The Democrat-controlled House is set to pass a bill Wednesday that bans the Biden administration from funding crack pipe distribution through mental health and substance abuse programs.
The Democrat-sponsored bill, which reauthorizes several mental health programs that were set to expire this year, includes a measure that ensures the federal funds are not used to “purchase, procure, or distribute pipes or cylindrical objects intended to be used to smoke or inhale illegal scheduled substances.” This language appears to cover crack pipes and meth pipes—drug paraphernalia the Biden administration was poised to fund through its $30 million harm reduction program, the Washington Free Beaconreportedearlier this year.
The bill, which passed unanimously out of committee, specifically bars the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration—the same agency that oversees the White House’s controversial harm reduction program—from using funds allocated for substance abuse and mental health programs to fund crack pipe distribution. It is scheduled to get a vote on the House floor on Wednesday afternoon.
It is unclear why Democrats believe it is necessary to ban funding for the drug paraphernalia, given resident Joe Biden’s denial that his administration ever had plans to fund crack pipe distribution. The White House said the agency would not fund “smoking kits” that contain crack pipes, so the measure may suggest the president’s congressional allies doubt the administration’s claims. Following the Free Beacon report, Republicans introduced several bills to ensure federal funds do not go toward crack pipes but were unable to advance legislation.
The New York Times reported that the “uproar” over crack pipes “derailed” the Biden administration’s drug policy. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration later listed a notice at the top of its harm reduction grant webpage that states, “No federal funding is used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to purchase pipes in safer smoking kits.”
Harm reduction organizations across the country aim to make drug use safer for abusers, rather than rehabilitating those abusers. Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R., N.D.), a member of the committee that passed the bill, said the provision distances Congress from the Biden administration’s radical approach to drug policy.
“Stopping the Biden administration from using taxpayer dollars to buy crack pipes is a win for those of us working on commonsense criminal justice reform,” Armstrong told the Free Beacon. “Handing them out did nothing to make our communities safer or help people struggling with addiction and mental health.”
Syringe exchange programs are supported by a majority of state governments, but smoking kits are a less common approach to harm reduction. Crack pipe distribution efforts are prominent in deep-blue cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston, and Baltimore.
Rep. Frank Pallone (D., N.J.), who as the head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sponsored the bill, did not respond to a request for comment.
The Restoring Hope for Mental Health and Well-Being Act of 2022 will also reauthorize programs for mental disorder screenings, suicide prevention, and mental health awareness for children.
Spot fails to mention star witness’s work for radical group that wants to defund police, teach CRT
A new Chuck Schumer ad uses a “former Republican” to attack Nevada’s Republican U.S. Senate nominee Adam Laxalt. Unmentioned is the star witness’s work for a far-left group that supports Laxalt’s opponent and wants to defund police.
In the ad, Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC features testimony from “Patty,” a “business owner” and “former Republican” who slams Laxalt as “wrong for Nevada.” The ad does not reveal that “Patty” is former Nevada state senator Patricia Farley, who began caucusing with Democrats more than five years ago in 2016. Two years later, Farley joined Battle Born Progress, a liberal nonprofit that works closely with Laxalt’s opponent, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D.). The group under Farley has taken a number of radical liberal positions on hot-button issues—a far cry from Schumer’s portrayal of Farley as a disillusioned conservative entrepreneur.
In July 2020, for example, Battle Born Progress called to end the “school-to-prison pipeline” and “save money” by “defunding school police.” One year later, group executive director Annette Magnus said Nevada “should be teaching” critical race theory in its public schools because “young people need to know this information.” Battle Born Progress also opposes voter ID requirements and supports late-term abortion. Cortez Masto said in November that she was “so glad” to speak at the group’s annual fundraising event.
Schumer’s willingness to omit Farley’s status as a liberal activist—and his decision to criticize Laxalt using a “Republican” figure—suggests the Democratic leader is concerned by Cortez Masto’s reelection chances. Resident Joe Biden won Nevada by 3 points in 2020, but his political standing has since deteriorated in the Silver State as Democrats navigate record-high inflation, gas prices, and illegal immigrant encounters. Fifty-six percent of Nevada voters disapprove of Biden, compared with 32 percent who approve, according to Civiqs.
Senate Majority PAC spokeswoman Veronica Yoo told the Washington Free Beacon the ad identifies Farley “as a local business owner and former Republican because those are the facts.” Yoo did not answer questions about Farley’s work with Battle Born Progress.
Farley in 2014 ran for state Senate as a Republican, receiving 57 percent of the vote. Two years later, she announced she would change her party affiliation to nonpartisan and caucus with Democrats, a decision she said stemmed from her disappointment with “party politics.” Farley’s subsequent political contributions and employment history, however, tell a different story.
In May 2018, just months after declining to run for reelection, Farley made her first federal political contribution—to failed Democratic congressional candidate Pat Spearman. Three months later, Farley donated to Nevada Democratic senator Jacky Rosen.
In October 2018—one month before leaving the state Senate—Farley joined Battle Born Progress as the president of its state PAC, Nevada Values. The group quickly launched a six-figure ad attacking Republican state Senate leader Michael Roberson. Roughly one year later, in December 2019, Farley endorsed Pete Buttigieg for president, saying the former South Bend, Ind., mayor “is offering bold solutions to our nation’s biggest problems.” She went on to contribute $1,500 to Buttigieg’s PAC, and has not contributed to a Republican at the federal level.
Still, Farley told the Free Beacon she is a “current independent” who is “not interested in pushing partisan political agendas” and “only care[s] about giving Nevadans the facts they need to make an informed decision.” While Farley also claims in the ad that she “used to work with Adam Laxalt in the state government,” she later told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that she had “few personal interactions” with the Republican.
Farley still serves as president of Nevada Values as of February 2022, the PAC’s latest campaign finance disclosure states. Nevada Values is registered as a Battle Born Progress affiliate and uses the same mailing address, email address, and phone number as the liberal nonprofit.
Both Laxalt and Cortez Masto cruised to victory in Nevada’s June 14 primary elections, and the pair will now face off in November. Cortez Masto holds a strong financial advantage—she has $9 million on hand to Laxalt’s roughly $2.1 million.
Tom Donilon has promoted investments in China, opposed tariffs on regime
The Biden administration’s pick to advise the State Department on “strategic competition” with Beijing chairs an investment think tank that urged Americans to triple their investments in China.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday selected BlackRock Investment Institute chairman and Obama administration national security adviser Tom Donilon to co-chair the Foreign Affairs Policy Board amid the State Department’s pivot to China.
Donilon’s work at BlackRock could pose a conflict of interest for the board, which provides “advice, feedback, and perspectives” to senior State Department officials on foreign policy matters. Under his leadership, the Investment Institute has urged investors to dramatically increase their stakes in Chinese companies. What’s more, BlackRock views “strategic competition” with China as bad for the company’s bottom line.
“Strategic competition between the U.S. and China and resulting tensions have also contributed to uncertainty in the geopolitical and regulatory landscapes,” reads BlackRock’s most recent annual report. The firm listed U.S.-Chinese competition as a factor that could hurt its revenue and profit. BlackRock opened a mutual fund in China in September, making it the first American firm approved to sell financial products there.
BlackRock’s Chinese entanglements have raised concerns that the company is undermining the United States. The company has come under fire for investing in sanctioned Chinese companies, including surveillance giant Hikvision. Even progressive megadonor George Soros called BlackRock’s investments in China a “tragic mistake” that would damage U.S. national security interests.
Donilon has sided with China in the debate over tariffs imposed during the Trump administration. He chided government officials in 2019 about the tariffs and inaccurately warned that they would cause a global recession.
“Future generations of Americans will judge today’s leaders harshly for squandering this moment,” Donilon wrote in an article touted byChina Daily, a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party.
Tariffs “are hurting U.S. businesses, consumers, and farmers,” Donilon wrote. “They are alienating U.S. allies. And, analysts warn, they are increasing the risk of a global recession.”
The Foreign Affairs Policy Board plays a crucial role at the State Department. The department says the board is “necessary to supplement the advice and support the Secretary gets from the Department” on a broad range of international issues. Its meetings are closed to the public due to “discussions on sensitive, and often classified, topics and materials.”
Tariffs are likely to be an area of focus for the board, as will the administration’s position on China’s human rights record and increased military activity in the Pacific and South China Sea. Blinken has accused Beijing of waging genocide against Muslims in western China. Other officials, including climate envoy John Kerry, have refused to confront Chinese leaders on the topic for fear of hurting cooperative efforts on climate change.
Donilon, whom Blinken has called his “dear friend,” is the latest in a string of Biden allies to land an influential advisory post. The State Department picked Dominic Ng, the chairman of East West Bank, to represent the United States on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s Business Advisory Council. Ng, a major Biden donor, has criticized U.S. foreign policy toward China and served on organizations linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
Biden selected his longtime friend, Chris Dodd, to serve as special adviser for the Summit of the Americas. Dodd signed an ethics agreement because his lobbying firm represents some of the countries represented at the summit. Biden appointed another major donor, Joe Kiani, to serve on the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Neither the State Department nor BlackRock returned requests for comment.
Resident Joe Biden’s pick for a top spot at the U.S. Agency for International Development praised Saudi Arabia’s “exciting, productive, inspiring” social progress after her employer received a large grant from the kingdom—and did an about-face months later when the financial agreement was cut off after Riyadh’s assassination of activist Jamal Khashoggi.
Tamara Cofman Wittes, a longtime fellow at the Brookings Institution, is seeking Senate confirmation for her nomination as assistant administrator at USAID. During her time at the think tank in 2018, Wittes received as much as $499,999 from Saudi Arabia, according to its annual report. Brookings told the Washington Post the Saudi grant was intended to fund an analysis of the “Saudi think tank sector,” which is relatively small compared with other countries in the region. Saudi Arabia has 13 think tanks, according to an unrelated 2020 global study by the University of Pennsylvania, compared with 87 in Iran, 47 in Egypt, and 29 in Yemen. At the time of the grant, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud was trying to rebrand the country as modernizing and progressive.
Wittes visited Saudi Arabia in February of that year, posting a slideshow on the Brookings website that highlighted an alleged increase in women’s freedom and a growing tourism industry.
“The pace of change is really notable compared to my previous visits to the kingdom where there was a sense that the leadership of the country moved very slowly and cautiously. … It is clear that’s not the case now,” she toldWashington Jewish Week in a glowing article headlined “Saudi expert eyes changing kingdom.”
While the nation said it would loosen restrictions on women’s attire and driving in 2018, Saudi Arabia faced allegations of far-reaching war crimes in Yemen and crackdowns on dissidents and women’s rights. Wittes published a mild criticism of the arrest of a Saudi female driving activist in May 2018, calling it “deeply sad and ironic” and a contrast with the “swift pace of change” she witnessed in the country.
Her comments could add to concerns from Republicans that Wittes helped bolster the reputations of Gulf state countries that donated to Brookings. Senate Republicans already raised questions during a confirmation hearing last week about Wittes’s praise for Qatar, which donated at least $22 million to Brookings during her employment. The think tank is facing scrutiny after its president, Gen. John Allen, stepped down last week amid a federal investigation into allegations that he worked as an unregistered lobbyist for Doha.
After Brookings terminated the Saudi funding in response to Khashoggi’s assassination, Wittes gave a much bleaker assessment of the country’s leadership—arguing that Khashoggi’s murder “catalyzed concerns that had already been growing about the young crown prince and his policy choices on other issues as well,” and praising the U.S. Senate’s decision to cut off funding for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.
“President Trump’s [supportive] behavior toward the Saudis and his statements make it look more like he’s the one being used. Like he’s being Mohammed bin Salman’s [son of a bitch] if you will,” Wittes said on a Brookings podcast. “He doesn’t mind their gross violations of international norms, whether it’s murdering a journalist, hitting civilians with bombs, or other moves in regional policy.”
Wittes also called for the United States to take a tougher stance against Saudi Arabia, telling the New York Times after Biden’s election that the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia has “a lot of value” but “it simply cannot continue in the way it has for the last four years.”
Wittes did not respond to a request for comment.
Republicans raised concerns at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week about Wittes receiving funding from the Qatari government—a country with a record of human rights abuses and anti-Israel terror financing—and for posting criticism about the historic peace accords between Israel and Arab states.
“The president of Brookings has resigned over [his financial ties with Qatar], but you ran the Middle East Center at Brookings,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas). “Should the American taxpayers be concerned that President Biden wants to put in charge of distributing millions of dollars of taxpayer money someone who has spent years being funded by a foreign nation who is not our friend?”
The Free Beacon first reported last week that Wittes described Qatar’s capital city Doha as a “global gathering place for dialogue” and amplified Qatari leaders’ claims that they support human rights and oppose “extremists who exploit religion to incite violence,” while Brookings was raking in millions from the government.
She also posted articles on Twitter decrying the Abraham Accords, Israel’s normalization agreement with the United Arab Emirates, as misogynistic, a “new Naksa”—referring to the Palestinian word for “setback”—and as a “triumph for authoritarianism.”
Wittes denied that she opposed the accords, telling Cruz that she was “skeptical when the Emiratis made their announcement, which was breathtaking, in August 2020. I was skeptical that other Arab states would join them, and I was proven wrong.”
Martin Indyk, the former vice president of Brookings who helped raise the funds from Doha, denied that the Qataris exercised any influence over the think tank’s work.
“They never showed any interest in what we wrote, the content,” Indyk, who also served as former president Barack Obama’s Middle East envoy, toldPolitico in an article last week. “What they were interested in was the cachet.”
If confirmed, Wittes wouldn’t be the first Biden administration official who received funding from the Qataris. Robert Malley, the special envoy for Iran and Biden’s point man for the nuclear negotiations, ran the International Crisis Group when it took in $4 million from the Qatari government.
Hady Amr, the administration’s special envoy to the Palestinians, was the founding director of the Qatari-funded Brookings Doha Center. Senior administration adviser Erin Pelton was previously a registered lobbyist for Qatar.
Facebook – a platform that routinely censors posts critical of COVID-19 vaccines – has hired several alumni from Pfizer’s marketing and internal audit teams to lead similar efforts at the social media platform, The National Pulse can reveal.
The hires appear to present a conflict of interest for the social media platform, which has come under fire for censoring and banning users who’ve posted about the side effects or questioned the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Facebook’s Internal Audit Director, for example, was formerly a Senior Director at Pfizer. The employee – Tiffany Stokes – has held the influential position at Facebook since January 2020.
“Build and own strong relationships with critical business partners, provide project oversight of operational audits, manage internal audit plan and risk assessment,” she lists as part of her job description on her LinkedIn profile. “Leadership requires close collaboration with the Sales, Partnerships, Global Operations, International, HR, and Legal teams to assess and prioritize risks across an ever-changing high-tech business landscape,” she adds.
Prior to joining Facebook, Stokes worked at COVID-19 vaccine maker Pfizer for five years as the Senior Director of its finance and legal operations.
“Established and managed legal, budgeting, and forecasting processes to achieve the business’s financial goals as well as cost control commitments made to shareholders and the financial and investment community,” she summarized her position.
Prior to serving in this role, which she also notes required her to “adjust financial forecasts based on fluctuating costs, prioritization of legal matters, and impending legal issues,” she worked as the pharmaceutical giant’s Assistant Treasurer for the U.S. and Capital Markets, where she “directed” the company’s $8 billion investment portfolio.
The National Pulse can also reveal that a Facebook Vice President for Global Clients and Categories was formerly Pfizer’s Chief Marketing Officer for consumer healthcare in the U.S. The employee, Brian Groves, worked at Pfizer for a total of 14 years before joining Facebook as a Director of its Global Accounts.
Similarly, a former Director for Digital Marketing and Innovation at Pfizer joined Facebook as a Client Partner for its Global Marketing Solutions branch in 2018.
In addition to Facebook hiring Pfizer marketing team alumni, the platform also added Pfizer’s former Senior Public Affairs and Corporate Communications Project Manager as its own Corporate Communications Manager in 2019.
The unearthed personnel links between Pfizer and Facebook follow the social media platform deploying its third-party “fact-checkers” – who have deep ties to Democratic politics and the Chinese Communist Party – to brand COVID-19 studies and articles at odds with mainstream narrative as “disinformation.”
The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) said that there is evidence suggesting the police response to the mass shooting at a Uvalde school was an “abject failure.”
“However, we do know this: There’s compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre,” DPS Director Steven McCraw told a Texas Senate panel on Tuesday.
Elaborating, McCraw suggested that the officers could have stopped gunman Salvador Ramos “three minutes” after he entered the school because there “was a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject.
“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,” he claimed.
Eight minutes after Ramos entered, police reported that they had a crowbar that could be used to break open the classroom door, he said. Nineteen minutes after Ramos entered, officials brought their first ballistic shield into the building, he remarked.
It comes as documents obtained by local news outlets suggest that several police officers armed with rifles and at least one ballistic shield were in Robb Elementary School within minutes of the suspect entering. KVUE-TV also released an image showing several officers in the building 19 minutes later, although they did not enter the classroom Ramos was in for nearly another hour.
Wooden crosses are placed at a memorial dedicated to the victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on June 3, 2022. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
During his testimony, McCraw again noted that Ramos entered Robb Elementary through an unlocked door. A teacher previously told news outlets via her attorney as she went inside the building to report a car crash involving Ramos, and when she saw Ramos approaching, she kicked the door shut after propping it open with a rock.
“It was closed, but unlocked,” McCraw said, saying it allowed the gunman to “walk straight through it.”
McCraw added that regardless of whether the door was locked, the windows to the side could have been shot, which could have allowed Ramos to enter the school. But the classroom that Ramos went to could not have been locked from the inside, McCraw said, further impugning previous accounts that he was barricaded inside the room.
Since the May 24 shooting, which left 19 students and two teachers dead, there have been questions about the role the school police chief, Pete Arredondo, played in the response.
“It has been reported that he didn’t have a radio with him. That’s true. He did not,” McCraw said of Arredondo on Tuesday.
Arredondo later told news outlets that he didn’t consider himself the individual in charge and assumed someone else had taken control of the response.
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of students’ rights in our Maine school choice case Carson v. Makin, which we brought together with the Institute for Justice.
Maine passed a law that banned families from sending their children to religious schools. Today’s Supreme Court decision held that this exclusion is unconstitutional. It affirms that states cannot discriminate in student-aid programs against parents who want to send their children to religious schools:
“The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools—so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion.”
In response to this important ruling, Kelly Shackelford, President, CEO, and Chief Counsel for First Liberty Institute said:
“We are thrilled that the Court affirmed once again that religious discrimination will not be tolerated in this country. Parents in Maine, and all over the country, can now choose the best education for their kids without fearing retribution from the government. This is a great day for religious liberty in America.”
Thank you for your support and prayers in this legal victory. First Liberty and the Institute for Justice are excited about this major victory as both parents’ rights and all American’s religious freedom were upheld at the highest court.
We know that we could not have won at the Supreme Court without you. But our work to defend our constitutional right to live according to our faith is far from over.
Together, we will continue to fight for every American’s right to freely live out their faith.
I bonds that offer inflation protection are currently paying nearly 10 percent annual rate
Inflation-protected bonds issued by the Treasury Department have exploded in popularity in recent months as Americans seek safe investments after being battered by the stock and bond markets.
I bonds, inflation-linked savings bonds, currently offer an annual interest rate of 9.62 percent. Investors can purchase these bonds at the current rate through October 2022 by creating a TreasuryDirect account. The rate is valid for six months after the purchase.
Due to high inflation, I bonds have emerged as one of the hottest investment assets of the year. Although these bonds have been around since 1998, interest in them has exploded over the past couple of months, according to Joseph Hogue, an investment analyst and creator of the YouTube channel Let’s Talk Money.
This is because no safe bond investment, especially savings bonds, has ever offered such a high-interest rate, Hogue told The Epoch Times.
Google search trends and the popularity of YouTube videos discussing I bonds, he added, have been good indicators of their rising popularity.
The Treasury has issued about 10 times more I bonds this year compared to 2021. The rates for I bonds are adjusted twice a year on May 1 and Nov. 1. Interest is accrued monthly and compounded semiannually. If inflation goes higher, so will the yield.
“I thought they were a no brainer, but people didn’t seem to be as excited as they are today,” he told The Epoch Times. “I was kind of a lone voice in the wilderness.”
There is no incentive for intermediaries to sell I bonds, so they are not frequently advertised.
“Financial advisors don’t want to sell them because they don’t make any money. There’s no commission on them,” Lindauer explained, adding that neither banks nor the Treasury Department advertise them.
So, I-bonds have been poorly understood throughout the years. Recently, thanks to social media, online forums, and press attention, people have begun to learn about them, he said.
One disadvantage of I bonds is that investors can only purchase a maximum of $10,000 a year. And this is because they are primarily intended for small savers and investors.
According to Lindauer, many investors ignore I bonds due to this constraint as they have little impact in a big portfolio.
However, there are a lot of ways that people can purchase more than $10,000 a year, Lindauer said, adding that people can buy for their family members, trusts, companies, and as a gift. People can also buy up to a total of $5,000 of paper I bonds using their tax refund.
Large investors prefer Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS), which also include an element of inflation protection. Investors face no constraints when purchasing TIPS.
Although some people believe that TIPS are better than I bonds, Lindauer asserts that TIPS might cause short-term financial loss because “if you sell prior to maturity, they could be up or down in terms of market value.”
In addition, the interest rate on I bonds cannot go below zero. This indicates that I bonds are protected against deflation. TIPS, on the other hand, will have their principal balance fall in times of deflation, making them less protected, according to Lindauer.
The Treasury sets a fixed rate for I bonds plus an inflation-adjusted rate based on the change in the Consumer Price Index over the previous six months. The next inflation adjustment will be announced on Nov. 1.
An I bond has a 30-year maturity, so investors can earn interest for 30 years unless it’s cashed. If redeemed prior to five years, the final three months of interest will be lost. After five years of ownership, there is no penalty for early redemption. However, the federal tax on the interest must be paid in the same year as the redemption.
Even with the penalty, an I bond currently provides “a great return,” Hogue says. In today’s inflationary environment, “investors are going to need that protection for at least a year.”
Due to the shocks caused by skyrocketing inflation and rising interest rates, investors are looking for anything that provides a positive return as they have lost money in both the stock and bond markets this year. For example, Vanguard Short-Term Bond ETF (BSV) lost more than 5 percent year to date, Hogue says. Even worse, stocks have declined by more than 20 percent, entering a bear market.
“Here, you’re getting almost 10 percent. It’s a safe investment.”
During the State of the Union address to Congress this year, resident Joe Biden delivered an astoundingly Orwellian endorsement of socialism, clothed as its anti-matter counterpart.
“I’m a capitalist, but capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism,” the president declared. “It’s exploitation, and it drives up prices. When corporations don’t have to compete, their profits go up, your prices go up, and small businesses and family farmers and ranchers go under.”
Besides dubiously blaming today’s 40-year-high inflation on corporate greed (greed that, presumably, was inexplicably dormant during decades of inflation that was a fraction of today’s), Biden’s remarks shamelessly suggest that his administration’s heavy imposition of new and revived regulations fosters competition when the real mission is to level unprecedented burdens and governmental control upon businesses of all sizes.
“I’m a capitalist” belongs alongside “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Promising to reduce average global temperatures by a degree or two is the most fashionable excuse in America today for the state battering companies, even though Russia and China have no intention of joining in the climate crusade at the expense of their expansionist objectives, and India and other developing nations aren’t going to abandon the ongoing industrialization their people yearn for in exchange for being congratulated by international bodies for going green.
Socialists who aren’t hiding their true identity propose basically a quick and merciful death for the private sector, like now-ousted British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn arguing that wasteful “fragmentation” warrants re-nationalizing privatized railroads. Or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders proposing a 95 percent tax on companies that are more successful than he likes. But while Biden suggests he’s enabling enhanced competition, his Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, Gary Gensler, finds new forms of slow torture for this country’s employers. Gensler was heavily involved in writing one of the most onerous pieces of regulatory legislation ever—2002’s Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which costs Fortune 500 firms millions of dollars each annually on average, and has been a powerful disincentive to firms setting themselves up as publicly traded or retaining that status.
The SEC’s most prominent policy under Gensler is requiring issuers of stocks and bonds to assess and report the risks climate change poses to their investors. As Heritage Foundation senior fellow David Burton pointed out in a letter to Gensler, “Requiring all public companies to develop climate modeling expertise, the ability to make macroeconomic projections based on these models and then make firm-specific economic assessments based on these climate and economic models will be expensive, imposing costs that will amount to billions of dollars on issuers. These expenses would harm investors by reducing shareholder returns.”
Burton also points to the irony that discouraging companies from being or going public gives fat cats more wealth and the average Joe less because it “would deny to ordinary (unaccredited) investors the opportunity to invest in dynamic, high-growth, profitable companies until most of the money has already been made by affluent accredited investors” and “would further impede entrepreneurial access to public capital markets.”
According to former SEC chief economist James Overdahl, the “massive scope and prescriptive particularity” of the regulations, “centering around the inherent complexity in collecting required data and completing the calculations and analysis necessary to make the proposed disclosures” make it “difficult to recall any other instance in which the SEC has mandated disclosures where there are so many significant uncertainties, data limitations and practical difficulties in developing the required information.”
Obviously, lawsuits would become legion, as publicly traded firms are endlessly accused of failing to report climate impact to the full satisfaction of environmentalists. But companies not to be found on the stock exchange, who think themselves safe in their private status, will actually also be subject to heavy new costs, because public companies’ private partners and contractors will be required by the SEC to report their emissions, outside firms having to be turned to for certification.
In a media conference call on Thursday, U.S. Chamber Executive VP Tom Quaadman pointed out that according to the SEC itself, the climate disclosure rule in its current form “would be at least three times the implementation costs of Sarbanes-Oxley, which was the most expensive disclosure regime that we’ve gone through over the last generation,” requiring “almost 16 to 18 years to finalize all of the different Sarbanes-Oxley rules.”
Quaadman added that after “many, many meetings” with companies that are U.S. Chamber members, they told the Chamber of “implementation costs in the millions or tens of millions of dollars” for each firm—many times the SEC’s estimates.
Testifying to the Senate Banking Committee in September, Gensler claimed of climate risk information that “investors are really demanding it.” More accurately, trendy asset managers, most prominently BlackRock, the largest such firm in the world with $10 trillion under its control, demand it, the better to inflict its wishes on companies in which it invests. Blackrock boasts that it “voted against 55 directors/director-related items on climate-related issues. This is a tool available to us in virtually every market we invest in on behalf of our clients … 83% of the time our votes against directors in the FTSE [Financial Times] 350 over remuneration concerns resulted in revisions to pay policies within 12 months.”
Pointless or politicized regulations both devastate private sector productivity and kill jobs. A Conference Board survey just found that “more than 60 percent of CEOs globally say they expect a recession in their primary region of operations before the end of 2023 or earlier … Fifteen percent of CEOs say their region is already in recession.”
With a looming economic downturn—on the heels of the devastation of COVID—is this a time to be helping multi-trillion-dollar money managers bully the nation’s providers of private-sector jobs, one objective being to charm the left so they might forget about things like BlackRock’s massive military investments?
And all in the guise of a “capitalist” eager to boost competition—like a call girl attending a masquerade party costumed as a mother superior.
Australians are still suffering from the trauma of government health mandates.
In the wake of Australia’s “zero COVID” policy, which boasts 95 percent of all citizens over 16 vaccinated and some of the world’s strictest lockdowns, Scott Morrison’s government was swept out of power in May. Yet broken businesses and people’s wrecked health struggle to recover.
Some fear they may never recover.
Ask Liz Mann, who was vaccinated and says she hasn’t been the same since. Mann, 50, who works in agriculture and runs a farm in northern Victoria, wasn’t an anti-vaxxer — she had her yellow fever, Hep-A, and other shots — but decided to pass on the corona vaccine. She had COVID already, she reckons, having suffered prolonged flu-like symptoms in January 2020. So she’d have immunity. With her health history of chronic fatigue, a UK study found, she had a 27 percent chance of a “severe reaction” to Pfizer’s vaccine. On those accounts, she ought to’ve been exempt.
None of that mattered.
(Courtesy of Liz Mann)
Per Victoria’s mandate, to work, she’d have to roll up her sleeve. Delaying the inevitable, she tried working remotely from home for two weeks and took another two weeks off, but the mandates loomed. So, she caved, visited the drive-through clinic in Murchison, got the jab, and was told to park and wait 15 minutes in case of aftereffects before driving home.
Her reaction was instantaneous.
“I wound down the window feeling like I was going to black out, I honked the horn, turned around and looked at the doctor out my rear vision mirror,” she told The Epoch Times. “And then I just dropped the seat because I was about to black out.” Medical staff at the clinic checked her blood pressure and it was “160 over 100,” she said, adding that she’s “normally low blood pressure.” “I had trouble standing up at that point,” she recalled, and told how chest pains followed. “Within about three hours, it felt like I’d been kicked in the chest by a horse.”
Doctors at the clinic watched on, arms crossed over their chests, and made remarks as she lay outside. “‘Well, wonder what will happen when she has her second vaccine,’ and I said, ‘I’m not having it,’” Liz recalled. “And they had a bit of a laugh and said, ‘We’ll see about that.’ I was pretty disgusted actually.”
We contacted Murchison Medical Clinic for comment, but they were unable to respond before publishing.
(Illustrations – Boyloso/Shutterstock)
Mann’s condition showed little improvement in the days and weeks following. She remained lethargic, was bedridden for weeks on end, and was unable to perform daily tasks maintaining the farm. When a tree fell onto a fence and she had to use a chainsaw, the physical strain spurred chest pains, which extended to her face, and she had to call an ambulance. Within two weeks of the jab, other symptoms, including rashes, spontaneous bruising, and a black eye, appeared. On day 41, one side of her face drooped, and she experienced “stroke-like symptoms.”
Despite all this, Mann couldn’t get a medical exemption for her impending second jab — unlike what one would expect with side effects from other drugs like penicillin. Meanwhile, her job demanded it. She refused. They terminated her contract, but the letter they sent made no mention of vaccine stipulations.
The point was moot anyway; she couldn’t work. Her health bottomed out.
Mann did eventually get a medical exemption after eight weeks, but couldn’t work at the level she once did. Any physical activity, such as tending to her livestock, brought on pain in her chest and face, with some days being lost entirely to poor health.
Adding insult to injury, when Mann was granted a public records request, she saw her doctor had written that she had “psychological issues,” placing the blame on “anxiety.” She also found a discrepancy: Her doctors had put in a claim for two doses (was it a double?) while her immunization history showed none.
(Courtesy of Liz Mann)(Courtesy of Liz Mann)Liz Mann’s medical record request yielded doctors’ notes that she had “psychological issues.” (Courtesy of Liz Mann)
Yet Mann is lucky in some respects. With her situation, having multiple jobs and the ability to work remotely or outside Victoria, where restrictions are less strict, she can earn a living. Not everyone’s so lucky.
Nevertheless, if the election proves anything, it’s that while Australians who’ve suffered due to health mandates struggle to reclaim their lost health and livelihoods, their collective faith in the medical industry and government may be beyond repair.
“I don’t trust them anymore. I never want to see another GP in my whole life,” said Mann, adding that, even while awaiting her exemption, all the doctors wanted to do “was to put the next vaccine in [her].” It’s not exactly lucid what lies behind the curtain of absurdities. She posits it’s “very much about control.”
There were medical professionals who were forthcoming in varying degrees. Doctors admitted Mann’s adverse reactions were due to the vaccine, yet referrals to specialists were few and excuses many: “Chest pain is nothing to worry about.” A nurse did look her in the eye and prod her to speak up — even though many in society aren’t open to it.
She did just that.
“I’m not afraid to speak out. I have lost friends over this,” said Mann. “People don’t want to know about this, and it annoys me when you hear from mainstream media about stories of long COVID, but ‘vaccine side effects’ is a dirty [term] that nobody wants to hear.”
In hindsight, faced with that ultimatum again — the jab or no job — would Mann choose differently? “I would have said, ‘I don’t want the job,’ and walked away at that point and had my health,” she said. “I lost the job anyway, so it would have been the same as what happened. But I would have had my health.”
Having two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine has been linked with negative protection against symptomatic infection with the disease, scientists say, while a previous infection without vaccination offers around 50 percent immunity, according to a study analyzing the Omicron wave in Qatar.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on June 15, examined the Omicron wave in Qatar that occurred from around December 2021 to February 2022, comparing vaccination rates and immunity among more than 100,000 Omicron infected and non-infected individuals.
The authors of the study found that those who had a prior infection but no vaccination had a 46.1 and 50 percent immunity against the two subvariants of the Omicron variant, even at an interval of more than 300 days since the previous infection.
However, individuals who received two doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine but had no previous infection, were found with negative immunity against both BA.1 and BA.2 Omicron subvariants, indicating an increased risk of contracting COVID-19 than an average person.
Over six months after getting two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, immunity against any Omicron infection dropped to -3.4 percent.
But for two doses of the Moderna vaccine, immunity against any Omicron infection dropped to -10.3 percent after more than six months since the last injection.
Though the authors reported that three doses of the Pfizer vaccine increased immunity to over 50 percent, this was measured just over 40 days after the third vaccination, which is a very short interval. In comparison, natural immunity persisted at around 50 percent when measured over 300 days after the previous infection, while immunity levels fell to negative figures 270 days after the second dose of vaccine.
These figures indicate a risk of waning immunity for the third vaccine dose as time progresses.
The findings are supported by another recent study from Israel that also found natural immunity waned significantly more slowly compared to artificial, or vaccinated, immunity.
The study found that both natural and artificial immunity waned over time.
Individuals that were previously infected but not vaccinated had half the risks of reinfection as compared to those that were vaccinated with two doses but not infected.
“Natural immunity wins again,” Dr. Martin Adel Makary, a public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Twitter, referring to the Israeli study.
“Among persons who had been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2, protection against reinfection decreased as the time increased,” the authors concluded, “however, this protection was higher” than protection conferred in the same time interval through two doses of the vaccine.
Corporate executives tell workers stick to business, leave politics at home
In an indication that corporate progressivism may be reaching its high-water mark, CEOs for the first time are pushing back against activist employees, in some cases going so far as to fire them rather than steer their companies into the mire of “woke” politics.
Last week, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell became the latest executive to say he has had enough. He invited employees who felt “triggered” by controversial ideas to accept a severance package and leave the company.
The cryptocurrency technology company’s new mission statement says that it “will never ask that our employees adopt any specific political ideology as a requirement for our workplace … We recognize that hurt feelings are inevitable in a global organization that is optimizing for team outcomes above individual sentiment. The ideal Krakenite is thick-skinned and well-intentioned.”
Powell told “Fox & Friends” that of the company’s 3,000 employees, about 30 have chosen to accept the four-month severance pay and leave, citing their need to express political or social beliefs in the workplace. Comments from the remaining 99 percent of Kraken employees regarding the policy to keep politics out of the workplace were “overwhelmingly positive,” he said.
“I think everyone is ready to get back to work and stop being distracted.”
“Suddenly, nobody has any interest in this anymore, and companies are responding accordingly and starting to drop ‘woke,’” said Scott Shepard, director at the National Center for Public Policy Research. “I don’t think this is the end of woke, I don’t even think it’s the beginning of the end, but to borrow from Mr. Churchill, I do think it might be the end of the beginning.”
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space exploration company, joined the chorus on June 16. After several employees publicized a letter denouncing Musk’s campaign to acquire Twitter and steer the social media platform away from censorship, SpaceX responded by firing them.
The employees publicly criticized Musk’s efforts as “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment” for SpaceX. After firing those responsible, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell emailed employees that the efforts against Musk’s Twitter acquisition “made employees feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and/or angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views. We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism.”
The Athletic, a sports news website owned by The New York Times, told its staff this week to stick to sports and drop the political activism.
“We don’t want to stop people from having a voice and expressing themselves,” Paul Fichtenbaum, the publication’s chief content officer, said in a directive. “We just need to keep it from tipping over into the political space.”
Some employees disagreed. A staffer quickly responded in protest. “What about Black Lives Matter? Is that a social cause? Who will write about athlete protests? What about trans athletes in sports?”
Political activism can take a toll on companies, both internally and externally. Walt Disney Co. has proven to be a cautionary tale for corporate leaders. In March, CEO Bob Chapek bowed to activist employees and announced that the family entertainment company would fight to support sex education for children in elementary school, while company executives revealed the intention to add LGBT content to kids’ movies and shows.
That action sparked a backlash from conservative employees and led to parents canceling subscriptions and theme park visits.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responded to Disney’s harsh criticism of a state law banning sex-ed in kindergarten through third grade by revoking the tax-advantaged status of the company’s theme park in Orlando. Meanwhile, shareholders watched with alarm as Disney stock fell from $130 per share in March to about $94 currently, a 28 percent drop that’s well in excess of the 18 percent decline in the S&P 500 over the same period.
Citibank’s pro-abortion and anti-gun advocacy also drew the attention of state lawmakers. Texas passed legislation in June 2021 that barred banks that discriminate against fossil fuel companies or gun makers from underwriting state bonds. And Texas state Rep. Briscoe Cain threatened Citibank with similar treatment in March over its policy of paying travel expenses for employees who go out of state to circumvent Texas’s anti-abortion laws. Texas is the second-largest issuer of municipal bonds in the United States. Other states such as West Virginia have passed similar laws.
In response to employee protests over controversial programs, such as comedian Dave Chappelle’s stand-up comedy show “The Closer,” Netflix told employees in May that it would no longer tolerate efforts to censor content that staff find objectionable.
“We support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with; we program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices,” the company stated. “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”
Netflix took that action after it lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of this year and projected that it would lose 2 million more in the second quarter.
“It turns out that alienating the majority of your customer base is terrible for business,” Shepard said. “You can sort of get away with that when the market is reaching new highs and interest rates are nothing, so you can borrow and make up for the lack of profits.”
But in today’s environment, with markets tumbling, interest rates rising, and a potential recession looming, “suddenly the luxury of alienating your customer base doesn’t exist anymore.”
In addition to efforts at SpaceX to refocus employees toward company business, Musk is also working to revamp his target acquisition, Twitter, into a more inclusive platform. Last week, he communicated to employees that the platform must be open to all political points of view and that conversations that represent legal free speech, however offensive, should be permitted on Twitter. He’s expected, if the sale of the company goes through, to fire many of the progressive pro-censorship executives.
Many organizations, even the most progressive ones, are finding that taking up divisive racial and gender agendas is causing employees to turn on each other. Politico reported in November 2020 that “following a botched diversity meeting, a highly critical employee survey, and the resignations of two top diversity and inclusion officials, the 600,000-member National Audubon Society is confronting allegations that it maintains a culture of retaliation, fear, and antagonism toward women and people of color, according to interviews with 13 current and former staff members.”
Left-wing internet publication The Intercept lamented that the election of resident Joe Biden was supposed to mark the start of a golden era for the progressive moment. Instead, “Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations … It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function.”
The Washington Post fired reporter Felicia Sonmez in early June for incessant public attacks on a fellow staff writer and on the paper itself, accusing them of racism and sexism. In response to Sonmez’s critical tweets, Executive Editor Sally Buzbee initially issued an advisory to all staff that “we do not tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues either face to face or online.”
When that failed to rein in Sonmez, the Post fired her for “insubordination, maligning your coworkers online and violating the Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”
Companies are learning that they are often hurting their own brands and losing customers by taking up highly controversial political positions. And like Chapek, many CEOs are finding themselves unprepared for the harsh world of social-justice politics.
The executives of Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Microsoft, Levi’s, and Major League Baseball chose to protest voter ID laws in Georgia, with MLB even removing its All-Star game from Atlanta. Delta CEO Ed Bastian first supported the law, then turned against it in response to left-wing threats to boycott the airline.
But few companies followed Disney into the fight over child sex education, and so far, few companies have waded into the abortion debate, despite indications that the Supreme Court could decide to overturn Roe v. Wade, sending decisions on abortion law back to state legislatures.
Whether or not Marie Antoinette said rioting French peasants upset about the shortage of bread to feed their families should “eat cake” instead is not important. The idea that she did has been passed down, generation to generation, as the perfect illustration of how the isolated elites in a society can become hopelessly out of touch.
This is not just a problem for the rich but also for the powerful, who use their positions to grant themselves perks that alleviate the need for them to worry about the kinds of things that keep the rest of us at night.
Like whether we’re going to have enough gas in the car to get to work in the morning.
Since coming into office, the Biden Administration has been at war with the American energy sector. Following the President’s lead, they believe climate change is an existential threat to the continued well-being of mankind that can only be thwarted if Americans are forced to go green.
That’s what’s really behind the sudden, continuing rise in the price of gasoline. It’s not, as resident Joe Biden continues to assert, a transitory thing caused by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It is the result of calculated policy decisions intended to roll back the energy independence that became a reality by the end of the Trump Administration.
There’s nothing wrong with green energy per se. Indeed, the United States would realize considerable benefit from the ability to rely on fuel coming from renewable sources like wind and solar and to be more efficient in the generation and use of power from fossil fuels so that less of it is wasted.
All that can be achieved by market forces a lot faster and cheaper than by government mandates. The Biden Administration has chosen – regardless of the consequences – to force this upon us all, meaning that some people are now, in a period of inflation unseen for at least 40 years, to face the very real choice between putting gas in the car and food on the table.
Too many Democrats regard that as a good thing. They don’t blame the government for the problem. They blame the energy sector, which it criticizes for earning record profits because the price at the pump is up thanks to the shrinkage Biden and his cohorts have forced on the industry. The cancelation of new pipelines and oil and gas leases on federal lands are two among a handful of reasons domestic energy producers cannot respond to the increase in demand by increasing the supply to keep prices stable.
The energy markets are behaving as the President wants, given his belief, he can prioritize his strategy to increase the use of energy made from renewables and the need to bring down the price of gasoline.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre seemed badly ignorant of economic reality when she insisted during a recent press briefing that there was nothing inherently problematic with pursuing both objectives at the same time.
“What we’re trying to deal with right now is how do we lower costs for American families,” she said. “One of the things that we are seeing currently right now with oil refiners is they are using this moment,” she continued, “to actually make a profit.”
She can get away with shifting blame for a while but what does she suggest as an alternative? Does she think the energy sector should sell gasoline and other fuels at a loss? That’s a recipe for economic catastrophe, as would be the kind of nationalization of the sector that exists in so many other countries.
The problem is that Biden and Jean-Pierre and so many others are out of touch with what’s going on. The people aren’t rioting for gas yet, but it may just be a matter of time.
Consider the comments of Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who recently described a drive she made from her home state to Washington in an electric vehicle.
“After waiting for a long time to have enough chips in this country to finally get my electric vehicle,” the state’s senior elected Democrat said during a June 7 meeting of the Senate Finance Committee. “I got it and drove it from Michigan to here last weekend and went by every gas station and it didn’t matter how high it was.”
Stabenow doesn’t have to choose between putting food on her table and putting gas in her car. Rather than being grateful and understanding she’s insulated from reality because she enjoys elected privilege, she claims she’s mystified by the expressions of concern coming from the American people because they are routinely paying more than $100 for a full tank of gas. Wonderful.
