Ryan joins picket line as teachers strike day before school set to begin
A teachers strike in Ohio has transformed into a microcosm of how the state’s two Senate candidates view public education, with Democrat Rep. Tim Ryan walking the picket lines and Republican J.D. Vance blasting the union for harming children.
The Columbus Education Association called a strike on Sunday, just days before the school year was set to begin, citing lack of a “fair contract” as well as “functional heating and air-conditioning” in a small number of classrooms. Teachers are also demanding an 8 percent annual salary hike over several years, while the city is offering a 3 percent hike.
Students, whose school year began Wednesday, will now be forced to attend class online. Sports and other extracurriculars are canceled until the strike ends.
Ryan and Vance have taken contrasting positions on the strike, in a familiar debate reminiscent of when schools shut down across the country in 2020 and 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic due to teacher union demands. Myriad studies show those shutdowns caused tremendous damage to children’s development and contributed to a dramatic increase in child suicide attempts.
But union support is critical for Ryan’s chances of winning a Senate seat in a state that voted for former president Donald Trump by 8 points twice. That dynamic however, clashes with Ryan’s campaign’s message that he’s a centrist who hopes to win over Republican voters, many of whom saw school closures as ineffective and an abuse of power by government bureaucrats.
“Our kids have lost so much ground,” Ryan said Tuesday on Twitter. “They need to get back in the classroom. But they can’t learn in extreme temps, leaky buildings or packed classes.”
Ryan is a top recipient of donations from teachers’ unions, according to campaign finance disclosure documents. Ryan’s education plan for his failed 2020 presidential bid, which included billions of dollars of more funding for things such as “social-emotional learning programs” and “housing assistance,” earned the support of controversial teachers’ union president Randi Weingarten.
Ryan’s campaign did not answer an inquiry from the Washington Free Beacon.
The Columbus Education Association told the Free Beacon that it welcomes Ryan’s attendance at the strike.
“The Columbus Education Association is grateful for Rep. Tim Ryan’s support as our teachers continue to fight for the safe, properly maintained, fully resourced schools Columbus students deserve,” a spokeswoman for the union said.
Ryan’s campaign also shared a fundraiser for the striking teachers. Those funds would help teachers stay off the job by providing lost income.
Meanwhile, Vance accused Ryan of fighting for “special interests that fund his campaign.”
“Tim Ryan and the union bosses he serves are deliberately misleading teachers, parents and students,” Vance said in a statement. “We know far too well from the past two years that ‘online learning’ is horrible for students, families, and communities.”
A study from Ohio State University found that COVID-19 education restrictions resulted in students there “missing one half to one full year’s worth of learning in math … and between one-third and one-half of a year’s worth of learning in English language arts.” The effects of school shutdowns were particularly profound in “disadvantaged students,” researchers said.
Ryan will face Vance in November. Recent polling shows Vance pulling ahead in the match up. A RealClearPolitics average of polls in the last two months has Vance leading by nearly 4 points.
China’s vast censorship efforts are under scrutiny again, after it was revealed on social media that the Chinese version of the new children’s film “Minions: The Rise of Gru” featured an altered ending that supported the communist regime’s policies.
While the global version of the film ends with two anti-heroes riding into the sunset after a heist, the Chinese version ends with one character going to prison for 20 years and the other renouncing his evil ways. The latter then dedicates his life to raising three children, in an apparent reference to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping’s three-child policy.
During an interview with NTD, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times, long-time Hollywood executive and “Feeding the Dragon” author Chris Fenton said that it was not clear if the censored ending was created by the film’s Chinese distributor or Universal Pictures.
In either event, Fenton said, Universal would likely have had little incentive to go against the wishes of the CCP.
“As far as Universal Studios is concerned, if they want to have that movie released [in China], they have no choice but to comply,” Fenton said.
Fenton said there were likely two overriding motivations driving Universal to comply with the censorship. The first is a desire for access to the Chinese box office. The second is its newly opened Universal Studios theme park in Beijing. NBCUniversal’s Universal Parks & Resorts holds a minority 30 percent stake in the park, while five state-run companies own the remaining 70 percent majority through the Beijing Shouhuan Cultural Tourism Investment Company.
Despite the effort to turn the film into communist propaganda, Fenton said there was a silver lining to the incident insofar as the edits were only made to the Chinese release of the film and that the regime had not successfully encouraged such alterations to the global release.
“We’re noticing that some of these edits just to get a movie into China are basically just for China, which is a positive,” Fenton said. “I’m not feeling like Hollywood is necessarily censoring itself after a movie is made in order to please Chinese censors for the worldwide cut of the movies. It’s being done just for the domestic cut.”
“That said, there’s still a lot of premeditated censorship in Hollywood, in terms of sensitive items that they know China is going to have problems with and possibly blackball not only the studio, but all the individuals involved with the film to begin with.”
Hollywood Caters to the CCP
To that end, Fenton said that Hollywood executives had long catered to the whims of the CCP in pursuit of the expansive Chinese market. Now, he said, the CCP is closing its jaws around those companies operating in the country, taking their ideas and funding to prop up Chinese competitors.
“A lot of people like myself were embarking on this U.S.-China collaborative business model because we thought we were getting our products and services from the United States into a market that was normally closed off to them,” Fenton said.
“We really created our own worst enemies over there,” Fenton said. “And on top of it, we really mitigated our beliefs, our principles, our values, the things that made us Americans and made us part of the democratic world in order to get that access. And I think a lot of us now are regretting it.”
Fenton said that the risk and reward calculus for Western businesses operating in China is changing, underscoring that China is unlikely to open itself back up any time soon. Under Xi’s rule, he said, Western companies, particularly in cultural industries such as film, are increasingly being required to submit to the whims of the Party.
“[Xi] is ruling that country with an iron fist,” Fenton said. “There’s a lot of resentment around the world towards him and his government and that is causing them to retreat even further.”
“I just don’t simply see an opening occur that’s going to make things better for Hollywood nor really any industry that’s trying to gain access to that market without doing some serious kowtowing to that government.”
A group of independent German scientists found toxic components—mostly metallic—in all the COVID vaccine samples they analyzed, “without exception” using modern medical and physical measuring techniques.
The Working Group for COVID Vaccine Analysis says that some of the toxic elements found inside the AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Moderna vaccine vials were not listed in the ingredient lists from the manufacturers.
The following metallic elements were found in the vaccines:
Alkali metals: caesium (Cs), potassium (K)
Alkaline earth metals: calcium (Ca), barium (Ba)
transition metals: cobalt (Co), iron (Fe), chromium (Cr), titanium (Ti)
Rare earth metals: cerium (Ce), gadolinium (Gd)
Mining group/metal: aluminum (Al)
Carbon group: silicon (Si) (partly support material/slide)
Oxygen group: sulphur (S)
These substances, furthermore, “are visible under the dark-field microscope as distinctive and complex structures of different sizes, can only partially be explained as a result of crystallization or decomposition processes, [and] cannot be explained as contamination from the manufacturing process,” the researchers found.
The findings “build on the work of other researchers in the international community who have described similar findings, such as Dr. Young, Dr. Nagase, Dr. Botha, Dr. Flemming, Dr, Robert Wakeling, and Dr. Noak,” Dr. Janci Lindsay, Ph.D., a toxicologist not involved in the study, told The Epoch Times.
“The number and consistency of the allegations of contamination alone, coupled with the eerie silence from global safety and regulatory bodies, is troublesome and perplexing in terms of ‘transparency’ and continued allegations by these bodies that the genetic vaccines are ‘safe,’” Lindsay added.
Comparison of crystals in the blood and in the vaccine; on the left, crystalline formations are found in the blood of test subjects vaccinated with Comirnaty (BioNTech/Pfizer), the images on the right show that these types of crystals are also found in Comirnaty vaccines. (Courtesy of Helen Krenn)
Helena Krenn, the group’s founder, submitted the findings to German government authorities for review.
“We had submitted it to the participants of the government and further addresses from newspapers with the platform open-debate.eu, only in Germany, Austria, and Suisse,” Krenn told The Epoch Times.
Two other important findings were that blood samples from the vaccinated had “marked changes” and that more side effects were observed in proportion to “the stability of the envelope of lipid nanoparticles.”
A lipid nanoparticle is an extremely small particle, a fat-soluble membrane that is the cargo of the messenger RNA (mRNA).
Methodology
“Using a small sample of live blood analyses from both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, we have determined that artificial intelligence (AI) can distinguish with 100% reliability between the blood of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. This indicates that the COVID-19 vaccines can effect long-term changes in the composition of the blood of the person vaccinated without that person being aware of these changes,” the study states.
The findings of acute and chronic physiological changes to the blood of those inoculated with the vaccines, consistently discerned via AI software, “also echoes the findings of many other researchers and support the contentions of contamination and/or adulteration,” Lindsay said.
“We have established that the COVID-19 vaccines consistently contain, in addition to contaminants, substances the purpose of which we are unable to determine,” their study says.
The group consists of 60 members, including physicians, physicists, chemists, microbiologists, and alternative health practitioners, supported by lawyers and psychologists.
Anomalous objects in Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vector vaccine. It should be noted that objects of this type were not found in all of the samples. (Courtesy of Helen Krenn)
The scientists claim that their results have been cross-confirmed using the following measuring techniques: “Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDX), Mass Spectroscopy (MS), Inductively Coupled Plasma Analysis (ICP), Bright Field Microscopy (BFM), Dark Field Microscopy (DFM) and Live Blood Image Diagnostics, as well as analysis of images using Artificial Intelligence.”
The analysts explain that they have been cooperating with other groups in different countries that have been executing similar investigations and have obtained results consistent with their own.
“The results from our analysis of the vaccines can, consequently, be regarded as cross-validated,” the summary report of their findings states.
“It should be acknowledged of course that [German Working Group’s] work is described as ‘Preliminary Findings,’ not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal and that chain of custody as well as the identity of many of these scientists is unknown. However, in this heavily charged and censored climate when it comes to any challenges to the ‘safety and efficacy’ of the genetic vaccines, I myself can attest to the difficulties in conducting the basic research, much less publishing that same research in a peer-reviewed journal, in order to get at these questions as well as disseminate the findings,” Lindsay said.
The Comirnaty vaccine from BioNTech/Pfizer exhibits a diversity and large number of unusual objects. The vast number of crystalline platelets and shapes can hardly be interpreted as impurities. They appear regularly and in large numbers in all samples. (Courtesy of Helen Krenn)
Astra Zeneca, Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J did not respond to a request for comment.
THE REACH OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY INTO THE BIDEN ADMIN IS WORTHY OF FULL INVESTIGATION.
Joe Biden’s Ambassador to China headlined an event sponsored by the U.S.-China Heartland Association (USCHA), a Chinese Communist Party-linked foreign influence group targeting American farmers and farmland.
Ambassador Nick Burns – who worked for consulting firms representing the Chinese regime prior to joining the White House – addressed the recent U.S.-China High-Level Agricultural Dialogue hosted by the U.S.-China Heartland Association (USCHA).
Founded by former Democrat Governor of Missouri Bob Holden, the USHCA purports to be a “bipartisan organization committed to building stronger ties between the USHCA Region (20 states located in the USA between the Great Lakes to the Gulf) and the People’s Republic of China.”
“Our focus will be on Trust Building efforts connecting government officials; business leaders; educational and community interests with like-minded institutions between the Heartland Region and the People’s Republic of China,” the group’s mission statement euphemizes.
The USHCA, however, appears to be used by several Chinese Communist Party-controlled organizations to gain access to American agricultural officials and company representatives. This includes sponsoring trips to China for Americans, often in exchange for “favorable coverage” and lucrative deals.
Among the Chinese Communist Party influence groups that collaborate with USHCA are the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) and China United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), both of which are part of Beijing’s United Front Work Department.
The United Front Work Department is a billion-dollar operation executed by the Chinese Communist Party seeking “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign individuals and the policies of foreign states to serve Beijing’s interests,” according to the federal U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission.
The U.S. State Department also compares the United Front to the Chinese regime’s “magic weapon” to advance its preferred policies.
“Close to 200 high-level participants, including an array of governmental, educational, national and international agri-business leaders attended this dialogue,” explains a summary of the event’s attendees headlined by Ambassador Burns.
Despite these ties, Ambassador Burns was a featured speaker alongside his Chinese Communist Party counterparts.
He used his speech to urge for more collaboration between China and the U.S. on agricultural endeavors, insisting “Agriculture is going to be priority for me as it is for our president as it is for Secretary [Tom] Vilsack.”
“Maintaining a constructive relationship on agriculture with the People’s Republic is going to be very important for the overall bilateral relationship,” he continued.
Ambassador Burns’s participation in the event follows the USHCA and other farming-focused Chinese Communist Party influence groups increasing their overtures towards American farmers amidst ongoing supply chain issues.
“IT WAS A COMPUTER GENERATED VOICE. THEY EXPLAINED THEY WERE UPSET ABOUT MS. GREENE’S STANCE ON ‘TRANS-GENDER YOUTH’S RIGHTS.”
Congressional firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene has reported that she was swatted by police at her Rome, Georgia home at 1am on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.
Local newspaper reports state:
According to a Rome Police Department report, Rome police officers responded to a 911 call on Wednesday at 01:03 a.m. which led them to initially believe a man who had been shot multiple times in the bathtub at Greene’s home. The caller also stated there was a woman inside the home and possibly children with her. When officers responded Greene assured the officers there was no issue at the home.
“After we cleared the call and went back in service, Rome-Floyd 911 received a call from the suspect, claiming responsibility for the incident and explaining his/her motives,” the report stated. “It was a computer generated voice. They explained they were upset about Ms. Greene’s stance on ‘trans-gender youth’s rights,’ and stated they were trying to ‘swat’ her.”
The report also stated caller said they are connected to a website, which police stated supports cyberstalking, and gave the police their user name on the site.
“Right now, Congresswoman Greene’s safety is our number one concern,” Greene’s spokesperson Nick Dyer said Wednesday. “Late last night, she was a victim of a political attack on her family and home. Whoever committed this violent crime will face the full extent of the law.”
ORIGINAL REPORT:
“Swatting” is commonly defined as “the action of making a false report of a serious emergency so that a SWAT team (=a group of officers trained to deal with dangerous situations) will go to a person’s home, by someone who wants to frighten, upset, or cause problems for that person”. The act usually involves heavily armed police.
Last night, I was swatted just after 1 am.
I can’t express enough gratitude to my local law enforcement here in Rome, Floyd County.
In 2015, Princeton New Jersey Police Chief Nick Sutter said of swatting: “To me, this fits the definition of terrorism. This isn’t a bomb threat that a child calls in.” He called it a national epidemic.
The act of “swatting” has been applied to a number of anti-establishment figures in recent months, with former Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon being swatted at his Capitol Hill townhouse, and YouTuber Tim Pool experiencing the same several times over in the past year, sometimes while live on air.
“Last night, I was swatted just after 1 am. I can’t express enough gratitude to my local law enforcement here in Rome, Floyd County. More details to come,” Taylor Greene wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning.
Kevin Kolbye, a former FBI swatting expert, toldThe Economist that annual swatting incidents have climbed from roughly 400 in 2011 to more than 1,000 in 2019.
Greene – a combative, right wing lawmaker – has been the target of Democrat and establishment Republican attacks since she entered Congress in 2020.
This is a developing story. We will add further details as they emerge.
Congressional lawmakers are probing allegations made by Twitter’s former chief of security in an explosive whistleblower complaint that includes claims of deception related to data security and privacy and misleading tech entrepreneur Elon Musk about the number of bots on the platform.
Peiter Zatko, the whistleblower who served as Twitter’s head of security for about 14 months before being fired earlier this year, asserted in a disclosure obtained by The Epoch Times that Twitter’s security and privacy systems were grossly inadequate and that the company misled regulators, investors, and Musk about fake “spam” bots on the platform.
While Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has called Zatko’s claims a “false narrative,” U.S. lawmakers appear determined to make up their own minds and are investigating.
‘Serious Concerns’
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that he is looking into Zatko’s allegations.
“The whistleblower’s allegations of widespread security failures at Twitter, willful misrepresentations by top executives to government agencies, and penetration of the company by foreign intelligence raise serious concerns,” he said.
“As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I will continue investigating this issue and take further steps as needed to get to the bottom of these alarming allegations,” he said, adding that if the whistleblower’s claims are accurate, there may be “dangerous” risks for Twitter users in terms of data privacy and security.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) sent a letter (pdf) to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice expressing “significant concerns” about the whistleblower’s allegations.
“According to Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, Twitter has systematically and repeatedly failed to take basic security measures to protect its user data and has misled investors, regulators, and the public about the strength of its security systems,” Markey said in a statement.
Markey added that Zatko’s allegations suggest that Twitter has again “flagrantly violated” its consent decree with the FTC, just months after the company agreed to pay a $150 million penalty for failing to keep Twitter users’ data secure.
“I strongly urge the federal government to investigate Zatko’s claims and, if necessary, take strong and swift action against Twitter to ensure Twitter user data is properly protected,” the senator wrote.
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement that he was “carefully reviewing this whistleblower disclosure and assessing next steps.”
“These allegations are alarming and reaffirm the need to pass my comprehensive privacy legislation to protect Americans’ online data,” Pallone added, referring to the American Data Privacy and Protection Act that he co-sponsored.
Several other lawmakers have issued similar statements.
Twitter officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment on Zatko’s claims.
Parag Agrawal, CEO of Twitter, walks to a morning session during the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference in Idaho, on July 7, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
‘False Narrative’
Twitter spokesperson Anna Hughes was cited by The Washington Post as saying that Zatko’s complaint seems to contain “inconsistencies and inaccuracies” and takes things out of context.
“Mr. Zatko’s allegations and opportunistic timing appear designed to capture attention and inflict harm on Twitter, its customers and its shareholders,” she said, according to the outlet.
Agrawal also pushed back on Zatko’s claims, reportedly writing in a message to staff that was shared on social media by CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan that the whistleblower’s complaint appears to be a “false narrative that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and presented without important context.”
“We will pursue all paths to defend our integrity as a company and set the record straight,” Agrawal wrote.
Key Takeaways from Whistleblower Complaint
Zatko claims that, despite Twitter agreeing in its settlement with the FTC to put in place stronger data security protections, the situation over time actually became worse.
His complaint alleges that Twitter’s internal systems let far too many employees access users’ personal data that they didn’t need for their jobs, opening the door to potential abuse.
Experts who were deeply familiar with Twitter’s problems with the FTC told Zatko “unequivocally that Twitter had never been in compliance with the 2011 FTC Consent Order, and was not on track to ever achieve full compliance,” the complaint reads.
Zatko’s disclosure also claims that Twitter had difficulty identifying—much less restricting—the presence of foreign agents on its platform, while alleging that Chinese entities gave money to Twitter, raising concerns that these entities could access sensitive information about Twitter users.
The complaint also claims Twitter experienced server vulnerabilities, alleging that over 50 percent of Twitter’s 500,000 data center servers had kernels or operating systems that were non-compliant and many had problems with encryption.
An image of Elon Musk is seen on smartphone placed on printed Twitter logos in this picture illustration taken on April 28, 2022. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters)
Zatko’s complaint also states that Musk, who’s embroiled in a legal fight with Twitter over his backing out of a deal to buy the platform for $44 billion, was right in claiming that Twitter executives have little incentive to carry out accurate measurements of the amount of fake accounts and spam bots on the platform.
“Senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts,” Zatko’s complaint states.
It alleges that Twitter executives were concerned that accurate bot counts would be damaging to Twitter’s “image and valuation.”
Zatko’s disclosure also includes the allegation that the true number of spam accounts and bots on Twitter is probably “meaningfully higher” that the 5 percent of daily monetizable users that the social media firm claims.
Key to Musk’s backing out of the buyout agreement is his claim that Twitter’s longstanding position that spam accounts and bots make up fewer than 5 percent of monetizable daily users is a fallacy.
Twitter has repeatedly insisted that its 5 percent estimate is accurate.
The two sides are scheduled to go to trial in October in a Delaware court, with experts saying Zatko’s disclosure could give Musk’s legal team more ammunition in their legal fight against Twitter.
Another FBIwhistleblower came forward to say that the FBI delayed its investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive, according to a Senate Republican this week.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), one of the leading investigators into Biden, sent a letter to Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz Tuesday about the latest whistleblower claims.
“Whistleblowers have recently contacted my office to share serious concerns about the FBI’s handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop,” Johnson wrote, adding that FBI leaders at the local level told employees that “you will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop” when it was discovered at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019.
