schroeder has been the target of death threats and vile accusations.
“I didn’t know that under your black robes of justice you wear a white robe of the klan. There is no way a fair trial can be heard under your supervision. Better yet, resign,” one of the messages reviewed by the Mail read.
Do you think Kyle Rittenhouse will be acquitted?
One email, which the British tabloid deemed too offensive to print in its entirety, allegedly expressed the hope that Schroeder’s children “become victims to the most heinous homicide known to man.”
“Enjoy your term, judge, it’s going to be your LAST,” another email read. “If I ever meet you in person, I fully intend to spit directly into your face, regardless the cost. You’re disgusting.”
The Daily Mail reported that Schroeder has mentioned the “thousands of communications” he’s received in court.
“I wouldn’t want to be those people,” he said this week, according to the outlet.
Schroeder has enraged the left throughout the high-profile trial, presumably for not ordering Rittenhouse to be tarred and feathered by a mob of social justice warriors the moment he stepped foot in his courtroom.
The judge’s first offense was establishing that the men shot by Rittenhouse could not be referred to as “victims” during the proceedings as, of course, whether or not Rittenhouse victimized anyone was exactly what the trial was supposed to determine.
According to an attorney who has worked in Schroeder’s courtrooms for 20 years, this is his common practice. Schroeder happens to be very sympathetic to defendants — which, were the defendant anyone other than a young white man who fired an AR-15 in self-defense during an anti-police riot, most leftists would certainly find admirable.
Another Schroeder offense came when his phone rang in the courtroom. Lo and behold, his ringtone was Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” Twitter leftists busted out their tinfoil hats quicker than you could say “MAGA” and pointed out that the patriotic anthem had been played at many a rally for former President Donald Trump.
Naturally, as far as they were concerned, this meant that the judge was not only a Trump fan but also sympathetic to Rittenhouse and probably a member of the KKK. There was no other explanation for why Schroeder would have selected the 1984 hit for his ringtone; it certainly wasn’t because he simply likes the song and his country.
Schroeder sent his critics over the edge last week, however, when, while discussing a lunchtime food delivery, he said he hoped his Asian food wasn’t stuck on “one of those boats in Long Beach Harbor,” a lighthearted reference to the supply chain crisis. Never mind that Schroeder used the most politically correct term possible for food from, well, Asia — to Twitter’s blue checkmarks, this was an insensitive racial comment.
The vitriol aimed at Schroeder is, of course, just an extension of the incoherent rage leveled at Rittenhouse, who has been turned into an effigy of everything the left hates simply for using a firearm to protect himself from violent rioters.
It’s not Rittenhouse or Schroeder leftists hate the most. It’s the idea that Rittenhouse should get a fair trial. It’s a justice system that does not take into account a person’s place on the intersectional totem pole when determining whether he has committed a crime.
That is the bigger issue at play here, and it’s the reason we must all pray that Rittenhouse does get a fair shake — and that more cities don’t burn as a result of the verdict.
Because if you think leftists hate this kid and the judge presiding over his trial now, just wait and see what they think if Rittenhouse is found innocent.
Alice Albright, recently tapped to lead a foreign aid agency in President Joe Biden’s White House, counts a six-figure investment in a private equity fund controlled by a Chinese Communist Party-run investment firm.
Albright was nominated to serve as Chief Executive Officer of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a federal agency focused on economic development in foreign countries with an operating budget of roughly $800 million. An alum of the Obama administration and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI), she is the daughter of Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who has a long track record of working with Chinese Communist Party influence groups and officials.
Albright’s 81-page financial disclosure reveals an investment worth $100,000 to $250,000 in the China-U.S. Industrial Cooperation Partnership. Formed in November 2017, the $5 billion private equity fund was jointly launched by the state-owned China Investment Corp (CIC) and Goldman Sachs.
CIC, a Chinese Communist Party sovereign wealth fund, describes itself as “a wholly state-owned company, with the mandate to invest and manage China’s foreign exchange reserves.” “We take advantage of Chinese Communist Party’s leadership,” notes the company in its description of its corporate culture.
CIC leadership ranks are also comprised of Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks.
Beyond backers of Albright’s investment being Chinese Communist Party officials, the fund seeks to use American capital to develop Chinese businesses.
Goldman Sachs outlined how the fund would “invest in American companies in the manufacturing, industrial, consumer and healthcare industries, among others, that have or can develop a material business connection to China” in an effort to “enhance commercial linkages and promote market access for US firms in China.”
The Cooperation fund “was set up expressly to help U.S. companies penetrate the Chinese market” and “the fund is touting CIC’s involvement as a strategic advantage in accomplishing this goal,” notes Reuters. In confidential marketing documents obtained by the outlet, Goldman Sachs boasted to its clients how the fund would “bring new pathways for growth via China.”
The revelation that Democratic operative Charles Dolan was one of the sources for the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele shows the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) withheld information from congressional investigators, Kash Patel said Friday.
“I’m the lead Russia guy, and I had never heard of this guy,” Patel said. “It means, to me, the FBI, DOJ under Rod Rosenstein withheld information that was critical to the Russiagate investigation that we were running in 2017, 2018. And who knows what else they’ve left out?”
Patel was an investigator for the House Intelligence Committee. He was speaking on “Kash’s Corner,” a program he hosts on EpochTV. Rosenstein was deputy attorney general under former President Donald Trump and appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Trump-Russia collusion theories.
Igor Danchenko, Steele’s primary sub-source, was charged last week with making false statements to federal investigators. One of the counts stems from Danchenko denying he spoke with a person dubbed “PR-Executive-1” in the federal indictment.
Dolan has had a relationship with former President Bill Clinton and former First Lady Hillary Clinton since the 1990s. Dolan campaigned on behalf of the latter in the 2016 presidential election. Hillary Clinton’s campaign helped pay for Steele’s dossier, which targeted then-candidate Donald Trump. The dossier has been shown to be riddled with false information.
The House Intelligence Committee, headed by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) while Republicans controlled the House following the election, sent letters and subpoenas to the FBI and Department of Justice for all documentation relating to the dossier, including all the connections that he and the FBI had throughout the scandal known as Russiagate, Patel said on his show.
“Charles Dolan never came up once. Me nor not one member of my team, nor any of the Republicans on House Intel, had ever heard of Charles Dolan until John Durham’s indictment,” Patel said, referring to Special Counsel John Durham.
As further evidence of what he described as the FBI and DOJ purposefully withholding information, Patel pointed to how the indictment reveals agents interviewed Danchenko on five different occasions. According to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 2019 examination of the dossier and related matters, only three interviews with Danchenko took place.
“They did not admit that to us when we were investigating the Russiagate investigation. I think we added at most two or three instances of an interview and we never got the full contents anyway,” Patel said. “Now there’s five. Where did that come from?”
“Why didn’t the FBI tell us this,” he added later. “Why did Rod Rosenstein withhold these documents and this information, even though Congress sent him subpoenas? They only turned over part of it, and what they did turn over, a lot of it was redacted. And that’s why we’re fighting such an uphill battle to disclose it to the American public, the full story.”
The FBI and DOJ didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Rosenstein could not be reached.
The action against James O’Keefe has prompted concern about the Biden administration’s commitment to the First Amendment.
The Biden administration’s effort to establish itself as a committed champion of press freedom is facing new doubts because of the Justice Department’s aggressive legal tactics against a conservative provocateur known for his hidden-camera video stings.
A predawn FBI raid last weekend against Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and similar raids on some of his associates are prompting alarm from some First Amendment advocates, who contend that prosecutors appear to have run roughshod over Justice Department media policies and a federal law protecting journalists.
Adding to the drama surrounding the brewing court showdown: It stems from a politically sensitive investigation into the alleged theft of the diary of President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley.
That document made it into the hands of O’Keefe’s organization, Project Veritas, which never published anything on the subject and eventually turned the document over to police.
An ensuing federal investigation resulted in the FBI raid on O’Keefe’s home in Westchester County, N.Y., at 6 a.m. last Saturday to seize his cell phones pursuant to a court order. O’Keefe says he stood handcuffed in his underwear in a hallway as almost a dozen agents — one carrying a battering ram — searched for the phones.
The politically fraught episode is shaping up as an early test of the vows from Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland to show greater respect for the media and to back away from the confrontational, often hostile approach favored by former President Donald Trump and his administration.
“This is just beyond belief,” said University of Minnesota law professor Jane Kirtley, a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “I’m not a big fan of Project Veritas, but this is just over the top. I hope they get a serious reprimand from the court because I think this is just wrong.”
O’Keefe’s lawyers complained to a federal judge this week that the raid unfairly denied him the legal protections afforded to journalists.
“The Department of Justice’s use of a search warrant to seize a reporter’s notes and work product violates decades of established Supreme Court precedent,” O’Keefe lawyer Paul Calli wrote to prosecutors.
O’Keefe’s lawyers are demanding that the court appoint a special master to supervise the review of the information on his phones, which they contend contains sensitive details about confidential sources, as well as privileged communication with Project Veritas’ attorneys.
Such a process is uncommon, but has been used in recent years to sift through information seized in federal investigations into two of Trump’s personal attorneys, Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani.
On Thursday, Manhattan-based U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres issued a one-page order giving prosecutors one day to confirm they have “paused [their] extraction and review of the contents” of O’Keefe’s cell phones. Torres — an appointee of President Barack Obama — has not yet ruled on O’Keefe’s request for a special master, who is typically a retired judge.
Project Veritas was facing a jury trial in Washington next month in the suit brought by Democracy Partners, a Democratic consulting firm it infiltrated, but on Thursday, a judge postponed the trial due to the raids and the unfolding legal fight over them.
At the center of the gathering legal storm is a pivotal question: Is O’Keefe a journalist in the eyes of the law?
O’Keefe’s attorneys insist that despite his evident political bent and his unorthodox — sometimes deceptive — tactics, he qualifies as a journalist under a federal statute and Justice Department regulations aimed at sharply restricting the use of search warrants and similar steps against members of the media.
Prosecutors insist they’ve complied with those requirements, but have thus far been cagey about whether or not they’re treating O’Keefe as a member of the press.
“The Government hereby confirms that it has complied with all applicable regulations and policies regarding potential members of the news media in the course of this investigation, including with respect to the search warrant at issue,” prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan wrote Monday in a letter to O’Keefe’s lawyers obtained by POLITICO.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month, Garland was asked who qualifies as a journalist under Justice Department policies. “It’s very difficult to make that kind of definition,” he said.
O’Keefe is certainly not a typical journalist. Indeed, several of his outfit’s major hidden-camera exposés have been directed at employees of major news organizations such as CNN and NPR, seeking to paint them as left-wing activists. (At least one such attempt was foiled in 2017 when Washington Post reporters suspected they were being set up and effectively turned the tables on O’Keefe’s operatives.)
While many of O’Keefe’s tactics are unsavory, they are far from unknown in the mainstream press. Hidden-camera stings and undercover reporting have fallen out of fashion at most traditional news organizations, but they were once a staple of network television news magazines.
In the 1970s, the Chicago Sun-Times bought a rundown bar and rigged it out with hidden cameras, successfully capturing city inspectors demanding bribes. NBC’s popular and controversial series, “To Catch a Predator,” revolves around hidden-camera stings.
O’Keefe’s rather overt political agenda is also in line with a long American tradition of advocacy journalism. And many conservatives view mainstream news outlets as pervasively liberal in their worldview even as most claim to be neutral in their reporting.
Some of O’Keefe’s practices do seem highly unusual. A poorly redacted pleading filed in the civil suit Project Veritas was set to face trial on next month indicates that O’Keefe encouraged a colleague to tell potential donors they could provide “input” on the timing of release of Project Veritas’ work, raising the specter that O’Keefe was essentially operating under the direct control of political benefactors.
“Real news organizations — whether Fox News, the New York Times or any other recognized media outlet — do not go to their donors, or advertisers, and ask for their ‘input’ on when stories should be run,” attorneys for Democracy Partners said in the court filing.
Kirtley, the Minnesota law professor, warned against denying legal protections to Project Veritas based on its political outlook or its tactics. She also noted that Trump repeatedly accused mainstream media outlets of both unethical practices and of having a political ax to grind.
“Trump’s been saying that about the New York Times for seven years,” she said. “It’s very dangerous to try to categorize people doing journalistic-type work, even if they’re not doing it the way I would do it or the way the mainstream media would do it or the way ethical journalists would do it,” Kirtley said.
Another First Amendment advocate, Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, also said the raids on Project Veritas were worrying.
“I don’t personally like Project Veritas at all, but imagine this was a liberal org under Trump. Not a good precedent,” he wrote on Twitter.
However, legal experts cautioned that even if Project Veritas and O’Keefe qualify as journalists under the law or Justice Department policy, that did not give them license to violate the law.
“If they’ve got evidence that [Project Veritas] has broken the law, then we’re in a completely different world here,” Kirtley said.
Precisely how the Biden daughter’s diary came into the organization’s possession is unclear, but there have been no public indications thus far that — if the diary was stolen — the conservative group planned the theft or helped carry it out.
Court papers provided to the Project Veritas founder when his phones were seized last weekend indicate that his devices were taken as part of an investigation that prosecutors are conducting into potential conspiracy to traffic stolen goods across state lines, as well as accessory-after-the-fact and misprision of a felony.
Precisely what the government told U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Cave to get the warrant used to seize O’Keefe’s phones is unclear and remains under seal.
But the bare-bones outline of the investigation contained in the warrant has fueled the concerns of First Amendment advocates because the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that media outlets cannot be held liable for publishing information that may have been obtained illegally, as long as they themselves obtained the material legally.
Project Veritas’ lawyer, Calli, acknowledged in an interview on Fox News’ “Hannity” last week that O’Keefe’s group “agreed to pay money for the right to publish” the purported Biden diary. Calli said lawyers for the sources assured Project Veritas that the diary had been obtained lawfully, but the group’s only information on how it was obtained came from the sources.
Calli told the court in a letter earlier this week that the sources told Project Veritas they obtained the diary after Ashley Biden abandoned it at a home in Delray Beach, Fla.
Lawyers tracking the case say the publicly available facts suggest two possibilities: the Justice Department deemed O’Keefe did not qualify as a journalist under DOJ guidelines and federal law known as the Privacy Protection Act, or concluded that he was a member of the media, but that Project Veritas’ personnel may still have committed a crime.
Some language in the warrant suggests prosecutors are examining whether a bidding process for the diary violated laws against fencing stolen items.
However, Calli insists that even if the FBI suspects O’Keefe or others of crimes, Justice Department policy required prosecutors to negotiate for Project Veritas’ materials rather than seizing them.
“The principles that informed this guidance are no less applicable where the news-gathering activities focus on the President’s daughter,” Calli wrote in the motion seeking a special master.
Emails obtained by POLITICO show prosecutors declined to tell Calli whether the Project Veritas searches were approved by a Justice Department committee that oversees investigations impacting the news media.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan declined to comment on the office’s handling of the inquiry. A Justice Department spokesperson also declined comment.
Over the past six months, Biden and Garland have introduced extraordinarily protective policies toward the press, protections so robust that some national security professionals have raised concerns. However, the fight with Project Veritas raises questions about how broadly the new administration intends to apply those robust protections.
“This is really a test in this administration of whether they’re going to put their money where their mouth is,” Kirtley said. “If they’re trying to be seen as great champions of press freedom, this is a pretty bad way to start.”
With the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial set to begin deliberating next week, it’s important to look back at what happened to another man who was ruthlessly assaulted by a mob in the same city during that series of riots.
Robert Cobb, 71, was minding his own business when civil unrest enveloped the area near his home in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Kenosha News reported Cobb did what he could to save the 100-year-old Danish Brotherhood Lodge after it was sacked by rioters.
Aug. 24, the night before Rittenhouse had run-ins with Anthony Huber, Joseph Rosenbaum and Gaige Grosskreutz, Cobb had attempted to protect the historic building with a fire extinguisher.
At one point, he began spraying rioters in the face with the fire extinguisher, as he would later explain, so that they might take off their masks and be filmed. He hoped that might identify them. He was hit in the head with concrete, suffered a broken jaw and needed stitches on his head.
WARNING: the following video is graphic and contains language which might offend some viewers.
Cobb’s story is one that we saw play out throughout the summer of 2020 in cities from Dallas to Portland. Good samaritans who wanted to protect their community were overwhelmed by mobs and attacked.
Do you think Rittenhouse will be found guilty?
Rittenhouse easily could have suffered the same fate — or much worse. He could have been killed during either of his two deadly interactions the following night. One could argue that rioters were incensed by the teen’s rifle, but seeing another person in possession of a rifle is not a justification to attack or kill them.
A rifle in a riot is also not the only deadly weapon.
In the teen’s first deadly encounter, he shot Rosenbaum, who he said was pursuing him, and who was not deterred by the presence of his gun.
R: He could have ran away instead of trying to take my gun from me, but..it didn’t stop him.
B: Mr. Rittenhouse, You’re telling us that you felt like you were about to die, right.
R: Yes.
B: But when you point the gun…that’s going to make them feel like they’re about to die. pic.twitter.com/HgauT7fq4Q
Rosenbaum, in every video shown to the jury, possessed two hands and two feet. Both are potentially deadly weapons. Rittenhouse made a decision to fire as Rosenbaum closed in on him. The man died while apparently trying to take possession of the teen’s gun.
That brings us to the second deadly interaction, when the teen was surrounded by people, including Huber and Grosskreutz. Huber struck Rittenhouse in the head with a skateboard and Rittenhouse shot him once. Huber died from a chest wound.
Somehow not mentioned in this CNN story: Getty photos show that Huber was actually beating Rittenhouse with his skateboard pic.twitter.com/J83ZbKbKy1
A skateboard is a deadly weapon when in the wrong hands. Run a Google search on “deadly skateboard attack” and look at all the coverage of people who were beaten to death with what Rittenhouse prosecutor Thomas Binger would probably call a benign piece of plywood sports equipment with plastic wheels.
As Binger has made abundantly clear, guns can be deadly. Grosskreutz himself has admitted he was pointing a pistol at Rittenhouse when he was shot through the right bicep.
#KyleRittenhouse – Under cross-examination Gaige Grosskreutz agrees that Rittenhouse did not fire at him when he had his hands up and that when Grosskreutz pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse while advancing on Rittenhouse, is when Rittenhouse shot him. Watch: pic.twitter.com/HSSFoINLCE
We’ll never know if Grosskreutz might have ended up firing. Rittenhouse didn’t wait to find out.
In just under three minutes, Rittenhouse went from walking toward a gas station to puttting out a fire to reporting he had just used deadly force to a line of police officers.
Rittenhouse, when looking at all the evidence presented, chose to live. He used his rifle when the mob came for him.
There are valid arguments that none of this would have happened if the teen had stayed home, or had refrained from carrying a firearm with him, but Cobb was only armed with a fire extinguisher. He was attacked without mercy.
Imagine what might have become of Rittenhouse if the mob had gotten its ugly hands on him after the first shot was fired. Imagine the beating — or worse — had he not kept his gun in his own hands.
Remember former President Barack Obama’s famous pledge in his push to pass the Affordable Care Act: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan”?
He said variations of it dozens of times over the course of 2009 and 2010 while pitching Obamacare to the American public.
In 2013, after provisions of the law were implemented and millions of people saw their health care plans go away, PolitiFact named the promise the “Lie of the Year.”
President Joe Biden appears to have taken a page from his old boss’ playbook as he attempts to sell the “Build Back Better” proposal, which would launch several new open-ended entitlement programs.
His consistent talking point has been that those making under $400,000 a year will not see their taxes go up. The White House has the pledge right on its website along with the pronouncement that the wealthy will finally pay their “fair share” under the plan.
In Scranton, Pennsylvania, last month, Biden said, “I guarantee you that no one making under $400,000 a year will see one single penny in tax go up. Not one.”
Biden: “The cost of the Build Back Better bill in terms of adding to the deficit is zero, zero, zero. Because we’re going to pay for it all.” pic.twitter.com/sRqBLeD6sA
In fact, he described his plan as “a tax cut for working-class people.”
Do you think Build Back Better would strengthen the economy?
Well, an analysis by the left-leaning Tax Policy Center found that “roughly 20 percent to 30 percent of middle-income households would pay more in taxes in 2022” under Build Back Better.
The group estimated that the tax increase for low- and middle-income Americans would not be substantial — $100 or less per year. Those making $200,000 to $500,000 would pay an additional $230 per year.
That, of course, is an increase of more than a penny and certainly isn’t a tax cut.
But here’s the kicker, after all Biden’s pontificating about the rich paying their “fair share”: Build Back Better — again, according to the liberal Tax Policy Center — actually lowers the tax burden on many of the wealthiest Americans.
You ask, “How can this be? Democrats are all about socking it to the rich.”
It all comes down to a provision in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed under former President Donald Trump that set a $10,000 cap on deductions that wage earners can take for state and local taxes when calculating their federal income tax payment. They’re known as SALT deductions.
Wealthy people in blue states with high income taxes like New Jersey, California and New York saw their tax bills go up when the new SALT cap went into effect after 2017.
“Wait,” you say, “I thought the Trump tax cuts were a giveaway to the rich.” That was a false talking point propagated by Biden, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Build Back Better benefits many high-income earners by taking the SALT deduction cap up to $80,000.
“The higher SALT cap would boost after-tax incomes by 1.2 percent for those making between about $370,000 and $870,000 (the 95th to 99th percentile),” according to the Tax Policy Center.
So Biden is lying. Build Back Better would raise taxes on many making less than $400,000 while easing the tax burden on the well-to-do, primarily in blue states.
But there’s another important aspect of the legislation that would hit Americans’ wallets across the board: a tax hike on corporations, reportedly from 21 percent to 26.5 percent.
The White House has claimed that the tax increase will not result in companies raising the prices for their wares.
Then-President Ronald Reagan explained in 1981 why this is not true.
“Some say, ‘Shift the tax burden to business and industry,’ but business doesn’t pay taxes,” he said.
“Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. Business is being taxed, so much so that we’re being priced out of the world market. But business must pass its costs of operations — and that includes taxes — on to the customer in the price of the product. Only people pay taxes, all the taxes,” Reagan continued.
“Government just uses business in a kind of sneaky way to help collect the taxes. They’re hidden in the price; we aren’t aware of how much tax we actually pay.”
Don’t be fooled. Build Back Better would result in a tax increase for many hard-working Americans while giving a break to Biden’s favored wealthy elite.
Border patrol agents this week in Texas arrested four suspected MS-13 gang members, as well as two illegal migrants who were previously accused of sex crimes in the U.S.
Fox News reported the arrests occurred in the Rio Grande Valley in a 14-hour period. Two of the alleged gang members had been previously deported.
Fox, citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, reported that the six people were taken into custody Friday near Roma, Texas. One of them was wanted on a warrant in Florida on a complaint he committed lascivious battery.
A 37-year-old Guatemalan national who entered into the U.S. near McAllen, Texas, was previously convicted of having engaged in lewd behavior with a child under 16.
The man spent 21 months in prison, but his identity was not released. None the men arrested were identified.
Immigration officials made the announcement of the arrests Friday, but offered no further details abut their apprehensions or detainments. Other MS-13 members have been arrested at the border this year as the crisis there has raged on for nearly a year.
MS-13 is a violent gang with origins in Central America and in California. It has a large footprint in cities across the country. Texas has seen its share of violence with the gang operating in the state.
A man affiliated with MS-13 was sentenced to life in prison this week in Harris County.
KPRC-TV reported 26-year-old Luis Gonzalez Cruz will spend the rest of his life in prison for murdering a teen boy who had agreed to testify against other members of the street gang.
Do you think the Biden administration is intentionally encouraging more illegal immigration?
Prosecutors said the teen, identified as Estuar Quinones, was shot by Cruz 15 times while he sat on a park bench in Missouri City, Texas, in 2016.
Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg hailed the conviction and sentencing as evidence that law enforcement officials in the area are going after gangs.
“Gang violence is an insidious and treacherous cycle of brutality and is particularly heinous when a cooperating witness is killed,” said Ogg. “It will never have a place in our city or county.”
Another man affiliated with the gang was sentenced to 40 years in prison over the killing of Quinones, KIAH-TV reported.
The outlet reported Darwin Josue Lopez-Ramos, who was 17 years old in 2016, helped to lure the victim to his death, along with several other MS-13 members.
The Justice Department has estimated that there are up to 70,000 MS-13 members operating across the country.
“The MS13 is a largely urban phenomenon that has cells operating in two continents. The MS13 has between 50,000 and 70,000 members who are concentrated in mostly urban areas in Central America or locations outside the region where there is a large Central American diaspora,” the DOJ has said.
“In Honduras and Guatemala, the gang is still largely urban. In El Salvador, however, the gang has steadily spread into more rural areas. Expansion beyond urban areas has also happened in places in the United States, most notably in Long Island and North Carolina, and increasingly California,” the DOJ added.
Elements of MS-13 have been reported as far away as Spain and Italy.
YouTube has again suspended Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) channel over a roundtable that featured people who say they were injured by COVID-19 vaccines and experts discussing the shots.
“For the 5th time this year, YouTube is censoring me from telling you the truth. This time they don’t want you to hear 3.5 hours of stories from doctors, scientists, and the vaccine injured,” Johnson said in a statement.
A 34-minute portion from the roundtable, held on Nov. 2, is still available for viewing on YouTube. The full version is up on Rumble, a YouTube competitor.
The roundtable stretched for nearly four hours. It included multiple people who say they suffered severe side effects from COVID-19 vaccines, including Theresa Long, an Army lieutenant colonel, and several experts, including Dr. Peter Doshi, an associate professor of pharmaceutical health services research at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy.
A YouTube spokesperson told The Hill that the suspension stemmed from Johnson citing statistics from the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System, a passive system run by federal authorities. Public health officials have repeatedly encouraged Americans to submit possible adverse events to the system for review.
Johnson noted that there have been over 17,600 reports of post-COVID vaccination deaths submitted to the system, which is well above the number for every other type of vaccine combined.
“These vaccine injuries are real,” he said.
“We craft our policies to reduce the risk of real-world harm, updating them as official guidance evolves, and we consider the context of a video to make exceptions that balance open discussion of people’s experiences with preventing the spread of harmful misinformation,” the YouTube spokesperson said.
YouTube also took issue with a participant wondering whether COVID-19 vaccines prevent death. The company appeared to be talking about Bob Kaplan, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health and Medicine, and a former National Institutes of Health official.
Kaplan told the roundtable that he supports vaccines and has gotten a COVID-19 vaccine himself but that he is concerned about “research integrity, and the process used to authorize, approve, and mandate vaccines during this emergency.”
Kaplan said he analyzed the data from the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials and found the death rates were identical between those who got a jab and those who got a placebo. He also called for more transparency from vaccine makers and from federal health officials.
Multiple participants questioned COVID-19 vaccine mandates, noting that the protection from the shots against infection has dropped sharply as time goes on, and that it’s also slipping against severe disease and hospitalization.
Johnson invited the heads of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other health agencies to the roundtable, but none accepted the offer.
President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday announced it is raising Medicare premiums, a move it blamed in part on the cost of drugs.
The Medicare Part B standard monthly premium will rise by nearly $22 to $170.10 next year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said.
“The increase in the Part B premium for 2022 is continued evidence that rising drug costs threaten the affordability and sustainability of the Medicare program,” Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, administrator of the agency, said in a statement.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is working to make drug prices more affordable and equitable for all Americans, and to advance drug pricing reform through competition, innovation, and transparency,” she added.
The move also stemmed from the limiting of the monthly premium increase this year in the Continuing Appropriations Act and from “spending trends driven by COVID-19,” the agency said. “It also reflects the need to maintain a contingency reserve for unanticipated increases in health care spending, particularly certain drug costs.”
One drug in particular was a major factor. Officials said the uncertainty surrounding the potential use of the Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm by people covered by Medicare meant they needed to store away a higher level of reserves. The agency in July began analyzing whether Medicare would cover the drug but has not yet finished the analysis.
Aduhelm, Biogen’s approved drug for early Alzheimer’s disease, is seen at Butler Hospital, one of the clinical research sites in Providence, R.I., on June 16, 2021. (Jessica Rinaldi/Pool via Reuters)
In addition to the monthly premium, the annual deductible will rise from $203 to $233. Also, Medicare Part A inpatient deductibles will jump $72 to $1,556 next year, and Medicare part A daily coinsurance and skilled nursing facility coinsurance will both increase at least $9.
Officials pointed out that many Americans covered by Medicare will see a net increase in Social Security benefits. The Social Security Administration announced last month that recipients will get a 5.9 percent increase in benefits.
However, the 14.5 percent jump in Medicare premiums—the highest since 2016—will eat up the entire adjustment for Social Security recipients with the lowest benefits, according to Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan seniors group.
“Social Security recipients with higher benefits should be able to cover the $21.60 per month increase, but they may not wind up with as much left over as they were counting on,” Mary Johnson, a policy analyst for the group, said in a statement.
Further, inflation is causing the cost of all variety of goods to rise, including core spending priorities like groceries.
Medicare is a federal health insurance program for Americans 65 or older. Americans can start receiving Social Security as early as age 62, though they receive more if they wait until full retirement age.
As House Democrats continue trying to muster enough votes to pass President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, said that the massive social spending bill—along with other Democrat-led policies—represent a “potentially fatal overdose of government” that could stifle free enterprise and push inflation higher.
Davidson, who serves co-chairman of the Congressional Sound Money Caucus, told NTD News in an interview that the Biden administration’s big-ticket spending proposals risk exacerbating inflation, which is running at a near 31-year high.
“The only debate on Capitol Hill is how much more gas to throw on the fire,” Davidson said.
“It gets bigger, and that’s the Democrats’ agenda—they want to throw more on with Build Back Better,” he said, adding that “it’s going to dump a lot of extra spending into the economy and it has a big impact” on inflation.
“Whether you’re talking about the American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure bill or Build Back Better—all part of this Bernie Sanders’ agenda,” Davidson said, alluding to the Vermont senator’s various left-leaning or far-left policy positions, including proposing to cut the wealth of billionaires by half over 15 years and initially putting forward a $6 trillion budget proposal that he said was “probably too little.”
“It is hostile to the American way of life and free enterprise. We’re confronting a potentially fatal overdose of government. We need more freedom and less government—and we need to embrace sound money,” Davidson said.
President Joe Biden has argued that his Build Back Better plan will ease inflationary pressures, including on the labor cost side by getting more Americans back into the workforce by reducing child and elder care costs. And more directly, his plan would lower costs for families by providing more affordable health coverage and prescription drugs, he said.
In a similar vein, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told CNBC in late October that the Build Back Better agenda would have an anti-inflationary impact by smoothing some supply-side dislocations and footing the bill for some costs facing American families.
“It will boost the economy’s potential to grow, the economy’s supply potential, which tends to push inflation down, not up,” she told the outlet.
“For many American families experiencing inflation, seeing the prices of gas and other things that they buy rise, what this package will do is lower some of the most important costs, what they pay for health care, for child care. It’s anti-inflationary in that sense as well,” Yellen added.
Yellen also said she continues to see inflation as a temporary supply-side-driven phenomenon that will normalize next year.
Davidson challenged the “transitory” inflation framing, noting that the Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned from around $4 trillion in the months prior to the outbreak of the pandemic to over $8 trillion.
“When you create that much cash into the economy, of course it shows up,” he said, adding that, initially, people were “happy” to see their financial assets grow in value, “but then you start seeing it in retail prices, and that’s what we’re seeing today.”
The most recent federal election filings by Republican Congressional candidate Anna Paulina Luna, whose biography, history, and temperament are already the subject of criticism by many conservatives and those in the America First Movement, reveal a $150,000 dirty trick. In fact, there could be some serious ethical violations as she used that amount of campaign funds on legal fees. Not to mention, an additional $32,000 was spent on her campaign manager in one quarter alone. This is not the kind of person I want to send to Congress – she is already showing how reckless her spending is with other people’s money.
Earlier this year, Luna (not her real name, and she is not Hispanic and does not speak Spanish) filed an extraordinary and sensational claim with the St. Petersburg Police Department and the State’s Attorney. She accused all of her prospective opponents in the upcoming primary contest for the Republican nomination for Congress in the 13th District (which is in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area) of plotting to murder her!
Luna’s sidekick, Erin Marie Olszewski, alleged that one of Luna’s then prospective Congressional opponents, William Braddock, told Olszewski in a phone call that he was involved in a plot with two other prospective Congressional opponents in the Republican primary, Amanda Makki and Matt Tito, to murder Luna in order to end her political ascendency. You can’t make this up! Makki ran for the nomination against Luna two years ago. Tito is a former State Representative candidate and decorated Marine combat veteran.
While this sensational charge got front page coverage in the Tampa Bay Times and POLITICO, both sources failed to point out that it was Olszewski who called Braddock (Braddock didn’t call her) at 1AM, and that the surreptitious recording of a phone call in which only the recording party knows the call is being recorded, is strictly prohibited by law in Florida. In fact, there are many instances of individuals being prosecuted for violating it.
Neither news organization pointed out that although a link to a recording of the entire call was included in Luna’s complaint to the St. Petersburg Police Department, because the call was conducted illegally, it could not be considered by the court in Luna’s failed effort to get a permanent restraining order against Braddock, who subsequently dropped out of the race.
Anna Mayerhofer (that’s Ana Paulina Luna’s real name) has pulled the restraining order scam at least 5 other times before. She filed a restraining order in an attempt to silence a family member who pointed out the falsification of her name and ethnicity, as well as against a woman in the panhandle who she thought was seeing her husband on the side. In fact, Luna claims that this woman violated the restraining order when she inadvertently visited a gentlemen’s club in Fort Walton Beach, Florida called the Red Rose Gentlemen’s Club, where Luna was violating military regulations by working as a dancer. Luna’s claim that she was only a cocktail waitress is vehemently denied by the club owner and multiple employees who worked in the club at the time. You can always tell when Anna Paulina Luna is lying; her lips are moving.