An elected official, whose annual salary is just shy of $200,000, is driving a car that cost more than most Americans make in a year that the taxpayers probably pay for her to use, thinks high gas prices aren’t a problem because she doesn’t have to pay them anymore. That’s the kind of leadership that causes politicians to lose their heads.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Peter Roff can be reached at RoffColumns@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.
Republican lawmakers said that the Biden administration is attempting to essentially ban AR-15-style rifles by banning commercial production of AR-15 ammunition at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Missouri—a move the White House has recently denied.
The factory, which is owned by the Department of Defense, allows private firms to operate the facility to produce 5.56mm ammunition for most AR-15 firearms.
“Severely limiting the commercially available 5.56 ammunition, which is most popularly used in modern sporting rifles (MSRs), is effectively a politically sanctioned semi-automatic rifle ban. This blatantly infringes on the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution by limiting law-abiding gun owners’ ability to legally purchase or use lawful semi-automatic rifles,” lawmakers wrote in their letter on Monday to resident Joe Biden.
The GOP representatives, led by Reps. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) and Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), added that the Missouri plant “currently produces a significant portion of this type of 5.56mm ammunition for the commercial market” and allows the operator to keep the factory at a high state of readiness. That factory, they continued, ensures that the U.S. “Army is ready to ramp up production in the event of a national emergency.”
“This decision will result in the immediate termination of up to 500 highly skilled employees and undermine the facility’s ability to hire and retain the skilled workforce needed to carry out the contract with the Department of Defense,” they wrote in the letter (pdf). “Additionally, the decision will exacerbate an already serious shortage of ammunition in the commercial market currently facing law-abiding gun owners.”
Hartzler said that the reported decision to ban the factory’s production of 5.56mm rounds is merely an attempt to quash Americans’ Second Amendment rights.
“This is a backdoor attempt by President Biden to bypass Congress and ban legal and highly popular commercial ammunition used by law-abiding Americans across the country,” Hartzler said. “The Biden administration has made their priorities clear: dismantle the Second Amendment, compromise military readiness, and push inflation to new heights. It’s time for the Biden administration to stop its attack on our Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”
The Epoch Times has contacted the White House for comment.
On Monday, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates disputed a report on a firearms blog alleging Winchester Ammunition, which operates the Missouri plant, was told by the government that it can no longer sell M855 and SS109 ammunition “produced in excess of the military’s needs on the civilian market.”
In reference to the report, Bates wrote Monday on Twitter that the “story isn’t true,” adding that it wouldn’t allow the plant to close down.
The Republican letter comes as several Republican and Democrat senators are working to pass a gun-control bill that would expand funding to states that use red-flag laws, end straw purchases, and other measures in the wake of several high-profile mass shootings in New York, Texas, and Oklahoma.
Columnist Naomi Wolf, author of “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human,” asserts that after two years of pandemic policies, people in free societies are behaving more like those in authoritarian societies.
Wolf maintains that America is now less free, and becoming almost unrecognizable.
“A handful of bad actors” including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Big Tech, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) used the pandemic to “exploit the crisis in such a way as to reengineer our free democratic open societies, especially in the West, especially in the United States, into a post-free society, a post-humane society,” said Wolf during a recent interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
The Biden administration in April extended the 2-year-old coronavirus public health emergency for another 90 days.
Wolf said, based on history, the ongoing lockdowns and extension of the public health emergency indicate society is in the last phase of a tyrannical takeover, because with emergency powers, laws protecting liberty can be suspended.
According to Wolf, there are 10 steps every tyrannical government has followed. We are now at step 10, said Wolf. Some of the other steps include demonizing whistleblowers and critics, calling dissent “treason,” “espionage,” or “subversion,” and controlling the media narrative.
During the last two years of lockdowns and mandates, Big Tech and the elites have profited while the average Americans have seen the American Dream slowly “closing” on them, she said.
“And so often, when a democracy is dying, or a regime is turning the screws on freedoms to create an established new form of tyranny, it happens intentionally in a very incremental way,” said Wolf. “And you really see this from 1930 to 1933 in Germany.”
She said humanity is witnessing the formation of a two-tier society of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, in which people who would never discriminate against others based on categories of race and sex are now discriminating against the unvaccinated.
“Suddenly, they’re happily embracing a discrimination society in which some people are cast as clean and valuable members of society and other people are ostracized and marginalized and ‘othered’ and described as sort of dirty and causing infection to others,” said Wolf.
She argues that big tech companies had an active role in creating these perceptions and in “shaping legislation and certainly in presenting the drama of COVID and lockdowns to us, and then the vaccine rollout, in such a way as to change human behavior and to change human society,” said Wolf.
Wolf cited the emails between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing Facebook’s role in getting the right public health “messages out” during the lockdowns.
Mark Zuckerberg (L) and Dr. Anthony Fauci. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images; Greg Nash/Getty Images)
People had no choice but to rely on tech platforms while they were locked down, and Big Tech used that to manipulate the public, said Wolf.
“What I do trace in the book is how there was a vast profit that tech companies made by suppressing human assembly, by helping to message that it was unsafe or unlawful to gather in person,” she said. “And when you understand that big tech companies are competing with human beings gathering in human spaces, you understand why there was a vested interest in suppressing human assembly.”
Wolf thinks big tech companies will not stop at just harvesting data on the computer, but that they want to dominate peoples’ bodily autonomy with vaccine passports.
“What these companies want more than anything is to leave the parameters of your computer and to colonize other currently non-colonized spaces, notably the human body,” said Wolf.
This would give these companies and governments the ability to switch off peoples’ access to commerce, travel, and other goods and services if they did not comply with a particular mandate, Wolf added.
Some forms of digital tracking and surveilling are already here in the United States, she said.
“You’re now expected to swipe these QR codes just to see the menu, or just to get in. And the QR code uploads your data to a central database,” she said, adding that she’s seen the software “that maps the relationships of everyone sitting at that table, and then builds databases and networks of relationships.”
This illustration photo shows a person looking at the app for the New York State Excelsior Pass, which provides digital proof of a Covid-19 vaccination, in Los Angeles on April 6, 2021 (Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images)
Wolf said that on a scale of one to 10 on the Chinese social credit system, the United States is currently at a three.
“There’s a change that’s happened in American cities in the last two years,” she said.
Because most people around the world, particularly in U.S. cities, use digital apps to travel, do banking, and shop, a digital social credit system similar to China’s is imminent, she said.
Our data is being harvested and used by the “global technocratic elite” to control human behavior, said Wolf.
“We’ve assumed that the worst it can be is data are harvested from us with everything that we choose to do using our free will as human beings,” said Wolf.
“But what I’ve seen is that digital technology has its own logic, and it isn’t restricted by what human beings want to do. So once digital platforms and their oligarchical masters can figure out how to change people’s behavior to suit technology, there’s nothing, moral or ethical, that will keep them from changing people’s behavior to suit their technology, and to suit their business plans,” she added.
The pandemic has revealed how this type of digital control is playing out, because humans, before the prevalence of digital technology, did not choose to “socially distance” to fight pandemics, said Wolf.
“The dream of our digital overlords is for technology to tell humans what to do, and that’s exactly where we’re at,” said Wolf.
While some people might label her a conspiracy theorist, her opinions are based on a long career as a journalist, political consultant, and now tech CEO, Wolf said. Furthermore, she has witnessed firsthand the powerful elites making historical decisions under the radar, she said.
Wolf was well acquainted with this group of powerful people until recently when she was ejected from their circles for writing oppositional pieces on lockdowns.
“But it’s really true that the global technocratic elite have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow Germans or Americans or Russians or Chinese, and they now are able to align above the level of nation-states,” she said.
The panel ‘Leaders for Europe’s Digital Decade’ at the 2022 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on May 25, 2022. The yearly meeting takes place from May 22 to 26 with heads of governments and economic leaders. (Eric Lalmand/AFP via Getty Images)
For example, one of the WEF’s goals is to make nation-level decision-making less and less important, and the World Health Organization’s goal is to make public health decisions on a global scale, bypassing countries’ own authorities via the pandemic treaty, said Wolf.
“These technocratic elites really do believe that they can order the world better than you and I and that they have the right to,” she said. “That’s really scary.”
Little by little, humanity’s tolerance for cruelty and authoritarianism has grown.
“The war wasn’t just on us as a political entity, the war was on American culture, and is on American culture,” she said. “And they’ve succeeded largely, unless we wake up, because we were a kind, decent, inclusive culture that respected other people’s boundaries and freedoms. … And now a CCP-style cruelty is something that we tolerate.”
What people believe is largely determined by the news they consume, said Wolf, and many people only watch news outlets that give a skewed picture of pandemic treatments and policies, largely funded by wealthy people like Bill Gates.
“I do trace in ‘The Bodies of Others’ how millions of dollars flowed and are flowing from entities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the BBC and the Guardian and NPR and other formerly very credible, objective news outlets.”
Because most people get slanted news coverage, the country is more divided and many people on the left refuse to consider any other narrative or look at primary source documents, because they believe only government sources are giving them “scientific” information, said Wolf.
This skewed messaging has been able to convince people that the mandates and lockdowns are more American and important than liberty or critical thinking.
Wolf said the most brilliant aspect of the pandemic messaging was that it was framed altruistically.
“You know, ‘You’ve got to exclude those people for the good of the community,’ or ‘You’ve got to mask yourself and your child to save your child,’” said Wolf. “This really brilliantly upended American culture because it cast freedom as selfish.”
Now that those in power have effectively conditioned people to be fearful and submissive, they can keep reinstituting emergency powers, she argued.
“That’s what emergency law means,” she said. “They can do whatever they want, basically. It’s a weaponization of boards of health, it’s a weaponization of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the [Department of Health and Human Services].”
Wolf said although the situation is dire, people can do something to push back against this tyranny by being informed about what is really going on in the country, assembling in groups, and getting involved politically on the local level.
As it stands now, “I will say that each side is being fed narratives and stereotypes about the other that would persuade each side that the other is absolutely insane and dangerous, dangerously insane,” said Wolf.
“I get that conservatives think, ‘liberals don’t know what a woman is.’ That is not actually literally true, and liberals think ‘conservatives all want to torch our democratic processes, storm the Capitol, and are misogynist, racist thugs who are trigger happy,” said Wolf.
The last two years have conditioned people to fear each other and so the conversations that would have normally occurred when people gathered are not happening and keeping the country divided, said Wolf. She said she will gladly talk to people on the right.
Communist Party cadres hang a placard on the neck of a Chinese man during the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The words on the placard state the man’s name and accuse him of being a member of the “black class.” (Public Domain)
“People I love think I’m doing something wrong in even talking to conservatives and libertarians. That’s very dangerous. The left, especially, has decided that you’re morally complicit if you have a conversation across the aisle,” Wolf said. “That is censorship, that is cancel culture, that’s un-American, that is an importation from Communism.”
She urges people to remember what makes America unique and a beacon to other nations: to remember we are the great experiment where neighbors talked to each other, listened, and didn’t “rat” each other out if they did not agree with each other, Wolf said.
100% waste of time spent on the one percenters [US Patriot]
The Navy is training its members to create a “safe space” by using proper gender pronouns in a new instructional video modeled after a children’s show.
“Hi! My name is Jony, and I use he/him pronouns,” Naval Undersea Warfare Center engineer Jony Rozon, who sports a rainbow-colored t-shirt, states in the video’s opening.
The official training video is meant to emphasize “the importance of using correct pronouns as well as polite etiquette when you may not be sure of someone’s pronouns,” according to the Navy, which late last month published the video online. The Defense Visual Information Distribution Service touts the video as an “official U.S. Navy video” posted by Air Force staff sergeant John Vannucci.
The video is the latest bid by the military to foster a more sensitive environment for its members and staff. The Army mandates similar gender identity training and trains officers on when to offer subordinates gender-transition surgery, the Washington Free Beaconreported in March. These programs are part of a larger push by the Biden administration to make the military more welcoming to transgender individuals.
The nearly four-minute Navy video emphasizes how members can create “a safe space” for their colleagues by using “inclusive language” that signals they are “allies” who “accept everybody.” Service members must take these steps to ensure they do not “misgender someone.” The Navy also warns staff against pressuring an individual to disclose his or her gender pronouns, saying that colleagues may still be in “the process of discovery” and not yet ready to provide this information.
“A pronoun is how we identify ourselves apart from our name, and it’s also how people refer to us in conversations,” notes engineer Conchy Vasquez, who hosts the video along with Rozon.
“Using the right pronouns is a really simple way to affirm someone’s identity. It is a signal of acceptance and respect,” adds Rozon.
The hosts go on to discuss how Navy members can create “a safe space for everybody” through the use of proper gender pronouns.
“Instead of saying something like ‘Hey guys,’ you can say, ‘Hey everyone,’ or ‘Hey team,'” Rozon says.
“Another way that we could show that we’re allies and that we accept everybody is to maybe include our pronouns in our emails or, like we just did, introduce ourselves using our pronouns,” Vasquez says.
Navy members are warned against pressuring colleagues to provide their gender pronouns.
“Some people may be going through the process of discovery, and they are not ready yet to tell you what their pronouns are, and that’s OK,” Vasquez says. If a colleague does not want to disclose gender pronouns, Navy members should “continue to use general-neutral language.”
The video also addresses what should be done when a person “misgender[s] someone.”
“I think the first thing to recognize is that it’s not the end of the world. You correct yourself and move on, or you accept the correction and move on,” Vasquez says. “The most important thing I can tell you is do not put the burden of making you feel good about your mistake on the person that you just misgendered.”
Service members are instructed to practice memorizing a person’s gender pronouns by going “through a progression of three good things about the person using their pronouns.”
“Let’s say the person chooses to use ‘they,'” Vasquez says. “Then you will in your mind go, ‘They have a nice shirt. They have a nice smile. They are really smart.’ So that kinda sticks in your brain.”
Cleveland’s 2019 police officer of the year is under investigation for a series of anti-Semitic social media posts that include praise for Adolf Hitler and the Hamas terrorist organization.
Ismail Quran is under investigation by the Cleveland police internal affairs unit for posting “inappropriate social media content,” a department spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon on Monday.
Quran has posted several anti-Semitic messages on social media, including a “salute to Hitler the great” and messages threatening violence against Jewish people, according to tweets provided by Canary Mission, a watchdog group that tracks anti-Semitic activity online.
The controversy surrounding Quran comes amid a nationwide spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes that Jewish community groups have deemed a pressing emergency. The presence of anti-Semitic individuals on the nation’s police forces is stoking concerns that these crimes are going unaddressed and pushed to the back-burner as more high-profile race-related crimes dominate the headlines.
The Cleveland police department hired Quran in 2018, several years after most of the public tweets were issued. Quran was presented with a belated 2019 officer of the year award in November 2021, more than a year after Canary Mission first exposed many of Quran’s anti-Semitic posts. At the award ceremony, the department said “Officer Ismail Quran has truly embodied the community policing philosophy for the Cleveland Division of Police.” The Cleveland police department is facing allegations it tried to sweep the controversy under the rug and ignore Quran’s bigotry. The officer is “assigned to administrative duties” while the investigation is underway.
“We initially released Ismail Quran’s profile in January 2019. His large number of anti-Semitic posts were severe and all posted after Quran had completed his first Police Officer Physical Agility Exam,” Canary Mission said in a statement. “We were already concerned that the Cleveland Police Department employed an officer with a record of anti-Semitic hate speech. However, we are shocked and dismayed that the Cleveland Police Department honored Quran later that same year.”
Canary Mission described Quran as a “dangerous anti-Semite” who should not be allowed to conduct police work.
When asked for comment on Quran’s posts, a Cleveland police spokesman informed the Free Beacon that the officer is under investigation, though it is unclear what the repercussions could be.
“The City of Cleveland, Division of Police was made aware of a matter involving a Cleveland Police Officer and inappropriate social media content,” the department said. “The matter has been referred to the Cleveland Division of Police Internal Affairs Unit and the City of Cleveland’s Ethics Officer for thorough investigation.”
The department “insists that officers provide the highest levels of professionalism and respect to all citizens. Discrimination of any kind will not be tolerated,” the spokesman said, adding that the “officer was hired by the Division of Police in 2018 and is currently assigned to administrative duties.”
Quran’s tweets promote violence against Jewish people, praise Hitler, and traffic in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
In October 2015, he stated, “Lol bum ass Jew tried to intimidate me. … Don’t try that shit with me.”
“The Jewish lobby,” he wrote in August 2014, runs “the USA.”
Quran claimed in an August 2014 tweet that the Hamas terror group, which routinely kills Jewish civilians in terror attacks, is merely “defending their land.”
In a July 2014 tweet, Quran wrote, “Fuck that Jew” in response to a message wishing an Israeli basketball player good luck. Quran’s tweet included a picture captioned, “LET ME SALUTE TO HITLER THE GREAT. He said ‘I would have killed all the Jews of the world, but I kept some to show the world why I killed them.’”
Other tweets threaten violence, such as one from 2012 where Quran wrote: “I’ll beat the hell out of you like I do Nadiah the Jew lol.”
Quran also has declared that “Jews run the world”—an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory—and that “ISIS = Israeli Secret Intelligence Unit.”
Most of these posts were active as of June 2022, though many were deleted when reports about Quran’s rhetoric began to emerge. Canary Mission has documented all of them on its website.
More than 50,000 residents left San Francisco last year, the highest population decrease of any major U.S. city.
Between July 2020 and July 2021, 54,813 people exited the Bay Area—a 6.3 percent decline resulting in San Francisco’s smallest population in a decade. High housing costs, rising crime, and rampant public vagrancy likely fueled the exodus, as residents have soured on the Golden City’s liberal leadership.
Voters in a June recall election ousted radical prosecutor Chesa Boudin for his soft-on-crime approach. Two-thirds of Asian Americans opposed Boudin, spurred on by his failure to quell attacks against seniors in their communities.
Driven by worries over public safety, a majority of Bay Area voters disapprove of Democratic mayor London Breed, according to a June San Francisco Examinerpoll. Breed slashed the city’s police budget by $120 million in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s death but reversed course 18 months later, making an emergency request to beef up law enforcement funding as crime soared.
The homicide rate in San Francisco has shot up 37 percent in the past two years. A retail theft wave garnered national attention last year, following California’s move to lessen penalties for shoplifting. Seventy percent of San Franciscans think their quality of life has declined, and 88 percent believe homelessness has worsened in recent years.
Rising housing costs are another major factor being cited for the decline. Some blame the zoning policies of the liberal city for inflating the cost of living, exacerbating homelessness.
Other liberal-run, large cities grappling with crime and homelessness have seen substantial declines in population as well. The 15 fastest-growing U.S. cities sit in states run by Republican governors. And some San Francisco-based companies are fleeing California for red states.
Congressional Democrats wrote to Google’s parent company on Friday to pressure the search engine to suppress results that offer alternatives to abortion.
Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.), and 19 other lawmakers wrote urging Google to “limit the appearance” or add “user friendly disclaimers” of pro-life clinics in search results. The Democrats said they want to “ensure women seeking health care services are directed to the basic information they request.”
Animosity toward pro-life pregnancy centers and offices has increased since a draft opinion of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision was leaked in May, showing a plan to overturn the original 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. Dozens of crisis pregnancy centers have been vandalized since the leak. Many of these attacks have not been federally investigated, as the Justice Department official responsible has refused to intervene.
The Democrats’ letter cites a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that has advocated for big tech censorship in the United Kingdom. Lobbyists who have worked for CCDH have also lobbied for Microsoft and green energy companies. The study logged Google search results for “abortion clinic near me” and “abortion pill” in states with abortion trigger laws.
Researchers recorded search results that qualify as “anti-abortion fake clinics.” Planned Parenthood defines “fake clinics” as “clinics or mobile vans that look like real health centers, but they have a shady, harmful agenda: to scare, shame, or pressure you out of getting an abortion … their goal is to spread misinformation and propaganda.”
The research found that 11 percent of search results and 37 percent of Google Maps results led to so-called fake clinics which, according to Planned Parenthood, may offer “free pregnancy tests, abortion counseling, pre-abortion screenings, abortion education, post-abortion care, or after-abortion help.”
The lawmakers said CCDH’s findings “undermines the integrity of Google’s search results,” adding, “if Google must continue showing these misleading results in search results and Google Maps, the results should, at the very least, be appropriately labeled.”
The Biden State Department this month named its first ever special representative for racial equity and justice. The newly minted envoy, Desirée Cormier Smith, once slammed white diplomats for being overly “protective” of the United States and lacking the “empathy” of their minority counterparts.
Smith, a self-described “Black activist,” made the comments in an October 2020 interview. At the time, Smith served as senior policy adviser for Open Society Foundations, the think tank funded by Democratic billionaire donor George Soros. The State Department on Friday announced Smith’s appointment to the post, which was created to “confront systemic racism and injustice around the world.” The State Department described Smith as a “racial justice expert with a deep and steadfast commitment to equity and justice for all.”
Smith may have to temper her racially charged views in her new role. The State Department prohibits statements that show “hostility toward an individual because of his or her race.” Department guidelines also prohibit discriminatory harassment in the form of “racial epithets, ‘jokes,’ offensive or derogatory comments, or other verbal or physical conduct based on an individual’s race/color.”
In an interview with the Black Diplomats podcast, Smith discussed her earlier work as a foreign service officer. She said her white colleagues displayed an “ownership” mentality when awarding visas to foreign applicants. White diplomats, Smith said, “were so protective of the United States, and they didn’t want anybody who could sully the image of the United States because it’s this perfect shining city on a hill.”
“We also come with a certain humility that I would say that a lot of white foreign service officers lack,” Smith said of her fellow minority diplomats. “We approached it with so much more empathy.”
Smith has spoken openly about her activist role at Foggy Bottom, where she has served as senior adviser in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.
“Black activists like myself are still working through the United Nations to defend human rights and freedoms for all,” Smith wrote in a column for the Grio in March. She said she worked “relentlessly” to elect a critical race theory scholar, Justin Hansford, to the United Nations Permanent Forum of People of African Descent.
Smith is not the only Biden State Department official to come under fire for controversial statements.
Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, the department’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, complained in a 2020 podcast interview about the “white male-dominated” national security field. She said that as a minority woman, she was “probably better prepared than my male colleagues, certainly my European-American colleagues.”
Jalina Porter, who until recently served as deputy spokeswoman at Foggy Bottom, has said the ”largest threat to U.S. national security are U.S. cops.” Porter left the State Department earlier this month.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) said the White House and media outlets lied about Florida’s health policies when they claimed he “reversed course” by permitting health care providers to order COVID-19 vaccines for children under the age of five.
“Not surprised the White House would lie, definitely not surprised that legacy media would amplify the lie because that’s what they do,” DeSantis said during a Monday news conference.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Friday said that after “repeated failures” to order vaccines, DeSantis “reversed course” and decided to allow health care providers to order the shots for children between six months old and five. But Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo said the state has always allowed providers to place orders for vaccines. DeSantis said Thursday that Florida discourages COVID vaccination for young children and would not place orders for the vaccine to be distributed to them, but the state would not block providers from acquiring it themselves.
“Doctors can get it. Hospitals can get it. But there’s not going to be any state programs that are going to be trying to get COVID jabs to infants and toddlers and newborns,” DeSantis said. “That’s not where we’re going to be utilizing our resources.”
Florida is the only state in the country that did not place advance orders for the pediatric vaccines, a position media outlets including Forbes, CBS News, and McClatchy DC claimed DeSantis reversed after Jean-Pierre’s comments on Friday. DeSantis’s approach to infant vaccination mirrors that of Scandinavian countries including Sweden, which decided not to recommend vaccinating children under 11 due to the “low risk for serious disease for kids,” and Denmark and Norway, which do not offer vaccines to children under five.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s vaccines for children five and younger on Friday, but only 18 percent of parents are eager for their child under five to receive the vaccine, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed. Less than a third of children ages 5-11 have received the vaccine since it became available to them in November.
Berkeley, Calif., has removed more than 75 tons of garbage, human waste, and drug paraphernalia from homeless camps since September, according to the city’s latest budget proposal.
The 2023-2024 budget describes the work of Berkeley’s Homeless Response Team, which it says “performed at least weekly garbage collection and debris removal from encampments across the City, removing over 151,000 pounds of trash between September 2021 and March 2022.”
The scale of Berkeley’s encampment cleanup efforts is indicative of the homelessness crisis facing many California cities, which worsened amid state and local government-imposed lockdowns during the pandemic. Sixty-four percent of Californians say homelessness is a “big problem” in their part of the state, and 63 percent say the number of homeless people in their community has grown.
With an estimated 535 homeless people living in tents or on the street in Berkeley, the city’s cleanup efforts amount to nearly 500 pounds of garbage removed per homeless person per year. A spokesman for the city confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that human waste and drug paraphernalia factored into the weight of the trash removed from camps.
Berkeley resident Michael Shellenberger, who this month placed third in California’s nonpartisan gubernatorial primary as an independent candidate, faults progressive policies for California’s homelessness crisis. He said the tons of waste Berkeley collects from camps serve as proof of the city’s rashness in allowing the homeless to shelter outside.
“The data showing that Berkeley’s homeless population is producing 500 pounds of garbage per person is yet more evidence that it is unsafe and unsanitary to allow homeless people to sleep outside,” Shellenberger told the Free Beacon. “The evidence comes just a few weeks after the release of data showing that homeless people in Los Angeles are three times more likely to die than homeless people in New York because most of the homeless in L.A. are unsheltered. How many more must die before California governor Gavin Newsom and the Democratic mayors of California’s cities act?”
Berkeley’s Homeless Response Team launched in September after a year and a half in which the city did not clean up encampments because of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, a period in which the “encampment situation … got much worse,” according to the city spokesman. The city established the team with the objective of reducing “the impact of encampments on the city … while avoiding citation and arrest.”
The Homeless Response Team “performed 16 closures of large and dangerous encampments,” according to the budget, “resolving conditions that included raw sewage and human waste, loose and scattered syringes and drug paraphernalia, rodents and other vector hazards, rotting food, and obstruction of sidewalks and vehicular lanes of traffic.”
The city boasted in the report that it issued zero criminal citations and made “only one arrest” in the process of clearing dangerous encampments of hazardous waste.
Richie Greenberg, one of the leaders of this month’s successful campaign to recall far-left San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, criticized Berkeley for tolerating open-air encampments, saying the money spent on clearing garbage and human waste should go toward “a permanent solution for the homeless problem.”
As part of its efforts to clean up the streets, Berkeley offered shelter to “well over” 200 homeless people, the budget said. Sixty-one percent of those offered housing by the city refused. When asked by the Free Beacon about the low acceptance rate, Berkeley’s spokesman said the city is “striving … to eliminate barriers to utilizing our shelters, to make them welcoming and comfortable, and to ensure that they create meaningful pathways to housing.”
Berkeley is famous for its far-left policies—it was the first in the country to establish “sanctuary city” laws. Since the pandemic, however, the liberal city has bowed to increasing pressure from residents to take more aggressive action against homelessness. The city has moved to evict homeless RV-dwellers and began clearing out some larger encampments. The spokesman for Berkeley pointed to the city’s roughly 5 percent decline in homelessness since 2019, telling the Free Beacon that Berkeley’s efforts to fight homelessness are “paying off, even though we have so much more to do.”
Shellenberger was less confident that Democrats are committed to removing dangerous homeless camps from California’s cities.
“How much more garbage must accumulate before we require people to sleep indoors?” Shellenberger said. “Newsom and Democratic mayors appear intent to use the homeless population to destroy California’s once-beautiful cities because they are in the grip of an anti-civilization ideology.”
Ohio Democrat takes page from GOP firebrand Lauren Boebert in attempt to distance himself from party
What do you do when running for office as a Democrat in resident Joe Biden’s America? Talk like a Republican—at least if you’re one Ohio Senate candidate.
From praising former president Donald Trump on trade to sounding the alarm about the southern border, Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) is trying his hardest to avoid being lumped in with the rest of the Democratic Party. Earlier this month, Ryan proposed a House resolution that would designate fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction.” That resolution appears to be lifted from a bill proposed the day before by one of the most right-wing members of the House, Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert (Colo.), who also called fentanyl “a weapon of mass destruction that is destroying our nation.”
Ryan, who will face against Republican nominee J.D. Vance in November, is considered a long shot by political analysts. Trump won Ohio by more than 8 points in 2020 and the seat Ryan is running for is occupied by a Republican, the retiring Sen. Rob Portman.
His strategy highlights the difficulty for Democratic candidates trying to pitch themselves as moderates in the current political environment. Biden is the most unpopular president at this point in his term in almost a century, according to the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, a fact largely driven by skyrocketing inflation. For Ryan, executing this strategy could prove difficult: FiveThirtyEight also found that Ryan votes in line with Biden’s position 100 percent of the time.
“Any Democrat running this November is gonna have a tough time running with Biden as president,” said Democratic political consultant Dick Harpootlian, a longtime friend of Biden, when asked about Ryan’s conservative messaging. “Biden is beset by huge issues and problems that are not playing well in America right now. I mean, we saw it in 1994 after [former president Bill] Clinton did well in 1992.”
At campaign stops around Ohio, Ryan seeks to distance himself from the Democratic Party by offering a moderate and pragmatic message. In May, Ryan was conspicuously absent from a Cincinnati event where Biden spoke about the necessity of passing a domestic manufacturing bill. The White House later said Biden and Ryan were “in close touch.”
“We’ve got to get away from the Democrat-Republican thing, all these stupid fights,” Ryan said at a campaign event last month. “And we can only do that by being Americans first. China and Russia, they want us to keep fighting with each other. And to me, it’s playing right into their hands.”
Ryan’s rebrand attempt began in April when he released an ad claiming he has spent his entire political life “sounding the alarm on China” and voting “against bad trade deals.” That ad backfired after left-wing Democrats accused him of xenophobia against Chinese Americans.
Following the Biden administration’s announcement that it would end Title 42 restrictions on the southern border—a federal power first used by Trump that gives law enforcement the ability to rapidly deport migrants—Ryan called the decision “wrong and reckless,” breaking with top Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.).
“Prematurely ending this policy without a path forward does nothing to keep Americans safe, support our Border Patrol agents, protect asylum-seekers, or bring about the comprehensive fix our immigration system needs,” Ryan said at the time. He has also called a “strong border” a “basic American value,” a stark contrast to his rhetoric in 2018 when he said Trump’s “zero-tolerance immigration policy” showed he didn’t have an “ounce of humanity.”
His change of heart could be a product of problems on the minds of Ohio voters. As one of the states hardest hit by the opioid crisis, many voters in Ohio blame the Biden administration’s lax border policies for the influx of fentanyl there. Ryan’s rhetoric on the issues, however, hasn’t been followed by action in the House. Although Ryan introduced a fentanyl resolution nearly identical to Boebert’s Republican proposal, for example, he has yet to cosponsor her bill—a move that would increase its likelihood of passing.
Ryan’s office did not respond to a request for comment asking whether he plans on cosponsoring the Republican bill.
Shortly after Vance clinched the Ohio Republican Senate nomination in May, Ryan offered praise for Trump—who endorsed Vance in the Republican primary.
“I agreed with Trump on trade,” Ryan says in an ad that debuted earlier this month. “I voted against outsourcing every single time. We’ve gotta get tough on China. Let’s make things in Ohio again.”
Ryan sent a letter on June 10 to Biden demanding the White House not lift any tariffs against China, alleging that such a move would “strip the U.S. of leverage in negotiations” and “inundate American companies with a slew of imports they may not be able to withstand.” He implored Biden to “prioritize American workers and American manufacturing companies.” The letter came after reports that Biden was considering lifting many of the tariffs in an effort to lower inflation.
As the midterms approach, Ryan seems to have pivoted on trade issues as well. During the Trump administration, Ryan called the China tariffs just a way for Trump to “look tough.” In an interview with the Washington Post, he called Trump’s actions “abominable and must be revised immediately.”
“[Trump’s tariffs are] designed to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. economy, for minimal gain,” Ryan tweeted in July 2018.
Vance has labeled Ryan an opportunist and dishonest. Ryan has responded by saying he is happy to talk about his past comments on a variety of issues, including trade.
“My record is very, very clear,” Ryan said last week. “We can squabble about some of the details of it, how things are implemented and all the Washington stuff in the details we have to deal with. But my record is very, very clear on this.”
Update, June 21, 11:15 a.m.: This piece was updated with additional information on Ryan’s voting record.
ANOTHER FOOLS ERRAND BROUGHT TO YOU BY BIDEN’S CURIOUS OBSESSION WITH UKRAINE.
Resident Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan revealed that the U.S. federal government is using taxpayer cash to maintain seized Russian yachts, according to a report from Insider. The accidental admission – caught on a “hot mic” – came during an event at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) on June 16th.
Sullivan – who many suspect is compromised by the Chinese Communist Party – was speaking with Richard Fontaine, chief executive officer of the CNAS, about the White House’s effort to seize Russian assets including yachts amidst the ongoing war in Ukraine when he made the remarks.
In a livestream video of the event uploaded to YouTube, which has since been deleted, the pair’s personal conversation before the publicized discussion portion of the CNAS was included.
I previously wrote how the popular seizure of yachts was ignoring legal and practical problems, including the cost of maintenance. Those costs are now mounting. https://t.co/PDuuE9QIaK Some of these yachts may have to be returned with tax-funded repairs. https://t.co/GgNipe6aKs
Speaking moments before the beginning of an event at the Center for a New American Security on Thursday, Sullivan mentioned the ongoing Operation KleptoCapture, a Justice Department-led effort targeting Russian “elites, proxies, and oligarchs” with sanctions and civil and criminal asset seizures.
Sullivan appeared to reference the recent seizure of the Amadea, a 348-foot yacht owned by sanctioned Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov. The U.S. government moved to seize the yacht in early May and it sailed for the U.S. in early June, after Fiji’s supreme court authorized its seizure.
“I just wasn’t aware how many super yachts there were in the world,” Fontaine tells Sullivan on the recording. “I mean the size of these things, the value of these things is unbelievable.”
Sullivan responds, noting that “we have to pay for upkeep” in reference to the U.S. federal government:
“I know. It’s so ridiculous, but you know what the craziest thing is? When we seize one, we have to pay for upkeep.”
“The federal government pays for upkeep because under the kind of forfeiture rubric, so like some people are basically being paid to maintain Russian superyachts on behalf of the United States government,” he continues.
A spokesperson for the think tank called the takedown an “honest mistake” and it was later reposted without Sullivan’s private comments.
It is believed that the U.S. Marshals Service, which takes control of seized property, is running the maintenance operations with a network of private contractors.
A White House official made a false claim on June 20 about COVID-19 vaccines while encouraging parents to get their young children vaccinated.
Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, said that “there have not been any serious side effects of these vaccines.”
Contrary to Jha’s claim, severe allergic reactions, blood clotting, heart inflammation, and paralysis are among the serious side effects linked to the three COVID-19 vaccines that are available in the United States.
“There is a well-documented risk of myocarditis from the COVID vaccine, especially in young men and adolescent boys, and an elevated risk of clotting in young women with the Moderna vaccine,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“It’s not right for government scientific advisers to downplay documented risks of the vaccine because it ultimately undermines confidence in public health.”
White House officials didn’t return a request for comment.
Jha, who recently took a post with the Biden administration and is on a break from being dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, was on a media tour on June 20 promoting COVID-19 vaccination for children younger than 5.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for young children last week, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that virtually every child who’s now eligible get one of the vaccines.
Jha said the steps happened because the data on the vaccines were “quite compellingly clear” and that the vaccines were both safe and effective, even though major questions have arisen about their safety and efficacy.
“It’s really reassuring to know that for young kids, these vaccines are exceedingly safe,” Jha said.
Children in Moderna’s trial were more likely to suffer a severe adverse event after vaccination than after getting a placebo, while more vaccinated volunteers in Pfizer’s trial experienced severe COVID-19 cases when compared to the placebo group.
“The phrase ‘safe and effective’ has become meaningless and can no longer be trusted. It has been hijacked by commercial interests. A more accurate phrase would be ‘buyer beware,’” Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate who started a group called Woody Matters, told The Epoch Times in a recent email after reviewing the data from the trials.
Jha also said the vaccines “are doing an extraordinary job at keeping kids out of the hospital.” While that appears to have been the case earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic, it may not be now, according to data presented during meetings with the government’s vaccine advisory panels last week.
For example, effectiveness against hospitalization was just 22 percent after 60 days among 12- to 15-year-olds who received Pfizer’s vaccine, according to data from the CDC’s VISION network.
Other studies indicate higher effectiveness, but it’s unclear whether the vaccines are doing an “extraordinary job.” There’s also no clinical evidence that the vaccines will shield against severe COVID-19 cases in young children.
Jha was speaking on CBS and ABC.
All of the experts who advise the government voted in support of the vaccines. But some said parents should know key details, including how the safety and efficacy data were based on small numbers of children.
“I think it’s the right decision today to make these vaccines available for this age group, but I also think it’s important that people understand it’s a small number of children who have received these vaccines, and the safety is not as well established as it is in adolescents and adults,” Dr. Cody Meissner, who advises the FDA on vaccines, said during one of the meetings. “So it’s important to continue to follow the safety profile of these vaccines. I don’t think they should be required for any specific situation.”
On the other hand, others said they think parents should get their children vaccinated, regardless of the child’s health.
“My personal hope [is] that every child in the U.S. seeks and gets vaccinated in the near future,” said Dr. Michael Nelson, another adviser.
In the United States, the right to worship freely is often called America’s first freedom. It is a necessary component of U.S. foreign policy and our commitment to creating a more peaceful world.
History has shown that governments and societies that champion religious freedom are safer, more prosperous, and secure. Our commitment to protect this fundamental human right is both a moral necessity and a national security imperative.
On June 2, the U.S. Department of State released the 2021 International Religious Freedom Report. The more than 2,000-page report is a comprehensive, fact-based account of nearly 200 countries and territories around the world that is made publicly available for use by all guardians of religious freedom, including governments, religious communities, and activists.
For more than two decades, the International Religious Freedom Report has been an essential tool for the United States to advance and defend the universal right to worship freely.
Under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, the State Department is required to submit an annual report to Congress detailing the status of religious freedom in countries, government policies violating religious beliefs and practices, and U.S. policies that promote religious freedom.
As former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo previously said of the report, “Its very existence is evidence of our strong resolve to defend human dignity.”
First, discriminatory laws and policies are used by foreign governments to abuse their own people. For example, excessive prison sentences and home raids target people of faith in Russia, the Taliban and ISIS-K threaten and attack religious minorities in Afghanistan, and the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other religious and ethnic minorities.
Second, the report found that the rise of intolerance and hatred in societies fuels violence and conflict. According to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, record-high levels of antisemitic incidents took place in Germany and the United Kingdom in 2020. In a separate report, the Commission stated that 82 percent of Jews in Sweden, 85 percent in Poland, 86 percent in Belgium, and 95 percent in France said that antisemitism is a “very big” problem.
Lastly, the partnership and collaboration among members of civil society, governments, and multilateral partners have been important to making progress in advancing and defending religious freedom.
Using the findings of the report, the president is also required to designate any nation that has “engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom,” as a “Country of Particular Concern.” Nations that are severe violators of religious freedom but don’t meet all of the CPC criteria are designated as “Special Watch List Countries.”
On Nov. 15, 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken designated Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan as Countries of Particular Concern.
The Special Watch List designations included Algeria, Comoros, Cuba, and Nicaragua. As I previously wrote, the administration removed Nigeria, but in the wake of the ongoing violence, it should be redesignated as one of the world’s most serious violators of religious freedom.
The Biden administration’s updates to these designations, which have yet to be released, will be watched closely by religious liberty advocates and perpetrators of persecution alike.
Tragically, as evidenced by the latest International Religious Freedom Report, religious oppression is a daily reality for millions of people of faith around the world.
The United States plays a consequential role in exposing these atrocities so that violators of religious freedom can be held accountable. America will not sit back as people are targeted, punished, and persecuted for their faith.
They are not just desperate. Remember from, their standpoint, all the issues that really matter doesn’t matter what Biden is doing. They are desperate to guarantee the right to have a tax paid abortion on the last day of the birth. They’re desperate to impose radical values in second and 3rd grade. They are desperate to keep the border open. I mean, this is a very issue oriented rather than personality oriented movement. And they look at the Republican’ potential victory and it scares them. Because the Republicans are going to stand for less government. Less inflation. Controlling the border. Locking up criminals, a tragic story we just heard a few minutes ago. I think on the left, there is a sense that this could be the moment they really do start getting defeated as a force in America.
NEWT:
Politics is a tough business. People are allowed to do anything they can to win. Within the law. And, if you figure out that you can help nominate somebody that’s easier to beat, that’s, you know, that’s your right. But it’s very dangerous. Because, in fact, in a lot of these cases, they are going to nominate people who they really deeply dislike but who are going to win. And they are going to govern based on their values not based on money from the democratic party. So, I have a hunch that whether it’s Dr. Oz winning in Pennsylvania or J.D. Vance winning in Ohio, there are a whole number of places people who are really populist and really against socialist big government are going to come out on top this fall. And the left sitting there thinking what happened? How can could this have happened?
NEWT:
Well, I think they are in a different position. Every week that goes by, Donald Trump’s presidency looks better. Look at his inflation rate, look at the price of gasoline when Trump was president. People find his I think his personality too aggressive and at times too annoying. But his policies certainly had turned America around. And in Biden’s case, he doesn’t just fall off his bicycle, he takes the country him with him. And you look at Biden’s inflation record which is worse than Jimmy Carter. Look at Biden’s open door policy in the southern border. Biden’s allies releasing murderers. A lot of reasons why the country on policy grounds would favor Trump over Biden and the latest poll I link was like 6 or 8 points.
Newt talks about what it’s going to take to build a new American majority focused on the key issues that will restore America.
How do we solve the many challenges that we have as a country and develop enough popular support that people will be able to get things done despite the bureaucracy, the news media and the resistance of special interest groups? How do we restore an America that works? Newt lays out the framework for creating a new American majority for the 21stcentury.
Balancing the budget, cutting bureaucracy, and eliminating unnecessary red tape could create a whole new rebirth of entrepreneurs and small businesses.
The Republican Study Committee has done a great service by developing a serious proposal for getting to a federal balanced budget within seven years. You can read it yourself here.
RSC Chairman Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana and RSC Budget and Spending Task Force Chairman Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma led the effort which produced a solid beginning for a discussion of how to make balancing the budget a practical project.
In my new book, “Defeating Big Government Socialism,” I discuss the moral and practical importance of getting back to a balanced budget.
For me, this is a real passion. When I was Speaker, we balanced the budget for four straight years (the only time in our lifetime it has been done). In fact, when I left the speakership in 1999, experts were projecting that we would pay down the entire federal debt and then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan testified to Congress that the Federal Reserve experts were wrestling with how to manage the money supply if there was no debt.
Tragically, President George W. Bush’s administration was overwhelmed with the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Sustaining the reforms to balance the budget disappeared, and America went back into a long cycle of debt. Instead of diminishing to almost zero as seemed possible in 2000, the deficit has ballooned in the last 20 years to more than $30 trillion. Just printing all the paper money to sustain the debt is a major factor in increasing inflation and slowing economic growth.
Now, the RSC balanced budget project reasserts that one of our major goals should be to balance the federal budget.
Balancing the federal budget is important for several reasons:
It is morally important for governments to live within their means. People must balance their personal and family budgets. Businesses must be aware of running a deficit which could bankrupt them. The same principles should apply to politicians overseeing the federal budget.