The new claims “allege that the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election—potentially a year after the FBI obtained the laptop in Dec. 2019,” Johnson said.
The whistleblower also allegedly said the leadership essentially said that employees are “not going to change the outcome of the election again,” possibly referring to former FBI Director James Comey’s 2016 letter to Congress about Hillary Clinton’s private email server that came just days before the 2016 General Election.
“It is clear to me based on numerous credible whistleblower disclosures that the FBI cannot be trusted with the handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop,” Johnson wrote in the Aug. 23 letter. “I call on you to immediately investigate the FBI’s handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop and begin by obtaining the history of the investigative actions taken by the FBI on Hunter Biden’s laptop which should be available on the FBI’s case management system, Sentinel.”
The Justice Department declined to comment on Johnson’s letter.
More Details
When the laptop story surfaced in October 2020, weeks before the election, then-candidate Joe Biden and other Democrats alleged it was disinformation, while Twitter and Facebook moved to block New York Post articles on its content from being shared or accessed. Contents of the laptop revealed Hunter Biden’s extensive overseas business ties, including with entities with links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden, attends the ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, during a ceremony honoring 17 recipients, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, on July 7, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
A former associate of Hunter Biden, Tony Bobulinski, said in late 2020 that the emails disclosed in the NY Post’s report were authentic and said he got an email in May 2017 about a business plan with the Bidens’ Oneida Holdings firm.
In the emails about the Chinese energy firm CEFC, the “H” was referring to Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden was “the big guy,” said Bobulinski. Former President Donald Trump made several references to the “big guy” claim in an Oct. 22 presidential debate between him and Biden.
Before that, Republican senators wrote in September 2020 that Hunter Biden engaged in millions of dollars in “questionable financial transactions” with associates and foreign individuals, including the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and CCP-linked individuals.
Hunter Biden, in an ABC News interview and elsewhere, has said he engaged in no illegal activity and that his business deals were proper. Anonymous sources in the federal government have told CNN and other media outlets in recent days that federal investigators are still looking into Biden’s finances.
A federal judge blocked the White House late Tuesday from enforcing guidance in Texas to require hospitals to provide emergency abortions regardless of state laws.
U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix in Lubbock agreed with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) guidance was unauthorized and went beyond the text of a related federal law.
The judge declined to enjoin the guidance nationwide and instead only barred HHS from enforcing it and its interpretation of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act in Texas.
Hendrix specifically rule that the HHS guidance, which cites the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), was not authorized.
“That guidance goes well beyond EMTALA’s text, which protects both mothers and unborn children, is silent as to abortion, and preempts state law only when the two directly conflict,” he wrote in the ruling. “Since the statute is silent on the question, the Guidance cannot answer how doctors should weigh risks to both a mother and her unborn child. Nor can it, in doing so, create a conflict with state law where one does not exist.”
The HHS’s interpretation of the rule allows for a doctor to initially determine that if the “unborn child does not have an emergency medical condition, the doctor must then close his or her eyes to the unborn child’s health for the remainder of the treatment.”
As a result, it “directly conflicts with the doctor’s ongoing duty to provide care for both the mother and the unborn child when stabilizing a pregnant woman,” the judge wrote. “Because the doctor has a duty to both, EMTALA does not require the doctor to introduce an emergency medical condition to one in order to stabilize the other. Again, EMTALA does not say how to balance both interests. It leaves that determination to the doctor, who is bound by state law.”
Paxton, the Republican Texas attorney general, filed a lawsuit against HHS on July 14, days after the guidance was issued, and said it forces hospitals and doctors to commit crimes and risk their medical licenses under Texas state law. EMTALA also doesn’t give the federal government the ability to force healthcare providers to perform abortions, he also wrote.
The White House issued a statement after Hendrix’s ruling on Wednesday.
“Today’s decision is a blow to Texans. Texas filed this suit to ensure that it can block medical providers from providing life-saving and health-preserving care,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wrote, claiming that women in Texas will now be “denied this vital care.”
Biden signed the emergency HHS rule weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that argued women have a constitutional right to get an abortion.
PUNTA GORDA, Fla.–Gov. Ron DeSantis made good on his promise to take action against the environmental, social and corporate governance movement (ESG), which he called an “alarming trend” and a threat to the American economy.
On Aug. 23 the governor, along with trustees of the State Board of Administration (SBA), passed a resolution directing Florida’s fund managers to make investments that do not involve the ideological agenda of the ESG.
“Corporate power has increasingly been utilized to impose an ideological agenda on the American people through the perversion of financial investment priorities under the euphemistic banners of environmental, social, and corporate governance and diversity, inclusion, and equity,” said DeSantis said in a written statement.
“With the resolution, we passed today, the tax dollars and proxy votes of the people of Florida will no longer be commandeered by Wall Street financial firms and used to implement policies through the board room that Floridians reject at the ballot box.”
At a July 27 press conference in Tampa, the governor said that most Americans were not aware of what ESG was and what the goal is of “leveraging corporate power to impose an ideological agenda on society.” He promised to do something about it.
Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), an investment research firm in New York, described ESG as “investing as the consideration of environmental, social and governance factors alongside financial factors in the investment decision-making process.”
But some view the movement as a sinister force.
James Lindsay, the author of “Race Marxism,” described ESG as a “weapon in the hands of ‘social justice warriors’ to shake down corporations and a tool in the hands of those seeking to impose ‘one world government.’”
DeSantis’ resolution followed an action taken in December 2021 when he reclaimed the SBA’s proxy voting authority from “large financial firms,” and provided guidance to the SBA for proxy voting and investment decisions.
“This guidance will ensure that the decisions made by these civil servants on behalf of the people of Florida are in accordance with the voters’ values as expressed through the democratic process rather than blindly in lockstep with the ESG mania taking hold of Wall Street and Washington,” the governor’s office said in a prepared statement.
In the upcoming 2023 legislative session, the governor plans to propose laws that would amend Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices statute that would prohibit discriminatory practices by large financial institutions that incorporate the ESG social credit score metric.
Incoming Florida House Speaker Paul Renner said that ESG is “a global elite weaponizing American capitalism against us” making it a national security issue as well as a “pocketbook issue.”
He warned that going down an ESG path would lead to companies being “choked off” of their ability to obtain financing and would hurt industries such as agriculture.
“So if you’re a meat eater, get ready,” he warned at a press conference on July 27. “They’re against meat and so they’re driving up food prices. These people don’t care—[they] will open our borders, choke off our agriculture sector, and basically weaken this country for their own local agenda.”
The governor’s statement went on to say that the “financial security” of Floridians is a priority over “whimsical notions of a utopian tomorrow,” and is “reasserting the authority of a republican governance.”
Two constitutional lawyers who worked in the Bush and Reagan administrations say that the warrant used to search former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence had no legal basis.
A former president’s right under the Presidential Records Act supersedes the statutes the Department of Justice and FBI used to carry out the raid earlier this month, wrote David Rivkin Jr. and Lee Casey, who both served under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
“The judge who issued the warrant for Mar-a-Lago has signaled that he is likely to release a redacted version of the affidavit supporting it. But the warrant itself suggests the answer is likely no—the FBI had no legally valid cause for the raid,” they wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
Earlier this month, federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart unsealed the warrant and property receipt, showing that it allowed FBI agents to obtain all “physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§793, 2071, or 1519.”
And the materials that could be seized are “any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021,” which encompasses all of Trump’s presidential term.
As a result, the two scholars said that “virtually all the materials at Mar-a-Lago are likely to fall within this category” but “federal law gives Mr. Trump a right of access to them.”
“His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant,” Rivkin and Casey wrote.
“Those statutes are general in their text and application. But Mr. Trump’s documents are covered by a specific statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978,” they said, adding that a Supreme Court decision in 1974 affirms their argument. “The former president’s rights under the [Presidential Records Act] trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.”
The 1978 law, which was passed two years after former President Richard Nixon resigned, “lays out detailed requirements for how the archivist is to administer the records, handle privilege claims, make the records public, and impose restrictions on access,” they added. “Notably, it doesn’t address the process by which a former president’s records are physically to be turned over to the archivist, or set any deadline, leaving this matter to be negotiated between the archivist and the former president.”
In their opinion piece, the authors stated that because the FBI and Justice Department were satisfied with an additional lock being installed on a Mar-a-Lago storage room, the federal agencies “could and should have sought a less intrusive” method than a search warrant.
The former president, in a legal complaint filed earlier this week, wrote that agents visited his home in early June—about two months before the raid—and appeared to approve the installation of another lock.
After one FBI agent saw the storage room, they told Trump’s team: “Thank you. You did not need to show us the storage room, but we appreciate it. Now it all makes sense,” according to the filing.
“Counsel for President Trump then closed the interaction and advised the Government officials that they should contact him with any further needs on the matter,” it added.
Hidden deep within the over 700 pages of the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a brand-new provision intended to give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) power to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Specifically, the IRA establishes the “Methane Emission Reduction Program” under a new section in the Clean Air Act, allowing the EPA to impose a fee on certain “climate pollutions.”
Importantly, this is the first time the federal government has ever imposed a fee on any GHG emission and is part of Congress’ effort to bolster the EPA’s power to address the “climate crisis.”
Congress Sends a Message
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that the EPA didn’t have the authority under the Clean Air Act or the Clean Power Plan to essentially force power plants to transition more towards wind and solar.
Moreover, SCOTUS determined that the interpretive question raised under the Clean Power Plan fell under the “major questions doctrine,” which states that Congress must make a “clear statement” if it wants to delegate authority “of this breadth to regulate a fundamental sector of the economy.”
Notably, the ruling expressly limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, which President Joe Biden called “devastating.”
Biden further added that he planned to “find ways that we can, under federal law, continue protecting Americans from harmful pollution, including pollution that causes climate change.”
President Joe Biden signs the Inflation Reduction Act as Democrat lawmakers look on at the White House in Washington, on Aug. 16, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Enter the IRA and Congress’ “clear statement” on what it wants the EPA to do.
Indeed, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) said Congress’ passing of the IRA “modernized” the Clean Air Act and established the EPA’s authority “to protect American families from climate and air pollution.”
Additionally, via the IRA, Congress reaffirmed that GHGs are “air pollutants” and further specified that the term “greenhouse gas” includes the air pollutants “carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.”
“These new Clean Air Act sections and the new provisions that rely on the Clean Air Act reinvigorate EPA’s responsibilities under the law addressing the climate crisis and long-standing inequities with new tools, new solutions, unprecedented investments, additional policies, and with great urgency,” EDF concludes.
Incentives and Penalties
The IRA includes several tax credits, incentives, and grants, totaling $369 billion for “Energy Security and Climate Change investments.”
And the above investments include over $1.5 billion to the EPA for “grants, rebates, contracts, loans” and “other activities” to reduce GHG emissions in the natural gas and oil sector.
But incentives aren’t the only tool the IRA utilizes regarding the oil and gas sector.
According to a report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the Methane Emissions Reduction Program applies to specific types of facilities that report their GHG emissions to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Emission Reporting Program.
A view of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., on March 16, 2017. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Specifically, the facilities that the charge applies to include:
“Offshore and onshore petroleum and natural gas production, onshore natural gas processing and transmission compression, underground natural gas storage, liquified natural gas storage, liquified natural gas imports and exports, onshore petroleum and natural gas gathering and boosting, and finally, onshore natural gas transmission pipelines.”
In other words, the EPA now has the authority to impose charges on oil and gas power plants, fulfilling SCOTUS’ above requirement.
More importantly, facilities that fall under one or more of the above categories, and exceed a specific methane threshold (thresholds vary by facility type), will have to pay $900 per metric ton of methane starting in 2024.
In 2025, the charge increases to $1,200, and in 2026 and beyond, the cost is $1,500.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates, based on 2019 data, that the new fees will raise $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2026, and almost $1.9 billion by FY2028. CBO projects revenues will decrease after that as facilities implement methane reduction strategies.
EPA Powers Up
Methane is the primary component of natural gas, and the EPA reports that methane emissions accounted for 11 percent of total U.S. GHG emissions in 2020. Carbon Dioxide (CO2) accounted for 79 percent.
However, methane is considered more “potent” than CO2, with some experts putting its “climate change impact” at 25 to 72 times greater than the equivalent mass of CO2. Consequently, reducing methane emissions is “one of the best opportunities for reducing near term [global] warming,” CRS reports.
Oil is pumped and natural gas is flared off on an oilfield near Watford City, N.D., on June 12, 2014. (Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)
Further, Biden made it clear that by 2030, he wants GHG emissions reduced by 40 percent compared to 2005 levels. And reduction levels of that amount require significant transformation.
The IRA’s passage and its implementation of a methane charge put Biden’s goals within reach.
Indeed, the Department of Energy reports that thanks to the IRA, the United States will not only meet the 40 percent reduction goal but exceed it as it now projects GHG emissions at 50-52 percent below 2005 levels.
Interestingly, according to the EPA, the primary source for methane emissions isn’t natural gas or oil—it’s livestock.
Nearly two years into the Biden presidency, allegations of fraud in the 2020 Presidential election continue to make headlines, and make powerful political ammunition for both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Allegations of voting fraud are not a fringe position held by a small minority. Polling shows that nearly half of American voters have serious doubts about Joe Biden’s election victory. According to a January Axios/Momentive poll, only a small majority (55 percent) accepts Biden as having legitimately won the 2020 election, down slightly from 58 percent a year earlier.
A Monmouth University poll in late 2021 provided similar findings: a third of the American public (32 percent) believes that Biden won the 2020 election only due to voter fraud—a percentage that has not changed across five different polls conducted by the university in 2021. Nearly 3 in 4 Republicans (73 percent) hold the same belief that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
And it isn’t just the general public expressing doubt. Dozens of Republican candidates for state and federal offices have made talking about 2020 election fraud a key part of their successful primary campaigns.
President Donald Trump speaks at the “Stop The Steal” Rally in Washington, on Jan. 6, 2021. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
According to a recent Washington Post analysis, candidates who question the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election have won more than 60 percent of Republican nominations for state and federal offices with authority over elections, including secretaries of state, and U.S. House and Senate seats. The Post reports that in their analysis of races for federal and state offices with power over elections, “more than half the GOP winners so far—about 250 candidates in 469 contests—have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat two years ago.” In the six battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, 62 percent of Republican nominees have made public claims of 2020 election fraud during their campaigns.
Republican candidates for governor have been especially prominent in their questioning of the 2020 Presidential election. More than half of the GOP nominees for governor in this election cycle have made statements casting doubt on the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election.
Among the most prominent politicians to make public claims of election fraud in 2020:
Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota
One of the first, and most well-known, governors to bring up the subject of election fraud in 2020. In interviews, tweets, and public speeches, she has made repeated claims of election fraud and what she calls “rigged election systems”, starting just two days after election day.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, candidate for governor of Arkansas
Former White House press secretary under President Donald Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders has directly addressed the issue of election fraud. In an interview earlier this year she said, “I don’t think we’ll ever know the depths of how much fraud existed. We know there is fraud in every election. How far and wide it went [in 2020], I don’t think that will be something that will be ever determined.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a press conference in Miami, Fla., on Jan. 26, 2022. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida
Two days after the 2020 Presidential election, Gov. Ron DeSantis gave an interview suggesting that Republican-controlled state legislatures could stop an unfair election. “Especially if you’re in those states that have Republican legislatures,” he said, “call your state representatives and your state senators. Under Article II of the Constitution, presidential electors are done by the legislatures, and the schemes they create and the framework. And if there’s departure from that, if they’re not following law, if they’re ignoring the law, then they can provide remedies as well. So I would exhaust every option to make sure we have a fair count.”
Kay Ivey, governor of Alabama
In April of this year, governor Ivey approved a campaign ad that stated the case bluntly. “The fake news media, Big Tech and the Blue State liberals stole the election from President Trump.” Challenged about the ad by reporters, Ivey did not back down. She said she believes Trump was the rightful winner of the election.
Darren Bailey, Republican candidate for governor of Illinois
Illinois State Sen. Darren Bailey, the Republican nominee for the governor’s office spoke up against the certification of Joe Biden’s election. On the day protestors were making news at the Capitol, Bailey signed a letter that asked an Illinois member of Congress to object to the certification. The letter said, “Certifying this election is tantamount to legitimizing fraud.”
Paul LePage, Republican candidate for governor of Maine
“This is clearly a stolen election.” Those are the words of Paul LePage during a local radio interview in late 2020. It’s not the first time he’s alleged voting fraud. Earlier this year he claimed that out-of-state voters had been bussed into Maine by Democrats to vote for a 2009 referendum on same-sex marriage.
DALLAS, TX—Kari Lake, Arizona gubernatorial candidate, speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas at the Hilton Anatole August 5, 2022. (Bobby Sanchez for The Epoch Times)
Kari Lake, Republican candidate for governor of Arizona
Perhaps more than any other gubernatorial candidate this year, Kari Lake has made 2020 election fraud the biggest talking point of her campaign.
In an interview with The New York Times, Lake explained her views this way: “Deep down, I think we all know this illegitimate fool in the White House—I feel sorry for him—didn’t win.”
Heidi Ganahl, Republican candidate for governor of Colorado
Heidi Ganahl has refused on multiple occasions to say that Biden won the election legitimately. In November 2021, Ganahl praised election activists who knocked on Colorado doors looking for evidence of fraud, saying the group was “doing great things.” Her running mate Danny Moore has also said that Biden was “elected by the Democrat steal.”
Kim Reynolds, governor of Iowa
Governor Kim Reynolds wanted Iowa to join the Texas lawsuit that tried to overturn Biden’s victories in four states, and she lamented that the state wasn’t given an opportunity to sign on because Iowa has a Democratic attorney general. She has publicly expressed her doubts “about the integrity of the election process.”
Dan Cox, Republican candidate for governor of Maryland
Dan Cox has done a lot to show where he stands on 2020 election fraud allegations. He organized buses to President Trump’s January 6 rally at the Capitol. During those protests, he called Vice President Pence a traitor on Twitter. And in a speech in 2021, Cox said that Trump remained “the only president that I recognize right now.” He has called the 2020 election the “GREAT HEIST” more than a few times.
Tudor Dixon, Republican candidate for governor of Michigan
Tudor Dixon has repeatedly said that Trump was the legitimate 2020 winner in Michigan and has openly called the election “stolen”. When pressed for proof of her claims, she told a reporter, “I don’t think we can see enough of the evidence because we weren’t able to look back and some of that is destroyed now.”
Scott Jensen, Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota
Scott Jensen has repeatedly cast doubt on the 2020 election results. “I don’t think there’s any question that we’ve had enough shenanigans that we should want to do something about our election integrity,” he said in an interview. He once suggested at a public event that Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, should be imprisoned for crimes related to the 2020 election.
Pennsylvania Republican nominee for governor, Doug Mastriano on the campaign trail in 2022. (Courtesy Mastriano Campaign)
Doug Mastriano, Republican Candidate for governor of Pennsylvania
How serious is Doug Mastriano about stopping the 2020 election fraud? In addition to speaking out in TV interviews, social media, and in public speeches, he made a direct contribution to the last-minute attempts to appeal the certification of the election—he chartered buses to take protestors to the Capitol.
Greg Abbott, governor of Texas
Gov. Greg Abbott spoke positively about the lawsuit that sought to overturn the results in four states (which was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton), telling a Spectrum News 1 television reporter in December 2020 that the lawsuit “tries to accelerate the process, providing certainty and clarity about the entire election process. The United States of America needs that.”
Tim Michels, Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin
“President Trump probably would be president right now if we had election integrity.” That’s one of the many public statements Tim Michels has made about the 2020 Presidential election.
At a campaign event in July of this year, Michels said: “My very first priority is election integrity. Everywhere I go on the campaign trail, people, the media, everybody says, ‘Tim, Tim, was the election fixed? Was the election rigged?’ I have a lot of questions.”
Vaccinated people are more likely than the unvaccinated in recent months to be a COVID-19 case, hospitalization, or death in 25 states, according to an Epoch Times investigation.
In Kentucky in June, for example, 67 percent of the deaths were among the vaccinated, according to data obtained by The Epoch Times.
That same month, the vaccinated made up 65 percent of COVID-19 cases, 64 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations, and 66 percent of COVID-19 deaths in Wisconsin.
The numbers are a drastic change from 2021.
After the mass vaccination campaign in the United States gained momentum, virtually every state reported unvaccinated people making up the vast majority of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
The numbers began tilting while the Delta virus variant was dominant. They have tilted even more since the Omicron variant displaced Delta, according to the newly collated numbers.