According to the Federal Election Commission report filed on October 15, it shows this legal hoax cost the Luna campaign $150,000 in legal fees. This is particularly problematic when you consider that Luna raised $231,000 in the last quarter, but spent $251,000. The filing for the Republican primary is not until next June, and the primary date is likely to be in August. The entourage of cult members, courtiers, hench-women, consultants, and camp-followers, and other hangers around Luna creates an unsustainable burn rate long before next year’s Republican primary. This campaign is just another example of political grifters like Luna trying to gain power while continuing to use GOP donor money on attorneys and consultants. It is the definition of The Swamp creatures that Donald Trump’s America First movement has tried to eradicate.
Perhaps Luna and her well-paid cabal believe the false “murder” narrative will distract voters from her past as a Democrat and Obama-supporter, not to mention her identifying herself on her California driver’s license as Caucasian rather than Hispanic. Anna Paulina Luna is the epitome of a chameleon; positioning herself as an America First candidate in the primary and then remaining silent on supporting Donald Trump in the 2020 general election. She has also done her best to cozy up to other “influencers” in the America First movement.
While I don’t know Ms. Makki, she appears to be an honorable woman. The smear of Matt Tito, who I do know, is both outrageous and insulting. Matt is a U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran who served his country with honor. He also took on a decidedly uphill race for the Florida state house against incumbent representative Ben Diamond who ironically is likely to win the Democratic nomination against a weak Democratic field.
In other words, should Matt Tito become the Republican nominee for Congress, this race against Diamond will be a rematch – except this time Tito will find a much more favorable constituency compared to the state house district in 2020. Tito took the nomination in a hopelessly Democrat district and waged an aggressive shoe-leather campaign running 18% ahead of President Trump and eight points ahead of Luna in this Democrat stronghold. Tito accepted the nomination largely because no other Republican would step forward and he felt strongly that no Democrat should get a free ride, particularly a Democrat as left-wing as Diamond.
Contrast this with Luna, who, although she served in the U.S. Air Force, was never deployed outside the country for combat. That makes her widespread use of a photograph of her in U.S. Marine fatigues and brandishing a military-style weapon, combined with her claim that “you can’t understand the concept of freedom being paid for with blood unless you’ve actually been there,” a very clear case of stolen valor. Falsely claiming combat duty is specifically prohibited under Florida State law. I can’t imagine the district’s many veterans will appreciate her lack of candor about her military record.
Luna’s husband, Andy Gamberzky, who she married, divorced, and remarried, is indeed a combat veteran who served his country with honor, and nothing here is meant to diminish or dishonor his service. His wife’s obvious attempt to conflate his combat duty to her “service,” is, however, a transparent fraud. Of course, in the recent report filed with the Saint Petersburg Police, Gamberzky signed his last name as Luna. His last name is not Luna and Florida law clearly states that it is a felony to sign a fake name to a police report. It is also possible that it was his wife who may well have signed for him without his knowledge or consent, to continue her “con” regarding her name for the people that would in fact look up the report. Either way, the illegal activity continues for the “Luna” family.
Luna and her supporters will counter all of this by pointing out that she was recently endorsed by former President Donald Trump. I highly doubt that our esteemed former President is aware of Luna’s false claims of combat duty, lack of any Hispanic ethnicity, name change, and her experience as a stripper, but then that’s what Republican primaries are all about. In fact, Donald Trump endorsed the opponent of Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina’s 11th congressional district in 2020 and Cawthorn defeated that Trump-endorsed candidate by 30 points. Today, Cawthorn is close with the former President. Endorsement mistakes happen and are often the result of establishment insiders having undue influence over outsiders like President Trump.
Who wins the Republican nomination in the 13th District of Florida is a crucially important contest when it comes to winning a majority back in the U.S. House of Representatives. Luna’s race against incumbent Charlie Crist was neither close nor impressive given Crist’s long service in both the State Senate and in various elected offices, including the Governorship. The flip-flopper Crist managed to hold on to 25% of the Republican vote against Luna. In fact, Luna ran 5 points behind President Trump, who only lost the district by one point.
Only time will tell what the impact of the revelations regarding Luna’s background, temperament, intellect, and ethics will have on Republican primary voters in the 13th District (or whether she will face legal action), but I am confident they, like President Trump, will learn not to make another mistake.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AmericanActionNews.com
Multiple Jan. 6 defendants were taken out of their cells on stretchers on Thursday, according to a court filing.
The situation started when one of the defendants refused to wear a mask, family members of Kelly Meggs, who is being held in the D.C. Jail, told Meggs lawyer.
Prison guards began spraying a chemical substance described as “some kind of mace or pepper spray, according to a filing in federal court.
“They sprayed mace or some type of gas at an inmate and kept missing so it went into an intake that fed into other cells and the lady with the key left because she didn’t like the gas, so the inmates in the cells who were being fed the gas from that intake were locked in for like 15 minutes while it was going into their rooms and they couldn’t see/breathe,” the family told Jonathon Moseley, the lawyer.
More than one of the defendants was taken out on stretchers to medical bays.
Julie Kelly, a writer for the American Greatness, reported on Wednesday that prison guards filled an area of the jail with chemical spray and three detainees had to be taken out on stretchers.
Moseley and the D.C. Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawyer said his client was not in one of the cells that the gas was cycled into by the ventilation system. He urged the court to explore with the Bureau of Prisons and Congress whether any federal funds are already or can be allocated to repair and upgrade the D.C. Jail facilities.
Neither prosecutors nor the judge has yet responded to the filing.
The jail has been under heightened scrutiny in recent months due to its holding of dozens of people accused of participating in the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
One defendant, Christopher Worrell, was released from pretrial custody last week because U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth became troubled by the lack of proper medical care he received from the jail.
The U.S. Marshals Service showed up unannounced at the facilities in mid-October. Officials deemed the part holding Jan. 6 detainees suitable but found conditions in another part that “do not meet the minimum standards of confinement,” the agency said in a recent statement.
Lamont Ruffin, the acting U.S. Marshal for Washington, told Quincy Booth, director of the D.C. Department of Corrections, in a letter that he personally went to the jail and saw “evidence of systemic failures.”
Prison guards routinely shut off water to cells as punishment and multiple cells had “large amounts of standing human sewage (urine and feces) in the toilets,” inspectors found. Additionally, guards were observed antagonizing detainees and hot meals were observed being served “cold and congealed.”
Jail officials were ordered to transfer around 400 detainees, or 36 percent of the inmates in the Central Treatment Facility, one of the facilities that makes up the D.C. Jail, to a prison in another state.
Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), after months of attempts, were able to tour the facilities last week. Greene said she witnessed terrible conditions, including Jan. 6 detainees receiving “very poor food” and “virtually no medical care.”
“I want to be very clear that we will deal with those deficiencies so that we have a safe jail until such time that the District is able to build a new one,” Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat who helped the members secure access, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Avis Buchanan, director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, said in a statement it has called out the treatment of detainees at the D.C. Jail for years.
“The inhumane conditions have included long-term solitary confinement for people with no disciplinary issues, lack of running water, full illumination of cells for 24-hours per day resulting in sleep deprivation, cells soiled with feces and blood, lack of air conditioning during the summer, and heat during the winter, lack of proper medical care, failure to provide mental health treatment, and physical and mental abuse by correctional officers of people in their custody,” Buchanan said.
Councilman Charles Allen, the Democrat chairman of the D.C. City Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, described the situation as “a crisis” during a remote hearing this week.
“I do not use that term lightly. The District of Columbia has a moral and constitutional duty to provide humane and dignified conditions of confinement and to do so immediately. And that’s not happening here,” he added.
D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, a Democrat, acknowledged during the hearing that concerns about the conditions in the jail “received little attention until they were raised, of course, by mostly white defendants accused of perpetrating the Jan. 6” breach, adding, “That’s not because people weren’t complaining.”
Chris Geldart, a deputy mayor, told councilmembers that there are “systemic issues” at the jail and the issues raised by U.S. Marshals were being addressed, but also claimed that the problems were “not so pervasive that [the jail] has become uninhabitable.”
Geldart also confirmed that Marshals were blocked from re-entering the facilities about a week after the inspection, pinning the decision on the warden.
The D.C. Department of Corrections and the U.S. Marshals Service on Nov. 10 entered into a memorandum of understanding that outlines plans to improve conditions at the jail. Each party is forbidden from issuing press releases or speaking to the media about the agreement without consent from the other party.
Group wants the justices to review the case alongside a similar challenge to Harvard
An advocacy group pushing the Supreme Court to overturn Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies on Thursday filed a petition that charges the University of North Carolina with anti-Asian bias.
The advocacy group, Students for Fair Admissions, asked the justices to fast-track a case against UNC that is still being processed in lower courts. The group is petitioning the Court to review the case alongside its landmark challenge to Harvard’s admissions practices, which it asked the justices to take up in February.
“If the Supreme Court decides, as it should, to reconsider racial preferences in college admissions, it should consider that question in the context of both a private school and a public school,” Students for Fair Admissions president Edward Blum said. “And it should resolve that question under both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.”
The request is a reminder that the Supreme Court is facing a wave of affirmative action cases. Separate attacks on affirmative action are unfolding across the country and will reach the justices in due course, even if the Court refuses to hear the Harvard and UNC disputes. For example, a challenge to race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Texas is pending before the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Both matters ask the Supreme Court to overturn a foundational affirmative action decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, and forbid consideration of race in college admissions. In Grutter, the Supreme Court said colleges may consider race as one factor among many on a case-by-case basis. Grutter involved an unsuccessful attack on affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan Law School.
Although it is a private institution, Harvard is subject to federal anti-discrimination laws because it accepts federal dollars each year. UNC, on the other hand, is a public school, so the plaintiffs can attack its program on statutory and constitutional grounds.
“This case and Harvard should be heard together,” Thursday’s petition reads. “The first question presented in both cases is the same: whether this Court should overrule Grutter and hold that institutions of higher education cannot use race as a factor in admissions. This Court can resolve that momentous question in either case. But if it decides to revisit Grutter, its analysis would be more complete if it considered both a private university (Harvard) and a public university (UNC) and both the Constitution (UNC) and Title VI (Harvard and UNC).”
UNC awards racial preferences to African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, but not to Asians. The university considers the first three groups underrepresented on campus as compared with North Carolina’s population. In contrast, Asians account for about 12 percent of UNC’s student body and 3 percent of the state population.
Students for Fair Admissions on the same day in 2014 filed lawsuits that accused Harvard and UNC of unlawful race discrimination. The UNC case lagged through the court system behind the Harvard dispute. A federal trial court ruled for Harvard in 2019, and a federal appeals court did the same a year later. In contrast, it took almost seven years for the UNC case to reach trial. U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs in Winston-Salem, N.C., ruled for the university on Oct. 18.
Grutter, decided in 2003, predicted that affirmative action would end 25 years in the future. In contrast, Biggs said race-conscious admissions are a permanent “institutional obligation to be broadly and equitably administered.”
“While no student can or should be admitted to this university, or any other, based solely on race, because race is so interwoven in every aspect of the lived experience of minority students, to ignore it, reduce its importance and measure it only by statistical models as [Students for Fair Admissions] has done, misses important context,” Biggs wrote.
Hearing the Harvard and UNC cases together would be consistent with Grutter. The justices decided to hear Grutter after a federal appeals court upheld Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policies. A separate legal challenge to Michigan’s undergraduate admissions criteria was not as far along, but the Court heard that lawsuit alongside Grutter to consider affirmative action at multiple levels of higher education.
The Court often fast-tracks closely linked cases. For example, the justices in October expedited review of two separate legal challenges to Texas’s abortion law, one from clinics in the state and another from the Biden administration.
The case is Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.
Secretary spoke in front of former employer’s buses at November event
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm committed a “flagrant” violation of ethics rules by using her official position to promote products of her former employer, electric bus manufacturer Proterra, according to a watchdog complaint obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust notified the Department of Energy’s inspector general on Friday of its concerns regarding a Nov. 1 event in which Granholm appeared at an official administration event with Proterra buses prominently displayed behind her. Granholm’s participation in the event, where more than $100 million worth of government grants were announced to support electric vehicle manufacturers, was a “conscious, flagrant affront to her ethics obligations,” the watchdog wrote.
“A full investigation is warranted to understand whether and to what extent Secretary Granholm has violated her legal and ethics obligations as a Cabinet official,” Protect the Public’s Trust director Michael Chamberlain wrote in the group’s letter to agency ethics officials.
The letter argues that it was unethical for Granholm to participate in an event in which grants that “directly and predictably benefit Proterra” were announced. During the event, where Granholm was flanked by Proterra buses and joined by Vice President Kamala Harris and several senators, she praised Proterra’s battery technology.
“We are doing it, going 400, 500, 600 miles on a charge,” Granholm said, referencing the technology in the Proterra-powered vehicles behind her. Granholm announced $127 million in government grants to fund electric vehicles, gesturing to her former company’s vehicles.
As energy secretary, Granholm is bound by the Biden administration’s ethics pledge, which prevents officials from “participating in particular matters … directly and substantially related to their former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.”
The Nov. 1 event followed several months of public scrutiny into the administration’s promotion of Proterra, which has come from President Joe Biden himself. Granholm had distanced herself from public events directly involving Proterra due to her large financial stake in the company, which she sold for a $1.6 million profit in May.
Proterra has made clear to investors that it is counting on significant government investment as part of its business plan. It told shareholders in August that it planned to “ride the wave” of the Biden administration’s proposed infrastructure plan, which was approved by Congress last week. The plan includes billions of dollars’ worth of investment in electric batteries, and Proterra boasts in company reports that it positioned itself to profit from the taxpayer funds.
Protect the Public’s Trust argues that any reasonable person with knowledge of Granholm’s history with Proterra would question whether the company received “preferential treatment” from the secretary. The government watchdog says Granholm should have felt obligated to consult with government ethics officials before participating in the event involving Proterra.
The watchdog also says Granholm should recuse herself from all government business involving grants that would be made available to Proterra.
The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) was photographed officiating Ivy Getty’s lavish wedding in San Francisco last week. The photo explains everything you need to know about the Democratic Party. Nearly every important aspect of the party and its voter base is represented.
For example:
1) Millionaires and billionaires
Getty, the great-granddaughter of oil baron J. Paul Getty, is presumed to have inherited several billion dollars after her father, John Gilbert Getty, died in 2020. Her grandfather, Gordon Getty, has helped finance the careers of prominent California Democrats such as Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, and Pelosi. Billionaires and their wealthy scions tend to be loyal backers of the Democratic Party, whose most generous supporters include George Soros, Walmart heiress Christy Walton, Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs, and the Pritzker family, heirs to the Hyatt hotel fortune. J.B. Pritzker was elected governor of Illinois in 2018, and the 2020 Democratic primary featured two billionaires, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.
2) Really old career politicians
The top three Democrats in the House of Representatives are octogenarians who have worked in politics almost their entire adult lives. Pelosi, 81, is a Democratic Party scion whose political career began in the early 1960s. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) is 82 and has worked in politics since 1962. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D., S.C.) is 81 and got his start in 1969. President Joe Biden, who will celebrate his 79th birthday later this month, is relatively young and inexperienced by comparison. He didn’t launch his political career until 1970.
3) White guys
The Democratic Party is dominated by college graduates, a demographic that comprises roughly a third of the adult population, and is disproportionately white. Getty’s random white dude husband wouldn’t have to try very hard to find success in the Democratic Party or its affiliate, the media industry, where mediocre white dudes continue to excel. In most cases, they do so while simultaneously denouncing the toxic influence of white men. Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Brian Stelter, Jeffrey Toobin, Andrew Cuomo, the Pod Save America bros, the bald weirdos at the Lincoln Project—the list goes on.
4) Celebrities
Mark Ronson opened for Earth, Wind & Fire, which played at the pre-wedding bash at The Palace of Fine Arts. Hollywood actress Anya-Taylor Joy, daughter of an investment banking tycoon, served as the maid of honor. Guests included pop star Olivia Rodrigo, assorted European royalty, and TikTok celebs, along with gender-bending performance artist Kiki Xtravaganza. As former president Barack Obama has gone out of his way to demonstrate, the ability to hang out with celebrities is one of the main reasons Democratic politicians run for higher office.
5) Anti-Semites
The bride’s dress was covered in shards of broken glass, which may or may not have been an homage to the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The bridal gown and the bridesmaid dresses were designed by British fashion icon John Galliano, who also attended the wedding as a guest. In 2011, he was convicted in a Paris court for making anti-Semitic remarks, which is illegal under French law. “I love Hitler,” Galliano reportedly told a group of Italian women at a café during Paris Fashion Week. “People like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers would all be f—ing gassed and f—ing dead.” In recent years, the Democratic Party has become a space foranti-Semites.
6) Selectively enforced rules
The wedding took place at San Francisco’s City Hall, which remains closed to the public due to COVID-19. Guests were asked to wear masks during the ceremony, but photos from the multi-day affair reveal that the California Department of Public Health’s recommendation regarding the use of masks indoors was largely ignored. Democratic politicians have routinely ignored such guidance, in some cases blatantly violating state and local mandates that might impede their ability to party with rich donors and celebrities.
There. That’s everything you need to know about the Democratic Party.
Sex ed curriculum has received $26 million in federal funding
Thousands of Massachusetts parents opted their children out of a federally funded sex education curriculum that teaches kindergartners about genitalia.
Worcester Public Schools this week announced that 13 percent of its students opted out of sex education, including 20 percent of K-4 students. The “Rights, Respect, Responsibility,” or “3Rs,” curriculum teaches elementary students about gender identity and instructs high school students to act out scenes in which gay and transgender couples decide to have sex. The curriculum’s authors include one current and one former Planned Parenthood employee. It is published by Advocates for Youth, a progressive group that since 1995 has received $26 million from the Centers for Disease Control.
Progressive advocacy groups are escalating efforts to expand sex education curricula to elementary schools and cover controversial issues such as gender identity and abortion. Commonly known as “comprehensive sex education,” this approach has angered parents, many of whom have flocked to school boards to oppose curricula.
The Worcester School Committee in May adopted the 3Rs curriculum following hours of heated debate between parents and activists. Worcester parents are able to remove their children from sex education lessons through an online opt-out form. Worcester Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment.
One of the parents leading this effort was Shanel Soucy, a single mother of three who had her first child when she was 15 and homeless. She says she opted her children out of the curriculum because it would not have helped her make better decisions as a child.
“We’re encouraging sex as being a way to cope in life,” Soucy told the Free Beacon. “It’s so dangerous. So many of these kids are developing habits that are carried out longterm.”
More than 3,000 of the district’s 23,000 students have opted out of sex education. Megara Bell, director of Partners in Sex Education, on Monday told the Worcester Board of Health that in her two decades of work on sex education, only eight parents in the area had opted their children out of sex education.
Area religious groups have lined up against the effort. Worcester bishop Robert McManus in September urged Catholic parents to opt out their children. Dozens of Worcester churches provided opt-out forms to their congregations, according to the Massachusetts Family Institute. Elise Almeyda, a Worcester pastor, says the curriculum will confuse children and enrich groups like Planned Parenthood.
“They want to sexualize kids at a very young age,” Almeyda told the Washington Free Beacon. “There’s definitely an agenda in the decisions being made. This is robbing the future of our kids.”
Advocates for Youth boasts that 3Rs is the first K-12 sex education curriculum. It has been adopted in 100 school districts and has reached more than 2.3 million students since it was released in 2016.
The curriculum includes lesson plans which instruct teachers to describe genitalia in gender-neutral terms such as “person with a vulva.” Lesson plans include role-play activities in which students enact scenes about how gay, bisexual, and transgender couples should become sexually active.
The Worcester Public Schools summary of the curriculum includes a plan to have high school students take a quiz on Planned Parenthood’s website about what contraceptives are best for them. The summary also includes plans to show seventh-graders a video from Amaze.org about asexuality and pansexuality. Another video for high schoolers promotes abortion and says that pregnancy centers deceive women.
The curriculum details ways in which teachers can make sex education more engaging for students. Fifth-graders are given a diagram of male genitalia to color with crayons as the teacher describes each part. One specific passage directs teachers to jokingly hold up a fake penis and announce that “today is the day” before they teach a lesson on condoms.
Advocates for Youth each year rakes in millions of dollars from progressive groups. The group has taken $20 million from the progressive Buffett Foundation since 2008 and has taken donations from the Packard and Hewlett Foundations. The group has a youth activism program called “Abortion Out Loud” that aims to “end abortion stigma and strengthen support for young people’s access to abortion.”
Labor Dept says inflation at highest point in 30 years
President Joe Biden in July dismissed concerns over inflation, saying it’s “highly unlikely” there will be “long-term inflation.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm echoed Biden’s claim this month, telling CNN that there is a “transitory nature to the inflation problem.”
While the White House downplays the threat of rising consumer prices, the Labor Department on Wednesday said the annual inflation rate has hit its highest point in 30 years, and economic observers warn there could be no end in sight for the country’s inflation surge.
The Washington Post on Friday corrected two articles and altered a dozen others in an attempt to respond to discrepancies that had emerged between its reporting and what was known about the dossier compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele.
The Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had long insisted that Sergei Millian, a Belrusian-American businessman, was one of Steele’s sources. But its stories, which relied on two sources it did not name publicly, were increasingly undermined as time went on, most recently a grand jury indictment against Igor Danchenko, who has been described as Steele’s “primary sub-source.”
Danchenko is accused of falsely telling FBI agents on four separate occasions that he spoke with Millian over the phone. But authorities discovered he had never spoken to Millian.
The indictment and “further reporting” drove the Post to correct two pieces—one originally published in 2017 and another in 2019, the Post said in editor’s notes appended to the stories.
A dozen others were altered to remove all references to Millian.
Sally Buzbee, the paper’s executive editor, said in a story published by the paper the indictment and other information “created doubts” about Millian’s alleged links to the dossier.
“We feel we are taking the most transparent approach possible,” Buzbee said.
Millian told The Epoch Times in a Twitter message that the correction was “long overdue.”
“Truth finally prevailed,” he said.
Jeffrey McCall, professor of communication at DePauw University, told The Epoch Times that “it’s very unusual to see a news organization step forward so plainly to correct reporting that was done, in this case, a couple of years ago.”
“This is a remarkable development,” he said.
While the corrections were a positive development, the Post should also publish the names of the sources that were relied upon and explain why they were shielded from public view in the first place, he added.
A spokeswoman for the paper declined to comment beyond the editor’s note.
Instead of naming the sources, the Post continued to cite them. In one note, the paper said one of the sources believes the new information, including the indictment, “puts in grave doubt” the claim Millian was a source for Steele. The other was said to have declined to comment.
Igor Danchenko is seen at a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., on Nov. 10, 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger, the co-authors of both corrected stories, did not respond to requests for comment. Each shared a Post story about the corrections on their Twitter feeds.
Helderman, though, has not deleted posts on Twitter about Millian, including a Feb. 7, 2019, missive that called him “a key source for the Steele dossier.”
Media experts say the best practice is to update readers on every channel when corrections are issued.
Reporting on the dossier by the Post and a slew of other outlets, including The New York Times, has been increasingly undermined.
Steele was revealed to have been paid by Fusion GPS, a firm that was itself hired by Hillary Clinton—the Democratic presidential candidate facing off against then-candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 election—and the Democratic National Committee. His sources have been revealed as a cast of characters with links to the Clinton network, including Michael Sussman, a Clinton campaign lawyer.
Sussman was charged last month with lying to the FBI about a claim that there were secret communications between the Trump Organization and a Russia Bank. Steele has said he received the information from Sussman, and ultimately included it in his series of unsubstantiated reports. The allegation was reported by multiple news outlets, many of which later corrected their stories.
Another source was Charles Dolan, according to special counsel John Durham. Dolan is a long-time Democrat Party operative. Dolan’s role was not previously known before.
President Joe Biden is having a hard time escaping the glaring lies he repeated during his 2020 campaign about Kyle Rittenhouse, who is currently standing trial for murder.
The trial has been a massive fiasco for the prosecution even as the establishment media carries water for the increasingly weak claims that Rittenhouse acted maliciously when he shot three people, killing two, amid the violent riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year.
So far, the state’s own witness has revealed that one of the men Rittenhouse shot had tried to grab his gun, and Gaige Grosskreutz, another of Rittenhouse’s “victims,” has admitted that Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, fired on him only after he pointed a loaded handgun at the teen.
One of the more painful moments of the trial came when Rittenhouse himself took the stand and broke down while describing the moments leading up to the shooting. As video evidence clearly shows, rioters chased him down before he was ultimately forced to fire in self-defense.
So Biden probably shouldn’t have counted his eggs before they hatched last year as he leveraged Rittenhouse to beef up the narrative that then-President Donald Trump was sympathetic to white supremacists. Now that he’s in office, the lies about both Rittenhouse and Trump are coming back to bite him.
In August 2020, just days after the Rittenhouse shooting, Biden was asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper why he thought Trump hadn’t yet spoken publicly about the police shooting of Jacob Blake, which sparked the riots in the first place.
Biden responded by suggesting that Rittenhouse was part of a “militia” and that Trump was unwilling to denounce white supremacists.
“Look, I don’t know enough to know whether that 17-year-old kid — exactly what he did. But allegedly he’s part of a militia coming out of the state of Illinois,” Biden said.
Do you think Kyle Rittenhouse is innocent?
“Have you ever heard this president say one negative thing about white supremacists? Have you ever heard it?” he continued, claiming that Trump had called white supremacists at the 2017 Charlottesville riot “very fine people.”
It really is astounding that Biden so confidently repeated this already exhaustivelydebunked lie.
Trump decidedly and in no uncertain terms condemned white supremacy after the riot, as a matter of fact.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence. It has no place in America,” he said in August 2017.
“Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
If this wasn’t clear enough, Trump immediately followed up his “very fine people” comment by saying, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
That’s right — even though leftists continue to claim to this day that Trump called white supremacists and neo-Nazis “very fine people,” he actually clarified who he was talking about in the same breath and denounced the radical factions present at the Charlottesville riot.
There are no two ways about it: Biden was lying. Trump had denounced white supremacy literally years before Biden campaigned on the insane claim that he hadn’t.
Our current president was not only willing to blatantly lie about Trump, but also to imply that Rittenhouse was probably a racist militia member, too.
Of course, Anderson Cooper, the brilliant and objective journalist that he is, did not push back on this wild suggestion. The media has for well over a year now spouted entirely fabricated claims about Rittenhouse — which is probably why Biden felt perfectly comfortable including the teen’s image in a campaign video about white supremacy.
There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night. pic.twitter.com/Q3VZTW1vUV
The Rittenhouse family has refused to take this bald-faced slander from the media and our now-president sitting down, as well they should not.
“The media has been absolutely irresponsible and purely abhorrent with this entire situation. They’ve been parroting the same false information time after time after time,” Rittenhouse spokesman David Hancock told Fox News on Wednesday. “It’s appalling, absolutely appalling.”
Rittenhouse’s mother also slammed Biden this week for using her son’s image in the campaign video, which recycled the same debunked line that Trump refused to disavow “white supremacists.”
“When I saw that, I was shocked, I was angry,” Wendy Rittenhouse told Fox on Thursday. “President Biden [doesn’t] know my son whatsoever, and he’s not a white supremacist. He’s not a racist. And [Biden] did that for the votes.”
“And I was so angry for a while at him and what he did to my son. He defamed him,” she said.
Who can blame her?
It’s bad enough that the media has so aggressively tried to taint this kid’s name in the court of public opinion. But for a presidential candidate to lump him in with vile racists is quite another matter.
That there’s someone in the White House who has so little regard for the basic principle of presumed innocence should seriously scare us.
Reports of intense surveillance of parents opposed to teaching critical race theory in Arizona’s Scottsdale Unified School District have provoked calls for the board president’s resignation.
At issue is a dossier of personal information of the parents and their children.
Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who writes for City Journal and is a Manhattan Institute fellow, said he reviewed the information and tweeted his conclusions.
“Scottsdale Unified school board president Jann-Michael Greenburg has been caught assembling a dossier with confidential information on parents who oppose critical race theory — including photographs of their children,” he tweeted Thursday.
“I’ve reviewed the dossier and Greenburg has assembled a disturbing range of information on parents: commercial background checks, criminal records, address histories, divorce records, business filings, personal photographs, and other sensitive data. Abusive.”
I’ve reviewed the dossier and Greenburg has assembled a disturbing range of information on parents: commercial background checks, criminal records, address histories, divorce records, business filings, personal photographs, and other sensitive data. Abusive.
“Greenburg paid for extensive private investigation profiles on individual parents. This file is more than 160 pages, with information including home addresses, family members, phone numbers, mortgage data, traffic tickets, ‘known associates,’ and social security numbers,” Rufo noted.
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
According to press reports, school board president Jann-Michael Greenburg, a 27-year-old man with no children, lives with and shares a computer with his father, Mark Greenburg. Parents have accused the father-son duo of harassing them and photographing their children.
“YIKES: Here’s the father of Scottsdale Unified school board president Jann-Michael Greenburg, secretly taking bodycam footage of parents on school property and saying he hired a “private investigator who is writing down all their [license] plates,” Rufo tweeted.
In the video, Mark Greenburg talks about the extent of his investigation.
“Somewhere around here, we have a private investigator who’s writing down all their plates,” he says.
“Yeah, I did. Yeah. I had our law firm do it so that it’s protected. So that we can get the information,” Greenburg replies.
These lunatics want to permanently mask your children and pump them full of critical race theory. We owe a debt of gratitude to the brave Arizona moms who are standing up to creeps like Mark and Jann-Michael Greenburg. Don’t stop until they are removed from public life.
Although the school district is blaming everything on Mark Greenburg, the father of Jann-Michael Greenburg who reportedly lives with his son, and trying to assuage parents, a report in AZ Free News made it clear that the damage — coming at a time when the National School Boards Association wants the Department of Justice to come down hard on parents resisting critical race theory — is beyond repair with soothing words.
“I am calling for the immediate resignation of our board president Jann-Michael Greenburg. We cannot allow anyone in a leadership position to secretly compile personal documents and information on moms and dads who have dared speak out publicly or on social media about their grievances with the district,” parent Amy Carney said.
“We request President Greenburg’s resignation from the Governing Board effective immediately for this and other recent embarrassments to our district.”
“These allegations are deeply troubling, especially as concerns the photography of a minor child without parental consent and the taking down of license plate numbers of parents who Mr. Greenberg supposedly perceived as political opponents,” said attorney Alexander Kolodin of the Davillier Law Group.
“Mr. Greenberg is an elected member of the school board. If such a photograph was taken with his express or tacit consent, he would potentially be liable for violations of Arizona’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which recognizes a parent’s ‘fundamental’ right to consent before the government makes a video or voice recording of the minor child,” he said.
If you want someone to wear a mask, the first step is to normally just ask. But some teachers have decided to go with the option of just taping masks to their students’ faces instead.
In October, there were several reports across the country of teachers taping face masks on their students’ faces.
The most recent happened in Beloit, Wisconsin.
At McNeel Intermediate School, Fox News reported that the police are investigating after a student claimed that a teacher duct-taped a mask to his face.
The 13-year-old boy said he pulled his mask down for a moment because he was having difficulty breathing. When the teacher told him to put the mask on he responded, “I can’t breathe. Give me a moment.”
“She got clearish yellowish tape, pulled up my mask up to my nose and wrapped the tape around my head five times. I’m thinking in my head. I’m like, this is crazy. Why is she doing this?” the student told WKOW.
The student’s parent said, “when he came home, he (had) a red mark on the back of his neck area. And it was a little bit red around his face.”
According to the police report that the Wisconsin State Journal reviewed, the teacher claimed it was all a joke.
“The teacher told police she did tape the front of the student’s mask to his face, but only as a joke after she said the student challenged her to do so and then he laughed about it. The teacher said she removed the tape, after which the student wore his mask properly.”
Should kids be wearing masks at school?
The student said that he did not feel like he could go back to school after the incident because he did not trust anyone.
“I’m very, very upset. I’m gonna keep pursuing this until my son gets justice and my family gets justice,” the parent said.
In response to this incident, a protest was then planned for Nov. 5 to take place in front of the School District of Beloit. The school district and the Beloit Police Department then decided to close the schools, “for the safety of the students and staff.“
This may sound like an outlandish, one-time kind of incident — some COVID-hypersensitive teacher just went off the rails. But there have been other reports of this happening in different states earlier in October and September.
Near Las Vegas, in Clark County School District, one fourth-grader forgot to put his mask back on after getting a drink of water. The substitute teacher, instead of simply instructing the student to put the mask back on, pulled him to the front of the class and taped the mask across the top of his face.
“I was furious, furious. I was scared for my son on what kind of long-term effect it is going to have on him socially, the fact that the entire class was laughing,” the student’s mother told KVVU-TV.
The student said that this was not the first time that had happened. He recalled up to five other times that this has happened to students in the class.
KKTV News in Colorado Springs reported a similar incident happening at Chinook Trail Middle School in October.
The school investigated the situation and found that, while teachers at Chinook Trail did not go to the extremes of the Clark County teacher in Nevada, teachers instructed students to tape masks to their faces.
“After examining all evidence, the district determined a policy/procedure was violated by the teaching team of 642. While we found that the teachers did NOT affix any student’s mask to their face, we did learn teachers directed students to affix their mask to their face with tape; and students believed they were required, by a teacher, to use tape to affix their mask to their face,” the school principal wrote in a letter to parents.
The fact that children are wearing masks in school is still questionable.
Children are obviously still in the developmental stage. They are not just learning information in school, but also learning how to socially interact and be with other people. Their emotions, social skills and cognitive skills all depend on having healthy interactions with peers, teachers and parents. Numerous experts and studies have shown this.
“Face-to-face interactions between a parent and child are the building blocks of the child’s emotional, social, and cognitive growth,” the Hanen Centre reported.
It’s really quite common sense.
“The right socially interactive environment will help children develop strong language skills, creativity, social intelligence, and confidence,” Tender Care Learning Center advocated.
For students to have that face-to-face interaction taken away from them in school can be detrimental. For teachers to enforce and humiliate students by taping masks to their faces could damage students even further. That kind of humiliation handed down from an authority figure, in front of peers, is going to cause problems.
As the mother of the Clark County School fourth-grader said, “It’s crazy. Corporal punishment in schools should not be happening.”