When deficits don’t matter, there is no reason for politicians to be frugal or responsible with the public’s money. If you are going to run a multi-billion-dollar deficit, why not just add the next payoff to one of your allies. In the 1990s, we discovered that when every dollar counted, suddenly elected officials began to say “no” to special interests and to be much more cautious about committing the taxpayers’ money to pet projects.
When deficits don’t matter and spending seems unlimited, the toleration for waste and corruption is amazing. California had $20 billion in unemployment compensation stolen (largely from prisoners in the state prison system using prison computers for identity theft operations). Then, the person in charge of the California unemployment program was promoted by resident Joe Biden to lead an even bigger bureaucracy in Washington. You see how sick the system is?
So many policies of Big Government Socialism are destructive and waste money that a balanced budget is a mortal threat to the Left. The Big Government Socialists cannot pay off their allies if they have to pinch pennies.
Yet, the Biden inflation is forcing virtually every American family to pinch pennies and worry about family finances. The flood of new regulations, anti-business attitudes of the Democrats, inflationary pressures, and supply chain breakdowns are compounding. They are threatening to bankrupt up to one-third of our small businesses. Balancing the budget, cutting bureaucracy, and eliminating unnecessary red tape could create a whole new rebirth of entrepreneurs and small businesses.
The Republican Study Committee is to be commended for its hard work, determination, and courage in reopening a vital debate that will dramatically improve the future of America.
A middle school in Massachusetts has been banned from calling itself Catholic for insisting to fly gay pride and Black Lives Matter (BLM) flags, which church leaders say embody an agenda that contradicts Catholic values.
Nativity School in Worcester, Massachusetts, is no longer allowed to identify as a Catholic school, according to a decree issued by the bishop of the Diocese of Worcester. The school is also prohibited from hosting mass and sacraments on its campus or sponsoring these activities in any church building within the diocese.
“The flying of these flags in front of a Catholic school sends a mixed, confusing and scandalous message to the public about the Church’s stance on these important moral and social issues,” Robert McManus, the Bishop of the Diocese of Worcester, wrote in the order.
“It is my contention that the ‘Gay Pride’ flag represents support of gay marriage and actively living a LGBTQ+ lifestyle,” McManus explained. “This is also true of ‘Black Lives Matter.’ The Catholic Church teaches that all life is sacred and the Church certainly stands unequivocally behind the phrase ‘black lives matter’ and strongly affirms that all lives matter.”
The bishop also noted that the Black Lives Matter organization “seeks to disrupt the family structure in clear opposition to the teachings of the Catholic Church.”
The BLM activist group, whose co-founders have described themselves as “trained Marxists,” initially declared on its website that it wants to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” The dismantling of traditional family structure remains a key tenet of Marxism.
Nativity has been displaying gay pride and BLM flags since early 2021, and continued to fly them after McManus was made aware of them this March and demanded their removal.
McManus wrote that as a diocesan bishop, he has the authority to determine whether a school claiming to be Catholic is acting in a way that is contrary to the Catholic teachings, and that Nativity’s defiance leaves him “no other option but to take canonical action.”
In response to the decision, Nativity claims that flying the flags is meant to show support for “marginalized people,” which is aligned with Catholic values.
“The flags simply state that all are welcome at Nativity, and this value of inclusion is rooted in Catholic teaching,” Nativity School President Thomas McKenney said in a statement. “Though any symbol or flag can be co-opted by political groups or organizations, flying our flags is not an endorsement of any organization or ideology, they fly in support of marginalized people.”
The school said it has no plan to take down the flags and may appeal the decree through “appropriate channels.”
Embedded ESU members wore a specific ‘bracelet on their left wrist identifying them as MPD personnel’
While there is growing speculation that federal agents and Capitol Police were involved in instigating acts of violence during the Jan. 6, 2021 protests and recording responses for the purposes of entrapment, evidence now proves that “plainclothes” members of a special Electronic Surveillance Unit (ESU) were embedded among the protesters for the purposes of conducting video surveillance. Evidence also points to a day of security deficiencies and police provocation for the purpose of entrapment.
According to a report—First Amendment Demonstrations, issued Jan. 3, 2021, by Chief of Police Robert Contee of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), Homeland Security Bureau, Special Operations Division, obtained exclusively by The Epoch Times—the MPD began to activate Civil Disturbance Unit (CDU) platoons on Jan. 4, 2021. Full activation of 28 platoons was scheduled to occur on the following two days.
Cover page for the First Amendment Demonstrations report, issued January 3, 2021, by the Metropolitan Police Department, Homeland Security Bureau, Special Operations Division. (Obtained by The Epoch Times)
According to the Department of Justice website, “A CDU is composed of law enforcement officers who are trained to respond to protests, demonstrations, and civil disturbances for the purpose of preventing violence, destruction of property, and unlawful interference with persons exercising their rights under law.”
The objective of MPD was “to assist with the safe execution of any First Amendment demonstration and ensure the safety of the participants, public, and the officers.” CDU personnel and Special Operations Division (SOD) members were to “monitor for any demonstration and/or violent activity and respond accordingly,” according to the report.
There has been speculation that federal agents and Capitol Police were involved in instigating acts of violence during the protests for the purposes of entrapment. As Red State reported in October 2021, “multiple surveillance videos show masked men opening up the doors to the U.S. Capitol Building to allow protesters to enter. In fact, one video shows them entering while Capitol Police officers simply stand around. Yet, we have no idea who those men are.”
The ‘Covert Cadre’ of ‘Provocateurs’
On a Dec. 7, 2021, episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the attorney for several Jan. 6 prisoners, Joseph McBride, identified a man tagged on the internet by so-called “Sedition Hunters” as “Red-Faced 45.” The man, dressed in red from head to toe—with even his face painted red—appears in a video engaging in continuous dialogue with uniformed personnel and others whom McBride insists are agents embedded in the crowd. McBride said the man is “clearly a law enforcement officer.”
“He passes out weapons, sledgehammers, poles, mace. Some of those things come in contact with some of the other protesters who have subsequently been charged with possessing dangerous weapons and are using dangerous weapons at the Capitol. That is clearly entrapment.
That is clearly the government creating conditions of dangerousness and entrapping members of the crowd to possess weapons and possibly use them for reasons that we cannot comprehend.”
On Jan. 13, 2021, J. Michael Waller, senior analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy, published a first-hand account of his observations. Waller is also President of Georgetown Research, a political risk and private intelligence company in Washington, D.C.; and was founding editorial board member of NATO’s peer-reviewed Defence Strategic Communicationsjournal (2015–2018), and a senior analyst with Wikistrat. He is convinced people were embedded in the crowd to execute “an organized operation planned well in advance of the January 6 joint session of Congress.”
J. Michael Waller, Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy. (With permission from J. Michael Waller.)
According to Waller, a “covert cadre” of people were scattered throughout the crowd to encourage people toward the Capitol, including “fake Trump protesters” he suspected were ANTIFA “wearing Trump or MAGA hats backwards.”
The Epoch Times reported on Jan. 1 that senior federal law enforcement officials refused to answer questions about an Arizona man named Ray Epps, captured on video the day before the rally wearing a Trump hat repeatedly encouraging protesters to “go into the Capitol” the next day. Many were suspicious of him. Chants of “fed, fed, fed” drown him out. On Jan. 6, he is seen telling the crowd “we are going to the Capitol, where all of our problems are.”
Ray Epps encourages protesters to go into the Capitol the night before the breach on Jan. 6, 2021. (Villain Report/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)
Epps is also seen standing before a bike rack barricade, whispering into the ear of a protester wearing his Trump hat backwards. Moments later, that man is joined by others in tearing down the barricade. Epps is then seen running with the crowd toward the Capitol Building. Despite the evidence, Epps has not had any charges filed against him and his photo has been removed from the government’s list of most-wanted people from the event.
Bobby Powell host of “The Truth is Viral” podcast, has several videos exposing two men, clad all in black, whom he believes are FBI informants. They are seen breaking windows, attacking the Capitol building, and even pushing people inside.
McBride finds it strange that these “provocateurs,” as he calls them, have yet to be charged, despite their having a much more active role in the Capitol incident than some who were charged, including some individuals who never even set foot on Capitol grounds.
The Proof
Unknown to the public until now, the First Amendment Demonstrations report also reveals that an undisclosed number of “plainclothes” MPD ESU “members” were embedded into the crowd to “document the actions of the demonstrators and MPD’s response to any civil disobedience or criminal activity.”
It is unclear who the MPD ESU “members” were. However, they are never referred to as “officers” or “police.” Of the 37 “Specialized Units” listed as part of the MPD, an ESU is not among them. In order for other security personnel to recognize embedded ESU members among the protesters, they wore a specific “bracelet on their left wrist identifying them as MPD personnel,” the report stated.
Photo of bracelet worn by plainclothes members of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Electronic Surveillance Unit, embedded in the crowds on Jan. 6, 2021 to “document the actions of the demonstrators and MPD’s response to any civil disobedience or criminal activity.” (Metropolitan Police Department First Amendment Demonstrations report.)
Because he didn’t assume the job as police chief until Jan. 2, 2021, Waller believes Contee inherited rather than set up the ESU. However, Waller is confident “this report raises a lot of questions.”
“While it is admittedly an important type of unit to have in the nation’s capital, electronic surveillance requires warrants,” Waller told The Epoch Times. “The word surveillance itself implies intrusive rather than passive monitoring of people, in which case it would be required for the police to get warrants to conduct electronic surveillance on people. What kind of warrants were asked for and under which jurisdiction? Were they issued? If not, why? Are such warrants necessary for the type of surveillance this unit was doing and how does it work? This raises a huge amount of questions about an entirely new kind of surveillance unit by the police chief of the nation’s capital.”
Waller also said the reference to “members” of the unit, as opposed to “officers” or “agents,” is also very disturbing. While he said “the rest of the memorandum sounds very disciplined in it’s language and specific,” that it doesn’t identify “officers” as members of the Electronic Surveillance Unit “is very troubling.”
“Are they using private contractors? Are they using political volunteers?” Waller posed. “Are using paid agents of different types? We don’t know. This is something the public has a right to know and we need to get to the bottom of it. If the D.C Police is running electronic surveillance on American citizens without warrants, this could be a very serious breach of our civil liberties.”
Even after Capitol occupation and violence on Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill Police made no attempt to apprehend “Q Anon Man,” who is on the Senate steps just a few feet from the Capitol Hill Police line. This photo was taken after the Capitol Hill Police removed protesters from inside the Senate wing of the Capitol. (Courtesy of J. Michael Waller)
Intentional Security Deficiencies
An Oct. 29, 2021 report by Politico exposed that a 17-page strategy report called “The Civil Disturbance Unit Operational Plan,” showed that police made plans for plainclothes “officers” to monitor protesters and carry out five objectives:
To provide an environment in which lawful First Amendment activity can be safely demonstrated.
To prevent any adverse impact to the legislative process associated with unlawful demonstration activity.
To effectively mitigate actions associated with civil disorder; safely respond to crimes of violence and destruction/defacing of property.
To safeguard and prevent any property damage directed at the US Capitol, West Front Inaugural Platform, and all Congressional buildings.
Establish and maintain a fixed march route while excluding access to counter-protestors to minimize potential for violent interactions.”
However, because the CDU was understaffed and unprepared, it failed in all its objectives.
According to a 140-page report issued by then-Capitol Police Inspector General Michael Bolton—”Review of the Events Surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, Takeover of the U.S. Capitol”—Capitol Police’s CDU was ordered by supervisors not to use the department’s most powerful tools, like stun guns. Bolton’s report, which has not yet been widely released to the public, also contends “heavier, less-lethal weapons,” including stun grenades, “were not used that day because of orders from leadership.”
The CDU was given riot shields, many locked in a bus some distance away, that “shattered upon impact.” They had expired weapons that didn’t work and inadequate training.
Bolton’s report also noted that officials were warned in an intelligence assessment three days before the protest that “Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike” and that “Congress itself is the target.”
A man authorities identified as Jerry Braun outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (DOJ via The Epoch Times)
However, reports surfaced that then acting House Sergeant-at-Arms Timothy Blodgett sent a memo to lawmakers informing them that security officials found that “there does not exist a known, credible threat against Congress or the Capitol Complex that warrants the temporary security fencing.”
Some Capitol Police officers were reportedly told to go home amid staffing shortages, reported Business Insider.
According to the “UNITED STATES CAPITOL POLICE TIMELINE OF EVENTS FOR JANUARY 6, 2021 ATTACK,” also obtained by The Epoch Times, “USCP Deputy Chief Gallagher replies” to the Department of Defense (DOD) “via text” on January 3, 2021, “that a request for National Guard support is not forthcoming at this time after consultation” with Chief of Police (COP) Steven Sund.
On Jan. 4, 2021, “COP Sund asked Senate Sergeant at Arms (SSAA) Michael Stenger and House Sergeant at Arms (HSAA) Paul Irving for authority to have National Guard to assist with security for the January 6, 2021 event based on briefings with law enforcement partners and revised intelligence assessment.”
• COP Sund’s request is denied. SSAA and HSAA tells COP Sund to contact General Walker at DC National Guard to discuss the guard’s ability to support a request if needed. • COP Sund notifies General Walker of DC National Guard, indicating that the USCP may need DC National Guard support for Jan. 6, 2021, but does not have the authority to request at this time. • General Walker advises COP Sund that in the event of an authorized request, DC National Guard could quickly repurpose 125 troops helping to provide DC with COVID-related assistance. Troops would need to be sworn in as USCP.
However, the timeline shows it took over three hours and five frantic requests before the National Guard was deployed.
During his opening remarks before two Senate committees on March 3, 2021, Walker told members of Congress he received a “frantic call” from Sund in the early afternoon advising that the security perimeter of the Capitol was being breached. However, military leaders informed him that deploying troops would not be “good optics.”
During testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Piatt and Flynn denied making such comments.
At the hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene informed the committee three people were involved in turning down repeated requests for the deployment of the National Guard. “Chuck Schumer in the Senate, Nancy Pelosi in the House, and Mayor Muriel Bowser. Also involved, are the SSAA Stenger, who answers directly to Schumer, and HSAA Irving, who answers directly to Pelosi.
National Guard troops leave Washington after being stationed there for four months following the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, on May 24, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
In stark contradiction to then acting House Sergeant-at-Arms Timothy Blodgett’s assessment that no “credible threat against Congress or the Capitol Complex” existed to warrant “temporary security fencing,” there are multiple admonishments in the First Amendment Demonstrations report of the importance “for the members to monitor the fence line” and orders that “all members” were to “monitor 16th Street and the surrounding area for any potential issues or demonstrations.”
“Members assigned to the bicycle rack” were ordered to “restrict pedestrian and vehicle movement upon making the closure of the police lines.”
“The bicycle rack, in conjunction with police cars and blocking vehicles will create a barrier in which no person or vehicle will be allowed to pass,” the report said.
However, video evidence shows police waving protesters past bike racks and even removing them to open a path into the restricted areas to encourage people to move toward the Capitol Building.
A March 2, 2021, USCP Report of Investigation regarding the incident, also obtained by The Epoch Times, confirms that on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, “an Unknown Officer violated USCP Directive 2053.013, Rules of Conduct, when they allegedly waived unauthorized persons into a restricted area secured by bike racks toward the US Capitol during an insurrection.” Evidence in the case included the “video posted to twitter, dated 01/06/21 ” and “CCTV of the East Front of the US Capitol, dated 01/06/21.”
On Monday, Feb. 1, 2021, then Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) Commander of the United States Capitol Police, Inspector Michael Shaffer, sent an email with the Twitter video of the unidentified officer (UO) to Inspectors Amy Hyman (Senate Division), Thomas Loyd (Capitol Division), Kimberley Bolinger (House Division) and Acting Inspector Jessica Baboulis (Library Division) requesting assistance in identifying the UO. All parties responded to Shaffer that they were unable to identify the UO.
The recommendation was that the report “be APPROVED and the case CLOSED.”
On Feb. 4, 2021, this case was put on hold pending a review by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Public Corruption. No further information is available.
Provocation and Entrapment
In a June 10 interview with EpochTV’s “Facts Matter,” Julie Kelly—a political consultant in Illinois and senior contributor for American Greatness—described Jan. 6, 2021, as “an inside job” and “something Democrats and some Republicans and federal agencies put together to entice” and “entrap” people who went to hear President Donald Trump’s speech. She noted that the FBI used agents to try to infiltrate the so-called militia groups.
Jeremy Brown exposed a video of FBI Terrorist Task Force agents attempting to recruit him to spy on fellow Oath Keepers.
The Department of Justice still won’t answer questions about Ray Epps, an Arizona resident captured on video encouraging protesters to breach the Capitol Building.
On January 6, 2021, Capitol Police fire tear gas into pro-Trump protesters well before the violence began. Even with the tear gas, the crowd remained orderly. (Courtesy of J. Michael Waller)
Kelly also noted how Capitol Police used flash bangs, teargas, and rubber bullets “to inflame the crowd and provoke a lot of the confrontations” seen in videos now being used as evidence to arrest, charge and incarcerate those who attended the rally.
More specifically, she accused Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Democrat Majority Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of “intentionally” leaving Capitol grounds unsecured.” She further alleged it was a “setup” designed specifically to cripple the MAGA movement.
While Bolton’s report said “heavier, less-lethal weapons,” including stun grenades, “were not used that day because of orders from leadership,” the Capitol Police timeline says United States Capitol Police (USCP) personnel “deploy[ed] munitions at the Rotunda door” at 1645 hours (4:45 p.m.) where protesters were alleged to be “pushing in doors and breaking windows.” Three minutes later, USCP deployed “chemical munitions on Lower West Terrace to disperse insurrectionists.”
Police release tear gas into a crowd of demonstrators during clashes outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. Still, the crowd remained orderly. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
Video footage found at Gateway Pundit shows flash grenades being launched by Capitol Police into a group of protesters, consisting of women, children, and elderly people, who were standing peacefully behind barriers. According to American Greatness, Capitol Police were also firing on the crowd with rubber bullets. The approximate time of the confrontation was around 1:36 p.m. However, the USCP Timeline does not mention the deployment of these flash grenades.
Another video, which still exists on TeaParty.org, was filmed by Kash Kelly from ground level where the flash grenades went off. Kelly, who is now himself in prison regarding pretrial release violations regarding a previous charge and the subsequent charges related to his presence in Washington, is shown ensuring the evacuation of women in the area where the flash grenades exploded.
“The police started shooting at people,” Kelly says. “There were kids in the crowd.”
More extensive video footage, analyzed by Ray Dietrich of Red Voice Media, shows “the beginning of violence on January 6.”
An unidentified USCP officer is seen repeatedly yelling down to the crowd, assembled peacefully below his position, advising that if they “want to get a good picture” they should “go up into the bleachers.”
“The video shows the moment either stun grenades or tear gas canisters were deployed into the crowd of protestors,” Dietrich says as the video plays out. “The question I have, after a 20-year career in law enforcement, is why were these munitions deployed? I have picked this video apart and many more, and cannot see why the USCP used this force against the crowd. There is no fighting and no violence, so why did they target these people with less-lethal weapons?”
“What happened next?” Dietrich asks rhetorically. “Chaos. Violence. The crowd fought back. The Capitol was breached.”
As the stunned crowd scurries in the attack, police can be seen spraying people in the face with pepper spray. In another segment, three police officers are beating a protester who is being held on the ground. In a measure that further escalates the tension, police begin deploying tear gas into the already frantic crowd. In a course of 20 minutes, a once peaceful scene descends into total chaos.
In June 2021, reports surfaced that the Justice Department had begun to release its own video footage, including footage from body-worn cameras that allegedly show assaults against police officers defending the U.S. Capitol.
A summary of findings shows that:
Evidence shows that until the deployment of munitions, the crowds were peaceful.
MPD Electronic Surveillance Unit (ESU) members were embedded into the crowd to “document the actions of the demonstrators and MPD’s response to any civil disobedience or criminal activity.”
Of the 37 “Specialized Units” listed as part of the Metropolitan Police Department, an ESU is not among them.
The Epoch Times reached out to the Metropolitan Police Department and Capitol Police for comment.
Fox Business host Larry Kudlow didn’t hold back on a recent segment of his show and told his audience the full extent of the Biden Administration’s failing economic policies.
In part of the segment, Kudlow gives an insight into the latest Fox News poll numbers which show waning confidence in the President’s ability to lead an economic recovery.
He also refuted a common talking point the left often uses about wealthy individuals and major corporations not paying their fair share of taxes.
Notably, Kudlow actually agreed on a few observations recently made by resident Biden about issues plaguing the nation – before highlighting the fact that Biden’s own policies have led to the problems he wants to solve.
A U.S. senator Friday spoke out against the “woke” policies implemented by the military, which has become especially apparent during LGBT Pride Month of June.
“The United States military should be focused on one objective – creating the most lethal fighting force on planet Earth,” Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told The TennesseeStar. “Instead, Joe Biden’s military leaders are secretly attempting to turn our brave warfighters into social justice warriors. Communist China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea do not care how woke our military is or what our soldiers’ pronouns are.“
She echoed a similar sentiment on Twitter.
“The Biden Defense Department should focus energy on combatting our adversaries — not wokeism,” she said.
Communist China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea do not care what our soldiers’ pronouns are.
The U.S. Air Force celebrated Pride Month with a message of its own on Twitter.
“Pride in all who serve,” the military branch said, attaching a photo of its members running alongside a pride flag.
Many Twitter users were quick to criticize the Air Force for the post, noting that there is not an American flag in the photo.
The Department of Defense’s Inspector General’s [DOGIG] office celebrated Pride Month on Friday, too.
“The [DODIG] recognizes June 2022 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) Pride Month. During Pride Month, we commemorate the achievements and contributions of the LGBTQ+ community, to include service in defense of our Nation,” that office said.
The @DoD_IG recognizes June 2022 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) Pride Month. During Pride Month, we commemorate the achievements and contributions of the LGBTQ+ community, to include service in defense of our Nation. pic.twitter.com/K69xtRi6EM— DoD Inspector General (@DoD_IG) June 17, 2022
The Department of Defense (DOD) itself, the parent organization of America’s military branches, sent out a June 7 press release officially recognizing Pride Month.
“DOD is committed to ensuring and promoting an atmosphere of dignity and respect for all civilian and military personnel,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen H. Hicks said. “We strive to make the Department of Defense a workplace of choice for all Americans willing and qualified to serve. In doing so, we set a bedrock foundation where all personnel are valued and given an equal opportunity to succeed.”
Rep. Sharice Davids (D., Kan.) has called for a total ban on members of Congress owning stocks in order to “restore trust” in the government. So it’s puzzling that Davids owns shares of three green energy firms that regularly lobby Congress for subsidies.
Her investments in FuelCell Energy, Maxeon Solar Technologies, and SunPower Corporation total up to $17,000. All three companies lobby Congress for green energy tax credits and other incentives, and Davids is in clear position to implement policy that impacts her investments—the Kansas Democrat sits on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, which has helped shape the Biden administration’s green-friendly infrastructure spending initiatives. Davids has said she would use her position on the committee to explore investments in infrastructure projects as “an effective way to combat the effects of climate change.”
Davids endorsed a bill in April aimed at ending the kinds of conflicts of interest her investments appear to present. Davids and 18 other members of Congress called for a ban on members, their spouses, and dependents from owning or trading stocks. At the time, Davids and her colleagues said stock ownership creates a “serious conflict of interest” for members conducting oversight of publicly traded companies, with Davids herself arguing that the law was needed in order to “improve transparency and accountability” in the wake of questionable financial conduct by elected officials.
Davids, who due to redistricting is among the most vulnerable incumbents in the House, is not the only member to have apparent conflicts of interest in “green infrastructure” companies. Rep. Sean Casten (D., Ill.) owns up to $500,000 in Greenleaf Power, a privately held green energy company, the Washington Free Beacon has reported. Casten, who serves on the House committee to address climate change, has also endorsed a ban on members of Congress owning individual stocks. Greenleaf Power is not publicly traded so would not be banned under the proposed legislation.
FuelCell Energy, Maxeon Solar Technologies, and SunPower Corporation, the green energy companies in Davids’s portfolio, have lobbied Congress for taxpayer-funded incentives in the administration’s infrastructure projects.
SunPower Corporation, which installs solar power systems, cheered an extension for solar credits in the American Jobs Plan, saying it would “unlock more markets in the United States where we’re just scratching the surface.” SunPower has lobbied Congress on a variety of green energy bills, as well as the Build Back Better Act, for investment tax credits for residential and commercial solar projects.
FuelCell Energy has lobbied Congress “to restore fuel cell tax credits” and funding for fuel cell research, according to the company’s lobbying disclosures.
Maxeon, which lobbies Congress on “solar trade issues,” said earlier this year it may expand manufacturing of solar panels in the United States depending on the implementation of Build Back Better and other climate-related legislation.
Davids is also invested in Organovo Holdings, a biotech company that lobbies the government regarding the use of human tissue in drug research.
Davids faces a tough re-election bid in November after losing Democrat-leaning portions of her district during the recent redistricting process. She flipped her seat in 2018, and won by 10 points in 2020. Cook Political Report rates the race a toss-up.
Davids’ office did not respond to a request for comment.
Eight months after his 19-year-old daughter Grace died in a hospital after having been given a combination of a sedative, an anxiety medication, and morphine, Scott Schara and his family continue to bring attention to why they think she died, and who’s responsible.
Their most recent billboard campaign targets St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his daughter with Down’s syndrome passed.
Hospital staff driving to and from work would have a hard time not seeing the billboards that ask, “Was Grace given a lethal combination of meds at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital? Intentional? … Who’s Next?”
Others ask, “Was Grace labeled Do Not Resuscitate without family consent at St. E’s?”
Grace died in October 2021, a month after COVID-19 vaccine mandates had been announced by resident Joe Biden.
People who didn’t want to take the experimental vaccine were being fired, while unvaccinated patients in hospitals were being treated much differently than the vaccinated.
Reports from people such as Anne Quiner in Minnesota painted a picture of medical discrimination and unusual hospital protocols that many, like Quiner, alleged led to the death of their loved ones.
According to Schara, Grace, who, like the rest of her family, was unvaccinated, was admitted to St. Elizabeth’s for COVID-19 respiratory issues on Oct. 6 but had been recovering when the doctor began giving her a sedative called Precedex.
Schara said there were frequent incidents of discrimination regarding Grace’s unvaccinated status, and their choice to use other early treatment medications that weren’t approved by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Grace was on Precedex for four days preceding her last day, Schara told The Epoch Times, despite severe risks associated with being on the drug for longer than 24 hours.
On Oct. 13, the day Grace died, she was given—in addition to the Precedex—Lorazepam, and morphine within a 29-minute window, Schara said, even though the package insert for morphine warns against using it in combination with the other two drugs because it can result in death.
With an armed guard standing near the doorway of her room at the hospital, Schara said Grace’s sister and patient advocate begged nurses she saw in the hallway to revive Grace as their parents watched from Facetime, joining her in their pleas.
There was nothing to be done, a nurse responded because Grace had been coded as Do Not Resuscitate (DNR), a label that Scott said must be legally approved and signed off on by the medical power of attorney, who was Grace’s mother, Cindy.
The family said this never happened.
“Why would we agree to a DNR when we would not only want the doctors to save our daughter at any cost but also the morning of Grace’s last day, the doctor recommended a feeding tube to start the process of getting Grace home?” he asked.
The doctor had told the family, Schara said, that Grace “had a good day yesterday; we should work on nutrition,” before recommending a feeding tube.
Medical records seen by The Epoch Times show that the DNR order was put into the system eight minutes after a maximum dose of Precedex was administered at 10:48 a.m., on Grace’s last day, which Schara calls the “smoking gun.”
“She had been on Precedex for four days at this point, then they gave her close to the maximum dose,” he said. “Eight minutes later, the doctor puts the illegal DNR on her.”
According to her death certificate, Grace died of acute respiratory failure with hypoxemia.
Schara said “respiratory failure” is a direct side effect of using Precedex for more than 24 hours.
“Of course, COVID-19 pneumonia is listed as the second cause of death in order for the hospital to receive the killing bonus from the government,” he said.
The Schara family’s billboard campaign, 2022. (Courtesy of Scott Schara)
‘We Are in a Spiritual Battle’
Since then, Schara said he has continued investigating and has found even more negligence.
To bring attention to what happened, he’s been on over 100 media outlets, and has even held a rally with city approval outside of the hospital, he said.
Schara said the family has committed over $300,000 to the campaigns, $225,454 of that is for the billboards they put up through May 2023.
“Money is temporary,” Schara said. “I don’t want this to happen to anyone else. We are in a spiritual battle, and people must realize that.”
After telling his story to a wider audience, Robin Riley from Newtown, Connecticut, reached out to Schara on Grace’s website to share her own experience.
Riley’s and Schara’s stories share many similarities. Riley told The Epoch Times that her daughter with Down’s syndrome, 37-year-old Megan, was admitted to a hospital for COVID-19 and put on numerous tranquilizers and Fentanyl, as well as remdesivir.
Megan was also labeled as DNR, which Riley said she had never approved, and didn’t know until she got Megan’s records.
Megan died on Dec. 9, 2021, Riley said.
After discovering that the hospital had put Megan on DNR, Riley said it made her grief worse.
“Because they had her on DNR the whole time, I just keep thinking, did the doctors do everything they could to save her?” she asked.
Megan Riley, 2021. (Courtesy of Robin Riley)
‘There Was No Reason to Sedate Her’
For Schara, none of this is a coincidence, he said.
For the combination of meds given to Grace, the doctor had to order, a pharmacist had to sign off, the hospital medication alarm had to be overridden, and in Grace’s case, a 14-year ICU nurse delivered the lethal combination, Schara said.
“We were not provided informed consent about the drugs administered to Grace, nor did we know they were being administered in the first place,” Schara said. “There was no reason to sedate her. There was no reason to give her Lorazepam–an anti-anxiety drug–while she was knocked out from Precedex. There was no reason to give her morphine. The Nuremberg Code was created to ensure people would have informed consent in regard to any medical procedure, and to be able to opt out of such things. St. Elizabeth’s ignored providing informed consent and they ignored all the warnings in the package inserts.”
Schara first thought the hospital protocols leading up to her death were about the hospital getting federal reimbursements; however, now he suspects a motive much worse: hospitals are taking federal funding to enact COVID protocols that were not only killing the unvaccinated but the disabled, he said.
He cited one 2020 study from the UK Office for National Statistics that show that disabled people had made up about three-fifths of COVID-related deaths in England and Wales.
“Disabled females between nine and 64 were even more at risk, in comparison with non-disabled females in the same age group, with a rate of death 10.8 times higher,” he said.
He cited a 2021 report from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy that stated that intellectual disability is second to old age as a risk factor for COVID-19 deaths.
“In unadjusted analysis, compared with 431,669 patients without intellectual disabilities, the 127,003 patients with intellectual disabilities were more suspectable to hospitalization, intensive care admission, and death,” he said.
He’s collected several additional studies and articles that support the theory that the disabled are at higher risk.
Combining that with his own experience, he thinks the disabled with COVID-19 are purposely being murdered.
He points to an article from NPR that tells the story of Melissa Hickson, who claimed a hospital where her quadriplegic husband was admitted for COVID-19 denied him life-saving treatment because of his disability.
The Milgram Experiment
All these reports and studies connect for Schara, implying ominous motives funded not only by money, but blind obedience, he said, alluding to a set of experiments in the 1960s that tested how far a person would go to follow orders.
“In the Milgram experiments, these psychologists tested the willingness of the participants in how far they would go to administer electric shock treatment to their peers under orders from an authority figure,” Schara said.
The experiments were held at Yale University by Stanley Milgram three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
Milgram’s intent of the experiments was to study the psychology of genocide, he explained in his reports.
‘Death Protocols’
Todd Callender, an international lawyer with Disabled Rights Advocates and legal counsel to Truth for Health Foundation, previously told The Epoch Times that the “death protocols” being enacted in hospitals are passed down hierarchically from the World Health Organization to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health, using the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act and Health and Human Services authorization to release funding for the declared pandemic that sets the protocols in motion.
From there, hospitals that are federally funded through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) use coding tied to NIH and CDC-written protocols. If those hospitals take that funding, they must follow those protocols, starting with ICD-10 codes (International Classification of Diseases).
According to Callender, the CDC and NIH protocols are based on the WHO’s 2005 International Health Regulations which directs each of its 196 signatory countries to cede all sovereign powers to the WHO in the case of a declared health emergency.
“The WHO then directs the various state health bodies—in this case, the CDC and NIH—on treatment,” Callender said. “This is why every country is responding in the same way at the same time globally; it’s a back door to a one-world dictatorial government.”
When these protocols are passed down to the hospitals that take funding, under the emergency declaration, patients’ rights are waived under the CMS COVID waiver program in conjunction with the PREP and CARES Act, giving participating hospitals legal immunity.
Patients admitted for a broken arm can be given a COVID-19 test that “will almost always come back positive,” then are admitted and put on an IV with a tranquilizer that lowers oxygen levels, which then justifies putting the patient into COVID isolation where the antiviral drug remdesivir—which Callender called “lethal”—is added to the bag before being moved into the intensive care unit where the patient is then given morphine and fentanyl while being deprived of nutrition, he said.
“Everybody talks about their fear of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) death camps,” Callender said. “Well, they’re already here; they’re called hospitals.”
Each of these procedures brings in high federal reimbursements of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, Callender said.
Tom Renz, an attorney with America’s Frontline Doctors and Make Americans Free Again—organizations that oppose unconstitutional federal health mandates—hosts his own show on Brighteon TV where he interviewed Schara.
He told The Epoch Times that, because the PREP and CARES Acts have been passed, it’s made it impossible to sue hospitals because they convey immunity to these hospitals.
“Through those acts, we’ve given hospitals as much immunity as we’ve given vaccine makers as long as the state of emergency is continuing,” he said. “And we’ve got to ask ourselves, why is there still a national emergency?”
In addition to immunity, hospitals get federal funding through the CARES Act, which gives a 20 percent increase in reimbursement to hospitals for inpatient stays resulting from COVID-19, Renz said.
“The laws are structured in a way that incentivizes hospitals to kill people,” Renz said. “The hospital makes more money if you die from COVID-19 than if you recover from it. Why don’t we incentivize hospitals for getting people cured of COVID?”
Renz supports Schara’s conclusion that the hospital killed Grace, he said.
“Can you imagine watching your daughter die on Facetime, begging the hospital to revive her, and they say, ‘No, we are not going to do that,’ claiming that they have a DNR that you didn’t agree to?” he asked. “I mean, can you imagine the horror? No person should have to go through that, and we’ve got to have accountability.”
Like Schara’s response from the hospital, Riley said the hospital contended that the family agreed to the DNR.
In a Dec. 15 letter to the Schara family, the hospital said that “multiple and in-depth discussions and explanations occurred with you, your wife and family in regards to resuscitation and intubation. The medical record documentation on October 13, 2021, reflects additional discussion and confirmation of the family decisions related to resuscitation and intubation interventions should Grace’s condition deteriorate.”
“What a bunch of crap,” Schara said, reemphasizing that his family never agreed to a DNR.
“The doctors only discussed the concept of DNR,” Schara said. “Why would we agree to a DNR when he just got done telling us that Grace had such a good day yesterday that we should work on nutrition?”
St. Elizabeth’s Hospital did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
‘Genocide’
There’s a pattern, Schara said, that he hasn’t been able to ignore.
“If I would have listened to me saying these words now seven months ago, I would have thought, at best he’s become a conspiracy theorist; at worst: a whack job,” he said.
However, too many incidences of negligence have lined up to be a coincidence, he said.
“At first I thought this was about money, but it’s clear to me now that money was used to simply grease the wheels to accomplish a bigger agenda, which, in my opinion, is genocide,” he said.
Texas Republicans passed a resolution on June 18 stating that resident Joe Biden was “not legitimately elected,” and that “substantial” election fraud in key metropolitan areas influenced the results of the 2020 presidential election in favor of Biden.
“We believe that the 2020 election violated Article 1 and 2 of the US Constitution, that various secretaries of state illegally circumvented their state legislatures in conducting their elections in multiple ways, including by allowing ballots to be received after November 3, 2020,” stated a resolution passed on Saturday, the last day of a three-day biennial Texas GOP convention held in Houston, the Texas Tribune reported.
“We believe that substantial election fraud in key metropolitan areas significantly affected the results in five key states in favor of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr,” the resolution continued.
“We reject the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and we hold that acting resident Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States,” it added.
The state’s GOP, the largest in the nation, passed the resolution after delegates sat through a Thursday screening of “2000 Mules,” a documentary directed by conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza.
The movie features the undercover investigative work of David Lara, a citizen investigator, and Arizona State Senate candidate Gary Snyder, as well as investigations conducted by the election integrity organization “True The Vote” on an alleged coordinated ballot trafficking operation during the 2020 election.
Described as an exposé of “widespread, coordinated voter fraud in the 2020 election,” the movie draws on cell phone location data paired with video surveillance footage that allegedly showed a cohort of people dropping ballots off at drop boxes situated outdoors on average more than 20 times each. Those people were dubbed by the investigators as “mules.”
While some states allow people to gather ballots from certain people and drop them off, the volume of ballots inserted into the boxes, and the fact that the people went to multiple boxes to drop ballots off, showed what happened was illegal, filmmakers say.
Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in Washington on Aug. 1, 2018. (Shannon Finney/Getty Images)
“The mules are instructed to do three votes over here or five votes over there, 10 votes over here, they spread it around so as not to raise eyebrows and not to raise suspicion,” D’Souza previously said on EpochTV’s “Crossroads.”The scale of the operation was enough to tip the 2020 election, he added.
The Texas GOP passed the resolution on Saturday afternoon during a voting session on the party’s platform and legislative priorities.
The approved platform also recommends numerous measures to bolster election integrity, including by implementing voter photo ID and in-person voting, and tightening the voter registration process.
Other issues endorsed in the state Republican’s latest platform include a call to abolish abortion, preserve gun rights, remove Marxist ideology and critical race theory from schools, and ban gender modification of children.
James Wesolek, communication director for the Republican Party of Texas, told The Epoch Times that 5,500 delegates attended the convention, which offers Republicans an opportunity to set priorities for the next legislative session in 2023 and elect party leaders.
“Remember, the Republican Party of Texas is a grassroots party,” Matt Rinaldi, chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, told attendees of the contention, Houston Public Media reported. “It doesn’t belong to me, the governor, or senators or congressmen, or any elected official. This is your party.”
According to the U.S. National Archives, Joe Biden received 306 electoral votes in the 2020 election and Donald Trump received 232 electoral votes. Trump and conservative figures across the country have alleged since then that substantial fraud influenced the 2020 election results. Democrats and mainstream media have vociferously denied such allegations, claiming them to be unfounded.
The Texas GOP, in the resolution, called on voting conservatives in the state to work to “overwhelm” any possibility of voter fraud.
“We strongly urge all Republicans to work to ensure election integrity and to show up to vote in November of 2022, bring your friends and family, volunteer for your local Republicans, and overwhelm any possible fraud,” the resolution stated.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.
Zachary Stieber and Darlene McCormick Sanchez contributed to this report.
AFTER YEARS OF HIDING IT, THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION IS APPARENTLY ADMITTING THE TRUTH BEHIND CLOSED DOORS.
The director of the World Health Organization privately believes the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a leak from a Chinese laboratory, according to a new report which undermines the publicly stated position of the global health chief.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) – had previously stressed how unlikely the long-derided “lab leak” theory was, despite evidence to the contrary. Now, according to a report from the Daily Mail, Dr. Tedros “confided to a senior European politician that the most likely explanation was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
The quiet admission in support of the “lab leak” theory is especially at odds with the public position of his WHO, whose affiliated scientists have often branded the hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory” and sought to silence the voices of those who claims otherwise.
BOMBSHELL REPORT BY THE MAIL.
The admission also follows the WHO launching a COVID-19 origins investigation that ultimately discredited the “lab leak” theory in favor of a “natural origins” theory. At the time, The National Pulse exclusively revealed that several researchers included on the team retained compromising links to the Chinese Communist Party, most notably EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak. Advisors to the Chinese Communist Party also served on the team.
Daszak and his partners conducted research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology using funds from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci. Using this million-dollar grant, the lab has worked on isolating bat coronavirus strains capable of “direct human infection” and is under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.
The lab also appears to have engaged in gain-of-function research, which manipulates pathogens to become more lethal and transmissible to humans. The lab has done similar research on other viruses including influenza and monkeypox.
The WHO sponsored a second COVID-19 origins investigation following its botched first attempt, leading Dr. Tedros to publicly admit that “we do not yet have the answers as to where it came from or how it entered the human population” this month.
Tedros himself has ties to the Chinese Communist Party, helping the regime expand its financial and political control over his home country of Ethiopia while serving in government.
Former U.S. President Donald J. Trump attempted to shift away from relying on Tedros, the World Health Organization, and even Anthony Fauci. He was widely ridiculed and maligned at the time, despite the mounting evidence that most of the above actors are now either totally discredited, or have rowed back from their original COVID-19 claims.
THIS MAY BE THE SCANDAL TO BRING BORIS JOHNSON’S GOVERNMENT DOWN.
The wife of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Carrie (neé Symonds), faces further scandal after allegedly demanding negative press stories about her and her husband were removed from British newspapers and their websites. The news comes at one of the worst periods for Johnson’s government, with immigration soaring and a recent “no confidence” vote in the Prime Minister which yielded a worse result than his deposed predecessor Theresa May.
On Saturday morning, The Times of London ran with a bombshell scoop by veteran reporter Simon Walters, entitled “Johnson tried to give Carrie top Foreign Office job during affair”.
A PHOTOGRAPH OF THETIMES FROM SATURDAY MORNING. CLICK TO ENLARGE.
The story alleged that during their extra-marital, undisputed affair, Boris Johnson (then Foreign Secretary) attempted to give his lover, Carrie, a six-figure job in the same Foreign and Commonwealth Office that he ran, the U.S. equivalent of the State Department. The ‘Chief of Staff’ role would have come with significant access to sensitive government information, as well as the ability to set policy at a high-level. The move was vetoed by staff who were aware of the pair’s affair, and how it might compromise one of the most senior diplomats in the United Kingdom as a result, Walters alleged in his article.
But within hours the article had been removed from The Times, the Daily Mail, and MSN.com amongst others. Even the secondary print edition of The Times had replaced the story with a pro-government article about immigration policy.
Strangely still, neither papers issued corrections, retractions, notes from editors, or otherwise explanations about what had happened. The story just disappeared from the press, all at once – in an unprecedented fashion.
Former Times reporter David Hewson noted on Twitter: “As someone who reporting for the Times got things wrong once or twice let me tell you what happens. We publish a correction. We don’t pretend the original story never happened. And the idea of deleting it entirely from the public record. Well…”
As someone who reporting for the Times got things wrong once or twice let me tell you what happens. We publish a correction. We don’t pretend the original story never happened. And the idea of deleting it entirely from the public record. Well…
Carrie – a friend and fan of the Biden family, who also worked at a Clinton Foundation think tank – is well known for cajoling close friends in the press for positive coverage. But veteran reporter Simon Walters toldThe New European newspaper that he “stand[s] by the story 100 per cent,” adding:
“I was in lengthy and detailed communication with No 10 [The Prime Minister’s Office] at a high level, Ben Gascoigne and Mrs Johnson’s spokeswoman for up to 48 hours before the paper went to press. At no point did any of them offer an on-the-record denial of any element of the story.”