The Epoch Times compiled the data from state health department websites and databases. Some were obtained through records requests and have never before been made public.
The statistics underline how vaccines have increasingly performed worse as newer virus variants emerged, according to some experts.
They are “clear evidence that the vaccines are not working to prevent disease and death,” Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the messenger RNA utilized in the two most widely-administered vaccines, told The Epoch Times.
Others argue the raw numbers don’t contribute to analyzing vaccine effectiveness because they must first be adjusted to account for factors such as age.
“Unless one is able to correct for age and health status, this number is misleading, and does not lead to the conclusion vaccines are ineffective,” Dr. Roger Klein, a policy adviser to The Heartland Institute and a former adviser to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other U.S. health agencies, told The Epoch Times via email.
Some states provide age-adjusted numbers, as recommended by the CDC.
Click the dots in the upper right part of the graph to unveil the full-screen option. Story continues below.
COVID-19 Cases in Alaska (March 2022)
Source: Alaska Division of Public Health
Vaccinated as of Aug. 14: 60.8 percent
COVID-19 Hospitalizations in Idaho (2022)
Source: Idaho Department of Health and Welfare
Fully Vaccinated as of July 25: 52 percent
Data Reporting
Most states report at least one metric (cases, hospitalizations, deaths) by vaccination status. Some group the partially vaccinated with the unvaccinated when breaking down metrics.
As vaccines have proven increasingly unable to prevent COVID-19 infection in the Omicron era, a growing number of states have followed the CDC in separating those who have received a booster from the fully vaccinated.
Key terms as generally defined:
Unvaccinated: people who have gotten zero shots.
Partially vaccinated: people who have received one dose of the Moderna or Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines and people who have not seen 14 days elapse since their final dose of a primary series.
Fully vaccinated: people who have completed a primary series of a vaccine.
Boosted: people who have received at least one extra shot on top of the primary series.
The term fully vaccinated will be used in this article to refer to anybody who has received a primary series, regardless of whether they’ve received a booster. Not fully vaccinated refers to anybody who has not received a primary series. The term vaccinated, meanwhile, will refer to anyone who has received at least one dose of a vaccine.
Exceeded Expectations
In 14 states, the percentage of one or more so-called breakthrough metrics—post-vaccination cases, hospitalizations, and/or deaths—in recent months exceeded the percentage of the population that was vaccinated or fully vaccinated.
In most cases, that was a single metric. But in several, it was multiple, and in one, it was all three.
All data are from 2022. Only percentages were available for some states. Data for June were preferred, followed by data for July. Metrics are only listed if they exceed the percentage of vaccinated.
Alaska* (March): 3,995 breakthrough cases (64.5 percent of cases) Vaccinated at the time: 59.1 percent of 5 and up
Idaho+ (June 6–July 3): 89 breakthrough hospitalizations (53 percent) Fully vaccinated at the time: 52 percent
Kentucky* (June): 55 breakthrough deaths (67 percent) Vaccinated at the time: 66 percent
Louisiana– (Aug. 7): 61 percent breakthrough deaths Vaccinated at the time: 52 percent full, 6 percent partial
Some states adjust the data before releasing it, which is meant to eliminate differences that result from one population being different from another. The most common adjustment is for age.
Age adjustment is used to compare populations directly “when the age distribution of who most commonly gets the disease, or seriously sick from the disease, is skewed,” according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. For COVID-19, older populations are more likely to experience severe illness and death, and are also more likely to be vaccinated, experts say.
While the raw numbers look bad for the vaccinated, after adjusting for age, the rates of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in Wisconsin are higher for the unvaccinated throughout 2022 (cases have been higher in the vaccinated in recent months). That’s similar to most of the other states that report data as rates, some of which also provide raw numbers.
Wisconsin’s raw numbers were obtained through a records request.
Clinical trials and vaccine efficacy studies are the basis for determining vaccine effectiveness, Dr. Ryan Westergaard, chief medical officer for the state’s Bureau of Communicable Diseases, said during a briefing, adding that the research shows that protection against severe disease and death remains high.
Studies can help control for biases such as vaccinated people being more likely to get tested at sites, which report data to the state, versus at home, which is not counted, Dr. Leisha Nolen, Utah’s state epidemiologist, told The Epoch Times.
The studies show “the vaccines aren’t doing as well at keeping us from getting infected, but they are still keeping people out of the hospital,” Nolen told The Epoch Times.
Nolen singled out a study from researchers with the CDC and partner institutions, published in the agency’s journal on July 22 (pdf).
Researchers reported data from a CDC-funded network of hospitals across 10 states from December 2021 to June 2022. The data showed that two doses of a vaccine, or a primary series, provided 57 to 68 percent protection against hospitalization through 149 days after vaccination, but dropped to as low as 24 percent 150 or more days after vaccination.
A third dose increased protection to 92 percent against BA.1, one of the subvariants, and 69 percent against BA.2, another subvariant. That protection dropped to 85 percent and 52 percent, respectively, after 120 or more days.
BA.5 is currently the dominant strain in the United States. Emerging dataindicate the vaccines do not provide as much shielding against BA.4 and BA.5 as earlier strains.
Dr. Leisha Nolen, Utah’s state epidemiologist, in an undated file photo. (Courtesy of Utah Department of Health)
Majority Vaccinated
In 11 other states, the vaccinated made up a majority of at least one metric, but the proportion of vaccinated did not exceed the percentage of vaccinated.
All data are from 2022. Percentages reported near or above 50 percent. Preference was for data in June, followed by data in July. Metrics with unvaccinated comprising a majority are not listed.
Arizona+** (May): 62 percent breakthrough cases; 56.4 percent breakthrough hospitalizations Fully vaccinated as of June 1: 62 percent
Illinois+ (June 1–June 29): 205 breakthrough hospitalizations (49 percent); 195 breakthrough deaths (62 percent) Fully vaccinated at the time as of Aug. 15: 65 percent
Maryland+ (June): 67.5 percent breakthrough cases, 70.6 percent breakthrough hospitalizations Fully vaccinated as of May 31: 76 percent
Massachusetts+ (Aug. 2): 334 breakthrough hospitalized patients (60 percent); (June 25–July 1) 48 breakthrough deaths (77 percent) Fully vaccinated as of July 18: 79 percent
Dr. Steven Hatfill, a virologist and specialist physician, in Washington on March 28, 2020. (Courtesy of Vish Burra)
Other Studies
Vaccine-provided protection began waningagainst infection and, to a lesser extent, against severe illness in 2021, when the Delta variant was dominant. Since Omicron emerged in December 2021, that trend has quickened.
Research on booster effectiveness has largely shown an initial increase in protection, followed by a quick decline. Other research, meanwhile, has indicated that vaccinated people are, at a certain point, more likely than unvaccinated people to get infected, which could relate to a phenomenon called immune imprinting.
Owing to the waning effectiveness, U.S. regulators have already cleared first and second boosters—as have many other countries—and are poised to authorize updated vaccines that target Omicron, describing the current formulation as not “well-matched” to the dominant variant.
“It’s really not possible to predict what this virus is going to do, and I think it makes sense to be prepared with these boosters, which contain components of a BA.4 and BA.5 as well as the so-called archival Wuhan strain,” Dr. Cody Meissner, one of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s external vaccine advisers, told The Epoch Times.
Some experts like Meissner say most people, including all adults, should still get vaccinated. Others note healthy individuals are at little risk from COVID-19, especially new variants, and say that the more recent data suggest little benefit for many.
That includes data from other parts of the world, including the United Kingdom, that have recorded the vaccinated as comprising the bulk of COVID-19 metrics.
“What we’re looking at now is a sign of progress of a number of factors, primarily [that] the vaccinated can still catch and spread the COVID-19 virus,” Dr. Steven Hatfill, a virologist, told The Epoch Times.
“The cost-benefit ratio now especially for the younger age groups has disappeared,” he added later.
Remaining States
Of the remaining 25 states, eight reported the unvaccinated as making up more of the COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
All data are from 2022. Rates are listed when raw numbers were not available. When rates are listed, they are age-adjusted. June is preferred, followed by July.
Indiana* (Jan. 1–late July): 264,779 unvaccinated cases (50.7 percent); 90 percent unvaccinated hospitalizations, 35 percent unvaccinated deaths Not fully vaccinated as of July 24: 45 percent
Maine*+ (July 16–July 23): 333 not fully vaccinated cases, 68.5 fully vaccinated; 17 not fully vaccinated hospitalizations, 1.8 fully vaccinated; 0.5 not fully vaccinated deaths, 0 vaccinated Not fully vaccinated at the time: 25.2 percent
Nebraska* (June 26–July 23): 11,048 not fully vaccinated cases (59 percent); 3,412 not fully vaccinated hospitalizations (97 percent); deaths unclear Not fully vaccinated at the time: 35 percent
New Jersey*+ (as of July 16): 565 not fully vaccinated cases, 117 fully vaccinated, 199 boosted; 16 not fully vaccinated hospitalizations, 3 fully vaccinated, 5.5 boosted; 0.35 not fully vaccinated deaths, 0.06 fully vaccinated, 0.1 boosted Not fully vaccinated as of Aug. 17: 33 percent
North Carolina* (July 31–Aug. 6): cases not available; 50.6 percent not fully vaccinated hospitalizations; death rate per 100,000 (June 30–July 30): 2.2 not fully vaccinated, 0.4 fully vaccinated, 0.2 boosted Not fully vaccinated as of Aug. 18: 37 percent
Texas*+ (June 18–June 25): 334.4 unvaccinated cases, 163.9 fully vaccinated; hospitalizations not available; 0.5 unvaccinated deaths, 0.2 fully vaccinated Not fully vaccinated as of Aug. 10: 38 percent
*counts partially vaccinated with unvaccinated +rates per 100,000 **excludes partially vaccinated
The 17 other states reported incomplete or insufficient data. To be included, states needed to report figures for at least one metric broken down by vaccination status, and a breakdown by time. States that would only provide data since the beginning of the pandemic were excluded. Some were still working on filling records requests by press time.
CDC Reporting
Earlier in the pandemic, when the unvaccinated were making up the bulk of the metrics across the country, U.S. officials and news outlets cited the state-level data as proof the vaccines worked.
The CDC still presents data on its website for COVID-19 cases and deaths by vaccination status. The data, based on statistics from 31 health departments, has repeatedly been offered by the agency as evidence of vaccine effectiveness.
The data is presented as incidence rates. Efforts to obtain the raw numbers have not yet been successful. According to the rates, the unvaccinated were 2.1 times more likely to test positive in June and five times more likely to die from COVID-19 in June than the fully vaccinated.
Separately, the CDC presents data on COVID-19 hospitalizations based on a hospital network in 14 states that it funds. But the agency has stopped listing fully vaccinated people. Instead, it lists only the unvaccinated and the boosted.
State officials are advised by the CDC not to report raw numbers by vaccination status, because “the percentage of vaccinated people among COVID-19 cases rises with either increasing vaccination coverage or decreasing vaccine effectiveness.” Officials are recommended to report data as incidence rates or rate ratios, which adjust for differences between the unvaccinated and vaccinated populations such as age. The rates are described as “more stable and directly related to vaccine effectiveness.”
Most states only report age-adjusted data or only present raw data in large chunks, such as from the beginning of the pandemic. The Epoch Times reviewed percentages and numbers from states that do report them, and obtained monthly or weekly breakdowns from some states. It also obtained unadjusted data from others that have never been reported before. Some states stopped reporting metrics by vaccination status after inquiries from The Epoch Times. Their reports were saved before they stopped.
Hilary Lin and Angel Yuan contributed to this report.
Polls show that fewer Americans do. There’s good reason for that.
“They don’t trust science because science is increasingly untrustworthy,” says science writer Andrew Follet in my new video. “The only group that trusts science right now is Democrats.”
Sixty-four percent of Democrats have “a great deal” of confidence in the scientific community, compared to 34% of Republicans.
Of course, true science — using the scientific method — is important. But that’s not what much of “science” is these days.
Instead, today government science is misused by progressive politicians.
Example 1: Environmental activists want to limit commercial fishing. They want Congress to pass what they call the “Ocean-Based Climate Solutions Act.” It claims climate change is the “greatest threat to America’s national security” and offers a dubious solution: close more of the ocean to commercial fishing.
The administration’s deputy director of Climate, Jane Lubchenco, told Congress that a scientific paper concludes that closing more of the ocean can actually increase catches of fish.
Really? That doesn’t seem logical.
It isn’t. The paper was retracted. One scientist called its logic “biologically impossible.”
Also, Lubchenco’s didn’t tell Congress that the paper was written by her brother-in-law! And edited by her!
Did the White House punish Lubchenco for her ethics violations? No. In fact, after her testimony, she was appointed co-head of President Joe Biden’s Scientific Integrity Task Force!
Last week, the National Academy of Sciences banned her for five years. Yet she’s still on the White House’s Scientific Integrity Task Force.
Sadly, much of what’s called science today is simply left-wing advocacy.
Fake? Well, they must be. “Experts” in those fields keep being fooled by people who submit gibberish.
Example 2:
A ridiculous paper, “Embracing Fatness as Self-Care in the Era of Trump,” was accepted by Massey University’s “Fat Studies” conference. The conference then invited the paper’s author, “Sea Matheson,” to speak.
Attendees gave Matheson’s speech rave reviews, praising the paper’s description of Donald Trump’s “fatphobia” and inviting Matheson to review other work submitted to their “scientific” journal, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society.
But Matheson is no scientist. “She” is actually comedian Steven Crowder, who disguised himself as an overweight woman to expose “ivory tower quackery.”
Crowder is just the latest person to fool today’s so-called science journals. James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose submitted nonsense papers to “grievance studies” journals like Fat Studies, Sexuality & Culture and Sex Roles.
Seven accepted ridiculous papers.
One that took a section of “Mein Kampf” but replaced references to “National Socialism” with “feminism,” was accepted by Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work.
Gender, Place and Culture accepted a paper that claimed there is rape culture at dog parks.
Follett blames this perversion of science on government. Its science agencies, like much of America, have been taken over by leftists hungry to promote themselves and their agenda.
In science, the way to promote yourself is to get papers published. That often gets you more funding. Government agencies like the National Science Foundation provide most of that funding.
“Nobody wants to publish something that goes against the paymaster,” says Follett. “You don’t get published unless the NSF likes your results.”
Example 3: The NSF gave nearly half a million dollars to a team that wrote a paper questioning glacier science because it “stems from knowledge created by men.”
Absurdities are pushed by the right, too. Some people still claim that man plays no part in climate change or that the climate isn’t warming at all. Some say vaccines don’t work. But the right’s junk science doesn’t get backed by government funds.
I’m angry that my tax dollars go to support leftist nonsense.
Unfortunately, most Americans don’t care. That’s probably because they don’t know that government throws so much money at ridiculous progressive advocacy.
“We’ll all start caring when the bridges start falling down and the planes start crashing,” says Follet. “That’s the inevitable end result of this.”
I wrote a column in 2011, as the presidential politics of the upcoming year were starting to unfold, with the headline “Why 2012 looks a lot like 1860.”
The deep fracturing of the American electorate — remember the Tea Party? — leading up to the 2012 presidential election was starting to look like what happened in the presidential election in 1860, which occurred amid another massive splintering of the American electorate.
The issue of slavery in the 1850s — whether or the extent to which it should or could be tolerated in America — tore apart the fabric of common values in the nation, and the result was collapse.
There were presidential candidates in 1860 running on four different party tickets — the newly formed Republican Party, the Constitutional Union Party, and Northern and Southern parts of a split Democratic Party.
Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, emerged victorious with just 39.82% of the popular vote. Immediately upon the Lincoln’s declared victory, seven Southern states seceded from the Union.
Soon there would be a bloody civil war.
A vibrant, free and democratic nation thrives with differences of opinion. But there is a difference between differences of opinion on specific issues of policy and fracturing of discourse because of absence of common ground of values and principles.
For a nation to function, there must be some common denominator of shared values and principles.
This common denominator of shared values and principles is dangerously eroding today, and animosities are sharpening and deepening.
Am I predicting another civil war? God forbid.
But the depth of animosities now is looking less like the healthy discourse of a free country and looking more like unraveling of our social fabric. It’s dangerous, and we should be aware of what is going on.
A new survey released by Pew Research Center bears out this trend, showing animosities between those identifying with the two parties getting increasingly sharp and increasing numbers of Americans, particularly younger Americans, not happy with either party.
Per the Pew report, in 1994, 21% of Republicans had a “very unfavorable” view of the Democratic Party. Today it is 62%. In 1994, 17% of Democrats had a “very unfavorable” view of the Republican Party. Today it is 54%.
Seventy-two percent of Republicans now, compared to 45% in 2016, say Democrats are more dishonest than other Americans. Sixty-three percent of Democrats, compared to 42% in 2016, say Republicans are more dishonest than other Americans.
According to the survey, in 2022, 27% of Americans now have unfavorable opinions of both parties compared to 6% in 1994 who held unfavorable views of both parties.
This is all consistent with a new survey from Gallup showing that more than half, 52%, of young Americans born between 1981 and 1996 identify as independents.
Forty-four percent of those born between 1960 and 1980, 33% of those born between 1946 and 1964, and 26% of those born between 1928 and 1945 identify as independents.
Just as the presence of slavery challenged the core values and beliefs on which the nation was founded, so today issues such as abortion, sexual identity, and the nature and existence of marriage and family are dividing the common ground on which we stand.
Related to this is the core question of government and its role in the lives of private Americans.
When our divisions become so deep that civil discourse can no longer mend what has unraveled, we need to tread carefully.
Another recent Gallup poll shows 53% of Americans saying they worry “a great deal” about crime and violence.
How can a nation remain intact when large parts of the population have absolutely nothing in common with each other regarding how they see the world?
Limited government and individual freedom are the classic American answers. Unfortunately, we seem to be going in the opposite direction.
Ex-Pink Floyd bassist calls American media ‘propaganda’
Roger Waters, an anti-Israel activist and cofounder of the rock band Pink Floyd, on Monday appeared on a Chinese propaganda network.
The now-78-year-old anti-Israel activist, who in 2020 discussed Israel’s alleged role in George Floyd’s death with the pro-Hamas Shehab News Agency and in 2017 tried to cancel a different band’s Israel concert, is now touting pro-China views.
China Global Television Network (CGTN) America, based in Washington, D.C., is an arm of the Beijing-led propaganda network China Central Television. In an interview with CGTN America about China’s sovereignty over Taiwan, Waters attacked American media.
“You won’t catch me watching MSNBC or Fox or anything in between because it’s all nonsense. It’s all propaganda, all of it … and they’re doing it as an exercise in control,” Waters said.
Waters compared American media’s coverage of U.S.-Taiwan relations to Nazi Germany and to George Orwell’s 1984.
“It’s the same kind of technique that, dare I say it,” Waters said, “the Third Reich used in the ’30s in Germany: You have to identify somebody. They identified the Jews. … Once you identify your enemy it’s much easier to control the people because you close down the window of attention that they have.”
Waters reprimanded the United States for its relationship with Taiwan and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) for visiting Taiwan earlier this month.
“It’s for the Chinese people to make those decisions … it’s none of our business … and it’s certainly none of Nancy Pelosi’s business,” Waters said. He described Pelosi’s actions as “retrograde,” “unhelpful,” and evidence that “she has no idea what diplomacy is.”
Controversial politics are central to Waters’s 2022 tour This is Not a Drill, where he references police brutality and abortion and calls President Joe Biden a “war criminal.”
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) voted for a COVID-19 relief bill that steered $75,000 to a nonprofit social justice group he founded that’s run by the church that supplements his Senate salary to the tune of more than $100,000, according to government records.
The Martin Luther King Sr. Collaborative, a community activist group that Warnock led as CEO until at least 2020, sought and received COVID relief funding from the American Rescue Plan in September 2021, according to Georgia financial records. The Martin Luther King Sr. Collaborative was founded by the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Warnock is still employed as lead pastor and which paid him $120,000 last year in addition to his Senate salary.
Warnock voted for the American Rescue Plan in March 2021, two months after ousting Republican Kelly Loeffler in a special Senate election. The bill passed on a 50-49 partisan split, with Warnock giving Democrats the 50th vote necessary to put it over the top.
“We were able to deliver on our promise to Georgia to pass historic COVID-19 relief. Georgia in a very real sense is delivering relief to the whole country,” Warnock said at the time, calling the bill “historic legislation.”