In 68.2 percent of the 500 biggest school districts in the United States, students are still required to wear masks in school, according to data from community tracker Burbio.
To those who just view U.S. media, this shouldn’t come as a shock. After all, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, has made it clear even vaccinated kids still need to mask up.
“We still have about 85 percent of our counties that are in high or substantial community transmission,” Walensky said during an appearance on “NBC Nightly News” on Thursday.
“And so, while I’m encouraged that numbers are coming down, I would say as our children are starting to get vaccinated, just a week into this program, to continue to scale up our vaccinations for these children and to not yet get complacent with our mitigation and prevention strategies that are keeping our children in school.”
“So that means kids should continue to wear masks even if they’re vaccinated?” Holt asked.
“And I would say masks are for now,” Walensky said, “but they are not forever.”
And yet, while the CDC continues to promise the masks aren’t forever but need to be worn for now, the United States is one of the few countries in the Western world that still forces its students to mask up in the classroom.
According to a Wednesday report in the U.K. Daily Mail, only seven countries in the West still recommend kids wear masks in school. Meanwhile, in at least 14 other countries, there is no masking requirement.Should mask mandates be banned?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.
“Aside from the U.S., DailyMail.com could only identify six other Western countries where masking is broadly required or recommended in schools: Canada, France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain,” the paper reported.
Canada leaves it up to individual provinces, all 10 of which have some kind of masking requirement. France had lifted its masking requirement previously, but it’s being re-instituted for elementary school students as of Nov. 15.
The other four countries started the school year with a mask requirement in place on a national scale.
However, in most other countries, they’ve been — as we like to say in these parts — following the science.
The Daily Mail noted that studies have shown that while minors test positive just as frequently as adults, about half are asymptomatic (compared with roughly 10 percent of those over 18) and that only 0.1 percent of school-age children experience serious illness or die from COVID-19.
“And because of this low risk, most Western nations have opted to ditch the masks and have kids return to ‘normalcy’ in classrooms,” the Daily Mail reported.
“In the UK, for example, millions of children returned to schools in early September with face coverings not required.
“And while masks are a politically divisive issue in the U.S., members of both the Conservative and Labour Parties in the UK have stated that wearing masks prevent children from being able to communicate and socialize.”
How has that worked out for them? In the United States, children are being hospitalized at four times higher rates than in the United Kingdom.
The paper provided three potential answers for why the mask mandates aren’t in place in other Western countries.
The first postulate: higher vaccination rates. “For example, West Virginia and Idaho have yet to vaccinate 50 percent of their populations compared to more than 70 percent in all Nordic countries, according to data from the U.S. CDC and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control,” the Daily Mail reported.
However, this one doesn’t necessarily hold water; according to U.S. News and World Report, neither West Virginia nor Idaho has statewide school mask mandates.
Of the eight states that outright ban school mask mandates, only one had a fully vaccinated rate above 60 percent as of Friday, according to the Mayo Clinic — Florida. Meanwhile, of the states that require masks in school, only one had a fully vaccinated rate under 60 percent: Kentucky.
Therefore, issue number two is a bit more likely: In most Western countries, particularly in the European Union, there’s a higher degree of trust in authority figures. Paradoxically, this often leads to less regulation and freer societies. As Nick Gillespie — editor at large for libertarian publication Reason — pointed out in a Daily Beast piece back in 2016, research shows citizens in countries where authority figures are trusted want less intervention from authority figures.
Meanwhile, in the United States — where one can distinctly recall a recent gubernatorial candidate saying parents shouldn’t be deciding what the state teaches their children — one can see how this would lead to education and political officials who botched in-person learning policy and public health dictums being handed more control over it, despite having proved themselves to be unworthy of the task.
Finally, the Daily Mail noted children in other Western countries are tested more often.
“Currently the UK’s Department of Education requires all secondary school students, between ages 11 and 18, be tested at home twice a week using tests,” they reported. “Additionally, Norway is mass testing students to phase out quarantining students amid Covid outbreaks.”
All of these are valuable lessons — but then, the most valuable should be that we’re an outlier when it comes to school mask mandates and we shouldn’t be. There’s little evidence they serve a public health good, particularly among vaccinated children, and with other alternatives at hand. Psychologically, they’ve done far more harm than good.
Geez…I really think I’m going to puke. WTF is happening? [US Patriot]
Inclusion, acceptance, welcoming, understanding, equality and affirmation: These are the words we often hear in support of the LGBT community. But should all sexual preferences and orientations be accepted, welcomed and included?
What about attraction to minors?
Allyn Walker — an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in the department of sociology and criminal justice who identifies as “non-binary” — wrote the book, “A Long, Dark Shadow,” to look more deeply into “Minor-Attracted People,” address the stigma around them and discuss how they should be treated.
To be clear, though, Walker is not condoning child sexual abuse in the book.
“And I want to be extremely clear that child sexual abuse is never ever okay,” Walker said in an interview discussing the book with the Prostasia Foundation.
However, Walker did clarify that “having an attraction to minors as long as it isn’t acted on, doesn’t mean that the person who has those attractions is doing something wrong.”
“I think we have a tendency to want to categorize people with these attractions as evil or morally corrupt … From my perspective, there is no morality or immorality attached to attraction to anyone because no one can control who they’re attracted to at all.”
This immediately brings into question the meaning of morality. In the simplest terms, morality is understanding what is right and wrong. But more specifically, morality is intricately tied to natural laws and what is innate in rational human beings.
It is not natural to be attracted to a child. That is why pedophilia is treated as a disorder.
Is pedophilia a sexual orientation?
“Because it causes harm to others, it is considered a disorder,” medical information reference Merck Manuals noted.
Walker, however, wanted to distinguish between those who act on this impulse and those who simply have it but do not act on it.
“And then just as importantly, many MAPs never commit a sexual offense against a minor. And that difference is important because when we don’t understand that distinction, we make incorrect assumptions about the likelihood of offending amongst MAPs,” Walker said.
“This leads to people believing that just because someone is attracted to minors, they’re likely to commit an offense. And we start to criminalize a population just because of their attractions. Not only is this a problem in terms of criminalization, but it also serves to heighten stigma against MAPs in general, which is a huge problem.”
However, Walker is wrong in equating pedophilia with crime. Pedophilia, of course, can lead to sexual activity with children, but attraction, arousal and behavior all fall under the definitional umbrella of pedophilia.
“Doctors diagnose pedophilia when people feel greatly distressed or become less able to function well because of their attraction to children or when they have acted on their urges,” Merck Manuals explains.
Psychology Today also lines up with Merck Manuals, defining pedophilia as, “recurrent and intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children — generally age 13 years or younger — over a period of at least six months.”
Walker is attempting to make a distinction that flies in the face of medical information, trying to differentiate between attraction and action. But there is great danger in doing so.
If “MAPs” are just people who are attracted to children, but do not abuse them, why should they not be accepted in a society that is seeking to be inclusive and welcoming to all sexual orientations?
Following the same reasoning, this could happen with defining and diagnosing pedophilia. And there is a push to view pedophilia as a sexual orientation.
Toronto psychiatrist Dr. James Cantor has tweeted in the past, “Speaking as a gay men, I believe we SHOULD include the P. To do otherwise is to betray the principles that give us our rights.”
Speaking as a gay men, I believe we SHOULD include the P. To do otherwise is to betray the principles that give us our rights.
Cantor’s reasoning is correct. If our society keeps operating on the principles that give LGBT members the rights that they have, the same has to extend to pedophiles. If we follow that train of thought, attraction to children is just their sexual orientation.
There are even sites dedicated to pedophiles who are celibate, non-offenders. “Virtuous Pedophiles” is a social support group for pedophiles that promise to live celibate, non-offending lives.
The problem is that pedophilia is dangerous to children. Even if a person who is attracted to minors is determined to not act upon the impulse, having that attraction takes them one step closer to the potential of becoming an abuser.
So if pedophilia is accepted as just another sexual orientation and not treated as a disorder, that would also widen the door to “acceptable” abuse of children. If a pedophile has sexual interactions with a child, and the minor claims that they were abused, then the pedophile could hide behind their accepted, no longer termed as a disorder, sexual attraction.
As shocking as it may seem to talk about adding pedophilia to the spectrum of sexual orientations, it should be no surprise. By throwing out the conception that morality must align with what is natural, our society just opened Pandora’s box. This is just the fallout that we have to deal with now.
Is natural or vaccinated immunity better for fighting COVID? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has offered conflicting evidence on this, which is causing more questions about the efficacy of the vaccine.
Last month, the CDC published a new study that seemed to firmly indicate that immunity from the vaccine is better than natural immunity.
“Unvaccinated people who had survived a previous COVID-19 infection were more than five times more likely to be reinfected with the virus compared to those who were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines,” CBS News reported on the CDC findings.
But there is new evidence that seems to debunk this claim from the CDC.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from a lawyer, the CDC admitted that they have not had any documented cases of an unvaccinated individual with natural immunity spreading the virus.
This certainly weakens the CDC’s previous argument and study results that the vaccine is better than natural immunity.
Not only has the CDC argued strongly for the vaccines, but it has even urged those who have already been infected and recovered to still get the vaccine.
“All eligible persons should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible, including unvaccinated persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2,” their study at the end of October outlined.
These decrees from the CDC fall perfectly in line with the left’s politics around the vaccine. As many cities and President Biden are trying to push through vaccine mandates, it’s awfully convenient to have the CDC backing them.
Should you get the vaccine if you already had COVID?
But the CDC is not the only place that is collecting data and running studies on COVID.
Recently an Israeli study that has been collecting data from March 1, 2020, to August 14, 2021, published data to show that natural immunity is actually stronger than the immunity gained from the Pfizer vaccine.
“SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold … increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected,” the study concluded.
The data from this study showed the exact opposite of the CDC’s claims. While the CDC said that unvaccinated people with natural immunity were five times more likely to be reinfected, the Israeli study found that vaccinated people had “a 5.96-fold … increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold … increased risk for symptomatic disease.”
Vaccinated individuals “were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected,” the study said.
The Israeli study was several times larger than the CDC’s study that concluded that vaccine immunity was superior.
This Israeli study, coupled with the new admission from the CDC that there have been no recorded cases of those with natural immunity spreading the virus, seems to contradict the CDC’s constant messaging that everyone needs to get vaccinated.
The arguments around vaccines have been so politically charged that it’s natural to begin asking whether the CDC is really as apolitical as it claims.
So far, the CDC has been on the side of those who are calling for vaccine mandates, promoting the vaccine and even incentivizing it.
The CDC has even been campaigning for “vaccine confidence.”
“Strong confidence in COVID-19 vaccines within communities leads to more adults, adolescents, and children getting vaccinated ― which leads to fewer COVID-19 illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths,” the CDC said.
But nearly everything regarding the vaccine now is politically charged. It’s no secret that the greatest battle over the vaccine is political, not scientific. The scientific facts seem to merely be tools in the broader political roil.
Last year, when the vaccine was still being developed, Brookings predicted this politicization.
“And now, as with all aspects of COVID-19, politics has crept into the vaccine conversation in ways that threaten to derail public confidence,” Brookings noted on Oct. 30, 2020.
But it’s not just the politicization that is raising questions.
Those who are hesitant about the vaccine may have good reason after now seeing the CDC double back on itself and conflict with other studies about the vaccine immunity.
Real America’s Voice correspondent Drew Hernandez corroborated Kyle Rittenhouse’s testimony that he acted in self-defense when he shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum last summer.
The 18-year-old has been charged in the shooting deaths of Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and the wounding of Gaige Grosskreutz during a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following a police shooting.
“The first time I saw Kyle, he actually de-escalated the situation,” Hernandez, who was at the scene to record the violent demonstration, testified Thursday during Rittenhouse’s murder trial in Kenosha.
The reporter recounted that on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, “Antifa and the rioters were going head-to-head with the police in front of the courthouse, and as they were doing so, the police then responded. I think they, I believe they called it an unlawful assembly of some sort.”
Hernandez said the rioters were throwing rocks at police officers and launching fireworks and other explosive devices.
“As they were being pushed down the street [by the police], they passed Car Source 2. And the rioters identified individuals with longarm rifles on top of the building, and they immediately attempted to agitate them, to try to start some conflict with them saying, ‘You ain’t the police. You ain’t the police,’” he said.
“At that point Kyle Rittenhouse came out of Car Source 2 and he attempted to de-escalate the situation.”
Witness says Kyle Rittenhouse tried to deescalate the situation. Meanwhile, rioters picked fights with people protecting a business: pic.twitter.com/1YIArIh41p
Hernandez then recreated how Rittenhouse was motioning with his hands trying to get people to settle down.
Do you think Rittenhouse should be found not guilty?
“He clearly attempts to de-escalate the situation. And he actually is successful because then the rioters then disperse,” the reporter said.
Hernandez went on to describe the fatal shooting of Rosenbaum, who he felt had become “triggered and aggravated” in the moments leading up to it. He testified that Rosenbaum had “led the charge into the gas station” and “was getting physically aggressive.”
“Rosenbaum was charging Kyle Rittenhouse from behind,” Hernandez said.
“Kyle is right at the corner … and turns around and Rosenbaum is lunging towards him very clearly, and Kyle fires,” he said, pointing to a video display in court.
The 18-year-old testified that people around him were saying, “Cranium him, kill him,” and he was “just trying to get to the police” where he felt he would be safe.
Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger asked Rittenhouse during cross-examination, “What was the risk to you of death or great bodily harm at the moment you killed Joseph Rosenbaum?”
Prosecutor: “What was the risk to you of death or great bodily harm at the moment you killed Joseph Rosenbaum?”
Rittenhouse: “If I would have let Mr. Rosenbaum take my firearm from me, he would’ve used it and killed me with it and probably killed more people.” pic.twitter.com/HfAswVqUED
Protests are not inherently bad. There is much good that can be accomplished through protesting in fact. But not all protests are the same.
There is, in fact, a difference between peaceful protesting and rioting.
By definition, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations which largely took place in the summer of 2020 crossed the line from protest to riot very quickly.
Cornell Law School defines a riot as a “concerted action made … through the use or threat of violence, disorder, or terror to the public; and resulting in a disturbance of the peace. Under common law, the crime of riot requires the assemblage of three or more actors.”
A protest, by contrast, is a “public remonstrance or demonstration (usually expressing dissent) centered around an act or policy of a governing body … [which] constitutes as an instance of civil resistance, or nonviolent resistance, when it is part of a larger systematic and peaceful nonviolent campaign aimed at achieving a specific objective by use of pressure and persuasion.”
So by definition, BLM demonstrations can be called riots.
In 2020, the world watched as BLM riots swept across the country. After the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, thousands turned out to take a stand against police violence. Sadly, many of those “peaceful protests” resulted in violence, vandalism and even death.
“The vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests — more than 93% — have been peaceful, according to a new report published Thursday by a nonprofit that researches political violence and protests across the world,” Time Magazine reported.
Harvard Radcliffe Institute wrote, “In fact, the Black Lives Matter uprisings were remarkably nonviolent. When there was violence, very often police or counterprotesters were reportedly directing it at the protesters.”
But in the same breath, the media wants to vilify those who are protesting the vaccine, mask and lockdown mandates which have swept America in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
U.S. News headlined that “Mask, Vaccine Conflicts Descend Into Violence and Harassment.” But then the article went on to describe that protesters merely showed shouted at people and showed their anger.
“The Hawaii lieutenant governor watched in horror as protesters showed up outside his condo, yelled at him through bullhorns and beamed strobe lights into the building to harass him over vaccine requirements,” U.S. News reported.
Is there a difference between riots and protests?
Sure, it’s not ideal for protesters to harass officials and show up outside their homes, but that is a far cry from being shot dead while simply on guard duty outside a federal courthouse, as happened to 53-year-old Dave Underwood. That is the fundamental difference between a protest and a riot.
In fact, the COVID-related protests have been marked by unusual peace.
In New Zealand, after knocking down a barricade, protesters made sure to put it back up.
Meanwhile, in September, when COVID protesters gathered in Los Angeles, there were no problems.
“Dozens of anti-vaccination protesters gathered for a rally Saturday in front of Los Angeles City Hall, but unlike previous gatherings no counter-demonstrators turned out and things remained mostly peaceful,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
You can disagree with anti-vaccination, mask and lockdown arguments, but it’s undeniable that these protests have been largely peaceful. They are actual protests, not riots.
NCSBA’s separation follows the South Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri School Board Associations’ cutting ties from the NSBA after its Sept. 29 letter to the White House comparing parents to domestic terrorists.
Union County Public Schools Board Chair Melissa Merrell was on her way to an NCSBA convention when she received an alert from the NCSBA announcing its separation.
“It was a pleasant surprise,” Merrell told The Epoch Times. “I definitely did not see this coming. I’ve had a couple of board members who had been requesting and sending emails to the NCSBA asking if it were going to withdraw our membership from the NSBA, and they (the NSBA) had asked for our feedback, and then, on the way to the convention, we saw this message.”
Merrell said nothing was mentioned at the convention about the NCSBA’s departure from the national board.
According to Parents Defending Education (PDE), an organization that investigates indoctrination in schools, as of Nov. 9, 26 states have distanced themselves from the NSBA after the letter.
The NSBA, which represents more than 90,000 school board members and 14,000 public school districts in the United States, had written a letter to President Joe Biden asking that the parents who have protested COVID-19 restrictions and the teaching of critical race theory in public schools be regarded as domestic terrorists that should be investigated by agencies such as the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI.
This led to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Oct. 4 memorandum to the FBI directing the agency to work with U.S. attorneys to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
“The September 29 letter from NSBA to President Biden, in both its inflammatory language and the request for federal agencies to intervene in our communities, was just one in a series of lapses in governance,” said NCSBA President Amy Churchill in a press release. “NCSBA shares its members’ concerns about safety at school board meetings. As a proponent of local control, NCSBA believes that local law enforcement is in the best position to respond to those concerns and seek outside assistance if necessary.”
On Oct. 22, the NSBA issued an apology, stating that “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
State Response
The PDE requested statements from 47 states affiliated with the NSBA, and reported that the Alabama Association of School Boards (AASB) said it “has withheld its dues to join the NSBA for the current membership year, though AASB’s bylaws require it to be an NSBA member.”
According to the PDE, the AASB said it would be voting in December on changes to its bylaws that would give the AASB board of directors authority to determine its membership with the NSBA.
The PDE said it received no response from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees (MSCA), prompting the PDE to file a public record request for emails “to get a sense of their position.”
“It turns out that Glenn Koocher, executive director of the MSCA, was so happy about the letter that he put it in an email to NSBA CEO Chip Slaven,” the PDE said.
“We in MASC are all very happy that the NSBA has reached out to the FBI and, based on local coverage, has been identified as a key agent for generating federal support,” Koocher said in the email.
Thirty-six Republican state representatives asked that the South Carolina School Boards Association (SCSBA) end its NSBA membership.
“NSBA has labeled parents as domestic terrorists, with no evidence to justify that term,” the House Republicans wrote in a letter to the SCSBA executive director. “The reality is that parents and stakeholders are beyond frustrated being ignored and left out of decisions with their child. The NSBA is detached from reality and fails to recognize that Americans are angered by what is happening in our classrooms.”
SCSBA Executive Director Scott Price told The Epoch Times that the decision to separate from the NSBA was “aimed at protecting our membership from fallout from NSBA’s September 29 letter.”
“Any pressure that SCSBA was under stemmed primarily from our desire to keep this from impacting our members (local school boards),” Price said.
The NSBA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
GQ Pan and Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.
At a meeting of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), a GOP fundraising organization, President Donald Trump outlined a strategy Wednesday for the party moving into the 2022 midterm elections.
After unexpectedly good returns in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, Republicans are optimistic about their prospect in next year’s midterms. In his speech to the NRCC, Trump emphasized this optimism, expressing his belief that Republicans will win big in 2022.
Republican victories on Nov. 2, Trump said, are “just the beginning.”
“If we do our jobs and stick together, then exactly one year from today we are going to be watching a massive red wave sweep across our entire country and we are going to be celebrating the election of the largest house republican majority in American history,” Trump told the audience.
“The Democratic Party,” he added, “is a house of cards ready to come tumbling down.”
“Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and the entire radical Democrat Party are headed for a political meltdown of unprecedented proportions,” Trump said. “If Republicans can stick together, we can beat them in deep blue cities and states, and we can beat them anywhere—but we must stay unified. If we are united, we will end Nancy Pelosi’s political career once and for all.”
After giving these predictions, Trump turned to a discussion of the Republican Party itself, touching on how the party should evolve moving into the 2022 elections and on which policies Republicans should run. Fundamentally, Trump proposed a party of populism with a focus on the economic wellbeing and cultural values of middle-class Americans.
Trump said, “To save our country, the Republican Party must be the party that fights fiercely for the economic interests of American workers—the party that speaks boldly for the social interests of American families—and the party that stands proudly for the cultural values of God-fearing American patriots.”
He continued: “Some call this American populism, some call it national conservatism, I call it putting America first. But whatever you call it, it is here to stay—and it is not just the best way to win, it is the only way to win.”
Trump compared his vision for the party moving forward to the old Republican Party.
The old GOP, Trump said, was a party of “endless wars, nation-building, loose immigration policies, idiotic trade deals, and surrendering our culture to left-wing arsonists.” That Republican Party, Trump said, “is gone forever.”
“We are now the working people’s party,” Trump said. “We will be tough on crime, strong on borders, strong on trade, proud of our heritage, and proud of our American values. We will defend our citizens’ jobs and wages. We will protect our people’s homes and communities. And we will defeat the woke zealots trying to destroy our country.”
Trump’s comments, more akin to his 2016 campaign than to his 2020 campaign, come in the midst of an ongoing intra-party struggle within the GOP.
Some in the party, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) have called for the party to move on from Trump’s brand of populism.
Speaking in Kentucky on Monday, McConnell gave a very different take on GOP goals in the 2022 elections.
“I think the key to ’22 is to have a discussion with the American people about the new administration, the Democratic Congress, and what they’re doing,” McConnell said.
“I think the election will be about the future and not the past,” McConnell added in an opaque reference to the former president.
Both McConnell and Cheney have blamed Trump for the events of Jan. 6, and have demanded that the party move past Trump.
But Trump maintains massive influence in the GOP nonetheless.
Across the country, many Republicans in tight primaries hope for Trump’s weighty endorsement. According to the results of a January 2021 survey conducted by Northeastern, Harvard, Northwestern, and Rutgers, 45 percent of Republicans said they would be more likely to support a candidate endorsed by Trump (pdf).
On Tuesday, for example, Trump endorsed Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, who is seeking to beat out the sitting governor in a primary.
Looking ahead to 2022, Trump has already thrown his high-value endorsement behind 45 candidates, including an endorsement of his former Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders for Arkansas governor, an endorsement for 2016 primary challengers in the Senate like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and a slew of other candidates vying for both state and federal level offices.
Despite the efforts of some in the party to move ahead without Trump, much of the GOP still looks to the former president as a leader in the party. His views on what the Republican Party should become moving forward are sure to influence the platforms of several Republicans hoping for his endorsement ahead of 2022’s elections.
Democrats have been hell-bent on getting Biden’s massive reconciliation bill passed. This “build back better” spending bill is little more than a socialist takeover of our country. Biden plans on putting millions of Americans on welfare, while hammering businesses and working Americans with new financial burdens.
Yet, Biden and Pelosi have claimed this bill will cost “zero.” We’ve already seen how the bill contains hidden tax hikes (unless you’re a rich Democrat). Now, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is calling out Pelosi over her hidden “gimmicks.”
From Fox Business:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce accused the authors of the Democrat-backed reconciliation bill of using “gimmicks to cover up well over $1 trillion in spending,” and called on Congress to identify the bill’s actual “real-world impact.”
The business group published a letter it sent to politicians in D.C. on Wednesday demanding that they consider the cost of the legislation, its inflationary impact and how the policies will impact future workforce participation.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce blasted Democrats for trying to hide the true cost of Biden’s massive spending bill. They revealed that the bill contains a sunset provision that will expire over time, which masks just how much this bill is going to cost. While saying it is only $1.75 trillion, this gimmick hides at least $1 trillion in spending.
The chamber warned lawmakers not to support a bill that will hurt our economy. They said this spending package will have an “inflationary impact” on our country and could hurt “future workforce participation.” This should sound alarm bells for every American.
Biden’s previous spending bill, passed earlier in the year, triggered massive inflation. That “stimulus” is largely to blame for our rising costs, worker shortage, and other economic problems. Democrats and RINOs just passed an infrastructure bill that could cause more damage. If the reconciliation bill is passed, it will only get worse.
Democrats don’t seem to be listening, though. Pelosi has been bullying her own party to get this bill rushed through the House. She doesn’t even want lawmakers to wait for the CBO’s assessment, which is sure to echo the chamber’s concern.
Key Takeaways:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce accused Democrats of hiding the true cost of Biden’s spending bill.
The chamber warned that “gimmicks” are hiding over $1 trillion in additional spending.
They warned that this bill would hurt the U.S. economy for years to come.
Nick Perry – Joe Biden’s nominee for Ambassador to Jamaica – participated in a lawmaker’s delegation to China aimed at “building friendship” with Chinese Communist Party officials and establishing business ties.
Perry, who’s served as a member of the New York State Assembly for three decades, joined an Asian American Business Development Center’s (AABDC) “Trade Mission to China” in September 2006. Previous trip participant and New York State Senator Malcolm Smith explained the purpose behind the trip as “provid[ing] us with a foundation to build friendship and an ongoing dialogue with Chinese government officials and business leaders” in an AABDC document chronicling Perry’s delegation.
Among the projects AABDC highlighted as one of its successes – in addition to Perry’s China trade mission – was assisting with the outsourcing of American jobs, noting it was helping “an American manufacturer [that] is seeking Chinese factories for order fulfillment.”
A summary of Perry’s trip reveals the China visit aimed to “enhance understanding of the Chinese government’s role in the country’s economic development and growth”:
The delegates’ first-hand experience of China gave them an enhanced understanding of the Chinese government’s role in the country’s economic development and growth. This, in turn, has provided these New York State legislators with a greater ability to effectively address their own constituents’ interests and concerns regarding doing business with China.
To do so, Perry’s delegation “met with Chinese government officials” in “every city [they] visited,” including events such as private dinners hosted by the National People’s Congress. During the trip, Perry, his fellow delegation members, and AABDC executives also “presented a gift” to the Chinese Communist Party Secretary of the Haining Municipality.
Perry provided a testimonial upon returning from the trip, praising the Chinese Communist Party’s development of China:
The economic development of China is remarkable. What stood out for me in all three cities was that even though they are ancient urban areas, I never had the sense that I was in an old city; everywhere, new construction and building is happening!
President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better spending plan would raise taxes on middle-class Americans, according to a study released Thursday, despite the president’s pledge that taxes would only increase for Americans earning $400,000 or more per year.
The Tax Policy Center study instead revealed a significant percentage of middle-income households would pay increased taxes in 2022 based on the current legislation.
“Taking into account all major tax provisions, roughly 20 percent to 30 percent of middle-income households would pay more in taxes in 2022,” the study found.
The estimated tax increases would be small, but would clearly exist.
“Among those with a tax increase, low- and middle-income households would pay an additional $100 or less on average. Those making $200,000-$500,000 would pay an average of about $230 more,” the research revealed.
More concerning would be tax changes for 2023.
“They would shrink the average 2023 tax cuts for low-income households, raise taxes slightly for moderate-income households, and increase taxes significantly for the highest-income households,” the study noted.
Biden has previously noted American families making under $400,000 per year would not “see a penny” in their taxes go up.
“Best of all, the cost of these bills, in terms of adding to the deficit, is zero. Zero. Zero. And I made a commitment when I wrote these when I was running: No one making under $400,000 a year will see a penny in their taxes go up,” Biden said during an Oct. 5 speech in Michigan.
The state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap has also been promoted as part of the spending plan. The Tax Policy Center’s research found that the changes would provide more help for the wealthy than for middle-income households.
“It would reduce their 2021 taxes by an average of only $20. Even those making between $175,000 and $250,000 would get a tax cut of just over $400 or about 0.2 percent of after-tax income. By contrast, the higher SALT cap would boost after-tax incomes by 1.2 percent for those making between about $370,000 and $870,000 (the 95th to 99th percentile),” the study stated.
Republicans have widely opposed the bill as “reckless” spending. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has also noted concerns with the bill’s spending.
The earlier version of Biden’s Build Back Better bill included a price tag of $3.5 trillion. Democrats were unable to move forward to pass the legislation in the Senate, needing a supermajority of 60 votes to avoid a filibuster.
Further negotiations led through concerns by Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have led to a revised version now sitting at $1.75 trillion.
Democrats hope to use a reconciliation process to move forward in the Senate and pass the bill through a simple majority. The current Senate includes a 50–50 tie, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaking vote.
Every Democratic senator will be needed to pass the legislation, making Manchin a vital part of moving forward with the new bill.
In October, roughly 20 months into the pandemic, China locked down a city of 4 million people. China has not “defeated” COVID-19, and yet Chinese leader Xi Jinping somehow convinced the world to adopt the China model of containment, despite the severe hardship and societal and economic damage caused by lockdowns, school closures, masks, and now forced vaccinations.
The United States and the world have never taken China’s advice on any other global problem in the past. So why was the pandemic response an exception?
Beijing’s original strategy was to cover up the virus. When that failed, it seemed the CCP believed that its legitimacy hinged on its ability to control the virus. Consequently, the CCP took a hard line. Authorities imposed draconian measures when they locked down Wuhan and other cities, which most of the world condemned as a violation of human rights. However, some Western media and politicians were less critical and said that the measures were effective, but they could never be applied to the West. And yet, within months, many countries followed suit.
China’s state media and internet trolls began publicly pushing CCP policies of mass testing, lockdowns, quarantines, masks, and school closures. ProPublica investigated Twitter accounts, supporting China’s pandemic response and its role as the “world’s savior,” and found 10,000 of them to be fake and linked to the Chinese regime. Twitter ended up deleting over 170,000 accounts that were linked to the CCP’s influence campaign.
In the West, mainstream media and some lawmakers began praising China for “flattening the curve” so quickly. In March 2020, scientific journal Nature ran an article about how the rest of the world could learn from China’s handling of COVID-19, suggesting that other countries should emulate China’s lockdowns.
Although Nature supported the Chinese model, it explained that travel bans would only delay the spread, not end the pandemic. It went on to say that the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended against travel bans at the time. The article also mentioned that Singapore had quickly adopted the China model of contact tracing and isolation, and thus brought the virus under control by March 2020. The reality is, however, Singapore was still under lockdown in the summer and has recently began to ease restrictions.
As for school closures, the Nature article made the claim that children were equally as likely to be infected as adults, something which has since been disproved. But the article also said that it was unclear if children could transmit the virus, so it was unknown if school closures would be beneficial. And yet, schools were closed around the world.
Perhaps the most important statement in the Nature article was “China is suppressing the virus, not eradicating” it. The article also goes on to say, “Lockdowns have to end at some point.” And yet, nearly two years later, COVID-19 restrictions are still being implemented.
Chinese commuters wear protective masks as they wait to cross an intersection at the end of the workday during rush hour in Beijing, China, on May 18, 2020. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
Xi began touting China’s “success with the virus” as a form of nationalism, which the Chinese public appeared to buy into. The rest of the world also believed it, as they followed China’s lead, locking down their own populations, closing schools, and requiring citizens to wear masks.
The CCP believed that its handling of the virus would catapult China to a position of world leadership. Beijing bragged, through state media and online posters, about the “low death count” in China and mounting deaths in the United States. To appear as the “world’s savior,” Beijing offered concessionary loans to Sri Lanka and other developing countries, whose economies were wiped out by the same virus response that China had recommended. The CCP sent Chinese-made masks, personal protective equipment (PPE), and medical supplies to Spain, Italy, the Philippines, and Malaysia.
In Italy, Chinese health “experts” taught the Italian government how to implement the China-model of pandemic containment.
Thus, China exported contact tracing, masks, lockdowns, and school closures. China sent aid along the “Health Silk Road” to legitimize the debt ridden Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Beijing criticized the United States’ refusal to support the WHO, while widely publicizing China’s engagement with it and other world organizations.
Xi called on world leaders to talk about pandemic response. He held talks with the G-20, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the African Union. Chinese diplomats released media articles and op-eds in the various countries they were stationed in, to highlight the aid that China was dolling out and the expertise that China was imparting to the world regarding containment measures.
State-sponsored media articles stressed how grateful countries around the world were for China’s help in fighting the pandemic. Much of the aid that countries received was not actually aid. They had to pay for it. And a great deal of the equipment was defective. Slovakia received $16 million worth of defective test kits. And Finland purchased Chinese-made masks that turned out to be unsuitable for use in hospitals.
Capitalizing on its alleged successful handling of COVID-19, the CCP sought to take a leading role in global health organizations. Western media apparently bought into the notion that China knew the right way to address the pandemic and began supporting the CCP’s initiatives. China provided funding to the WHO, which then parroted Beijing’s recommendations about the importance of suspending civil liberties and locking down the global economy as a means of preventing the spread of the disease.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the WHO rejected reports provided by doctors in Taiwan, because Beijing opposes Taiwanese representation in international bodies. Instead, the WHO transmitted the CCP’s narrative, praising China’s alleged early response.
The WHO issued a China mission report, which stated: “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history” gaining valuable response time, utilizing an “all-of-government and all-of society approach.”
The WHO report did not include anything about the negative impact of China’s draconian measures. Instead, it endorsed the China strategy, recommending it to the world.
And one-by-one, countries adopted the China model, disregarding the negative impact and ignoring data, which suggested that these methods were not effective at ending the pandemic.
Writing for RealClearPolitics, Professor Andrew E. Busch of Claremont McKenna College finds that “one reason for Americans’ increasing political discomfort—the feeling that politics has become a blood sport in which traditional protections and safety nets are no longer present—is that the nonpartisan insulation protecting the rule of law and consent of the governed has frayed. There is a broad pattern of offices that require political neutrality being converted into offices that are genuinely partisan in their operation.”
What, I wonder, was his first clue?