Walters concluded: “Nor have any of these three offered an on-the-record denial to me since. No 10 and Mr Gascoigne did not deny it off-the-record either.”
But the Johnsons’s attempts to keep yet another scandal about their relationship off newspaper pages appears to have backfired.
By Sunday evening, UK time, the phrases #carriejohnson and ‘The Times’ were both trending online, eliciting far more views that those who would’ve seen the story on page five of The Times‘ Saturday newspaper.
With the Conservative Party around seven points behind the Labour Party in averaged national polling, and a recent no-confidence vote in the Prime Minister going worse than Boris Johnson had hoped, this latest “Carrie Antoinette” scandal could well bring the current British government down.
The National Pulse first reported on the scandal-ridden Symonds and her impending impact on British politics in February 2021. The British press caught up some six months later.
The governing body for international swimming approved new policies for transgender swimmers that will go into effect starting on June 20.
In a notice (pdf) on June 19, the International Swimming Federation (FINA) said it will only allow biological male swimmers to compete in women’s events if they have not experienced male puberty and have had puberty suppressed before age 12. They would also have to “continuously [maintain] their testosterone levels in serum (or plasma) below 2.5 nmol/L.”
About 72 percent of FINA members voted in favor of the directive to restrict the participation of transgender athletes in elite women’s competitions and create an “open” category for them.
The debate intensified after University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male who publicly identifies as a female, became the first transgender NCAA champion in women’s Division I history after winning the women’s 500-yard freestyle earlier this year. The win drew significant backlash from female swimmers,activists, and other athletes, including Thomas’s teammates.
In an interview with Sports Illustrated last month, Thomas expressed the intention to seek a spot on the national women’s swimming team before the 2024 Olympics. The new FINA rule issued on June 19 would block Thomas’s participation.
The new eligibility policy for FINA-backed competitions says that biological male athletes are eligible to compete in women’s sports only if “they can establish to FINA’s comfortable satisfaction that they have not experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 (of puberty) or before age 12, whichever is later,” according to the notice. The governing body added that biological women who claim to be men can fully compete in men’s swimming events.
The organization heard from several doctors and scientists who argued that puberty gives a clear physical advantage to males over females.
“By 14 years or older, the difference between boys and girls is substantial. That’s due to the advantages experienced due to the physiological adaptations in testosterone and the possession of the Y chromosome,” physiologist Dr. Sandra Hunter said. “Some of these physical advantages are structural in origin such as height, limb length, heart size, lung size and they will be retained, even with the suppression or reduction of testosterone that occurs in the transition from male to female.”
FINA President Husain Al-Musallam in a statement that the governing body has “to protect competitive fairness at our events, especially the women’s category at FINA competitions.”
He added that its newly created “open category will mean that everybody has the opportunity to compete at an elite level.”
“This has not been done before, so FINA will need to lead the way. I want all athletes to feel included in being able to develop ideas during this process,” he said.
Sharron Davies, who won a swimming silver medal at the 1980 Olympic Games, welcomed the decision.
“I can’t tell you how proud I am of my sport, FINA, and the FINA president for doing the science, asking the athletes/coaches, and standing up for fair sport for females,” Davies said, adding that “fairness is the cornerstone of sport.”
The NCAA said in January that it would enable “a sport-by-sport approach to transgender participation,” or participation by athletes who claim to be a gender that doesn’t match their biological sex.
Livingston County, Michigan, this week became the latest jurisdiction in the country and the first in its state to ban the private funding of the administration of elections.
The move came after good-government advocates became incensed that a Mark Zuckerberg-funded activist group, the left-wing Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), flooded election offices in Democratic Party strongholds in Michigan with millions of dollars in an apparent effort to drive up voter turnout for that party in 2020.
Critics say Zuckerberg, the billionaire Facebook founder and Democrat activist, along his wife Priscilla Chan, gave the money in an effort to influence the 2020 election.
According to critics, the grants accomplished Zuckerberg’s goal.
In 2016, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, a Republican, beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in Michigan by 10,704 votes. But in 2020, Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump in the state by 154,188 votes, according to official results as reported by Ballotpedia.
Critics claim the assistance provided by CTCL to Detroit, Benton Harbor, Muskegon and other heavily Democratic jurisdictions in the state may have put Biden over the top.
On June 13, the Livingston County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to ban the acceptance of unregulated monies for funding elections, a move that lawyer Erick Kaardal said will enhance election integrity.
Kaardal, a special counsel for the Thomas More Society, a nationwide public interest law firm that protects religious freedom and maintains an election integrity practice, said he provided the commissioners with an analysis of the resolution before they voted on it.
Livingston County is between Detroit and the state capital Lansing.
The commission’s vote pushes Michigan closer toward a national movement to banish “dark money,” or political spending meant to influence voters, where the donor is not disclosed, and the source of the money is unknown, he said.
Walworth County in nearby Wisconsin became the first local government in that state to ban the acceptance of private monies or grants for use in the administration of elections, as The Epoch Times reported.
“In the last 18 months, 20 states have enacted laws banning private money to administer public elections,” Kaardal said in a statement in which he identified Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Arizona, as among those now with such laws in effect.
He added that legislatures in another six states have passed such legislation but governors vetoed it.
“This is a win for the voters of Livingston County and will hopefully lead the way for other local governments to optimize election integrity in their regions,” Kaardal said.
“When there is an absence of any insistence on election integrity from the top, it is incumbent upon counties and municipalities to protect the right of voters entrusted to them.”
“Because Michigan’s executive branch has been unwilling to bar private money from entering the elections, the burden has fallen upon cities and counties to protect themselves from outside interference by illegal money sources,” Kaardal said.
“The people understand that the right to vote is a cornerstone of a free society and that the biased intervention of those who influence the outcome with their dirty dollars is not to be tolerated.”
The Epoch Times reached out for comment to CTCL but had not received a reply as of press time.
PUNTA GORDA, Fla.–Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd announced on June 17 the arrest of 12 suspects—one a Disney employee—on charges of soliciting children online for “grooming” purposes.
Judd identified them at a press conference, where he displayed their photos and gave a brief description of each suspect. One was a bus driver for Disney.
“He was doing this while he was on the clock for Disney … so if your bus was running late at Disney, he was busy taking pictures of himself and talking trash to what he thought was a little girl.”
On June 2, the Polk County Sheriff’s office, along with two other municipal police departments, conducted “Operation Child Protector II,” with detectives posing as children on social media platforms as well as other popular apps and online dating sites. The result was the arrest of 12 suspects who “prey upon and travel to meet children for unlawful sexual activity.” During the sting, the suspects communicated and solicited who they thought were children.
The investigations are an “ongoing process,” Judd said, but parents need to be aware.
“We never quit investigating these folks,” he said. “Parents have to understand the first line of defense is at home, so they need to be all up in their child’s business.”
According to a written release, four suspects showed up at an undercover location in Polk County to meet who they thought were children with the intent to commit sexual battery. “Detectives obtained warrants for eight other suspects” who were subsequently “arrested and booked into jails in their respective counties. Additional suspects were charged via a warrant after transmitting pornographic images and/or grooming and soliciting children online—they are still at large in Florida and police are actively looking for them.”
The 12 who were arrested are facing a total of 49 felony charges.
Judd stated at the press conference that some of them “flew under the radar” with no criminal histories.
“What I want parents to understand is these aren’t traditional criminals,” Judd said. “Nine of the 12 don’t have a criminal history. These are evil people lurking online and grooming children online to engage them in sexual conduct.”
The combined criminal histories of the others, Judd said, included 22 felonies and 31 misdemeanor charges. The youngest suspect is 20 years old and the oldest is 67.
Most of the suspects had active warrants, and two men were from out of state—Michigan and Alabama. The latter is 66 years old and works as a Blackhawk mechanic at Fort Rucker, Judd said.
“He had chats with a 13-year-old while he was at work I hope he didn’t get so carried away that he forgot to put all the parts back on the Blackhawk helicopters. That could be a real problem.”
Two of the men are married and told detectives they “waited until their wives were asleep” to go online to talk to children.
The sheriff had a final message for those who wish to do harm to children.
“We are all the time looking for these deviants. So wherever you are in the world, if you’ve been talking nasty and sending nasty pictures to what you thought was a child, we’ll be after you.”
Strong, virtuous fathers are the foundations of close-knit families and a better world. While households the world over are preparing to celebrate Father’s Day, honoring their share of the protective fatherly love in their lives, let’s not forget the brave dads who are being persecuted in communist China, either for their faith or for defending human rights.
Here are some of these soul-stirring life stories—which will forever be listed in the darkest chapters of human history—revealing how communist ideologies are anti-divine, and a threat to humanity and world peace.
‘My Father Believes This Is God’s Message, and I Believe My Father’
It has been almost 1,770 days since the prominent Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng went missing on Aug. 13, 2017. Gao has been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
A devoted Christian and known as the “Conscience of China,” Gao was on good terms with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) until he stood up to defend members of persecuted faith groups: Christian family churches and Falun Gong practitioners. He had been repeatedly arrested and tortured over the years and was formally arrested in 2006 after he wrote open letters to the top Chinese leadership condemning the suppression of faith.
When in prison, Gao was subjected to brutal torture, such as being shocked with electric batons, having his teeth knocked loose, and even having toothpicks stabbed into his genitals. Gao was under house arrest for years before suddenly disappearing on Aug. 13, 2017; the family hasn’t heard anything about him since.
Missing human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng. (The Epoch Times)Grace Geng, Gao Zhisheng’s daughter, holds a copy of Gao’s book, “Year 2017: Stand Up China,” at the book-launch ceremony in Hong Kong on June 16, 2016. (Stone Poon/The Epoch Times)
Gao’s wife, Geng He, and his two children, who had faced constant harassment from the police, escaped to the United States in 2009 with the help of underground faith groups. Residing in a free country this past decade, Gao’s family has never stopped speaking out and worrying about his whereabouts.
His daughter, Grace Geng, believes that her dad’s book, the Chinese title of which translates to “Year 2017: Stand Up China,” has an unwavering message for the world—that the CCP will soon collapse. “My father believes this is God’s message, and I believe my father,” Grace said during the launch ceremony of the book in Hong Kong on June 16, 2016.
‘My Family is Just One Example Out of Thousands’
A 22-year-old student at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, has been advocating for his parents’ release. His father—a “rare talent” and renowned professional in the petroleum industry—was accused of sending informational text messages about the persecuted spiritual practice of Falun Gong via Bluetooth at a subway in Beijing.
Jack Zhiyuan Liu’s parents, both former engineers at the China National Petroleum Corporation, had faced imprisonment and persecution for their faith years ago. And on Nov. 19, 2021, they were arrested once again, according to Minghui.org—a U.S.-based website dedicated to reporting on the persecution of Falun Gong in China. His mother, Cao Wenbei, was released a month later, but his father, Liu Zhoubo, is still detained at Beijing No. 3 Detention Center.
“The CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong is destroying lives and families,” Jack told the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times. “What had happened to my family is just one example out of thousands.”
Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) is an ancient self-cultivation discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The atheistic communist regime has been violently persecuting the spiritual practice since July 1999. The CCP-led campaign of persecution that ensued 23 years ago has left numerous adherents detained, arrested, and subjected to extreme torture, including having their organs forcibly harvested for profit.
Jack Zhiyuan Liu calls for the release of his father, Liu Zhoubo, and other Falun Gong practitioners, at a rally held in Ottawa on April 22, 2022. (Ren Qiaosheng/The Epoch Times)
In the past, Jack’s parents, grandmother, and uncle had been imprisoned for 1 1/2 years for practicing Falun Gong. His father had also been sentenced to 9 years in prison before being released in 2010—a period that Jack described as “hell” for his father, as the elderly man was subjected to torture, starvation, and death threats in prison.
‘I Have Been Trying to Do Anything That Could Possibly Help My Father’
On Feb. 2, 2013, Jewher Ilham was supposed to accompany her father, Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur economics professor in China, to Indiana University for a month as a visiting scholar. However, when the Chinese authorities restricted her dad from leaving the country, she ended up taking a flight alone from Beijing to the United States.
That fateful day at the airport would become the last time she’d see her dad, to this day. Jewher’s father was arrested and later sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of inciting separatism—a charge that she said was unfounded. “He had never mentioned a word about separating the country,” Jewher told China Uncensored.
Jewher has been increasingly worrying about her dad since 2017—the year when the world came to know about the Xinjiang re-education and internment camps; her family in China had lost contact with her father that same year.
Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur professor of economics, delivers his lecture under a security surveillance camera mounted above the teacher’s podium in a classroom in Beijing on June 12, 2010. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)Jewher Ilham, daughter of Ilham Tohti, holds a portrait of her father during the award ceremony for his 2019 European Parliament’s Sakharov human rights prize at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, on Dec. 18, 2019. (Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images)
To seek her father’s release, the young daughter has been advocating for him.
“I have been trying to do anything that could possibly help my father and my community. I don’t know if it’s helping, I don’t know if anything would help. I just don’t want to regret,” she said.
Jewher had also met the then-President Donald Trump at the White House in July 2019, together with other survivors of religious persecution, and spoke at the UN General Assembly. In December 2019, she accepted the 2019 Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament on her father’s behalf for the defense of human rights.
‘I Dream One Day We Can Be Together Again’
A young Chinese refugee, Eric Jia, had a happy family, which became nonexistent the day his dad was arrested; he was only 3 years old at that time.
Eric’s father, Ye Jia, was also arrested for practicing Falun Gong. Like his father, Eric’s close relatives, including his grandmother and aunties, had also been arrested several times for the same reason and had been subjected to different forms of torture while imprisoned.
For instance, in April 2013, when Eric’s father was in jail for an eight-year sentence, guards tortured him by pouring pungent liquid into his nose while hanging him upside down; the guards refused to allow him to seek treatment when he vomited blood for months later.
“He was locked in a small room for six years, with two to three prison guards watching him every day,” he told The Epoch Times in a previous interview.
Eric Jia with his mother, Li Liu, at a rally in Martin Place, Sydney, Australia, on July 20, 2015. (He Wei/The Epoch Times)
Eric’s father was last arrested in September 2017 and released three months later in December after Australian Greens Senator for Victoria Janet Rice sent a letter to the mayor of Xi’an, China, in November 2017, urging him to release Ye Jia “immediately and unconditionally.” Eric’s story mirrors that of many other overseas Chinese Falun Gong practitioners whose families are still being persecuted by the CCP in mainland China. Eric fled to Australia with his mother in 2012 and has been raising awareness of the persecution.
“There is nothing wrong to have faith in Falun Dafa. The CCP used all kinds of means to make us give up our beliefs,” Eric said to a crowd that had gathered at Martin Place in Sydney in 2018 to commemorate the lives lost at the hands of the CCP.
“I dream one day that they can be free and we can be together again.”
No Hope for Reunion
While many families are waiting anxiously for the day they can reunite with their fathers, for countless others, this reunion day would never arrive.
For instance, 20-year-old Xu Xinyang lost her dad in the brutal persecution.
“In my memory, most of my childhood was spent in fear and horror,” said Xu Xinyang at a forum on Dec. 4, 2018, on Capitol Hill to highlight the deteriorating human rights situation in China.
Xinyang’s parents, both Falun Gong practitioners, were arrested by the Chinese regime for printing materials to expose the persecution of their faith. Her father was sentenced to eight years in prison when her mother was pregnant with her. Xinyang’s father died 13 days after he was released.
Xu Xinyang (R) and her mother, Chi Lihua, hold pictures of her late father, Xu Dawei. Xu was sentenced to eight years for practicing Falun Gong. He died just 13 days after he was released. (Jennifer Zeng/The Epoch Times)
Due to the brutality of the persecution, Xinyang never saw her dad until she was 8 years old, she told the audience at the forum.
“He wanted to hold me, but I was scared and hid behind my mom. I refused to let him hold me because I never had a chance to know him,” she said. “This became my lifelong regret.”
Even after her father was persecuted to death, Xinyang and her mother were not spared. The police even arrested her school principal and some of her teachers, all of whom were Falun Gong practitioners. Xinyang was wanted by the police. Fortunately, she managed to flee to Thailand with her mother when she was 12 and arrived in the United States in 2017.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk revealed that he believes certain unions are primary drivers of the Democratic Party’s and Biden administration’s policies.
“The general public is not aware of the degree to which unions control the Democratic Party. One does not need to speculate on this point,” Musk said in an interview published over the weekend.
Two of Musk’s businesses, Tesla and SpaceX, are not unionized, which Musk says is because of the “negative employment” in Silicon Valley. He says that Tesla workers typically often have numerous job offers.
“Last year, Biden held an EV summit where Tesla was explicitly not allowed to come, but [United Auto Workers] was. So, Tesla has made two-thirds of all the electric vehicles in the United States,” said Musk, who is estimated to be worth more than $250 billion.
United Auto Workers (UAW), with more than 390,000 active members, is one of the largest unions in the United States and has long been a major player in Democratic Party politics since its inception nearly 100 years ago.
“So, deliberately excluding us from an EV summit at the White House—but including UAW—tells you everything you need to know,” Musk said in the interview. “They have so much power over the White House that they can exclude Tesla from an EV summit—insane.”
Musk said that during the recent summit, Biden praised General Motors and its president, Mary Barra, for leading the “EV revolution,” despite GM only delivering 26 electric vehicles in that same quarter. Tesla is by far the largest maker of electric vehicles in the United States.
“That’s some next-level insanity,” he said of the incident.
In early June, Biden also brushed off Musk’s comments on a possible recession and said that other car companies have made recent investments in electric vehicles.
“Well, let me tell you, while Elon Musk is talking about that, Ford is increasing their investment overwhelmingly,” Biden said during an event in response to Musk’s Twitter post about the economy possibly hitting a recession in the coming months.
“I think Ford is increasing investment in building new electric vehicles, 6,000 new employees—union employees, I might add—in the Midwest,” Biden said, noting that “the former Chrysler corporation, Stellantis, they are also making similar investments in electric vehicles.”
Musk has frequently criticized the UAW in recent months, taking a swipe at the union in late March after a former union official pleaded guilty to bilking more than $2 million from the organization.
“UAW slogan – ‘Fighting for the right to embezzle money from auto workers!’” he wrote.
It came days after UAW President Ray Curry said his union hasn’t had any discussions with Tesla or Musk since Musk invited UAW to hold a Tesla union vote.
“That would be a good faith effort if they were interested in having that type of exchange,” Curry said at the time.
The Epoch Times has contacted the UAW for comment.
Four key House Republicans are questioning a $500 million earmark sought by resident Joe Biden for an international group headquartered in Oslo, Norway, and led in the United States by political appointees of former President Barack Obama.
The $500 million would go to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation (CEPI), a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), which was formed in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and the World Economic Forum (WEF), according to the group’s website.
The website claims that “CEPI’s early coronavirus investments combined with its global focus, multi-sectoral partnerships, and ability to move quickly resulted in 20+ vaccines against COVID-19 and its variants.” The website also quotes Microsoft founder Bill Gates as crediting CEPI with helping “develop COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year.”
It’s not clear how CEPI can claim credit for vaccines that were prompted and overseen by the Operation Warp Speed program initiated at the outset of the virus in the United States by then-President Donald Trump in 2020.
Shortly after leaving the Obama administration, Dawn O’Connell, former Counsel at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Obama, became CEPI’s Washington, D.C. Executive Director, according to the House GOPers in a June 16 letter. O’Connell is now back at HHS as Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), a position in which she could be helpful to CEPI.
The signers are Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), the Ranking Member of the House Administration Committee, Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
All four of the GOP signers could become chairs of their respective committees if Republicans retake the House majority in the November congressional elections. Their letter was addressed to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda Young, and Samantha Power, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Acting Administrator.
“President Biden’s FY23 budget calls for a specific allocation to CEPI through no evident bidding process. In addition to the creation of a $4.5 billion Global Health Security and Pandemic Preparedness Fund to contract with international health organizations, the budget request includes a separate $500 million line item for CEPI,” the GOP letter signers wrote.
“This $500 million request for CEPI is significantly larger than the federal government’s previous five-year distribution of $20 million, making the United States the single largest contributor to CEPI,” the letter continued.
“The lack of transparency and justification for this funding increase raises concerns. Furthermore, CEPI’s close ties to the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris Administrations, suggest a revolving door of politically-connected personnel where Administration friends are rewarded with federal dollars,” the letter said.
In addition to moving from HHS to CEPI and then back to HHS, O’Connell, during her four years running the NGO’s Washington office, “lobbied the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in ‘support of appropriations from USAID to CEPI… [and an] Unsolicited Proposal Concept Note… for possible cooperative agreement funding relationship,’” according to the letter, citing federal lobbying records.
The letter further notes that O’Connell has never registered as a foreign lobbyist and that “CEPI’s current Director of the U.S. office is Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as ASPR under the Obama Administration.”
A spokesman for CEPI did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment. A spokesman for O’Connell did not reply after asking The Epoch Times for written questions and being given these queries:
Why did she not register as a foreign agent during her tenure in CEPI’s Washington, D.C. office as required by the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) statute, given her employment and lobbying activities targeting USAID?
Has she recused herself as ASPR from any decision-making process, both formally and informally, at HHS that potentially could result in federal dollars or other resources being directed to CEPI?
With whom at OMB or elsewhere in the White House has she discussed the proposed $500 million grant to CEPI prior to today?
The four GOP letter signers want to know how the Biden administration can justify a 2,400 percent increase in funding from the federal government’s current $20 million annual contribution to CEPI.
The signers also want to know if any other NGOs were invited to be considered as alternative grant recipients and which federal agencies, offices and individuals were consulted about CEPI during development of the $500 million grant proposal.
In addition, the signers want to know why has “no lobbyist for CEPI ever registered under [FARA], given the primary beneficiaries of such a large infusion of taxpayer dollars will be the foreign governments funding the group’s operations?”
On its website, CEPI describes the CCP Virus that is also known as the COVID-19 as the main reason for its formation for the development and implementation of the NGO’s proposal of a plan it claims can eliminate the prospect of any similar pandemics in the future.
“As COVID-19 has so amply demonstrated, emerging infectious diseases represent an existential threat to our way of life. It was not the first and, unless we take dramatic action, will not be the last pandemic of the 21st century,” according to the CEPI website.
“But unlike some of the other big threats that humanity faces, we have the tools to substantially reduce and even to eliminate the risk of future pandemics. A decade ago such an ambition would have seemed utopian; now, having compressed a decade of technology development into less than 12 months, it is well within our grasp—if we take action,” according to the site.
The site claims that “CEPI has secured financial support from Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Denmark, the European Commission, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Switzerland, The Republic of Korea, United Kingdom, USAID, and Wellcome.”
Elon Musk recently questioned whether the short video app TikTok is leading to the collapse of civilization, following a new report that alleged the China-owned platform had obtained private U.S. user data.
“Is TikTok destroying civilization?” the billionaire said on June 17 via Twitter. “Some people think so,” his post reads, offering no further explanation.
The remarks came after leaked audio from more than 80 internal meetings showed employees of TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance have “repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about U.S. TikTok users” in China, according to Buzzfeed. It said the recordings include 14 statements from nine employees who indicated engineers had access to U.S. user data “at the very least” for five months between September 2021 and January 2022.
Although the company has also previously claimed that it does not share user information with Beijing, and has a “world-renowned U.S.-based security team” to decide who can access this data, evidence shows employees had to turn to colleagues in China to decide how user data would flow.
“U.S. staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own,” the Buzzfeed report reads, citing tape recordings. It was hours before TikTok announced it had completed migrating its American user data to U.S.-based servers at Oracle, a move that could address U.S. regulatory concerns over data integrity on the popular short video app.
Counting the United States as its largest market, TikTok has more than 1 billion active users globally. Washington has been scrutinizing app developers over the personal data they handle, especially when it involves U.S. military or intelligence personnel.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk later posted that perhaps it is “social media in general” that poses the risk to civilization.
He called censorship on Twitter a “civilization risk” in April. While negotiating a $44 billion buyout of Twitter, Musk has said his offer is about “the future of civilization,” not for profit.
The billionaire, who used to stay out of politics, has also declared his concerns over Twitter’s apparent left-wing political bias.
When asked on Twitter last month about his intentions in wading into political controversy, the founder and chief engineer of SpaceX mentioned “civilization” again, in the context of what he called “woke” progressive policies.
“Unless it is stopped, the woke mind virus will destroy civilization and humanity will never” reach Mars, Musk responded.
Refineries suggest a different path for Biden administration to boost production
American fossil fuel companies responded on Wednesday to resident Joe Biden’s June 14 letter that accused them of profiteering and driving up gas prices during a “time of war.”
Biden’s letter blamed gas prices, which have skyrocketed from $2.53 per gallon when he took office to $5.00 today, on “Putin’s war of aggression” and greedy corporations, ignoring his own efforts to suppress American fossil fuel production. Since taking power in January 2021, the Biden administration has worked relentlessly across multiple agencies to carry out his campaign pledge in which he stated, “I guarantee you we are going to end fossil fuel.”
Biden’s note to energy executives put the blame for today’s surging gas prices on refineries and the “high profit margins for refining oil into gasoline,” stating that when crude oil was $120 per barrel in March, similar to today’s prices, “the price of gas at the pump was $4.25 per gallon. Today, gas prices are 75 cents higher.” The difference, he claimed, was due to refiners’ profit margins, which have tripled since then. Simultaneously, White House Spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre slammed U.S. oil companies for failing to do their “patriotic duty.”
Responding to Biden’s letter, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers stated (pdf) that U.S. refineries are currently operating at 94 percent capacity, among the highest utilization rates in the world, and that prices for oil products are set on world markets based on global supply and demand, not by American companies. According to the Energy Information Administration, refining costs made up 14 percent of the total price of gasoline in 2021. The remainder includes 54 percent for crude oil, 16 percent for distribution, and 16 percent for taxes. Escalating prices have driven up the share of crude oil to 60 percent of the total this month.
Regarding Biden’s complaint that U.S. refineries had pushed gas prices higher by reducing their capacity by 800,000 barrels a day, industry representatives responded that half of the refineries that have shut did so because they are being converted to renewable fuel production. “These investments cannot be easily or quickly undone,” they stated.
The fossil fuel industry, its consumers, and its investors have responded to administration policies designed to reduce production and capacity. This includes federal incentives to replace gasoline-powered cars and trucks with electric vehicles (EVs), cancellation of oil leases in Alaska, canceling new lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico, and canceling the $9 billion Keystone Pipeline, for which construction was already underway.
On March 11, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reinstated California’s authority to enforce its own emissions standards for cars and trucks, “which other states can also adopt and enforce,” according to an official statement. “With this authority restored, the EPA will continue partnering with states to advance the next generation of clean vehicle technologies.”
Kathleen Sgama, President of the Western Energy Alliance, stated in a June 16 Fox News interview that “we keep hearing that he’s working like the devil to bring down energy prices and that is anything but the truth.” She noted that there are about 5,900 development leases and 3,000 permits that are currently being held up by environmental litigation.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced the creation of its Office of Environmental Justice, which “will engage all Justice Department bureaus, components and offices in the collective pursuit of environmental justice.” In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a ruling on March 21 that all listed companies must issue audited reports on their greenhouse gas emissions including that of their suppliers.
The SEC action underscored the administration’s alignment with progressive investment managers, pension funds, banks, insurers, and finance ministers who joined together in global clubs like Climate Action 100+, the Global Investors Statement to Governments on Climate Change, the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. Members of these clubs have signed joint pledges to reduce or eliminate financing for the fossil fuel industry.
The sum effect of these policies has been a chilling effect on fossil fuel investment. The last major refinery built in America was in 1977, long before the current administration, but Chevron CEO Mike Wirth stated that he does not expect any new refineries will be built in the United States for economic and political reasons.
“We’ve seen refineries closed,” Wirth stated. “We’ve seen refineries being repurposed to become bio refineries. And we live in a world where the policy, the stated policy of the U.S. government is to reduce demand for the products that refiners produce.” Currently, the United States has 129 operable refineries.
Many in the fossil fuel industry see current gas prices as the result of a deliberate and continuing effort by the Biden administration to force Americans to switch from oil and gas to renewable energy.
Biden recently praised oil price hikes as “an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.” And Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm stated that rising oil prices were “an exclamation point” demonstrating the need to switch from oil to wind and solar, previously advising Americans that “if you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you.”
“They want this current situation,” Daniel Turner, Executive Director of Power the Future, an energy advocacy group, told The Epoch Times. “They want the status quo, they just don’t want the political fallout from it. The Biden administration needs to understand that if they’re going to pursue this agenda, then there are going to be consequences. It’s almost childlike naivete to think that you can have such a radical agenda and not have any consequences. It just shows how unserious and in-over-their-heads this administration is.”
But the progressive push to curtail fossil fuels is taking effect before renewables such as wind and solar are capable of filling the gap. Price hikes and shortages of gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer—an oil derivative—have had a ripple effect throughout the economy, hitting not only prices at the pump but also food prices, shipping and delivery expenses, and the cost of products that use plastic or other oil-based components.
To the many things that Democrats have blamed on Russia, including buying Facebook ads to support President Trump’s campaign and spreading misinformation, Biden has now added America’s inflationary crisis. “There is no question that Vladimir Putin is principally responsible for the intense financial pain the American people and their families are bearing,” he wrote.
He encouraged refineries to stand up to Putin and “take immediate actions to increase the supply of gasoline, oil, and diesel.” Biden said he has done his part by releasing supplies from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, allowing greater use of ethanol in gasoline, and using the Defense Production Act to provide inputs for energy production.
The fossil fuel industry responded to Biden that better solutions would include “promoting infrastructure development, addressing escalating regulatory compliance costs, allowing all technologies to compete to reduce emissions, modernizing fuels policies, and ensuring capital markets are functioning for all participants.”
Meanwhile, Biden has planned a trip to Saudi Arabia in July to implore oil producers there to boost their output. And the Biden administration has been working on a deal with Iran to end sanctions, allowing them to sell more oil as well.
“I wish the Biden administration made the same overtures and had the same spirit of collaboration with [American oil companies] that they have with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Maduro government in Venezuela, and the Ayatollah in Iran,” Turner said. “The American oil and gas industry just gets threats and questioning of our patriotism.”
A superior court judge rejected the Arizona attorney general’s request to revamp election rules for the 2022 election cycle, citing timing as the reason for the rejection.
Yavapai County Superior Court Judge John Napper denied Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s request to ask Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs to improve the election procedure manual for the 2022 elections on Friday.
“At this point in the game, there is no mechanism for the Court to assist the parties in constructing an EMP which complies with [the law] within the timelines of the statute,” Napper wrote in Friday’s ruling, reported The Associated Press. “The Complaint was filed far too late for this to occur without disrupting elections that have already begun.”
The judge’s rejection marked the end of the AG’s complaint first filed against Hobbs in April, in which he alleged that Hobbs refused to make changes in the elections procedures manual and did not provide him with a “legally-compliant” election procedures manual by Oct. 1, 2021, as required by Arizona state law.
“This case is about the Secretary’s ongoing violation of her mandatory statutory duty to promulgate an Elections Procedures Manual (“EPM”) for the 2022 election cycle,” reads Brnovich’s court filing dated April 21. “To cure that ongoing violation, Plaintiffs are entitled to special action relief ordering the Secretary to comply with the mandatory requirement of providing a legally-compliant EPM to the AG and Governor for approval.”
Brnovich asked that the court order Hobbs to amend the election procedures manual by adding election integrity measures, including prohibiting unstaffed drop boxes, requiring signature verification for non-mailed early ballots, and preserving the requirement that voters vote in their precinct, according to a June 10 statement on the AG’s website.
He called the situation especially “problematic” because the election procedure manual has the “force of law.”
“Regardless of individual politics or party, everyone should understand the importance of maintaining public confidence in our elections,” Brnovich said. “I brought suit to support confidence in the integrity of our elections and accuracy of the results.”
Arizona is becoming a focal point for election integrity issues as the 2022 midterms approach. Earlier this month, the state’s Senate and House lawmakers heard evidence and allegations from election integrity organization “True the Vote” pertaining to a statewide ballot harvesting campaign during the 2020 presidential election.
The hearing presented evidence of cellphone tracking data showing that more than 200 devices had visited ballot drop boxes in two of the state’s largest counties no less than 5,700 times during the 2020 election.
Catherine Engelbrecht, founder and president of True The Vote, said the group’s investigators settled on 10 visits as “outlier behavior” on the side of too many visits to the ballot box. In Arizona, however, they found that each alleged ballot harvester went an average of 21 times each. She called it “extreme outlier behavior.”
Two days after the hearing, the AG concluded the prosecution of Guillermina Fuentes, former mayor of an Arizona county, for voter fraud charges. Fuentes pleaded guilty to using her position in the Democratic Party to illegally harvest ballots in a ballot abuse scheme.
“Based on our research, the ‘Arizona model’ is one that is followed across the country, and it involves national organizations,” Engelbrecht told The Epoch Times earlier this month, referring to alleged widespread ballot harvesting.
“So we, the American people, need to continue the pressure on to continue investigations moving forward to get to the bottom of what’s happening, not just in Yuma County, Arizona, but in many counties across this country.”
An armed would-be assassin’s alleged attempt on the life of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week is part of a wave of violence, arson, vandalism, and intimidation targeting pro-life groups and government officials since the leak last month of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
There have been more than three dozen such incidents directed at crisis pregnancy centers and churches in at least 20 states and Washington, D.C., according to a tally maintained by LifeNews.com, an anti-abortion site.
These include:
The firebombing of a pro-life pregnancy center in suburban Buffalo on June 7
An arson attack including Molotov cocktails against the headquarters of the pro-life Wisconsin Family Action center in Madison on May 8
Graffiti with the threat, “If abortion isn’t safe then you aren’t either,” spray-painted on the walls of centers in Washington state.
Extensive graffiti spray-painted on small rural evangelical churches in the Deep South, where some of the deacons protested their congregations were apolitical
A loosely organized group known as Jane’s Revenge claimed responsibility for several of the attacks, including the apparent arson in Wisconsin and Buffalo. The group, which sometimes attaches the Antifa “A” symbol to its pronouncements, has called for a “night of rage” over the pending Supreme Court decision, on a website called The Anarchist Library.
Another group, Ruth Sent Us–its name evoking the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg–has published the home addresses of conservative Supreme Court justices on Twitter. While not claiming responsibility for the disturbed gunman arrested near Kavanaugh’s house, it informed followers where his children and the children of Justice Amy Coney Barrett attend school.
Federal law expressly prohibits “pickets or parades … in or near a building or residence occupied or used by” any judge, and the House passed a bill this week to expand Supreme Court Police protection to justices’ families.
The rash of incidents and intimidating behavior is domestic terrorism, said Jim Harden, executive director of CompassCare, a nonprofit that operates the Buffalo pregnancy clinic and two others in upstate New York. Harden and his family relocated Sunday after social media accounts began seeking his home address.
“This is new,” he said. “It was the leak that really sparked this kind of activity.”
CompassCare also described the campaign against it as “abortion terrorism”–expressing heightened fears in a place where a white supremacist terrorist had murdered 10 people just weeks before. FBI agents visited the Buffalo clinic in response to the firebombing, but the organization has heard nothing since from federal authorities. Harden expressed skepticism that they–in contrast with local police–have taken the incident seriously.
“It’s been eerily silent,” Harden said.
In response to the May 2 leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe, which in 1973 legalized abortion nationally, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul earmarked $35 million in protection funds–but it was to safeguard abortion clinics, which have not been targets of attacks lately.
The Justice Department did not respond to questions from RealClearInvestigations about whether it has classified the multiple incidents as domestic terrorism or assigned a team to an investigation. Jane’s Revenge has claimed responsibility for the arson and vandalism attack on the Madison office of the Wisconsin Family Action center. Madison police also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
There have been no arrests made in connection with any of the incidents, which began after Politico published the leaked draft opinion by conservative Justice Samuel Alito declaring that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”
Harden compared the law enforcement response to the CompassCare attacks to the silence surrounding the person who may have leaked the draft opinion.
“There doesn’t appear to be anything going on in either case,” Harden said.
Chief Justice John Roberts said he had ordered an internal investigation that might identify the leaker, who presumably comes from a very small circle of people who would have had access to draft opinions.
Agreeing with Harden was Rebecca Anderson of 40 Days for Life, an anti-abortion group headquartered in Texas that has worked with an organization also targeted by Jane’s Revenge vandals: a Lynnwood, Washington, crisis pregnancy center called NextStep.
“I don’t think these acts of violence are being taken seriously as elected officials aren’t publicly condemning them,” she said. “The lack of response from the Justice Department leads one to believe that they pick and choose what qualifies as domestic terrorism based on politics. Our concern is that this will embolden abortion supporters to commit more violence against those who support life.”
In contrast, several anti-abortion figures told RealClearInvestigations, local police have been exemplary in their response and attitude.
“The police came immediately, and the DC Metro Police have been outstanding,” said Janet Durig, executive director of the Capital Pregnancy Center, which saw its front door splashed with red paint and the threatening graffiti tag left by Jane’s Revenge vandals, “If abortion isn’t safe then you aren’t either.”
“The local authorities are taking this very seriously and are investigating,” Harden said. “We had cameras trained at all the points of entry so there is videotape evidence.” Still, there has been no indication that local authorities have made any progress in their investigations.
The available evidence may be thin. Cameras did capture the vandals at NextStep in Lynnwood, Washington, but the assailant was bundled up like an Antifa extremist and nearly impossible to identify, according to NextStep Executive Director Heather Vasquez. “You could tell it was a woman,” she said.
The attacks on pro-life centers don’t square with an emphasis in major news outlets on the potential for attacks on abortion providers, which do not appear to have proliferated in the past several weeks.
“Abortion clinics are secured like fortresses,” a USA Today headline blared a week after the Politico story. “Advocates fear Roe ruling could spur new attacks.”
Reports about the spate of incidents involving anti-abortion centers by both CNN and the Washington Post have stressed that violence occurs on “both sides” of the abortion debate.
Planned Parenthood said late Tuesday that “we condemn violence and hatred in all forms” in a statement to RCI that emphasized “acts of violence, vandalism, and intimidation from anti-abortion activists and politicians” aimed at the organization’s “health center staff and patients.”
The pro-choice National Abortion Federation claimed in a 2020 report that abortion providers receive hundreds of death threats and thousands of “hate emails” and harassing phone calls each year. There has been one deadly incident at an abortion clinic since 2010–the 2015 attack on a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs that left three dead.
The anti-abortion movement does not have an equivalent database regarding threats received by pregnancy centers and religious organizations. In 2012, a left-wing activist entered the Family Research Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and shot and wounded a security guard.
While violence and intimidation have long characterized the abortion debate, Jane’s Revenge has promised to escalate the conflict. In its self-titled “First Communique” published after the Wisconsin attack, it declared:
“We have run thin on patience and mercy for those who seek to strip us of what little autonomy we have left. As you continue to bomb clinics and assassinate doctors with impunity, so too shall we adopt increasingly extreme tactics to maintain freedom over our own bodies. We are forced to adopt the minimum military requirement for a political struggle. Again, this was only a warning. Next time the infrastructure of the enslavers will not survive. Medical imperialism will not face a passive enemy. Wisconsin is the first flashpoint, but we are all over the US, and we will issue no further warnings.”
“Severely flawed” is a cardiologist’s verdict on a peer-reviewed study funded by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggesting possible risks of developing myocarditis and pericarditis after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.
The recent FDA study published on June 11, 2022, used health insurance databases to identify myocarditis or pericarditis hospitalizations occurring in people aged 18 to 64 years, 1 to 7 days after a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.
The authors found that though only 12 to 14 percent of the studied cohort were 18- to 25-year-olds, 33 to 42 percent of the myocarditis or pericarditis events occurred in people of this age group, suggesting that this age group may be linked with these vaccine adverse events.
“These results do not indicate a statistically significant risk difference between mRNA-1273 (the Moderna vaccine) and BNT162b2 (the Pfizer vaccine), but it should not be ruled out that a difference might exist,” the authors wrote in the study.
However, cardiologist Dr. Sanjay Verma told The Epoch Times that the study “using a 7-day limit for clinical endpoints” for myocarditis or pericarditis events after vaccination was “severely flawed.”
Explaining that spike proteins have been found in blood circulation even four months after injection, “there is no medical justification for a 7- or 21-day cutoff,” he said.
Verma pointed out further issues in the study, stating that it does not include 12- to 17-year-olds, “who are the highest risk cohort.”
The same CDC MMWR report also found that the 12- to 17-year-old cohort has “2 to 3 times increased incidence compared to the 18- to 29-year-old cohort,” the doctor explained.
After the second dose, males aged 12 to 17 years had an incidence of 22.0 to 35.9 myocarditis or pericarditis cases out of 100,000 as compared to males aged 18 to 29 years who had an incidence of 6.5 to 15 cases out of 100,000, demonstrating that teens have a higher risk than adults.
Verma also added that “the study does not account for those who may have died before hospitalization,” who would not be “included in insurance claims database.”
Nonetheless, the cardiologist noted a “tremendous improvement” in the study for using health insurance databases as compared to prior FDA studies that exclusively relied on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which would most likely result in a lower incidence of cases.
“Overall, the findings of the study are interesting, but the above limitations likely yield significant underestimation of the true risk of myocarditis or pericarditis after COVID vaccination.”
“Public safety and ethical post market pharmacovigilance warrants more robust active longitudinal follow-up to ensure informed consent and appropriate risk stratification counseling,” Verma concluded.
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out some uncomfortable truths. The ‘elephant in the room’ is being overlooked by our media, despite the fact it’s directly linked to the rise in mass shootings.
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems
Gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are not the problem, because the more gun control laws that have been passed, the more mass shootings have occurred
97.8 percent of mass shootings occur in “gun-free zones,” as the perpetrators know legally armed citizens won’t be there to stop them
Depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings really take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants
Antidepressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are well-known for their ability to cause suicidal and homicidal ideation and violence
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems.
An article written by Molly Carter, initially published on ammo.com at an unknown date1 and subsequently republished by The Libertarian Institute in May 2019,2 and psychreg.org in late January 2021,3 noted:
“According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a mass murder occurs when at least four people are murdered, not including the shooter … during a single incident …
Seemingly every time a mass shooting occurs … the anti-gun media and politicians have a knee-jerk response — they blame the tragedy solely on the tool used, namely firearms, and focus all of their proposed ‘solutions’ on more laws, ignoring that the murderer already broke numerous laws when they committed their atrocity.
Facts matter when addressing such an emotionally charged topic, and more gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are NOT the problem. Consider the following: The more gun control laws that are passed, the more mass murders have occurred.
Whether or not this is correlation or causation is debatable. What is not debatable is that this sick phenomenon of mass murderers targeting ‘gun-free zones,’ where they know civilian carry isn’t available to law-abiding Americans, is happening.
According to the Crime Prevention Research Center,4 97.8 percent of public shootings occur in ‘gun-free zones’ – and ‘gun-free zones’ are the epitome of the core philosophical tenet of gun control, that laws are all the defense one needs against violence …
This debate leads them away from the elephant in the room and one of the real issues behind mass shootings — mental health and prescription drugs.