The funding raises questions about whether Warnock or his employers used Warnock’s position as a senator to benefit from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that some leading economists have blamed for skyrocketing inflation. Americans for Public Trust, an ethics watchdog group, said the federal relief funding adds to concerns that Warnock’s outside work poses a financial conflict. Warnock receives a housing allowance from Ebenezer Baptist Church that amounts to nearly $7,500 per month, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“It’s not a great look to learn that a U.S. senator cast the key vote that awarded his former nonprofit tens of thousands of dollars,” said Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust. “And now that it’s been revealed that Warnock is receiving a housing allowance from Ebenezer, this arrangement seems rife with potential conflicts of interest.”
Warnock served as CEO and chairman of the Martin Luther King Sr. Collaborative since 2016, although public records give different dates on when he left. His financial disclosure records, which he filed with the U.S. Senate, say he stepped down as chairman in August 2020. The nonprofit’s corporate filings in Georgia, however, listed him as CEO until April 2021, one month after his vote on the American Rescue Plan.
Warnock’s connection with the Martin Luther King Sr. Collaborative continued after he stepped down as CEO. The group’s new board chairman and CEO, Kenneth Palmer, is also on the board of trustees for the Ebenezer Baptist Church, which employs Warnock and pays his salary. The Martin Luther King Sr. Collaborative also shares an address with the church.
Critics of the American Rescue Plan argue that the massive government stimulus bill destabilized the economy. Larry Summers, who served as Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, warned in February 2021 that the plan would trigger inflation “of a kind we have not seen in a generation.”
Warnock is locked in a competitive race against Republican challenger Herschel Walker, an election that could determine party control of the Senate next year.
The liberal elites are at it again, attacking a successful black man for daring to have an opinion they don’t like.
Herschel Walker, the Republican Party’s candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia, is being assailed for criticizing the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. The partisan legislation won’t reduce inflation but will spend $80 billion to expand the IRS and billions more to combat so-called climate change. That is why mainstream journalists have stopped calling it the Inflation Reduction Act. It is now the “massive climate, tax, and health bill.” Walker is not a fan.
“They continue to try to fool you like they are helping you out. But they’re not. They’re not helping you out because a lot of money, it’s going to trees,” Walker said at a campaign event near Atlanta. “Don’t we have enough trees around here?”
Walker’s comments unleashed a torrent of racially charged hate. “Scientists have long debated whether a human body could survive without a brain, and Herschel Walker is now providing that answer,” wrote the Palmer Report, a left-wing website. Democratic campaign operative Jon Cooper wondered if there was “something seriously wrong” with the candidate. “No one this ignorant should be anywhere near the Senate,” wrote Hollywood actor Ken Olin.
These comments, among many others, help to reinforce America’s structural white supremacy by invoking harmful racial stereotypes about the intelligence of black men. Elite liberals have a history of trying to undermine the credentials of successful black men. Dr. Ben Carson, Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.), and Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas have also been shamelessly targeted by libs.
Stoking racial prejudice by questioning a black man’s intelligence is a common left-wing tactic designed to thwart debate and erode democracy. Walker’s critics are reluctant—afraid perhaps—to engage the substance of his remarks. Wonder why?
It probably has something to do with the fact that Walker is right. According to the results of a Washington Free Beacon analysis, we do have enough trees around here, and Democrats are constantly trying to fool you like they are helping you out. “Yes, you heard me right,” Walker tweeted in response to his racist critics. “Joe Biden and [Rev. Raphael Warnock] are spending $1.5 billion on ‘urban forestry’ and raising taxes on those making under $200k to pay for it. Yes, I have a problem with that.”
The arrogance of urban-dwelling liberal elites knows no bounds. Of course they would assume that they know more about trees than Walker, who was raised in Wrightsville, a small blue-collar town in central Georgia surrounded by trees. They don’t just look down on him because he’s an “ignorant” black man. They also despise the fact that he attended a state school—the University of Georgia—on an athletic scholarship no less. They are terrified at the thought of anyone who isn’t an Ivy League grad school nerd being in charge of anything. They didn’t even want Joe Biden to be president. They embraced him reluctantly after Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg flamed out.
The Free Beacon doesn’t care about the racial and class biases of liberal elites. We care about the truth. As it turns out, the truth is on Walker’s side. According to Treehugger.com, there are roughly 230 billion trees in the United States. That’s almost 700 trees per person. Isn’t that enough? Most of Walker’s critics probably assume that trees are declining in number, but the science says otherwise. In fact, there are more trees in the United States today than there were 100 years ago. Maybe Walker’s critics should spend less time tweeting and more time learning.
Walker is a football legend, obviously, but he’s new to politics. His campaign has suffered as a result. The Free Beacon would humbly suggest that Walker abandon his entire platform and start running on a single issue: getting rid of all these extra trees. It might not be enough to win a seat in the Senate, but a strong finish would make Walker the prohibitive frontrunner to run the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration. How refreshing it will be to have the actual experts back in charge.
David Crane is a board member of the state-owned Saudi Electricity Company, a top producer of fossil fuels. It works hand in glove with Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative.
President Biden campaigned for office pledging to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” and take on China. If his much-scrutinized fist bump with Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman was the first indication that might have been little more than empty rhetoric, the White House announced earlier this month that it is nominating for a top position at the Department of Energy the only American who sits on the board of a state-owned Saudi Arabian energy company.
David Crane, the nominee to be the Energy Department’s undersecretary for infrastructure, sits on the board of the state-owned Saudi Electricity Company, a fact curiously absent from the biography circulated by the administration when it announced Crane’s nomination on August 3.
The Saudi Electricity Company has paid Crane over $100,000 in the past year, including over $90,000 in bonuses, according to a financial disclosure he filed last week. The state-owned power monopoly has been central to Chinese strongman Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, the global infrastructure investment program, allowing the Saudis to help China lay millions of feet of smart energy meters, an undertaking the Chinese government has hailed as a “milestone” for Belt and Road in the Gulf region.
The Chinese government has loaned billions to the Saudi Electricity Company, whose board Crane joined in January 2021. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a state-owned commercial bank, in 2016 loaned $1.5 billion to the company, one of the largest Chinese loans ever in the Gulf region. The company has also signed agreements with Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications giant sanctioned by the United States for its role in Beijing’s human rights atrocities. Before joining Saudi Electricity, Crane served on the board of ACWA Power, a private Saudi-based geothermal company involved in numerous Belt and Road projects.
Though the White House lauds Crane as a “leading business voice in the field of sustainability, clean energy, and climate change,” Saudi Arabia is one of the leading global exporters of crude oil, and Saudi Electricity generates virtually all of its power—99 percent, according to one estimate—through fossil fuels. Biden’s visit to Jeddah in July, for which he took flak from human-rights advocates and the mainstream media, was spent in large part coaxing the Gulf monarchy to produce more crude to ease global fuel prices.
Biden in February created the Energy Department post that Crane will fill to oversee the distribution of $62 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which allocated the funds to rebuild roads, bridges, and railroads. If confirmed, Crane will oversee investments under the Grid Infrastructure Office and the Loan Programs Office, among other things. Biden last year created the position of White House infrastructure coordinator as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. His pick, former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu (D.), advised the United States China Heartland Association, a nonprofit linked to Chinese Communist Party front groups.
Crane’s other business ties could also draw scrutiny during his Senate confirmation process. Until March, he served as an independent trustee at EN+ Group, a Russian energy company whose largest shareholder is the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin. In 2019, the company appointed Crane to the role as part of a deal with the Treasury Department to lift sanctions against the group due to its ties to Deripaska. EN+ Group, which controls Russian aluminum giant Rusal, paid Crane $150,000 for his services, according to his financial disclosure. He also served on EN+ Group’s environmental advisory board, according to its 2019 sustainability report.
Crane also owns between as much as $65 million in shares and warrants in EVgo, an electric car charging station company that is poised for a windfall under Biden’s infrastructure program. The company since July 2021 has spent $320,000 on lobbying Congress, the Department of Energy, and other agencies on a variety of issues, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that Crane will now oversee.
Crane said he will divest his holdings in EVgo and step down from the board of Saudi Electricity Company if he is confirmed to the Department of Energy post.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about Crane’s nomination or its omission of Crane’s ties to the Saudis. Crane did not respond to requests for comment.
A whistleblower who served as Twitter’s security chief said in regulatory filings obtained by The Epoch Times that the social media company misled tech entrepreneur Elon Musk about the number of bots on the platform, with possible implications for the legal battle between the Tesla chief and Twitter.
Peiter Zatko, who has publicly come forward as the whistleblower, made a series of explosive allegations regarding Twitter’s cybersecurity policies in a disclosure filed in July with federal regulators (pdf), including the claim of Twitter “lying about bots to Elon Musk.”
Zatko’s disclosure alleges that Twitter uses an “opaque metric” called monetizable daily active users (mDAU), rather than an earlier metric of total monthly users that was subject to big swings, including when spam and bot accounts were removed.
“From Twitter’s perspective, ‘mDAU’ was an improvement because it could internally define the mDAU formula, and thereby report numbers that would reassure shareholders and advertisers,” the disclosure states, adding that executive bonuses—which could be in excess of $10 million—are tied to mDAU growth.
The disclosure alleges that Twitter executives are “incentivized to avoid counting spam bots as mDAU” in order for the platform to be more appealing to advertisers. It also claims there are “many millions” of active accounts that aren’t part of the mDAU calculations because they’re spam bots or Twitter doesn’t think they can monetize them, but their presence on the platform still affects user experience.
‘We Don’t Really Know’
As Twitter’s erstwhile head of security, Zatko asked the company’s Head of Site Integrity—who’s responsible for addressing platform manipulation, including bots—what the underlying spam bot count was, according to the disclosure.
“We don’t really know,” was the response, according to the disclosure, which said that “the company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform.”
The reasons for not being able to provide an accurate bot count included difficulty with measurement and that “senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts” because, as the disclosure claims, “they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”
Zatko’s disclosure also includes the allegation that the true number of spam accounts and bots on Twitter is probably “meaningfully higher” that the 5 percent of daily monetizable users that the social media firm claims.
The whistleblower also alleges that Twitter executives have “little or no personal incentive” to accurately count the number of bots and that “deliberate ignorance was the norm.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to Twitter with a request for comment, but received no reply by press time.
Zatko’s disclosure could give Musk’s legal team more ammunition in their legal fight against Twitter. The two sides are scheduled to go to trial in October in a Delaware court.
‘Meaningfully Higher’ Bot Count?
Musk and Twitter are facing off in court over the tech mogul’s reversal of a bid to buy the social media platform.
Key to Musk’s backing out of the deal is his claim that Twitter’s longstanding position that spam accounts and bots make up fewer than 5 percent of monetizable daily users is a fallacy.
A Twitter spokesperson told The Washington Post in response to Zatko’s claim that it “fully stands by” its earlier statements on the percentage of bots on the platform.
Twitter has sued Musk, seeking to force him to follow through with his $44 billion buyout offer.
Musk has countersued, alleging that Twitter misled his team about Twitter’s true advertising base and accusing Twitter of breach of contract and fraud. The buyout agreement includes a provision for a $1 billion termination fee to be paid by whichever side is considered to have broken the deal.
In early August, Musk signaled that his offer to buy Twitter might go through if the social media firm were to provide him with accurate data on user accounts and bots.
“If Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they’re confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms,” Musk wrote on Aug. 6 in response to a Twitter user’s comment. “However, if it turns out that their SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] filings are materially false, then it should not.”
Musk also wrote that he wants to challenge Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a debate about the number of fake accounts on the platform.
“I hereby challenge [Parag Agrawal] to a public debate about the Twitter bot percentage. Let him prove to the public that Twitter has [less than 5 percent] fake or spam daily users!” Musk wrote in a post on Twitter.
Musk ‘Hoodwinked by Twitter’?
Twitter has pushed back on Musk’s allegation that he was duped into signing the buyout agreement.
“According to Musk, he—the billionaire founder of multiple companies, advised by Wall Street bankers and lawyers—was hoodwinked by Twitter into signing a $44 billion merger agreement. That story is as implausible and contrary to fact as it sounds,” Twitter stated in an Aug. 4 court filing.
Twitter also has accused Musk of creating a “public spectacle” to acquire the company while alleging that his public comments about Twitter caused its stock price to plummet.
“Rather than bear the cost of the market downturn, as the merger agreement requires, Musk wants to shift it to Twitter’s stockholders,” Twitter’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit. “Since signing the merger agreement, Musk has repeatedly disparaged Twitter and the deal, creating business risk for Twitter and downward pressure on its share price.”
Musk’s countersuit against Twitter accuses the firm of intentionally miscounting the number of bots on the platform “as part of its scheme to mislead investors about the company’s prospects.”
Musk’s lawyers also argued that Twitter’s reliance on the metric of mDAU as a basis for calculating revenue is misleading.
Further, Musk’s legal team has subpoenaed former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey in a bid to obtain documents and communications relating to Twitter’s use of user metrics other than monetizable daily active users, “including but not limited to, daily active users.”
Dorsey has yet to issue a public comment on the subpoena.
Economists have pasted many labels on today’s economic landscape: recession, stagflation, or an economy that is transitioning to slower growth.
Whatever the professionals and public policymakers call the U.S. economy, the data and consumer surveys show that households are enduring a cost-of-living crisis. Everything is piling up for consumers coast to coast, from soaring food prices to rising utility bills to increasing shelter costs. Although the White House claims that the country is not facing an economic downturn, it feels like a recession for millions of households nationwide.
The American people have made it clear that they are financially struggling.
Inflation Is Still Main Worry
Inflation and being able to pay for food and groceries continue to be top concerns for U.S. households, according to Primerica’s second-quarter 2022 Middle-Income Financial Security Monitor report. Sixty-one percent anticipate the economy will be worse off over the next year, and 71 percent are preparing to cut back on non-essential spending.
Millions of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, too.
According to a new Lending Club survey, 61 percent of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck in June, up from 55 percent a year ago. Thirteen percent reported spending more than they earned in the past six months.
Consumers shop for meat at a grocery store in Annapolis, Md., on May 16, 2022. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
“What a difference a year makes. Last summer we were all worried about how quickly the economy would recover. Now, as inflation continues its upward swing, consumers are finding it more difficult to manage spending and are eating into their savings as financial pressures mount,” said Anuj Nayar, LendingClub’s financial health officer, in a statement.
Despite rampant wage growth over the last 18 months, real average hourly earnings (inflation-adjusted) stand at negative 3.6 percent.
The July Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s (FRBNY) Survey of Consumer Expectations revealed that 38 percent of households anticipate that their financial situation will be worse off over the next year.
Using Debt to Cope
This bearish sentiment on their finances and the broader economy has a growing number of Americans anticipating going into debt for the rest of the year and heading into 2023 amid elevated living costs.
According to a recent LendingTree poll, 43 percent of U.S. consumers expect to take on new debt over the next six months. They are not using credit cards or lines of credit on frivolous items. The survey found that most consumers are using credit for necessities, including shelter (30 percent), unexpected emergencies (26 percent), and health care expenses (25 percent).
Chris Nddie, the co-founder and CEO of digital commerce information firm ClothingRIC, has also noticed more people turning to buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) schemes to purchase even basic items.
“Services like Klarna and AfterPay are allowing people to buy everything from groceries to electronic items on debt,” Nddie told The Epoch Times. “This isn’t an ideal scenario, because piling up debt to fund your purchases is never a good option.”
Many shoppers are utilizing BNPL, especially during the busy and costly back-to-school shopping season. New TransUnion research found that more than one-third (37 percent) of consumers have already or plan to take out BNPL loans to pay for their back-to-school purchases.
Families are also adjusting their spending behaviors, because 55 percent expect to spend more on school supplies, from apparel to electronics.
“Families are especially hard hit by inflation, and back-to-school shopping represents a significant cost on top of everyday expenses,” said Cecilia Seiden, vice president of TransUnion’s retail business, in a statement. “The ability to spread those payments out over time, interest-free, is a very attractive option to parents and students who are already stretched thin financially.”
But while BNPL plans are ubiquitous during this time of the year, a new report suggests that inflation and recession risks mean the credit instrument is not going anywhere.
A new report from Morning Consult found that consumers are expecting goods and services to cost more, so they are turning to BNPL “to pay for some of them.”
“The consistency with which U.S. consumers have used BNPL to fund their purchases throughout 2022 indicates that the payment form may be helping to keep their price sensitivity and substitutions at bay, and should be viewed as an indicator of the staying power of BNPL,” the report stated.
Consumers Are Changing Their Buying Habits
Consumer demand trends have been altered in multiple sectors of the economy, from housing to gasoline.
According to industry leaders, the real estate market has slipped into a recession.
In July, new home sales plunged 12.6 percent to an annualized rate of 511,000 units, Census Bureau data show. This represented the sharpest decline since February 2021 and the lowest reading in more than six years. Existing home sales also tumbled 5.9 percent, to 4.81 million units.
A window sticker advertising Visa and MasterCard credit cards hangs in a window in San Francisco, Calif., on Feb. 25, 2008. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
New housing construction activity has fallen amid rising interest rates. Last month, housing starts and building permits dropped 9.6 percent and 1.3 percent, respectively.
Although gasoline prices have fallen below $4 per gallon, motorists have not been lured back to the pump. The present Energy Information Administration (EIA) seasonal four-week rolling average consumption rate is the same as it was in 2020, as demand hovers around 9 million barrels per day.
A July American Automobile Association (AAA) survey learned that 64 percent of Americans adapted their driving or lifestyle habits because of surging fuel prices. Some of the changes include driving less, combining errands, and reducing shopping or dining out.
Consumers are exploring multiple avenues to diminish the inflation pain.
A July U.S. News & World Report Inflation Shopping Habits Survey discovered that 58 percent of Americans are searching for coupons at least once a week. Nearly half (44 percent) of consumers are using apps and online tools to save money. The high cost of living has already affected consumers’ holiday shopping plans, with 52 percent planning to spend less on gifts this year compared to last year.
More Americans are finding basic food staples more expensive, households are trimming their non-essential spending, and shoppers are turning to generic brand labels to save money.
U.S. retailers may need to brace for a transformed shopper heading into the typically busy fourth quarter. Walmart and Target have reported bloated inventories due to sliding demand, forcing these retail giants to slash prices, cancel billions of dollars in orders, and slash the number of shipping containers.
In July, business and retail inventories climbed 1.4 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively. Retail sales were flat at zero percent.
The state of the consumer may deteriorate heading into the new year. More debt, fewer savings, and subzero wage growth are all factors that may weigh on Americans in 2023. Could unemployment be the next domino to fall?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP issues an order to declassify documents related to Spygate—the scandal in which operatives of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to tie Trump to Russia using false information, and the FBI used that information to spy on Trump associates.
2021
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
JAN. 19
TRUMP ISSUES a memo declassifying more Spygate documents.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
JAN. 20
TRUMP LEAVES the White House in a manner his lawyer Rudy Giuliani would later describe as“chaotic.”
The “bulk” of the Spygate documents are returned to the DOJ for further redactions regarding privacy issues before they are to be released, Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, says in a memo.
According to Newsweek, 27 boxes of materials were mistakenly shipped from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. The White House Office of Records Management had informed the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) that some of the boxes should go to the archive. NARA engaged in a back-and-forth with Trump staff about transferring the materials.
2022
MANDEL NGAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGE
JANUARY
TRUMP TRANSFERS 15 boxes of materials to NARA. The materials reportedly include documents marked as classified.
PAUL MORIGI/GETTY IMAGES
NATIONAL ARCHIVES FOUNDATION
JAN. 13
ARCHIVIST of the United States David Ferriero announces that he will retire
in mid-April. Ferriero was appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama.
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
MARCH 24
TRUMP FILES A LAWSUIT
under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act against Clinton and dozens of other parties involved in the unsubstantiated allegations that Trump colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election. The suit is filed in Florida federal court.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
APRIL 7
THE WASHINGTON POST reports, citing unnamed sources, that the DOJ is taking steps to investigate “improper removal of presidential
records to Mar-a-Lago.”
SAUL LOEB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
APRIL 28
C-SPAN PUBLISHES an interview with Ferriero in which he says “there is an investigation going on” regarding materials Trump kept from his time in office.
“We suspect that we don’t
have everything,” Ferriero says. “We’re still trying to figure out what we don’t have.”
He complains about the “weakness of the Presidential Records Act,” which is a civil, rather than criminal, statute.
STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
MAY
THE DOJ REPORTEDLY subpoenas some documents from Trump.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
MAY 11
THE WASHINGTON POST publishes an interview with Ferriero in which he says that Jan. 6, 2021, was “the absolute worst” day of his life and that he was worried the National Archives could be in danger upon seeing a “mob” of “really angry, angry people” on Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, all violence that day took place at the U.S. Capitol, more than half a mile away. Footage from Pennsylvania Avenue indicates the crowd streaming along was peaceful and, if anything, cheerful.