Understandably, Busch concentrates on the most recent examples of this creeping partisanship in places that are supposed to be non-partisan, since the Biden administration represents a quantum leap in the politicization of everything, but especially of the law.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, he writes, “has already used the Justice Department to advance his own party’s version of the stolen-election story by suing to stop state legislative efforts to enhance ballot security, then threatening to sic the FBI on parents who complain to their local school boards about left-wing political indoctrination in the classroom.”
By contrast, Busch praises the non-partisan spirit of former Attorney General William Barr for resigning rather than supporting President Trump’s demand for a thorough investigation of election irregularities.
But then he can’t help noticing the concerted legal efforts by Democratic Attorneys General in swing states last year to change voting laws in order to create those irregularities—and, with them, the opportunities for cheating.
You can see why Busch wants to be even-handed and pretend that the partisan takeover of supposedly non-partisan institutions is coming from both sides, but he can’t quite obscure the fact that the overwhelmingly majority of these efforts have been made—and successfully made, thanks to the compliant media—on behalf of Democrats.
There is nothing like a Republican equivalent, for example, of the partisan takeover of the FBI under James Comey. “The course of the Russia investigation,” writes Busch, “complete with the obvious biases of Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, implied that the bureau had picked sides.”
Implied? Can there be any doubt about which side these and others in the bureau were on? Or which side Robert Mueller and his team were on? If there were any doubt about it, it must have been dispelled by the recent revelations, and indictments, coming out of the John Durham investigation.
Busch might also have mentioned the disparity in federal law-enforcement’s treatment of the Capitol rioters of Jan. 6 as constituting an “insurrection” and its almost complete lack of interest in the hundreds of riots, the billions of dollars in property damage and the many deaths that took place around the country last summer.
You don’t have to be particularly good at spotting “implied” biases to tell that the difference between the two was that the first was in support of Donald Trump, the others opposed to him. And, violently, opposed to the police. But why would we expect the federal police, ostensibly there to uphold the rule of law, to care about that?
Also, as I pointed out last summer in these pages, General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the nation’s armed forces, traditionally our number one non-partisan institution, along with the judiciary, testified before Congress on behalf of the Democratic talking point by asserting on the basis of zero evidence that the Capitol riot was motivated by “white rage.”
Milley is also charged with weeding out of the services those identified by the extreme left as members of the “extremist right.”
But the perspicacious could have picked up hints of the erosion of the “nonpartisan insulation” of key institutions long before 2016.
The politicization of the judiciary, I would argue, began at least as far back as 1987 when a certain Joseph R. Biden, newly appointed chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, put the kibosh on President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court for transparently political reasons.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who once said of his fellow judges that “we don’t work as Democrats or Republicans,” has gone to heroic lengths to keep up the pretense of non-partisanship in the judiciary, but then he is also the man who, apparently without irony, once called the U.S. Senate “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
The politicization of the armed services began even earlier. As the late Colin Powell cheerfully put it in 2007, presumably with reference to his own military career, which started in the Vietnam era, “Anybody who becomes a senior officer had better have some political instincts or you’re going to get ground up. We are a political nation. It is not a dirty word.”
What he meant to say, perhaps, was that it is only a dirty word when applied to constitutionally non-political institutions. Like the military.
I understand that he was talking about the internal politics that are inevitable in any large organization, but in the military, whose most senior officers are appointed by civilian (and political) authority, those politics are always bound up with the other kind.
Under President George W. Bush we learned, at least if we were paying attention, of the politicization of the CIA, which regularly briefed the media (anonymously, of course) against their ostensible commander-in-chief.
Under President Barack Obama we learned, even if we weren’t paying much attention, of the politicization of the Department of Justice and the IRS.
And, as everyone now knows, under President Donald Trump we learned of the politicization not only of the FBI and (again) the Justice Department but also of the State Department. All three, while ostensibly serving the President, were actually undermining him.
It should not be necessary to point out that all of these encroachments of the political onto officially non-political territory have been in one direction and one direction only—leftwards. It’s as if there were some law of political inertia analogous to Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”
Maybe this is what the progressives mean by saying that they are “on the right side of history,” If so, it means that the rest of us, who still treasure what we think is our right to be non-political, must be on the wrong side of history.
The CIA’s China ops have failed since at least 2010. Double them.
The CIA lags on China intelligence by at least a decade. Only in August did it moot the idea of a “China Mission Center,” which it finally announced on Oct. 7.
The center will reportedly make it easier to leverage agency resources to address the growing China threat, and intelligence failures of the last decade on all things Beijing, China, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But without significantly more resources, the new center will be yet another agency fail.
According to a Nov. 10 Bloomberg report, “A lack of top-tier intelligence on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s inner circle is frustrating senior Biden administration officials struggling to get ahead of Beijing’s next steps, according to current and former officials who have reviewed the most sensitive U.S. intelligence reports.”
The officials say American intelligence finds it increasingly difficult to penetrate Xi’s opaque decision-making and ever-more centralized control of the CCP.
The agency or other officials were surprised, according to Bloomberg, the Telegraph, and the Financial Times, about China’s hypersonic missile test that was reported on Oct. 16, the breaking of the Hong Kong treaty with Britain, the projection of military power over the South China Sea, limits of independent investigation into the COVID-19 origin, cancellation of Chinese IPOs, and increased Chinese hacking.
From 2010 to 2012, Beijing found and killed at least 12 CIA sources in China, through a mole or hacking the agency’s covert electronic communications. At least another half-dozen were imprisoned, according to a 2017 New York Times report.
Previously, a suspected Chinese mole escaped the United States and is now living abroad. CCP spies penetrated Taiwan’s National Security Agency. Chinese operators infiltrated the CIA’s hiring process.
According to The New York Times, “Some officers met their sources at a restaurant where Chinese agents had planted listening devices, former officials said, and even the waiters worked for Chinese intelligence.”
Amateur hour at the CIA costs lives.
Also in 2017, thousands of pages detailing the CIA’s most sensitive cybersecurity hacking tools were themselves hacked and released on Wikileaks. The source of the leak sought “to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons,” according to Wikileaks.
Prince, a member of the hacking group Red Hacker Alliance who refused to give his real name, uses his computer at the group’s office in Dongguan, China, on Aug. 4, 2020. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)
The agency’s current lack of Mandarin speakers, according to Bloomberg, is icing on Beijing’s cake.
The CIA and FBI have failed to address the many U.S. citizens who operate in gray areas of both business in China, the profit of which can be turned up and down by the CCP, and pro-Beijing political influence in Washington, which they can use to demonstrate their “friendship” for China.
These Beijing–New York business interests act to paralyze American defenses against the CCP by promoting the soft-on-China approach, which is therefore pro-business—in the short run. In the long run, America is selling the CCP $2.3 trillion worth of investments and over $600 billion in annual trade, which is plenty of rope to hang itself with.
The root cause of the CIA’s failure is therefore political, at both macro and micro levels. Successive American presidents and congresses are too influenced by U.S. corporations profiting from trillions of dollars worth of business in China. Corporations would rather have Washington ignore the China threat than overturn their applecart of profits. Our top American political leadership, including the CIA’s leadership over multiple administrations, is therefore at fault. China analysts who are closest to the intel have understood the threat all along.
The political problem is also personal, in that the occasional insider threats within the CIA and other powerful American institutions are insufficiently patriotic. They apparently don’t understand that the CIA and other U.S. military and intelligence entities are absolutely critical in the fight against Beijing’s totalitarianism. They see America’s military, intelligence, and police capabilities as a threat to liberty, rather than its defense. We need better vetting and more patriotic teachers—from primary through graduate and post-professional training.
Now America’s applecart is rolling toward the cliff of defeat at the hands of Beijing. It’s unclear whether a last-minute reorientation of intelligence resources will make any difference. But we must try. At this point, along with doubling defense expenditures related to China, especially in terms of large weapons systems with strategic effect, America should be multiplying intelligence expenditures.
We need more of all kinds of intelligence about China, including human intelligence, signals intelligence, and imagery intelligence. All of it costs lots of money. Instead, we’re plowing $1 trillion into the Biden administration’s “infrastructure” programs, some of which can be nabbed by Beijing, while our old China intelligence is getting bureaucratically reshuffled into the CIA’s new center.
Expect more failures down the road until President Joe Biden and Congress do what’s really needed—put real resources behind the CIA.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) reportedly opposes an effort by his party to give a $4,500 tax benefit to electric vehicles made in the United States by unionized manufacturers.
Currently, U.S. law provides some tax credits to individuals who purchase an electric vehicle, ranging from $2,500 on the low end up to $7,500 for qualifying vehicles. Democrats hope to expand that top line credit to $12,500 in their Build Back Better budget bill as part of a larger climate effort.
Of that, a $4,500 tax credit is exclusive to cars produced by unionized manufacturers. Honda, Toyota, and Tesla, who are not unionized firms, have criticized the plan, saying that it would unfairly benefit their unionized rivals: General Motors, Ford Motor, and Stellantis (formerly Fiat Chrysler).
According to a report by Automotive News, Sen. Joe Manchin agrees with these criticisms.
On Thursday, Manchin attended an event by Toyota in his home state of West Virginia, where the Japanese firm announced a $240 million investment in an engine and transmission factory in the state. In an interview at the event, Manchin criticized the proposal by his party.
“When I heard about this, what they were putting in the bill, I went right to the sponsor and I said, ‘This is wrong. This can’t happen. It’s not who we are as a country. It’s not how we built this country, and the product should speak for itself,’” Manchin said, referring to Sen. Debbie Stabenow, (D-Mich.).
“We shouldn’t use everyone’s tax dollars to pick winners and losers,” he continued. “If you’re a capitalist economy that we are in society, then you let the product speak for itself, and hopefully, we’ll get that, that’ll be corrected.”
But many more Democrats support the proposal.
In a mid-October letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) signed by more than 100 House Democrats, Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-N.Y.) applauded the $4,500 tax credit.
“We strongly support leveling the playing field between non-union and unionized workforces by including the added $4,500 incentive to support union-made EVs,” Suozzi wrote. The tax credits, he added, “help guarantee that working men and women are an integral part of that success story.”
The expanded tax credits are intended as part of a larger legislative effort by Democrats to address the alleged “climate crisis.”
President Joe Biden, after taking office, put forward a goal for the United States to achieve a 50 percent reduction in carbon emissions by the year 2030.
To meet this tall order, Democrats have emphasized the importance of encouraging and expanding alternate sources of energy. In Democrats’ $1.75 trillion budget bill, over $500 billion—more than a quarter of all spending in the bill—goes towards meeting this goal.
The bill would give some incentives to utility companies who transition their power grid away from fossil fuel sources. To further incentivize electric vehicles, the bill authorizes the government to build more charging stations for the vehicles across the United States, in conjunction with the tax credit.
Manchin, a self-described “conservative Democrat,” has not shared these lofty ambitions toward climate policy.
Coming from the coal-rich state of West Virginia, where coal powers nearly the entire state, Manchin has been careful not to endorse policies that would hurt his constituents.
In the past Manchin has shot down a proposed carbon tax and has been skeptical of the plan to give grants or other incentives to utility companies who transition to non-fossil fuel power sources.
Manchin’s vote is a must-have for the final budget package to pass in view of Democrats’ thinnest-possible majority in the upper chamber. Manchin has already had a substantial impact on the bill’s course, causing its price to be cut in half and causing several programs to be cut from the bill.
Because the party needs his vote to get anything done, a strong show of opposition to the new program could force Democrats to remove the additional credit from the bill.
Sen. Manchin’s office has not immediately responded to a request for comment.
CBS on Thursday deleted a social media post that alleged Kyle Rittenhouse “murdered two men” in Kenosha, Wisconsin last year.
Rittenhouse, 18, is on trial for fatally shooting two men and wounding another.
One of the men had his hand over Rittenhouse’s rifle barrel, according to a pathologist’s testimony. Another smacked Rittenhouse with a skateboard and was reaching for his gun, according to video footage and testimony during the trial. The third was pointing his gun at Rittenhouse when he was shot.
“Kyle Rittenhouse testified in his murder trial yesterday, breaking down in tears as he told the jury he murdered two men at a Black Lives Matter protest last year in self-defense,” a post on Twitter from CBS Mornings stated.
The post drew quick backlash, with some lawyers asserting it could be grounds for a libel case.
“Hard to believe that’s a real tweet. Straight up libel from CBS. I look forward to Rittenhouse’s numerous lawsuits, some of which will be successful,” lawyer Mike Cernovich wrote on the social media website.
“Oh, well, then. No need for trials, CBS News has delivered its verdict!” added Dan McLaughlin, a writer at National Review.
A CBS spokesperson, asked for comment, told The Epoch Times in an email that “the tweet was revised.”
The spokesperson declined to answer who cleared the post and why it was deleted.
The original post was taken down and a new one was put up that used the same language, except it replaced “murdered” with “killed.”
The situation unfolded after David Hancock, a spokesman for Rittenhouse, appeared on Fox News and called the media coverage of the shootings “absolutely irresponsible and purely abhorrent.”
A public school district in Northern California announced Wednesday it will not be enforcing the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for K–12 schools.
In a 5–0 vote, the governing board of the Calaveras Unified School District (CUSD) decided at a Tuesday meeting to not “enforce, support, or comply” with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mandate, which would require students at all public, public charter, and private schools to receive COVID-19 vaccines following full federal approval of the shots for their grade span.
The school board said in a message to the school community that the decision, which came during the meeting, applies to both students and employees, adding that it will further discuss and potentially make a decision on mask mandates and testing protocols at its next meeting scheduled for Nov. 23.
In an earlier statement, the CUSD said its board was aware of the possible repercussions the district may face as a result of rejecting the state mandate, including “possible liability exposure, funding loss, and other formal actions that can be taken against the district.”
“[Board members] understand there are strong perspectives and opinions on both sides of the issue,” the statement read. “They understand the Superintendent’s recommendation for mandate compliance based on these potential consequences, but they feel strong in their individual positions on this topic.”
CUSD serves about 5,300 students and includes five elementary schools, one middle school, and Calaveras County’s only two public high schools.
California became the first state in the nation to announce COVID-19 vaccine requirements for K–12 schools in October, when the pediatric vaccines were still pending a recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Newsom said the mandate would take effect only when the vaccines receive full approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in children.
“The state already requires that students are vaccinated against viruses that cause measles, mumps, and rubella,” Newsom said when he announced the mandate. “There’s no reason why we wouldn’t do the same for COVID-19.”
“Vaccines work. It’s why California leads the country in preventing school closures and has the lowest case rates,” said the Democratic governor, who survived his recall election fueled by his pandemic response. “We encourage other states to follow our lead to keep our kids safe and prevent the spread of COVID-19.”
Despite mask mandates and other preventive measures the Newsom administration put in place, California’ COVID-19 infection rate has recently stopped dropping and started ticking up. As of Nov. 10, California remains one of the CDC’s red “high” level of virus transmission states, compared to yellow “moderate” level in Florida, where there is no state-issued mask or vaccination mandate.
Despite student outrage, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California (USC) is refusing to take down a pro-police flag from his office.
James Moore, who directs the USC’s transportation engineering program, has been displaying a “Thin Blue Line” flag outside of his office door since August when the fall semester began, but has faced a complaint only recently from students who took issue with the flag’s alleged “racist origin,” according to student newspaper Daily Trojan.
“This is an inappropriate and unnecessary symbol to have on an office door where USC is, within the last year or two, trying to have a much broader diversity initiative and to be inclusive, especially in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) area,” one USC graduate student told the newspaper. The student said that he discovered the flag in October and reported the matter to the university’s office of equity and diversity.
Moore explained that he wants to add some diversity of thought to the USC campus by exposing students to a point of view they’re not usually exposed to.
“We are in an environment where there is a lot of homogenization of ideas, and diversity should include diversity of ideas,” the professor said in an interview with education news site The College Fix. “We are charging people very good money to teach them to think. I am just trying to deliver.”
The USC said Moore’s action falls within his freedom of expression and there is no rule that prevents him from hanging such a flag on the door of his own office.
“The university does not have a policy that limits the display of materials in spaces like this, though we are looking at whether it is needed,” a statement provided to the Daily Trojan reads.
This is not the first time Moore’s unpopular viewpoints upset the progressive members of the USC community. In September 2018, Moore responded to a campus-wide invitation to an event focused on believing survivors of alleged sexual assault, saying that “accusers sometimes lie.” Moore’s comment triggered a series of angry responses, including a student-led protest calling for his resignation.
“If some of them are annoyed by ideas that are opposed to theirs, well that’s just preparation for adult life,” Moore told Daily Trojan at that time regarding criticism of his remark.
Moore also expressed disagreement with USC’s policy proposals centered on racial equity in the wake of unrest sparked by George Floyd’s death, such as that faculty members undergo training to address their “unconscious biases.” He told USC President Carol Folt in a letter that the university has no business in correcting his thoughts and decision making.
“My mental and moral development are my own ongoing responsibility. The market for good ideas and sound thinking provides me with ample incentive to deliver both if I can,” Moore wrote in the June 2020 letter. “If I elect to try and improve my decisions via an assessment and awareness of my unconscious biases, this is my own affair, my own duty. I am not inclined to surrender to anyone my own role in deciding how I will decide.”
Zhang Gaoli linked to former leader Jiang Zemin’s order of live organ harvesting
News analysis
Zhang Gaoli, the former vice premier of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) State Council, was recently accused of sexual assault against Peng Shuai, a professional tennis star who is 40 years younger than Zhang. Although Chinese authorities have been scrambling to block all related posts, more and more of Zhang’s alleged scandals are being publicized online.
On the night of Nov. 2 in a Weibo post, Peng alleged that she had nonconsensual sexual relations with the 75-year-old Zhang. Peng said that Zhang’s wife was aware of it and “stood guard outside” while Peng was sexually assaulted. The post was deleted 20 minutes later, but a screenshot of the post has been widely circulated in China and abroad. The General Administration of Sports, the CCP’s State Council, and official media held a rare unanimous silence on the matter.
The New York Times noted in an article that Peng’s post was quickly deleted, and even her name and the word “tennis” were not searchable, “reflecting the extraordinary sensitivity within China of discussing misconduct by party leaders.”
As early as 2004, the CCP’s Central Discipline Inspection Commission received several reports about Zhang’s debauched lifestyle and family corruption. However, Zhang claimed publicly that “lifestyle problems and extra-marital affairs are, after all, minor … I am against promoting a puritanical life,” according to Secret China, an overseas Chinese media.
In August 2015, when Zhang was the CCP’s secretary of Tianjin, a chemical warehouse in the port of Tianjin experienced two major explosions. According to the China Earthquake Networks Centre, the first explosion was as powerful as if three tons of TNT had detonated, and the second was equivalent to 21 tons detonating. The two explosions killed a total of 173 people.
Huang Dong, a Macau military commentator, told Hong Kong Oriental Daily News on Aug. 22, 2015, that the Tianjin explosion was related to the city planning of the Tianjin Binhai New Area. Tianjin’s top official, Zhang, gave the green light at the time.
Zhang’s Real Estate and Financial Corruption Cases
On Nov. 3, the Central Discipline Inspection Commission published eight major corruption cases in Tianjin, some of which are related to the real estate development that Zhang promoted during his tenure as secretary of the Tianjin Municipal Committee.
Since the 18th CCP’s National Congress, a number of officials in Tianjin’s urban construction group, the largest state-owned enterprise in this city, have been arrested including Ma Baiyu, who was known as the “female head of urban construction” during Zhang’s administration in Tianjin.
Zhang was also involved in fraudulently financing private entity funds with $15 billion in Tianjin, according to Liberty Time Net, a Taiwan media.
Like most corrupt CCP officials, Zhang has transferred huge amounts of assets to Hong Kong and overseas through his family.
Listed in the Panama Papers—more than 11 million leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm—are many family members of Communist Party leaders who have set up companies and purchased properties in Hong Kong, and some of them even have permanent Hong Kong resident identity cards.
The Panama Papers detail financial information for more than 214,000 offshore entities. The papers were published beginning on April 3, 2016, when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 300 reporters worldwide wrote a series of stories to expose the hidden infrastructure, political corruption, and the global scale of offshore tax havens.
Family members of at least eight of China’s current and former top-ranking political leaders appear in the Panama Papers as owners or shareholders of secret offshore companies.
Taiwan’s Apple Daily newspaper reported in 2018 that at least six current and former Standing Committee members owned properties in Hong Kong, most of which are owned by the family of Zhang, who purchased nearly $110 million in property under the names of his daughter Zhang Xiaoyan and her husband Li Shengpo. Li himself is listed in the Panama Papers as a shareholder of three offshore companies.
Zhang’s Links to Genocidal Persecution and Live Organ Harvesting
Zhang served in China’s petroleum industry for 14 years as a member of the once-powerful “petroleum gang”— part of former leader Jiang Zemin’s faction—to whom Zhang was very loyal.
According to a 2006 report by Hong Kong’s Apple Daily, the retired Jiang wanted to climb Mount Tai, so Zhang ordered Mount Tai to be “closed for two days” despite it being a public holiday. Zhang also asked local officials to “line up to welcome” Jiang as “the most beloved leader of the whole party, army, and country.” Zhang even specially prepared an eight-person palanquin to carry Jiang up the mountain, while Zhang followed behind.
Since July 1999, when Jiang launched the persecution of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, Zhang has closely followed Jiang’s genocidal policy. Zhang carried out the persecution in Guangdong Province, Shenzhen, Shandong Province, and Tianjin. He is suspected of committing the crimes of genocide and torture, as well as crimes against humanity, according to the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG).
On July 5, 2021, Wang Zhiyuan, the chairman of the WOIPFG, told The Epoch Times that he had spoken with Zhang by telephone on June 24, 2015. At that time, Zhang was on an official visit to Kazakhstan as a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Central Committee and Vice Premier of the CCP’s State Council.
Wang said that during the phone call Zhang indirectly admitted that Jiang was responsible for ordering the organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners—orders that Zhang faithfully carried out.
KINNEY COUNTY, Texas—Charging an illegal immigrant with a misdemeanor such as criminal trespass sounds simple enough.
But throw 1,008 cases at a small county with a jail that has 14 spaces and a court system that usually handles six or seven cases per month—using Microsoft Word—and the wheels start to fall off.
On June 10, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed state troopers to start arresting illegal aliens—on charges including trespass, criminal mischief, and evading on foot—officials in Kinney County jumped on the idea.
County Sheriff Brad Coe was keen to stick illegal immigrants with any charges he could to deter them from coming to his county.
“We’re going to try to hold these people accountable,” Coe said. He also wanted to get them in the system because the illegal aliens captured in Kinney County have evaded Border Patrol, so they’re unknown.
Since January, ranchers and local law enforcement had seen an unprecedented increase in the number of illegal aliens traversing the county, and they’d given up on expecting federal solutions. Local ranchers, tired of cut fences and property damage, signed affidavits allowing the sheriff and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to press charges on their behalf.
Although Abbott announced the Operation Lone Star border security initiative in June, it took almost two months to secure enough jail space and for the DPS to work out the process. The state set up a temporary 100-bed detention center in neighboring Val Verde County and cleared out the 1,000-bed Briscoe Unit in Dilley.
Meanwhile, in July, almost 10,000 illegal aliens evaded Border Patrol in the Del Rio Sector, according to preliminary Customs and Border Protection numbers.
By August, DPS was ready to start the initiative in Val Verde and Kinney counties. In Kinney, DPS assigned a small team to work the brush near the U.S.–Mexico border in areas of high foot traffic. The officers quickly started arresting an average of 25 illegal aliens per day from private ranches, often at night.
At the sheriff’s office, state troopers and local jail staff took about two hours to complete the paperwork and magistrate seven Mexicans who were arrested late on Aug. 7. They’d been walking for two days before being caught on a ranch.
Texas State Troopers complete paperwork after arresting illegal immigrants for criminal trespass on a local ranch, at the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office in Brackettville, Texas, on Aug. 8, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Two said they had already tried crossing a month ago but got caught by Border Patrol and expelled. Another man, who said he was aiming to get to New York, said this was his third time trying to get through. He said his cousin intended to pay the $4,000 smuggling fee upon his delivery to New York.
Several said they’ll probably try again, while others weren’t as enthusiastic. They all said a “travel agent” on the Mexican side of the border directed them on where to cross, gave directions of where to walk, and had planned to coordinate a vehicle pick-up for them.
At first, Kinney County Justice of the Peace Narce Villarreal came down to the sheriff’s office in the middle of the night to magistrate the groups before DPS transported them the 30 miles to the Val Verde facility. But the hours became untenable and the sheriff’s office parking lot was overwhelmed with detainees, so the whole process was moved to Val Verde.
From Val Verde, the illegal aliens would eventually be transported 126 miles to the Briscoe Unit in Dilley while they waited for their court hearing. Subsequently, some were then transported another 200 miles to the Segovia jail facility in Edinburgh.
Illegal immigrants wait to be magistrated on trespassing charges in Kinney County outside the Sheriff’s Office in Brackettville, Texas, on Aug. 6, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
The Prosecution
Meanwhile, Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith was scrambling to take up the flood of new cases. He had started the job in January and was building the backend process on the fly. He had to go to the county commissioners to request a software system that would streamline the paperwork on the cases—Word documents had become too unwieldy under the volume. He contacted two other county attorneys to double-check that his complaints were solid.
Smith said he’s filed around 900 charges for criminal trespass since August, with more pending, and has had to rely heavily on Mason District Attorney Tonya Ahlschwede, who is part of Texas’s border prosecution unit, to keep up.
Former chief of the Del Rio Border Patrol Sector Austin Skero, who retired at the end of July, also joined the unit as an investigator.
After a misdemeanor arrest, Smith examines the evidence in the case file from the sheriff’s office or DPS. If it’s determined that trespass occurred, he’ll file a complaint against the individual for trespassing, which is a Class B misdemeanor. The charge is elevated if the individual has a deadly weapon, is found more than 100 feet past the property line on agricultural land, or if the alleged crime took place during a disaster (the county has been in a perpetual state of disaster since April).
Once charged, the suspect will make a plea, and if he pleads guilty, he’ll most likely get time served and be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
It’s not a hefty penalty, but “we’re hoping they avoid our county,” Smith said.
The maximum punishment for a Class B misdemeanor in Texas is 180 days in jail and a $2,000 fine, whereas a Class A is one year in jail and a $4,000 fine.
Recent trail camera photos of illegal aliens provided by ranchers in Kinney County, Texas. (Courtesy of ranchers)
As the cases have piled up, it has become a race against time for Smith.
“If they don’t make bail, they’re in jail the whole time until trial,” he said. From the time of the arrest, he has 30 days to file a Class A misdemeanor complaint against a detained individual before the habeas corpus statute requires a personal recognizance (PR) bond to be set and the individual released.
In some cases, Smith received the arrest files from DPS on day 29, or even beyond day 30. In other cases, the complaints were filed within the 30 days, but the inmate had bonded out of jail and was nowhere to be found.
Logistics and lack of manpower were the bottlenecks, he said.
“Because what the state did, when they planned on this process, they got the jails set up, they got defense attorneys funded, but not one prosecutor was there to get the prosecution set up for this,” he said.
“So we’re playing catch up, trying to get the resources at the same time to do everything—versus the defense had everything set up from the very beginning.”
On Oct. 14, Abbott announced $36.4 million in grant funding toward border prosecutions and 12 border counties, including more than $3.1 million in grant money to Kinney County, as part of Operation Lone Star.
But the money doesn’t just appear in the county bank account. It’s grant money that requires an application process, and the county must carry the costs in the meantime.
Smith has already spent more than his annual office supplies budget (about $1,200) on file folders for the trespass cases.
Court Proceedings
The first of Kinney County’s cases came up on the court docket during the last week of October. They were conducted over video conference with retired judges coming in to fill the gaps.
On Oct. 26, Judge Vivian Torres sat on the virtual bench. The cases proceeded slowly, with frequent pauses for the translator to ensure the defendant understood the goings-on.
Defense lawyer Sylvia Delgado had arranged a plea deal for several defendants that reduced their charge from a Class A to a Class B misdemeanor and a sentence of “time served,” with court costs being waived.
The defendants pleaded guilty, and the judge agreed to the plea deal terms, which included a 72-day sentence, which had been served.
Delgado said she’s been assigned about 190 cases so far by the Lubbock Public Defenders’ Office and has been focusing on getting the first ones out of jail because they’d been detained so long.
She said she meets her clients via Zoom video conference. “And I tell them specifically: ‘You have not been forgotten. I’m your attorney, I’m going to work to get you out,’” Delgado told The Epoch Times on Oct. 28.
Delgado said she lets them know that she’ll attempt to get them released on a no-fee PR bond, try to get charges reduced, and, if they want to plead guilty, ask for time served.
“And then, unfortunately, when I go back to see them before docket, a lot of them are gone,” she said. Of her 18 clients for the Nov. 2 court docket, she has only been able to follow up with the six who are still in jail.
“I met with Joselito, and Joselito had told me, ‘Well, Ms. Delgado, I just want to plead guilty and get sent back to Mexico. I just want to go back to Mexico.’
“So I was looking for Joselito. And he’s nowhere to be found.”
She was told by the other inmates that Joselito was transferred to ICE, while others had returned to Mexico after bonding out.
Defense lawyer Sylvia Delgado (bottom-right) speaks during an arraignment hearing for an illegal alien charged with criminal trespass in Kinney County, on Oct. 28, 2021. (Screenshot/The Epoch Times)
Other defense attorneys have also said they had no idea where their clients were after they bonded out.
The region’s district attorney, Suzanne West, told The Epoch Times that she believes inmates who bond out are released to ICE.
ICE didn’t confirm that it was taking custody of the inmates, or what happened next. A spokesperson said the agency is following the enforcement priorities set out by the Biden administration.
“In Texas and elsewhere, ICE conducts an individualized determination in each case to assess whether arrest and removal is warranted. This determination includes an assessment of aggravating and mitigating factors, as well as a determination of whether the person is removable under the law,” ICE spokesperson Monica Yoas stated in an email to The Epoch Times.
“ICE fully respects the civil rights and liberties of all people when conducting this assessment.”
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which operates the Briscoe and Segovia jails, said that as of Oct. 29, the Briscoe unit held 654 illegal alien inmates, with 536 from Kinney County, 105 from Val Verde, 10 from Zavala, and three from Frio County. In Segovia, all 291 illegal alien inmates are from Kinney County.
Delgado said she has asked for an investigator to help on the ground to find the missing people and has meanwhile obtained a continuance in court for their hearing dates.
“If they’re truly lost, like we don’t ever hear from them again, we don’t know what happened. If I can’t really find out, then they’re probably just going to keep getting reset,” she said.
“So I suppose a warrant may issue, but we’re not there yet. We’re just not there in that system yet.”
Most of the defendants on the next several dockets, totaling about 60 cases, had their cases dismissed because defense lawyers argued that the complaints were deficient as they lacked the landowner’s name.
Smith later said he was disappointed that the name of the ranch wasn’t sufficient for the court, as he was hoping to avoid naming the landowner in public records. The landowner’s name is usually included in the arrest file, which the lawyer can access.
“A lot of ranchers are concerned about cartel retribution, possibly, if their name comes up in complaint after complaint after complaint” he said.
“So we can still refile it and prosecute once we correct that information. But you know, they’re not going to show up.”
Smith’s office scrambled to amend the 900 complaints already filed to include the landowner name and the GPS location of the alleged offense.
A total of 52 illegal immigrants from Mexico and Honduras wait to be booked for criminal trespass after being arrested by Texas State Troopers on local ranches, at the Kinney County Sheriffs Office in Brackettville, Texas, on Aug. 8, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Defense lawyers appeared to change tack on the Nov. 2 docket and entered “not guilty” pleas for all their clients who were still present.
The judge subsequently ordered the release of each defendant on a no-fee PR bond and set a pre-trial hearing for Nov. 18.
Ahlschwede, from the border prosecution unit, told the court on Nov. 2 that several illegal aliens who had been released from jail after paying a cash bond have since been arrested again for criminal trespass in Kinney County.
Smith said one man was released after paying a $4,000 cash bond. “Then we re-arrested him 10 days ago. And despite it being a multiple offense, they gave a $500 bond. Well, we filed the motion to revoke [the bond] once we got the case file—which was 10 days after it occurred,” Smith said.
The man had been released three days prior to receiving the motion.
“By the time we got the file, he was already gone. Who knows where he’s at now,” Smith said.
Coe said his office has been juggling a steady stream of people coming in to pay cash bonds with wads of crisp $100 bills.
“Some of them are $5,000. Where are they getting the money?” he said. At one point, he had more than half a million dollars in cash sitting in his vault.
“I’d bet there’s a 99 percent chance that they don’t show up [to court],” Coe said of the released illegal alien defendants.
“They’ll probably end up in places like Michigan, Missouri, West Virginia, Washington—we’ll never see them again. So are we doing this all in vain? I mean, it’s doable. It’s very, very new. It’s just getting the mechanism rolling.”
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe sets up a pop-up vehicle checkpoint near Brackettville, Texas, on Aug. 16, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Impact
Coe said he hoped the convictions might be a roadblock for illegal aliens if they ever tried to file for some type of assistance or become U.S. citizens.
“That’d be a check mark against them. Some type of consequence has to be there,” he said.
However, in reality, having a trespass conviction on record will act more like a speedbump, according to former immigration judge Andrew Arthur, who is now a resident fellow in law and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies.
“Generally, this isn’t going to have any effect on them from an immigration standpoint, but again, sleeping in a room with 30 guys for six months really does have a way of concentrating one’s attention,” Arthur told The Epoch Times on Oct. 27.
Even if the Texas legislature passes a bill that would enhance punishment to a third-degree felony for illegal alien trespassers, the impact on future immigration status would be negligible, Arthur said.
“But again, anything that impedes people’s ability to enter the United States, anything that’s going to require them to be detained pretrial, or imprisoned post-trial, is going to be a deterrent,” he said.
“Now, how strong a deterrent effect that is remains to be seen.”
Arthur said the deterrent effect was worth the taxpayer dollars spent on the trespass prosecutions.
“The problem is that Texas is doing the job that the federal government should be doing.”