Ignoring what’s going on in the heads of these psychopaths not only allows mass shootings to continue, it leads to misguided gun control laws that violate the Second Amendment and negate the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens.
As Jeff Snyder put it in The Washington Times: ‘But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow.’”
The Elephant in the Room: Antidepressants
Thoughts, emotions and a variety of environmental factors play into the manifestation of violence, but mental illness by itself cannot account for the massive rise in mass murder — unless you include antidepressants in the equation. Yet even when mental health does enter the mass shooter discussion, the issue of antidepressants, specifically, is rarely mentioned.
The fact is, depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants.
Prozac, released in 1987, was the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) to be approved for depression and anxiety. Only two years earlier, direct-to-consumer advertising had been legalized. In the mid-1990s, the Food and Drug Administration loosened regulations, direct-to-consumer ads for SSRIs exploded and, with it, prescriptions for SSRIs.
In 1989, just two years after Prozac came to market, Joseph Wesbecker shot 20 of his coworkers, killing nine. He had been on Prozac for one month, and the survivors of the drug-induced attack sued Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac. Since then, antidepressant use and mass shootings have both risen, more or less in tandem.
In the two decades between 1988 and 2008, antidepressant use in the U.S. rose by 400 percent,5 and by 2010, 11 percent of the U.S. population over the age of 12 were on an antidepressant prescription.6
In 1982, pre-Prozac, there was one mass shooting in the U.S.7 In 1984, there were two incidents and in 1986 — the year Prozac was released — there was one. One to three mass shootings per year remained the norm up until 1999, when it jumped to five.
How can we possibly ignore the connection between rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings?
Another jump took place in 2012, when there were seven mass shootings. And while the annual count has gone up and down from year to year, there’s been a clear trend of an increased number of mass shootings post-2012. Over time, mass shootings have also gotten larger, with more people getting injured or killed per incident.
How can we possibly ignore the connection between rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings? Suicidal ideation, violence and homicidal ideation are all known side effects of these drugs. Sometimes, the drugs disrupt brain function so dramatically the perpetrator can’t even remember what they did.
For example, in 2001, a 16-year-old high schooler was prescribed Effexor, starting off at 40 milligrams and moving up to 300 mg over the course of three weeks. On the first day of taking a 300-mg dose, the boy woke up with a headache, decided to skip school and went back to bed.
Some time later, he got up, took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage at gunpoint. He later claimed he had no recollection of anything that happened after he went back to bed that morning.9
In one review of 484 drugs in the FDA’s database, 31 were found to account for 78.8 percent of all cases of violence against others, and 11 of those drugs were antidepressants. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The Risks Are Clear
The risks of psychiatric disturbances are so clear, ever since mid-October 2004, all antidepressants in the U.S. must include a black box warning that the drug can cause suicidal thoughts and behaviors, especially in those younger than 25, and that:10
“Anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric.”
SSRIs can also cause emotional blunting and detachment, such that patients report “not feeling” or “not caring” about anything or anyone, as well as psychosis and hallucinations. All of these side effects can contribute to someone acting out an unthinkable violent crime.
In one review11,12 of 484 drugs in the FDA’s database, 31 were found to account for 78.8 percent of all cases of violence against others, and 11 of those drugs were antidepressants.
The researchers concluded that violence against others was a “genuine and serious adverse drug event” and that of the drugs analyzed, SSRI antidepressants and the smoking cessation medication, varenicline (Chantix), had the strongest associations. The top-five most dangerous SSRIs were:13
Fluoxetine (Prozac), which increased aggressive behavior 10.9 times
Paroxetine (Paxil), which increased violent behavior 10.3 times
Fluvoxamine (Luvox), which increased violent behavior 8.4 times
Venlafaxine (Effexor), which increased violent behavior 8.3 times
Desvenlafaxine (Pristiq), which increased violent behavior 7.9 times
Depression Is Vastly Overdiagnosed
In her article, Carter also reviewed the clinical determinants for a diagnosis of clinical depression warranting medication. To qualify, you must experience five or more of the following symptoms, most of the day, every day, for two weeks or more, and the symptoms must be severe enough to interfere with normal everyday functioning:14
Sadness
Feeling hopeless
Feeling helpless
Feeling guilty
Fatigue
Loss of interest in hobbies
Restlessness
Abnormal sleep patterns, whether sleeping too much or not enough
Thoughts of death or suicide
Anxiety
Feeling worthless
Feeling ’empty’
Irritable
Lack of energy
Slow talking and moving
Trouble concentrating
Abnormal weight changes, either eating too much or having no appetite
The reality is that a majority of patients who receive a depression diagnosis and subsequent prescription for an antidepressant do not, in fact, qualify. In one study,15 only 38.4 percent actually met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) criteria, and among older adults, that ratio was even lower. Only 14.3 percent of those aged 65 and older met the diagnostic criteria. According to the authors:16
“Participants who did not meet the 12-month MDE criteria reported less distress and impairment in role functioning and used fewer services. A majority of both groups, however, were prescribed and used psychiatric medications.
Conclusion: Depression overdiagnosis and overtreatment is common in community settings in the USA. There is a need for improved targeting of diagnosis and treatments of depression and other mental disorders in these settings.”
What Role Might War Games Play?
Aside from antidepressants, another factor that gets ignored is the influence of shooting simulations, i.e., violent video games. How does the military train soldiers for war? Through simulations. With the proliferation of video games involving indiscriminate violence, should we really be surprised when this “training” is then put into practice?
As reported by World Bank Blogs, young men who experience violence “often struggle to reintegrate peacefully into their communities” when hostilities end.17 While American youth typically have little experience with real-world war, simulated war games do occupy much of their time and may over time color their everyday perceptions of life. As noted by Centrical, some of the top benefits of simulations training include:18
Allowing you to practice genuine real-life scenarios and responses
Repetition of content, which boosts knowledge retention
Personalization and diversification, so you can learn from your mistakes and evaluate your performance, thereby achieving a deeper level of learning
In short, violent mass shooter games are the perfect training platform for future mass shooters. Whereas a teenager without such exposure might not be very successful at carrying out a mass shooting due to inexperience with weapons and tactics, one who has spent many hours, years even, training in simulations could have knowledge akin to that of military personnel.
Add antidepressant side effects such as emotional blunting and loss of impulse control, and you have a perfect prescription for a mass casualty event.
On top of that, we, as a nation, also demonstrate the “righteousness” of war by engaging in them without end.19 When was the last time the U.S. was not at war someplace? It’s been ongoing for decades.
Even now, the United States insists on inserting itself into the dispute between Russia and Ukraine, and diplomacy isn’t the chosen conflict resolution tool. Sending weapons to Ukraine and calling for more violence against Russians are. Sen. Lindsey Graham has even called for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Showing just how serious such a suggestion is, the White House had to publicly disavow it, stating Graham’s comment “is not the position of the U.S. government.”20
Graham, meanwhile, does not appear to understand how his nonchalant call for murder might actually incite murder. In the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, he now wants to mobilize retired service members to enhance security at schools, and while that might be a good idea, how about also vowing never to call for the murder of political opponents? Don’t politicians understand that this could translate into some kid thinking it’s acceptable to murder THEIR perceived opponents?
As far as I can tell, mass shootings have far more to do with societal norms, dangerous medications, a lack of high-quality mental health services, and the normalization of violence through entertainment and in politics, than it does with gun laws per se.
There are likely many other factors as well, but these are clearly observable phenomena known to nurture violent behavior. I’m afraid Americans are in need of a far deeper and more introspective analysis of the problem than many are capable of at the moment. But those who can should try, and make an effort to affect much-needed change locally and in their own home.
The Left is once again attacking our country’s most vulnerable – children outside the protection of their parents.
A school district in Arizona has been using a worksheet with young students that is making them question their heterosexual identity. The school program in which it is being used claims to “promote leadership and diversity,” but it is really just a cover to teach young kids gender identity and sexuality. Just take a look at this:
The students are being asked what they think “caused” their heterosexuality, whether they just need “a good gay/lesbian lover,” and whether their heterosexuality is just “a phase.” These are totally inappropriate questions for our children and an obvious attempt to push the Left’s woke gender ideology on them. These attacks on our most vulnerable must end NOW!
Parents of young children everywhere need a fighter in Congress, and you can rest assured that I will always stand up for America’s kids. I am standing up to the Radical Left trying to indoctrinate our kids, but I need to know I have YOU on my team!
After some optimistic signs for Democrats hoping to reach a bipartisan agreement on a gun control package, progress in the negotiations has begun to stall as lawmakers failed to reach a final agreement on the legislative text on Thursday.
Following a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 children and two adults dead, the Senate began to make a concerted push to reach a legislative agreement that could pass the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the upper chamber.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) direct Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) to oversee negotiations with Democrats, led by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), for a gun control package.
On Wednesday, Cornyn told reporters on Capitol Hill that he’s “starting to get a little concerned” as the group tries to iron out details, including funding for states that have so-called red flag laws in place.
On Thursday, when some lawmakers hoped they could reach a final text on the package, Cornyn told reporters that negotiations had fallen through and would need more time.
He suggested that the setback is because some lawmakers are unwilling to buckle down and make a final decision.
“This is the hardest part because at some point you just [have] to make a decision and when people don’t want to make a decision, you can’t accomplish a result. And that’s kind of where we are right now,” Cornyn told reporters.
“You don’t want to give politicians an unlimited amount of time to talk because they will fill the available space,” he said. “It’s fish or cut bait.”
“I told them I’m leaving but I’ll be available or by text messages,” Cornyn, walking out of Murphy’s office, added.
If the bill had been worked out by Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) could have had the opportunity to bring it to the floor for a vote next week.
After lawmakers failed to reach a final agreement on the bill, Murphy downplayed the significance of the setback.
That morning Murphy, already prepared for a delay, told reporters, “I don’t think we have to get it done by today but that should be our goal.”
The broad outlines of the plan are well-known and were made public in the negotiators’ June 12 announcement.
The plan calls for an “enhanced review process” for younger gun buyers.
For prospective buyers under 21 years of age, the plan “requires an investigative period to review juvenile and mental health records, including checks with state databases and local law enforcement,” according to their statement.
The bill also will provide support for state crisis intervention, protections for domestic violence victims, funding for school-based mental health and supportive services, investment in children and family mental health services, clarification of the definition of federally licensed firearms dealer, penalties for “straw purchasing” of guns, and telehealth investments.
However, other proposals have been less well-received by Republicans.
For instance, the framework bill also includes a so-called red flag provision, allowing for “resources to states and tribes to create and administer laws that help ensure deadly weapons are kept out of the hands of individuals whom a court has determined to be a significant danger to themselves or others,” according to a June 12 statement by the group.
Red flag laws have long been controversial among Republicans and gun rights activists, who have expressed concerns that red flag laws deny individuals’ rights without due process.
Cornyn explained Republicans’ concerns during an appearance on The First TV on Wednesday.
Cornyn argued that it would be “inappropriate” to incentivize other states to pass similar laws. States that do not have such laws in place, including Texas, should be able to get financial assistance for other programs, according to the Republican. Some states with red flag laws should not get access to the funding because their laws are not in compliance with the Constitution, Cornyn indicated.
This provision, one of the most substantial concessions sought by Democrats, is in part responsible for slowing the agreement.
There are also disagreements on another provision, an effort to make sure people convicted of domestic abuse and those subject to domestic abuse restraining orders cannot have guns.
A law known as the Federal Gun Control Act bars people convicted of domestic violence from owning a gun, but it does not apply in some cases if a person commits the violence against their boyfriend or girlfriend.
“The other issue has to do with the way that nontraditional relationships are handled in terms of domestic violence and misdemeanors. We’ve got to come up with a good definition of what that actually means,” Cornyn told reporters in Washington.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Thursday praised fellow Justice Clarence Thomas for his dedication to the high court’s integrity in light of recent protests and threats that were made against the institution.
Speaking at the American Constitution Society, Sotomayor, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, said Thomas is a “man who cares deeply about the court as an institution.”
And while the two often disagree in their opinions, Sotomayor said she and Thomas have a “common understanding about people and kindness towards them,” adding, “Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee’s name, every one of them. And not only does he know their names, he remembers their families’ names and histories.”
“He’s the first one who will go up to someone when you’re walking with him and say, ‘Is your son okay? How’s your daughter doing in college?’ He’s the first one that, when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida,” Sotomayor added of Thomas, who was nominated by former President George H.W. Bush.
Her comments come as the Supreme Court remains poised to release decisions on several high-profile cases, including potentially overturning Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court will also soon issue a ruling in a New York gun rights case that could expand the scope of protection afforded under the Constitution’s Second Amendment—the first major decision on a gun-rights case in more than a decade.
Several weeks ago, the Supreme Court confirmed that a staffer may have leaked a majority opinion signaling that the court will indeed overturn Roe v. Wade, triggering a cascade of protests as well as threats against the institution.
An armed individual was arrested outside the Maryland home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week. The suspect allegedly told investigators that he was planning to kill Kavanaugh because he believed the justice would side with rulings to overturn Roe v. Wade and would side to expand gun rights in the United States.
“We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like,” Thomas said after the draft was leaked. “We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want. The events from earlier this week are a symptom of that.”
Later, Thomas commented on the leak, saying that “I do think that what happened at the court is tremendously bad.”
“I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them,” Thomas continued, adding that there is a “different attitude of the young” in how they view institutions and the rule of law.
Fairfax County Public Schools will suspend students for using wrong pronouns over parent objections
A Virginia school district will suspend students from fourth grade on up for using the wrong pronouns to designate transgender peers, igniting a fierce backlash from parents during a Thursday school board meeting.
The Fairfax County School Board voted eight to four to approve guidelines that will discipline students who engage in “malicious misgendering,” “malicious deadnaming,” or use a slur based on a classmate’s “gender identity,” “gender expression,” or “sexual orientation.” The board approved the rules as part of next year’s school handbook. Four board members who objected did so for reasons unrelated to the suspension provision, preferring to debate a run-of-the-mill cell phone policy for an hour after fielding heated questions from parents.
The meeting showcased the power liberal school boards wield in America, as the members approved the rules over strenuous objections from parents on constitutional grounds and potentially under threat of lawsuits. While one board member acknowledged the concerns, another board member, Karl Frisch, evaded questions, saying the changes had already been implemented last year, though parents pointed out the school district quietly implemented them during the pandemic. A third, Abrar Omeish, floated the idea of nixing the public question period at the next meeting.
It equally showed parents’ frustration over their lack of influence, and their willingness to pull their children out of public schools due to their ideological drift. In a charged session that stretched late into the evening, many mothers questioned the legality of the new handbook rules as well as their necessity, citing learning loss for their children during the pandemic. One father told the Washington Free Beacon he would withdraw his kids from Fairfax County Public Schools if the “misgendering” rules passed. He mentioned two other parents he knew who had said the same.
Barbara Eckman is a mother of four boys, two of whom are gay. She told the school board she will homeschool her children now to avoid “activist policies” and redress learning gaps, saying she is having to do “the job that Fairfax County couldn’t.”
“I am both a loving mother and an ally to the Pride community,” Eckman said. “The fact that I do not support overwhelming, overreaching activist policies that violate First Amendment rights has nothing to do with how I feel about the gay and transgender community. … I have liberal and conservative friends, and when I discuss your proposed policies—the co-ed family life education and transgender unit in fourth grade, the potential suspensions for misgendering and deadnaming for kids as early as fourth grade—they’re all astonished. So this leads me to one question: Who are you really representing?”
A coalition of parents, conservative grassroots groups, political actors, and one erstwhile Trump administration official rallied before the vote. Many stayed to voice concerns during the open question period, though most left by the time of the vote, expecting unfavorable results. Of the 13 who addressed the school board, 8 rose in opposition to the new handbook.
“I’m here to stop these Maoists,” former deputy assistant to Donald Trump Sebastian Gorka told the Free Beacon, before giving a speech at the parents’ rally in opposition to the school board vote.
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, who organized the rally and is a mother of three Fairfax students, is encouraging parents to refuse to sign off on the new handbook when asked by schools.
“It is a blatant disregard for the community feedback they’ve received, for parental rights in general, and for the First Amendment,” Lundquist-Arora told the Free Beacon. “Given that only 38 percent of Virginia’s fourth graders are proficient in reading, I think the FCPS Board’s enthusiasm to improve primary school students’ reading skills and general education should exceed their ambition to pass draconian laws to suspend them and compel their speech.”
The school board’s vote was a foregone conclusion, given the long reach of the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County. Democratic politicians including resident Joe Biden and then-Virginia governor Ralph Northam used the decision to prohibit discrimination based on “gender identity” or “sexual orientation.” State and local education bodies then implemented policies to the same end, citing the executive measures. Virginia’s Education Department in 2020 drafted a model plan for transgender students that formed the basis of the Fairfax County School Board’s eventual handbook rules. The plan recommended punishments for discrimination, harassment, or bullying, and identifying and maintaining records based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
Fairfax County Public Schools has spent about $16 million in legal fees since 2020. One lawsuit involved race-based discrimination for admission to one of the nation’s top high schools, which was aimed at reducing its Asian-American student population. America First Legal, a conservative legal group, had warned board members before Thursday’s vote that the new rules suspending students for “misgendering” may be unconstitutional.
“No discernible effort is being made to improve our students’ reading, writing, and math skills,” Steve Rogers, a district Republican leader, told the Free Beacon. “That is where they should focus their time, and we need to hold them accountable in the 2023 election.”
Jeff Hoffman, a father of three Fairfax students, told the Free Beacon nearly half of the county supports candidates who may soon be announced to challenge the school board.
“We are fed up with political agendas in our common sense classrooms, which according to public statement from the FCPS most gender identity measures were passed in 2020,” Hoffman said. “The parents of this county are awake, aware, and ready to vote for change. This is just the beginning.”
An excerpt from Matt Walsh’s new book, ‘What Is a Woman?’
The following is an excerpt from Matt Walsh’s new book, What Is a Woman? One Man’s Journey to Answer the Question of a Generation, an investigation into the radical gender ideology movement. The passage is taken from Chapter 5, “The Transgender Takeover.”
***
Transgenderism has taken the (western) world by storm, and there’s no medium where we aren’t confronted with it, often on a daily basis. While this appears to have happened rather rapidly, pressure had been building for quite some time.
In the early 1950s, a former GI from the Bronx who renamed himself Christine Jorgensen went to Copenhagen, Denmark, received a sex change surgery and massive doses of estrogen, and became the first international transgender media sensation. Three wire services together sent out a sum total of 50,000 words on the Jorgensen story in the first two weeks of coverage. While Alfred Kinsey and John Money conducted their experiments and the ideas behind sex change surgery and gender theory spread through academia, society at large took passing interest in the transgender issue after Jorgensen. One could be forgiven for living life in the mid 20th century without worrying if your daughter would come home and announce she is actually a man. It was a simpler time. Jorgensen was a media sensation, but like all media sensations, he was soon forgotten.
In the 1970s, the controversy over Renee Richards broke onto the scene, presaging debates we are still embroiled in today. Renee Richards was a tennis player who underwent a sex change and proposed that, as a result, he was a woman. As Dr. Bowers recounted to me, “Renee Richards was a competitive tennis player who was assigned male at birth, went through a transition, and when her [sic] situation was found out, the women in the U.S. tennis circuit were very upset, thinking that she [sic] had a competitive advantage, and [they] tried to block her [sic] from competing.”
Renee’s case went all the way up to the New York State Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor, writing that forcing Renee to take a Barr body test to determine his sex before being eligible to compete was “grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and violative of her [sic] rights under the Human Rights Law of this state.”
After that, it was yet again largely quiet on the western front until all of a sudden the trans movement stopped making splashes in the headlines and began to form a tidal wave that would wash over society. In 2008, the reality show “America’s Next Top Model” featured a transgender character, normalizing transgenderism with regular appearances on many Americans’ TV diets. A few years later, Bruce Jenner was reborn as “Caitlyn.” Vanity Fair ran a flattering cover story, and nearly every media outlet in America praised him as a hero. Soon after, the Obama administration lifted the ban on transgender service members in the military (a ban that President Trump reinstated and resident Biden lifted yet again).
Transgenderism was moving from sideshow to the main stage, and now it’s in absolutely every sphere of life. There’s no avoiding it. Transgenderism is the heart of the cultural conversation in America, and the only escape is death or becoming Amish.
In the movie industry, Amazon Prime produced a remake of the classic Cinderella, casting the fairy godmother as transgender. In the Marvel Universe—which produces the biggest blockbuster hits today—Disney (which owns Marvel) announced that there would soon be a transgender superhero.
Television boasts its own array of transgender characters. The hit show Glee on Fox introduced a transgender character as far back as 2012. A series called Transparent about a father of three grown children announcing he is transgender ran for five seasons until 2019. Orange is the New Black on Netflix featured a trans character played by an actual trans actor, Laverne Cox. Netflix is reportedly introducing its first non-binary (meaning not following the “binaries” of male or female) character in a series for preschool children.
The celebrity world is filling up with a sizeable collection of trans or non-binary personas from Chaz Bono to the creators of The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers (now proclaimed “sisters”), to actress, singer/songwriter Demi Lovato. Lovato—a former Disney child star—is a self-anointed prophet of the sexual anarchy pioneered by Kinsey and Money. One of her Instagram posts in 2021 read, “Be a slut. Show your body. Get naked. Have all the safe, different, consensual sex you want. Be kinky. Masturbate. Make/watch porn. Make money. Just a reminder that being sexual is okay.”
Lest you worry that only adults and former Disney child stars are in on the fun, Desmond is Amazing is a prepubescent drag queen who was featured glowingly in a segment on Good Morning America. His abuse-courting parents also allowed him to dance at a Brooklyn gay club while grown men tossed dollar bills at him. Of course, no cell phones were allowed while he danced for the men at the bar.
Even if you aren’t a pop culture junky, it’s impossible to get by watching the news over the past few years without enduring a continual parade of transgender “firsts.” Rachel Levine was confirmed as the first transgender cabinet secretary, and he now runs the Department of Health and Human Services charged with managing health policies governing, among other issues, Medicare, Obamacare, and the coronavirus. We’ve had our first transgender Rhodes Scholar, our first transgender boy scout, our first transgender national political party convention speaker, and even our first high-profile transgender government leaker and whistleblower in the person of Chelsea Manning. The amount of history being made is just staggering.
Drag Queen Story Hour swept across the country as frighteningly dressed and confused men (generally) with a strange affection for young children formed chapters and invaded local libraries across the country. Human Resource specialists and allies everywhere have taken it upon themselves to announce their preferred pronouns in emails and everyday conversations at work and in social gatherings. You can be sure if you refuse to do the same, your lack of inclusivity will be noted.
Even having a baby has become another avenue for the pervasive touch of gender theory. Hardly a hospital in America has blue or pink blankets and caps for tiny newborns anymore. They are either a mixture of pink and blue—or lack the colors at all—apparently in an effort to save that puffy-eyed nugget of a baby from having a gender imposed on her at any point in time.
There is no escape. Maybe you’ve already had your kids, and you’re not having any more. Maybe you work from home or for yourself, and you even homeschool your kids. Maybe you’ve already cut the cord on the television, deleted the social media apps, and the only celebrities you can name are Elvis Presley, John Wayne, Audrey Hepburn, and Mickey Mouse. Well, that doesn’t stop the parents down the street from engaging in the hot new trend of raising their children Zyler and Kadyn as genderless or genderfluid. (Zyler and Kadyn, by the way, are actual twin children in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose parents are raising them without gender so that the children can decide for themselves when they’re older.)
You don’t just have to worry about your kids. When was the last time you had a real conversation with your spouse about gender identity? When I spoke with Dr. Bowers, I asked him how his family dealt with his transition, seeing as he was married and had kids at the time. “If you marry someone who is your best friend, they’re likely to understand you, and they’re likely to be with you in the long run,” Dr. Bowers said. “We’re still married legally,” Dr. Bowers said of his wife, “but I wouldn’t call it a marriage. I would call it more like a modern family.”
“Is your experience typical, where the spouse is supportive?” I asked.
“Increasingly so,” he said. “I think as trans as a phenomenon has emerged and become, you know, more acceptable, spouses go along for the ride.” He continued, “If somebody is not a great spouse, whether male or female, and you add this into the mix, you’re likely to create problems. But if you have someone who you’ve been friends with and you have mutual respect for, you know, it often remains.” Got it. So if your spouse declares that he or she is the opposite sex and the marriage breaks down, it’s really your fault for not accepting it. There were probably already problems with you in the first place.
Matt Walsh is a writer at the Daily Wire. His book, What Is a Woman?, was published this month by DW Books. A companion documentary of the same title was also released in June.
PUNTA GORDA, Fla.—An Alabama man who personalized his license plate with “LGBFJB” on a state-issued “Don’t Tread on Me” yellow license plate that the state found “objectionable” now says he can keep it.
Nathan Kirk, Blount County resident and owner of Blount County Tactical, a store that sells firearms and ammunition, received a letter from the Alabama Department of Revenue dated March 9 stating that the license plate would “not be recalled.”
“The state had telephoned me [on March 11] and told me that they would not be recalling the plate and that a letter would be forthcoming,” Kirk told The Epoch Times in a telephone interview. “I wanted to make sure and verify with that letter that it was real.”
Kirk believes the amount of attention his story garnered was the reason behind the state changing its mind.
“Jefferson County Sheriff David Clarke tagged the governor [Kay Ivey] about what was happening to me,” he said. “Then, before you know it, I was getting a telephone call and now a letter. I don’t think they wanted the backlash.”
Kirk said his advice to anyone who is getting “bullied” by government officials is to “not lay down.”
“Unless it’s something bad or vulgar in expressing your opinion, it’s nobody’s right to tell you you can’t do something,” he said. “America in general needs to start standing up.”
Kirk said that he is meeting with legal counsel soon to discuss his options and said that litigation is not off the table.
“I will listen to what they have to say,” he said. “As long as they don’t mess with me any longer—it shouldn’t have ever happened and my main thing was shutting it down, and I’ve accomplished that.”
In October Kirk received his new Ford truck that he had ordered a couple of months prior. He registered the vehicle in his wife’s name and ordered a specialty plate, sometimes called a “vanity plate,” displaying in bold black letters “LGBFJB” against a yellow background with the Gadsden coiled snake logo for his new silver Ford F-150 King Ranch pick-up truck from the Alabama Department of Revenue, Motor Vehicle Division.
“I wanted to do something ‘goofy’ with the tag,” Kirk told The Epoch Times in a telephone interview. “Being in the firearm industry and knowing how [President Joe] Biden feels about firearms, yeah, it’s derogatory against Joe Biden, I’ll admit that.”
Kirk said in Alabama tags “normally” arrive within two weeks of ordering them, but “not this one.”
“The paper tag that I had on the truck was expired and I called the tag office and they told me that there was an aluminum shortage at the courthouse where I ordered the tag—that was news to me because everyone was still drinking out of aluminum cans,” he continued.
On Jan. 21, Kirk said he received his tag in the mail, put it on his truck, took a picture of it, and posted it on his Facebook account.
Then on Feb. 25 he received a letter telling him that the tag was “inappropriate and “objectionable.”
“That doesn’t sound right to me,” he said of the letter. “I thought somebody had seen it and then reported it, but that turned out not to be the case.”
He said he received a telephone call “a few days” after receiving the letter and told him the “exact reason” why they found Kirk’s tag to be “objectionable.”
“They told me they have ‘reviewers from the review department’—that’s the exact terminology they used,” he said. “The reviewer said they thought the “F” meant the explicative word.”
But Kirk said the letter “F” that has “everyone’s feather’s ruffled” doesn’t stand for that, it stands for the word “forget.”
“In my interpretation, it doesn’t stand for that,” he said. “I can’t help what they make it stand for, but regardless, it’s up to your own interpretation.”
Don’t Tread on Me sample license plate from the state of Alabama. (Alabama Dept. of Revenue)
Kirk said he issued a challenge to the department by telling them he would surrender his tag if they “revoked every single license plate in the state of Alabama that has the letter ‘F’ in it.”
“They said they’re not going to do that,” he laughed. “Then I said you’re probably not going to get mine either.”
Kirk said while researching license plates throughout the state he came upon something “very interesting.”
“I found out just a year ago, the state was issuing tags for the Freemasons, the Masonic Lodge, and you’ll never guess what the first three letters were on the tag—FJB 001, FJB 002 and the numbers go up from there,” he said. “But my “F” tapping is offensive?”
Florida attorney Charles Heekin said that if the state of Alabama had carried through with its plan of revoking Kirk’s license plate he had a “good case” against the state.
“Alabama, because it has censored political speech, has set itself up as an arbiter of political speech and therefore has violated the man’s First Amendment rights,” Heekin told The Epoch Times during a telephone interview. “This is a breathtaking ignorance of the law regarding free speech and the First Amendment, which is the most sacred.”
The anthem of “Let’s go Brandon” reportedly has cemented itself into the vernacular of American citizens who do not particularly care for the sitting president originated from a cheer that broke out at Alabama’s Talladega Speedway in May 2021 when a reporter mistook the crowd’s cheers of “[expletive] Joe Biden” for a cheer of “Let’s Go, Brandon,” referring to the NASCAR driver she was interviewing, Brandon Brown, after he won the race.
The phrase subsequently caught on like wildfire on social media, with numerous public figures, from rappers to politicians, using the term, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed legislation ending mask and vaccine mandates in Brandon, Florida.
First amendment rights and expressing oneself came at a price for Kirk and his family, however, as they, and even their pets, have received death threats because of his gun store and now his license plate dispute with the state.
He said that he gets calls from “private numbers” saying “awful things” about his wife and her salon business.
He said he does not think that it is anyone local, he believes it is someone who has seen the story on “other media outlets” and has gone to great lengths to obtain his and his wife’s cell numbers, and the calls are “relentless.”
He said that people will call and say derogatory things about his wife, and his children were singled out by telling him they were “going to find them and slap them.”
“They called my wife and said the same things,” he said. “They even said I wasted my money on a car tag when I could’ve gotten my wife a facelift and a boob job.”
“It can’t be anyone from around here,” he said about his hometown. “They’re not the same breed of people. I would never do anything like that to someone no matter their political views—it’s just a smear campaign and they tried the cancel culture thing and failed.”
A Facebook digital sign is seen in Menlo Park, Calif., on Oct. 23, 2019. (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)
Kirk has also had an issue with Facebook canceling his page in an attempt to “silence his opinions” and “hurt his firearm business.”
“I have had four profiles that I’ve had to make because of my affiliation with a firearm store,” he said. “They will either take them down or say I am violating their community standards.”
Kirk said he has lost his Facebook pages due to advertising sales that he has in his store and that Facebook is violating its advertising policies on the Marketplace site located within the Facebook domain.
“They said that a brick-and-mortar firearms store can post things for sale at your store,” he said. “But they cancel it anyway—and they have moved my feed to where nobody can see it—I’m basically irrelevant.
Kirk said his personal Facebook page has been banned because of comments he posted during the pandemic involving vaccines.
“I got banned from Facebook for 30 days because I called a woman a liberal, but she wished death on me and my family—even my dogs—and she gets to keep her page,” he said.
Kirk is now seeking the advice of a constitutional attorney to not only take on the state of Alabama over his license plate, but Facebook as well.
“I want Mark Zuckerberg to know who I am,” he said.
According to the department’s website, In Alabama, “every motor vehicle operator who operates a motor vehicle upon any city street or other public highway of or in this state shall at all times keep attached and plainly visible on the rear end of such motor vehicle a license tag or license plate as prescribed and furnished by the Department of Revenue at the time the owner or operator purchases his license.”
“Anyone violating the provisions of this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall, upon conviction, be punished by fine not exceeding $500.00 and, in addition thereto, shall be prohibited from driving a motor vehicle in Alabama for a period of not less than 60 days nor more than six months,” the website says.
The Alabama Department of Revenue responded via email to The Epoch Times that the “matter is now closed.”
‘China is the drug he just can’t quit’: GOP Senator slams NIAD head’s remarks
Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was unable to commit to stop federal funding from going to Chinese scientific research, despite the U.S. intelligence community assessing the regime as America’s top adversary.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), made the remarks while appearing virtually at the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee hearing on June 16, during an exchange with Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas).
“The NIH is still funding research in China, at least $8 million since 2020. In the Intelligence Community’s 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, the Chinese Communist Party is presented as one of the top threats to the United States, along with Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. To my knowledge, only China is receiving U.S. research dollars,” said the senator during the hearing. “When will you as director of NIAID stop funding research in China?”
Since 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a total of $8.3 million in grants to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and its division National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, along with five top public universities in mainland China and Hong Kong, according to the NIH website.
Although this amount doesn’t capture dollars later funneled to a Chinese institution through a U.S.-based organization, such as New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which had partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to perform coronavirus-related experiments that some experts said fit the definition of gain-of-function research, that is, experiments that increase the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a virus.
Fauci, in response to Marshall’s question, said that the U.S. federal agencies “had very productive peer-reviewed highly regarded research projects with our Chinese colleagues that have led to some major advances in biomedical research.”
“So I don’t think I’d be able to tell you that we are going to stop funding Chinese,” Fauci said.
“We obviously need to be careful and make sure that when we do fund them we have the proper peer review and we go through all the established guidelines,” he continued, adding that “grants that go to foreign countries, including China, have State Department clearance.”
“Dr. Fauci’s remarks prove that China is the drug he just can’t quit,” Marshall later told The Epoch Times about the NIAID head’s response.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) questions Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a Senate panel on June 16, 2022. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
“Dr. Fauci told the truth for once after years of repeated dishonesty that has eroded Americans’ trust in our public health institutions. In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, our government should know it’s dangerous and wrong to continue funding research projects supported by the Chinese Communist Party.”
The senator, at the hearing, followed up by asking Fauci if he agrees that the American public lacks records and studies from EcoHealth Alliance’s research.
Fauci’s answer was evasive.
“We have access to an extraordinary amount of information that has gone there,” he said, arguing that the publicly available information in the scientific journals is sufficient.
“Obviously none of us know everything that’s going on in China but if the question at hand is the rather small … peer-reviewed high-priority grant that was given from Eco[Health] to China in a sub-award we have a lot of good information that’s in the publishing.”
The NIH gave a total of $3.1 million grant to EcoHealth over the five years from 2014 to 2019. A fifth of that, $599,000, went to the Wuhan lab, in part for identifying and altering bat coronaviruses deemed likely to infect humans, documents obtained by The Intercept show.
Fauci earlier this week tested positive for COVID-19 and joined the Thursday Senate hearing remotely. His response to Marshall omitted reference EcoHealth’s lack of disclosure over some of its research activities, which would have prompted an NIH review over biosafety measures.
In this image from video, Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies to a Senate panel via remotelink on June 16, 2022. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
In one experiment at the Wuhan facility, funded by NIH via EcoHealth, mice infected with a modified version of the original bat coronavirus “became sicker than those infected” with the original version, an “unexpected result” that was not “something that the researchers set out to do,” Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director at the NIH, told lawmakers last October.
He said EcoHealth had violated grant terms by failing to promptly notify the NIH about the finding.
Fauci, at the Thursday hearing, also told Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) that he believes the outbreak of the virus “is very, very likely a jump in species from an animal host,” and less likely to be the result of a lab leak.
“I believe it’s essential to have cooperation and collaboration with the Chinese,” he said when Braun asked him whether he thinks Beijing will cooperate with him to “get to the thorough bottom of” COVID-19 origins.
The Supreme Court of Iowa on June 17 overturned a four-year-old decision it made holding that the Iowa Constitution guarantees the right to abortion, and determined the state constitution does not in fact provide any such guarantee.
The move allows the Republican-controlled Iowa General Assembly to move forward with plans to restrict, or possibly prohibit, abortions in the state.
The state court ruling came as Americans await the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which a leaked drafted majority opinion suggests will overturn Roe v. Wade, the seminal 1973 precedent that federalized abortion policy, overriding the states and making the procedure lawful throughout the entire United States. The landmark 7-2 decision held that a woman’s right to an abortion was safeguarded by her right to privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The ruling also came a month after both chambers of the Iowa General Assembly passed a proposed amendment to the Iowa Constitution stating that “this Constitution does not recognize, grant, or secure a right to abortion or require the public funding of abortion,” as The Epoch Times reported. To take effect, the amendment must be agreed to by two successive General Assemblies and ratified by a majority of Iowa voters.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, Iowa lawmakers would presumably not have to continue pursuing an anti-abortion amendment to the Iowa Constitution in order to roll back protections for the procedure.
In Planned Parenthood of the Heartland v. Reynolds, court file 21-0856, the abortion rights group and abortion provider challenged the constitutionality of a law mandating a 24-hour waiting period in the state for an abortion. In a 182-page opinion (pdf), the Supreme Court of Iowa held the state’s constitution “is not the source of a fundamental right to an abortion.”
The court reversed a district court’s grant of summary judgment to Planned Parenthood and remanded the waiting period case to that court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
In a 2018 ruling, the Supreme Court of Iowa found that abortion was protected by the state constitution. The court ruled at the time that “autonomy and dominion over one’s body go to the very heart of what it means to be free.”
But in its new decision, the Iowa court held that its 2018 ruling “insufficiently recognizes that future human lives are at stake.”
“Although we overrule PPH2 [i.e. the 2018 decision], and thus reject the proposition that there is a fundamental right to an abortion in Iowa’s Constitution subjecting abortion regulation to strict scrutiny, we do not at this time decide what constitutional standard should replace it,” added Justice Edward Mansfield, author of the new majority opinion.
The composition of the state’s high court has changed in the four years since GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds, an outspoken pro-life advocate, took office. Reynolds has appointed four justices, which means that six of the seven members of the court have been named to it by Republican governors.
Reynolds issued a statement praising the new ruling.
“Today’s ruling is a significant victory in our fight to protect the unborn,” she said.
“The Iowa Supreme Court reversed its earlier 2018 decision, which made Iowa the most abortion-friendly state in the country. Every life is sacred and should be protected, and as long as I’m governor that is exactly what I will do.”
Peter Navarro, a White House adviser during the Trump administration, pleaded not guilty on June 17 to contempt of Congress charges.
Navarro was hit with the misdemeanor charges earlier in June, after declining to cooperate with the House of Representatives panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, citing executive privilege due to his former position at the White House.
Navarro had been representing himself before the issue turned into a criminal one.
“Obviously being put in leg irons and having people want to put me in prison have changed matters,” Navarro told reporters outside the federal courthouse in Washington.
Navarro has also said he was denied a call to a lawyer after being arrested, which prosecutors have denied.
During Friday’s hearing, Navarro’s attorneys asked for the trial to take place in 2023 so that constitutional questions surrounding the privilege invocation could be resolved, WUSA-TV reported.
They also said Navarro plans to go on a tour beginning in September promoting his new book, “Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win it Back.”
Prosecutors said the government was ready to start the trial sooner.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta set the start of the trial for Nov. 17, but indicated that might not be the final trial date.
Navarro is the second former Trump adviser charged for refusing to cooperate with the House Jan. 6 panel.
Steve Bannon, who has also cited privilege, was the first.
Bannon’s motion to dismiss the charges was rejected by U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, this week.
Bannon’s attempts to subpoena House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—who appointed every member of the panel—and members of the panel, have not yet been ruled upon.
Two other former Trump aides who have resisted working with the panel have not been charged.
The Department of Justice reportedly made the decision not to prosecute the former White House employees, Dan Scavino and Mark Meadows, despite exhortations from the panel that the men be prosecuted.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the panel, and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), chairwoman of the panel, said in a recent joint statement that they were puzzled by the move.
Thompson has said that Navarro’s testimony was being sought, as well as records he possessed, because he appeared to have information “directly relevant to the Select Committee’s investigation into the causes of the January 6th attack on the Capitol.”
Chevron this week released a statement addressing resident Joe Biden’s letter to oil companies that suggested he may take executive action amid record-high gas prices.
“We understand the significant concerns around higher fuel prices currently faced by consumers around the country, and the world. We share these concerns, and expect the Administration’s approach to energy policy will start to better reflect the importance of addressing them,” Chevron said in a statement to Biden.
The president sent letters Wednesday to Marathon Petroleum Corp., Valero Energy Corp., ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, Chevron, BP, and Shell to demand action on lowering gas prices. He asked why oil companies are not refining more and claimed they are reaping windfall profits.
“At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” Biden wrote, according to the letter. This weak, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated that oil producers have a “patriotic duty” to increase refining capacity, although she told a reporter Thursday that the United States doesn’t need to be drilling more to deal with the record prices at the pump.
Chevron further said that since Biden took office in January 2021, his administration has signaled that it will “impose obstacles to our industry delivering energy resources the world needs.”
While the firm did not elaborate, it may have been referring to a flurry of executive orders targeting the oil industry such as killing the Keystone XL pipeline, suspending new oil drilling leases on federal lands, and ending fossil fuel subsidies used by certain agencies, among other measures.
Chevron also stated it will increase its Permian Basin production by 15 percent in 2022, while other oil firms have said they’ve already increased capacity in light of the gas prices.
“Our refineries are running full out,” Bruce Niemeyer, corporate vice president of strategy and sustainability at Chevron, told the Reuters news agency on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Shell told the news outlet that it is “producing at capacity” and looking at options to increase oil production.
ExxonMobil also issued a response to Biden’s letter and provided what it described as short-term and long-term solutions.
“In the short term, the U.S. government could enact measures often used in emergencies following hurricanes or other supply disruptions—such as waivers of Jones Act provisions and some fuel specifications to increase supplies,” the energy company said in a news release Wednesday.
In the longer term, the federal government “can promote investment through clear and consistent policy that supports U.S. resource development, such as regular and predictable lease sales, as well as streamlined regulatory approval and support for infrastructure such as pipelines,” according to ExxonMobil.
An Obama-appointed federal judge in New York who owns between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of Pfizer stock has recused herself to avoid the possible appearance of bias or prejudice since she was overseeing a case of NYC teachers trying to get exemptions to the COVID vaccines.
Recusal, in legal terms, means that a judge excuses him or herself because of a potential conflict of interest.
Valerie Caproni is a United States District Court for the Southern District of New York who was overseeing two cases that could potentially have a conflict of interest.
“Plaintiffs argue that the Undersigned’s ownership of stock in Pfizer Inc. ‘constitutes a direct financial conflict of interest in the outcome of this case,’” reads the order granting recusal (pdf) of Caproni—the first judge—which was filed on June 11.
Att. Sujata Gibson, who represents one of the lawsuits, Kane et al. v. de Blasio, told The Epoch Times: “Federal law prohibits federal judges from taking part in a case in which they have any financial interest, no matter how small. Pfizer stocks have been impacted by court injunctions against COVID vaccine mandates, and ownership of this stock, therefore, constitutes a conflict of interest. We are glad that Judge Caproni is stepping down after improperly overseeing this case for eight months.”
The second appointed judge also stepped down for similar reasons.
On the morning of June 14, plaintiffs filed a motion to disqualify Judge Edgardo Ramos, who was initially assigned and has agreed to step down due to his investments in Pfizer and other COVID vaccine stocks.
According to a Wall Street Journal article, Edgardo Ramos and other 130 federal judges broke the law by overseeing court cases where they or their families owned stock in the company or companies involved.