Ferriero also says he resigned so that his replacement—who he says “better not [be] … another white male”—could be picked by President Joe Biden.
KEVIN DIETSCH/GETTY IMAGES
MAY 12
THE WASHINGTON POST reports, citing unnamed sources, that the DOJ is using a grand jury to issue a subpoena to NARA in an investigation of the 15 boxes handed over to the agency by Trump in January.
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
JUNE 3
TOP DOJ counterintelligence official Jay Bratt and three FBI agents visit Mar-a-Lago to discuss document issues with Trump’s lawyers, RealClearInvestigations reports based on unnamed sources. Trump pops in to say hello and instructs his lawyers to give the officials a tour of a basement room where he keeps documents and artifacts from his presidency. Agents are allowed to go through the boxes and leave with some documents. The interaction is “nice and friendly and very professional,” one of Trump’s lawyers says.
MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
JUNE 19
TRUMP APPOINTS former national security official Kash Patel and investigative journalist John Solomon as his representatives to NARA.
BRANDON BELL/GETTY IMAGES
JUNE 21
TRUMP FILES an amended complaint in his RICO suit.
ANNA MONEYMAKER/GETTY IMAGES
JUNE 21
KASH PATEL reveals in an interview that he was tasked by Trump to go to NARA and retrieve and release Spygate documents. “We are going to start putting that information out next week,” he says.
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
JUNE 22
MAGISTRATE JUDGE Bruce Reinhart recuses himself from assisting District Judge Donald Middlebrooks with the Trump suit. Reinhart is the third in a line of six magistrates who have recused themselves from the case, after Judge Shaniek Maynard recused herself on March 25 and Judge Ryon McCabe did so on April 6. Judge William Matthewman would recuse himself on June 27.
MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
JULY 1
MAGISTRATE JUDGES Alicia Valle and Jared Strauss recuse themselves from Trump’s suit.
SAMIRA BOUAOU/THE EPOCH TIMES
JULY 4
PATEL COMPLAINS during an interview about bureaucratic hurdles to obtaining the Spygate documents from NARA, but promises to follow through.
“I will be coming to the National Archives in the coming weeks, I will be identifying those documents, and I will be demanding that they’ll be released because they’re already declassified,” he says.
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
MID-TO-
LATE JULY
MID-TO-
LATE JULY
ATTORNEY GENERAL Merrick Garland starts weighing whether to greenlight a raid on Mar-a-Lago, unnamed sources would later tell The Wall Street Journal.
ATTORNEY GENERAL Merrick Garland starts weighing whether to greenlight a raid on Mar-a-Lago, unnamed sources would later tell The Wall Street Journal.
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
AUG. 5
REINHART ISSUES a sealed search warrant for Mar-a-Lago.
AUG. 8
GIORGIO VIERA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
AROUND
9 A.M.
SOME 30 FBI AGENTS arrive at the Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, Florida. Trump isn’t present. Agents tell staff on site that nobody is allowed to observe the search and that security cameras must be turned off. The staff initially complies, but then switches the cameras back on.
10 A.M.
TRUMP LAWYER Christina Bobb receives a phone call from a Trump staffer that Mar-a-Lago is being raided by the FBI and that she needs to go there immediately.
10:30 A.M.
BOBB ARRIVES AT Mar-a-Lago. She asks the FBI agents on the scene to show her the search warrant. They initially claim they don’t have to, but she insists. She attempts to accompany agents during the search, but is physically prevented from doing so and is forced to remain in the parking lot outside. Agents eventually start giving her updates on which part of the property they are searching.
6–7 P.M.
FBI AGENTS FINISH their search of Trump’s office, residence, and basement document storage room. Bobb is provided a copy of the warrant and signs an inventory of what was taken. The inventory is too general for her to tell what specifically was taken. She isn’t provided with the supporting affidavit that explains on what grounds the warrant was granted. Agents leave with dozens of boxes, binders of photos, and other items.
6:51 P.M.
TRUMP ISSUES a statement saying his house has been “under siege, raided, and occupied by a large number of FBI agents.” The raid is “not necessary or appropriate,” he says, given that he has been cooperating with the government.
COURTESY OF PAUL SPERRY
AUG. 9
THE TWITTER ACCOUNT of investigative journalist Paul Sperry is suspended after he posts that “speculation on Capitol Hill” was that the FBI “had PERSONAL stake & searching for classified docs related to its #Spygate scandal” during the raid.
He would later tell Breitbart that he was given no warning or explanation by Twitter. He also would point out that Twitter’s deputy general counsel is James Baker, former FBI general counsel during the Spygate era.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refuses to comment on the raid.
White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre says President Joe Biden was not briefed on the raid.
ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
AUG. 10
NEWSWEEK REPORTS that the FBI sought the search warrant based on information from a “confidential human source” regarding Trump’s possession of classified documents.
FBI Director Christopher Wray says he can’t comment on the raid and refers questions to the DOJ.
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGE
AUG. 11
GARLAND TAKES responsibility for approving the raid and announces that the DOJ will ask the court to unseal the warrant.
Wray issues a statement condemning “unfounded attacks on the integrity of the FBI” and threats and violence against law enforcement.
The Washington Post, relying on unnamed sources, reports that the FBI was looking for “nuclear documents.”
STRINGER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
AUG. 12
TRUMP CALLS for the release of the warrant documents. He also calls the “nuclear weapons issue” a “hoax” and suggests the FBI may have planted evidence during the raid since his lawyers were prevented from observing the search.
Reinhart releases the warrant application and attachments showing what and where was to be searched as well as a general list of what was taken. The supporting affidavit, which shows the justification used for the warrant, is not released.
The documents cite three statutes as related to the raid: mishandling of defense information; taking, hiding, or destroying government records; and altering, destroying, or falsifying records in federal investigations. None of the statutes talk specifically about classified information.
Trump says he had declassified all documents kept at Mar-a-Lago.
ROBYN BECK/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
AUG. 14
TRUMP AND HIS STAFF say the FBI took materials covered by attorney-client privilege, and potentially executive privilege. Trump requests the return of the documents.
JEFF HAYNES/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
AUG. 15
TRUMP SAYS the FBI took his passports during the raid. His spokesman then releases an email from the DOJ saying Trump staff could pick up his passports at the FBI Washington Field Office.
FBI plans to return privileged materials within two weeks, Just the News reports, citing unnamed sources.
The DOJ tells the court it opposes the release of the supporting affidavit.
Trump calls for the affidavit to be released.
REUTERS/JIM BOURG
AUG. 17
CITING UNNAMEDSOURCES, Newsweek reports that the FBI sought a personal “stash” of documents Trump allegedly collected during his presidency, “including material that Trump apparently thought would exonerate him of any claims of Russian collusion in 2016 or any other election-related charges.”
REUTERS/AL DRAGO/FILE PHOTO
AUG. 18
REINHART HOLDS a hearing on unsealing the affidavit.
Wind turbine blades could be recycled into gummy bears for human consumption at the end of their lifespan, according to new research from scientists at Michigan State University.
The news comes amidst Democrats and their corporate allies including the World Economic Forum (WEF) pushing renewable energy as a solution to climate change and a viable alternative to traditional fuel. Wind power, which relies on turbines, is one of the most popular forms of renewable energy and counts staunch advocates in the White House.
Amidst this renewable energy push, researchers at Michigan State University constructed a new form of composite resin for wind turbine blades.
It is comprised of a mixture of glass fibers with plant-derived and synthetic polymers. Once blades formed from this resin can no longer be used, the new material can be recycled into a variety of products – including gummy bears.
When dissolved in an alkaline solution, the newly formulated resin produces potassium lactate. The compound, researchers allege, can be purified and converted into sweets or sports drinks.
“We recovered food-grade potassium lactate and used it to make gummy bear candies, which I ate,” explained John Dorgan, one of the authors of the paper.
“A carbon atom derived from a plant, like corn or grass, is no different from a carbon atom that came from a fossil fuel. It’s all part of the global carbon cycle, and we’ve shown that we can go from biomass in the field to durable plastic materials and back to foodstuffs,” continued the researcher.
“The beauty of our resin system is that at the end of its use cycle, we can dissolve it, and that releases it from whatever matrix it’s in so that it can be used over and over again in an infinite loop. That’s the goal of the circular economy.”
Another byproduct of combining the resin with an alkaline solution is poly(methyl methacrylate), or PMMA, which is an acrylic material regularly used in windows and car taillights.
The news comes after months of promotion of insects and other bugs as a “sustainable” source of human food. “We will not eat the bugs,” has become a popular meme in response to the push from globalist allies such as the World Economic Forum.
Being put in solitary confinement was one of Dr. Simone Gold’s “most horrible experiences of her life,” according to the chairman of the board for America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), the organization that Gold founded.
“I mean, unfortunately, she had to spend about eight days in the SHU, which is also known as solitary confinement because she’s unvaccinated,” Joey Gilbert said. “So that was, as she says, one of the most horrible experiences of her life.”
Gold surrendered herself to the Federal Detention Center in Miami (FDC Miami) on July 26, where she was put in solitary confinement for eight days, as part of the prison’s COVID-19 infection prevention protocol for not being fully vaccinated, classified as having received two doses of the COVID-19 injection.
“Not fully vaccinated inmates need to complete a 10-day quarantine as new intakes or if they have a known or suspected exposure to a case of SARS-CoV-2,” the Federal Bureau of Prison that manages federal prisons said on its website.
Gold, in an Aug. 12 email from prison, said that solitary confinement was a “punishing and inhumane experience.”
“Using the excuse of COVID-19, all incoming female inmates are put into a punishment isolation cell under the guise of a ‘quarantine.’ They told me it wasn’t for punishment, but it was certainly a punishing and inhumane experience,” Gold wrote. “Apparently, men are not subjected to this treatment.”
Gilbert claims that if the federal detention center had opened up another unit for its female detainees, Gold and other female inmates would not have been put in solitary confinement during their quarantine.
“They don’t separate the men like this,” Gilbert said. “They could open up another unit but they don’t want to, and you know, it’s all cost-based.”
“The women in this prison are not being treated the same as the men for sure.”
Spokesperson Benjamin O’Cone from the Bureau of Prisons, in a reply to The Epoch Times, said the federal agency can’t comment or provide information on inmates’ “conditions of confinement or medical care” due to privacy, safety, and security reasons but claimed that all inmates are treated equally.
“All institutions have areas set aside for quarantine and medical isolation,” O’Cone wrote. “All inmates are managed per CDC guidelines and treated equally regardless of gender.”
“Concerning your inquiry on ‘solitary confinement,’ the BOP [Bureau of Prisons] does not house inmates in solitary confinement. Rather, the BOP operates under the guiding principle that inmates should be housed in the least restrictive setting necessary to ensure their own safety, as well as the safety of staff, other inmates, and the public; and they should only remain there for as long as necessary to address the specific reason(s) for placement. It is the practice of the BOP to use restrictive housing only as necessary,” he added.
As of Aug. 23, Gold is 28 days into her 60-day prison term for entering the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. She pleaded guilty in March 2022 to the misdemeanor charge of trespassing the restricted building. On June 16, she was sentenced to serve 60 days in jail, one year of supervised release, a $500 restitution, and pay a $9,500 fine.
Staying Positive
Gilbert says that overall, Gold is “staying you know very, very positive” and keeping busy with writing her second book, reading, and her work with AFLDS.
“So she really is staying in the fight more than anything. She’s right on the same place she was when she went in … On the fight for medical freedom, medical privacy, [and] parental rights, we talk about that every time we speak, every email,” Gilbert said. “She is a woman of her word and she’s not backing off an ounce on the stuff that we’ve been fighting for since really March 2020.”
He also said that the letters, postcards, and well wishes that Gold’s been receiving in prison have helped her tremendously get through some days.
“I would just say that, please don’t assume or think your card or postcard or words of well wishing are not important. They are so important to her,” Gilbert said, adding that “some days, it’s the only thing getting her through.”
Medical License Inactive
Since entering prison, the Medical Board of California has placed Gold’s medical license on inactive status, which will continue throughout the duration of her sentence.
“The license of Dr. Gold was automatically placed in ‘inactive’ status pursuant to Business and Professions Code 2236.2, which states ‘a physician and surgeon’s certificate shall be automatically placed on inactive status during any period of time that the holder of the certificate is incarcerated after conviction of a misdemeanor,’” Carlos Villatoro, public information manager for the Medical Board of California, told The Epoch Times in an email. “The law further explains that license shall be returned by the Board to its appropriate status within five business days of receiving notice that the physician and surgeon is no longer incarcerated.”
“I should note that the automatic change in the license from active to inactive is not considered discipline,” he added.
Gold is also licensed to practice in Florida where she has an active status.
Correction: A previous version of this story had the wrong month Dr. Gold surrendered herself to prison. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
The Democrats’ new reconciliation bill isn’t just going to be the largest-ever expansion of a government agency. It’s going to be the largest expansion of the domestic police state in American history. Only a statist could believe that a federal government, which already collects $4.1 trillion every year—or $12,300 for every citizen—supposedly needs 80 battalions of new IRS cops.
The average American has less reason to be concerned about cops with guns—though the IRS is looking for special agents who can “carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary”—than they do bureaucrats armed with pens who are authorized to sift through their lives. If you pay your taxes you have nothing to worry about, Democrats claim. But most law-abiding citizens know they have something to fear from a state agency that doesn’t concern itself with your due process, has no regard for your privacy, and is empowered to target anyone it wants without any genuine oversight.
And, please, spare us this nonsense about the IRS expansion focusing exclusively on “high earners.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre promised that the IRS wouldn’t engage in new audits of anyone making under $400,000—a claim she has no authority to make and could not possibly predict even if she did. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy also said that the bill was passed to stop an “epidemic of tax cheating amongst the millionaires and billionaires” and promised that “audit rates won’t increase for anyone making under $400K.”
This is a lie. Nothing in the bill that Democrats passed through the Senate limits audits. Murphy, along with every other Democrat in the Senate, voted against a Republican amendment that would have prevented new agents from auditing individuals and small businesses with less than $400,000 of taxable income. Not long ago, Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan Act—which had as much to do with rescuing as the Inflation Reduction Act has to do with reducing inflation—and changed tax code so that mobile payment apps like Venmo and Cash App were now required to report transactions totaling $600 or more per year to the IRS. Does that sound like a party aiming fire exclusively at high-earning Americans?
Indeed, poor and middle-class Americans are far more likely to do their own taxes, and thus more prone to making mistakes. In 2021, those making $25,000 or less (often the young and elderly) were audited at a rate five times higher than everyone else. The wealthier you are the more likely it is that you can hire lawyers and accountants to work within the system. There aren’t enough millionaires and billionaires in the world to keep a potential new 87,000 IRS employees busy.
There are other overlooked aspects of the Democrats’ IRS expansion. The bill, for instance, strengthens the federal public-sector union monopoly that funds Democrats’ political aspirations. IRS and Treasury Department employees spent 353,820 hours engaged in union activism—their PAC gives every cent to the Democrats—in 2019. One can imagine what another 87,000 employees would do for that effort. In the real world, laundering taxpayer funds through unions and using them on political campaigns is called racketeering.
None of this is to say that everyone who works for IRS is corrupt or power-hungry or an ideologue. The unassailable rules of giant bureaucracies, however, are that they always experience mission creep, they always do enough to justify their funding, and sooner or later, their leaders become political operatives.
With that said, it’s worth remembering that the IRS doesn’t simply collect taxes. It enforces speech codes. This is what empowered former IRS official Lois Lerner to target conservative groups—“crazies” and “a–holes”—who used words like “Tea Party” or “patriots” in their names. But, even at the time, leftists at The New York Times editorial board praised the IRS for going after conservative groups because they did not “primarily” engage in “social welfare,” and so did not deserve an exemption under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. Has anything in the evolution of the Democratic Party given you confidence that such power would not be abused or that an engorged IRS would be immune from political pressure?
Wrestling with an insanely complex tax code—nearly 8 million words—costs Americans billions every year. Rather than flattening and simplifying this astonishingly convoluted code, which not only would have saved citizens but the government money, Democrats decided we needed up to another 87,000 people to enforce it.
In an Epoch Health podcast, our very own Dr. Ann Corson spoke with Dr. Stephanie Seneff on the cumulation of Dr. Seneff‘s research on the chemical glyphosate compiled in her book, “Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment,” how she discovered it, how it damages many systems in our body and the environment, and what we can do against it.
Dr. Stephanie Seneff is a senior research scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She spent over four decades working at the intersection of human biology and computers, and has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles on a wide range of topics. In 2008, she began applying her expertise on statistical analysis and computational modeling in biology to investigate the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxicants on human health and has been researching and writing about glyphosate for nearly a decade. She holds four academic degrees from MIT and since 2011, has co-authored over 30 papers in various peer-reviewed medical and health journals on topics such as modern-day diseases and the impact of environmental toxins on human health.
Dr. Corson has four decades of clinical practice. Her patient population includes people who are immunocompromised due to conditions like Lyme disease and mold-induced illness. She treats with an integrative approach and is known internationally for her success. Dr. Corson grew up in Southeastern Pennsylvania and obtained the Doctor of Medicine degree in 1982 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, PA. She was board certified in Family Medicine in 1993 and in Integrative Holistic Medicine in 2011. Today, she has a solo practice in Philadelphia and cares deeply about medical ethics and humanity. In 2008, she joined the non-profit organization Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of DAFOH’s e-newsletter.
Coming Across Glyphosate
Dr. Seneff didn’t expect to take a dive deep into the weed-killing agent glyphosate, used in the popular herbicide Roundup®, when researching autism. “My best friend had a son who developed autism. So I [became] aware of the problem. And I was watching the rates go up in the early 2000s, you know, [from] 2000 to 2008,” she said. After seeing the rates go up, she thought that it must have been something in the environment that caused it, so she began looking into it.
“I happened to be at a conference where Professor Don Huber gave a two hour presentation on glyphosate. That was the first [time] that I really was aware of the word.” After hearing about everything glyphosate caused, Dr. Seneff was “on the edge of [her] seat.”
“Glyphosate is disrupting those microbes [because] glyphosate is chelating [essential] minerals, making them unavailable, actually making them simultaneously toxic and deficient [in our bodies]. And then [glyphosate is] also disrupting liver enzymes that are critical for detoxifying other toxic chemicals,” she says. “And I knew that the autistic kids, many of them have … issues, food sensitivities, bloating, constipation, all these problems, diarrhea, I knew there was something going on in the gut, I really was thinking it’s something they’re eating.”
Dr. Seneff later found through research that the rise of autism, when plotted on a curve, coincides perfectly with the glyphosate usage over time. “It’s a perfect match.”
The list of glyphosate-related issues doesn’t end here, yet how does a chemical cause so many problems? Dr. Seneff says that it has to do with the mechanisms of toxicity.
What Exactly Is Glyphosate and What Does it Do to Our Bodies?
Glyphosate is a simple molecule. “It’s basically a glycine,” one of the 20 fundamental amino acids that make up all proteins in our body, but with a twist, Seneff explained. There is an extra thing stuck to the glycine molecule, something called a methyl-phosphonyl group which makes its behavior radically different from the normal glycine we need. The methyl-phosphonyl group makes glyphosate different from glycine in terms of its biophysical and biochemical behavior, yet still, according to Dr. Seneff, is most substituted for the regular glycine amino acid by the body’s protein-building machinery.
“Glyphosate has that glycine piece that matches the code for glycine in the assembly of the proteins. That’s what’s so critical. It’s a unique mechanism of toxicity that … I believe [glyphosate is] getting into the proteins by mistake in place of glycine, and … certain proteins are getting messed up critically by glyphosate,” Dr. Seneff says.
She tells us that the reason glyphosate is widely used as a weed killer is because “Monsanto claims EPSP synthase, which is … an enzyme in this critical [plant] pathway, the shikimate pathway … exists [only] in plants, but not in humans … [they claim glyphosate is] safe, because we don’t even have that enzyme. But the problem is … many of our gut microbes have that enzyme and use that enzyme in the shikimate pathway to produce the aromatic amino acids [that are essential to us].” Enzymes are catalysts in our body, which speed up metabolism and other internal processes.
Gut microbes are very important, Dr. Seneff highlights. She says that most diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and autism are all connected to gut issues.
Glyphosate was actually unintentionally discovered as a herbicide. It was initially used as an industrial pipe cleaning chelator and the workers found that the plants all around the efflux of the pipes were dying off, which is how it was repurposed as a weedkiller.