Volume
The majority of Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border occur in Texas. Of the more than 1.6 million illegal alien apprehensions in fiscal year 2021, Border Patrol apprehended almost 958,000, or 58 percent, crossing into Texas.
Customs and Border Protection doesn’t publish the number of illegal aliens that Border Patrol agents have detected but who subsequently evade apprehension, but the internal numbers have sat at around 50,000 per month this year, according to an inside source. It’s impossible to estimate the number of those who aren’t detected at all.
Within the Operation Lone Star border effort, the DPS had made 7,744 criminal arrests as of Oct. 14, including 1,300 for criminal trespass and 6,339 on felony charges. State troopers had been involved in 822 vehicle pursuits, mostly chasing smugglers who were transporting illegal aliens.
Kinney County has charged significantly more illegal aliens with trespass than Val Verde County so far, which started the initiative at the same time. Other counties, such as Frio and Zavala started prosecuting more recently, while Uvalde and Brooks counties are considering getting started but are strapped with the same lack of resources that Kinney County has experienced.
Smith said the volume of prosecutions coming from Kinney County were a result of the county officials caring about the issue.
“They want to do something more about it than just close your eyes and not watch what’s happening to your county,” he said.
Smith said he’s been accused by a defense lawyer of being racist for prosecuting illegal aliens.
“The criminal complaints make no mention of immigration status or hinge on race. If you come down to Kinney County and trespass on private property, we’ll arrest you too,” he said in a statement on Oct. 26.
Delgado, the defense lawyer, said she hadn’t seen any malfeasance, despite the scramble to pull everything together.
“It’s a big ship and it’s making a large turn in a small canal. And so we are all working really hard to get things moving. And I believe it is starting to unclog,” she said.
Smith predicted that the system will be much more robust within a couple of months.
“What we’re working on right now is tweaking the language of the complaints, researching everything, making sure there’s nothing else they [the defense] can pick at,” he said.
“Now, will this Operation Lone Star continue for the next three years? Probably so. Unless the federal government decides to actually follow the laws passed by Congress—which at the moment they’re not doing.
“The only realistic solution to this crisis will require deploying all of the Texas military on the border and actually prevent the illegal entries from occurring. Right now, it’s like trying to build a dam after the flood gates have already been opened.”
Creating more government jobs is an expense (AKA subsidy), not a benefit. Do less with more. [US Patriot]
WASHINGTON—The U.S. infrastructure bill President Joe Biden is expected to sign soon will boost investments in the U.S. Department of Energy by the most since its founding in 1977 and create about 1,000 jobs in the agency, officials said on Wednesday.
The bipartisan bill contains more than $62 billion in incentives for emerging and traditional technologies for the department.
Biden and his fellow Democrats in Congress are also seeking to pass a bigger reconciliation bill that has even more incentives for the energy transition, but which has been delayed by disagreements within the party.
“Over the coming days, weeks, months, we are going to have to step up,” Tarak Shah, the DOE chief of staff told reporters about the programs included in the bipartisan bill.
“We anticipate somewhere around 1,000 new folks coming on board to help us spend this money efficiently and effectively for the American people.” The DOE has about 13,000 federal employees and tens of thousands more at its 17 national labs.
For the development of new technologies, the bipartisan bill includes more than $7 billion in incentives for producing, sourcing, and recycling minerals and materials for batteries to store renewable power.
It also has $21.5 billion for clean energy demonstration plants for development of hydrogen gas, sucking carbon emissions out of the air and from industrial plants, and for advanced nuclear power plants.
Hydrogen can be used in fuel cell vehicles, mixed with natural gas, or in making synthetic fuels for ships, but costs about four times as much to generate from wind and solar power as from fossil fuels.
On helping the existing U.S. energy system function better, the bill also has $11 billion in grants for states, tribes and utilities to enhance the resilience of the electric grid from extreme weather and cyber attacks.
And it creates a $6 billion nuclear power credit program at the department to save existing reactors, some of which have been struggling to compete with plants that burn plentiful natural gas and with falling costs for renewable power.
The nuclear power credit program will be one of the fastest programs to develop, with a deadline of 180 days to start running. Reactor owners will have to submit applications showing that their plants are under economic duress before receiving any subsidies.
An official said nuclear power was essential for meeting Biden’s climate goals, including decarbonizing the electric grid by 2035.
FREDERICK COUNTY, Va.—Veterans Day is a “very special day” for Austin Riddell, a fourth-grader at Redbud Run Elementary School in Winchester, Virginia.
“It’s a day set aside to recognize bravery, courage, selflessness, a day to show our military veterans that our country loves them,” the 8-year-old said.
To pay tribute to this, Austin organized an event on Nov. 11 to push the local school board to observe Veterans Day as a school holiday.
“I could never get away with an event like this in North Korea, China, lots of other places; only in America are we this free,” Austin said during his opening speech at the event, held at the football field across from the school. “And it’s all because of our courageous veterans who gave me a voice to go in front of the Board of Education, to go in front of the Board of Supervisors to change the world starting right here in Winchester.”
As a boy born into a family with four generations serving in the Army, Austin said he never had perfect attendance, because he doesn’t go to school on Veterans Day. On Aug. 10 and Nov. 3, he urged the Frederick County School Board to make the day a school holiday. The board has yet to take any action.
“Apple Blossom Festival is a day off at the schools, but Veterans Day isn’t. That made me mad,” Austin told The Epoch Times.
Austin’s mother, Priscilla Bellido, thanked the local community for making the event happen. “We started with 35 flyers when he said he wanted to put together today’s tribute. Mama ran off 35 flyers, passed them out. And then it just spread like wildfire,” Bellido said at the event.
Several veterans spoke at the event, and Lt. Governor-Elect Winsome Sears was also present. A former Marine and Jamaican born, she lives with her family in Winchester.
Austin Riddell, a fourth-grader at Redbud Run Elementary School, gives an American flag to Virginia Lt. Governor-Elect Winsome Sears at a Veterans Day event in Winchester, Va., on Nov. 11, 2021. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
“I’m always amazed that someone so young is so driven. And you wonder what is it, and can we bottle that and sell it? Clearly, this young man is destined for greatness. He’s already shown true leadership. And he recognizes sacrifice and love of country,” Sears told The Epoch Times.
“It is always good when a nation honors its veterans knowing that they could have died in service to them,” she said. “And we want to encourage our young people to continue to serve their country because America is worth fighting for, worth dying for.”
Virginia Lt. Governor-Elect Winsome Sears at a Veterans Day event in Winchester, Va., on Nov. 11, 2021. (Courtesy of Pegah Fowler)
Describing himself as “an 8-year-old boy not only with dreams, but with plans to lead our country and represent our great Americans” to the county school board, Austin said he wants to be a U.S. senator. His goal is to run in 2052 when he turns 40.
Austin decided to become a U.S. senator at about 2 years old, his mother said. She said she was switching TV channels when Austin asked her to “go back” to C-SPAN. He asked her: “Who are those people? What are they doing?” After she explained to him about what was being displayed, a congressional hearing, he said, “I want to be one of those when I grow up.”
Asked if she gave Austin any help writing his speeches at the school board meetings, she said she only helped with punctuation and “removing curse words.” Bellido said the 8-year-old missed his iPad time and bedtime to come up with his speeches.
Miles Adkins, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and Frederick County School Board member-elect, presented a Certificate of Appreciation to Austin Riddell (L) on behalf of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, at a Veterans Day event in Winchester, Va., on Nov. 11, 2021. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon is warning that he thinks “things are spinning out of control” for Joe Biden.
During an interview with Joe Hoft, Bannon warned that he has no idea if Biden is even in charge or who is calling the shots behind the scenes at the White House.
“If you look at really the policies of what President Trump stands for, two-thirds of the nation I think agrees with us and it’s time we start acting like we control the country. We do control this country,” Bannon began.
“People are responding and we’re winning and we’re going to win,” Bannon added.
When discussing Joe Biden, he argued: “He’s just so inappropriate on so many things…Not only is it radical, not only is it reckless, but it’s also gross incompetence.”
Bannon went on to slam Biden on rising inflation and the threat of China.
“It’s the cruelest tax on the elderly and the cruelest tax on the working class. I’m not sure anyone is running this country, I think it’s spinning out of control,” Bannon said.
“Their [Democrats and RINOs] radical plans, they tried to destroy this country. This thing with China is a disgrace,” he said.
“I think that’s a clearer and present danger. These advances in robotics, the advances in artificial intelligence, the advanced chip design, and the merger of those along with biotechnology and CRISPR, that is a real challenge to us. It’s technology that’s out of control and quite frankly gonna spin out of control, out of our grasp within, I think the next five or ten years,” he added.
Last month, Bannon warned
Bannon is warning Americans that they can use “psychological warfare” to their advantage to cut through the information noise from the elites.
During an episode on his War Room podcast, Bannon warned about what’s coming and how Americans need to be prepared.
“The first tenet of psychological warfare is to break you to become compliant to make sure all your actions and the human agency will be futile.”
He went on to warn about what’s to come.
Bannon continued with his warning of psychological warfare, saying, ” With information, you can be armed to take action in a world gone awry and that you will never succumb to psychological warfare which is to break your resistance which is to make you complicit.”
Last week, Bannon warned that The Economist has issued a new issue of their newsletter with the headline: “The Shortage Economy.”
Bannon called it a “tip sheet” for the elites and warns that America should take it seriously. He suggests that if even mainstream sources like the Economist are predicting doom, then it’s time for the American people to prepare and get ready.
“The revered Economist, what is their headline? The Shortage Economy. America needs to prepare… Get ready for the bleakest, darkest Christmas in living memory… This is far beyond stagflation,” Bannon said.
“We’re entering into another faze. It’s all the converging forces. Remember, elections have consequences, illegal elections have catastrophic consequences,” he added.
”This is why we’re in dangerous territory right now. Biden’s fiscal and monetary stimulus is the most reckless thing in American history. And you know who’s going to pay for that, the workers… I’m gonna tell you, This Christmas, it’s going to hit and it’s going to hit like nobody’s business. And nobody else in all media is going to tell you this,” he added.
Bannon is also the subject of the Democrats’ political witch hunt.
Unable or unwilling, so far, to go for Trump himself and issue him a subpoena they have trained their focus on Bannon, the host of the hugely popular “War Room” podcast.
It could be because Bannon hosts the popular show and they fear him as much as they fear Trump, or it could be that they believe they have a real case.
If you haven’t downloaded the War Room podcast, you’re missing out on critical information you can’t get anywhere else (and it’s FREE)!
Let’s get the groundbreaking podcast to 100 million downloads to show mainstream media and the left how strong this movement is!
Journalist Megyn Kelly went scorched earth on NBA superstar LeBron James after he mocked Kyle Rittenhouse for getting emotional during his trial.
Critics blasted James on social media after he attacked Rittenhouse for breaking down in tears during testimony in his murder trial on Wednesday.
During a segment on her popular podcast, Kelly did not waste time going after James.
“LeBron James just tweeted out quote, ‘what tears? I didn’t see one,’” Kelly said. “‘Man, knock it off. That boy ate some lemon heads before walking into court.’ Good gracious. Where’s your humanity?”
“Hakeem Jeffries, the head of the House Democratic caucus, tweeted ‘lock up Kyle Rittenhouse and throw away the key,’” she added. “Do you know anything about law, about criminal law? Anything at all? Have you bothered to look into it, even a little? Have you followed the trial at all before you decided to make a public comment from that post?”
“Disgusting, dishonest,” Kelly continued. “And the natural product of what happens when the false, ideological social justice crew meets actual, fact-based courtroom justice. Where truth and fairness still matter.”
James came under heavy fire this week for his tweet mocking Rittenhouse.
“What tears????? I didn’t see one. Man knock it off! That boy ate some lemon heads before walking into court,” James noted derisively on Twitter in a post that included a clip of the 18-year-old beginning to cry uncontrollably as he attempted to recount the Aug. 25, 2020 shootings that left two men dead and a third man wounded.
What tears????? I didn’t see one. Man knock it off! That boy ate some lemon heads before walking into court. 🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/LKwYssIUmD
Fox News noted that social media users blasted the NBA star for his remark:
Critics lambasted James on social media, with some referring to him as a “coward,” and others suggesting he didn’t have the credibility to chime in on Rittenhouse’s emotions considering he was “known as the king of faking injuries, flopping, and crying to refs.” James is an outspoken progressive on domestic political issues.
You like picking on the powerless a teenager while turning a blind eye to true evil like your Chinese CCP masters that have 2 million Muslims in concentration camps making your sneakers.
Hey King, any support for your fellow NBA player @EnesKanter speaking out against the mass extermination of ethnic Muslims in China? You fucking coward.
LeBron James appears to be mocking people dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in this post. Why? Is this a joke to you? Not a good look!
As it became apparent that Rittenhouse could not continue his testimony, Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder, who is presiding over the case, called a short recess so the teen could compose himself.
Later in the day, Schroeder took a prosecutor to task for repeated violations of protocol and pre-trial orders.
At one point, after he instructed the jury to go to the library, the judge ripped Binger, saying that he had committed a “grave constitutional violation” after discussing Rittenhouse’s right to remain silent.
“You’re right on the borderline. You may be over. But it better stop,” the judge warned.
The judge ordered the jury to leave his chambers for a second time during cross-examination after the prosecutor asked the teen about an Aug. 10 incident that had been excluded under a pre-trial order.
“Why would you think that made it okay for you to bring this matter before the jury?” Schroeder hollered at Binger.
“I was astonished when you began his examination by commenting on the defendant’s post-arrest silence. That’s basic law. It’s been basic law in this country for 40 years, 50 years. I have no idea why you would do something like that,” he added. “I don’t know what you’re up to.”
The defense team for Kyle Rittenhouse has rested its case and his mom is furious with President Joe Biden for the way, she said, he has portrayed her son.
Last year, during the presidential election campaign, Biden attacked Donald Trump for not disavowing “white supremacists” as he tweeted a video featuring a photo of the teenage Rittenhouse.
“There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night,” he said.
There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night. pic.twitter.com/Q3VZTW1vUV
“When I saw that I was shocked, I was angry. President Biden don’t [sic] know my son whatsoever, and he’s not a White supremacist. He’s not a racist. And [Biden] did that for the votes. And I was so angry for a while at him and what he did to my son, he defamed him,” Wendy Rittenhouse said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday, Fox News reported.
Rittenhouse was charged with two counts of homicide for shooting Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, with an AR-15. The third person Rittenhouse shot, Gaige Grosskreutz, survived and testified Monday.
Rittenhouse was also charged with possessing a weapon by a person under 18, and multiple counts of reckless endangerment.
At trial, the prosecution tried to convey that the defendant went to the riots and had a gun with him because he intended to use it. The defendant pleaded not guilty to all charges and testified that he fired his weapon, all eight times, in self-defense.
“I see this man trying to kick my son in the face …. When I look at the video with that guy pointing a gun to my son’s head, I thought: he was going to die,” she said of the video of the shooting.
She said that her son “has a lot of healing to do” and experiences “nightmares.”
But she did have nice things to say about the judge in the case.
“The judge is very fair. The people that I talked to that lived in Kenosha all their lives. They told me that Judge Schroeder is a very fair judge and he doesn’t allow no nonsense [sic] in his courtroom,” she said.
The judge has been hammering the prosecution this week.
Sparks flew during the eighth day of Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial in Kenosha, Wis., after Judge Bruce Schroeder yelled at one of the prosecutors.
According to reports, the heated exchange between Schroeder and Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger came following his cross-examination of the teen who had earlier broken down on the stand, leading Schroeder to call for recess.
“The first rift between Binger and Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder broke out after the district attorney pressed Rittenhouse if he was telling his account of August 25, 2020—when he fatally shot two men and wounded a third—for the first time,” Newsweek reported.
After he instructed the jury to go to the library, the judge ripped Binger, saying that he had committed a “grave constitutional violation” after discussing Rittenhouse’s right to remain silent.
“You’re right on the borderline. You may be over. But it better stop,” the judge warned.
The judge ordered the jury to leave his chambers for a second time during cross-examination after the prosecutor asked the teen about an Aug. 10 incident that had been excluded under a pre-trial order.
“Why would you think that made it okay for you to bring this matter before the jury?” Schroeder hollered at Binger.
“I was astonished when you began his examination by commenting on the defendant’s post-arrest silence. That’s basic law. It’s been basic law in this country for 40 years, 50 years. I have no idea why you would do something like that,” he added. “I don’t know what you’re up to.”
Binger replied that he was attempting to impeach Rittenhouse during his line of questioning, but that didn’t go over at all with Schroeder.
“Don’t get brazen with me!” Schroeder yelled at Binger. “You know very well that an attorney can’t go into these types of areas when the judge has already ruled, without asking outside the presence of the jury to do so. So don’t give me that!”
The judge went on to say that he did not want to have another issue with the prosecutor.
Attorneys for the Project Vertitas founder believe that the Department of Justice has been tipping off the New York Times about raids on current and former employees.
The company has been scrutinized regarding the theft of a diary purported to belong to President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden, that the company never published, The Daily Mail reported.
The FBI conducted raids at O’Keefe’s New York home and those of others connected to Project Veritas early Saturday morning, seizing two of O’Keefe’s cell phones, among other items.
Days later, on Thursday, the New York Times published a report based on memos from the group’s lawyer, revealing his legal advice on the group’s use of false identities and undercover filming, tactics that are eschewed by most modern journalists.
Later that day, a federal judge ordered the DOJ to stop extracting data from the phones, grating a request from O’Keefe’s legal team made the day before for an independent party to be appointed to oversee the review of the confiscated devices.
O’Keefe’s attorney Harmeet Dhillon in an interview on Thursday night slammed the Times’ report as a ‘hit piece’ and questioned whether the DOJ had leaked the legal memos to the Times, an extraordinary and possibly illegal step.
“I can’t say how the New York Times got this information, but they got it in a way that is illegal and unethical,” she said on Fox News.
“We have a disturbing situation of the US Attorney’s office or the FBI tipping off the New York Times to each of the raids on Project Veritas current and former employees,” the attorney said.
“We know that because minutes after these raids occurred they got calls from the New York Times which was the only journalism outlet that knew about it. And they published this hit piece today, which is really despicable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this low from the New York Times before, to publish people’s private legal communications,” she said.
“This is a scandal of epic proportions. Every journalist who is not worried about this should hang up their journalism card, and all First Amendment lawyers as well,” she said.
The attorney gave credit to District Court Judge Analisa Torres for a Thursday decision that ordered the DOJ to stop taking data from O’Keefe’s phone.
“We are gratified that the Department of Justice has been ordered to stop extracting and reviewing confidential and privileged information obtained in their raids of our reporters, including legal, donor, and confidential source communications.
‘The First Amendment won a temporary victory today, but Project Veritas has a long way to go to hold the DOJ and FBI accountable for their actions,” she said.
She said that the federal government grabbing information pertaining to Project Veritas’ employees containing donor information, communications with attorneys and sources from within the Biden administration raise “multiple First Amendment issues.”
“We went to the court and asked the court to order a special master to review this information and not let the Southern District of New York prosecutors and the FBI look at it without somebody separating out this information,” she said to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“The government would not agree to do that voluntarily but we went to court and today a federal judge did order the government to stop looking at these phones. So ultimately, we’re going to get some answers as to what was reviewed and what they did with it,” the attorney said.
“The DOJ has specific regulations about this. There’s also a federal statute called the Privacy Protection Act that protects journalists and their information from exactly this type of thuggish behavior that the DOJ has done in this case,” she said.
“They have blown federal law, they blown the Constitution, they blown due process and civil rights and now they’re so easily communicating in some level for sure with the New York Times,” she said.
The FBI has been ordered by a federal judge to stop plundering information from James O’Keefe’s phone following a raid on his home and other properties connected with Project Veritas last weekend.
The raid was a chilling and frightening overreach by law enforcement of protected journalistic work product. O’Keefe has said that his phone offers a window into what other projects he and his staff are working on — projects the Biden Administration may not want him to cover.
The FBI raided O’Keefe’s apartment about 6 a.m. on Saturday with a phalanx of agents taking his electronics and other information, which they claimed would help discover how the journalist came into possession of President Biden’s daughter’s diary.
They claim the diary was stolen. O’Keefe denies that characterization.
The president’s daughter, Ashley Biden’s, diary reportedly contains down, dirty, and disgusting secrets about the Biden family.
Judge Analisa Torres ordered the FBI to stop exploiting information contained in O’Keefe’s phone and to verify that they’d done so by Friday.
BREAKING! The federal court has just ordered the DOJ to STOP extracting data from our client, journalist James O’Keefe’s phone, and ordered a hearing. Counsel for Project Veritas asked the court to do this yesterday! pic.twitter.com/nBrmf4myuj
O’Keefe and Project Veritas have been in negotiations with the Justice Department about the diary and its provenance since last year.
Unless O’Keefe stole that diary, there’s doesn’t appear to be anything different about O’Keefe coming into possession of the document than what happens every day at the New York Times or Washington Post with their leaked documents.
Prior restraint doesn’t even begin to cover how intrusive and frightening this intentional intimidation by law enforcement is on a journalistic enterprise.
The raid is reminiscent of the one conducted by former California Attorney General Kamala Harris into the work product of David Daleiden, who produced a series of explosive videos showing Planned Parenthood buying and selling aborted baby parts.
The way it looks now, this judge’s ruling is a win for journalism, but journalists who don’t like O’Keefe may not see it that way.
NSBA leaders even altered the letter’s text to satisfy the Biden White House
Newly released internal emails reveal that the National School Boards Association coordinated with the White House and the Department of Justice before sending President Biden the notorious letter that compared concerned parents to domestic terrorists. Emails provided to Fox News show that NSBA had coordinated with the White House for weeks beforehand.
Viola Garcia, the NSBA president whom the Department of Education later named to a federal board, sent a memo to NSBA members on Oct. 11 (but dated Oct. 12), providing a timeline of the NSBA’s interaction with the White House ahead of the letter to Biden, which the NSBA sent on Sept. 29.
Five days later, on Oct. 4, the DOJ issued a memo directing law enforcement to investigate threats to school boards. On Oct. 22, the NSBA issued an apology for the letter.
“Concern over the current climate for school board members is also a top priority as disruptions at school board meetings grow and members face growing threats,” Garcia wrote at the time, according to the memo obtained by Parents Defending Education through a Freedom of Information Act request. “NSBA has been actively engaged with the White House, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, Surgeon General, and other federal agencies on pandemic related issues.”
(Oregon School Boards Association)
“In the September 14, 2021 meeting of the [NSBA Organization of State Association Executive Directors] liaison group, they were informed there had been a meeting with White House staff that morning and that NSBA was preparing to send a letter to the President. Subsequently, on September 17, 2021, the interim Executive Director emailed notice to the state association executive directors that indicated a letter requesting federal assistance would be sent.”
“In response to the letter sent by NSBA, on October 4, 2021 the Attorney General announced in a memorandum widely shared throughout the U.S. Department of Justice that he was ordering all U.S. Attorney Offices and local FBI offices to reach out to local and state law enforcement officials to coordinate efforts on this problem within 30 days of the memorandum,” Garcia also noted.
This statement appears to contradict Attorney General Merrick Garland’s testimony to Congress on Oct. 27. When Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked Garland if he had “second thoughts” following NSBA’s apology for the letter, he said that the DOJ memorandum did not rely upon the letter.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., calls out the attorney general for his memo directing the FBI to look into reports of threats against school board members and has harsh words for teachers union leader Randi Weingarten.
“The letter that was subsequently sent does not change the association’s concern of violence or threats of violence. It alters some of the language in the letter … that we did not rely on and is not contained in my own memorandum,” Garland said.
Neither Garland nor the DOJ responded to Fox News’ request for comment by press time.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appears before the House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Oct. 21. (Michael Reynolds/Pool via REUTERS)
Another email exclusively sent to Fox News revealed that NSBA had discussed the issues with the White House “for weeks” before sending the letter. Garcia and Chip Slaven, an NSBA executive, altered the text of the letter to satisfy the curiosity of White House staff.
“In talks over the last several weeks with White House staff, they requested additional information on some of the specific threats, so the letter also details many of the incidents that have been occurring,” Slaven wrote in a September 29, 2021, email to the NSBA board of directors.
Parents have spoken up at school board meetings around the country, protesting harsh COVID-19 mitigation measures like school closures, and raising their voices against transgender policies, critical race theory, and other issues. The letter warned that these parents pose a violent threat to school boards, even going so far as comparing them to domestic terrorists.
The fallout from the letter has proven particularly severe. Ohio’s, Wisconsin‘s, and the school boards of nine other states have reportedly terminated their relationships with NSBA, and parent’s education rights organizations have grown in prominence since the letter. The letter may have also emboldened concerned parents who supported Republican Glenn Youngkin, who won the Virginia governor’s race earlier this month.
Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin gestures during a [Loudoun Parents Matter Rally] campaign event in Leesburg, Virginia, on Nov. 1, 2021. (REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz)
James Bennet, New York Times Editorial Page Editor: “I endeavored to do that, but I failed to do that.”
Bennet: “We did a very poor job.”
Bennet: “I’m the ultimate manager of the department, the decision maker of the department — and I’m ultimately responsible for the journalism that we produce.”
[NEW YORK – Nov. 10, 2021] Project Veritas released a new video today exposing former New York Times editorial page editor, James Bennet, who led the paper’s editorial department from May 2016 until his resignation in June 2020.
The video shows Bennet being deposed under oath in an ongoing lawsuit filed by former Alaska governor, Sarah Palin. She is suing The Times after an editorial published by the paper attempted to tie her Political Action Committee to the shooting of former U.S. Congresswoman, Gabby Giffords.
Palin’s attorney, Shane Vogt, pressed Bennet on how The Times reached its conclusions on his client’s Political Action Committee:
Shane Vogt, Attorney for Sarah Palin: “Do you consider this map (shown above) to be political incitement?”
James Bennet, New York Times Editorial Page Editor:“In the sense I was using the term that day in our editorial? Yeah, I do. I just think it’s using violent imagery. I read those as gun sites, and I just don’t think we should import that kind of language to talk about our political adversaries. I wish politicians wouldn’t do it.”
Vogt: “You see a map there (shown above)?”
Bennet:“I do.”
Vogt:“You consider that to be political incitement?”
Bennet: “Okay. I understand what you’re asking me and the comparison you’re drawing. I don’t — those don’t look like gun sites to me. So, I guess I wouldn’t use the same term?”
Vogt:“What do you consider the symbols on the map in exhibit 217 to be?”
Bennet:“I don’t know what they’re meant to represent. I mean they’re meant to represent — it says targeting strategy, but they don’t look like sites to me.”
Vogt:“Do they look like bullseyes?”
Bennet:“No — now that you say that — yeah, I could see that.”
Vogt:“What are bullseyes used for?”
Bennet: “Targeting. Target practice.”
Vogt:“With weapons?”
Bennet:“Yeah.”
Vogt asked Bennet about the decision-making process inside The New York Times and the context behind publishing this piece:
Vogt:“Do you remember seeing the [Palin] map when it was initially circulated?”
Bennet:“I don’t remember if I did.”
Vogt:“Do you know when that was?”
Bennet:“I believe it was around the time of the — it got a lot of press attention. It is my understanding around the time of the shooting in 2011.”
Vogt:“And what’s that understanding based on?”
Bennet:“I guess the — we did a very poor job, I did, of trying to express the thought that created an inference for readers that there was a causal link between political incitement and the shooting of Gabby Giffords. The point where that happens is where we say the link to political incitement was clear.”
Vogt:“Is ‘incitement’ a strong word?”
Bennet:“I’d say so. Yeah.”
Bennet admitted to Vogt that he ultimately failed as a journalist:
Vogt:“As a journalist, are you taught to consider how the reader may interpret words you use when you’re writing a piece?”
Bennet: “Yes.”
Vogt:“Did you do that when you were writing ‘America’s Lethal Politics’?”
Bennet:“I endeavored to do that, but I failed to do that.”
Vogt:“While you were at The Atlantic up through today during your tenure at The New York Times, have you ever published any pieces that called out the left for using what you just called incendiary rhetoric?”
Bennet: “I don’t remember. I don’t know.”
Vogt also asked Bennet about his family’s political connections to the Democratic Party. Bennet did not seem to remember key details about their ties to Clinton and Obama:
Vogt:“When you were a White House correspondent during the Clinton administration, was your brother Michael working there?”
Bennet:“I don’t remember. I can check on that. He had — I don’t think so. I don’t think so…”
Vogt:“At some point though, he did have a position within the Clinton administration, correct?”
Bennet:“He worked at the Justice Department for a while.”
Vogt:“Did your father also work with the Clinton administration?”
Bennet:“He had been with the Clinton administration. Yes.”
Vogt:“Did your brother Michael have a role with President Obama’s election committee?”
Bennet:“I actually don’t know the answer to that.”
Vogt:[Laughs] “Okay.”
Bennet:“I don’t. He may have.”
Vogt:“But I thought I saw something indicating that he was a co-chair of President Obama’s campaign committee.”
Bennet:“It wouldn’t surprise me if he was, I just don’t know.”
Vogt:“Have you ever written speeches for your brother?”
Bennet:“In his first run for Senate, I edited — I did not write any speeches for him, but I edited and looked over a couple of speeches for him.”
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.
Twitter, Facebook deemed defendant guilty immediately after Wisconsin shooting
And if Kyle was black and the rioters were KKK…? [US Patriot]
Social media platforms rendered a verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse long before he went to trial, suppressing claims that he was innocent and blocking users from searching for details of the case.
Immediately after the anti-police riots that thrust Rittenhouse into the national spotlight, social media companies began to block users who expressed support for the Illinois teen. Twitter suspended the accounts of users who called Rittenhouse innocent, including the defendant’s own lawyer. Facebook said it “designated this shooting as a mass murder and … removed the shooter’s accounts from Facebook and Instagram.” The platform also blocked searches for “Kyle Rittenhouse.”
Social media platforms often intervene to suppress posts expressing a particular stance on controversial issues. Both platforms censored news stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the month before the 2020 election. Facebook blocked a Gold Star mother’s criticism of President Joe Biden and suppressed a song that criticized the president. Twitter and Facebook also suspended users who oppose vaccine mandates.
The fundraising platform GoFundMe also removed a page set up to support Rittenhouse, which the company said violated its ban on fundraisers involving “the legal defense of alleged crimes associated with hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism, or intolerance.” GoFundMe supported fundraising for the family of one of Rittenhouse’s assailants, Anthony Huber. The site regularly hosts fundraisers for individuals associated with Black Lives Matter.
When smaller platforms began raising funds for Rittenhouse, hackers breached the donation lists. News outlets doxxed paramedics and police officers who gave small donations to Rittenhouse’s defense.
Twitter is still banning or suspending users for supporting Rittenhouse, even as the trial proceeds. Facebook searches for Rittenhouse’s name turn up no results. Neither platform responded to requests for comment.
Rittenhouse faces six charges, including two counts of homicide, after shooting three men who attacked him during last August’s anti-police riots in Kenosha, Wis. His murder trial began on Nov. 1. His defense hopes that videos that show rioters assaulting Rittenhouse will bolster his self-defense claim.
A Swiss billionaire is bankrolling a leading dark money group lobbying for the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan and green energy jobs initiatives, according to corporation and lobbying records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Climate Power, one of the main groups pushing for the White House’s climate agenda, has billed itself as a traditional advocacy organization, with an advisory board featuring John Podesta, Stacey Abrams, and former senator Harry Reid. But the group doesn’t actually exist independently—it is owned and operates as a front group under the Fund for a Better Future, a Democratic dark money organization that has received the majority of its funding from Swiss health care mogul Hansjorg Wyss’s foundation since 2016, according to corporation records.
Wyss has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Fund for a Better Future and other progressive dark money groups and has been the subject of controversy since his opaque web of donations was detailed by the New York Times last spring. The connection between the Wyss-funded Fund for a Better Future and Climate Power has not been reported until now.
The link raises questions about foreign influence on the climate debate and the prominence of dark money groups in the Biden administration’s public advocacy campaign for the Build Back Better legislation. While foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to federal campaigns, lawmakers and watchdogs have raised concerns about foreign donations to nonprofit political advocacy organizations—so-called dark money groups—which could be used as a legal loophole to influence elections.
Americans for Public Trust, a conservative watchdog group, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in May, calling for an investigation into whether some of Wyss’s donations amount to “campaign contributions from a foreign national, running afoul of federal law.”
The group told the Free Beacon that Wyss’s contributions to groups leading the climate legislation lobbying add to concerns about his political funding.
“Hansjörg Wyss has been indirectly funding American politics for years, so the news that his foreign money is tied up in this latest dark money campaign to pass President Biden’s legislative agenda comes as no surprise,” Americans for Public Trust executive director Caitlin Sutherland told the Free Beacon. “Americans for Public Trust has previously filed an FEC complaint against Mr. Wyss calling for an investigation into his political spending, and we look forward to the commission taking action.”
Wyss, a Swiss citizen born in Bern who has declined to clarify his citizenship status in the United States, has become one of the most prolific donors to progressive advocacy groups in recent years. His foundations, the Berger Action Fund and the Wyss Foundation, have poured over $200 million into organizations supporting Democratic policies since 2016, the New York Timesreported in May.
Since last summer, Climate Power has emerged as one of the most active lobbying arms of the Democratic Party’s climate agenda. The group rolled out a $10 million ad blitz in June, aimed at pushing lawmakers to support the Biden administration’s American Jobs Plan and Build Back Better legislation.
Climate Power also hired a lobbying firm, Pioneer Public Affairs, last February to press lawmakers in the House and Senate on “climate provisions of the American Rescue Plan (H.R.1319) and the American Jobs Plan,” according to lobbying disclosure records.
Climate Power is not an independent entity, according to records reviewed by the Free Beacon. The group operates under the ownership of the Fund for a Better Future, according to business records filed in Sacramento, where the fund is based.
The Fund for a Better Future received $44,468,000 from Wyss’s foundations between 2017 and 2020, according to the latest available financial disclosure records. Wyss’s contributions to the Fund for a Better Future make up “the majority of its funding” during this time, the Times reported in May.