According to the outlet, Ramos handled a lawsuit between TIG Insurance Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp. unit related to pollution allegations while owning up to $50,000 of Exxon stock.
A third judge, who also appeared to own Pfizer and J&J stocks, was asked to step down but denied the request.
“Application denied. The application is based on outdated information,” Judge Naomi Buchwald responded on June 14.
Gibson’s team requested updated financial disclosures.
“The court has now twice reassigned the case to other members of the judiciary with even worse financial conflicts of interest,” Gibson said. “We were alerted that the case was reassigned to the Hon. Naomi Reice Buchwald, who owned up to a quarter of a million dollars in Pfizer stock, and up to $100,000 in Johnson and Johnson stock as of 2020. We have three times now asked that the Court appoint a judge without financial conflicts of interest.”
Michael Kane speaks outside the Australian Consulate to protesters supporting people locked up in Australia for being unvaccinated, Manhattan, New York, on Dec 4, 2021 (Enrico Trigoso/The Epoch Times)
Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is sponsoring the two cases in NYC, representing workers that were fired for rejecting the jabs.
On Nov. 13, 2021, some NYC teachers were granted a right to reapply for their religious exemptions, overturning Caproni’s original denial of relief.
Main plaintiff Michael Kane told The Epoch Times: “Judge Caproni presided over my case for more than 8 months knowing the entire time she had a conflict of interest in owning Pfizer stock. I can’t help but think of all the teachers and New Yorkers who are now on welfare, losing their homes, can barely feed their children, and wonder if it would have been different for them if only we had an impartial judge before us.”
In March, NYC Mayor Eric Adams granted vaccination exemption for the city’s athletes and performers and later denied accusations of being lobbied by economic groups to nullify the requirement.
“What our economic team has been doing is stating, ‘How do we turn around our economy?’” Adams said during an appearance on FOX5 in March.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams gives a speech at Kings Theatre, in the Flatbush neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough in New York on April 26, 2022. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“That’s why we did the outside dining, that’s why we lifted the determination of must-have the vaccine inside the restaurants. We listen to people and stated we’re going to do this at the right time so that we can turn around our economy and make sure we don’t do it [in a way] that’s going to impact our health,” Adams said.
However, Adams admitted that ex-City Council Speaker Corey Johnson lobbied him on behalf of the Brooklyn Nets prior to granting exemptions to local athletes from New York’s vaccine mandates.
“Corey reached out, clearly stated he was speaking on behalf of the Nets when he reached out,” Adams said. “I received calls from people who were against and for—that happens in this city. I said, ‘Corey, like any other person, I’m going based on what my doctors stated.’”
In the public record of the contract, it shows that the lobbying is targeting three city officials: Eric Adams, Frank Carone, Adams’s counselor, and his chief legal adviser Brendan McGuire.
Screenshot of a table from the New York Office of The City Clerk. (Screenshot via The Epoch Times)
The Epoch Times reached out to Caproni’s office for comment.
Schools are adopting programs tied to “Comprehensive Sex Ed” and others that are teaching a hyper-sexualized narrative on gender and personal relationships. Behind these programs is a system that is pulling children from the authority of their parents, and exposing them to direct lines of communication with adults on sexual platforms. Children who refuse the new sexual and political narratives face various forms of racial and sexual discrimination, and parents who refuse to acknowledge the sexual narratives can be accused of “spiritual abuse.” According to Brenda Lebsack, a teacher of 30 years and a former school board member for Orange Unified School District, these programs equate to the grooming of children and are part of a broader agenda.
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A lawsuit has been filed against a California school district and staff accused of coaching a middle school student into thinking she was transgender and secretly changing her name and pronouns at school.
The lawsuit alleges school staff manipulated the sixth-grade student into “believing she was bisexual and that her gender did not match her biological sex” and instructed her “not to tell her [mother] about the new gender identity and expression.”
Harmeet Dhillon, CEO of the Center for American Liberty, which is representing the minor student and her mother, told The Epoch Times the case could be the first of many exposing the consequences of transgender activism in schools.
The lawsuit, filed on June 14, names Spreckels Union School District, Katelyn Pagaran, the principal at Buena Vista Middle School in Salinas, Calif., and two teachers: Lori Caldeira and Kelly Baraki as defendants.
Jessica Konen, the child’s mother, came forward after a leaked audio recording revealed Caldeira and Baraki telling other teachers about how they secretly recruited students into the school’s LGBT club.
Jessica Konen, the mother of a child who was allegedly coached into a transgender identity at school in Salinas, Calif. (Courtesy of Trevor Lewis)
The teachers bragged about spying on students’ online searches and activity as well as eavesdropping on their conversations to identify and recruit sixth-grade students into the LGBT clubs whose membership rolls were kept hidden from parents.
“We totally stalked what they were doing on Google,” Baraki said in the recording.
The duo led a workshop called “How We Run a ‘GSA’ in Conservative Communities” at a California Teachers Association (CTA) conference billed as the “2021 LGBTQ+ Issues Conference, Beyond the Binary: Identity & Imagining Possibilities” in Palm Springs last October. They described the hurdles they encountered as teachers to conceal the activities of the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) “Equality Club” from parents.
New details have surfaced in the case now that Konen’s daughter, who is protected under the pseudonym “A.G.” in the lawsuit because she is a minor, is actively participating in the case, Dhillon said.
The lawsuit alleges that the teachers acted with principal Pagaran’s knowledge.
“Pagaran was aware of the Equality Club and Caldeira’s and Baraki’s tactics … and approved of them. In fact, Pagaran frequently attended Equality Club meetings,” the lawsuit states.
It also alleges that Baraki and Caldeira tried to push identities on students that they resisted.
Near the beginning of the 2018 school year, when the student was 11 years old, she was invited by a friend to attend an Equality Club meeting but was not interested in the discussion and decided not to return, according to the lawsuit.
About two weeks later, Caldeira approached Konen’s daughter and asked her to come back to the club, saying that she “fit in perfectly,” and the child obliged, the lawsuit alleges.
A file photo of El Segundo High School in El Segundo, Calif., on July 28, 2020. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
In the spring of 2019, Konen’s daughter told a school counselor she was depressed and began attending weekly counseling sessions, after which “Caldeira and Pagaran would often have follow-up meetings with [her] and the school counselor,” the lawsuit states. “During those meetings, the counselor and Caldeira informed [the child] that the feelings she was having were because she was ‘not being who she was’ and that if she became her ‘true self,’ her depression and stress would be better (or words to that effect).”
Caldeira encouraged Konen’s daughter to change her name to a boy’s name, and she began wearing boy’s clothing, the lawsuit further alleges.
“Sometimes, Caldeira and Baraki would introduce and push identities on students, and the students resisted,” states the lawsuit.
Before attending a school board meeting in mid-December to expose the alleged manipulation her daughter had endured, Konen went public with her story and accused school staff, including the two teachers, of “coaching” her daughter.
The Center for American Liberty filed a notice of claim under the Government Claims Act, a prerequisite to filing a lawsuit against the California government, on Jan. 19. The state had 60 days to respond, but did not do so.
“For me, as a civil rights lawyer, I think adults should be allowed to do whatever they want, and if they want to express themselves that way after full information, then that’s their right. But, people are not getting the full information about this radical transgender agenda,” Dhillon said.
Human rights lawyer Harmeet Dhillon. (Courtesy of Trevor Lewis)
“They’re not learning about the permanent effects of these changes. They’re not learning that their sadness and their depression is never going to go away. In the process, American school teachers are actively interfering with the civil rights of American families. And so, we intend through this lawsuit and others … to put a stop to this before they permanently damage and scar more children and destroy more lives.”
Dhillon disagrees with President Joe Biden’s recent push for “gender-affirming care” and state legislation proposed by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Assemblywoman Lori Wilson (D-Suisun City) to harbor transgender-affirming parents who’ve been charged with child abuse in other states.
Some treatments, such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, used to treat minors who identify as trans have not been properly medically tested for use on children, Dhillon alleged.
“The use of puberty blockers on children is not on label. It is not tested,” she said. “They’re using drugs meant for other diseases like prostate cancer. They’re using that to suppress hormones in American children.
“This is barbaric,” Dhillon continued. “When we see other countries mutilate the genitalia of girls and boys, we call that ‘barbaric.’ We call for human rights sanctions on those countries. We’re doing that in America under the guise of ‘gender affirming care.’”
Decisions on transgender medicine are best left to adults—patients who are 18 and older—and can legally make those decisions for themselves, she said.
“I think it will be sad if they do that, but I have no problem with it legally. I have a huge problem, legally, with parents being alienated from the children,” Dhillon said.
Schools hiding the gender identities of children from their parents is not only problematic, but it is illegal, “and we will show that in this lawsuit,” she said.
A California doctor has been sentenced to two months in prison for being involved in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol and stepping inside the restricted premises along with her co-defendant John Strand.
Dr. Simone Melissa Gold was initially charged with entering a restricted building or grounds, violent entry, and disorderly conduct, and arrested on Jan. 18, 2021. She spent two days in custody. On March 3, 2022, she pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of illegally entering the restricted building. Gold was sentenced June 16 to serve 60 days in jail, one year of supervised release, pay a $9,500 fine, and $500 restitution.
Gold is the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), a nonprofit that has spoken out against the emergency use authorization of COVID-19 vaccines and promoted the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during the initial days of the pandemic.
While inside the building, Gold delivered a speech through a megaphone to a crowd gathered in Statuary Hall, where she stated her opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine mandates and government-imposed lockdowns.
Gold expressed regret for entry into the Capitol building in a Jan. 12 interview with The Washington Post. “During the same interview Strand stated that he was also inside the U.S. Capitol with Gold and was there to protect Gold,” according to an official statement.
“I was misguided. I should not have entered,” Gold said. “Everything I did on January 6, misguided or not, was consistent with my effort to do my best for people.” She sounded emotional when she told Cooper that she was “shocked” the prosecutors believed she was not remorseful and did not intend to take part “in a situation that was so destructive to our nation.”
Strand—the communication director at AFLDS and Gold’s boyfriend—has been charged along with Gold. He has pleaded not guilty and rejected an offer for a plea agreement. Strand’s trial is scheduled for July 18.
Regarding Gold’s sentencing, an AFLDS press release on Thursday said, “Like most January 6 defendants, she is a victim of selective prosecution—the defining feature of corrupted governments.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to AFLDS for comment.
However, district Judge Christopher Cooper, a Barack Obama appointee, said that AFLDS was “leaving people with the misimpression that this is a political prosecution or that it’s about free speech,” as he delivered the sentence.
“January 6 was about a lot of things, but it wasn’t about the First Amendment or COVID vaccinations … the only reason you are here is where and when and how you chose to express your view,” Cooper said.
Gold had raised over $400,000 for her and the organization’s legal issues. Cooper said that the funds were a “disservice to the true victims that day.”
Gold’s attorney Dickson Young asked for a sentence of community medical service, stating that his client did not commit or incite violence.
“The loss of our country’s freedoms,” said Gold in a tweet on Friday regarding the sentencing.
Over 800 people have been charged with federal crimes over the breach on Jan. 6, with 300 pleading guilty and nearly 200 sentenced.
JOHANNESBURG—South Africans are clamouring for guns in the midst of soaring violent crime, while their government tries to pass legislation to outlaw ownership of firearms for self-defense.
“A government is supposed to protect its people. A government is supposed to care about the welfare of citizens,” said Dave Alfonso, outside a firearms dealership in Johannesburg, minutes after his purchase of a 9mm pistol.
“Here we have a government which has established one of the most useless police forces in the world, and under whose watch we are now one of the most dangerous countries on the planet. A government that says South Africa will be safer when private citizens are not allowed to own guns!”
There are no official statistics indicating the recent rise in gun demand, but the police confirm burgeoning demand for firearm licenses.
A young gang member shows a gun and ammunition, in in Cape Town, in file photo from 2012. Cape Town’s murder rate is 62 in every 100,000 people, the highest in the world. (Rodger Bosch/AFP via Getty Images)
Weapons dealerships across South Africa report rising trade since the events of last July, when mobs rampaged across several cities, destroying property, looting stores and private homes and attacking people.
Hundreds lost their lives. Law enforcement agencies faced extreme public backlash for their initial slow reaction to the violence, with citizens forced to form vigilante militias to defend their families and property.
“I think that opened a lot of eyes as to what this country could look like in the not-too-distant future, and people have been rushing to arm themselves,” said Nick Yale, who’s been selling firearms in Johannesburg for almost 40 years.
“The last time I saw demand like this was between 1990 and 1994.”
Thousands were killed in the period that Yale mentions, as a South Africa transitioning from apartheid to democracy teetered on the brink of civil war, with assassinations, security force massacres of protesters and bombings by far-Right groups.
South Africa remains one of the most dangerous places on earth, constantly rated as such by global violence and crime watchdog groups.
The World Atlas, for example, collates crime data from around the world, and places South Africa 9th on its list of countries with the most murders, with 36 per 100,000 people. But that ranking springs from data before 2020.
Given that murders have increased exponentially since then, say crime analysts, South Africa’s murders per 100,000 people are now closer to 40, enough to put it on par with Lesotho, the tiny kingdom surrounded by South Africa, and ranked 5th on the World Atlas list.
Several violence monitoring organizations rank South African cities among the most dangerous, with Cape Town’s homicide rate—currently measured at 62.22 people murdered per 100,000 based on 2021 police statistics—being the highest in the world.
The country’s main firearms rights group, Gun Owners of South Africa (GOSA), says weapons sales and license applications spiked again after police released crime statistics in January, numbers that showed increases in all violent crimes, including murder, armed robbery, and rape.
The data showed almost 7,000 murders in the last three months of 2021, an increase of almost 9 percent compared to a year earlier.
Fresh police information indicates almost 6,100 people murdered between January and March 2022, an increase of 22 percent compared to the same period last year.
Almost 11,000 rapes were reported during this period, and almost 14,000 attempted murders.
“We don’t need [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to invade us and bomb us; South Africa is at war with itself. I’m struggling to decide which place is safer at the moment, South Africa or Ukraine,” said member of parliament for the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), Ockert Terblanche.
A riot police officers points his shot gun at protesters during clashes in October 2016 in Johannesburg. In July 2021 July, mobs rampaged across several South African cities, destroying property, looting stores and private homes, and attacking people. (Mujahid Safodien/AFP via Getty Images)
As flippant as his comment appears to be, a comparison of the numbers of murder victims in South Africa with official civilian deaths in Ukraine gives insight into the scale of horror Africa’s most industrialized economy is enduring.
In early May, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said 3,381 civilians had been killed in the first 70 days of the Russian invasion.
So, said Terblanche, the civilian death toll in a “full-scale war isn’t too different from the death toll of South Africans murdered over a similar period of time, in a so-called peaceful country.”
GOSA chairman Paul Oxley told The Epoch Times: “In this context, it’s understandable and fair that sensible people want to arm themselves. What’s not understandable is that the government wants to remove citizens’ rights to defend themselves from criminals.”
In May last year, the African National Congress (ANC) government moved to amend the Firearms Control Act. The change, if approved in parliament, would prohibit the issuing of licenses for firearms bought for self-defense.
Following a public outcry and court action, the proposed bill is on hold, but police minister Bheki Cele told The Epoch Times the ANC “remains resolute” in making the amendment, “because it will make South Africa a safer place.”
He explained further: “Our data shows that the majority of gun crimes are committed by criminals in possession of weapons stolen from private citizens.”
The country’s biggest anti-firearms lobby group, Gun-Free South Africa (GFSA), says reducing the numbers of firearms will mean less violent crime.
“We need non-proliferation, in line with international norms and standards. There are too many guns in the country,” said GFSA director Adele Kirsten.
According to international weapons monitoring group, the Small Arms Survey, there are 5.4 million privately held firearms in the country with a population of roughly 60 million.
That’s enough to place South Africa 20th on its list of nations with the most private guns in circulation, but very far away from the 120.5 firearms for every 100 residents in the United States.
An armed South African police officer responds to a shooting of two alleged gang members in Manenberg on October 18, 2017 in Cape Town. (Pieter Bauermeister/AFP via Getty Images)
Oxley points out that the 5.4 million private guns in South Africa are “legal, and registered by responsible people who have to undergo strict competency training and background checks before they’re permitted to take possession of firearms.”
He said the government should not be trying to limit ownership of legal guns, but should focus instead on seizing the many thousands of illicit weapons left over from the apartheid era.
During apartheid, black people were prohibited from owning firearms. In contrast, the Nationalist government made it relatively easy for whites to get guns, arguing they needed to protect themselves from “communist liberation movements” like the ANC.
But the Soviet Union provided thousands of AK47 assault rifles and Makarov pistols to the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation.” These were smuggled into South Africa through neighbouring countries, especially Mozambique.
Kirsten said she’d provided the government with “tons” of research showing that limiting legal gun ownership “will lower levels of gun violence and can only do good.”
Rubbish, is Oxley’s response.
“None of what GFSA presents as credible research is applicable to South Africa. It applies to countries in Europe, which don’t have the levels of violent crime that we have here. Europeans don’t have to defend themselves against the kind and scale of threats that are normal in a traumatized, violent nation such as South Africa.
“Our constitution guarantees us the right to life, and if we have that right, then we surely also have the right to protect our lives and to defend the lives of our loved ones.
“Until someone, somewhere, comes up with a better way then the best way to do that is by using firearms, responsibly and safely, but using them when necessary and without hesitation when life is threatened.”
That’s exactly what Ronald Naidoo said he did when he and colleagues from a neighbourhood watch group fought off a crowd of people trying to enter the suburb of Phoenix in the city of Durban last July.
He told The Epoch Times: “If we didn’t have our firearms, I don’t think I’d be standing here right now. The only reason these guys did not invade our area was because we stood guard at all entrances with firearms. When they approached, we shot over their heads and they turned back.”
The body of a gang member in Cape Town during a period of violent gang battles in May 2022. (Rodger Bosch/AFP via Getty Images)
GOSA says if weapons for personal protection are banned, it’s going to make South Africa even more dangerous than it already is.
“Go into any suburb now and you’ll see that it’s protected by private security officers, not the police, because our police service is broken by corruption, mismanagement, lack of training, and lack of funding,” said Oxley.
“Likewise poor townships, that are often protected by private self-defence units. The new bill, if it becomes law, will mean it’s illegal for private security officers and these units to own firearms.
“It’ll be party-time for the criminals.”
But Cele maintains the self-defence clause must be removed from the Firearms Control Act as soon as possible.
“It’s too easy to abuse. Almost everyone registering a gun says they want it for self-defence. We only want police in this country to have guns.”
GOSA says if parliament passes the law, it’ll challenge it in South Africa’s Constitutional Court, the highest in the land.
“It can’t be that only police have the right to self-defence using firearms,” said Oxley. “What must citizens use to defend themselves against rampant criminality? Knives? Karate?”
Top Department of Justice (DOJ) officials have chastised the House of Representatives committee investigating the U.S. Capitol breach that took place on Jan. 6, 2021, for not handing over transcripts of interviews they’ve conducted.
“It is now readily apparent that the interviews the Select Committee conducted are not just potentially relevant to our overall criminal investigations, but are likely relevant to specific prosecutions that have already commenced,” Assistant Attorney Generals Kenneth Polite Jr. and Matthew Olsen wrote to the panel in a letter dated June 15 that was docketed in a federal court on Thursday.
“The Select Committee’s failure to grant the Department access to these transcripts complicates the Department’s ability to investigate and prosecute those who engaged in criminal conduct in relation to the January 6 attack on the Capitol,” they added later, urging the panel to reverse its position.
Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, also signed the missive.
The office of Graves submitted the letter in a case against members of the Proud Boys who are charged with crimes in relation to Jan. 6.
Prosecutors said the DOJ “has neither access to the transcripts, nor the ability to compel Congress, a co-equal branch of government, to provide copies of the transcripts.” They also said they do not oppose pushing back the trial of the defendants due to the transcripts not being available.
Members of Congress pose for photos before the House select committee tasked with investigating the breach at the Capitol on Jan. 6 holds a hearing on Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C., on June 13, 2022. (Jabin Botsford/Pool via Getty Images)
“We got the letter yesterday, we are reviewing it, we will respond to it, but we are in the midst of conducting our hearings,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House panel on Thursday.
We have a program to get over, we have to get the facts and circumstances behind Jan. 6. We will work with them, but we have a report to do. We are not going to stop what we are doing to share the information that we have gotten so far with the Department of Justice. We have to do our work,” he added.
Thompson told reporters in May that he rebuffed a request from DOJ officials to turn over transcripts, describing them at the time as “the committee’s work product.”
The transcripts would be shared after the panel’s work is done, Thompson added.
Lawmakers on the panel cannot bring criminal charges, but they can make criminal referrals. Thompson said recently that the panel wouldn’t make any referrals; some members said that decision has not been made yet.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, head of the DOJ, told reporters this week that he is watching the hearings the panel is holding. “And I can assure you that the January 6 prosecutors are watching all of the hearings as well,” he said at an unrelated briefing in Washington.
Garland said the DOJ is working to “hold all perpetrators who are criminally responsible for Jan. 6 accountable, regardless of their level, their position, and regardless of whether they were present for the events of Jan. 6.”
The Jan. 6 House panel has interviewed over 1,000 people in its probe, including many who have not been charged with a crime. The list includes former President Donald Trump’s daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump; former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; and Bill Stepien, who managed Trump’s 2020 campaign.
The panel is holding hearings in June, with the third one of the month completed Thursday. Leaders have said they plan to issue a report by the end of the year.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on June 16 pressed Dr. Anthony Fauci on the royalty payments he’s received while working for the federal government.
Recently disclosed information showed that Fauci was one of hundreds of scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to receive royalty payments. Fauci got 23 payments between October 2009 and September 2014, but it is unclear how much money he made.
“Can you tell me that you have not received a royalty from any entity that you ever oversaw the distribution of money in research grants?” Paul asked Fauci. “Have you ever received a royalty payment from a company that you later oversaw money going to that company?”
“I don’t know, as a fact, but I doubt it,” Fauci responded.
“Why don’t you let us know? Why don’t you reveal how much you’ve gotten, and from what entities?” Paul said.
The Epoch Times has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for all royalty payments that Fauci has received since becoming head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the NIH, in 1984.
Open the Books received information in May showing that 1,675 NIH scientists received at least one payment during fiscal years 2010 to 2014, and that Fauci received 23 payments during that time.
In this image from video, Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies to a Senate panel via remote link. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
The amount of the payments is unclear “because of how these documents are redacted,” Open the Books said in a fact sheet.
The Associated Press previously found that Fauci received $45,000 between 1997 and 2004 in payments for interleukin-2, an experimental AIDS treatment. Fauci told the outlet at the time that he tried refusing the payments but was told that couldn’t happen, so he donated the money to charity. Fauci also said he tried reporting the payments on financial disclosures mandated for government employees but was told to remove them because they were considered federal compensation as opposed to outside income.
Adam Andrzejewski, founder and president of Open the Books, told The Epoch Times that every royalty payment “could be a conflict of interest” and urged the government to be transparent about the payments.
During Thursday’s hearing, Paul said his efforts to get the information have been stonewalled. “We asked them, the NIH, who got it and how much. They refused to tell us. They sent it redacted.”
Fauci defended the withholding of the information, telling Paul, “According to the regulations, people who have received royalties are not required to divulge them even on their financial statements, according to the Bayh–Dole Act.”
He then read off information he had brought up off-camera, which he said showed that from 2015 to 2020, the only royalties he received were for a monoclonal antibody he made.
“And during that period of time, my royalties range from $21 a year to $700 a year,” Fauci said. “The average per year was $191.46.”
The United States has increased heavy crude imports amid Western sanctions on Russia and resident Joe Biden’s letter calling on U.S. energy producers to make more gasoline and diesel.
Customs data shows that U.S. refiners last month imported the highest number of crude barrels in nearly two years, with refiners importing 33.5 million barrels of heavy crude in May.
According to the data, 56 vessels discharged nearly 1.1 million barrels per day (bpd) of Mexico’s Maya, Ecuador’s Napo and Oriente, and Iraq’s Basra heavy, among other grades.
Heavy crudes cost less than lighter shale oils that are produced in the United States and typically produce more diesel and less gasoline.
U.S. inventories of diesel were down to 104 million barrels in May, with further declines expected. Meanwhile, margins continue to rise, further lining refiners’ pockets.
While higher heavy-crude imports are common in summer-driving months, the latest boost to imports comes after the Biden administration called on refiners to bring “near-term solutions” to address rising gas prices and inflation levels at a 40-year-high.
“Your companies and others have an opportunity to take immediate actions to increase the supply of gasoline, diesel, and other refined product you are producing,” Biden wrote in the letter to oil refiners.
“My administration is prepared to use all reasonable and appropriate Federal Government tools and emergency authorities to increase refinery capacity and output in the near term, and to ensure that every region of this country is appropriately supplied.”
Biden’s letter comes as gas prices have soared across the country, currently standing at a national average of $5 per gallon, according to AAA.
The president has attributed the higher prices to the Russia–Ukraine war and increased demand after the COVID-19 pandemic.
In response to Biden’s letter to Marathon Petroleum Corp., Valero Energy Corp., Phillips 66, Chevron, BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil, the latter released a statement stating that the administration’s policies were partly to blame for the current economic climate.
“In the short term, the U.S. government could enact measures often used in emergencies following hurricanes or other supply disruptions—such as waivers of Jones Act provisions and some fuel specifications to increase supplies,” ExxonMobil said Wednesday.
The oil giant states that it has also “been investing more than any other company to develop U.S. oil and gas supplies” including more than $50 billion over the past five years, which it says has boosted U.S. production of oil during this period by nearly 50 percent.
“Longer term, [the] government can promote investment through clear and consistent policy that supports U.S. resource development, such as regular and predictable lease sales, as well as streamlined regulatory approval and support for infrastructure such as pipelines,” it added.
Imports of Mexico’s heavy crudes, mainly Maya and Altamira, reached around 507,000 barrels per day last month, the highest in 11 months, while fuel oil imports from Mexico were near a record at 156,000 bpd.
U.S. refiners also imported a record volume of Basra Heavy crude from Iraq, nearly 129,000 bpd, in May while imports of Ecuadorian Oriente and Napo crudes reached around 112,000 bpd, the highest in 12 months.
Among the heaviest crude buyers were Valero Energy Corp’s Benicia and PBF Energy’s Martinez refinery, both of which are located in California, and Chevron’s refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
“We have healthy demand, low products inventories, and strained refining capacity,” said Refinitiv senior energy analyst Corey Stewart. “Refiners are looking to bring feedstocks into the U.S. to most economically meet what products the markets demand,” he added.
Resident Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats are doing their best to price Americans out of their ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
The Biden Administration is reportedly looking to decrease civilian access to .223 and 5.56 ammunition by nearly 30% – they seek to do this by barring the sale of excess military ammunition produced by Winchester at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Missouri.
Both the .223 and 5.56 caliber rounds are standard self-defense and target shooting rounds used in AR platform firearms.
“Winchester, which operates the US Army’s Lake City ammunition plant, has been informed that it may no longer sell M855 and SS109 ammunition produced in excess of the military’s needs on the civilian market.
How would that affect the civilian supply of .223 and 5.56 ammunition? We understand that as much as 30% of the commercial market’s sales volume of .223/5.56 is produced by Lake City.
The motivation here is obvious. The Biden administration is attempting to further spike the price of ammunition, squeezing the owners of America’s favorite rifles…the scary black ones that the president assures us are only good for killing people and taking down Kevlar vest-wearing deer.
Let’s face it. Even the hapless Biden administration must realize that they don’t have any realistic prospect of getting another “assault weapons” ban through the Senate. Instead, they’re doing the next best thing. They’re trying to make shooting most AR-15 rifles as expensive as possible for Americans who own between 20 and 25 million AR platform guns“
This move should be a jarring wake-up call for any law-abiding gun owners who may not yet be paying attention to the radical moves being pushed by Democrats.
Earlier this week, Virginia Congressman Don Beyer introduced H.R.8051 – legislation that would impose an excise tax of 1,000% on sales of “large capacity ammunition feeding devices and semiautomatic assault weapons.”
Although the text of the bill is not yet publicly available, Beyer has already gained the support of 36 of his Democratic colleagues who have signed on to cosponsor the radical proposal.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
On the 10th anniversary of the implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a law that gives illegal aliens who were brought to America as children immunity from deportation, Arizona’s Democrats are calling for a permanent solution.
Today marks the 10th anniversary of #DACA, Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ-03) tweeted. “It’s a reminder that we have a moral obligation to protect Dreamers in AZ and across the nation. We must guarantee certainty for those who have known no other home but this one.”
It’s a reminder that we have a moral obligation to protect Dreamers in AZ and across the nation.
We must guarantee certainty for those who have known no other home but this one. #HomeisHere 1/3— Raul M. Grijalva (@RepRaulGrijalva) June 15, 2022
DACA recipients are commonly known as “Dreamers.”
“Despite the House’s best efforts, we continue to see xenophobic attacks and inaction,” he said. “The Senate must immediately pass the Dream and Promise Act. Anything less would shamefully neglect our values.”
Grijalva also said that DACA “remains the floor, not the ceiling, when it comes to protecting immigrant communities,” suggesting that Democrats may pursue citizenship for other illegal aliens.
“For the 60,000 DACA recipients who call Arizona home, pursuing their American Dreams by going to college or working has helped grow our state’s economy, culture, and community for the better,” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ-07) said Wednesday on Twitter. “We owe it to our Dreamers to repair our broken immigration system.”
For the 60,000 DACA recipients who call Arizona home, pursuing their American Dreams by going to college or working has helped grow our state’s economy, culture, and community for the better.
“Ten years ago today, I stood by President Obama as we carried out one of our proudest accomplishments,” Biden said. “On this 10th DACA Anniversary, we celebrate the transformational impact it’s had on hundreds of thousands of young people. It’s time for Congress to make this permanent now.”
Ten years ago today, I stood by President Obama as we carried out one of our proudest accomplishments. On this 10th DACA Anniversary, we celebrate the transformational impact it’s had on hundreds of thousands of young people.
The calls to make the program permanent are being made as the United States sees a record-setting spike in illegal alien crossings at the Southern Border.
In April, more than 234,000 illegal aliens were encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the most in history, as foreigners continue to pour across the open border.
Recent reports suggest that CBP’s morale is virtually non-existent, and that many of its agents harbor contempt for the Biden administration, which has stood by idly amid the crisis.
This article originally appeared in The Arizona Sun Times . The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News. Republished with permission.
The new heir to the late Richard Trumka at the AFL-CIO hailed resident Joe Biden on Tuesday as the “the most pro-union president in history,” indicating in her first days as its elected president that her election will not interrupt the decades-long alliance between the nation’s largest union federation and the Democratic Party.
Liz Shuler was elected to a four-year term Sunday and spoke of the need to modernize union organizing, declaring “this is not your granddaddy’s labor movement.” But critics of the group’s leadership note Shuler served as Trumka’s number two since 2009 as secretary-treasurer and was his handpicked successor. Grassroots labor organizers teased a potential challenge to the group’s establishment over concerns it prioritizes Democrats in Washington, D.C., over local organizers, but were unable to propel a candidate that could compete with leadership’s choice.
The AFL-CIO and its affiliated PAC have since 1995 spentroughly $25 million to elect Democrats and $5 million annually on lobbying. Shuler’s ascent comes as the AFL-CIO pushes the Senate to pass the PRO Act, which was renamed after Trumka and is touted by Biden as the most pro-union legislation since the New Deal. If passed, the legislation will overturn right-to-work laws in 27 states. Biden, in a speech at the group’s convention Tuesday, pushed Congress to pass the legislation and spoke of his close relationship with Trumka in past decades.
“I promise you, I am gonna keep fighting for you, are you prepared to fight with me?” Biden asked the delegates.
Shuler pushed to keep her members unified amid speculation over potential challengers. Left-wing leaders, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), and their mediaalliespropped up Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, as a challenger to the Trumka establishment who could build a “militant” and “progressive” labor movement. Nelson has pushed unions to limit their political activity in the nation’s capital and shift resources toward more radical left-wing organizing at the local level. It is unclear why Nelson declined to run for AFL-CIO president.
Shuler told Axios in a story published ahead of her Sunday election that the union can engage in both national politics while also supporting grassroots movements. She presented herself as a progressive leader for a new generation of labor.
“The emerging workforce is people of color, is young people, is women, particularly women of color,” Shuler said. “This is not your granddaddy’s labor movement.”
Patrick Semmens, vice president for the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, said the narrative that Shuler will be a fresh voice for the federation is nonsense. The focus, he said, will remain to bankroll political allies so they push pro-labor legislation to counter declining union membership nationwide.
“Coronation is more apt than election given there hasn’t been a contested election for the head of the AFL-CIO in decades,” Semmens told the Washington Free Beacon. “Shuler swept into power unopposed using the same machine that backed Trumka, so the idea that this is any new direction for big labor doesn’t really seem plausible.”
Shuler has not been without controversy as president. She refused to release information about an investigation into AFL-CIO Pennsylvania president-elect Frank Snyder after he faced a dozen accusations of workplace harassment, largely toward women. To release this information, she said, would be a political risk in a purple state.
“The report was never written,” Shuler told Axios. “We decided to take action prior to official findings because I knew it would divide the labor movement, and we are going into an important election year. Pennsylvania is a critical state.”
Snyder retired days before he was set to take the lead of the Pennsylvania chapter.
Frank Ricci, a fellow at the Yankee Institute, said Shuler’s decision to keep the matter internal shows that the AFL-CIO “puts politics above the very workers it’s supposed to fight for.”
The AFL-CIO represents more than 12 million active and retired workers from 56 national and international unions. The last contested election for president was in 1995, which marked the start of Trumka’s run as secretary-treasurer.
Management ordered veteran to remove American flag on Flag Day
Management at a Riviera Beach, Florida, apartment complex forced a 63-year-old veteran to remove an American flag he had put up in honor of Flag Day.
Army veteran Joseph Carpenter on June 14, Flag Day, mounted an American flag outside the unit he rents. Hours later, Carpenter’s property manager told him he had to take down Old Glory.
“I defended this land,” Carpenter told CBS12 News. “For someone to tell me I don’t have the right to display my own country’s colors, it’s beyond me.”
Carpenter isn’t the only Florida veteran to face pushback for flying the Stars and Stripes. Air Force veteran Larry Murphree, who lives in North Florida, last year won his 12-year legal battle with his former homeowner’s association over his decision to display the American flag.
Carpenter cited 2005’s Freedom to Display the American Flag Act as legal justification for flying the flag on his rental property.
Under the act, a landlord cannot restrict tenants from flying the American flag except in rare circumstances.
Fritz Pamphile Construction, Consulting, & Investments, LLC, the company that owns Carpenter’s apartment complex, told CBS12 that installing the flag constituted property damage.
Carpenter disagrees, telling CBS12 that after he took down the flag, “you can’t even tell where it was.”
Fritz Pamphile Construction did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon request for comment.
Democratic Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and her state’s Board of Education are opposing a ballot initiative, already passed by the state legislature, that would provide vouchers for more than one million students to attend the school of their choice.
The state education board adopted a resolution on Tuesday against the Let MI Kids Learn ballot initiative, which is similar to legislation used in dozens of other states and would allow families to use tax credits to send their children to private schools. If it receives around 340,000 signatures, the proposal will be included on the November ballot without the governor’s signature. Whitmer in October had vetoed bills containing the school choice tax credits, which had been passed by the Michigan House and Senate, saying they created “tax shelters for the wealthy.”
Democrats and members of national teachers’ union organizations have consistently opposed school choice initiatives. Resident Joe Biden’s Education Department drew fire in May when it proposed a cut to federal funding for some charter schools. School choice and educational voucher programs are supported in one form or another by more than 65 percent of public school parents. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy has also found school choice alternatives are more likely to serve poor or minority student populations in Michigan.
Michigan superintendent Michael Rice said the Michigan Student Opportunity Accounts program would “devastate” public schools and reduce state revenue by $500 million in the first year. But Mackinac Center for Public Policy director of education policy Ben DeGrow argued looking at only the revenue impact obscures the program’s overall fiscal effect.
“The State Board majority and superintendent have consistently taken the side of a broken K-12 system over the neglected needs of many students,” DeGrow said. “Looking only at the revenue side ignores the fact that the program would have a very small fiscal impact, and likely a favorable one. … The only way school systems would be devastated is if large numbers of students leave because they’re being poorly served.”
The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on students as remote school reduced learning rates nationwide. A Harvard study released in May found K-12 students who attended school from home in the 2020-2021 school year lost 50 percent of their typical math curriculum learning.
More than 20 other states have enacted similar voucher programs. Funded by donations, the Michigan Student Opportunity Accounts would allow 90 percent of public school students to use tax credits on online classes, school supplies, tutoring and tuition, transportation, textbooks, and skilled training and CTE expenses.
“Every child deserves a fair shot to succeed, no matter their background, their family’s income, or their learning challenges,” Let MI Kids Learn’s website says.
The ACLU is helping an immigration scamster beat federal criminal charges as it seeks to strike down a federal law that makes it a felony to induce illegal immigration.
The convicted conman, Helaman Hansen, scammed almost 500 illegal immigrants out of $1 million by giving phony advice about applying for citizenship. ACLU lawyers fret the anti-inducement law under which Hansen was charged criminalizes support commonly offered to illegal immigrants, such as tips about evading ICE raids.
“Under this broad language, the government could prosecute a loving grandmother who urges her grandson to overstay his visa; a concerned citizen who criticizes or warns about ICE raids; a pro bono immigration attorney who hosts a free legal clinic for undocumented immigrants … and many others,” an ACLU filing in Hansen’s case reads.
The attack puts top officials in the Biden Justice Department at odds with their usual allies. The Biden administration has alienated practically all stakeholders on illegal immigration. Pro-migrant groups are disappointed that the White House did not more quickly end Trump-era public-health expulsions at the border. Frontline Border Patrol agents and DHS officials say the administration’s security policies are clueless and unserious.
Hansen conned hundreds of migrants into signing up for his fraudulent “Migration Program,” according to court documents. Hansen lied to his victims by promising to arrange for them to be adopted into American families, thereby allowing them to obtain citizenship. Aliens adopted after their 16th birthday are not automatically eligible for citizenship.
Prosecutors in court documents called Hansen a “fast-talking con man,” saying he used sleek marketing materials and a fake Ph.D. to entice clients. Almost 500 people enrolled in Hansen’s program, collectively paying him upward of $1 million. Federal prosecutors charged Hansen with inducing illegal immigration because he advised his clients to overstay their visas, stick with his program, and pay him more money. The anti-inducement law at issue is 8 U.S.C. 1324.
“He preyed upon hundreds of people who wanted to find a pathway to American citizenship and exploited their hopes and dreams for his own financial gain,” said Phillip Talbert, the top federal prosecutor in Sacramento, Calif. “The defendant’s lies and false promises caused many to part with substantial amounts of money, and in some instances, a lifetime’s worth of savings.”
Hansen in 2017 was sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to pay $576,000 in restitution following convictions for fraud and inducing illegal immigration. The ACLU backed Hansen’s appeal and in February helped persuade a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to strike the law down. Hansen’s fraud convictions were unaffected.
The ACLU has been attacking the anti-inducement law for a decade. It filed a 2012 amicus brief in a federal appeals court arguing the law is unconstitutional and tried persuading the Supreme Court in 2020 to strike it down.
The thrust of the ACLU’s argument is that the law applies to more protected First Amendment speech than unprotected criminal speech. And the group compared convicted bilkers like Hansen to suffragettes who cast illegal votes and civil rights activists who sat at segregated lunch counters.
“The law impermissibly targets a traditional means of protest with deep roots in American democracy: expressing disagreement with laws by advocating their violation,” ACLU lawyers wrote in legal filings.
The Justice Department is pressing a rarely used Ninth Circuit “super panel” to reverse the decision. If the request is unsuccessful, it will likely appeal to the Supreme Court. The department’s request for a super-panel rehearing was signed by Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite, a senior Biden appointee who runs the department’s criminal division.
Government lawyers counter that the law, properly construed, only reaches people like Hansen, who target specific individuals and then aid or abet their illegal entry. Properly understood, the law is simply a ban on soliciting or facilitating illegality, which is common in the criminal law, lawyers said in legal papers.
The Supreme Court will likely get involved with the case in the future. The justices were set to interpret the anti-inducement law in a 2020 case, but they returned it to a lower court for procedural reasons without deciding on the constitutionality of the law. As with Hansen, the 2020 case involved a defendant running a con on illegal immigrants.
Slack banned the immigration restrictionist group Federation for American Immigration Reform from using any of its services for allegedly violating the company’s terms of service.
A Slack employee informed FAIR of the ban on Wednesday but did not provide any rationale other than that they violated the company’s “Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,” according to emails reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
The ban, imposed on one of the largest anti-immigration policy groups in the country, comes as part of a broader trend from tech companies arbitrarily censoring conservative groups and individuals. Under the guise of policing “misinformation” and “hate speech,” companies such as Twitter have barred users from sharing articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop or criticism of left-wing gender ideology. Although Slack has banned its services in countries facing U.S. sanctions such as Russia, the move appears to be the first against a domestic nonprofit.
Slack’s terms of service prohibit clients from engaging “in activity that incites or encourages violence or hatred against individuals or groups,” although the Free Beacon could not identify any incidents from FAIR that violated this policy. FAIR describes itself as a “non-partisan, public interest organization with a support base comprising nearly 50 private foundations and over 1.9 million diverse members and supporters” dedicated to reducing U.S. immigration levels.
FAIR president Dan Stein wrote to Slack on Thursday demanding the company “preserve all internal communications involving this decision in anticipation of probable litigation.” Stein also alleged that Slack violated FAIR’s contract by shutting down the account without notice or prior warning.
“You should be advised that FAIR is well aware that there are government actors who are actively trying to censor Americans’ right to freedom of speech and their use of tech platforms, including particular individuals at the Department of Homeland Security,” Stein wrote. “Evidence that there was intervention by government officials in this matter would be of supreme interest not only to FAIR but to the general public.”
A spokesman for Slack told the Free Beacon it banned FAIR because it violated the company’s policy forbidding incitement of hatred or violence and that the nonprofit is “affiliated with a known hate group.”
“When we learn of an organization using Slack for illegal, harmful or other prohibited purposes, we conduct an investigation and take appropriate action in accordance with our policy,” the spokesman said.
Slack is owned by Salesforce, a software company valued at more than $160 billion and chaired by left-wing activist Marc Benioff. Over the years, Benioff has earned the moniker “Tech’s woke CEO” by making Salesforce a champion of left-wing values.
Benioff has generously donated to various Democratic politicians such as Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. In 2019, he announced that Salesforce would no longer do business with any company that sells certain types of firearms or ammunition magazines. Last September, Salesforce said it would pay to relocate any employees in Texas who feared they could not get abortions.
The move from Slack follows years of censorship campaigns against conservatives. In January, Facebook banned a conservative publisher from advertising children’s books about U.S. presidents for allegedly violating the company’s “standards.”
Many of these platforms, such as Twitter, have appointed left-wing ideologues in charge of content moderation. In May, the Free Beacon reported on Twitter’s lead censor Yoel Roth’s history of calling Trump officials “actual Nazis” and his decision to block the sharing of an October 2020 New York Post report on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop because he believed the Russian government may have been involved in its publication.