One particular ramification of glyphosate is that it begins to inhibit nutrient processing in infants. “Lactobacillus is a critical microbe in the gut. And when you’re born, that’s the … microbe that’s going to help you digest milk,” Dr. Seneff says. “[Lactobacillus] really depends on manganese … to be healthy, and the glyphosate is chelating the manganese making it unavailable to the [lactobacillus] and that’s part of what’s making [infants] sick. [All this is] on top of, of course, disrupting that enzyme [EPSP synthase].”
Glyphosate, Dr. Seneff tells us, basically kills important bacteria in our own gut microbiome that are essential for producing proteins, neurotransmitters, and many other essential things. Once this happens, it allows for the overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria that make us sick.
Another complication “is that some of those metabolites that are produced by these pathogens are toxic … the liver can detoxify them [but only] using enzymes that get disrupted by glyphosate,” Dr. Seneff adds. “There are many of them … in the liver, they activate vitamin D, they deactivate vitamin A [preventing vitamin A toxicity] … they process many pharmaceutical drugs and clear them … these are cytochrome P 450 enzymes [and they] are super, super important … [but they’re] getting disrupted by glyphosate.”
The Mechanism Behind the Disruption
“It gets into those enzymes by mistake in place [of] the coding amino acid glycine,” Dr. Seneff explains. Each protein is made of a chain of amino acids, and a change in one amino acid can radically change the structure of the entire protein. One example of this is sickle cell disease, where a defective hemoglobin protein substructure in the sickle cell changes it fundamentally. Glyphosate has the ability to do something similar with other vital proteins in the human body.
Taking the enzyme EPSP synthase as an example, Dr. Seneff explained that it displays, at its substrate binding site, a motif containing glycine that is susceptible to damage by glyphosate. This means a short chain of building blocks in the EPSP enzyme that has the vital function of binding to its substrate is rendered useless if glyphosate is substituted for glycine in that spot. “[Glyphosate is] substituting for glycine during protein synthesis, it’s getting into the enzyme itself, where glycine should go,” Dr. Seneff claims. This ruins the whole ‘docking station’ structure enzymes are meant to have at their substrate binding sites.
As glyphosate, as a herbicide, kills plants, GMO plants have their own way of surviving its application. “The GMO crops … [are] engineered to resist glyphosate, they’re given a version of that enzyme, the EPSP synthase, it’s produced by a particular microbe. And that microbe does not have glycine at that spot, it has alanine, so they give them that [other] … version of the protein, which is able to work fine. That’s how they protect [themselves] from glyphosate.”
EPSP is not the only enzyme glyphosate is disrupting. It has incredible ramifications for the entire metabolism of the body. Dr. Seneff says that “[studies on] the mitochondria … have shown that glyphosate disrupts the mitochondria [and] causes mitochondrial stress, specifically inhibiting succinate dehydrogenase, which is an absolutely crucial enzyme.” Mitochondria are known as the powerhouses of the cell, responsible for producing the necessary energy most organisms use. A disruption in the enzyme likely leads to less units of energy produced.
Dr. Seneff explained that another way glyphosate disrupts our body is by disabling enzymes that attach sulfates to other molecules in the bloodstream. Adding sulfate molecules to others will make them water soluble and easy to transport around in the bloodstream. This is vital for many internal systems, prevents blood clotting, and keeps the sulfur levels in the bloodstream in check.
Glyphosate has also shown disturbing effects on offspring. Dr. Seneff talked about an experiment where pregnant mother rats were given a low dose of glyphosate during their pregnancy, “and then the mouse was fine. The offspring were fine too. But then when they went to the next generation, and especially to the third generation, you started to see all kinds of problems and kidney problems and reproductive issues and … inflammatory problems.”
Dr. Seneff further talked about how glyphosate also disrupts infant development if the mother is exposed to it during pregnancy. “Glyphosate disrupts the enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen. And the boys depend critically on that [mechanism] for brain development, because they don’t naturally have much estrogen in the brain unless they can use that enzyme,” she says. “The girls then end up with this polycystic ovary syndrome … which is the most common cause for infertility in women.”
How to Avoid Glyphosate
Dr. Seneff tells us that “the most critical thing … is to eat a certified organic whole foods diet, I think get rid of the processed foods because even without the glyphosate, they’re not healthy … it’s really just pure calories.”
“Eating whole foods, and buying a certified organic label or having [a] personal relationship with a farmer where you know that they don’t use chemicals.” Dr. Seneff advises that you should move away from a place where they use glyphosate in their crops, because “when the wind is blowing your way and they’re spraying the glyphosate on the crop, you are in trouble.”
“I encourage people to eat fermented foods, sauerkraut, apple cider vinegar, it’s possible that the microbes … [in fermented foods are] able to metabolize glyphosate,” Dr. Seneff says. She also remarks that chlorine to disinfect water is great because “chlorine can also break down glyphosate.” If your local county doesn’t use chlorine to disinfect water, Dr. Seneff recommends that you install a reverse osmosis filter to remove it. It needs to be reverse osmosis as other filters don’t remove the glyphosate.
Dr. Seneff also says, “Glycine is a supplement [sometimes prescribed to patients] … you can see that if you have more glycine, it’s less likely for glyphosate to substitute if there’s plenty of glycine. But you’ve got to make sure that that’s organic … because if it’s not, it’s probably got glyphosate in it.”
She also advises people to talk with the local school districts, golf clubs, city parks, and other areas that have greenery so that they stop using Roundup® in these areas. Becoming active and voicing concerns is vital in raising more awareness of this issue and for action to be taken on a local, city, and state level to reduce the effects of these toxic products on soil, animal, and human health.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.
One of the prosecutors on special counsel John Durham’s team has withdrawn from the team’s upcoming case against a source for the anti-Trump dossier.
Durham asked the federal court in Alexandria, Virginia on Aug. 21 to “withdraw the appearance” of Andrew DeFilippis, an assistant special counsel, in the case against Igor Danchenko.
Durham referred comment to a spokesperson, who declined to comment on the development. DeFilippis did not return a query.
DeFilippis was one of the prosecutors in the trial of Michael Sussmann, the first trial stemming from Durham’s investigation. Jurors acquitted Sussmann in May of lying to the FBI.
DeFilippis had been involved in the case against Danchenko since shortly after Danchenko was indicted in November 2021.
Durham, a former U.S. attorney appointed as special counsel by former Attorney General William Barr, went to court each day for the Sussmann trial, but did not speak during the proceedings and declined to answer questions after the verdict was handed down.
Durham has signaled he will take a larger role in the case against Danchenko, who has been charged with five counts of lying to the FBI and faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
Durham was the lone prosecutor to speak in the most recent hearing, on Aug. 1, and soon after lodged a filing that indicated he will lead the prosecution. Several assistant prosecutors, including Michael Keilty, were present, but DeFilippis was not there.
Keilty and Jonathan Algor are holdovers from the Sussmann trial. Adam Small, who was at the August hearing, did not participate in that case.
The trial is slated to start on Oct. 11 and last five or six days.
Steele Dossier Source
Danchenko, a Russian national who once worked for the Brookings Institution, provided information to Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who compiled the dossier about then-candidate Donald Trump while being paid by the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
Danchenko falsely told the FBI that he never communicated with a person later identified as Charles Dolan, a longtime Clinton associate, according to charging documents and Dolan’s lawyer. Danchenko is also accused of lying when he said he spoke with a businessman named Sergei Millian and conveyed some of the information he received to Steele.
According to prosecutors, Danchenko “fabricated” a phone call with Millian, and made up purported plans to meet with Millian.
The lies were important because the FBI relied on the dossier to obtain spy warrants on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign associate, and because the FBI “devoted substantial resources” in trying to track down and interview Danchenko’s purported sub-sources, according to prosecutors.
A recent legal motion from former President Donald Trump on Monday said the 45th president invited FBI agents to come to Mar-a-Lago two months before the raid on his property.
The agents, the filing said (pdf), were greeted by Trump lawyers when they arrived on June 3 to retrieve documents. The agents were shown a basement storage room with boxes of documents and memorabilia from when Trump was president.
The filing also claimed that after one FBI agent saw the storage room, they told Trump’s team: “Thank you. You did not need to show us the storage room, but we appreciate it. Now it all makes sense.”
In the Mar-a-Lago storage room, there were “boxes, many containing the clothing and personal items of President Trump and the First Lady,” the complaint added. Department of Justice official Jay Bratt asked the Trump team to secure that storage room and the former president “directed his staff to place a second lock on the door,” it said.
“Counsel for President Trump then closed the interaction and advised the Government officials that they should contact him with any further needs on the matter,” the filing said.
Trump’s lawyers wrote that the former president even personally greeted Bratt and FBI agents in Mar-a-Lago’s dining area.
“Before leaving the group, President Trump’s last words to Mr. Bratt and the FBI agents were as follows: ‘Whatever you need, just let us know,’” the motion said.
“Responsive documents were provided to the FBI agents. Mr. Bratt asked to inspect a storage room. Counsel for President Trump advised the group that President Trump had authorized him to take the group to that room,” Trump’s lawyers added. “The group proceeded to the storage room, escorted by two Secret Service agents. The storage room contained boxes, many containing the clothing and personal items of President Trump and the First Lady.”
Elsewhere in the complaint, Trump’s lawyers asserted that the more than two dozen boxes of documents that were taken by the FBI in the Aug. 8 raid were covered by executive privilege.
The motion demanded that federal investigators stop looking into the material that was taken at Mar-a-Lago until a special master can be appointed to review the records.
‘Immediately STOP the Review’
“We are now demanding that the Department of ‘Justice’ be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home. ALL documents have been previously declassified,” Trump said in an accompanying statement on his Truth Social platform.
Supporters of former U.S. President Donald Trump in West Palm Beach, Fla. drive around the Paul G. Rogers Federal Building & Courthouse as the court on Aug.18, 2022 holds a hearing to determine if the affidavit used by the FBI as justification for the raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate should be unsealed. (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
The former president said he would have handed over the documents without FBI agents carrying out the raid on his home, implying that the search was politically motivated. The documents, he added, would have been given to the National Archives until they are required by the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum.
The filing is Trump’s first since the unprecedented raid on his Florida home. Other legal activity connected to the FBI case involved media outlets and third-party entities filing motions to release the search warrant, property receipt, and affidavit in the case—and the former president is not a party in those cases.
On Monday morning, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the FBI search warrant, suggested that the affidavit would be released to the public. He again reiterated that the Department of Justice is ordered to submit the affidavit with proposed redactions by 12 p.m. Thursday.
Because of the “intense” public interest in the investigation and case, Reinhart explained that the document should not be entirely sealed. Department of Justice officials and lawyers argued that releasing it—even in its redacted form—would harm the agency’s investigation.
The Department of Justice has not immediately responded to a request for comment on the lawsuit’s statement about FBI agents having visited Mar-a-Lago in June.
A spokesman for the Justice Department, Anthony Coley, issued a statement following Trump’s filing Monday.
“The Aug. 8 search warrant at Mar-a-Lago was authorized by a federal court upon the required finding of probable cause,” his statement said. “The Department is aware of this evening’s motion. The United States will file its response in court.”
YET THE AMERICAN CORPORATE AND POLITICAL CLASSES REFUSE TO TAKE ACTION AGAINST THE CHINA-OWNED APP.
Chinese Communist Party-backed social media platform TikTok inserted code into its app to allow for the tracking of users’ activity on external websites, including their keystrokes, according to a stunning new report.
The evidence – originally authored by software engineer Felix Krause who shared it with Forbes – also found that TikTok could capture a user’s credit card details, passwords, and other forms of personal information.
TikTok retains this tracking capability due to the way it codes websites launched by users on the in-app browser. When people click on TikTok ads or visit links affiliated with a creator’s profile, for example, the app uses its own in-app browser as opposed to traditional browsers such as Safari or Chrome.
Special lines of code enable TikTok to track this content, with Krause alleging “this was an active choice the company made.”
“This is a non-trivial engineering task. This does not happen by mistake or randomly.”
Krause is the founder of Fastlane, a service for testing and deploying apps, which Google acquired five years ago.
His report includes an analysis of seven popular iPhone apps that use in-app browsers: TikTok, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat, Amazon and Robinhood.
Of the seven apps Krause tested, TikTok was the sole app with code allowing it to monitor keystrokes and appeared to be monitoring user activity considerably more than its counterparts. By tracking keystrokes, the app could potentially gather sensitive information related to someone’s bank accounts, finances, identity, or passwords.
The report follows continued controversy over the app and its ties to the Chinese Communist Party, with fears about the regime using the app to covertly promote propaganda or specific agendas prompting a federal government-led effort to ban it.
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance employs former Chinese Communist Party officials, including individuals with military ties, to executive roles and grants party members preferential treatment in hiring processes. Its founder has also pledged to use ByteDance to “promote socialist core values” and devotion to the Chinese Communist Party, which recently acquired an official stake in the company.
A pro-life pregnancy center in Virginia is rebounding after vandals inflicted thousands of dollars worth of damage there in reaction to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Director of Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center Susan Campbell believes the suspects belong to an anarchist group and that they specifically targeted the center because it’s in Lynchburg—traditionally known for being conservative and Christian.
The attack, Campbell says, hasn’t dampened their spirit—just the reverse.
“We reopened less than 24 hours later, began seeing patients again with boarded up windows,” she told The Epoch Times. “We’re continuing the mission, we will not stop, and we will just pray more and put more practical things in place that protect us.”
She added, “It just spurs us on to do it even more.”
The overturning of Roe v. Wade was what pro-lifers like Campbell had prayed for; the day it actually happened in June, she recalled, the center’s security camera showed “something didn’t seem right.”
Deciding to check the property the next morning, she didn’t get half way there when police called to say the center had been hit.
Arriving, she saw shattered glass and graffiti. The foyer’s outside, the building’s brick side, and the front sign all were spray-painted. The words “If abortion aint safe, you aint safe!” accompanied depictions of coat hangers, anarchist symbols, and the name of the group, “Jane’s Revenge,” claiming responsibility.
Security footage shows four hooded, masked individuals, believed to be young adults, potentially two males and two females, wielding crowbars and paint. “They took crowbars to 13 glass windows and doors and they did a matter of tens of thousands of dollars in six minutes,” said Campbell, adding, “Feeling violated and harmed is not helping healing.”
It still “was numbing,” “very sad,” and “hard to believe” that it could happen in this conservatively minded community, she said. “But that’s the very reason they said they attacked us.”
The anarchist group’s website boasts similar attacks on pregnancy centers and pro-life businesses in Nashville, Tennessee; Asheville, North Carolina; and elsewhere nationwide.
“They have complete descriptions of each location they’ve done this to,” Campbell said. “They actually encourage people to get crowbars and: ‘All you need is a little passion, go get ’em!’”
The hit was tantamount to a “vandalism tantrum,” she added, “because their beliefs they didn’t feel were heard.” They followed this up with an “online tantrum.”
The center’s social media was flooded with vicious comments from identities claiming to be former patients, spewing what Campbells calls “lies,” “hate,” and “fake” information after the vandalism. Neither Facebook nor Google curtailed the abusive comments, she said.
Blue Ridge provides support for pregnant women—including to abortion advocates—seeking life-saving alternatives. The center educates, throws baby showers, celebrates motherhood, and offers a year’s worth of financial support for needy new moms.
Now, security at Blue Ridge is being beefed up. More cameras will be added. Going forward, a heavier police presence will patrol the area.
A federal investigation is also being conducted by the FBI, said Campbell. She is confident the suspects will be caught.
Meanwhile, there’s been no shortage of support streaming in from the community—from life-affirming businesses, local construction companies, and pro-life supporters nationwide—lending the center a hand. They received gifts, help cleaning up, and repairs contributions.
“I lost count of the hundreds of people who came within a matter of me sending an email,” she said. “It really just restored faith and made me stronger.”
The striking down of Roe v. Wade means individual states now determine the legality of abortion. Although Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has supported its ban, current state laws permit it up to the second trimester—that is, up to 22 weeks’ gestation.
Pro-life Virginians still have “more praying to do,” Campbell said. “We’re still not out of the woods.”
Regardless, life-affirming pregnancy centers outnumber abortion clinics more than 3 to 1 in the United States. This she attributes to grander designs.
“The reason we’re seeing so many life-affirming pregnancy centers is because God is in control,” added Campbell. “He is going to put people in people’s path that are in crisis that are there to help and share hope.”
The non-profit group Citizens United filed lawsuits on Aug. 17 against the U.S. Department of the Interior and Department of State over their failure to provide records related to President Joe Biden’s Promoting Access to Voting executive order, the Federalist has learned.
The two agencies were accused of violating the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The lawsuit came approximately two months after the group lodged the related request in June.
The appeal sought any emails or text messages to and from the two agencies mentioning the Promoting Access to Voting executive order and the Hatch Act, which limits certain political activities of federal employees, according to the complaints.
“The time period covered by the FOIA request was January 20, 2021 to June 2, 2022,” the complaint stated.
Driving Voter Registration Through Federal Bureaucracy
In March 2021, Biden signed Executive Order 14019, titled “Promoting Access to Voting,” in a bid to “leverage the resources of the federal government to increase access to voter registration services and information about voting,” according to a White House statement.
The stated goal of the executive order is to remove obstacles to voting for service members, people with disabilities, and Native Americans. The measure also directs federal agencies to expand time off policies to allow federal workers to vote and volunteer as poll workers.
However, Citizens United President David Bossie said the administration’s move “politicizes the federal workforce.” He called it “a blatant abuse of power that needs much more transparency.”
“The Biden Administration may have violated the Hatch Act and these records should provide the answer,” Bossie told The Federalist.
“This issue deserves far more transparency and that’s why we’re demanding these records be released to the American people,” he explained.
Conservatives’ Concern
The order, which has been dubbed an “election takeover” by conservatives, has sparked concern that it is an effort to drive Democrat voter registration and turnout, swinging elections in favor of Democrats as the 2022 Midterm elections approach.
“Biden’s executive order pushing federal agencies to engage in electioneering on the taxpayers’ dime is inherently partisan and wrong,” Budd said on Twitter.
His bill was co-sponsored by other seven Republican House lawmakers, including House Election Integrity Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.)
“President Biden has no business turning federal agencies into partisan voting operations for Democrats. It’s unconstitutional and would further undermine confidence in the integrity of our elections. I am standing up today to put an end to this overreaching effort,” Tenney said in a statement.
Meanwhile, other government watchdogs, including the Foundation for Government Accountability, the American Accountability Foundation, and the Center for Renewing America have all joined in the legal challenge against the Biden administration for failing to comply with FOIA requests in relation to the executive order.
In response to a complaint filed by the Foundation for Government Accountability in July, a federal district court ruled that the Department of Justice must hand over documents related to the executive order before the 2022 midterms.
Smith & Wesson firearm president and CEO Mark Smith lashed out at leftist politicians for creating America’s “culture of lawlessness” while they blame gun makers for violent crime.
In an open letter on Twitter, Smith accused “politicians and their lobbying partners in the media” of efforts to disparage and undermine his company and other firearm makers.
“Some have had the audacity to suggest that after they have vilified, undermined, and defunded law enforcement for years; supported prosecutors who refuse to hold criminals accountable for their actions; overseen the decay of our country’s mental health infrastructure; and generally promoted a culture of lawlessness—Smith & Wesson and other firearm manufacturers are somehow responsible for the crime wave that has predictably resulted from these destructive policies,” Smith said.
“But they are the ones to blame for the surge in violence and lawlessness, and they seek to avoid responsibility for the crisis of violence they have created by attempting to shift the blame to Smith & Wesson, other firearm manufacturers, and law-abiding gun owners.”
Smith & Wesson president and CEO Mark Smith blames leftist politicians and media for creating a culture of violence in this recent open letter on Twitter. (Courtesy of Smith & Wesson)
Smith’s letter comes amid increasing pressure by anti-gun Democrats and President Joe Biden’s administration to expand federal gun control laws, including a ban on semi-automatic weapons.
There are 393 million registered firearms in the United States, the U.S. Census Bureau, Small Arms Survey reports. While more than 45,000 deaths were attributed to guns in 2021, according to federal statistics, about half were due to suicide.
About 700 were mass shootings used to justify Second Amendment challenges. The city of Chicago, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of gun violence, for example, also has some of the most stringent gun control laws.
According to the Chicago Police Department’s crime statistics for 2021, there were 797 murders, up 3 percent from 2020, and 3,561 shooting incidents, a 9 percent increase from the previous year.