Between 2017 and 2018, Wyss’s financial support accounted for 80 percent of the Fund for a Better Future’s total receipts, according to financial disclosure records.
According to Climate Power’s website, the group was founded “by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, League of Conservation Voters, and Sierra Club” and “integrates hard-hitting research, polling, state and national earned media, digital and paid media to influence the national conversation, embolden leaders to take immediate, bold climate action, and expose climate deniers and their oil and gas lobby allies.”
Climate Power launched another front group in August called the “Great American Build” to promote the Biden administration’s Build Back Better agenda. The Great American Build’s website describes it as a “public awareness campaign launched by Climate Power, League of Conservation Voters and their allies to build the momentum necessary to create millions of good clean energy jobs and give our economy the boost it needs.”
Climate Power did not respond to a request for comment. The Wyss Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
President Joe Biden’s appeasement is getting its usual payback.
An Iranian-backed militant group the Biden administration removed from a designated list of foreign terrorist organizations right after assuming power has stormed the shuttered U.S. Embassy in Yemen, making hostages of Yemenis who worked at the facility, The Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday.
And making fools, once again, of the Biden administration and its foreign policy.
BREAKING: Iran-Backed Militants Storm US Embassy in Yemen, Seize Hostages and Equipment — State Dept tells me it is ‘concerned about the breach of the compound,’ demands release of hostages & equipment https://t.co/vA8sQc35mt
According to the Free Beacon, the Houthi rebels, who’ve been fighting a proxy war on Iran’s behalf against the government on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, took over the compound in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on Wednesday, leaving it to Biden’s beleaguered State Department to try to negotiate for the release of the employees.
“The United States has been unceasing in its diplomatic efforts to secure their release,” a State Department spokesman said, according to the Free Beacon. “The majority of the detained have been released, but the Houthis continue to detain additional Yemeni employees of the embassy.”
To be clear, the embassy has been closed since 2015, when the Obama administration and the State Department under then-Secretary of State John Kerry decided the situation amid the violence was untenable, as Fox News reported at the time. No Americans are among the Yemeni hostages.
Still, Yemen has remained a simmering cauldron on the world stage, breaking into the news periodically with reports of yet more Houthi savagery, the involvement of the Iranian government in that savagery, or the Democratic congressional effort to end U.S. support for the government fighting to defeat that savagery. (For nearly half a century, or roughly the entirety of Joe Biden’s political career, his party has been on exactly the wrong side when it came to fighting Islamic fascism. That’s probably not a coincidence.)
But there’s no way to safely ignore the role of Iran in the unrest.
Is the possibility of war greater with Joe Biden in the White House than it was with Donald Trump as president?
The world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism, where “Death to America” is practically the national motto, just proved once again that it has zero respect for a Biden administration that has projected nothing but weakness on the international stage since coming to power.
To Americans of a certain age, this all might sound familiar: Abroad, chaos with Iran playing a starring role, the storming of a U.S. embassy; at home, a weak Democrat in the White House and raging inflation, among other problems.
Welcome to the 1970s — an abysmal decade that isn’t looking any better with time.
As a National Review article pointed out, the raid on the embassy comes 10 months after the Biden administration, hoping to curry favor with the Iranian mullahs, overturned a decision made in the final days of the Trump administration to designate the Houthis as a terrorist organization.
At the time, according to ABC News, Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the decision was “a recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen.”
It was also, according to the Free Beacon, “seen as a goodwill gesture” toward the murderous mullahs of Tehran, in hopes of restarting talks on the Iran nuclear deal.
Well, it’s a good bet that Yemen’s “dire humanitarian situation” is no better now than it was back in February. And it’s an obvious conclusion that the “goodwill gesture” toward Tehran has paid off in the usual way such gestures do when dealing with the Islamist dictatorship: more aggression, more provocation, more terrorism.
In short, it’s an utter failure – one more humiliation for the United States to add to the Biden humiliation in Afghanistan, and one more sign that the Biden White House can’t truly be trusted by anyone except the country’s bitterest enemies — and then, only to do exactly the wrong thing.
In Yemen, even now, Yemeni nationals are in the hands of the Islamist terrorist group that, among other things, has staged missile attacks against Saudi Arabia, a country that, whatever its obvious faults, is a U.S. ally in the region.
And it’s one more example of how far the United States’ image has fallen since President Donald Trump left the White House.
Where Trump walked away from the Obama-era nuclear deal because it amounted to a blank check for the mullahs to obtain a nuclear weapon in the future, Team Biden is abasing itself and the country to try to get Iran back to the table.
Where Trump met Iranian provocation and intransigence with strength (see Soleimani, Qassim: Death of), his successor has established a record of weakness that gives confidence to the country’s enemies and anxiety to its friends.
And most importantly, where the Trump administration fostered peace or the potential for peace between Israel and its Arab foes in the region through a series of deals, Biden brings chaos and the potential for ever more war, with the deaths of innocents that inevitably come with it.
It’s appeasement that’s getting its usual payback.
Unfortunately, the country is likely to see a lot more of it in the next three years.
Earlier this year, many California citizens moved to oust Governor Gavin Newsom via recall petition and election. This ultimately ended up falling shy, however, as Newsom easily avoided the recall.
However, now another top progressive leader is on the hot seat in the Golden State. And those seeking to get rid of him already have enough signatures on the recall petition.
If successful, his career could hit a serious roadblock.
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is a progressive prosecutor, and thousands have been trying to remove him from office for much of 2021.
In fact, this is the second recall effort against him: the first didn’t manage to round up enough signatures, but the second is moving along at a much faster pace.
Now, with enough signatures, Boudin will have to face a recall election next year. And though Newsom didn’t fall in his election, it’s very possible that Boudin will have a tougher time hanging onto his spot.
Director of Elections John Arntz announced that the petition to remove Boudin “contains a sufficient number of valid signatures.”
This means the embattled DA will be forced to defend himself come 2022.
From Fox News:
As the first petition to recall Boudin failed to garner enough signatures to trigger a special election, news of a second recall effort against Boudin came in August.
Last month, prior to the certification of the petition, NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit reported ‘more than 83,000 signatures’ had already been submitted to force Boudin into a special election during the statewide primary election on June 7, 2022.
The Department reviewed 4,174 signatures, selected at random from the total 83,484 signatures collected.
This review showed that the petition had more than the minimum of 51,325 valid signatures, so it’s officially successful. This kicks off the second phase, which is a recall election next June.
Boudin has responded with a “Friends of Chesa” group that fights back against the recall.
They’re saying petitioners spent $1.4 million and used “shady tactics” to get the recall on the ballot. Spokesperson Julie Edwards said they’re “confident San Francisco voters will reject this Republican-funded and endorsed effort.”
But Boudin has been under fire for a while, primarily for “his lack of commitment to prosecuting crimes.”
If he falls in the recall election, San Francisco Mayor London Breed will have to find a temporary replacement, until the city elects a new District Attorney in November.
Even if Boudin avoids the recall as Newsom did, this petition is more proof that many California residents aren’t happy with their leadership. And it’s obvious that thousands are pushing back.
This could hint at a seismic shift in the traditionally Democrat-dominated state in the future.
And if that happens, things could look very different come 2024, when the next presidential election begins.
Key Takeaways:
San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin will face a recall election in June 2022.
The recall petition is officially successful, having garnered enough valid signatures (a total of 83,484 were collected).
Boudin has been criticized for not committing to his prosecution of crimes.
A New York City Black Lives Matter group threatened NYC Mayor-elect Eric Adams with “riots” and “bloodshed” if Adams restores the New York City Police Department’s anti-crime units.
The police anti-crime units were disbanded last year in reaction to Black Lives Matter protests and riots and calls to “defund” police departments. Adams, a Democrat, won election after campaigning on a tough-on-crime agenda and pledging to restore the NYPD’s anti-crime units.
Adams met with leaders of New York City’s Black Lives Matter movement at Brooklyn Borough Hall. After the meeting, Hawk Newsome, co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, and his sister Chivona Newsome, also a co-founder of the group, threatened civil unrest and violence if Adams kept to his campaign pledge.
“If he thinks that they’re going to go back to the old ways of policing, then we are going to take to the streets again. There will be riots, there will be fire and there will be bloodshed because we believe in defending our people,” Newsome told the New York Daily News after the meeting.
“So there is no way that he is going to let some Gestapo come in here and harm our people,” he continued. “We pray for peace but … prepare for the worst.”
His sister added: “We will shut the city down. We will shut down City Hall, and we will give him hell and make it a nightmare.”
During the meeting, Adams “erupted” at Newsome after the BLM leader swore to hold Adams responsible for any future misconduct by the NYPD, according to the Daily News.
“You’re on the ground: Stop the violence in my community. I’m holding you accountable,” Adams said.
“Don’t hold me accountable,” he continued. “Being the mayor, being the borough president, being the state senator — I put my body on the line for my community, so I’m not here for folks to come and say, ‘Eric, we’re gonna hold you accountable.’”
“No, it’s us. We need to do this together,” Adams said.
Last year, Newsome suggested that his group would use violence and chaos to push its policy goals while claiming “self-defense.”
“If this country doesn’t give us what we want then we will burn down the system and replace it,” he said in a June 2020 interview with Fox News. “All right. And I could be speaking figuratively, I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation. Like let’s be very real and observe the history of the 1960s. When black people were rioting we have their highest growth and wealth and property ownership.”
The NYPD eliminated its anti-crime unit earlier that same month, reassigning roughly 600 officers from the units into other posts at the NYPD. At the time, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea defended the decision as a chance to “move forward and change how we police in this city.”
“This is 21st-century policing: intelligence, data, ShotSpotter, video, DNA, and building prosecutable cases,” Shea said. “It continues to be building these cases—cases on a small number of people that unfortunately still terrorize a part of this city. I would consider this in the realm of closing on one of the last chapters on stop, question and frisk.”
For Transgender in a nutshell, see Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” and look for Eric Idle’s “Stan (AKA Loretta)” character. [US Patriot]
Legendary actor John Cleese has cancelled a talk he was scheduled to give at Cambridge University due to what he called “woke rules” that resulted in another speaker getting blacklisted for doing an impression of Adolf Hitler.
Deadline reported that Cleese’s decision came a week after Cambridge University paper Varsity reported that Union speaker Andrew Graham-Dixon used a German accent to impersonate Hitler, using racial slurs in a videotaped meeting. Graham-Dixon said the act “was meant to be satirical and was not an endorsement of Hitler or anti-Semitism, claiming he had intended to ‘underline the utterly evil nature of Hitler and his regime,’” Deadline reported.
As the outlet noted, Cleese “famously impersonated Hitler while in character as Basil Fawlty in the 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers.”
Cleese confirmed in a tweet that he had canceled his speech at Cambridge.
“I was looking forward to talking to students at the Cambridge Union this Friday, but I hear that someone there has been blacklisted for doing an impersonation of Hitler,” Cleese wrote. “I regret that I did the same on a Monty Python show, so I am blacklisting myself before someone else does.”
“I apologise to anyone at Cambridge who was hoping to talk with me, but perhaps some of you can find a venue where woke rules do not apply,” Cleese added.
Cleese had planned to give the talk with the Channel 4 crew behind his new documentary series “Cancel Me” in attendance. The new series involves Cleese interviewing victims of cancel culture.
Cleese has been an outspoken opponent of cancel culture and those who have apologized when woke mobs came for them. In April, Cleese mocked Hank Azaria for apologizing over his portrayal of Apu on the Simpsons.
“Not wishing to be left behind by Hank Azaria, I would like to apologise on behalf on (sic) Monty Python for all the many sketches we did making fun of white English people,” Cleese tweeted. “We’re sorry for any distress we may have caused.”
The tweet came after Azaria said he left the role of Apu after some people told him they were offended by the character.
“I was speaking at my son’s school, I was talking to the Indian kids there because I wanted to get their input,” Azaria said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “A 17-year-old … he’s never even seen TheSimpsons but knows what Apu means. It’s practically a slur at this point. All he knows is that is how his people are thought of and represented to many people in this country.”
“I really do apologize,” Azaria added. “It’s important. I apologize for my part in creating that and participating in that. Part of me feels like I need to go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize. And sometimes I do.”
In July of last year, Cleese took on cancel culture directly, saying it “misunderstands the main purposes of life, which is to have fun.”
Illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and Syria were reportedly apprehended Wednesday crossing the Rio Grande River across the southern border of the U.S. into Texas as Border Patrol continues to encounter migrants from a growing number of nations.
The exclusive report by retired Border Patrol agent Randy Clark was released Thursday on Breitbart.
Four of the individuals among a group of seven people reportedly apprehended Wednesday identified themselves as citizens of Afghanistan, according to a Customs and Border Protection source.
EXCLUSIVE: Afghans, Syrians, Pakistanis Apprehended in West Texas near Border https://t.co/kCMWBUYRG6
Two additional individuals were reportedly from India, while another was said to be a citizen of Pakistan.
Later the same day, the Del Rio Sector Border Patrol reportedly apprehended five more “significant interest migrants,” including four Syrian citizens.
Also on Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security released an updated National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin.
The bulletin did not directly mention border crossings along the southern border.Should more National Guard troops be sent to the southern border?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.
However, the update did note that “foreign terrorist organizations and [domestic violent extremists] continue to attempt to inspire potential followers to conduct attacks in the United States, including by exploiting recent events in Afghanistan.”
“As of November 10, 2021, DHS is not aware of an imminent and credible threat to a specific location in the United States.”
Concerns regarding migrants crossing the southern border continue to grow as the numbers have surged during President Joe Biden’s term in office.
An alarming 192,001 “land border encounters” were recorded by Customs and Border Protection in September. The number did not include migrants who alluded apprehension.
More than 1.7 million migrants have been apprehended at the southern border over the past year.
In addition to the large number of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. in recent months, Biden authorized the entry of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees to live on U.S. military bases when the military departed Afghanistan at the end of August.
As of late October, more than 53,000 Afghans reportedly remained on eight American military bases. Nearly 6,700 additional Afghans have resettled within the U.S., according to an Oct. 25 Stars and Stripes report.
“Approximately 3,000 Afghans remain on U.S. military bases in the Middle East and another 463 are at U.S. bases in Europe, Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon,” the report said.
“Those evacuees are undergoing security screenings before they are taken to the U.S. to wait out their visa process.”
Several provinces and cities in China have released official guideline prices for human vital organs, such as livers, kidneys, and hearts. This is one of the actions taken by local governments following a notice issued by central authorities in July on fees and financial management measures for securing organs for transplant.
According to medical experts familiar with China’s organ transplant market, the actions indicate that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is attempting to normalize the country’s less than transparent organ transplant system as it continues to face pressure to disclose its sourcing of transplant organs.
In a July notice, the CCP ordered provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions to set their own rates for human organs effective Sept. 1.
In Henan Province, for example, six related departments, including the Health Commission, the Department of Finance, and the Market Supervision Administration, jointly issued “standard rates for donated organs.”
According to the list, organs for transplant include livers at 260,000 yuan ($40,700), kidneys at 160,000 yuan ($25,000), hearts at 100,000 yuan ($15,600), lungs at 80,000 yuan ($12,500), corneas at 10,000 yuan ($1,600), pancreas at 50,000 yuan ($7,800), small intestines at 50,000 yuan, and other organ segments.
Price Tags for Human Organs That Make No Medical Sense
Dr. Wayne Shih-wei Huang, a surgeon and director at the IRCAD Taiwan, Asia’s largest training center for minimally invasive surgery, said that the CCP is hoping to whitewash its transplant abuses by putting a price tag on human organs.
Huang told The Epoch Times that the CCP document clearly states that the cost of obtaining what it says are donated organs is calculated based on resource consumption, technology, labor value, and public acceptability.
However, in the organ prices listed by province officials, a heart is much cheaper than a kidney, which makes no sense in terms of medical cost. The cost of obtaining a heart should be higher than that of a kidney, since the heart must be extracted, appropriately stored, and transported within hours.
Huang believes that the pricing of organs is instead a reflection of market value and demand, and nothing to do with medical cost.
In addition, both Hubei and Henan provinces listed different prices for organs for children and adults. The price in Henan province is 100,000 yuan ($15,600) for a child’s liver, less than half of the 260,000 yuan ($41,000) for an adult. The prices for single and double kidneys for children are also lower than those for adults by 60,000 yuan ($9,400) and 80,000 yuan ($12,500) respectively.
Dr. Alex Chih-Yu Chen, medical director of Novartis Japan, told The Epoch Times that in terms of medical costs, organ supply and transplants for children are more difficult and should be more expensive than for adults.
Questionable Donation Figures
Dr. Huang believes that the CCP’s organ transplant system, in which organs are obtained, supplied, and traded, is only open to organ transplant hospitals. The system is not open to the public and not transparent, and is for the hospitals to make money.
“The CCP cannot make its organ transplant system as transparent as that of Western countries,” he said, but it must have a system on the surface for others to see.
He explained that the Red Cross Society of China, which is actually under the control of Beijing, is one of the organizations that documents organ donations and releases data to the national database. It says that in China, “organ donation is voluntary and free.”
The CCP will ostensibly get some organ donation cases, which may be used for media coverage of heartwarming patient stories, Huang said, but China’s Red Cross’s figures cannot be trusted.
Hamid Sabi—an independent counsel on the London-based China Tribunal, which found that forced organ harvesting had taken place “on a significant scale” in China—told a press conference in Belgium on Oct. 27 that the Chinese authorities have used testimony from China’s Red Cross to counter pressure from Europe, the United States, and other countries to provide transparency on its organ donation program.
But the Red Cross Society of China has nothing to do with the International Red Cross, Sabi said—it is simply an internal organ of the CCP that will certify whatever the party’s authorities demand of it.
As for the CCP’s official organ donor database, Sabi said that China’s claims of being able to obtain 2.8 organs per donor—which is 180 times higher than what is achievable by donation systems in Europe and the United States—would still fall far short of providing for the 10,000 transplants officially recorded per year.
Many experts also estimate that the actual number of transplants being conducted in China is magnitudes higher than the official figures.
CCP’s Live Organ Harvesting From Falun Gong Practitioners
A June 2016 report by David Kilgour, the former Canadian Secretary of State for the Asia-Pacific; David Matas, a human rights lawyer; and Ethan Guttmann, a senior American investigative journalist, estimated based on multiple sources of evidence that China could be performing between 60,000 to 100,000 transplants a year. Many indicators point to the main source of these organs being Falun Gong students and other prisoners of conscience caught up in China’s politicized judicial system.
Falun Gong is a spiritual meditation practice that became widely popular in China in the 1990s until it was banned in 1999 and its practitioners became the target of media slander, illegal arrests, and torture.
Reports from the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) also suggest that since the CCP began persecuting Falun Gong, imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners have become a large bank of living human organs for transplants in China.
The WOIPFG searched and analyzed hundreds of thousands of public media reports, papers, and databases from across 891 transplant hospitals and 9,515 transplant surgeons in China over the past 15 years, and found that, between 2000 and 2006, the number of organ transplants being conducted in China experienced exponential growth.
During the same period, at least one million Falun Gong practitioners were arrested and detained in China’s labor camps, prisons, detention centers, and brainwashing centers.
Of note, in addition to the top-rated hospitals in China that are qualified to perform transplants, many unqualified hospitals were transformed into transplant centers or started offering organ transplant procedures.
Eyewitness testimonies, audio recordings from interviews with 45 directors or doctors at 41 of China’s transplant hospitals and centers, and other information and evidence collated by the WOIPFG all point to the widespread forced removal of organs from Falun Gong practitioners across hospitals in China.
Each year we tell the world of our gratitude for the sacrifices of those who keep us free. But our gratitude is not enough.
In America, it’s Veteran’s Day. Across the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, it is Remembrance Day. In New Zealand, France, and Belgium it is Armistice Day, and in Poland, it is National Independence Day.
And it is an especially hard day in 2021, considering the sacrifices made by those who came before us, and the circumstances we have allowed to develop in their absence.
The fourth verse of For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon is the traditional Remembrance Day poem in the United Kingdom. Few have not heard it, even of younger generations:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
But the first verse perhaps should give us more pause, this year:
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
And whether you are from England, American, Australia, Canada, France, Belgium, Poland, New Zealand, or otherwise, those final words should resonate.
“Fallen in the cause of the free.”
The people the world remembers today were not fighting for a political party, nor for an oligarchy. They were fighting for something we have let too easily slip through our fingers. Basic freedoms. Freedoms, in fact, from oppressive, overbearing governments with little regard for life, and only regard for ideological or partisan compliance.
And today’s services of remembrance sting that little bit more knowing what hell the West hath wrought in our decades-long foreign wars that have left so many without full lives or full families.
The draw down in Afghanistan just three months ago served as a reminder – which of course most have now already forgotten – of the fragility of Western military might. And indeed the futility of our abilities to project values in places where they bear no weight.
That very point separates the hills of Kandahar from the Flanders Fields, not that the sharpest minds in foreign policy and military strategy seem to recognize it.
But then again, they’ve been very wrong, for so very long. As Peter Hitchens noted in pre-COVID 2018:
It has also struck me, since I am so often told that those who fought in 1914 did so for our freedom, that we are far less free as a people, from all kinds of government interference, than we were before that war. It was 1914 that began the era of heavy taxation, surveillance, regulation and general snooping and bureaucracy which now stifle us.
It was also 1914 that swept away the restrained and quiet world of yesterday, and the great, stuffy cumbersome empires of Austria, Germany and Russia, replacing them with the slick murderous modern empires of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. Was this progress?
It wasn’t progress. And no “progress” has been made since the world removed those evils it installed in place of the empires that came before them. In reality, all we’ve achieved in 100+ years besides the good technological advancements that came from some relatively free enterprises using capital to lift people from poverty is cementing the dark specter of centralization as a means of governance. Today, we reap what has been sown.
“Fallen in the cause of the free”?
We do little to prove we ever deserved their sacrifices.
The Google-owned giant is going to hide “dislikes” to shield the Biden regime from criticism.
YouTube has removed its famous “dislike” button and counter following unprecedented levels of downvotes on President Biden’s White House channel videos. The removal of the feature was mooted in March. This week, it was announced that YouTube will be removing it.
When the Google-owned video streaming giant first announced the testing of new features surrounding the counter, an organization called 81m.org extrapolated data to determine the approval ratings of Biden’s channel. The site further noted that YouTube was manipulating dislikes to shield the early Biden administration from criticism.
When originally investigated by The National Pulse, it was found that within 6-12 hours of posting a video, YouTube began deleting dislikes from Biden’s videos. The firm continued to delete likes at regular intervals from that time onwards.
Twitter users were quick to note that the number of dislikes were removed. YouTube claimed, without evidence, that these dislikes were classified as “spam”.
Analysis by Zoe Phin found that the dislike counts were organic in nature, but the number of dislikes would reduce between the 6-12 hour mark after posting.
Analysis of other popular and mid-sized YouTubers revealed no manipulation in dislike counts.
Even with the dislike manipulation, The National Pulse found that all of Biden’s videos dislike count far outranked the likes. In one video “President Biden Reviews the Readiness of Military Troops in a Pass in Review” had twelve thousand (12,000) dislikes at the time of writing. The same video had only eighteen hundred (1,800) likes.
Almost a year later, the video only has forty-two hundred likes (4,200) and twenty thousand (20,000) dislikes. The inauguration video had only fifty-three thousand (5,300) likes to twenty-three thousand dislikes (23,000). The same video now has seventeen thousand likes (17,000) and one hundred and ten thousand dislikes (110,000).
A statement posted to YouTube’s Official Blog reads: “the dislike count will be private across YouTube, but the dislike button will remain.”
The platform stated the reasons for the removal were focused on “promoting respectful interactions between viewers and creators.” The statement went on to say that YouTube wants to reduce “dislike attacks – where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos.” YouTube concludes by noting that this is just one of the steps being taken to reduce harassment on the platform.
Creators will still be able to view the dislike count in their YouTube Studio. The change started being rolled out on November 10th.
When President Joe Biden talks about “temporary” inflation, how long does “temporary” mean? Asking for America.
In October, inflation hit a high not seen in three decades, according to The Wall Street Journal. Prices year-over-year increased by 6.2 percent, the biggest jump since 1990. The core price index, meanwhile — which takes unpredictable food and energy prices out of the equation — sat at 4.6 percent, the highest since 1991.
When Biden took office in January, inflation was at 1.4 percent. By April, it had soared to 4.2 percent. It was at 5 percent in May and has stayed above that number ever since.
And yet, Biden has been dismissive of the idea that there would be any kind of long-term inflation problem — because Wall Street said so.
On July 19, for instance, the president said, “We also know that as our economy has come roaring back, we’ve seen some price increases.
“Some folks have raised worries that this could be a sign of persistent inflation — but that’s not our view,” he continued. “Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen were expected and expected to be temporary.”
On July 21, he also said “the vast majority of the experts — including Wall Street — are suggesting that it’s highly unlikely that it’s going to be long-term inflation, that it’s going to get out of hand.”
Is inflation a real issue?
Yes, no long-term inflation problem because Wall Street said so. And it’s not just the president who comes across as a man who’s never read or watched the movie adaptation of “The Big Short,” Michael Lewis’ postmortem of the 2008 economic crisis and Cassandra-esque warning about why trusting Wall Street may not be the wisest move there is.
Take Jared Bernstein, a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.
“From the start, we were clear that inflation would firm as the rescue plan got shots in arms and checks in pockets,” Bernstein said in June, according to Politico.
“The reason these price pressures are upon us is getting lost: There’s an extremely robust recovery afoot, with strong job creation and wage gains for workers who finally have some bargaining clout.”
By most metrics, however, wage increases haven’t been able to keep up with inflation, according to a Friday CNBC report. Not only that, as the financial network noted in September, many analysts were concerned about how rising wages and the labor shortage were inducing inflation numbers to rise. It seems that if you pay people more money for the same work, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be any better off — particularly if that causes costs to rise.
It’s worth noting that with this round of inflation numbers, Joe Biden is paying attention. Kind of.
“Inflation hurts Americans pocketbooks, and reversing this trend is a top priority for me,” Biden said in a statement on Wednesday. “The largest share of the increase in prices in this report is due to rising energy costs — and in the few days since the data for this report were collected, the price of natural gas has fallen.”
“Other price increases reflect the ongoing struggle to restore smooth operations in the economy in the restart: I am traveling to Baltimore today to highlight how my Infrastructure Bill will bring down these costs, reduce these bottlenecks and make goods more available and less costly. And I want to reemphasize my commitment to the independence of the Federal Reserve to monitor inflation and take steps necessary to combat it.”
That first part isn’t just grammatically incorrect. The core price index still takes energy out of the equation — and it’s higher than it’s been in 30 years. The second part is disingenuous: Biden’s infrastructure bill won’t help bring down supply chain-induced inflation any time in the near future, to the extent trillions more in government spending will quell inflation at all.
But don’t just ask me. Ask Wall Street, as Joe Biden was so willing to do back in the summer. According to The Hill, Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, said in a Wednesday analysis that we’re just getting started.
“The costs for low-wage households to cover their commuting costs, grocery bills and rents are eating into the jump they have seen in wages,” Swonk wrote. “The public is angry.”
“Inflation is sizzling and will likely get hotter before it cools.”
Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps she’s not. Whatever the case, however, our inflationary issues don’t feel like they fit under any reasonable definition of “temporary” any more.
The Democrat who has battled to keep the Biden administration and far-out liberals from spending their way off an inflationary cliff can count on a Republican to back him in the next election.
Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, a Republican and a billionaire, said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that he will raise funds for Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
For weeks, Manchin has rejected multiple elements of the spending plan proposed by the Bidenistas in Congress, saying last week, “I for one won’t support a multitrillion-dollar bill without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects of inflation,” according to WDJT-TV.
“I don’t see leadership any place in this country. Thank god for Joe Manchin. The guy gots guts and courage … I’m going to have one of the biggest fundraisers I’ve ever had for him. He’s special,” says Ken Langone on @Sen_JoeManchin. pic.twitter.com/HUkZHdI41a
“Thank God for Joe Manchin. The guy’s got guts and courage.”
Although Langone has never supported Manchin before, he will now. Manchin is up for re-election in 2024.
Will the Democrats still end up spending too much money?
“He’s a Democrat, I’m a Republican; I’m going to have one of the biggest fundraisers I’ve ever had for him,” Langone said. “He’s special. He’s precious. He’s a great American.”
But Langone was far more somber as he turned to a subject that vexes him and Manchin – inflation.
“Let me give you a warning — this inflation is a lot worse than people think. It is not transitory. The little people … they’re going to suffer,” Langone said.
Inflation rose 6.2 percent in the 12 months that ended in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Wednesday.
That’s the biggest monthly increase in 30 years, according to CBS News.
Fuel oil prices are up nearly 60 percent, gas is up about 50 percent, and average food costs are up over 5 percent. Beef is up about 20 percent, and pork is up approximately 14.
US crushed by an inflation crisis, energy crisis, supply chain crisis, employment crisis, border crisis (to name a few). In response, Dems planning to vote for a bill that spends trillions, taxes energy, offshores supply chains, pays people not to work & abolishes migration caps.
Inflation is now at 6.2%, which represents a huge tax increase on the working class. Joe Biden is a much worse version of Jimmy Carter & the idea that the government spending trillions more is going to make inflation lower, which is what they are arguing, is absolute insanity.
Manchin said the report shows that the Biden party line of inflation being just a tiny passing cloud is way off.
By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not “transitory” and is instead getting worse. From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.
“By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse,” Manchin said on Twitter. “From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.”
Forbes has reported that Langone has donated over $2.4 million to Republican causes since 2019.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Wednesday threatened to send illegal immigrants to President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware following reports the White House has directed dozens of flights of migrants to Florida in the dead of night.
Amid the ongoing border crisis, 70 flights filled with foreign nationals were flown into the city of Jacksonville in the middle of the night with no notice given to city or state officials, a Florida official told the Washington Examiner on Saturday.
“On average, there’s 36 passengers on each of these flights. And that has been going on over the course of the summer through September,” said Larry Keefe, DeSantis’ public safety czar.
Florida Republican Rep. Maria Salazar was among those to scorch the White House over the flights.
“It’s very embarrassing that this is happening … no one really asks us, the brown community, the representatives of the Latinos in this country, how do we feel about this?” she said Monday during an interview with Fox News.
“And I’m going to tell you that this is extremely embarrassing because do you know where those people wind up at? In our barrios, in neighborhoods and we do not know if those people are child sex traffickers, if they’re drug dealers, if they’re coyotes,” she said.
Salazar called for “immigration reform,” but that might be too late for one family.
According to police, a 24-year-old Honduran man named Yery Medina Ulloa lied about his age to get into the country this year and then stabbed a man to death, WJXT-TV reported Nov. 4.
The Associated Press reported that witnesses found Medina Ulloa covered in blood near a pond in Jacksonville on Oct. 7 after police say he killed Francisco Cuellar, a 46-year-old father of four who had taken in the immigrant.
Do you think DeSantis would be a great president?
Citing the case, DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw told the AP that border agents should have known Medina Ulloa “was not a minor, was dishonest about his real identity, and should not be free to move around our country.”
The governor said in a statement to WJXT last week that the “horrific crime is the latest example of how unfettered illegal migration costs Floridians’ lives. If not for the Biden Administration’s unlawful ‘catch and release’ policy, Francisco Cuellar would still be alive today.”
On Wednesday, DeSantis was asked about the immigrant flights during a news conference in Jacksonville — and responded by threatening to send illegals flown to his state to Biden’s home state.
“We’re going to get together and figure out what we can do in the immediate term to protect folks in Florida,” the Republican governor said, noting that because the federal government has jurisdiction over the air, his options are limited.
If the federal government isn’t going to protect Floridians, he said, “then clearly, I think, the state should be able to come in and provide protections, and so that’s what we’re going to be looking to do.”
What might DeSantis have up his sleeve? Buses headed north, he said.
“If they’re going to come here, you know, we’ll provide buses … I will send them to Delaware,” the governor said.
“If he’s not going to support the border being secured, then he should be able to have everyone there,” DeSantis said of Biden.
According to the New York Post, he was not joking. Pushaw told the paper that while the governor’s reference to Delaware was tongue-in-cheek, the idea of busing migrants out of Florida is being considered.
“To the extent that the federal government is paying for them to go all over the country and resettling them in Jacksonville, would it be against the law for us to send them somewhere else? … That’s something that I think we would want to look into,” she said.
“The big question is, how many more people can get through and what are the holes in this vetting process?” Pushaw added. “The Biden administration has not shared any information with us regarding how that vetting takes place.”
The governor’s remarks were met with a harsh backlash from leftists on Twitter.
DeSantis is also working with Republican Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry, who this week tweeted his ire about planes full of migrants landing in his city.
2. To be specific, this is happening in Jacksonville without any communication with us. We hear about it after they land.
The Biden administration all year has failed border communities. Now, people as far away as Florida are being asked to absorb a never-ending influx of illegal migrants, at least one of whom has allegedly killed someone.
If a state is going to be asked to house and pay for people who don’t belong in the country, and some of them might be violent, why not send them straight to Dover or Wilmington?
Delaware is not your average blue state. Delaware elected Biden to the Senate and then kept on electing him for decades until he eventually wandered his way into the White House. Shouldn’t those voters be the ones feeling the consequences?
Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton ripped President Joe Biden’s remark that labeled Kyle Rittenhouse a “white supremacist” in a Twitter post last year without considering the evidence.
Cotton shared the comments during a “Fox & Friends” interview Thursday morning.
“I want to focus on what Joe Biden said last year, which is calling this young man a white supremacist based on a few seconds of video,” Cotton said.
“As I often say, when there’s a shooting like this, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on some video circulating on social media. You should allow all the facts to be collected and make a reasoned judgment,” he added.
Cotton also commented that Biden’s critical response has become the “go-to” move of Democrats.
“When Joe Biden called Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist last year, it really was just the go-to move of the Democrats,” Cotton said.
“They do this all the time when they’re losing an argument on the merits,” the senator argued.
Cotton then applied the attitude by Democrats to the left’s response to school board issues where parents are viewed as enemies for protesting policies like closures or critical race theory.
Should Rittenhouse be found not guilty?