Whistleblower documents obtained earlier this month by Republican senators Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) revealed that the Department of Homeland Security’s now-shuttered Disinformation Governance Board intended on working with such tech companies as Twitter to police content. DHS terminated the Disinformation Governance Board following bipartisan outrage amid controversy over its then-executive director Nina Jankowicz, who had spread conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden’s laptop and called for lawmakers to outlaw “awful but lawful” content on social media platforms.
Stein said Slack’s conduct should have other conservative organizations on notice going into the November midterm elections.
University’s approach to Kevin Kruse provides stark contrast to its treatment of Joshua Katz
Princeton University learned in December about plagiarism allegations against one of its star progressive professors, emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show, but it does not appear to have taken action against him in the intervening six months.
On Dec. 6, the economic historian Phillip Magness emailed Princeton’s dean of faculty, Gene Jarrett, with evidence that Princeton historian Kevin Kruse plagiarized several passages of his 2015 book One Nation Under God.
“I am sharing this information in the interest of academic integrity,” Magness wrote. The email contained detailed comparisons between Kruse’s book and a 1956 New York Times article from which Kruse appears to have lifted passages without attribution.
The university never replied to Magness’s email, Magness told the Free Beacon, and has not announced an investigation of Kruse. Jarrett did not respond to a request for comment.
The university’s treatment of Kruse—a historian known for his searing criticism of conservative media—contrasts sharply with its scorched-earth approach to Joshua Katz, the classics professor who was fired last month after raising hell over the school’s racial politics.
That contrast raises questions about political double standards at the Ivy League university, which has denied that its firing of Katz had anything to do with ideology.
Katz was a Princeton pariah: His biting criticism of the school’s political correctness drew flak from students, faculty, and staff, including Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber. The university even condemned Katz as a racist in its 2021 freshman orientation programming, doctoring one of his quotes to make him seem racially insensitive. It began investigating him within a month of receiving “new information” about a consensual relationship he had with a student in 2007, for which he had already been punished in 2018.
Kruse, on the other hand, is a darling of the online left. He frequently posts Twitter threads debunking conservative “lies” and, in 2017, mocked a member of the Trump administration for plagiarizing his master’s thesis.
“We’d expel a student who pulled this,” Kruse tweeted.
Kruse may have plagiarized his own thesis, Magness argued in a June 14 Reason article, on top of his 2015 book. Passages in Kruse’s 2000 doctoral dissertation are almost indistinguishable from those in two 1996 monographs: Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta by Ronald Bayor and The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas Sugrue.
Magness highlighted these similarities in another email to Princeton on June 7, this time addressed to the dean of research, Pablo Debenedetti. Debenedetti replied that he forwarded the email to Jarrett’s office, which never circled back to Magness.
Plagiarism is a “very serious charge at Princeton,” the school’s academic integrity policies state. “It can result in disciplinary probation, suspension, or expulsion.”
In the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, a quarter of employees at the federal government’s top health agency failed to even check their emails as they worked remotely, according to internal documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
An estimated 25 percent of Department of Health and Human Services employees neglected to log on to the agency’s software suite, which includes their email, work files, video conference calls, and other applications needed to perform remote work, according to the internal documents. The report, commissioned by then-HHS chief of staff Brian Harrison, measured employees’ inactivity on a day-to-day basis between March 2020 and December 2020. The documents, portions of which were leaked by a whistleblower to the Functional Government Initiative and reviewed by the Free Beacon, state that all HHS employees had secure access to these accounts to work remotely.
Federal employees have begun to return to the office in recent months, but the Biden administration has explored ways to make pandemic telework policies permanent. The effort is backed by House Democrats, who on Wednesday advanced a bill that would require agencies to provide advance notice to Congress and the Office of Personnel Management if they want workers to return to the office.
Harrison, now a Republican state representative in Texas, said he grew concerned in the early months of the pandemic that lenient telework policies led to inefficient output from employees. He said he began to track office attendance and found fewer than 10 percent of employees showed up at certain points in 2020. The discovery led him to conduct a comprehensive review of how much remote work employees were doing.
“Almost everyone was home at the federal health agency responding to a pandemic—I found that problematic and worked to safely increase those numbers,” Harrison told the Free Beacon. “Biden sent everyone back home, and you can’t run HHS like that effectively.”
Harrison did not receive the results of the report until January 2021—a week before the Biden administration took over. Biden on his first day in office issued an executive order that included a mask mandate for federal workers and directed agencies to explore new telework policies. The Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the operation of all federal agencies, implemented guidance days later that stated: “Every effort will be made to maximize the use of remote work during widespread community transmission.”
Harrison said it is likely that these new telework policies have only worsened work participation. A top official at the Food and Drug Administration admitted the agency lost a 34-page whistleblower report sent in October 2021 that warned about an imminent baby formula shortage, which became a rampant issue for the Biden administration by May. The report, lost in an FDA mail room, did not reach the department’s food policy deputy commissioner until February. FDA commissioner Robert Califf said the lost document was a “technical issue” that could be attributed to poor coordination at the agency.
Peter McGinnis, the communications director for the Functional Government Initiative, said the Biden administration’s push for unnecessary telework has harmed taxpayers.
“Work from home? Perhaps not working at all,” McGinnis told the Free Beacon. “Sadly, this dysfunction now threatens the health of mothers and children.”
House Republicans introduced a bill in May that would reestablish pre-pandemic telework policies for federal workers and require agencies to submit a report on the impact of their telework policies since 2020. Rep. Yvette Herrell (R., N.M.), who sponsored the bill, said the Biden administration needs to justify the need for expanded telework to taxpayers.
“Extending pandemic-era telework for no good reason hurts Americans who need in-person attention and care,” Herrell told the Free Beacon. “The first priority of public employees should be to serve their employers, the American people.”
HHS, which employs more than 80,000 workers and requested a mandatory budget of $1.7 trillion for 2023, did not respond to a request for comment.
Herrell said the negative impact of telework goes beyond HHS. CNN reported that in the first week of Biden’s presidency several White House national security workers were forced to return to remote work, which prevented them from accessing classified materials crucial to their jobs. The Internal Revenue Service this year has seen historic delays in tax returns that have left its facilities full of unchecked paperwork. The Department of Veterans Affairs has similarly struggled with overdue disability claims amid the pandemic.
Previous administrations debated telework policies before the pandemic. The Obama administration expanded telework opportunities, but these programs were reduced under former president Donald Trump.
Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.) has pressed several federal agencies to provide more information on the impact of their telework policies, saying they have hindered the administration’s ability to address ongoing crises, including the baby formula shortage.
“Americans expect accountability from an agency that deals with some of the nation’s most difficult and complex challenges,” Burr told the Free Beacon.
CCP boosts ties with Russia amid Taiwan invasion fears
Congressional Republicans are spearheading an effort to fast-track U.S. weapons shipments to Taiwan amid growing concerns Communist China is planning to start “a war of aggression,” Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) told the Washington Free Beacon.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has emboldened the CCP, which took steps earlier this week to strengthen bilateral ties with Moscow to help it combat Western economic sanctions. With the two malign regimes displaying a united front, Republican lawmakers want to send a clear message that America will come to Taiwan’s aid if Beijing launches an invasion.
The Biden administration also is closely monitoring the situation, with a State Department official telling the Free Beacon on Thursday that U.S. officials remain “concerned about China’s alignment with Russia.”
Banks, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the Biden administration was caught off guard by Russia’s incursion, proving that “you can’t deter an invasion after it happens.” China is learning lessons from its Russian ally, fueling concerns that Beijing will make good on its threats to invade Taiwan sooner rather than later. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin raised the prospect of a Chinese attack on Taiwan during a speech over the weekend, saying, “We will defend our interests without flinching.”
“China breached Taiwan’s airspace a record number of times in 2021,” Banks told the Free Beacon. “House Republicans can’t let Joe Biden repeat the same mistakes he made in Ukraine. You can’t deter an invasion after it happens and Congress and the Biden administration should be entirely unified around the need to send Taiwan defensive weaponry to dissuade Xi from starting a war of aggression.”
Banks, who has repeatedly pressed the Biden administration in multiple forums to “unequivocally and publicly” commit to defending Taiwan in the event of an invasion, said the Taiwan Weapons Exports Act would serve as a central legislative vehicle to deter Beijing.
It would boost Taiwan’s trade standing to make it a central U.S. ally in the same way that NATO members like Japan and South Korea are, according to a full copy of the bill provided to the Free Beacon. It also would expedite licensing approval for weapons shipments to Taiwan and remove other administrative barriers that could slow the process. The measure also cuts in half the amount of time these types of weapons deals are reviewed by Congress, making it easier for military equipment to actually arrive in Taiwan.
A Senate companion version of the bill is being spearheaded by Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.).
The Republican Study Committee, which is helmed by Banks, also is using its 2023 budget proposal to increase U.S. commitments to Taiwan. Under the RSC’s proposal, the U.S. would accelerate lethal aid to Taiwan, including stinger missiles, naval strike missiles, and quick strike air-dropped sea mine—all of which could be used if China launches an attack.
Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping spoke by phone on Wednesday to reaffirm relations in the face of Western sanctions. Xi reportedly “noted the legitimacy” of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, claiming that Moscow is protecting its “fundamental national interests in the face of challenges to its security created by external forces.”
Russia and China inked a cooperation agreement in February and both countries have said the deal contains “no limits” on their partnership.
The State Department says it sees through China’s claims of neutrality on the Russian war.
The U.S. and European partners have already “warned China against providing Russia military assistance” and continue to closely monitor Beijing’s actions, according to the State Department.
“More than three months into Russia’s brutal invasion, China is still standing by Russia,” the official said. “It is still echoing Russian propaganda around the world. It is still shielding Russia in international organizations, shirking its responsibilities as a P5 member. And it is still denying Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine by suggesting instead that they were staged.”
Both countries are believed to be boosting their economic infrastructure to “bypass SWIFT,” the international banking system, as well as “U.S. and European sanctions,” according to the official. These efforts have been accompanied by military drills, most recently a joint bomber patrol in East Asia.
“Nations that side with Vladimir Putin will inevitably find themselves on the wrong side of history,” the State Department official said. “This is not a moment for equivocation or hiding or waiting to see what happens next. It is already clear what is happening.”
The U.S. education system appears to have been hijacked by people with a specific agenda. Actual education has been replaced by indoctrination, teachers replaced by activists pushing nefarious agendas.
However, all is not lost. More and more Americans are speaking up against the madness. They have had enough. According to the latest University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll, an increasing number of Americans want the insanity, or the slide into insanity, to stop—and they want it to stop now.
The vast majority of respondents stated that teachers asking children in grades K-6 for their preferred gender pronouns was wrong. The vast majority also said they were against the idea of assigning children in grades K-6 books that discuss transgender issues. They also opposed the idea of teachers discussing their sexual orientation with young children.
Commenting on the poll, author Don Surber had this to say: “LGBT classes are indoctrination, not education.” The same could be said about CRT classes. As Surber noted, although “CRT proponents claim this is only taught in college, they should have no problem with banning teaching a racist and anti-American doctrine that seeks to discredit the Constitution.” But, for some strange reason, “proof of CRT instruction in schools keeps popping up.”
Surber finished by asking a pertinent question: “If so many people oppose teaching CRT and LGBT, why are these subjects being taught in public schools?”
Signs against critical race theory in front of the Loudoun County School Administration building in Virginia on Nov. 9, 2021. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
He’s right. How did we get here?
I’ll tell you how. Last year, in an article for The American Mind, I discussed something called the gated institutional narrative (GIN), a concept first put forward by the polymath Eric Weinstein. The GIN perfectly encapsulates the madness that has swept, and continues to sweep, through the U.S. education system.
As I said at the time, the “GIN explains the ways in which heavily filtered information is presented to the public by the mainstream media and academics.” Take the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” for example. Although the project has been lambasted by highly-respected commentators, it still, for some unfathomable reason, carries a great deal of authority.
On closer inspection, however, the reason it carries so much authority is entirely understandable. After all, the project was initiated by the NY Times, one of the most influential papers on the planet. Additionally, its historically inaccurate narrative has been pushed by comparably powerful outlets, frequently and forcefully. Furthermore, it appeals not to facts, but to feelings. In this age of speaking “your truth” instead of the truth, the NY Times decided to tell its “truth.”
The GIN, as I said in The American Mind piece, “is like an exclusive nightclub. Only the right kind of people can enter.” Orthodox thinkers—in other words, people willing to follow the herd—are the only people permitted entry. Those who refuse to comply are quickly turned away. “Go away and sober up,” they’re told.
Boxes of donated LGBT books sit stacked on the playground at Nystrom Elementary School in Richmond, Calif., on May 17, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Bad ideas beget bad ideas—the inaccurate (often pernicious) ideas generated within the GIN bounce around in a gigantic echo chamber. Then, like a swift missile strike, they’re launched into broader society.
At the same time, good ideas—that is, ideas that counter the bad ones created within the system—are intentionally blocked from entering. With such a design, it’s easy to see how bad ideas, even wicked ones, continue to circulate and become more virulent in nature.
Bad Ideas Spread Like a Virus
In his latest book, aptly titled “The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense,” Dr. Gad Saad discusses how bad ideas, or “idea pathogens,” spread like a virus, killing common sense in the process. In the American education system, as you’re no doubt aware, commonsense is in short supply.
If in doubt, let me point you in the direction of a recent piece written by Jonathan Turley, one of the country’s leading legal scholars. Unlike so many involved in academia, Turley has a backbone. He has a significant voice and is not afraid to use it. Instead of echoing the narratives of the GIN, Turley exposes the absurdities occurring within the gated community.
In the insular world of academia, he noted, “there have been growing controversies over language guides and usages, including the use of pronouns that some object to as matters of religion or grammar.” Now he warned, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), “the largest association of science teachers in the world,” wants to add to the controversy.
Take a read of the NSTA’s latest guide, and you’ll quickly see that Turley’s concerns are very much warranted. The educators are now pushing for “gender-inclusive biology.” What, you’re probably wondering, could this new-age biology entail?
In short, unscientific calls to permanently abandon everyday terms like “men,” “women,” “parent,” “mother,” and “father.” Mothers, according to the guide, should only be referred to as “persons with ovaries.” Fathers, meanwhile, should be referred to as “persons with testes.”
Although tens of millions of Americans have had enough, don’t expect the GIN to stop churning out bad ideas anytime soon.
Two police officers—one a 22-year veteran and the other a rookie—were shot and killed in the Los Angeles County city of El Monte late Tuesday afternoon, authorities said. The suspect is also dead. The mayor said the officers were “essentially ambushed.”
Two police officers—one a 22-year veteran and the other a rookie—were shot and killed in the Los Angeles County city of El Monte late Tuesday afternoon, authorities said. The suspect is also dead. The mayor said the officers were “essentially ambushed.”
The El Monte officers were identified Wednesday as Cpl. Michael Paredes and Officer Joseph Santana. Paredes, the longtime veteran of the department, is survived by his wife, daughter, and son, police said. Santana, who previously worked as a public works employee and with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department before joining the police department in his hometown, is survived by his wife, daughter, and twin sons.
Per FOX news sources, the gang member who fatally shot two El Monte PD officers was on probation for felon with a firearm after he received a bare minimum sentence in a plea deal under Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon last year, despite having a previous strike on his record.
Today’s Larry Elder Show guest is John Gardner, a launch operation specialist II (Starship) at SpaceX.
IS THE U.S. GOVERNMENT FULL OF CHINESE AGENTS? IT SEEMS SO.
Jack Markell – resident Joe Biden’s pick to serve as ambassador to the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – has a long history of partnering with Chinese Communist Party foreign influence groups and has called on Americans to “welcome” and “understand” the communist regime.
Markell, a former Governor of Delaware, was also tapped by the White House to lead its Afghan refugee resettlement program “Operation Allies Welcome” in September before his ambassadorship was confirmed by the Senate.
In 2011, Markell penned an op-ed – “How We Can Use China’s Growth To Fuel American Jobs” – where he called for increased ties with the communist country.
“The Chinese growth that has long stirred fear among many Americans is increasingly opening up new opportunities for US workers and exporters,” Markell argued in the piece before calling on Americans to “welcome” and “understand” the brutal, communist regime:
It’s obvious that our political systems are different, but the differences in our legal systems, business culture, and consumer expectations have a far greater impact on companies. If we want to attract Chinese investors and local jobs, we need to welcome them, understand them, and be prepared to help them understand our expectations.
“From my work in the private sector, I know that competitiveness is fortified by cooperation. These efforts will make our country and each of our states stronger,” he added.
Markell also details his work with the National Governors Association (NGA), including inking deals with Chinese Communist Party officials.
“At the NGA Winter Meeting this February, I was pleased to sign an agreement with the top official from China’s Hunan Province, Secretary Zhou Qiang, to cooperate on job creation,” he outlined before praising the group’s effort to “promote cooperation” with China:
I applaud the initiatives by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the National Governors Association to promote cooperation between “subnational” (state and local) governments in China and the United States.
In a separate NGA forum taking place in July 2011, Markell signed another memorandum of understanding with the secretary of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China Zhao Hongzhu. Markell would later go on to serve as the Chairman of the NGA from 2012 to 2013.
The NGA has a long history of collaboration with the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) – a premier state-run foreign influence group that functions as part of the country’s United Front Work Department (UFWD). The U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission has flagged the UFWD as Beijing’s weapon “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing.”
The Trump administration designated the group a foreign mission, noting it has “sought to directly and malignly influence” American officials to promote China’s global agenda and relies on NGA forums to do so.
While in office, Markell also partnered with the Chinese company Wanxiang to fund delegations of Delaware students to study in China.
Wanxiang, however, is run by high-ranking Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks and has a long track record of adding relatives and associates of establishment American politicians to its rolodex to secure legislative and regulatory favors.
As Peter Schweizer points out inSecret Empires, the company leverages these connections to circumvent federal regulations aimed at curtailing predatory acquisition and investment at the hands of Beijing-linked firms:
“It has also collected powerful political friends on both sides of the aisle, by putting them and their family members on the payroll. Along the way, it has skated past federal regulations and avoided sanctions for doing business in North Korea that have plagued other companies. It offers a powerful illustration of how politically connected firms make members of the American political class wealthy while getting special treatment in the United States.”
Since departing the Delaware Governor’s office, Markell has stayed in the Chinese Communist Party’s orbit, including attending events sponsored by another Beijing-backed influence group: China General Chamber of Commerce-U.S.A.
THE MICROSOFT NEWS WEBSITE FOUNDED BY BILL GATES HURRIEDLY DELETED THE STUDY FROM ITS PAGES.
A research paper found that people who did not receive a COVID-19 vaccine had a lower rate of suffering a severe case of the virus amidst the pandemic.
The article, which has been uploaded to the preprint server ResearchGate, relied on data from over 18,500 respondents across 175 countries. Analysis revealed that individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19 reported fewer instances of hospitalization in comparison to their vaccinated counterparts.
MSN – a news website launched by vaccine enthusiast Bill Gates’s Microsoft in 1995 – covered the study, titling its article “Severe COVID-19 ‘Rare’ In Unvaccinated People,” but appears to have taken down the story since its publication. Archived versions of the article are still available, however.
The survey – “Self-reported outcomes, choices and discrimination among a global COVID-19 unvaccinated cohort“– was conducted from September 2021 through February 2022. Data collected for the survey was analyzed by an independent, international team of scientists led by Robert Verkerk, Ph.D., the founder and executive and scientific director of Alliance for Natural Health International.
“It is important to recognize that because the cohort represents a self-selected, as opposed to randomly selected, sample, the findings cannot be directly compared with other observational studies based on self-reported data based on randomly selected subjects,” emphasized the study.
Many of the unvaccinated individuals included in the analysis opted for natural treatments such as vitamin D, zinc, quercetin, and drugs such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
The study also found that people unvaccinated against COVID-19 faced discrimination for their decisions, with between 20 to 60 percent of people per country reporting being personal targets of “hate or victimization.”
“Respondents reported feeling even more victimized by their respective states, with rates among respondents being greatest in Southern Europe (61%), Western Europe (59%), Australia and New Zealand (57%) and South America (57%),” explained the paper.
The survey follows additional studies reaching similar conclusions about the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine. A Koch Institute report assessing data from the German government, for example, found that 80 percent of cases of the Omicron variant occurred in fully vaccinated people in the country.
We are now back to a national average gas price of $5.00/gallon. This is a subject of serious concern for almost everyone. Conservatives will (rightly) point to the Biden Administration’s hostility toward domestic oil production and distribution as the primary cause of the growing crisis, yet struggle to frame the problem in terms other than “the naïveté of environmentalist policy.” While the American ruling class is indeed dominated by extremely stupid people, its environmentalism is not “oh whoops we accidentally made gas cost way too much, who could have predicted that!”
Allowing it to be framed that way while giving conservative satirists plenty of low-hanging fruit to work with, is a massive mistake. It is easy to poke fun at the stupidity of people like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and AOC. And that’s entirely the problem. These people are not sincerely-yet-naively attempting a solution to what they see as a truly apocalyptic disaster. It is a major mistake to assume they are ever operating in good faith. None of these people actually believe this stuff. They all have massive multimillion-dollar homes on coastlines they say will not exist by the end of the decade. It has been demonstrated ad nauseum that these people fly around in private jets, expending more fossil fuels in a single vacation than the average person will in their entire lives. You have to understand these are deeply cynical people. They do not care about the stuff they say they do. But what do they care about?
The most important filter to understand politics, especially politics in the Current Year, is Friend/Enemy distinction. Do not look at what these people say, look at what they do. And, look at who benefits from what they do or who is harmed by what they do. Who are the enemies of the occupational regime? Obviously, they will never explicitly state who it is they seek to destroy. Unless the pharmaceutical cocktail that allows the current president brief moments of lucidity is badly messed up, you are never going to hear him say “we want to totally impoverish and destroy the American middle and working class.” But every single day the actions of the regime speak as clearly as possible.
You need to stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt. They are not stupid, at least not the ones that truly matter. They are not misguided. They are not simply mistaken. They are intentionally malicious. It is not the naïveté of bleeding-heart liberals who get teary-eyed at the thought of punishing violent criminals that have caused the ruling regime to empty prisons and violent crime to exponentially increase. Yes, the naive liberal useful idiots who give them power are easily deluded by propaganda, but those who wield power know exactly what they are doing. They want the people they hate to be punished. They want white women and their babies to be run over by violent criminals who never should have been let out of prison. They want violent criminals to be released back into the wild, they want police to be terrified to fight them, and they want you to go to prison if you ever have to defend yourself against them. These are not accidents caused by well-meaning-but-naive libs—this stuff is by design.
“Climate change” is no different. For his entire presidential campaign, Joe Biden read carefully crafted scripts about reducing the use of fossil fuels, cutting oil production, increasing “clean energy,” etc. That the cost of gasoline is nearly triple what it was when he took office is not some accident of the inscrutable forces of the free market. The people who rule the American people want gasoline and diesel to be unaffordable for most of the country. Regular people—with jobs and families and mortgages—those people are the enemies of the regime. They want things to be more expensive for you. They want you to suffer.
They not only don’t care if you are impoverished, but it also brings them sick pleasure. You are their enemy. They want to destroy you. This should have been evident during the Wuhan Flu, the Mostly Peaceful Summer of George, and the Most Secure Election in History. What were those events, in truth? Whether you believe those events were 100% organic or they were operations of alphabet agencies and aligned NGOs or (most likely) some mixture of both, it doesn’t matter. What matters is both who benefited from these events and who was harmed. Who benefited from the lockdowns? Megacorporations, especially trillion-dollar hedge funds like Blackrock, which got the overwhelming majority of newly printed trillions (while you got a couple of tiny checks). In short, the greatest constituency of the regime benefitted from everything that happened in 2020. Every industry got hundreds of billions for almost nothing, Big Pharma got a huge boon, and the military-industrial complex now likewise gets to cash in on an absurdly expensive (even by War on Terror standards) proxy war with Russia. Everyone who was already filthy rich got even richer, all at your expense. Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and especially billionaire retailers like the Waltons and Bezos raked in the dough while their competitors were shut down.
And who was harmed by the events of 2020 (and beyond)? The greatest enemy of the regime, that’s who: the middle class, the people who have spent their entire lives toiling away to build businesses that provide services and goods and jobs for their neighbors, who donate to the things that make their communities worth living in, churches, local sports teams, youth activities, and service organizations. The regular people who have a stake in the places they live, who love their country and their neighborhoods, who want to live in peace and quiet, who simply want good order. That is who the regime hates the most. The few Norman Rockwell Americans who have the audacity to still exist. The regime was happy to allow your businesses to be locked down, while their billionaire friends could stay open. The regime was happy to allow organized violent revolutionaries to burn down your neighborhoods with almost no arrests and no investigation into the machinations behind the scenes. All of this while spending years holding men without trial in solitary confinement for walking through wide-open doors to the U.S. Capitol and spending years investigating an understandably overly exuberant protest of a fraudulent election. You need to filter everything that happens today through the friend/enemy distinction and politics becomes absolutely crystal clear.
This is why it cost so much to fill up your car and your grocery cart. The people in power hate you and your family. They are stupid and incompetent, but even worse, they are malicious. If you are a normal person, who just wants to have a job and home and family, who loves his country and loves his God, the people in power do not want you to exist. They want to make life as hard as possible for you. They do not want you to have children. And if you somehow can even have children, they want the children you do have to be groomed into disgusting freaks. You have an enemy that hates you. Do not ever forget it.
But you also have friends. The good news is that more and more people are starting to see they no longer live in the America they grew up in. More people are beginning to see that the America of “at the end of the day everyone is an American on the same team and we just disagree about some things” is dead. And while this is a great tragedy it is a necessity. We have to realize the thing we love is gone before we can begin to bring it back. And many people are now beginning to have that realization.
This is the very first step in things being made right again. Now you can organize around this principle, knowing who your friends are and who is on your side. From there you can build churches, build neighborhoods and towns, build communities dedicated to rebuilding Christian civilization, communities that will have the strength to weather together the difficult years to come. One in which you can recognize who your friends are and who your enemies are, only then will you have the ability to fight and build.
Andrew Isker is the pastor of 4th Street Evangelical Church in Waseca, MN. He is a graduate of Minnesota State University and Greyfriar’s Hall Ministerial Training School, and he has served churches in Missouri, West Virginia, and Minnesota. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Boniface Option. Andrew, his wife Kara, and their five children reside in his hometown of Waseca, MN. He can be found on Gab @BonifaceOption.
If you’ve recently wondered what former President Barack Obama has been up to, do I have news for you.
In between throwing lavish parties for his friends, Obama has been producing and starring in a Netflix series with Hollywood actor Adam Connover of the popular internet series, Adam Ruins Everything.
It appears that Obama’s publicists are trying to rebuild his public image after the many failures of his presidency, such as arming the Mexican drug cartels through Operation Fast and Furious, accidently bombing civilian weddings abroad with drone strikes, and vastly growing the size of the federal government.
The series, The G Word with Adam Connover, is a tribute to big government. In the opening scene, Obama is having a conversation with Adam while doing his own taxes in his home office (as if the former president actually files his own taxes). In a condescending tone, he says that he “likes doing his own taxes” and that “taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society”.
The episode blames capitalism and limited government for various societal issues, blatantly disregarding the fact that it is almost always big-government bureaucrats who are to blame. They go so far as to praise the USDA’s stranglehold on meat processing facilities across the country as a benefit to society.
However, at the very end of the series, in the very last episode, Obama gets it right. He confidently makes the point that the local level is where individuals can make the most impact. He even illustrates that point by describing how easy it is to take over district attorney elections in small communities to support a Marxist agenda.
In one of the last scenes, Adam is at a ‘Resist’ Rally in Philadelphia.
Adam highlights two young men who worked on the Bernie Sanders for President campaign who are now both members of the Pennsylvania legislature and deciding Pennsylvania state laws!
These radicals talk about all of the changes they are able to make on the local level. They learned how to engage in the political process with tactics like canvassing and door knocking on the Bernie Sanders for President campaign, and now they have taken over Pennsylvania State House seats.
The point Obama is making, and the point politicians like him have proven, is that state legislatures are where individuals can make a real impact – and Obama is right!
If the era of pandemic tyranny has shown us anything, it is that our local leaders – often state-level leaders – are the people who imposed these oppressive restrictions like banning worship, preventing Americans from being able to work, and instituting intrusive mask and vaccine mandates. You and I realized this early on. That is why Young Americans for Liberty started Operation Win at the Door in 2018 with the express purpose of electing 250 liberty legislators across the country by the end of 2022 – this year.
Click on the link above to see the real impact you and I are creating across the country.
Through this program, YAL-recruited activists knock doors for principled, liberty candidates across the country who are set on limiting the size and scope of government. To date, YAL activists have elected 174 liberty candidates to state legislatures across the country and this year alone have knocked doors for 55 additional candidates who won their primaries with safe general election races.
This year our trained activists are knocking on over 2 million doors in key districts across the country. We have a once in a generation opportunity to radically shift the direction of our country.
Now, more than ever, you and I can’t let up.
Consider supporting our crucial effort as our trained activists knock on over 2 million doors to turn out the vote this year.
Dr. Peter McCullough and co-author John Leake spoke to ‘American Thought Leaders’
During the research for their book, “The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex,” cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough and author John Leake discovered that the “system” was primed by global leaders to make vaccination the principal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This was absolutely telegraphed from the beginning,” McCullough said. “[In] 2010, Gates says it’s the decade of the vaccines. Later on, Gates announces at meetings that the return on investment of vaccines is 20-to-1 anything else that he’s done.
“It is clear the system is juiced for a vaccine,” McCullough said during a recent interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
McCullough was referring to a 2010 post by Bill Gates on Twitter, in which the billionaire investor wrote: “Decade of Vaccines- a $10B, 10yr pledge for vaccine research, development & delivery.”
In 2019 Gates told CNBC’s Becky Quick on “Squawk Box” from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, “We feel there’s been over a 20-to-1 return” on his $10 billion investment into vaccine development.
In the interview with McCullough, Leake questioned why the COVID vaccines, which were developed hastily, were advertised as safe and touted as the only solution to the pandemic while effective alternative and off-label treatments were demonized.
“What we discovered in our research and what we map out in our book is that this was being planned for, well in advance,” Leake said.
He also criticized Gates for his obsession with vaccines.
Bill Gates attends a press conference on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on May 25, 2022. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
“[Gates] seems to have sort of shifted his monopolistic spirit from the software business to the vaccine business,” said Leake.
Gates is also the founder and major contributing member of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation (CEPI), which was launched at the World Economic Forum in 2017. In the organization’s business plan, it appears to be entirely focused on the development of vaccines, with no mention of other treatments for viral outbreaks, said McCullough.
CEPI says it brings together heads of government, private businesses, and philanthropists to “accelerate” the development of vaccines to prevent future “epidemics and pandemics” and to ensure that “all people in need” have access to these vaccines.
Moreover, one of Gates’ most recent efforts in the proliferation of vaccines is his book, “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic.” In the book, Gates makes the case for establishing a well-funded global organization that would be managed by the United Nations’ World Health Organization, whose job it would be to search for and respond to the world’s next pandemic, said McCullough.
The Epoch Times reached out to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for comment.
McCullough said that although vaccines generally do little to prevent illness from upper-respiratory infections, they were still pushed as the answer to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There isn’t a single shot in the arm that does virtually anything for a respiratory illness,” McCullough said, adding that the COVID vaccines were introduced “with an implicit talking point, and the talking point is, ‘They are safe and they are effective, and you will take them.’ Period. No discussions after that. No official discussions on safety and efficacy, no guarantee for reevaluation, no monthly review of safety.”
The safety was just assumed, even after a Chinese scientific paper was published pointing out that there were major health problems from the vaccine for people with underlying health issues, said McCullough.
McCullough called this broad use of the vaccines a “biological catastrophe.”
Furthermore, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tried to bury information about the vaccines’ safety and efficacy by sealing, for 55 years, the “Pfizer dossier,” which is about half a million pages of documents detailing the key findings in the development and implementation of the vaccines, said McCullough.
The organization Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency sued the FDA under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and demanded the dossier be made public.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman said the group’s FOIA request was “of paramount public importance,” and ordered that the FDA release 55,000 pages per month (pdf).
From these documents, “we learned there were 1,223 deaths within 90 days of the release of the Pfizer program, worldwide. The standard is typically 50 deaths for some widely used product, [and it’s] taken off the market,” said McCullough
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) records deaths on its Vaccine Adverse Events Recording System (VAERS).
In the United States, McCullough said there have been 13,000 deaths recorded after receiving the COVID vaccine.
“That is astounding,” he said. “We have never let a product run like this for this period of time without revisiting safety, without reporting safety, without even questioning safety, and death being the final outcome.”
The Epoch Times reached out Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson for comment on vaccine safety.
“What I think a lot of the public didn’t understand is this is a completely novel technology,” said Leake. “These are genetic transfer technologies. You’re actually injecting messenger RNA that codes for the production of the spike protein, so this is Star Trek stuff.”
McCullough said it’s a false claim that vaccines reduce hospitalization and death.
He said there have been no thorough randomized trials with the active drug and placebo to show a reduction in hospitalization and death.
“None of the vaccines have had clinical trials done versus placebo with that composite endpoint,” said McCullough. “What’s happened over time is a false narrative that’s developed from observational data.”
There have been many “biased analyses by investigators and doctors and those in the biopharmaceutical complex who are invested in trying to promote the vaccines,” said McCullough
This file photo shows a box of ivermectin tablets. (Carl D. Master/Shutterstock)
He added that the analyses are based on faulty and biased data, which does not keep track of vaccinated individuals who come into a hospital. Instead, all who come into the hospital with a COVID infection are counted as unvaccinated by default.
“I can tell you those who’ve taken the vaccine are much more likely to have gotten early treatment, which really is the driver for reducing hospitalization and death,” said McCullough. He added that Gates, Anderson Cooper, and Vice President Kamala Harris all are vaccinated but also took Paxlovid, an early treatment for COVID-19.
Leake said the same rigor and safety standards that were applied to early treatment for COVID are completely ignored with the new messenger RNA vaccines. “Suddenly, the methodology and the rigor of ascertaining safety and efficacy is just thrown out the window with the vaccine,” he said.
McCullough said the pandemic could have ended quickly if resources had been put into giving high-risk patients early treatments with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, but instead these early treatments were maligned.
McCullough also brought up monoclonal antibodies, another safe and effective treatment that’s been throttled in favor of vaccines, he said.
Despite the fact that these early treatments work well, they are pulled off the shelf, but the vaccines, which are not proven to be either safe or effective, are pushed on the public as the solution for the pandemic, said McCullough.
Leake and McCullough described what they observed and documented as a “monolithic vaccine solution” for all public health problems.
“This is what these international foundations are: the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. The big money guys have put all of their money on vaccines,” said Leake.
Their book documents how other national institutions, like the National Institutes of Health, profit from these vaccines and from a relationship with wealthy philanthropists.
“They actually had a meeting at Bill Gates’ grand house near Seattle back in 2000. For 20 years, they’ve been working together,” said Leake.
There is a vaccine agenda, in which the powers that be want every person to keep getting vaccinated indefinitely, McCullough said.
“They have advanced it forward and there is at the same time an oblivion to safety, and it’s global,” said McCullough.
McCullough and Leake said they’d like to see all vaccine mandates lifted and all COVID-19 vaccines pulled off the shelves for a thorough safety and efficacy review.
“We have been burned,” McCullough said. “This has been, in a sense, the crime of our lifetime, if not of all time, of mass vaccination of the world in the middle of a highly prevalent and evolving pandemic.”
The Exxon Mobil Corportation fired back at resident Joe Biden’s letter calling on U.S. energy producers to bring “near-term solutions” to address rising gas prices and decades-high inflation.
“In the short term, the U.S. government could enact measures often used in emergencies following hurricanes or other supply disruptions—such as waivers of Jones Act provisions and some fuel specifications to increase supplies,” the oil giant said in a news release Wednesday.
And in the longer term, the federal government “can promote investment through clear and consistent policy that supports U.S. resource development, such as regular and predictable lease sales, as well as streamlined regulatory approval and support for infrastructure such as pipelines,” according to ExxonMobil.
Notably, Biden signed an executive order in early 2021 that suspended construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought oil from Alberta, Canada, to the interior United States. The move was criticized by oil industry officials, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Republicans.
In recent days, the president has increasingly blamed oil companies for allegedly gouging consumers as gas prices remain elevated at $5 per gallon. Gas prices nationwide are averaging roughly $5 a gallon, an economic burden for many Americans and a political threat for Biden’s fellow Democrats going into the midterm elections.
“The crunch that families are facing deserves immediate action,” Biden wrote in a letter this week to seven oil refiners, including Exxon. “Your companies need to work with my Administration to bring forward concrete, near-term solutions that address the crisis.”
In the letter, Biden suggested that he might use emergency powers, adding that his “administration is prepared to use all reasonable and appropriate Federal Government tools and emergency authorities to increase refinery capacity and output in the near term, and to ensure that every region of this country is appropriately supplied.”
But the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the industry, said in a statement that capacity has been diminished as the Biden administration has sought to move away from fossil fuels as part of its climate agenda. Meanwhile, several prominent White House officials continue to tout electric vehicles as a means to escape the current high gas prices despite the average cost of a new EV being about $56,000.
“While we appreciate the opportunity to open increased dialogue with the White House, the administration’s misguided policy agenda shifting away from domestic oil and natural gas has compounded inflationary pressures and added headwinds to companies’ daily efforts to meet growing energy needs while reducing emissions,” American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers said in a statement.
Amid continually increasing gas prices, White House officials have continually recommended that Americans feeling pain at the pump should switch to electric vehicles.
During a live streaming event this week, the Biden administration’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, said a way to deal with $5 per gallon gas is to purchase an electric vehicle
“If you filled up your EV [electric vehicle] and you filled up your gas tank with gasoline, you would save $60 per fill-up by going electric rather than using gasoline, but it’s a very compelling case. But again, we want to bring down the price at the point of purchase,” she said in a clip circulated by Republicans on social media on June 14.
Her comments received significant criticism from Republican lawmakers and conservatives on social media, who accused Granholm, a former Michigan governor, of being out of touch. Last year, Granholm sold millions of dollars in stock options from Proterra—a company that manufactures electric buses.
“If you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you,” she said in May 2021 in reference to the elevated gas prices.
And several weeks ago, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg touted electric vehicles to a House panel amid increasing gas prices and Republican concerns that motorists in rural areas won’t benefit from more federal spending on electric vehicles.
“It is actually rural drivers who would benefit the most,” Buttigieg said in May. “The more they drive, typically, the more of their income is going to gas, so the more money they are going to save if they can afford an electric vehicle, which allows them to fill up on electrons.”
Last year, Buttigieg drew criticism for telling families who are struggling with high gas prices to buy an electric vehicle, because if they do, they’ll “never have to worry about gas prices again.”
According to Kelly Blue Book’s late 2021 figures, the average price of a new electric vehicle hovered at roughly $56,000. In contrast, the average price of a new compact was about $25,000 at about the same time. The average price of a new, non-electric SUV was $34,000, while the electric version was nearly $45,000.
The 2022 Chevrolet Bolt EV starts at about $31,500, according to the website.
As of June 16, data from auto club AAA show that the average price for a gallon of regular gas fell by about 1 cent to $5.009 across the United States. California, as usual, led the way with prices hitting $6.428, the figures show, and no other state had a gas price of $6 per gallon.
Biden himself said in late May that the record gas prices will spur Americans to purchase electric vehicles. Earlier this year, Biden announced the release of 180 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which the White House said would cause gas prices to “come down fairly significantly.”
“[When] it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over,” Biden said during a trip to Japan.
Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr bolstered the Jan. 6 House committee’s case that the 2020 presidential election was the “most secure in history.”
He also did his best to debunk former President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, the Trump-appointed Republican testified in a recorded deposition that aired nationwide on June 13.
He told the committee he hadn’t seen any evidence of voter fraud on a scale that could have affected the outcome of the presidential election.
Documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza couldn’t disagree more.
D’Souza’s latest movie, “2000 Mules,” contains detailed evidence of an organized illegal vote-harvesting scheme operated in Democratic-dominated cities in key swing states in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election—a crime that many voters and the Trump campaign want independently investigated to determine if it could have altered the result.
Teaming with True the Vote, a public interest election watchdog organization, D’Souza and a squad of investigators purchased 10 trillion cellphone pings (unique identity signals) to reconstruct the movements of suspected ballot traffickers.
Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in Washington on Aug. 1, 2018. (Shannon Finney/Getty Images)
The states included in the study were Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Texas.
The group also obtained and reviewed thousands of hours of government surveillance tape of the drop boxes where the alleged traffickers, whom they called “mules,” could be seen depositing multiple ballots on multiple occasions.
Four million minutes of drop box video were reviewed in Georgia alone.
The painstaking and costly 15-month study was funded by donations from the human rights organization First Freedoms.
The video review was part of the process the group used—along with personal interviews with traffickers and information from tipsters—to estimate the number of fraudulent absentee ballots that were likely deposited in the drop boxes.
True the Vote cyber-expert Gregg Phillips estimates that 4.8 million votes were trafficked nationally in 2020.
During his deposition, Barr laughed as he mentioned “2000 Mules.” He said the film’s cellphone tracking investigation and photographic evidence were “unimpressive,” and that its conclusions were “indefensible.”
According to Barr, the documentary “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting.”
True the Vote spokesperson Catherine Engelbrecht told The Epoch Times, “Over 80 percent of Americans are concerned about election integrity.
“Bill Barr took some cheap shots with his fellow Beltway buddies, but America isn’t laughing.”
Engelbrecht said the Department of Justice under Barr did very little to investigate the 2020 election.
“Instead, he mocked President Trump and disregarded nationwide entreaties for help.
“Now, he’s supporting the January 6 Committee and their use of cellphone data—so reliable they rush to jail Americans without trial.
“Yet, when the same data is used to expose patterns of drop box abuse and election fraud, he is totally disinterested,” Engelbrecht said.
On Twitter, D’Souza challenged Barr to a public debate on election fraud, writing, “What do you say, Barr? Do you dare back up your belly laughs with arguments that can withstand rebuttal and cross-examination?”
Engelbrecht told The Epoch Times: “We have not been asked to present our findings to the committee, nor will we be. They will never risk giving us that platform.
“Their interest is not in getting to the truth. Never has been.”
D’Souza told The Epoch Times, “The hearings are one-sided propaganda, not an attempt to get to the truth.”
He has repeatedly said that the evidence presented in “2000 Mules” is “indisputable,” and invites people to judge for themselves.
True the Vote founder and President Catherine Engelbrecht makes a point during a presentation on ballot trafficking at the Arizona statehouse on May 31, 2022. Seated next to her is True the Vote data investigator Gregg Phillips. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Trump responded quickly to the June 13 hearing, firing off a 12-page rebuttal.
He wrote that the Democrats “are desperate to change the narrative of a failing nation. … They own this disaster. They are hoping that these hearings will somehow alter their failing prospects.”
Michigan grassroots conservative activist Robert Gelt told The Epoch Times, “Jan. 6 would never have taken place if it wasn’t for the adamant refusal of the primary law enforcement officer of our federal government, Bill Barr, to get the Department of Justice involved in investigating the Nov. 3, 2020, election.”