The U.S. Department of Justice reports in its National Crime Victimization Survey the number of guns used in self-defense varies between 760,000 and 3.6 million, based on 18 different surveys, with an average of 2 million defensive gun uses per year.
“It is no surprise that cities suffering the most from violent crime are the very same cities that have promoted irresponsible, soft-on-crime policies that often treat criminals as victims and victims as criminals,” Smith wrote.
“But rather than confront the failure of their policies, certain politicians have sought more laws restricting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, while simultaneously continuing to undermine our institutions of law and order.”
Smith blamed politicians that seek to prohibit gun manufacturers from advertising products that remind citizens of their constitutional right to bear arms for the rising wave of violence.
“To be clear, a Smith & Wesson firearm has never broken into a home; a Smith & Wesson firearm has never assaulted a woman out for a late-night run in the city; a Smith & Wesson firearm has never carjacked an unsuspecting driver stopped at a traffic light,” Smith wrote.
“Instead, Smith & Wesson provides these citizens with the means to protect themselves and their families.”
Smith & Wesson was established 170 years ago with headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts, offering its products to law enforcement and gun enthusiasts.
“We will continue informing law-abiding citizens that they have a constitutionally protected right to defend themselves and their families. We will never back down in our defense of the Second Amendment,” Smith wrote.
Whistleblower faces involuntary separation from Army
A medical Army officer who discovered a sudden increase in disease coinciding with reports of side effects alongside COVID-19 vaccines—which the Army has dismissed as a data glitch—said he faces involuntary separation after being convicted but not punished for disobeying COVID-19 protocol.
In January 2022, First Lt. Mark Bashaw, a preventive medicine officer at the Army, started noticing some “alarming signals” within the defense epidemiological database.
The Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which tracks disease and injuries of 1.3 million active component service members, showed during the pandemic a significant increase in reports of cancers, myocarditis, and pericarditis; as well as some other diseases like male infertility, tumors, a lung disease caused by blood clots, and HIV, Bashaw said.
All these illnesses are listed in FDA documentation as potential adverse reactions associated with COVID-19 vaccines, Bashaw told EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program in an interview on Aug. 1.
Seeing increases in cases of these illnesses as high as 50 percent or 100 percent in some situations, Bashaw stepped forward as a whistleblower to raise concerns about his findings.
Bashaw’s whistleblower declaration, submitted to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) who is facilitating the sharing of information from early investigations of COVID-19 products with Congress, said he saw the increasing incidence of these disorders observed in DMED as “very troubling.”
Specifically, the number of cancer cases among active service members in 2021 nearly tripled in comparison with the average number of cancer instances per year from 2016 to 2020, Bashaw said in his declaration.
Bashaw’s responsibilities as a preventive medicine officer, with a specialty in entomology, include “participating in fact-finding inquiries and investigations to determine potential public health risk to DoD [Department of Defense] personnel from diseases caused by insects and other non-battle related injuries.”
Glitch in DMED
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) speaks during a hearing in Washington on Jan. 24, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
A week after this information was brought out in January in a “COVID-19: Second Opinion” roundtable organized by Johnson, the data in DMED changed, Bashaw said, and all of these troubling spikes in diseases and injuries “seemed to have disappeared and been realigned with previous years.”
Curiously, the glitch didn’t affect the data from 2021, which remained the same. Instead, the corrected data saw the data for prior years increased, which made the 2021 data look normal and in line with the running average, Bashaw explained.
In response to the whistleblower claims, spokesperson for the health agency of the Department of Defense Peter Graves told PolitiFact that the data in DMED “was incorrect for the years 2016-2020,” so the system was taken offline to correct the root cause of the data corruption, which didn’t impact data from 2021.
After the roundtable, Johnson sent three letters to the Department of Defense (DoD) requesting an explanation of the sudden increase in medical diagnosis and the changes in the DMED data.
“The concern is that these increases may be related to the COVID-19 vaccines that our servicemen and women have been mandated to take,” Johnson said in one of his letters.
The senator also sent a letter to the technology company that manages DMED asking for clarification of all data integrity issues uncovered in the database.
Although Johnson received some responses from the tech company, there has not been still a “solid, rational explanation” as to why a glitch occurred in the database and what it was, Bashaw said.
After the glitch, Bashaw pulled out data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) for injuries related to viral vaccines to compare to his findings on DMED. He compared the average of the last 24 years to data for 2021 and found an eleven-fold increase in the number of suspected adverse incidents reported in 2021.
“I compared it to the average of the last 24 years, it’s a 1,100 percent increase in 2021. And the only difference we had in 2021 was the rollout of these experimental emergency use authorized COVID-19 vaccines,” Bashaw said.
VAERS is managed by agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and serves as “a national early warning system to detect possible safety problems in U.S.-licensed vaccines,” according to HHS’s website.
Though reporting to VAERS is voluntary for individuals, “healthcare professionals are required to report certain adverse events, and vaccine manufacturers are required to report all adverse events that come to their attention,” the website says. However, non-professionals are also able to make entries.
Emergency Use Authorized Products
A soldier watches another soldier receive his COVID-19 vaccination from Army Preventive Medical Services in Fort Knox, Ky., on Sept. 9, 2021. (Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
Bashaw tried to raise his concerns regarding COVID-19 vaccines to his leadership at the army through the proper channels, recommending that it change its risk communication strategy for the vaccine from ”safe and effective “ to “there might be some problems.”
However, his concerns were not addressed, Bashaw said. “And then, later, I was targeted due to my own [COVID-19] vaccination status.”
Bashaw said he was “forced into an experimental emergency use authorized testing protocol, which was only for the unvaccinated.”
He questioned the policy, saying that forcing unvaccinated individuals into such a testing regimen seems “coercive” and “kind of punitive.”
Bashaw invoked the provisions of the United States Code, which gives liability protection for epidemic products authorized for emergency use to manufacturers and distributors of the product, the government, and medical personnel who administer the product.
However, the perspective of the individual who chooses to use these products or to whom the product is administered is not considered by this law despite their taking on all the burden of risk. “For this reason, [they should have] the ability to accept or refuse these products,” Bashaw said.
“It’s my job as a medical officer in general, to warn individuals, or at least try to communicate [to them] what they might be getting themselves into with these products.”
Bashaw pointed out that the individual’s right to accept or refuse administration of these products and to informed consent has also been written down in the United States Code, specifically 21 U.S. Code § 360bbb–3.
Individuals to whom the product is authorized for emergency use should be informed “of the significant known and potential benefits and risks of such use, and of the extent to which such benefits and risks are unknown,” the said law stipulates.
This applies not only to the experimental vaccines but also to COVID-19 testing procedures and the wearing of masks, Bashaw said.
Targeted for Disobeying COVID-19 Rules
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Bashaw has been court-martialed for disobeying the mandated COVID-19 protocol. He challenged the accusation saying that the order to follow the protocol disregarded the individual’s right to informed consent guaranteed by U.S. law.
The court convicted Bashaw, but the judge did not hand down any punishment and recommended to the commanding general to drop the conviction, Bashaw said, but the general upheld the conviction.
After the conviction, the Army initiated Bashaw’s involuntary separation from service after 17 years of honorable service. His expected promotion to captain was also withheld, the officer said.
The justification for his discharge was that the army lost trust in his “capabilities as an officer over the past seven months,” Bashaw explained.
Bashaw filed a rebuttal, hoping to reverse its course.
In addition, Bashaw filed a whistleblower complaint at DoD, but the decision was made that there was no retaliation against him, and the case was closed out. He said that he then filed another complaint which exercises his right guaranteed by the code of military justice to challenge such decisions.
The Epoch Times reached out to the Army Public Health Center and the Department of Defense for comment.
Recently, Bashaw has petitioned the Judge Advocate General of the Army, asking the general to review what he has brought forth in official documentation.
This is concrete evidence, and it is well founded on the law to protect service members and individuals in general, Bashaw said. “I wouldn’t be risking 17 years of my service [and] the health and welfare of my family on some flimsy argument.”
Bashaw said that he is concerned with the integrity of the data that the leadership is basing their strategic decisions upon. If data is being manipulated in some way, or if there is a data glitch, then these senior-level leaders make decisions “based on something that might not be the case,” he explained. It is especially “a serious sign of concern” if a private contractor manages the medical information of service members and has glitches with it.
“And so it’s super important to have solid data and trustworthy sources.”
Bashaw said he decided to bring his concerns to his leaders’ awareness to honor the oath he took to uphold the Constitution of the United States and to glorify God.
“I will absolutely do everything in my power to warn my brothers and sisters in uniform. And that’s my job as a medical officer, to communicate risks and potential harms,” Bashaw said. “That’s my duty.”
THE NEWS COMES AS POLLS SHOW REPUBLICANS ARE DUE TO TAKE CONTROL OF CONGRESS IN JANUARY, AND WILL LIKELY OPEN INVESTIGATIONS INTO MUCH OF FAUCI’S HISTORICAL WORK.
Anthony Fauci is set to receive an annual retirement package exceeding $350,000 following his controversial tenure as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The staggering, taxpayer-funded figure comes amidst Fauci – who sent U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund risky bat coronavirus research at a Chinese Communist Party-controlled lab in Wuhan – announcing he’d step down from his National Institutes of Health (NIH) position in addition to the role of Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden in December.
“I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career,” Fauci added.
“It has been the honor of a lifetime to have led the NIAID, an extraordinary institution, for so many years and through so many scientific and public health challenges,” he said, glossing past the long-standing allegations of impropriety in his career that saw him labelled a “murderer” by the LGBT community, as well as seeing his wife take a role as Head of Bioethics in the U.S. government.
But Fauci will have to wait on his government checks for a while, as he also announced, “I am not retiring. After more than 50 years of government service, I plan to pursue the next phase of my career while I still have so much energy and passion for my field. I want to use what I have learned as NIAID Director to continue to advance science and public health and to inspire and mentor the next generation of scientific leaders as they help prepare the world to face future infectious disease threats.”
Commenters have already noted that Fauci’s vague resignation as Republicans are set to take control of the House and its investigative powers means he may well be leaving the gates open to the corporate side of his work. Fauci’s operations have enriched Big Pharma for decades, and he may now reap the rewards.
“Over the coming months, I will continue to put my full effort, passion and commitment into my current responsibilities, as well as help prepare the Institute for a leadership transition. NIH is served by some of the most talented scientists in the world, and I have no doubt that I am leaving this work in very capable hands,” he concluded in a statement.
As the most highly compensated federal employee who served in the government for 55 years, Fauci is eligible to earn “80 percent of [his] high-3 average salary, plus credit for [his] sick leave,” according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
The most recent disclosures of Fauci’s salary are from the years 2018, 2019, and 2020, which total $399,625, $417,608, and $434,312, respectively.
Based on analysis and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by the watchdog group Open The Books, Fauci’s salaries from more recent years would likely be even higher and entitle him to an even larger retirement package.
Dr. Fauci earned a total of $1,252,000 from 2018 to 2020, entitling him to a federal pension of $333,745 a year, plus cost-of-living increases, as calculated by Open The Books.
“However, Fauci’s unpublished FY2021 and FY2022 salaries are likely commensurate, if not higher than his 2020 salary. Therefore, his retirement pay would be closer to $347,500 a year,” explained the group. Fauci will also likely receive an annuity from the federal government.
After 10 years of service, federal employees are eligible for “2 percent of [their] high-3 average salary for each year.” This would allow him to earn an extra $8,344 a year (($1,251,545/3) x 2% = $8,344).
“If he leaves at the end of this month, that figure is likely closer to $8,575 a year in annuity payments, assuming his salary did not go down in 2021,” explained Open The Books.
Fauci’s impending resignation follows NIH Director Francis Collins stepping down from his role upon scrutiny of the agency’s decision to fund gain-of-function research in China. Fauci, whose track record on other public health crises such as HIV and AIDS has also been controversial, also retained close relationships with many of the researchers involved in the Wuhan-based research despite efforts to distance himself following the outbreak of COVID-19.
Lawyers for the former president teased the possibility of major legal action in recent days.
The lawsuit is titled Trump v. United States Government.
The introduction starts off as follows, “Politics cannot be allowed to impact the administration of justice. President Donald J. Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run.”
It proceeds to say that the FBI should have considered that executing a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago would have distressed his supporters, who Trump says are “most” Americans.
In a 21-page motion that echoes much of the former president’s claims that the search was politically motivated, Trump’s attorneys ask for outside oversight to ensure the materials seized from his home do not include items they argue could be protected by executive privilege.
The suit asks for the court to enjoin the FBI from reviewing the evidence it has collected until a special master is appointed.
“It is unreasonable to allow the prosecutorial team to review them without meaningful safeguards,” Trump’s attorneys write.
“Short of returning the seized items to the movant, only a neutral review by a special master can protect the ‘great public interest’ in preserving ‘the confidentiality of conversations that take place in the president’s performance of his official duties.’”
Violent rhetoric has risen dramatically against federal law enforcement officers in recent days, leading to pleas from allies of the former president and Fox News hosts like Steve Doocy to call on Trump to tamp down on inflammatory statements against the FBI because “the FBI was simply doing what the DOJ asked them to do.”
Two weeks ago, Ricky Walter Shiffer, who was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, attempted to breach an FBI office in Cincinnati with an AR-15 and a nail gun.
Shiffer was later killed when he aimed his gun at Ohio State Police.
With less than three months to go before Americans go to the polls, Democrats are giving even “failure” a bad name.
The party with nothing to run on but its own failures has been trying to fashion a strategy for the midterm elections based on smearing a single citizen.
But according to even a sympathetic poll, it’s failing badly at that. And the latest liberal spin is doing no better.
An NBC News poll released Sunday shows efforts by the Democratic-legacy media complex to win the midterm elections with an unrelenting series of attacks on former President Donald Trump — including an unprecedented FBI raid that’s become a national embarrassment — has been unable to move the needle with an American public sees the country moving only in one direction — the wrong one.
The poll of 1,000 registered voters was conducted Aug. 12-16 by landline and cell phones, according to NBC. It had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points. And by any standard, the numbers are eye-opening.
Political Strategist Chuck Callesto wrote in a tweet, “Americans Are Angry, Disappointed And Worried…”
BREAKING REPORT: New NBC Poll Finds 74% of Americans Say COUNTRY IS ON THE WRONG TRACK, “Americans Are Angry, Disappointed And Worried…
With Democratic control of both Houses of Congress and the White House, 74 percent of those polled thought the country is headed in the wrong direction, versus only 21 percent who said it was headed in the right direction.
(Those 21 percent must live in a safe suburban neighborhood, never watch or read the news about ever-increasing crime, never worry about inflation in the cost of gas or groceries and not care a damn about the country’s national security, but why digress?)
So, without a record of their own to boast of, Democrats have spent virtually every minute since Jan. 2021 trying desperately to frame the midterm elections around framing Donald Trump, and it isn’t working.
To NBC, the poll’s headline number was 57 percent: “NBC News poll: 57% of voters say investigations into Trump should continue.”
That constitutes a “clear majority of American voters,” NBC declared — which is true enough. But it’s also a number that includes 92 percent of Democrats polled and 61 percent of independents, according to NBC.
Meanwhile, 40 percent of those polled, including Republicans and Independents, say the investigations should not continue. Considering the huge amount of political capital Democrats have invested in Trump investigations that’s an astounding figure.
Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, with the Eichmann-like orchestration of Attorney General Merrick Garland, has debased the once-esteemed FBI by turning it into a private political army. The Democratic Congress has turned the House of Representatives into a theater of the absurd, bent on staging a series of show trials — literally made for television — intended to sway the American public.
And the establishment media’s complicity has been evident throughout, contributing live prime-time coverage to promoting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s narrative of a Trump-inspired “insurrection” related to the Jan. 6, 2021, incursion at the U.S. Capitol, and the breathless, utterly unthinking news coverage that benefitted Democrats throughout the years of the Trump presidency.
A convicted sex offender has been arrested in California after an incident in a girls’ restroom at McAuliffe Elementary School in Riverside.
Logan Nighswonger, 32, was arrested Friday by the Riverside Police Department, the department announced on its Facebook page.
Nighswonger was charged with attempted sex acts with a child under the age of 10 and being a registered sex offender on school grounds.
He is being held without bail, police said.
The incident began when police were told that a man had jumped a fence at the school and entered a girls’ restroom.
32-yr-old Logan Nighswonger of Riverside, a registered sex offender since 2016, has been arrested again after officials at an elementary school say he jumped a fence and ran into a girl’s restroom. And within moments, a little girl was heard crying.💔https://t.co/uBAd1mvpvL
What police identified as a campus supervisor saw a man coming out of the girls’ restroom and heard a girl crying inside.
The campus supervisor saw the man who left the restroom jump fences to get to a vehicle and then drive off.
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Police were given a description of the vehicle by the school employee and were able to track the vehicle to the nearby community of Placentia.
Nighswonger was arrested and brought back to Riverside.
“We are grateful to our law enforcement partners for their swift action in apprehending and removing this threat to our society,” Alvord Unified School District Superintendent Allan Mucerino said.
“Children should never experience a situation such as this and it deeply saddens me that this incident occurred. It gives us pause and reinforces our commitment to school safety in recognition that even when we follow safety best practices and do everything in our power to secure our campuses there continues to be threats, which we will continue to work tirelessly to mitigate,” he said.
How? This man had jumped the fence and entered a girls’ bathroom at McAuliffe Elementary School. A campus supervisor observed Nighswonger come out of the restroom and heard a girl crying inside. WTF! Was this school protected? No. https://t.co/vOBdaKGOVx
“The safety of our students and staff at school will always remain amongst our top priorities. When that safety is put at risk, we will do everything within the law to quickly find and arrest the person responsible,” Riverside Police Chief Larry Gonzalez said.
Police said the incident is still under investigation.
In 2015, Nighswonger was arrested on suspicion of exposing himself to students at Mark Twain Elementary in Riverside, according to a Riverside police statement on its Facebook page.
In 2016 he was convicted of annoying or molesting a child under 18 years of age, according to the state’s records.
Biden will unwind sanctions on Tehran’s assassination group as part of nuclear deal bid
The Biden administration’s nuclear deal with Iran will lift sanctions on the hardline regime’s government organization that funds assassination plots and puts bounties on the country’s political enemies, according to a former U.S. official and Iranian government documents.
As part of the administration’s efforts to secure a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal, the United States will unwind sanctions on an Iranian government organization called the 15 Khordad Foundation, which offers bounties for the assassination of Iran’s political enemies. The foundation, for example, is behind the $3.3 million bounty on author Salman Rushdie’s head, which is believed to have in part motivated the attacker who earlier this month stabbed Rushdie 10 times during a public appearance, nearly killing him.
“Biden’s new Iran deal would lift sanctions on the very organizations raising bounties to kill Americans,” said Gabriel Noronha, a former senior Iran adviser at the State Department during the Trump administration and now a distinguished fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. “That will help Iran raise the funds to kill American dissidents and officials.”
Noronha confirmed earlier this year with State Department officials that these sanctions will be lifted. Critics of the nuclear deal, including Republicans in Congress, say the Biden administration is incentivizing Iran’s global terror campaign and endangering American assassination targets, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former White House national security adviser John Bolton, who was recently the target of a murder-for-hire plot orchestrated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
The 15 Khordad Foundation is best known for its decades-long bounty on Rushdie, which increased from its initial $2 million reward to $2.5 million in 1997. It rose again in 1999 to $2.8 million and then in 2012 to its present-day $3.3 million, as the organization received increased funding. The foundation receives its budget and direction from Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s office. Nearly 6 percent of the funds included in Iran’s 2021-2022 national budget went to groups like the 15 Khordad Foundation, which are exempt from taxes, financial reporting rules, and anti-corruption regulations.
As of 1989, the 15 Khordad Foundation operates under a larger parent organization known as “Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order,” or EIKO, which was formed to consolidate assets the regime stole from political prisoners and other targets, particularly persecuted members of the Baha’i faith. The 15 Khordad Foundation and its news releases appear as an entry on EIKO’s main website. The foundation’s head was one of three original EIKO directors appointed by then-supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini.
EIKO and its affiliates were first sanctioned in January 2021 by the Trump administration due to their corrupt dealings, ties to Khamenei, and persecution of the regime’s political enemies. These sanctions are set to be lifted by the Biden administration if Iran agrees to a new deal, which is looking increasingly likely as the United States and its European Union allies finalize the text of a new agreement.
“Biden and his officials claim they are trying to protect Americans, but their concessions to Iran are doing the exact opposite,” Noronha said. “If we lift sanctions on these organizations, it will send a message that this behavior of bounties and assassination plots can continue.”