“They don’t like parents going to school boards to protest what their kids are learning or school closures, so those parents are called racists,” he said.
“They don’t like that Virginians elected Republicans last week, they condemn Virginia voters as racist,” Cotton added.
The senator argued Democrats even apply the same approach to the Constitution when it fits their agenda.
“They don’t like the United States Constitution or the norms and the customs of the United States Senate, so they call it racist,” Cotton said.
Cotton noted the name-calling is a losing approach and said it’s “not a sign” of a strong party.
“They are constantly losing arguments with the American people, and then they just revert to name-calling towards their opponents. It’s not a sign of a party that is strong or healthy,” he said.
Last night was a clear indication that the American people are disappointed, dissatisfied, and disgusted with the modern Democratic Party. pic.twitter.com/Y5cmVg4Gw7
Parents who never imagined running for office battled to win seats on local school boards last week; they won some, but lost many. Their fiercest opponents were the teachers unions.
The media portrayed these school board races as culture wars, but more than anything they were struggles by parents to wrest control of the boards from self-serving unions. For decades, the unions have maintained a tight grip on who gets elected. No wonder school district decisions—about budgets, masking, COVID closures, curriculum, and teacher contracts—protect teachers first. Never mind what’s best for kids.
That needs to change. Albuquerque, New Mexico, winning candidate Courtney Jackson told a local newspaper, “the board of education should be the kids’ union,” not a puppet of the teachers union. Jackson decided to run after watching the board discuss when to end lockdowns. The discussion focused entirely on what teachers wanted, never addressing the kids’ needs. “Their interests were not brought up once,” she said.
In Guilford, Connecticut, a small seacoast town, the Guilford Education Association, representing teachers, ran the show. In a questionnaire for school board candidates, the union’s No. 1 question asked candidates to pledge support for “collective bargaining rights.” Question two asked candidates to guarantee unions will be included in all discussions of the schools’ policies and funding. Question three asked candidates to promise to “oppose all proposals that would censor teachers from teaching about inclusion, diversity, and equity.” What about the kids?
All five Guilford candidates who gave the “correct” answers won the union’s backing and prevailed on election night. Their slogan was “Protect Guilford Schools,” but their true goal was “Protect the Teachers Union.” One of the winners boasted of coming from “a long line of educators,” while another promised, “I will listen to our teachers, administrators, and superintendent and respect that they act always in the best interest of our students and schools.”
Nearly everywhere, teachers unions use money and manpower to turn out voters. Challengers need to do the same. The three Albuquerque school board candidates who defeated the union slate went to the local chamber of commerce, other small business groups, and Republican party allies for alternate sources of money.
When the results were in, the president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation predicted “a new dynamic on the board,” with some members actually disagreeing with the school district’s employees. Imagine that.
In Colorado’s cities, including Denver and Steamboat Springs, union slates won handily. But in Douglas County, Aurora County, and Greeley Evans School District 6, challengers outspent the union and broke its monopoly on school board seats.
After union-backed candidates were defeated in Douglas County, Kevin DiPasquale, president of the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, predicted big changes. In the past, teachers could just assume the school board “had their backs.”
In Montclair, New Jersey, the mayor, Sean Spiller, serves as president of the state’s largest teachers union but also appointed the school board—a blatant conflict of interest. The board negotiates the teachers’ contract. Last Tuesday, the town voted 70 percent in favor of replacing mayoral control with an elected board.
That’s an improvement, but electing the board won’t guarantee students become the priority. In New Jersey, the teachers union wields enormous electoral power with the support of Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.
Although school board elections are often officially labelled nonpartisan, that’s intentionally misleading. In Tennessee and Florida, Republican state lawmakers are pushing legislation to discard the nonpartisan label so voters can see these elections for what they are.
Last week’s elections were just the beginning. Many school districts will elect board members sometime in the spring, instead of on Election Day. That’s by design to keep the public in the dark that an election is even happening, and to discourage turnout.
Parents and other concerned citizens have roughly half a year to gird for these upcoming contests. For anyone who has a child in public school, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The other night I had a brief but remarkable dream. I was speaking out against a proud propaganda artist regarding a poster he intended to give out to his fellows. He was peddling the sort of agitprop that one would expect to find in our fallen world and I wasn’t having any of it.
Now normally I would remain silent on such matters in the waking world, but in the dream I was boldly speaking out against the worldly misinformation.
I was ruminating on this dream for the greater portion of the morning, and while being careful not to read too much into it, I started thumbing my woolen knots in order to calm my spirit and try to discern which prayerful meditation may have inspired these feelings of mutebreak within me. Then it hit me, these words from my newly discovered patron that I chanced upon in an icon:
“Brothers: it is later than you think. Hasten, therefore, to do the work of God.” – Fr. Seraphim Rose
What explicit conviction these words bring to the humbled heart! Too careful I have been in the past few years of wavering unbelief to speak out against anything. -Lord have mercy-
Despite an entire lifetime spent in the shade of the shadow of the cross, I could not make declarations outside of echo chambers for fear of being wrong, cancelled or sounding a neophyte. -Lord have mercy-
The wanderings through culture secular and sanctified, all to sound well-read and enlightened, and yet I was fooled by a prelest-like false peace. -Lord have mercy-
No more. And so here we are, how can I begin to describe the wellspring from which words become intelligible and articulated again. This much I can relate: it is not for me to boast.
Those familiar with the epic animated film “The Prince of Egypt” 1998, will remember a particular scene that can make a man cry. From the Burning Bush, the LORD answers a shying Moses thusly:
“…Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind? Have not I, the Lord? 12 Now therefore, go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say.” Exodus 4:11-12 NKJV
Moses has been thought to have had a stutter or some other sort of speech impediment, more reason to have been reluctant than I. Yet by heeding the voice of God he went on to become one of the most important figures of the faith, remembered and venerated for generations after.
What is the point of saying all of this at all? Why speak up now, after years of suppression in a feigned humility? In my zigzagging back towards the light, I have remembered what is truly essential to be spoken and shared, more so than any political opinion, any scientific declaration, any sign or wisdom or identity or nationality: “We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness” 1 Cor 1:23 NKJV.
This, the entire reason behind the repetitions ’round my rope (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, a sinner), the one thing so worth saying that it has reignited the logos within me.
This supreme truth, from which all other conversations and creations may follow, and by which I would have a solid foundation to begin again using my talents, is the essence of what is at all worth saying, or gabbing.
In this little dark age we have all been living through, let all of us who have been called and gifted with the ability to speak, write or sing, do so.
May we use our God-given talents to build for the Kingdom of God by participating in the re-creation of our fallen world remade in the image of His Son Jesus Christ.
I pray that this short post becomes a sort of rallying cry for all of the “little-c” creators out there and I can assure you that there will be much more to come on this subject. That thrilling adventure of the escape from stagnation and silence and towards a pursuance of beauty & truth, or, a craving of the cup.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health is refusing to share complete information about how it counted COVID-19deaths for reports ordered by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
The reports were ordered when the House unanimously approved a resolution in November 2020 requiring the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee (LBFC) to review the Department of Health’s reporting of COVID-19 testing and deaths.
State Rep. Kate Klunk sponsored the legislation, House Resolution 1087, noting that throughout the pandemic, there have been discrepancies in the information published by the Department of Health, including thousands of COVID-19 positive cases being removed from the daily totals, days where there were significant statistical anomalies in the data, the commingling of data, and COVID-19 being listed as a factor of death when the cause of death was something else.
The LBFC was tasked with providing rolling reports continuing until 90 days after Gov. Tom Wolf’s emergency declaration ends. That declaration ended in June. Five months later, the LBFC issued its first report (pdf) on Nov. 10 after being delayed due to a lack of information.
The LBFC is a bipartisan body made up of state representatives and senators. It routinely conducts studies within the Pennsylvania state government.
“Our intent was to review death certificates/records for individuals who had COVID-19 listed on their death record,” the report reads.
And although the information that the LBFC sought is generally confidential under the state’s 1953 Vital Statistics Law, the law provides exceptions to that confidentiality, allowing for the Department of Health to share the information with government agencies. The law also permits sharing the information for research.
However, LBFC’s request for death records was denied.
The Department of Health wrote in letters that the LBFC isn’t an “agency of government,” that its work isn’t “in the interest of conduct of official duty,” and that its work studying and analyzing the reporting of death records is “not research.”
“We strongly disagree with the department’s position on each of these points,” the report reads.
The LBFC finally received what it described as “highly redacted information.” With that information, it issued the report with a “scope limitation,” meaning the report attempts to answer a research question, but the limitations imposed by the lack of access to information impairs the ability to arrive at an answer.
“Unfortunately for the people of Pennsylvania, the Wolf administration attempted to shield data needed by the LBFC to do its review,” Klunk said in a Nov. 10 statement. “It’s mind boggling to me that a branch of government would try to deny a bipartisan, bicameral government entity that routinely examines data and performs research, information it needs to complete its task.”
Study findings
The LBFC noted that this is the first of what will be several studies related to COVID-19 data reporting, and it made some recommendations:
First, the Department of Health should improve its data collection and presentation on its website. While COVID-19 data is plentiful on the site, it needs better descriptions of its source and where and why it may conflict with other presented data sources. And the Department should resolve the inconsistent reporting that’s apparent in long-term care facility data, according to the report.
Second, the department should monitor the accuracy in cause of death reporting by creating a task force to address ongoing issues. Cause of death reporting was an issue before the pandemic, according to the report. Since the pandemic, the need for accurate cause of death reporting has been emphasized. The task force should include coroners, physicians, funeral directors, and medical schools. It should work to improve reporting.
Finally, the General Assembly should consider amending the Vital Statistics Law to expressly grant access to the records to legislative agencies, in order to avoid any future confusion.
The 110-page report goes into detail about the intentions of the study and the difficulties the agency faced in obtaining the necessary data. Both the LBFC and the Department of Health have used attorneys to negotiate for or block access to data.
The report provides demographic information as well. Of those who died of COVID-19 in 2020, there were 8,092 females and 7,886 males. Asian American deaths numbered 266, the category “other” accounted for 573 deaths, and there were 2,243 black deaths and 12,896 white deaths.
In 2020, no one under the age of 14 died from COVID-19 in Pennsylvania, and five died in the age range of 15 to 19, the report shows. Deaths increase with age noticeably at roughly age 60, and the majority of people who died from COVID-19 in 2020 were aged 85 to 89. In that age group, 2,792 people died.
“This data shaped policies imposed by Gov. Tom Wolf throughout this pandemic,” Klunk said. “He and all Pennsylvanians have a right to know that the data driving public health policy and individual health choices is reliable. If the governor wants a ‘government that works,’ he and his administration must be willing to not only talk the transparency talk, but walk the transparency walk by releasing this data and working with the LBFC.”
Pennsylvania acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam, speaking to the press in Lancaster, Penn., on Sept. 14, 2021 (Commonwealth Media Service)
In a Nov. 3 letter to the LBFC, Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam reiterated the position that the department isn’t legally authorized to share the requested death records with the LBFC.
“The department worked closely with LBFC to support its drafting of the report and is pleased to see the result will largely serve as a great educational tool for the General Assembly and the Public,” Beam wrote. “The department believes that Pennsylvanians have a right to accurate and concise data and information related to the COVID-19 pandemic response.”
A federal appeals court on Thursday halted the scheduled transfer of records of President Donald Trump’s time in office from the National Archives to Congress, ruling that Congress cannot access the files for now.
A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overruled a federal judge, who had opined earlier this week that a House of Representatives panel investigating the Jan. 6 of the U.S. Capitol had a legitimate legislative purpose in seeking the records.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama nominee, said the transfer could proceed as planned on Friday.
Trump appealed. Jesse Binnall, a Trump lawyer, said the former president is likely to prevail as he tried to convince the higher court to enter an injunction against Chutkan’s order.
“The alleged legislative purpose underpinning the overbroad request at issue here clearly does not merit involving the President and his records,” Binnall said. “The Committee has failed to identify anything in the broad swath of requested materials that would inform proposed legislation.”
The panel agreed to stop the transfer, pending a further order from the court.
The court will hear the case in the coming days before making a more permanent ruling.
Trump’s team was ordered to file a brief by Nov. 16 at noon, with a brief due from the House panel six days later. Trump’s team can respond in a second filing due by Nov. 24 at noon. Oral argument is slated to take place on Nov. 30.
The panel consisted of Judges Patricia Millett, an Obama nominee; Robert Wilkins, an Obama nominee; and Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden nominee.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the head of the Jan. 6 House panel, did not immediately react to the order.
A year after the election day in 2020, concerns still linger about election integrity in many states. This does not mean the election results are deeply in question, but it does suggest a need for more secure election processes next cycle.
According to Just the News, election integrity group VoterGA filed an Open Records Requests regarding the alleged destruction of ballot images from the 2020 election in Georgia. Their findings were stunning.
VoterGA said 74 Georgia counties had failed to produce the images, and it said 56 counties confirmed “most or all of the images” had been destroyed.
The images were automatically created by Dominion Voting Systems machines for tabulating votes, Just the News reported. The outlet said these images are “crucial for election records.”
Ballot images for people who voted in person are stored on compact flash memory cards. For ballots that were mailed in, the images are stored on flash drives.
After the elections, the most populated counties use scanners to transfer the images to the Election Management Server. Less populated counties manually upload the flash drives and cards to the server.
According to Just the News, federal law requires these images to be kept for 22 months post-election. In Georgia, state law dictates that the images be kept for 24 months.
Despite that, the election integrity group said the images are nowhere to be seen just 12 months after the 2020 presidential election.
“At least 28 counties admitted having no original images at all and 22 of those counties only had recount images that some claimed are the same as originals,” VoterGA said.
Are you concerned about election integrity?
Even if the recount images are the same as the originals, VoterGA said they are not as useful. Recount images lack original timestamps and meta data that the original images have.
For that reason, Just the News reported recount images are invalid for audits since “they can be changed by tampering between scans.”
The mere fact that many counties could not provide ballot images does not necessarily mean the election results were inaccurate. However, it does cast even more doubt on an already suspect election process in Georgia.
One of Georgia’s largest counties, DeKalb, has experienced a litany of issues since the election. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, DeKalb County elections director Erica Hamilton was placed on leave without explanation in early September, and she later resigned.
In addition, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger opened a probe into DeKalb County drop boxes from the election, according to a separate article from Just the News.
“The investigation includes not only whether DeKalb County properly complied with the documentation required by the State Election Board but also whether the actual procedures used by DeKalb adequately protected chain of custody for ballots returned to drop boxes,” the secretary of state’s office said in September.
When Georgia passed new laws to shore up future elections, leftists went crazy and accused them of suppressing minority voters. Major League Baseball even moved the All-Star Game out of Atlanta because of the new regulations.
In order to ensure American confidence in elections, malpractice must be addressed quickly and thoroughly. The latest issue in Georgia is another reminder that we still have a long way to go in the fight for election integrity.
The following is an installment in a weekly series of commentary articles by Cameron Arcand, host of the Young Not Stupid interview series and a contributor to The Western Journal.
While most documentaries now are either about serial killers or social justice movements, the Daily Caller’s “Cartelville, USA” brings fresh investigative journalism to the table.
The film, clocking in at a brief but impactful 36 minutes, features reporter Jorge Ventura as he delves into a troubling trend in the high desert of Los Angeles County: illegal cannabis farms.
Ventura was the perfect person to produce and narrate the documentary, as he is one of the few journalists who have covered the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border on location.
Ventura uses his own experience growing up in Palmdale, California, to explain that many families move to the desert to get out of the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles. Now, they’re starting to flee what used to be their sanctuary.
Using testimonies from local residents and law enforcement, the documentary reveals how cartels are buying up cheap houses with vast amounts of land in order to start pot farms without proper state licensing.
Property prices in the area have skyrocketed, ruining the region’s reputation for being more affordable. The high desert is now overrun by criminal enterprises wasting precious resources, including water, with no regard for the communities around them.
Are progressive policies to blame for California’s illegal cannabis problem?
These cartels staff their operations with migrants smuggled in from the southern border, many of whom are working as indentured servants.
Ventura does a fantastic job drawing distinctions between the people running the farms and the ones laboring on them.
He tells a far more nuanced story about the average person coming across the border than the hyper-partisan narrative coming from both sides of the aisle.
Furthermore, the documentary clarifies which state laws make these operations possible in a way that is simple enough for laypeople to understand.
The fault lies with poor policies and, of course, with people — namely, Democratic Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón.
Gascón is currently under the threat of a recall petition, as his progressive law enforcement style has left many in the community feeling unsafe. Realistically, he would be the one necessary for a crackdown on illegal cannabis farms in the county.
LA County DA Gascón under fire as convicted killer set to be released 6 years into 50-year sentence https://t.co/UTJKNH1nCl
In Florida, every county has a supervisor of elections.
These supervisors have their own professional organization, the Florida Supervisors of Elections. Until 2019, their name was the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, which made their purpose far clearer. But then two years ago they changed it to the current name, “Florida Supervisors of Elections,” which hides their real purpose and makes them look like an official government body. Their website looks almost exactly like an official government website. It includes links for registering to vote. It has a calendar of election dates. It has a whole battery of links to other state election websites. It has a profile photo for the current chief of the organization, whom you might come away thinking is the holder of an official statewide post.
But of course, the Florida Supervisors of Elections organization is not a government body. It’s just a professional group representing all the county supervisors.
That might be all right if it were just a boring organization nobody had to pay attention to. But the Florida supervisors are not that. They’re staking out political territory. Last month, they released a statement, claiming that concern about fraud in the 2020 election is undermining, quote, “the integrity of our democracy.”
This group presents itself as a body for organizing and training 67 different election supervisors. If they’re then putting out statements assuring everyone that our elections are perfect, and we should ignore the obvious problems with mail voting and everything else, what exactly is the group teaching its members?
It gets weirder, though. Last June, all 67 of Florida’s election supervisors attended a conference organized by this group. Who sponsored that conference? What would be the absolute most ridiculous group that could sponsor a gathering of election supervisors? We’ll wait a few seconds for you to think on that.
Okay, ready? That’s right. It’s Dominion Voting Systems. They sponsored the Florida Election Supervisors. And by the way, it wasn’t just the supervisors there. Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee addressed the conference.
So this conference has dozens of elected officials at it, being addressed by the appointed chief overseer of Florida’s elections. And get this: It wasn’t open to the public. You could buy a ticket to go, but they sold out, and the proceedings weren’t broadcast online.
Now, you start to see an additional purpose for this organization to exist. Florida has one of the broadest sunshine laws in the country. Pretty much all government and legal documents are accessible to the public. Political proceedings have to be public too. But through this “non-profit”, dozens of elected officials and the secretary of state are meeting up to discuss governmental matters, but because it’s not “official” it’s not subject to the sunshine law and the public doesn’t have to have access.
It’s all shady, and Governor Ron DeSantis is letting his own chosen secretary of state participate in this.
Laura Loomer has been tracking this story, and just 6 days ago she published a video showing her interaction with that Dominion Voting Systems employee.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), a moderate who has broken with his party over a slew of issues, took to Twitter on Wednesday to warn that unprecedented inflation is not “transitory” as his party insists, but is only “getting worse.”
Currently, inflation of the U.S. dollar is at its highest level since 1990. According to the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), inflation jumped by 0.9 percent in October alone, more than doubling September’s 0.4 percent increase.
The CPI showed a 30 percent increase in the price of energy in October. The price of gasoline itself increased by a staggering 49.6 percent in October.
These increased prices have been partly driven by an intentional effort by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to decrease their oil production. At the same time, the United States has cut its own oil production significantly since President Joe Biden, who promised to “transition away” from fossil fuels during the 2020 presidential campaign.
The cost of food also increased by 5.3 percent during the month of October, riding on the back of unprecedented supply chain issues.
Since Biden took office, many Democratic leaders, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Democratic caucus chair and co-chairs Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), have insisted that this unprecedented inflation is the result of the nation’s efforts to bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The inflation, these leaders have insisted, is “transitory.” Sen. Joe Manchin, who has raised the alarm on inflation for months, does not agree with this assessment.
On Twitter, Manchin wrote: “By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse. From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.”
The “inflation tax,” long a talking point for conservative and libertarian elements of the Republican Party, has been embraced by Manchin, who has demanded that his party limit its spending in order to combat continued inflation of the money supply.
In March 2020, soon after the beginning of the global pandemic, Congress authorized $2.2 trillion in spending to respond to the virus, which included direct payments to qualifying American families. President Donald Trump signed that bill into law not long after.
Later the same year, after months of wrangling, Congress passed an additional $900 billion in spending to modify and extend the earlier legislation, which Trump also signed into law.
Around a year after its original CCP virus relief package Congress, now controlled by Democrats, used the reconciliation process to pass a further $1.9 trillion bill called the American Rescue Plan on a party-line vote. The bill was quickly signed into law by Biden.
Recently, Democrats also passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill with some Republican support, though many in the GOP opposed the bill.
At the same time, Democrats tried to push through a $1.75 trillion budget bill even though the legislation had not been scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO); They failed in this effort after moderates demanded a CBO score as a precondition to vote for the bill, but Democrats still hope to pass the legislation in the near future.
The U.S. government has already added $6.2 trillion in new obligations with these bills, which will shoot to $7.95 trillion if the Democrats’ budget reconciliation bill is passed.
Manchin Has Tied Effects of Inflation to His Support of Budget Bill
In the wake of this unprecedented spending, Manchin has staked out a position against much of his party, emphasizing fiscal responsibility and warning of the effects that Democrats’ unprecedented spending will have on inflation.
“I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact it will have on our national debt, our economy, and most importantly all of our American people,” said Manchin at a Nov. 1 press conference. “We must allow time for complete transparency and analysis on the impact of changes to our tax code, energy, and climate policies to ensure that our country is well-positioned to remain the superpower of the world.”
At the same conference, Manchin accused his party of hiding the price of the bill.
The “so-called $1.75 trillion” reconciliation bill, said Manchin, is full of “shell games” and “budget gimmicks that make the real cost of the [bill] estimated to be nearly twice that amount.” He continued, “This is a recipe for economic crisis. None of us should ever misrepresent to the American people what the real cost of legislation is.”
“To be clear, I will not support the reconciliation bill without knowing how the bill will impact our debt and our economy and our country,” the West Virginia Democrat vowed.
Manchin also repeated a demand first put forward in a Sept. 2 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. To win his vote, he said on both occasions, his party must give him “greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on existing government programs.”
While Manchin staking out a position against his party is nothing new, he is now one of the only Democrats who have broken from the party line over inflation.
Manchin has tied his support for the Democrats’ budget bill, in part, to the effects of inflation. His latest split with the party over inflation could bode poorly for Democrats as they attempt to win Manchin’s vote for the budget bill after months of delays.
After the Labor Department report came out, Biden said that fighting inflation would now be a “top priority” for the administration, but getting inflation under control is sure to take some time—time that will be in short supply for congressional Democrats as they frantically try to pass their budget before the 2022 midterm election season.
For Democrats like John Kerry, no sacrifice is too great for the greater good — as long as it’s someone else doing the sacrificing.
The former secretary of state, U.S. senator, one-time Democratic presidential candidate and current Biden administration climate czar makes a pretense with the rest of his party of caring for the commoners in American life.
But in an interview from Glasgow, Scotland, this week, he made it clear that the policies of the White House he now serves are dead set on directly killing an industry that employs more than 40,000 of his fellow citizens.
“By 2030 in the United States, we won’t have coal,” Kerry said in an interview Tuesday, according to Bloomberg News. “We will not have coal plants.”
Kerry was speaking at COP26, one of those periodic multinational gatherings where the good and the great gather together to display their hypocrisy on the world stage while talking about ways to battle the boogeyman of “climate change,” usually on the backs of those far less fortunate.
In the Kerry case, those less fortunate include the tens of thousands of Americans whose livelihoods are directly connected to the coal industry liberals loathe (42,000 jobs in the U.S., according to the data company Statista). And that doesn’t even count their families, communities and businesses that rely on them.
That’s the Biden administration’s brand of “leadership” — part of a plan to reduce carbon emissions to zero in the next 14 years.
“We’re saying we are going to be carbon free in the power sector by 2035,” Kerry said. “I think that’s leadership. I think that’s indicative of what we can do.”
And if that means destroying jobs and the source of nearly one-fifth of the country’s current energy supply, then that’s the price Kerry & Co. are willing to pay.
Do you think the U.S. coal industry will be around longer than John Kerry?
But it’s not a plan that’s likely to sit well with lawmakers who represent major coal-producing areas — like, say, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a guy who, with Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, basically holds the Biden administration’s future in his hands.
Manchin’s state, which went for Donald Trump by overwhelming margins in both 2016 and 2020, has about a quarter of the jobs that would be lost if coal disappeared, according to Statista.
In an interview with Newsmax, another U.S. lawmaker, Rep. James Comer, an outspoken Republican whose district includes coal-rich areas of Kentucky, said the plan is self-defeating for an administration that is also hellbent on getting rid of natural gas, oil and the internal combustion engine.
Electricity, he told Newsmax in an interview on Wednesday, has to come from somewhere.
“This is another bad policy being talked about by the Biden administration,” he said.
Even in the liberal cesspool of social media, plenty of Twitter users agreed with him.
Kerry, in this one statement, proves himself completely unable to handle his position. Without coal, a lot of America loses electricity, especially with natural gas usage hindered by Biden’s policies.
John Kerry and his socialist co-conspirators do not care if the vast majority of Americans are forced into abject poverty.
The ruling class will have wealth and power beyond their wildest dreams. That is all they care about. Kerry is a Clown!#DemsAreEvil#SocialismSucks#FJB — Scott Cook (@ScottCookOCMD) November 10, 2021
No energy source will ever come without costs and environmental tradeoffs. That’s part of life on earth.
But coal provides stable power, is in American hands and employees tens of thousands of jobs for the kind of workers liberals used to pretend to care about.
Democrats, on the other hand, provide little to the country besides duplicitous politics, social unrest and an ever more-grasping-hand of an ever-more-powerful state. Certainly, real jobs — the kind that don’t involve working for the government, for instance — aren’t high on the agenda. (President Joe Biden opened his administration by killing the Keystone XL pipeline, remember, at the cost of about 11,000 jobs. Democrats didn’t give much of a damn.)
The United States could cheerfully do without the likes of John Kerry and his hypocritical “climate change” hype by the year 2035, along with the rest of his socialist power-hungry party — much more so than it could do without coal and the electricity and jobs it provides.
Some people spreading information about COVID-19 contrary to what is deemed “acceptable” by Big Pharma are criminals, according to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
They’re professionals, he says, that “circulate, on purpose, misinformation” regarding mRNA vaccine shots.
“They’re not [just] bad people, they’re criminals. Because they literally have costed millions of lives,” Bourla said Tuesday in a telecast with Frederick Kempe, CEO of the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank.
.@pfizer CEO Albert Bourla: People who share “misinformation” on vaccines’ efficacy are “criminals.”
“They’re not bad people. They’re criminals because they have literally cost millions of lives.” pic.twitter.com/VjIXs5rQCg
So who are these professionals? Dissenting researchers? Doctors treating patients with the Drugs Which Must Not Be Named? Nurses losing their jobs because of the vaccine mandate?
What about the president of the United States, Joe Biden? He’s a professional. Is he a criminal? If we follow Bourla’s reasoning, he would be.
Is Pfizer’s CEO out of line calling professionals who are critics of COVID vaccines “criminals”?
Several times throughout the course of the pandemic, Biden has said things to large audiences which contradict White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“You’re not gonna get COVID if you get these vaccinations,” Biden said.
However, Fauci has told the American people, “It is important to remember…that infections after vaccination are expected.”
BIDEN: “You’re not gonna get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
FAUCI: “Infections after vaccination are expected.”
— Young Americans for Liberty (@YALiberty) July 22, 2021
Now, in all likelihood, Bourla would not say Joe Biden is a criminal. He would say Uncle Joe’s just wrong. And Bourla said a lot of people are refusing to take the COVID vaccine for reasons which are largely not nefarious.
“There are two groups of people, alright, there are the people that — they are vaccinated [and] there are the people that are skeptical about the vaccination, and both of them are afraid,” he said.
“Those that are getting the vaccine, they are afraid of the disease and they believe, because people are not getting vaccinated, [the unvaccinated] are increasing the risk to them, they are increasing the exposure, so they are mad with them because they don’t get the vaccine.”
“Those that don’t get the vaccine, they’re afraid of the vaccine and they are mad with the people that are oppressing them to get it,” Bourla continued.
“Those I understand — they are very good people, they are decent people, but they have a fear and I understand it and they don’t want to take chances.”
“But there is a very small part of professionals, which they circulate, on purpose, misinformation so that they will mislead those that they have concerned. Those who are criminals. They’re not [just] bad people, they’re criminals. Because they literally have costed millions of lives.”
Millions of lives. Right.
There are plenty of top-notch medical researchers and professionals with legitimate questions about the catastrophic events of what is now going on two years, including the lockdowns, the mask mandates and, of course, the quickly developed vaccine.
But Bourla says professional dissenting “criminals” are profiting by pushing “conspiracy theory.”
“People want [to] make money — some of them — by playing with the emotions of these people [and] are creating a whole conspiracy theory and they are trying to basically to benefit and profit from this fear of the people. And this is who are the criminals.”
These are not criminals. They are individuals following the time-honored practices of science which, to sum it up as a sort of meme, is: “Here’s my hypothesis — change my mind.”
That’s the scientific practice of what’s called falsification.
That seems to have been missing in this entire COVID scenario. And it’s been evident in the unmitigated propaganda: the constant public service announcements, the droning announcements in stores, even the proclamations of electric highway signs.
And the censorship. Where there’s censorship, there is no science.
Besides being censored, people are losing their jobs, being subjected to unhealthy physical and mental health situations and suffering from divided friendships and families because of poor decision-making on the part of makers of public policy.
It’s due to a sickness that can be truly dangerous mainly to people who are aged and who have other physical problems, such as obesity, diabetes and more.
Maybe those at most risk can receive some reduction in the chance of getting COVID-19 from an experimental vaccine presented without legal liability on the part of companies like Bourla’s.
But confidence in a company like Pfizer is not increased when its CEO describes professionals who disagree as criminals.
Danchenko pleaded not guilty Wednesday to making false statements about the source of information that he provided to Steele for the dossier
Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, had a message for those who pushed and believed the anti-Trump dossier amid recent indictments out of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe: “We told you so.”
Last week, Durham indicted the Russian national, Igor Danchenko, who is believed to be the sub-source for former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who compiled the dossier that served as the basis for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Trump campaign aide Carter Page in 2016.
The dossier was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through law firm Perkins Coie.
Danchenko pleaded not guilty Wednesday to making false statements about the source of information that he provided to Steele for the dossier.
In an interview with Fox News, Jordan, who was heavily involved in GOP congressional investigations into the origins of the Russia probe, reacted to the developments.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, during a Justice Department oversight hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 21, 2021. (Greg Nash/Pool via REUTERS)
“Those of us who were in this, you know, back when no one else was, it’s sort of like, we told you so,” Jordan said. “That sounds arrogant, and I don’t mean to be, but this is what we said. This is what they were doing – what they were accusing President Trump of doing, they were actually doing – they were working with the Russians and it goes right to the Clinton campaign.”
Former Attorney General William Barr last year revealed that the sub-source, now known to be Danchenko, was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011 for suspected contact with Russian intelligence officers.
Jordan, citing Danchenko’s indictment, said he was “bragging that if Clinton won he was going to get a job in the State Department.”
“This is the Clinton campaign – they orchestrated this whole thing,” Jordan said.
Jordan also pointed out that both Danchenko and Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann were charged with making false statements to the FBI – not as part of Durham’s probe, but rather, during interviews with the FBI in 2016 and 2017.
“They are being indicted for the original lies that they told back in 2016 and 2017 to the FBI,” Jordan said.
Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe yielded no evidence of criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians during the 2016 election.
At the conclusion of Mueller’s probe in 2019, Barr appointed Durham, who at the time served as the U.S. attorney from Connecticut, to investigate the origins of the FBI’s original Russia probe, also known as Crossfire Hurricane, which began in July 2016. Durham was instructed to review that probe through the appointment of Mueller in May 2017.
Barr, before leaving the Trump administration in December 2020, tapped Durham as special counsel to continue his investigation through the Biden administration.
In the scope order, Barr stated that Durham “is authorized to investigate whether any federal official, employee, or any other person or entity violated the law in connection with the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns, and individuals associated with the administration of President Donald J. Trump, including but not limited to Crossfire Hurricane and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III.”
Jordan, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, served as ranking member on the House Oversight Committee until March 2020, and now serves as the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee.
Jordan has led the charge on a number of high-profile congressional investigations – ranging from the Benghazi probe during the Obama administration, to the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, the first impeachment of former President Trump, the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, and more.
Jordan shares an “inside look” at those investigations and more in his new book, “Do What You Said You Would Do: Fighting for Freedom in the Swamp,” set to be released Nov. 23.
“I spent a lot of time writing about investigations,” Jordan told Fox News. “That’s by the nature of my committees – I just always seemed to be involved in all of this.”
He added: “I really do think that people who read this will enjoy it,” Jordan said, noting that it’s a “fun read,” and adding that the book also focuses on his interactions with Trump.
“You know, the title, no one, no one did the title more than President Trump,” he said. “No one did more of what they said they would do than he did.”
“We walked through all the important investigations and some fun stories are in there as well, that, like I said, I think readers are going to like,” Jordan added. “So I’m excited.”
Join Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke in the latest episode of “Truth Over News” as they reveal the latest details surrounding Peter Daszak’s violation of NIH grant requirements and his admission that information regarding the experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are currently subject to censorship by the Communist Party of China.
The National Institutes of Health recently gave EcoHealth Alliance five days to submit any and all unpublished data from its experiments at the Wuhan lab. Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health and pandemic prevention, failed to submit the required material. In a letter to the NIH, Daszak revealed concerning information regarding the quality and integrity of these experiments that may explain why this information was not submitted to begin with.