The only thing that could curb the current record-high gasoline prices would be a major drop in demand, i.e. a recession, according to several experts. Theoretically, a major shift in U.S. foreign and energy policy could make a difference too, but nobody seems to realistically expect that to happen.
Gas prices have particularly pained Americans, climbing in recent months to more than $5 a gallon. Some experts even consider it the driver of price inflation, which hit a four-decade high of 8.6 percent in May. The price hike has been caused by several factors piling up, including currency inflation, anti-carbon policy moves, misjudging the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We’ve made a lot of policy errors in this country and overseas to put us in this situation and it’s not going to be easily fixed,” commented Phil Flynn, senior analyst with The Price Futures Group.
“If we start to reverse some of those policies, the market can start pricing in a better future.”
The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, on June 14 released a list of 10 steps the U.S. government should take to boost domestic oil production, which still lags behind pre-pandemic levels and barely budged for half a year now. Top of the list is restarting drilling leases on federal land and speeding up project approvals.
But since the Biden administration has centered its agenda around “decarbonizing” the economy, chances of any pro-oil policy moves are expected to be nil.
Tight Supply
The administration has been begging foreign producers, from Saudi Arabia to Venezuela, to pump out more, but with little success.
“People are estimating that global spare production capacity can be as low as 2 million barrels a day,” Flynn said, noting that “we’ve already stretched the system to the limit.”
Refineries have emerged as another bottleneck with no apparent fix in sight. Refining capacity in the United States and Europe has been declining for years under the mantra of moving away from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and governments locked down large swaths of the economy and population, oil prices collapsed and the industry was stuck with massive excess capacity. The prospects at the time were deary. Not only was there no end of the pandemic in sight, but financial elites openly discussed using the crisis as an opportunity to move away from oil. Especially in the financial sector, the “environment, social, governance” (ESG) initiatives went into overdrive, promising to starve the oil industry of capital. Investment prospects in the industry took a severe hit.
“We had people predicting that oil demand would never get to pre-pandemic levels,” Flynn told The Epoch Times.
As it turned out, the pandemic didn’t cripple the economy quite as severely as expected. Many U.S. states quickly started lifting the lockdowns and by the end of the year just about returned to normal. The vaccine was delivered before the end of the year, allowing reopening even in most areas that were previously reluctant to do so. Demand quickly bounced back and so did the oil market.
U.S. oil product demand reached roughly the pre-pandemic level in June last year, even as domestic oil production still lagged about 2 million barrels per day (bpd) behind the pre-pandemic maximum of over 13 million bpd.
With the inauguration of President Joe Biden came a new era of “whole of government” anti-fossil fuel policy. The administration stopped leasing federal land for drilling and nixed the Keystone XL pipeline, further squashing long-term industry prospects.
To attract investors, oil companies adopted a strategy of “efficiency”—cut costs, cut development, and instead send their profits to stockholders. The strategy has somewhat worked, but only at the expense of future production and processing capacity.
The Biden administration has recently blamed refineries and oil companies for profiting from the high oil prices, which have been hovering around $120 a barrel for the past few days—more than double from a year ago.
But some experts have argued that it’s been the excessive government spending and the subsequent money printing by the Federal Reserve that has allowed the oil industry to raise prices so much without, so far, significantly affecting demand.
“The government never makes any mistakes. Have you ever noticed that,” Flynn quipped.
Excise tax on oil recently floated by the administration would be “disastrous for the economy,” he said.
“If you kill the refining margins, you’re going to kill the incentive to work and you’re going to have less supply,” he explained.
Ukraine Invasion
The Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year was timed to take advantage of the tight oil supply, according to Art Berman, geologist and energy expert.
“Putin knew what he was doing,” he told Wealthion’s Adam Taggart in a recent interview, noting the Russian President has a Ph.D. in energy economics.
Oil prices rallied on concerns that Western sanctions on Russia will prevent it from selling its oil.
Such expectations haven’t materialized. European countries still buy the majority of Russian oil and China and India continue to buy too, albeit at a discount.
E.U. leaders have been promising to ban oil imports from Russia, but Berman doesn’t believe that’s realistic.
“They’re absolutely incapable of doing that,” he said.
The U.S. and the E.U. could also put pressure on India to stop buying.
“But they haven’t done that yet because they know, at the end of the day, if they do that, oil prices will go to $300,” Flynn said.
Russia is the world’s second-largest oil producer and it appears there’s just not enough spare capacity available to exclude it completely.
There are already examples of clever schemes to dodge the sanctions. Russia-made diesel is mixed with diesel of other origins, resulting in a product that can be shipped to Europe without restrictions, Berman said.
Price Drop
Berman predicted oil prices will come down significantly, but only through “demand destruction.” He argued that, historically, inflation and high gas prices in particular have caused consumers to cut back. He expects that U.S. gas and diesel consumption could drop about 10 percent in the next 12–18 months. That could lead to an oil glut and price collapse, but it could very well also mean a recession.
From an investment perspective, Lance Roberts, chief investment strategist at RIA Advisors, warned that oil rallies tend to unwind just as suddenly as they build up.
“Oil prices are all driven by commodity traders. So oil prices are somewhat supply-demand driven, but a lot of it is these non-commercial speculators in the options markets that are driving oil prices through options contracts. Right now, everybody is ramping up their oil contracts,” he said during a recent Wealthion interview.
“Well at some point, somebody says, ‘I’m out.’ … He’s like the popular guy that brings all the people to a party. Whoever that guy is, when he says, ‘I’m out,’ the rest of the herd follows him.”
Flynn doesn’t see that happening—at least not in the short term.
“Technically, most people think we’re in a recession right now, but assuming that we are, it might be a mild recession,” he said.
He expects “real demand destruction” would only come if oil climbs even further, perhaps to $150 a barrel.
Both Flynn and Berman agreed that in the longer term, oil prices will remain high.
“We can see a big correction of $30 … I think it will recover … I think it would only be a pause in the bull market,” Flynn said.
The Fed’s flurry of interest rate hikes may be the wild card that could pull the rug from under the economy more broadly.
In the race to become the top prosecutor in Maine’s largest county, George Soros-backed candidate Jacqueline Sartoris defeated incumbent Jonathan Sahrbeck.
With 94 percent of precincts counted, Sartoris collected 15,209 votes, or 65 percent, to Sahrbeck’s 8,069 votes in the June 14 Democratic primary, according to local radio station WMTM. Since they were the only two candidates seeking the office, Sartoris is expected to be elected as Cumberland County’s district attorney in the November general election.
The billionaire Soros is known for his efforts to bankroll the campaigns of progressive state and local prosecutor candidates across the country.
In the month before the primary, a Soros-backed super-PAC spent nearly $384,000 opposing Sahrbeck and supporting Sartoris, a whopping amount that’s almost five times the combined total spent by both candidates and unheard of in local prosecutor races.
While both candidates are registered Democrats, they hold different views on top priorities.
Sahrbeck, a career prosecutor, said most crimes in the county are fueled by either drug addiction or mental health issues, so he wanted to leverage the criminal justice system in a way to get more people into court-ordered treatment programs, according to a virtual candidate forum hosted by Portland Center for Restorative Justice.
To Sartoris, an environmental-lawyer-turned prosecutor, a district attorney’s top job is to set prosecution policies. Her vision is to reduce jail and prison populations through office-wide policies that set when to charge crimes, what charges to file, and how to resolve the charges, according to the same forum.
“People are mostly unaware that prosecutors have an incredible amount of power in the system. We, in fact, have the greatest power in the criminal justice system,” she said at the forum.
In contrast, Sahrbeck disagrees that the top prosecutor is a “policy position.”
He said prosecutors should judge every case on its own merits (such as the crime committed, the history of the offender, and the victim,) and make a prosecutorial decision that’s best in the interest of justice, which includes the interests of offenders, victims, and the broader community, according to the candidate forum.
However, about a month before the primary, the Soros-backed Democracy PAC II poured $300,000 into the newly formed Maine Justice and Public Safety PAC. The latter ended up spending $383,945 on mailers and digital ads opposing Sahrbeck and supporting Sartoris, according to data by Maine Ethics Commission.
Soros is the principal donor to the Democracy PAC II in this election cycle, contributing $125 million, or 99 percent of the total, according to finance data published by Federal Election Commission.
Super PACs such as Maine Justice and Public Safety can raise and spend unlimited money on communications opposing or supporting candidates under the protection of free speech. But they can’t communicate directly with candidates and must follow certain finance disclosure rules.
For more than two decades, Republican Stephanie Anderson held the top prosecutor job in Cumberland County, which includes Maine’s largest city, Portland.
After Anderson announced her retirement in 2018, Sahrbeck, a Republican-turned-independent candidate at the time, was to face Jon Gale, a Democrat, in the general election.
However, just a week before the election, Gale dropped out of the race over sexual misconduct allegations.
Last September, Sahrbeck changed his party registration again, this time to Democrat. He said his record as a district attorney reflects the Democratic values of addressing root causes of crime, according to the above candidate forum.
While in office, Sahrbeck created a diversion program, a veterans treatment court, and a community network called the Cumberland County Coalition on Substance Use Prevention.
Israel forged a major economic pact with Arkansas on Tuesday to share research and technology, especially for agriculture, broadening a trade relationship between the two worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Though his state contains one of the smallest Jewish populations in the nation, Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson (R.) celebrated the trade agreement for bringing closer ties with Israel, which he called “a critical ally.” Trade between the two was valued at more than $100 million last year, and both have enjoyed agricultural and scientific research grants worth more than $400,000 since the start of their partnership. In 2017, Hutchinson passed a law prohibiting Arkansas from working with companies that support the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. He told the Washington Free Beacon their new memorandum of understanding reflects Arkansas’s ongoing “friendship” with the Jewish state.
“This is a mutually beneficial partnership between two leaders in innovation,” Hutchinson said. “The agreement builds on the momentum we have created for the past eight years to develop a tech-based workforce that can meet the needs of a 21st century economy. In addition, this agreement allows us to strengthen our relationship with a critical ally to the United States.”
Israel has become a world leader in agricultural technology, investing heavily over the years in its high-tech sector, which now accounts for 15 percent of its GDP. Though more than half of its land area is desert and it lacks water resources, the Jewish state has learned to produce some of the highest yields of agricultural products, including cow milk and tomatoes, of any nation in the world. The success has made others take note in an effort to boost their own agricultural industries. Agriculture is Arkansas’s largest industry, adding around $16 billion to the state’s economy annually.
Israel and Arkansas have enjoyed an economic partnership for the past 40 years that has added billions to the U.S. economy, according to a 2019 review of one agricultural grant program between the nations.
“Israel is a country that has almost no water resources needed for agriculture and no traditional automotive industry, yet, with a uniquely successful technological innovation ecosystem, we have created booming agro-tech and smart mobility sectors that include hundreds of companies and startups that are among the leading in their respective fields worldwide,” said Dr. Ami Appelbaum, a chairman of the board of the Israel Innovation Authority who attended the signing event. “It’s a collaboration between similar states that have very similar challenges, as the governor mentioned: agriculture, medical, and of course, the autonomous transportation.”
“It’s going to make a big difference in the future of mobility and how quickly we can improve our supply chains,” Hutchinson said.
Democratic Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth on Tuesday said she was “shocked” after the world’s largest construction-equipment manufacturer announced it would move its headquarters out of her state to Texas.
“I’m shocked and disappointed by Caterpillar’s decision to move its HQ from Illinois,” Duckworth said on Twitter. “While this will only directly affect about 1.5 percent of IL-based employees, I’ll keep working to encourage Caterpillar to preserve jobs and follow through on its promise to hire even more Illinoisans.”
Caterpillar, a Chicago area-based company with more than $50 billion in annual revenue, announced it will set up its new headquarters outside Dallas, saying the move is “in the best strategic interest of the company.”
The manufacturer’s move marks the second time in recent weeks that a major corporation announced it would move its headquarters out of the Democrat-governed state. Last month, Boeing said it would move its headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, Va.
Illinois House Minority Leader Jim Durkin (R.) told the Center Square that Democratic policies that are unfriendly for business are to blame for Caterpillar and other companies moving jobs out of the state.
“I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times of what these manufacturers are paying and there’s really little for them to do,” Durkin said. “They’re getting no relief from local governments nor from the state. … When it comes back to it, it’s the cost of doing business in Illinois.”
Duckworth has advocated policies unfriendly to business as a senator. In March, she called for a federal “tax on excessive profits” by oil companies.
In a poll of nearly 700 CEOs and business owners conducted this year by business magazine Chief Executive, Texas was ranked the number-one state for business. Illinois came in 48th place out of 50.
The World Health Organization announced that officials are working to rename the monkeypox virus after a group of scientists called the moniker “discriminatory and stigmatizing.”
“WHO is also working with partners and experts from around the world on changing the name of monkeypox virus, its clades, and the disease it causes,” organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a Tuesday media briefing. He said WHO will announce the new name “as soon as possible.”
This is not the first time that health officials have declared a disease name discriminatory. Soon after WHO in early 2020 named the novel coronavirus “COVID-19,” journalists wrote that calling the disease, which originated in China, “the Wuhan virus” or “the China virus” is racist. The Chinese Communist government at the same time launched a propaganda campaign to deny that the disease originated in China, the Washington Free Beaconreported.
During the pandemic, WHO covered up China’s hesitation to report on the COVID-19’s dangers, then falsely claimed that human-to-human transmission was unconfirmed. WHO officials, including Tedros, publicly praised China’s transparency as the regime withheld information.
The announcement comes after a group of almost 30 scientists said that changing the virus’s name is an “urgent need,” arguing that “continued reference to and nomenclature of this virus being African is not only inaccurate but is also discriminatory and stigmatizing.”
Monkeypox got its name when scientists observed the pox-like disease in an African monkey colony. The first human case was reported in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The groups of organisms that cause monkeypox, also known as clades, are named for the regions of Africa—West African and Central African/Congo Basin—in which scientists first found them.
The Justice Department official who investigates attacks on reproductive health care facilities has been a staunch critic of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, dozens of which have been vandalized by abortion supporters over the past month.
Civil rights division chief Kristen Clarke criticized the centers following a Supreme Court decision issued in their favor in 2018. Clarke said the centers, which counsel pregnant women on alternatives to abortion, were “harmful” and “predatory” against women of color. She also referred to them with the hashtag, “ExposeFakeClinics.”
Clarke’s stance on the centers offers a potential explanation for the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate a string of attacks on pro-life centers since the May 2 leak of a draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) asked Attorney General Merrick Garland last week to investigate the incidents as acts of domestic terrorism. Garland has yet to open an investigation, even though he said on Sept. 6 he would investigate crimes against “reproductive health center[s]” under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act).
Clarke oversees investigations of potential FACE Act violations. She charged nine people under the statute in March for blocking the entrance to a Washington, D.C., abortion provider.
The attacks on crisis pregnancy centers, churches, and other pro-life organizations have run rampant since the leak of the Roe v. Wade draft opinion last month. Twenty-four crisis centers have been vandalized or set on fire since the leak, according to a group that tracks the incidents. In the latest assaults, a facility in Buffalo was firebombed on June 7. A center in Gresham, Ore., was hit with an “incendiary device” over the weekend.
The attacks are part of a broad intimidation campaign by left-wing activists upset that Roe may be overturned. Activists have protested outside the homes of conservative justices. A radical left-wing group hatched plans to shut down the Supreme Court using tactics that “stretch the bounds of constitutionally protected speech.” One abortion supporter attempted to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week.
Clarke showed her opposition to crisis pregnancy centers following a Supreme Court ruling in June 2018 that struck down a California requirement that the centers inform patients about state abortion services.
“The anti-choice movement will stop at nothing,” wrote Clarke, using left-wing activist jargon to refer to pro-life groups. She added the hashtags, “#EndTheLies” and “#ExposeFakeClinics.”
Clarke also said the centers prey on women of color. She said the Supreme Court decision would have “harmful consequences for women, especially women of color who are often targeted by predatory [crisis pregnancy centers].”
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a civil rights group Clarke led at the time, alleged that crisis pregnancy centers “target some of the most vulnerable women in communities today.”
Asked about Clarke’s tweets, Rubio said she should be disqualified from overseeing any eventual investigation into the crisis pregnancy center attacks.
“Kristen Clarke never should have been confirmed,” Rubio told the Washington Free Beacon. “Her disdain toward the very people now under threat was predictable and it should be disqualifying. Attorney General Garland should make clear that Clarke will have no involvement in any of these cases as those move forward.”
The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment about Clarke or whether the agency is considering investigations into the attacks.
Clarke has a long history of making controversial statements about issues she now oversees as civil rights chief. She wrote in support of the movement to defund the police in 2020 but denied to Republicans during her confirmation hearing that she wanted to defund police departments. In 2019, Clarke criticized the Chicago police department for requesting access to the cell phone of Jussie Smollett, the actor found to have staged a hoax in which he falsely claimed Trump supporters attacked him because he is black and gay. Clarke has criticized conservative Supreme Court judges, many of whom are now the target of left-wing radical protesters. She claimed that Kavanaugh’s presence on the bench would be “dangerous.” She called him a “man who harbors such bias, rage, fury and is so easily unhinged.”
Automaker recalls 49,000 vehicles due to safety defect that ‘could cause a crash’
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg might have to start biking to work again like a total nerd. That’s because the Mexican-made electric SUV he purchased last year for his security detail is being recalled due to a safety defect that “could result in a loss of power [while driving], which could cause a crash,” according to Consumer Reports.
Ford announced Tuesday that it was instructing car dealers to stop selling the Mustang Mach-E in response to the safety concern affecting nearly 49,000 of the 100,000 vehicles manufactured at the automaker’s Cuautitlan plant in Mexico between 2020 and 2022. The company decided to make the cars in Mexico because it was a lot cheaper than hiring American workers to do it in this country.
The development could undermine Buttigieg’s controversial suggestion that hardworking Americans should stop complaining about record gas prices and buy expensive electric cars so that they’ll “never have to worry about gas prices again.” The Mach-E has a starting price of $43,895, although most new models for sale in the Washington, D.C., area are listed in the $60,000 to $80,000 price range.
Buttigieg, 40, is the former mayor of South Bend, the fourth-largest city in Indiana. He has high, high hopes for his political future. While his presidential campaign in 2020 didn’t pan out so well, he did develop a niche fanbase of wealthy white liberals in “boat shoe” strongholds such as Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. His failure to win a statistically significant percentage of black voters in the Democratic primary has not stopped some party officials from floating his name as a potential nominee to replace resident Joe Biden on the ticket in 2024.
The Department of Transportation did not return a request for comment about whether Buttigieg’s security detail’s Mach-E was affected by the recall.
More than half of state attorneys general rejected an “unlawful” Biden administration memorandum, which prevented students from receiving federal funding for public school lunches if their district didn’t comply with LGBT mandates.
In a letter to the president, 26 Republican attorneys general demanded the Biden administration withdraw its Department of Agriculture’s Title IX interpretation, which will take billions of dollars in National School Lunch Program funding away from schools that don’t let biological males use the girls’ bathroom or compete in girls’ sports. The department’s interpretation violated the Administrative Procedures Act, since it was issued as a memorandum rather than a proposed rule for the public to comment on, the attorneys general wrote.
The Biden administration has a history of going around the public when issuing policies, Matt Bowman, a senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, told the Washington Free Beacon. Before the Supreme Court blocked it in January, a mandate without public comment from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration required that workers at businesses with 100 or more employees get vaccinated or submit a negative COVID test weekly.
With the exception of New Hampshire attorney general John Formella, every Republican attorney general joined the coalition, which is led by Tennessee attorney general Herbert Slatery.
The coalition is “evaluating all options to stop this federal overreach,” a spokeswoman for Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich (R.) told the Free Beacon. He said “a federal government bully is more than any child or school should have to contend with.” Florida attorney general Ashley Moody (R.) criticized the Biden administration for “using hungry children to advance a political agenda.”
Approximately 30 million students benefit from the National School Lunch Program.
‘Drag queens—not only are they not hurting our kids—drag queens make everything better,’ said state AG Dana Nessel
Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel (D.) said Wednesday that drag queens ought to be in every school.
Nessel, who is best known for passing out drunk in the stands after two Bloody Marys at the 2021 Michigan-Michigan State football game, admitted she did not poll-test the idea before floating it at a civil rights conference in Lansing.
“A drag queen for every school! That is what would be fun for the kids and lift them up when they are having emotional issues,” Nessel said. “Drag queens—not only are they not hurting our kids—drag queens make everything better! Drag queens are fun.”
The attorney general made the remarks by way of saying she doesn’t understand why the electorate is deeply divided over social issues. She said that state leaders should ignore “wedge issues” and come together in pursuit of common goals, such as education and health care.
Nessel’s “drag queens for any age” platform is a marked contrast with states like Texas and Florida, where exposing children to pornified dancers giving lewd performances can trigger a child abuse investigation.
Her comments also stand in contrast with her sprawling probe of sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Nessel’s long-running investigation, which covers allegations going back decades, has netted fewer than a dozen indictments. And the probe is larger than her office’s investigation of Michigan State University and Dr. Larry Nasser, the physician who assaulted over 250 young girls in his role as team doctor for the U.S. women’s gymnastics team, according to the Detroit News.
Nessel is seeking a second term this November. Her Republican challenger, Kalamazoo lawyer Matthew DePerno, said the comments show her unfitness for office.
“Students in the third grade are behind on their reading, our test scores are some of the worst in the country thanks to these disastrous COVID lockdowns, and she calls for drag shows for Kindergarteners,” DePerno said.
Virginia Democratic congresswoman Elaine Luria said every staffer in her office makes a “living wage.” She lied, House disbursement records show.
Luria paid staff assistant Madeleine Gagne $8,311.10 from January through March, the Democrat’s latest expense disclosures show. That pay rate marks a yearly salary of just $33,244.40, which is thousands of dollars less than the $40,362 an adult with no children must earn to make a living wage in Virginia, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator.
Luria says she believes “that everyone deserves a living wage to raise a family in the community.” But Gagne is not the first staffer in the Democrat’s office who earns less than the income required to reach a living wage in the Old Dominion.
As a staff assistant, Jacob Olander—who left Luria’s office in April—earned a yearly salary of $33,588. Fellow staff assistant Nolan Brown—who also left Luria’s office last year—made even less, earning a yearly salary of just $31,769. When the Washington Free Beacon in March approached Luria’s office with that information, Communications Director Jayce Genco did not comment on past staffers but said that every Luria aide now “makes a living wage.” Just weeks later, Luria filed her statement of disbursements from January to March, which proved Genco wrong.
Luria’s living wage hypocrisy could spark the ire of progressive Democrats, a voting bloc Luria will need to win as she navigates a difficult reelection campaign. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin (R.) won Luria’s Second Congressional District by 12 points last November, just one year after President Joe Biden won it by 2 points—a colossal 14-point swing. That result has Republicans confident they can beat Luria—a top Republican target since she joined Congress three years ago—in 2022.
Luria, whose office did not return a request for comment, will have to overcome Biden’s dismal political standing in Virginia to overcome that challenge. As record-high gas prices and inflation sweep the nation, just 33 percent of Virginians approve of the president, compared with 55 percent who disapprove, according to Civiqs. MIT’s living wage calculator reflects those issues—in March, the database placed the pre-tax salary required to earn a living wage in Virginia at $34,552. Just months later, that number rose by 17 percent.
This is not the first time Luria has flip-flopped on a wage issue. The Democrat as a candidate in 2018 came out against a $15 nationwide minimum wage, arguing that lawmakers should instead enact a wage hike “based off of different areas of the country that have different costs of living.” As a small business owner, Luria said she understood the economic risk of a one-size-fits-all minimum wage, which would “cause risk to my business and other businesses,” she said.
Years later, however, Luria sold her small business—and ditched her opposition to a $15 federal minimum wage. In July 2019, Luria sold her design-your-own craft shop, the Mermaid Factory. Within days, the Democrat voted for the Raise the Wage Act, a Nancy Pelosi-backed bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour regardless of local economic conditions.
Luria does not face a primary opponent this year—Navy veteran Neil Smith planned to challenge the Democrat but withdrew his candidacy. Voters will choose Luria’s Republican opponent on Tuesday. State senator Jennifer Kiggans leads that race’s fundraising battle, having raised $1.3 million as of June 1.
As parents across the nation fight to have a say in their children’s public education, more are taking things into their own hands: running for local school boards.
Sean Kaufman in Woodstock, Georgia, is one of them. And his journey began with a school assignment on the American dream.
Before that, he never felt any reason to question what schools were teaching his children, and he would always check on whether his kids had done what their teachers had asked them to do.
“It was this ultimate trust [in the school system],” said the father of three, a small business owner and part-time professor at a local university.
During the pandemic, however, the virtual learning in public schools allowed him a closer look at what his children were learning.
In November 2020, his middle child Aiden, then a junior at the Woodstock High School, got an assignment in his advanced placement (AP) English class to write a paper on whether the American dream was dead or alive. He was also assigned to peer review two other students’ essays.
“Every single child wrote the American dream was dead. And that really bothered me,” Kaufman told The Epoch Times about the three papers he read.
While Aiden wrote that the American dream was “dwindling” and “unable to be fulfilled by the current American society,” his classmates described the ideal in their essays as a “delusion,” “fallacy,” and a “broken dream.”
One cited George Floyd’s death as the reason the American dream was “an illusion” and “broken.” The 46-year-old black man died after a police officer held his knee on Floyd’s back and neck while pinned to the ground in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020. His death prompted mass demonstrations across the globe as protestors called for racial justice.
Kaufman asked his son why wrote the essay in that way.
“Dad, it’s easier,” replied Aiden. “They [the teacher] give you argumentative papers [papers provided for background]. Three say the American dream is dead, and one says it’s kind of alive.” And according to Aiden, if he “went along” with the main theme that the American dream was dead, the teacher wouldn’t ask him to defend his position.
Sean Kaufman (2nd R) with wife Jacqueline and sons Sean Patrick (L) and Aiden, and daughter Jamielynn (Courtesy of Sean Kaufman)
Kaufman thought his public health students at the Kennesaw State University might know more than high schoolers.
During the same week, he conducted an ad hoc survey in class, “How many of you believe the American dream is dead?” He asked his class of about 25 students.
“Ninety percent raised their hands,” said Kaufman. “I was just blown away.”
He asked his college students what the American dream was. Not getting an answer, he defined it for them, “The American dream is, in this country, if you work hard, you sacrifice, and you never quit, you will find some type of success in your life.”
After giving the students his definition, he tried again, “How many of you still believe the American dream is dead?”
Still, 90 percent raised their hands.
“If you believe the American dream is dead in this country, why are you sitting in a college classroom?” he asked. The class was silent. Students looked shocked, and one said he hadn’t thought about that.
To Kaufman, associating the death of George Floyd with the end of the American dream reflects a tenet of critical race theory (CRT). “CRT believes that everywhere you are, the system is rigged against persons of color.”
CRT is a quasi-Marxist framework that argues that America is systematically racist. Supporters say it’s a college-level theory course not taught in K-12 public schools, yet critics beg to differ.
Kaufman is not alone in Georgia in believing in the American dream.
In a June 2021 poll, eighty-one percent of voters in Georgia agreed with the following statement: “Children should never be taught that their destiny and inherent value depends on their skin color. Instead, American schools should be teaching American children about the American Dream that is available to them.” The Georgia statewide survey was conducted by Heritage Action for America, the grassroots and advocacy arm of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.
The percentages of agreement in Democrat, independent, and Republican groups were 62, 85, and 97, respectively. The survey’s sample size was 600, with 38 percent Democrats, 15 percent independents, and 41 percent Republicans.
Running for School Board and Raising Awareness
Fast forward to this February, an 11th-grade English language arts class assignment prompted Kaufman to file a formal lesson challenge and speak at the Cherokee County School Board meeting.
The assignment asked students to read the book “Desiree’s Baby” by 19th-century American author Kate Chopin and write an extended ending. Students should “stay true to the tenet of the literary period” and write in the original third-person point of view or as any of the characters.
In the short story written in 1893, Desiree, abandoned as a baby and raised by a wealthy family in Louisiana, married Armond, a son of a plantation owner. When it turned out that their baby’s skin was black, Armond blamed Desiree for being part black and drove her away. However, when burning Desiree’s belongings, he came across a letter between his parents that revealed the secret they kept from him: he was the one who was part black.
Many students wrote from the perspective of Armond, according to Kaufman.
He quoted one such writing during his speech at the February school board meeting, “Surrounding me were the negroes fueling the fire, their skin now a reminder that I was part of who they were. I felt a horrid disgust inside of me. Oh, how I wished my skin would melt from my bones; I could never be one of them.”
“What benefit is there, in my opinion, to make a child write as though he is a racist, bigoted slave owner hundreds of years later?” asked Kaufman.
In response to his challenge, the school’s English department formed a review committee with members from the administration, professional learning community, and instruction personnel. A month later, the committee recommended the continuation of the assignment because students could choose any character’s point of view for their writing. It also suggested offering alternative assignments and hiding students’ names on papers during peer review at parents’ request.
Kaufman didn’t think alternative assignments were the solution. And he didn’t believe the school board listened. Hence, he decided to run for the school board to become a voice for change.
And no surprise, CRT is front and center in his first attempt at public service.
Unlike in most states, some of Georgia’s school board elections are partisan. Kaufman was up against two other Republican candidates, Erin Ragsdale and Eric Richards, in the primary on May 24. The Republican incumbent didn’t run this time. None of the candidates got over half of the votes. Therefore, a runoff was scheduled for June 21, with early voting between June 13 and 17. The runoff winner will face the Democrat primary winner on Nov. 8.
Kaufman finished second at the primary last month, earning him a seat in the runoff. A total of 6,493 votes were cast in the Republican primary, compared to 1,392 votes in the Democrat primary with only one candidate.
Kaufman’s opponent Ragsdale, a pediatric speech-language pathologist, runs on “making the best [school district] even better.” She promised “continued support” of the district’s decision to ban CRT on her website.
In May 2021, the county school district passed a resolution prohibiting the implementation of CRT. Kaufman said that many voters were thus confused and didn’t know that, although banned, CRT had been integrated into the schools’ teaching.
“You integrate theory into class; you don’t teach the theory,” he said. “When people say, ‘CRT is not being taught,’ it’s a lie.”
He said Democrats voted for his opponent because she wouldn’t change the status quo much. Primaries are open in Georgia, meaning voters can cross party lines to vote. The Epoch Times has reached out to Ragsdale for comment.
“I love our children. Our children are born the way that they are born, and the way they are born is beautiful. They are perfect,” he said, explaining his determination to get CRT out of the county schools. “And to tell a child that the way they are born and the color of their skin dictates who they will be in this life, whether they will be an oppressed or an oppressor?
“It breaks my heart.”
After the primary, Richards, who ranked last, endorsed Kaufman. He had run his race on similar stances. If Kaufman can get the votes that previously supported Richards, he may reach the majority and defeat Ragsdale in the runoff. To achieve that, he has continued to post videos on social media, go door to door, and send mailers and text messages.
“Every vote in runoff counts. Every vote,” he said. “It’s going to be decided very very closely. And I’m praying that Eric Richards’ voters get behind me.”
However, losing the runoff wouldn’t mean the end of his efforts. He said he wanted to be the voice that brought about the change, “I have raised awareness in over 2,000 people in my community.”
“That’s 2,000 people that believe and have been wakened and will continue to fight beside me as we continue to try and increase awareness about what’s happening in our community,” he added.
Sean Kaufman (L) with his son Aiden (Courtesy of Sean Kaufman)
‘Are You For or Against CRT?’
While the outcome of Kaufman’s runoff has still to be decided, halfway across the nation in the south, Stephanie Elad has won her seat in the Frisco Independent School District (Frisco ISD), an area about 30 miles north of Dallas, Texas. It was an open seat as the incumbent didn’t seek re-election. She campaigned on academic excellence and teacher retention, and ran as a conservative in the non-partisan race.
Although she didn’t run with CRT as her number one issue or mention the term CRT much, it was the number one question she was asked during door-knocking on Republican-leaning voters. The first question they often asked her was, “Are you for or against CRT?”
“Ninety-five percent of them wanted me just to say I’m against it,” she told The Epoch Times. “I would say I’m against it. And then my next statement was, ‘And we do have it here in Frisco.’”
Some people said they knew, but most were surprised. Then, Elad would provide examples of what she believed to be “CRT inspired.” “One of our high schools did a ‘privilege walk’ last fall. All you had to do is to tell people about that, and they were horrified.”
In a privilege walk, students usually stand in a straight line and step forward if they have certain privileges, such as being white and a male. It’s an activity stemming from the viewpoint that society doesn’t offer equal access to opportunities.
The school board seat is Elad’s first public service job. Her journey began in April 2021 at a school board meeting. She had signed up for public comment to talk about mask mandates but decided to change her topic after the then-board president Chad Rudy told the audience: “Please keep the discussion down. We’re trying to get through our meeting tonight. This is our discussion.”
“There was a comment made that this was your meeting. I think this is our meeting,” she told trustees on the school board. The audience applauded.
“I think the parents and the taxpayers deserve a little more respect,” she added. “This is our meeting.” The audience cheered again.
Stephanie Elad (R) with Marvin Lowe, another conservative who also won a seat on the school board of the Frisco Independent School District in Texas. (Courtesy of Stephanie Elad)
After that, people told her she should run for the school board. And she did. She announced the campaign in January and decided to “lean in” her conservative identity.
She avoided getting into the debate whether CRT was or was not taught in Frisco schools but focused on the outcomes, such as sliding academic standards. For example, to her, the Integrated Language Arts (ILA) pilot program introduced in the 2021-21 school year that combined on-level and advanced-level learning into the same classroom to promote equity and inclusivity was an outcome of a CRT-inspired approach.
The Frisco ISD serves 66,000 students and spans over two counties: Collin and Denton, which is more conservative than Collin. And all board seats are at-large, meaning they represent the entire ISD. This year’s school board election saw a big turnout of around 15,000, compared to 8,000 a year ago.
Elad said everyone told her that, like many conservative municipal candidates before her, she would lose Collin and win Denton and that she needed to make sure the margin in Denton would compensate the loss in Collin. On the contrary, she defeated the runner-up—Dustin Paschal who identified student mental health issues as the biggest challenge—by 400 in Collin County and about 800 votes in Denton.
“I have Democrats donate to me because they hate this [ILA pilot] program so much. Their kids are in it. Some of them have advanced kids, and some don’t,” she told The Epoch Times. “They just don’t like the program and the concept behind it. And they are concerned that it can spread to other subjects.”
‘Fight like Hell with a Smile on Our Faces’
While both Kaufman and Elad run for an open seat, many candidates run against incumbents.
“School boards incumbents lost at nearly twice the historical average,” Ballotpedia, a website that tracks election results, reported at the end of May. The finding was based on candidates who ran on at least one of the three “conflict issues”—identified as race in education, COVID-19 responses, or sex and gender in schools—in 141 school districts in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin’s school board elections held on April 5. And the sample size involved 334 seats in those 141 districts.
“I think this might be the first time that people are actually paying attention to school board elections,” Virginia Beach City school board member Victoria Manning told The Epoch Times.
“Often, people go to the polls, and we’re passing out our literature, and I say, ‘Do you know whom you’re voting for school board?’ And they look at me, dazed and confused, ‘What’s that?’”
Manning, a realtor, won her election in 2016 and was re-elected in 2020.
All three issues—race, COVID-19, and sex education—boiled down to parental rights to her. “Ultimately, it boils down to parents having to be the ultimate decision-makers, parents and guardians.”
According to Tiffany Justice, co-founder of advocacy group Moms for Liberty (M4L), parents are “acting preemptively at their local level” to protect their children and not waiting to fight against “harms that they see coming down the pipe.”
Founded in January 2021, M4L now has over 90,000 members in 195 chapters across 37 states, Justice said. A third of the total membership has been new since November. Hawaii, Louisiana, and Connecticut are the latest states with new chapters.
Justice said that her organization continues to grow across the country, focusing on “unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend or protect their parental rights at all levels of government.”
The battles were not all victories. M4L supported or endorsed over 40 school board candidates who won in the state of New York but also saw losses. For example, in Dutchess County, every candidate the organization endorsed lost.
Justice described the journey as a “long road:” “We didn’t get to this place in America overnight, and it’s going to take time. But we have found that America’s government does not work without us involved.”
Moms are getting creative, she said. She gave an example: at a chapter chair meeting in mid-May, one of the mothers said she got a meeting with the superintendent in her school district. Although angry, she made sure to sandwich her concerns with positive things she could say about the school district. And slowly, she found that the division leadership began addressing her concerns.
“Our moms and dads know that we are fighting for the survival of America,” Justice told The Epoch Times. “There’s no greater national security threat to the United States than having a generation of children who are not able to read or discern [right from wrong] for themselves.”
Her and M4L members’ responses? “Fight like hell with a smile on our faces. Get as many people out and encourage many parents to go out and vote to have their voices heard.”
Either 0.50 or 0.75 percentage point hike ‘seems most likely’ at the July meeting, according to Powell
The Federal Reserve raised the benchmark interest rate by 75 basis points on June 15, the largest rate hike since November 1994, as part of its effort to tame soaring inflation.
Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) officials agreed to increase the Fed funds target range to between 1.5 percent and 1.75 percent. This is the rate that banks charge each other for overnight borrowing, affecting consumer borrowing, such as credit cards and home equity loans.
Before the latest headline inflation reading, the Fed forward guidance had penciled in a 50-basis-point rate hike in June. Investors had been pricing in this level, but a red-hot consumer price index (CPI) prompted the market to alter its expectation and forecast a more hawkish central bank.
During his post-FOMC meeting press conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell told reporters that “either a 50 basis point or a 75 basis point increase seems most likely” at the July meeting.
The Fed raised interest rates by 25 basis points in March, marking the first increase since 2018. Rates were increased by a half percentage point last month.
Looking ahead to the FOMC’s interest rate projections, the Fed is forecasting 3.4 percent at the end of 2022, up from 1.9 percent in the March projection. It’s also expecting 3.8 percent next year. The Fed’s policymakers anticipate that they’ll start trimming interest rates in 2024.
The Fed increased its inflation forecast for this year from 4.3 percent in March projections to 5.2 percent. The central bank sees inflation slowing to 2.6 percent next year.
On the gross domestic product (GDP) front, the Fed projects that growth will slow to 1.7 percent this year from the previous forecast of 2.8 percent.
“Overall economic activity appears to have picked up after edging down in the first quarter,” the revised FOMC statement reads. “Job gains have been robust in recent months, and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation remains elevated, reflecting supply and demand imbalances related to the pandemic, higher energy prices, and broader price pressures.
“The invasion of Ukraine by Russia is causing tremendous human and economic hardship. The invasion and related events are creating additional upward pressure on inflation and are weighing on global economic activity. In addition, COVID-related lockdowns in China are likely to exacerbate supply chain disruptions. The Committee is highly attentive to inflation risks.”
Kansas City Fed Bank President Esther George was the lone dissent vote, preferring a 0.5 percentage point increase.
Financial markets turned positive during Powell’s press conference after he signaled that the Fed would remain tough on inflation. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained nearly 300 points. The S&P 500 increased by 1.5 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite Index was up by 2.5 percent.
The U.S. Treasury market was mostly in the red, with the benchmark 10-year yield down 14 basis points to 3.34 percent.
U.S. rate futures have priced in a 93.4 percent probability of a 75-basis-point hike in July and a 55 percent chance of a half-point increase in September.
Fed’s Balancing Act
The central bank has been coming under pressure to rein in four-decade high inflation by being more aggressive in tightening monetary policy and employing enormous rate hikes. At the same time, the Fed needs to avert a hard crash, ensuring that the United States doesn’t slip into a recession.
Powell and the FOMC are entrenched in a juggling act to balance economic growth and curb inflation. A chorus of economic commentators is doubtful that the Fed can fight inflation and sustain the post-pandemic economic expansion.
When asked if the economy will still experience a soft landing, Powell indicated that recent events, such as commodity price volatility, have increased the degree of difficulty and provided significant challenges to the central bank.
“Panicked by sky-high inflation, now the Fed is stepping hard on the monetary policy brakes too hard in much the same way as last year it kept its foot on the accelerator too long,” Desmond Lachman, economist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Epoch Times in an email. “It is doing so now by rising interest rates in 75 basis point steps rather than the more normal 25 basis point steps.”
Lachman noted that the Fed’s shift to a more hawkish policy stance might trigger a recession because “it has already caused the asset and credit market bubbles it created last year to burst.”
“Since the start of the year, equity prices have fallen by around 25 percent, bond prices have declined by more than 20 percent, and the cryptocurrency market has lost more than half of its value,” he said. “That has involved the evaporation of around $15 trillion or 70 percent of GDP in household wealth that could cause consumers to cut back heavily on spending.”
The situation comes down to the Fed being unable to admit the problem in the first place, according to Nancy Tengler, CEO and chief investment officer of Laffer Tengler Investments.
Since last year, the policymakers “shared a stubborn refusal to admit the problem,” she wrote in a research note. “The chaos resulting from their actions—and make no mistake, those poor policies straddle both parties—goes unrecognized, un-examined, unresolved, doomed to be repeated.”
Ed Yardeni, president and chief investment strategist of Yardeni Research, essentially echoed this sentiment in a June 15 note, writing that the Fed has been behind the curve, turning “woke” in the process.
“Perhaps the most important similarity between the 1970s and recent events is the lame response of the Fed to the wage-price-rent spiral. The Fed was well behind the inflation curve during most of the 1970s and is now once again,” Yardeni wrote.
Today, the U.S. economy is dealing with a trade-off: beat inflation with a recession or deal with soaring prices and maintain stagnant growth.
“[A] more accelerated Fed hiking cycle ultimately should help tame inflation pressures but will make it more difficult to thread the needle between lower inflation and a recession,” Deutsche Bank said in a June 14 note. “We continue to anticipate that bringing inflation back down to target will require a meaningful hit to demand and rise in the unemployment rate, the latter of which historically does.”
There’s a growing expectation that substantial rate hikes would halt business activity and spending, while also leading to greater job losses.
But everything the Fed will do moving forward will be based on data, which has been the modus operandi from before the start of the tightening cycle, according to Robert R. Johnson, CEO of Economic Index Associates and professor at Heider College of Business, Creighton University.
“Let the Federal Reserve raise rates in a very measured manner and there is a possibility that we could achieve a soft landing for the economy,” he told The Epoch Times. “Reckless moves like some are calling for would preclude any possibility of a soft landing.”
Johnson does anticipate that the year-end interest rate would be closer to 3.75 percent to 4 percent.
About That Recession
Wall Street appears to be split on the odds of a recession. Many financial institutions and analysts have placed the bets at 50 percent, while others think there’s a decent chance that the U.S. economy could experience a soft landing.
But could a recession already be here? It wouldn’t be surprising, said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it started in the third quarter of this year,” he told CNBC on June 10. “You can say that we’re in the midst of it right now, in the beginning phase. Only in retrospect will we know for sure, but it should not surprise us at this point.”
In the first quarter, the U.S. economy contracted at a 1.5 percent rate.
The next two-day FOMC policy meeting will take place on July 26 and 27.
According to the CME FedWatch Tool, the market is penciling in a three-quarter point rate hike next month.