On Oct. 20, the NIH admitted to Congress that they had funded dangerous gain-of-function experiments conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The NIH also sent EcoHealth a letter giving it five days to provide missing data that was required under the NIH grant. Instead of directly complying with their request, Peter Daszak sent a response to the NIH. He again failed to provide the data, which included a fifth year progress report that was required under the terms and conditions of the NIH grant. This missing report was only discovered due to a lawsuit against the NIH for documents related to EcoHealth. If not for this lawsuit, the unsubmitted progress report would likely remain undetected.
In his letter to the NIH, Daszak claimed the NIH had not pursued EcoHealth for the missing data, among a host of other excuses. He said they had uploaded the report, but the system did not allow them to officially submit it. He also said that the NIH never sent a request for the fifth year report. Daszak however failed to mention whether or not he or other members ever raised the issue to anyone in the NIH. Rather, he continued to point the finger at the NIH for not pursuing EcoHealth when it was his organization that did not submit the required report under their grant agreement.
In his letter, Daszak also revealed a progress report that extended beyond the period covered by the missing report. Daszak noted that the NIH had only required that EcoHealth stop funding work at the Wuhan Institute in April 2020, after President Trump terminated their grant. However, even when the funding was no longer available, Daszak said EcoHealth continued reporting its work, saying “even though the grant was terminated and then suspended, and funding is not available to us to work on this, we have continued to comply with NIH reporting requests, and submitted reporting for years six and seven of this grant.” What types of experiments, if any, were done during this period? As far as the hosts know, these year six and seven reports are not currently made public.
Under the original NIH grant, EcoHealth was supposed to immediately stop any experiments that showed evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 10 times. However, EcoHealth’s 2018 annual progress report described an experiment that exceeded NIH reporting thresholds. In these experiments, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had created a novel coronavirus with a 10,000 times higher viral load. This should have created a cessation of experiments and a review by the NIH. Instead, those experiments continued, even during the time when the fifth year progress report had failed to be submitted. Daszak defends his failure to report on these experiments by claiming that he was not under any duty to stop or report the experiments as the viral load data was based on genome copies per gram, not viral titer.
Daszak Admits Gain-of-Function Research Continued, CCP Censoring Data | Truth Over News [Full Episode]Play Video
However, the viral load was over 10,000 times greater when it should have remained under 10, making it far more pathogenic than the reporting requirements set forth in the NIH grant. Daszak argued that their work should have been ignored, noting that “given the small number of mice, it is also uncertain whether the survival and weight loss data were statistically relevant.” Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, a long time critic of gain-of-function experiments, responded to Daszak’s reasoning in a tweet, saying “EcoHealth has reached a point of such desperation that it now points to the slipshod character of its research, and the limited predictive value of its research, as defense.”
Daszak also claimed several times that he couldn’t hand over the genetic sequence data to the NIH because that information is currently going through an approval process by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities. In other words, U.S. taxpayers, through the use of a government federal agency, gave Daszak millions of dollars in grant money to conduct advanced gain-of-function experiments, only for the results of those experiments to be withheld and censored under the control of the CCP. This is a breach of the terms and conditions of the NIH grant, which demanded all genetic sequence data be made available, regardless of CCP involvement. The fact that this data remains under the control of the CCP discredits the NIH and Daszak’s claim that their Wuhan experiments could not have caused the pandemic. It is not knowable what viruses were studied because the data has not been released and because it is still being censored by the CCP.
What is known is that EcoHealth did not comply with the reporting requirements and the NIH did not hold them accountable. Even though the two organizations are currently engaged in a conflict of words, they are likely both fighting for the same outcome—to convince the world that they were not involved in the creation of COVID-19.
Watch the full episode for more in depth information on this important topic, and share this article so others can know the truth behind the COVID-19 pandemic.
The world’s two largest emitters of carbon dioxide on Nov. 10 pledged to work together in tackling climate change as global leaders wrap up the two-week COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
The framework, unveiled by U.S. climate envoy John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua two days before the conference comes to a close, was billed by both sides as a way to help the summit achieve success.
“In the area of climate change there is more agreement between China and the US than divergence, making it an area with huge potential for our cooperation,” Xie said through an interpreter at the conference briefing room.
He said that the joint agreement “shows again that cooperation is the only choice for both China and the United States.”
The plan identified five areas for cooperation but is thin on concrete targets, emphasizing that the countries have “differentiated responsibilities” according to their “different national circumstances,” a concept Xie stressed during the press briefing.
Xie did not commit the country to the Global Methane Pledge, which 104 countries signed onto during the conference promising to cut their methane emissions by 30 percent during the five-year period between 2025 and 2030.
Early into the summit, Xie also defended China’s reliance on coal—which supplies around 60 percent of the country’s electricity supply—saying Beijing is “at a special development stage” and already “making our biggest possible effort to address climate change.”
A coal-fired power plant in Shanghai, China, Oct. 14, 2021. (Aly Song/Reuters)
Beijing, in the joint declaration, promised to phase down coal consumption over the next decade and cooperate with America to boost clean energy. The two countries will also share technology innovation aimed at slowing climate change. A bilateral meeting on reducing methane, the second-largest source of greenhouse gases after carbon dioxide, will be convened in the first half of 2022, the announcement said.
Kerry said the declaration was a “roadmap for our present and future collaboration” on climate.
“You know the expression that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Well, every step matters right now, and we have a long journey ahead of us,” he told reporters.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed the agreement between China and the United States.
“Tackling the climate crisis requires international collaboration and solidarity, and this is an important step in the right direction,” he wrote on Twitter.
China’s leader Xi Jinping did not attend the COP26 summit, becoming the only world leader who delivered remarks via written statement, in which he demanded richer nations to lead the climate effort and accommodate less developed countries. He did not give new promises.
Chinese officials have repeatedly asked Washington to soften its China policies to facilitate climate cooperation. On Nov. 2, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson declared that “you can’t ask China to cut coal production on the one hand, while at the same time imposing sanctions on Chinese photovoltaic enterprises,” a reference to a June trade blacklist on several Chinese solar panel parts manufacturers that allegedly used forced labor from Uyghur minorities in China’s Xinjiang region.
Kerry, who said previously that “life is always full of tough choices“ in answering a reporter’s question about Beijing’s abuses in Xinjiang, said again on Wednesday that pressing Beijing on human rights is within his purview.
“We’re honest about the differences. We certainly know what they are and we’ve articulated them,” Kerry told reporters. “But that’s not my lane here. My job is to be the climate guy and stay focused on trying to move the climate agenda forward.”
US special climate envoy, John Kerry speaks during a joint China and US statement on a declaration enhancing climate action in the 2020’s on day eleven of the COP26 climate change conference at the SEC in Glasgow, Scotland, on Nov. 10, 2021. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
The regime has not been sincere about tackling climate change but is merely playing the issue to its advantage, some China experts have said.
Even as China expands wind and solar capacity, such efforts are driven by a need to satiate energy shortage, according to Katie Tubb, an economic policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation think tank.
“They are willing to get energy wherever they can get it,” she told The Epoch Times.
China has made a long-term target to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, 10 years later than the deadline set by developed countries. In Tubb’s point of view, it is a strategic decision for the regime to see the West pursue green technologies and potentially reap any fruit coming out of it.
“They’re hedging their bets,” she said.
Miles Yu, the principal China policy advisor to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said getting China’s cooperation on climate is a “very difficult” task.
“China, really deep inside, does not care nearly as much about the issues like climate change as the United States current government does,” Yu told The Epoch Times late October.
Climate change is not “China’s top strategic priority” but a potential lever for Beijing to extract concessions on issues such as human rights and trade from the United States, Yu said.
“They focus on this radical push for just economic power at any cost, even at the expense of global ecology.”
For the second time in less than a week, parents are demanding answers after their children were given the incorrect of COVID vaccine.
The first incident, however, merely involved two children under 10 in Texas who were given adult doses of the vaccine on Oct. 31. This time, it involves over 100 children ages 5-to-11 in Loudoun County, Virginia, who were given diluted versions of the vaccine meant for those 12 and older, according to WRC-TV in Washington, D.C.
Despite the larger number of children who were affected this time, this still isn’t national news — in part because it doesn’t fit the narrative that the Biden administration is effectively rolling out a vaccine for children, and possibly because Google is trying to starve publications that don’t parrot the approved line when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines. (We’re trying to fight this at The Western Journal — and you can help us in our fight by subscribing here.)
On Wednesday, the Virginia Department of Health confirmed that Ted Pharmacy in Aldie, Virginia administered a diluted version of the inoculation formulated for 12- to 17-year-olds to 112 children younger than 11 on Nov. 3 and 4, according to Washington’s WTTG-TV.
On Nov. 5, state and federal authorities stepped in and ordered the pharmacy to stop administering the shots. The Virginia Department of Health later collected the remainder of the vaccines at the pharmacy.
Dasha Hermosilla’s daughter, 7-year-old Gryffin Fahle, is one of those affected. She told WRC that Gryffin was given a diluted dose of the vaccine for older kids, which comes with a purple cap. The dose for 5-11 comes with an orange cap to differentiate it.
The pharmacist said this was allowed. All it took was a Google search for Hermosilla to confirm that it wasn’t.
“Nothing says that you can change a purple to an orange,” Hermosilla told the station. “I had this pit in my stomach that, like, ‘what did they just do to my daughter?’”
She also criticized how the pharmacy treated parents after it happened.
Would you vaccinate your children against COVID-19?
“The way they have dealt with individuals is really, like, ‘Oh, it’s no big deal,’” Hermosilla said. “There are dozens and dozens of families out there that don’t even know that this is an issue.”
She wasn’t alone.
“Another mom sent News4 a screengrab of a Facebook conversation in which the pharmacy admitted to the mistake and apologized for the ‘inconvenience,’” WRC reported.
BREAKING NEWS: 112 children were administered the WRONG DOSE of COVID-19 vaccine at Ted Pharmacy in Loudoun County https://t.co/V1iq68N1yh
According to WRRC, the Loudoun County Health Department released an alert after the station reported Hermosilla’s case, acknowledging the incident.
The letter stated that the formulation used resulted in the affected children receiving “a dose of COVID19 vaccine that is potentially lower than recommended.”
“The pharmacy who administered the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination to your child last week has been removed from both state and federal COVID-19 vaccination programs,” said Loudoun County Department of Health Director David Goodfriend said in the letter.
Virginia’s Board of Pharmacy, meanwhile, said it is “not at liberty to confirm nor deny whether an investigation into a possible violation of a law or regulation is or is not underway.”
“Should an investigation reveal there is probable cause to believe a law or regulation was broken an Informal Conference or a Formal Hearing before the board may be held for consideration of possible disciplinary action,” the board said in a statement.
“The Board’s findings of fact and resulting actions are contained in a Board Order that becomes a matter of public record available online on the Board of Pharmacy’s website under License Lookup and Recent Case Decisions.”
It’s unclear what this means for the children. As the county health department’s letter stated, the pharmacy’s action meant the children likely received a lower dose than they ordinarily would have.
Even still, Goodfriend’s letter said parents should first contact their pediatrician “for clinical judgment and decision making to determine the best course of action for each patient.”
The letter also urged parents to watch for the traditional COVID-19 vaccine side effects, such as fever, chills, fatigue or pain or swelling at the site of the injection.
“If any additional or more serious side effects occur or are prolonged, contact your primary care provider or pediatrician,” the letter warned.
Parents were then told to log the event in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance says parents can either restart the vaccine series in 21 days or wait for a second dose with the orange cap as scheduled.
In this case, the danger seems less pronounced than it was during a similar incident on Oct. 31 in Garland, Texas, where a 6- and a 7-year-old were both given adult doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine before a child formulation had even been approved.
“They asked us our kids’ ages, and so we told them 4 and 6, and they said ‘the 6-year-old can obviously get it if you’d like to go ahead and do that,’” Julian Gonzalez, father of the 6-year-old, told KTVT-TV in Fort Worth.
“Going off their confidence and what we read [on the form], we were all for it,” he said.
The next day, however, they were contacted by the Garland Health Department, alerting them that the vaccine hadn’t been approved for their son but that they’d received adult doses.
A dose for ages 5-to-11 is 10 micrograms while an adult version contains 30 micrograms. Gonzalez’s son experienced some side effects, while the mother of the 7-year-old said he was fine.
The case in Virginia is worrying for a different reason: It involved 112 children getting faulty vaccinations over a two-day period. And people wonder why some parents are skeptical about vaccinations?
As of Nov. 10, CDC data show only 595 individuals under the age of 17 have officially died of COVID-19 in the U.S. — and this says nothing about whether or not they had pre-existing risk factors. While every death is tragic, of course, 595 is a minuscule fraction of the more than 780,000 deaths attributed to the coronavirus in the country.
When looking at the cost-benefit analysis of vaccinating a child, that’s something that has to be taken into consideration.
Incidents like the one in Virginia may be rare. However, when it’s questionable whether the vaccination is necessary for this age group at all, it’s enough to give a mother or father pause.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who has repeatedly criticized loose central bank policies and has forcefully sounded the alarm on the upside risks of the current bout of inflation, has warned that global financial markets seem to be pricing in slow growth and low real interest rates for the next several years.
“The stimulus that we’ve enacted is 5 to 10 times—depending on how you do the calculation—as large as the fiscal stimulus enacted after the [2008] financial crisis,” Summers said in a Nov. 10 lecture hosted by the London School of Economics (LSE).
“Currently, the driving event is the extraordinary scale of the fiscal stimulus, along with extraordinary monetary policy, that has been put in place,” he said, adding that, “what markets are seeming to price is a return to secular stagnation, or another way to put it is … Japanization.”
Secular stagnation is a period of little or no economic growth, while the term “Japanization” is often used by economists to describe long-term stagnation and deflation, typically accompanied by symptoms like high unemployment, real interest rates near zero, weak economic activity, and central bank stimulus, including quantitative easing.
“Japanization has been in the spotlight since the global financial crisis of 2008,” wrote Dino Lauria Ubatuba de Faria, CEO at Lince Investimentos, in a note. “The term Japanization refers to the economic conditions of Japan during the two lost decades, which resulted in both low growth and deflation.”
In a separate interview for International Economy magazine (pdf), Summers denounced what he called “woke central banking,” a condition where policymakers extend easy money policies in service of peripheral policy objectives, while losing sight of the need to rein in inflation.
“The climate today is of more woke central banking, where central bankers give speeches about challenges not proximally related to inflation or unemployment such as climate change, and reject the idea of preempting inflation in favor of the idea of waiting until inflation is firmly established,” Summers said.
“These things threaten a return to the kind of psychology that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s and contributed to excessive inflation,” he warned.
It comes as consumer price inflation surged 0.9 percent over the month and 6.2 percent over the year in October, with the annual rate of inflation being the highest in nearly 31 years.
Summers, who served as chief economist at the World Bank and is an emeritus professor at Harvard, told LSE that he “came to a diagnosis a few years after the financial crisis that the right way to conceptualize the economic problem of the industrialized world in the 21st century was in terms of difficulty of savings absorption.”
He explained that the phenomenon entails excess savings combined with under-investment, along with very low real interest rates, economic sluggishness, high leverage and inflated asset prices, and “enhanced proclivity to financial crisis.”
He said that the years after 2013 bore out his hypothesis, with budget deficits considerably higher, interest rates considerably lower, and asset prices considerably higher than expected, yet growth far more sluggish than anticipated.
“That is exactly what we would expect if there was difficulty in generating excess demand—or adequate demand—because of a savings absorption problem,” Summers said.
“The judgment of markets is that real rates, for the next generation, are going to be negative, even in the presence of extraordinarily high, by historical standards, debt-to-GDP ratios and, prospectively for some significant number of years, relatively high fiscal deficits,” he said.
He said this shows that the problem of savings absorption is going to persist for “quite some time.”
Summers also said easy money policies raised the risk of asset bubbles and mis-allocation of capital.
“Extremely low interest rates set the stage for leveraging and the perpetuation of zombie enterprises and the perpetuation of financial bubbles,” Summers said. “We’re seeing a lot of evidence of speculative risk. Extremely low and negative real interest rates are problematic.”
A group of Virginia parents say they have secured enough signatures on petitions to remove the school board chair they say has endangered their children and placed woke politics ahead of education.
Fight for Schools filed the recall documents in Loudoun County Circuit Court on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.
The filing said board President Brenda Sheridan broke open meetings laws by using closed Facebook groups as a way to discuss school business without the public being aware. Sheridan is also accused of violating the First Amendment rights of parents by limiting public comment at meetings.
The board chair is also accused of mishandling a sexual assault case in the schools in which a student who was accused of a sexual assault was shunted from one school to another, where he has been accused of another sexual assault.
“Today, we just filed 1200 signatures to remove the chairwoman of Loudoun County School Board, Brenda Sheridan,” Fight for Schools Executive Director Ian Prior told Fox News. “We decided that for the chairwoman and the vice-chairwoman, the buck stops with them, that we were going to draft new petitions … We were able to finish those off in 13 days.”
The group says it also has petitions to remove Board Vice-Chair Atoosa Reaser and board members Ian Serotkin and Denise Corbo, all with more than enough signatures to meet the legal requirement to trigger a recall. In Virginia, elected officials can be recalled if a petition to remove them receives a number of signatures equal to 10 percent of the votes cast in the previous election, Fox reported.
Have school boards become rubber stamps for liberals?
The intent to recall all of the board members was expressed during a public comment period at Tuesday’s board meeting.
“By the way, Denise, Brenda, Ian, Atoosa, we are well over 100% of required signatures for the petitions,” Megan Jenkins said, according to Fox News. “So I’m not going to encourage any of you to resign because when you are recalled and removed from office, it will be much more satisfying. See you in court.”
“I have the privilege of telling you that we are finished collecting signatures for your removal,” parent Jessica Mendez said during the meeting.
“I used to think that there was no point in speaking at these meetings,” Mendez said. “There was no point in trying to have a voice because you never seem to listen, anyway. But I had it all wrong. It wasn’t you who needed to hear our voices. It was all those parents, grandparents and neighbors listening at home, horrified at your actions or inactions. They were the ones who needed to hear us, and they were the ones who sign petitions, see you in court.”
“For six months, Fight for Schools has been out collecting signatures in the heat, the cold, the rain and even hail,” Prior said on Monday. “To get 20,000 signatures during that time is a testament to the dedication of our volunteers and an engaged community that wants to see a change on its school board.”
“We are looking forward to the next steps and replacing school board members that are political servants with non-partisan public servants who will put the focus back on excellence in education,” he said.
Sheridan issued a statement in reply.
“My election was a mandate from those who came to the polls — three times — to choose me as their representative. Tuesday’s filing is the result of a fraction of those citizens signing a petition, whether they voted or not,” she said, according to the Post.
But Prior said change is necessary.
“From violating open meetings law to ignoring the school board’s code of conduct to neglecting to keep our children safe, all for her activist causes, Sheridan has been nothing short of a disaster,” Prior said, the Post reported.
“Let this serve as a message to the rest of the board and Superintendent Ziegler,” he said. “We’re still here, and we’re not going anywhere.”
Procedurally, if recall cases go to trial, a judge or a jury rules on the removal of a board member. The board then gets 45 days to appoint an interim replacement and 15 days to schedule a special election, according to Fox.
In addition to issues over student safety, parents have objected to the district embracing Critical Race Theory, as explained Tuesday night by parent Erin Dunbar, who accused the board of using tax dollars to teach “critical theory of the Marxist philosophy,” Fox reported.
“You have activist teachers using to indoctrinate their kids who are at the mercy of their authority,” she said. “That is child abuse. And you have no right to brainwash children into believing that their skin color determines their purpose.”
Apprehensions along the U.S.–Mexico border in October set a new record for the month, unpublished data obtained by The Epoch Times show.
Border Patrol logged about 163,000 arrests of illegal immigrants at the northern and southern borders, according to preliminary data that doesn’t include Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations (OFO). While arrests at the U.S.–Canadian border are typically less than 100 each month, the OFO has recently recorded at least 5,096 arrests per month.
While the total apprehensions are down from the previous month, they established a new record for October, easily clearing the 91,410 arrests recorded in October of 1999 and well above the figures seen during recent administrations.
“It’s an improvement, but it’s still four or five times the level that we saw during the Obama or Trump administrations,” Steven Kopits, president of the Princeton Policy Advisors, told The Epoch Times.
Arrests under former President Donald Trump averaged 45,000 per October and arrests under former President Barack Obama averaged 33,000 per October.
The new October record isn’t the only one set by the Biden administration. The arrests last month mean the administration has presided over the year with the most arrests, with two months still left to go.
For the full year, Princeton Policy’s forecast stands at 1.87 million apprehensions, up from the prior record of 1.61 million set under the Clinton administration in 2000.
A chart shows the number of border apprehensions at the southwest border in recent years. (Courtesy of Princeton Policy Advisors)A chart shows the annual number of border apprehensions at the southwest border in recent years and the projection that 2021 will set a new record. (Courtesy of Princeton Policy Advisors)
Most of the October apprehensions took place in the always-busy Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol sector in Texas. But agents in other areas also made significant arrests, with the number breaching 22,400 in the Yuma, Arizona, sector.
Illegal border crossings have exploded since President Joe Biden took office in January. The Democrat quickly reversed or altered key Trump-era border security and enforcement policies, including halting the construction of the border wall and stopping the “Remain in Mexico” program. The administration also ended the expulsion of many illegal immigrants despite the COVID-19 pandemic and released hundreds of thousands into the U.S. interior, some without official papers to appear in court.
The Biden administration, which has called Trump-era policies “inhumane” and “cruel,” has said its immigration system overhaul will take time to complete.
Vice President Kamala Harris was tapped in March to address the border issue and has said her focus is on the “root causes” of illegal immigration.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has said the agency’s three-part plan is to invest in countries that people are leaving, to build “safe, orderly, and humane pathways” for immigration, and rebuild the asylum system and refugee program.
Thousands of illegal immigrants amass in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 16, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Scores of illegal immigrants have said they’ve traveled to the United States because of Biden’s policies. Mexico’s government also appears to have become more lenient with illegal immigrants transiting through since Biden took office.
Many Haitians who crossed into a primitive camp under the international bridge in Del Rio, Texas, recently told The Epoch Times that now was the time to come because it was easier to get in and stay in under Biden. The majority had been living in Chile or Brazil for years.
In addition to the apprehensions in October, there were roughly 50,000 “gotaways,” or illegal immigrants who were recorded as evading arrest, according to the unpublished data. An untold number of other illegal immigrants enter the country without being arrested or recorded as having gotten away.
“Those gotaway numbers are higher than I’d have expected—they’re equivalent to 30 percent of apprehensions,” Mark Kirkorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Epoch Times in an email.
The decline in arrests from September may stem from a decrease in the number of U.S. job openings, Kopits said.
“There are a number of factors. One is that you may be running out of migrants right now—the number of people who wanted to come. It could just be a monthly blip, that happens sometimes. It could be the enforcement’s a little bit better than it was. Or it could be that the job market’s a little softer,” he said. “There’s a little bit less opportunity for migrants and so they’re slowing down a little bit.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated when the Biden administration would set a new yearly record. It already has. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
Jonathan Mantz – Hillary Clinton’s former Finance Director who’s “raised nearly half a billion dollars over his career for Democratic campaigns” – is now a lobbyist for the American Chamber of Commerce in South China, which seeks to craft policies favorable to American companies doing business in China and routinely partners with the Chinese Communist Party to do so.
Jonathan Mantz, a Principal at BGR Group, “leads the firm’s Democratic outreach efforts,” according to his professional bio and serves as a member of the Finance Committee of the Democratic Governors Association.
“Over the past three decades, Jonathan has held senior positions to elect Democrats to the White House, Senate, House of Representatives and governorships. A leading political strategist, he has raised nearly half a billion dollars over his career for Democratic campaigns,” the summary adds, including positions such as the National Finance Director for then-Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential campaign.
Mantz has also served as the Finance Director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) under Nancy Pelosi.
Following his long stint in Democratic politics, Mantz is now lobbying on behalf of the American Chamber of Commerce in South China. Lobbying registration documents reveal Mantz is lobbying the National Security Council (NSC) and providing “strategic counsel on bilateral issues.”
The chamber counts its primary objective as “promot[ing] the development of trade, commerce, and investment between the United States and the People’s Republic of China” and includes over 2,000 corporations as members. “Through engaging in dialogue with our more than 2,300 members, we formulate policy objectives that represent the immediate interests of the Chamber as a whole, and then pursue them at the local, regional and national levels in the United States and the People’s Republic of China,” asserts the group.
To do so, however, the group routinely partners with the Chinese Communist Party on events and conferences.
The upcoming China (Shanxi)–U.S. Symposium on Investments is sponsored by the American Chamber of Commerce in South China in partnership with Chinese Communist Party officials from Shanxi province. The group has also organized events in support of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which the U.S. State Department has warned that Beijing “to expand foreign markets for Chinese companies and as a means of drawing nations, particularly their political and economic elites, into Beijing’s geopolitical orbit.”
“Supported by Guangdong Provincial Party Committee and People’s Government of Guangdong Province, it is built as an important high-end platform for business and trade exchange and cooperation, corresponding to the Belt and Road Initiative,” notes the chamber’s event summary.
The American Chamber of Commerce in South China has also sponsored events connecting its members with Chinese Communist Party and military-linked companies such as BGI Genomics, Huawei spin-off Honor, and DJI Drones.
“The delegation will focus on healthcare, manufacturing, and technology industries and offers exclusive opportunities for our members to meet with government officials from the Commerce Bureau of Shenzhen Municipality, Shenzhen Municipal Health Commission, [and] the Drug Administration of Shenzhen Municipality,” notes a description of a recent chamber delegation to Shanghai.
Import ban could agitate Beijing as U.S. pushes for climate deal
Climate czar John Kerry is lobbying House lawmakers to oppose legislation that would ban the import of all Chinese-made goods that are produced using Uyghur slave labor, a move aimed at buying goodwill with Beijing as the United States seeks a new climate deal, according to congressional sources and foreign policy insiders familiar with the matter.
Kerry and a faction of State Department officials oppose legislation meant to curtail Chinese imports made using slave labor, sources said, due to concerns that the restrictive measures will agitate Beijing. The legislation, known as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, in July passed the Senate by voice vote but is stalled in the House. It would target China’s construction of solar panels and other equipment the United States needs to migrate the country to green energy sources.
The Biden administration’s internal strife over China points to a tug-of-war between the White House, which supports this type of measure, and the State Department, which is pushing a softer China policy in the hopes of securing a climate deal with Beijing—an effort that Kerry is spearheading in his role as presidential envoy for climate change. Kerry has been under fire in recent weeks for owning stakes in an investment group that funds companies that are linked to forced labor and have been blacklisted for human rights abuses, as the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Reports issued during the past several weeks indicate that Kerry, who operates out of the State Department, is the principal opponent of increased sanctions on China and its use of Uyghur slave labor. During remarks Wednesday at the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, Kerry told reporters that the United States and China have made progress on reducing carbon emissions, which is fueling speculation that any action on Uyghur slave labor will take a backseat to these ongoing negotiations.
Kerry was reported to have engaged in a “forceful debate with other administration officials on the matter before his most recent China trip,” according to the Associated Press, a claim that jibes with information provided by congressional and foreign policy community sources to the Free Beacon. One veteran foreign policy hand told the Free Beacon that there “is a lot of chatter about” Kerry’s opposition to the legislation swirling “in the China policy circle.”
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Michael Sobolik, a fellow in Indo-Pacific studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, told the Free Beacon he sees evidence of an “ongoing turf war within the Biden administration over China policy—specifically, how will the president square his climate goals with his insistence that human rights is at the center of his foreign policy?”
China is forcing the Biden administration “to choose between those priorities,” Sobolik said. “If the bill remains stuck, it’s a safe bet that Biden’s rhetoric about human rights in China is just that—rhetoric.”
Renewed attention has been cast on the issue in the days since Democrats stripped language from the hotly contested House budget reconciliation bill that would have leveled restrictions on China’s surveillance and internment of Uyghurs, a move that generated outrage in the human rights community.
One senior GOP congressional aide tracking the matter said it is becoming clear that Kerry’s push for a climate deal is eclipsing the Biden administration’s human rights agenda, which has expressly included Uyghur rights issues.
“It’s not surprising that the Biden administration, especially Secretary Kerry, is actively pushing back against any efforts in Congress to stop Uyghur Muslim slave labor in China. Kerry will do whatever he can to get a climate deal with China, even allowing federal science funding for Uyghur Muslim slave labor and those involved in constructing the Uyghur forced labor camps,” said the source, who was not authorized to speak on record. “The Democrats should never again mention the word human rights.”
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was also reported to be siding with Kerry on the issue, but the White House National Security Council rejected this claim when contacted by the Free Beacon.
“This is false,” an NSC spokesman told the Free Beacon when asked if Sullivan was part of the faction opposing the slave labor legislation. “We share Congress’s concern about forced Labor in Xinjiang and in fact the Biden administration has taken concrete measures on our own, including but not limited to visa restrictions, financial sanctions, export controls, import restrictions, the release of a business advisory, and rallying the G7 to commit to take action to ensure all global supply chains are free from the use of forced labor, including from Xinjiang.”
Republican lawmakers say that Kerry’s lobbying on the issue is wholly inappropriate given Kerry’s holdings in an investment group that funds companies linked to Uyghur slave labor. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) wrote to President Joe Biden earlier this week to express their concerns about the matter.
“There isn’t a good explanation for why President Biden has not fired John Kerry, who appears to be profiting from slave labor,” Rubio told the Free Beacon. “But it does help explain why Kerry and others in the Biden administration continue to undermine my commonsense, bipartisan, and bicameral Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.”
Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.), another chief backer of efforts to penalize China, told the Free Beacon, “John Kerry wants all of us to have a moral backbone as weak as a soufflé. Let’s be clear what he’s asking for: He’s so desperate for a paper-thin Chi-Comm climate pledge he can parade around Paris that he wants us to deny a genocide. It’s pathetic.”
Congressional Democrats are also divided on efforts to penalize the CCP’s use of Uyghur slave labor. Republican foreign policy leaders in the House told the Free Beacon that Democratic leaders refuse to explain why they stripped language from the budget reconciliation bill that would have penalized Beijing’s use of slave labor.
“Democrats still haven’t explained why they’re taking steps to enable and protect the Chinese Communist Party’s use of Uighur slave labor in the reconciliation bill,” Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Free Beacon. “I sure hope it doesn’t have anything to do with John Kerry’s desperate attempts to reach a climate deal with China. Anyone who says they care about the worst human rights violation of our lifetime but supports this bill is a hypocrite.”
Rep. Greg Steube (R., Fla.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Democrats “cruelly decided to remove” measures aimed at ensuring U.S. taxpayer dollars do not fund entities engaged in using Uyghur slave labor. “Democrats decry racial injustice in America but actively support slavery in China,” Steube said.
Senator Cortez Masto has close relationship with nonprofit that says ‘young people need to know’ critical race theory
Nevada Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto praised a liberal nonprofit that has called to defund police and teach critical race theory in public schools.
On Nov. 3, Cortez Masto said she was “so glad” to speak at Battle Born Progress’s annual fundraising event, lauding the liberal group as “incredible advocates for our state.” The self-described “public relations firm of the progressive community in Nevada,” Battle Born Progress has taken a number of radical positions on hot-button issues, including the movements to defund police and teach critical race theory in K-12 classrooms.
In July 2020, Battle Born Progress Called to “save money by defunding” the state’s police presence in schools, adding that “police officers in schools help foster the school-to-prison pipeline.” Roughly one year later, executive director Annette Magnus argued during a Battle Born Progress virtual event that Nevada “should be teaching” critical race theory in public schools because “young people need to know this information.”
Cortez Masto’s close relationship with Battle Born Progress—less than one week after her fundraising appearance, the Democrat held a tele-townhall with the group—could become a political liability as she enters a difficult reelection battle in 2022. According to a 2020 Las Vegas Review-Journal poll, nearly two-thirds of Nevadans oppose cuts to police department funding. In June, meanwhile, a Reno-based school district ditched its plan to enact a “social justice curriculum” for elementary school students amid backlash from local parents.
Neither Cortez Masto nor Battle Born Progress returned requests for comment.
Battle Born Progress advocated critical race theory during an August virtual conversation with No Racism in Schools cofounders Akiko Cooks and Jshauntae Marshall. After Cooks noted she “absolutely” supports critical race theory but is not “yet” focused on including the framework in public school curricula, Magnus said she “like[s] the ‘yet’ part, because that’s exactly right.”
“I mean, eventually, yes, we should be teaching that,” Magnus said. “Young people need to know this information. I would love to have known that information.”
Cooks, whom Magnus said she is “very close” with, is also tied to the defund police movement. According to her LinkedIn, she works as an organizer for Mass Liberation Project NV, which aims to “abolish the criminal legal system as we know it.” The group in 2020 disseminated petitions to defund the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and has likened policing to “terrorism.”
In addition to Battle Born Progress’s call to teach critical race theory in public schools, the group has attacked Nevada parents who oppose the controversial curriculum. In August, the group tweeted a photo of a mother who spoke against critical race theory at her local school board meeting, calling the woman “another ‘Karen'” who holds “conspiracy-laden beliefs.”
Battle Born Progress has received tens of thousands of dollars in funding from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a George Soros-funded group that funnels millions of dollars to liberal causes but does not disclose its donors. According to the Sixteen Thirty Fund’s IRS filings, the group gave nearly $6,000 to Battle Born Progress in 2017 and an additional $90,000 to the Nevada nonprofit in 2018.
Cortez Masto has condemned so-called dark money groups like the Sixteen Thirty Fund. In a September press release, she stressed the need to “put power back in the hands of the public” by “getting dark money out of politics.”
Cortez Masto joined the Senate in 2017 after she defeated Republican challenger Joe Heck by less than 3 points. A slew of Republicans have entered the race to unseat her in 2022, including former state attorney general Adam Laxalt and Army veteran Sam Brown.
![Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin gestures during a [Loudoun Parents Matter Rally] campaign event in Leesburg, Virginia, on Nov. 1, 2021.](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2021/11/640/320/GLENN-YOUNGKIN-RALLY-IN-VIRGINIA-THUMBS-UP.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