Iranian government documents that were translated and published last year by the National Union for Democracy in Iran indicate that the removal of these sanctions is being negotiated as part of the deal. U.S. officials earlier this year also confirmed the lifting of sanctions against EIKO, according to a report by Noronha published in Tablet. Leaks from Iranian negotiators last week also indicate that these sanctions could be lifted before the Biden administration submits a new nuclear deal to Congress, as is required by law.
“The problem is that a terror state has been embedded into the very fabric of the Iranian state. When you lift sanctions on Iran, you directly help fund terrorism,” Noronha said. “The only way that ends is when the Iranian regime falls apart.”
The 15 Khordad Foundation was formed in 1982 on direct order from Khomeini and was tasked with advancing the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary ideology. It remains part of the Supreme Leader’s Office.
The foundation’s leader reiterated as recently as 2012 that the bounty on Rushdie is in force, saying in the country’s state-controlled press, “The arrogance of the spiteful enemies of Islam, which is carried out under the banner of the great devil of America and the racist Zionists, can only be brought to a dead end by the resolute implementation of the ruling of Islam. … The blessed foundation of 15 Khordad was aimed at rooting out the anti-Islamic conspiracy … and whoever executes this death sentence will be paid the entire amount [$3.3 million] immediately.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), one of the most vocal opponents of a new nuclear deal, accused the Biden administration of helping finance Iran’s global terror plots via sanctions relief.
“On top of all the catastrophic failures of the Iran deal, this current iteration would lift sanctions, which would enable Iran to finance and incite the murder of American officials and dissidents on American soil,” Cruz told the Free Beacon. “By advancing this deal, the Biden administration would be incentivizing and encouraging Iran to carry out assassinations in the United States.”
Michelle Vallejo says she’s still a progressive, she just doesn’t want voters to know
South Texas Democrat Michelle Vallejo said she’s misleading voters about the radical nature of her policy positions after a Washington Free Beacon report revealed the congressional hopeful deleted her progressive platform from her campaign site.
After winning a bitter primary fight as an unabashed liberal, Vallejo scrubbed from her campaign site all evidence of her support for a slew of progressive policies—including Medicare for All, student debt cancellation, and a federal jobs guarantee—the Free Beaconreported Wednesday. Just days later, Vallejo said she still supports those policies, she just doesn’t want voters to know: Her campaign told the Wall Street Journal Vallejo continues to back student loan forgiveness and Medicare for All but changed her site to “better reflect how the candidate is talking to voters.”
Vallejo’s decision to hide her liberal policy positions on the campaign trail comes as many Hispanic voters in South Texas shift to the right, a trend that jeopardizes Democrats’ longtime dominance in the Rio Grande Valley. In June, for example, Republicans flipped a majority-Hispanic seat in the region for the first time in more than a century—a result Democrats are hoping to prevent in Vallejo’s 15th Congressional District, which has remained blue since its creation in 1903.
Vallejo’s far-left past, however, complicates that effort. In May, Vallejo defeated fellow Democrat Ruben Ramirez in a tight primary contest that saw her express support for a “single-payer universal healthcare system,” a Green New Deal-esque “federal jobs guarantee” that would cost up to $44.6 trillion, and the cancellation of “all student loan debt.”
Just a few months later, Vallejo replaced all mentions of those policies with watered down, center-left alternatives. She also removed a border policy portion that attacked America’s “racist criminal legal system,” opting to replace it with a call to invest in “border infrastructure” and “border security.”
But the attempt to rebrand as a moderate won’t be easy, particularly as Vallejo admits she still supports the same progressive positions she now refuses to discuss on the campaign trail. Vallejo’s Republican opponent, Monica De La Cruz, has hammered Vallejo for the flip-flop, saying the Democrat “knows how out of touch her progressive beliefs are in our community.” The National Republican Congressional Committee, meanwhile, used Vallejo’s policy U-turn to argue the Democrat “is willing to say and do anything to get elected—even lie to voters.”
Vallejo did not return a request for comment. Her race against De La Cruz comes two years after the Republican narrowly lost to incumbent Rep. Vicente González (D., Texas), who subsequently opted to vacate the 15th district for a nearby seat that is more solidly blue. De La Cruz, a small business owner and self-described “woman of strong faith,” has raised $2.9 million to Vallejo’s $700,000.
As mayor of Braddock, Pa., Senate hopeful John Fetterman (D.) ordered a police officer to dig up dirt on one of his political rivals, according to a town solicitor whom Fetterman later fired.
In a heated 2009 mayoral campaign, Braddock solicitor Lawrence Shields accused Fetterman of “abuse of your mayoral authority” for ordering a Braddock cop to obtain a police report from a 2004 domestic incident involving Fetterman’s challenger, Jayme Cox. Braddock city council members called for Fetterman’s arrest for violating state laws regarding the handling of criminal information in cases where charges are dropped.
Three years later, Fetterman cast the tie-breaking vote—his only vote in 13 years as Braddock mayor—to fire Shields as solicitor, purportedly to save money in the borough’s budget. Fetterman said he was an “enthusiastic yes” in favor of ousting Shields. Shields and Fetterman’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment about whether the earlier criticism of Fetterman was a factor in Shields’s firing.
The incident is another black mark on Fetterman’s tenure as mayor of the dilapidated steel town, which the progressive candidate has touted on the campaign trail as evidence of his blue collar bona fides. In 2013, Fetterman pulled a shotgun on an unarmed black jogger he wrongly suspected of firing a gun near his house. The jogger, Christopher Miyares, said Fetterman aimed a shotgun at his chest. Fetterman admitted in a television interview that he “may have broken the law,” but he has refused to apologize for the incident.
Fetterman admitted to asking a police officer for the report on Cox and discussing it with others. But he denied pressuring the officer to dig up the information and said it was necessary to inform voters about Cox, who had charges dropped after taking a domestic abuse class.
Reached by phone, Cox acknowledged he got in an altercation with his wife in 2004 but said the allegation he hit her “wasn’t true.” The seven-year Navy veteran told the WashingtonFree Beacon he and his wife reconciled and remained married until she passed away in 2017. He said he still doesn’t know how Fetterman obtained the police report.
“He’ll stab anybody in the back who gets in his way,” Cox said of Fetterman.
Fetterman also faced allegations from city officials of failing to perform his duties as mayor. He missed more than one-third of council meetings during his tenure, the Free Beaconreported. Jesse Brown, the president of the city council when Fetterman was in office, said he “should have been at all council meetings” but stopped showing up after multiple confrontations over his official duties.
In one city council meeting Fetterman did attend, he “began discussing his political views” about Cox, according to meeting records obtained by the Free Beacon. Fetterman’s rant during the May 2009 meeting prompted Brown to ask Braddock’s police chief “to remove [Fetterman] from the meeting after he refused to end the discussion.” Fetterman was allowed to stay in the meeting after calming down.
As lieutenant governor, Fetterman has proposed rewriting the very same law he was accused of violating in 2009, the Criminal History Record Information Act. He claimed the act “unfairly” disqualified “many Black and Brown Pennsylvanians” from employment. Braddock solicitor Shields said in 2009 that Fetterman’s release of the police report on Cox, who is black, opened Braddock up to a potential lawsuit for violating the act, which bars the release of criminal information three years after an arrest when no conviction occurred. Pennsylvania’s Bucks County was fined $67 million in 2019 for violating the act by publishing protected criminal information.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, 81, is finally stepping down. The chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden said Monday he will be “moving on” from his career in medical bureaucracy but is “not retiring in the classic sense.” He will formally exit the Biden administration at the end of the year, after which the liberal sex symbol said he plans to “devote himself to traveling, writing and encouraging young people to enter government service.”
The good doctor will not be missed. Fauci is leaving at a time when public trust in the medical bureaucracy is at an all-time low. His so-called leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a cult of freaks who cheered as children suffered due to prolonged school closures. Fauci and his fellow health “experts” gave widely inconsistent advice throughout the pandemic while accusing their critics of being “anti-science.”
Fauci quickly became a symbol of the #Resistance. Liberal elites worshiped him like a celebrity. He graced the cover of InStyle and countless other magazines. He was the subject of children’s books and a recurrent figure on Saturday Night Live. He won baseball awards despite throwing like a little girl. Fauci reveled in the attention, never missing an opportunity to remind Americans how lucky they were to be taking advice from people like him. He even coined a term—”the Fauci Effect”—to describe how he has come to symbolize “consistency,” “integrity,” and “truth.”
More than one million Americans have died from COVID-19 on Fauci’s watch.
‘Third and fourth nominees must self-identify as a woman, Black/African descent, Hispanic/Latino/Latinx, Indigenous, and/or a person with a disability,’ the fellowship guidelines read.
Google is setting strict caps on the number of white and Asian students that universities can nominate for a prestigious fellowship program, a policy legal experts say likely violates civil rights law and could threaten the federal funding of nearly every elite university in the United States.
The Google Ph.D. Fellowship, which gives promising computer scientists nearly $100,000, allows each participating university—a group that includes most elite schools—to nominate four Ph.D. students annually. “If a university chooses to nominate more than two students,” Google says, “the third and fourth nominees must self-identify as a woman, Black / African descent, Hispanic / Latino / Latinx, Indigenous, and/or a person with a disability.”
That criterion, which an archived webpage shows has been in place since at least April 2020, is almost certainly illegal, civil rights lawyers told the Washington Free Beacon—both for Google and the universities.
“It is illegal for Google to enter into contracts based on race under the Civil Rights Act of 1866,” said Adam Mortara, the lead trial lawyer for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, who are pressing the Supreme Court to outlaw affirmative action. “And it is illegal for universities receiving federal funds to nominate students based on race under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
Those schools also have their own policies banning discrimination by race, gender, or disability—the three categories on which Google requires them to base fellowship nominations.
“The Google Fellowship program is a blatantly unlawful and immoral quota plan that pits students against one another by skin color and ethnic heritage,” said Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions. “Our nation’s enduring civil rights laws were passed to specifically forbid this type of racial discrimination.”
The fellowship shows how racial quotas, when sanctioned by a sufficiently powerful corporate actor, can metastasize and multiply across institutions. It also shows how private companies can circumvent Congress and federal law through a kind of bribery, providing a financial reward for illegal discrimination.
“Google is using its pocket-book to incentivize America’s elite universities to violate Title VI,” said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project. “It’s using its financial support to directly counter Congress’s policy.”
The bet, Morenoff added, is that “the feds won’t notice, won’t care, or won’t actually force the schools to choose between federal funding and Google’s.”
That assumption reflects the race-conscious consensus that has captured both private and public bureaucracies. Uber Eats in 2020 waived delivery fees for black-owned restaurants, only to scrap the policy after a lawsuit. In 2021, NASDAQ mandated racial quotas for all companies listed on its exchange, a rule now being challenged in the Fifth Circuit. And from New York to Utah to Minnesota, state public health departments have allocated scarce COVID-19 drugs based on race—even after lawyers informed them that their allocation schemes were illegal.
Those plans, like Google’s fellowship criteria, were all posted on public websites. No effort was made to hide them, suggesting that race-discriminaton—against certain groups, at least—is now the norm for many professionals.
It is also the norm at many universities, some of which explicitly advertise the Google fellowship’s diversity criteria to students. In an August 16 email encouraging all computer science Ph.D.’s to apply for the fellowship, New York University said it would not nominate more than two white or Asian males, “in order to increase opportunities for students who are underrepresented in the field of computing.” Duke University includes the same language on its “Research Funding” website.
Contacted about these concerns, New York University appeared to backtrack. “The language used in the internal announcement was not NYU’s but rather was drawn from the FAQ that Google posted about the Fellowship program,” a spokesman, John Beckman, told the Free Beacon, adding that “we are reviewing the language in the announcement.”
The participating universities may be violating as many as three different civil rights laws, not just Title VI. If schools are nominating people for a fellowship, Morenoff said, courts might treat them as employment agencies under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in employment. State civil rights laws, which are often more exacting than federal statutes, pose a separate challenge. New York’s Human Rights Law, Morenoff said, is the most broadly written antidiscrimination law in the United States, and almost certainly bars universities from nominating students based on race.
That said, it would take a lot for universities to lose federal funding—a punishment of last resort under Title VI—over the fellowship. It could, however, open universities to civil rights investigations, Morenoff said, as well as to lawsuits from private parties. Universities usually blink in the face of such pressure. Harvard, for example, rescinded a ban on nominating members of single-gender clubs for the Rhodes scholarship after a 2019 lawsuit alleged that the policy violated Title IX.
Google’s legal problems are just as extensive as the universities’. Mortara, Morenoff, and another lawyer said that the fellowship’s racial caps likely violate the 1886 Civil Right Act, the law that bans contracting on the basis of race. Because it imposes requirements on students as well as Google—for example, that students remain enrolled in a Ph.D. program for the duration of the fellowship—courts would probably consider it a contract.
“Might Google have some defense? It’s possible,” Morenoff said. “But on its face, this is a violation of our oldest civil rights enactment.”
In addition, Google may be violating Title VII, whose ban on employment discrimination extends to employment training programs. The fellowship could be considered such a program, Morenoff said: Though fellows are not employed by Google, they are paired with a “Google mentor” and encouraged to apply for internships with the company. California state law, Morenoff added, also prohibits discrimination in employment training programs.
In response to a detailed inquiry about these legal concerns, Google defended the nominating criteria and denied that it was breaking the law.
“Like many companies, we actively encourage a broad range of individuals to apply to our PhD Fellowship program in order to attract the widest and most representative pool of applicants possible—this follows all relevant laws and is extremely common to do,” a Google spokesperson said. “Selection for the fellowships”—that is, selection from the pool of nominees, not the nomination process itself—”is not based on demographics in any way. Fellows receive unrestricted funding for their studies, and if they are interested in working at Google, they are welcome to apply for jobs and go through the same hiring process as any other person.”
This is not the first time Google has pushed the envelope with its diversity initiatives. The company’s former director of diversity strategy, Kamau Bobb, was reassigned in June of 2021 in the wake of a Free Beacon report that revealed his history of anti-Semitic comments, including that “Jews have an insatiable appetite for war.” Around the same time, Google told employees in a series of diversity trainings that “America is a system of white supremacy” in which everyone is “raised to be racist” and that “colorblindness” is “covert white supremacy.”
In 2017, the company also fired a programmer, James Damore, after he questioned Google’s diversity policies in an internal memo. The memo—“Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”—proposed ways “to increase women’s representation in tech without resorting to discrimination,” a practice Damore called “unfair, divisive, and bad for businesses.”
Google’s diversity quotas extend beyond the United States. The Ph.D. Fellowship recruits students from across the world, with different nominating criteria for each region. Universities in East Asia and Europe, which are only allowed three nominations each, do not have to worry about race or disability. But gender is another story.
“If a university chooses to nominate more than two students,” the rules for Asia and Europe read, “the third nominee must self-identify as a woman.”
Update Aug. 23, 12:00 p.m.: This story has been updated to include additional information about the fellowship. An earlier version of this story also stated incorrectly that Kamau Bobb was Google’s head of diversity; he was Google’s director of diversity strategy, a different position. The Washington Free Beacon regrets the error.
Here’s a microcosm of a Republican government that Liz Cheney calls “sick.” If Florida is sick, the rest of the country is petrified wood. [US Patriot]
PUNTA GORDA, Fla.—Florida’s July unemployment rate dropped to a historic 2.7 percent while the “state’s job creation skyrocketed,” Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office announced on Aug. 19.
The office reported that “this level has only been reached three times” since 1976 when the state began recording unemployment data.
“Florida’s statewide unemployment rate has been lower than the national rate for 20 consecutive months and has declined or held steady for 24 consecutive months; indicating that Florida’s economy is secure and resilient,” it said in a statement.
While the national labor force shrank for the second consecutive month, DeSantis said Floridians are “continuing to enter the workplace and businesses are continuing to create jobs.”
He said that private-sector employment increased by 70,000 during July.
“July’s job numbers represent one of the largest month’s job gains over the past generation, and Florida continues to outpace the nation in labor force growth.”
The chief economist for the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity Adrienne Johnson said in a statement that the state’s private-sector job growth was “historic.”
Johnston attributed the jump to Florida reopening earlier than other states after the pandemic.
“We see strong consumer demand continuing, even today,” Johnston said in an Aug. 19 conference call with reporters. “As that continues to grow, we are going to see strength in our employment.”
While the state has rebounded, Johnson said it has had a shift in the types of jobs.
“While we’ve gone back to levels that are commensurate with where we were back in 2019 and … early 2020, we’re seeing a little bit of a shift in which industries are growing the most,” Johnston said.
“And most of that is in industries that tend to have higher wages. So, for example, we’re seeing strong growth in financial activities, and professional and business services.”
She added Florida has outpaced the nation in terms of manufacturing.
In February 2020 the jobless rate was 2.7 percent, which represented 282,000 people from a workforce of 10.66 million. By May 2020 1.4 million Floridians filed for unemployment and pushed the jobless rate to 13.9 percent.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, current job openings in Florida stand at 588,000, up 12,000 from a year ago.
“This is less than the rate of increase in total employment, which means that the share of jobs that are vacant has now declined over the year,” Johnston continued. “This is an indication that staffing shortages may be starting to ease.”
From June to July, Florida was one of 14 states to post decreases in jobless rates according to the Labor Department. Three states saw upticks—Indiana, Montana, and Nebraska—while rates in the others were unchanged.
The national unemployment rate stands at 3.5 percent.
Amy Baker, coordinator of the Florida Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research, said that even though the latest numbers are impressive “economic disruption is still evident.”
“The risk associated with the national economic forecasts is skewed to the downside with almost equal probability that the new forecast will unfold as predicted or fall short of expectations,” Baker said in a written statement.
“With challenges including the end of significant federal monetary and fiscal stimulus provided during the early years of the pandemic, the rapid drawdown of savings over the past year, the elevated use of credit over the past few months, the continued normalization of spending on services and away from taxable goods, and strong inflationary pressures on households.”
Nationally, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said, “there are too many jobs without people to fill them,” and as a result, “businesses can’t grow, compete, and thrive.”
The latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that thousands of people are entering the workforce but while that seems positive, the chamber said the “labor force participation does not match” pre-pandemic levels.
Its website said that in February 2020, 3.4 million people left the labor force.
These numbers have left economists scratching their heads and asking, “where did the workers go?”
The U.S. Chamber theorized that the boosted unemployment benefits, stimulus payments, and child tax credits have “padded the finances of some previously employed workers, and they no longer need to work.”
In addition, early retirements have also contributed to a worker deficit.
At the height of the pandemic, more than 120,000 businesses temporarily closed, and more than 30 million U.S. workers were unemployed.
Since then, job openings have continued to climb, while unemployment has slowly declined, the website added.
The non-profit Children’s Health Defense (CHD) has been booted off Facebook and Instagram for 30 days for allegedly violating the company’s community standards on “misinformation” about COVID-19.
“Facebook is acting here as a surrogate for the Federal government’s crusade to silence all criticism of draconian government policies. Our constitutional framers recognized this peril of government censorship,” wrote CDH founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a public statement.
“We don’t need the First Amendment to protect popular or government-approved speech. They incorporated the First Amendment specifically to protect free expression of dissenting opinions.
“They understood that a government that can silence its critics has license for every atrocity.”
Meta is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
On Aug. 17, Meta notified the CHD that it had suspended its webpage for 30 days. The page had hundreds of thousands of followers.
“This is because Children’s Health Defense goes against our Community Standards on misinformation that could cause physical harm,” the notice read.
“We encourage free expression but don’t allow false information about COVID-19 that could contribute to physical harm.”
“Your page has been unpublished.”
In August 2020, the CHD filed a lawsuit against Meta, accusing the Big Tech company of censorship.
In the 150-page lawsuit, the CHD said a judicial remedy is “urgently required” to redress the damage to the organization, including the “abridgement of its fundamental rights caused by Facebook and its Chairman Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive and illegal efforts, embarked upon in response to state pressure and in conjunction with state actors, to censor and suppress CHD’s posting of material critical of those very state actors and voicing alternative views concerning the safety and efficacy of vaccines.”
The CHD appealed against a judge’s ruling in favor of Meta and produced U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) documents the agency shared with Facebook.
“These documents, provided to Facebook on a regular basis, contained what the CDC considered misinformation,” according to the CHD.
Titled “COVID Vaccine Misinformation: Hot Topics,” the documents asked tech giants to “be on the lookout for various topics the CDC considers to be misinformation, including COVID-19 vaccine shedding, VAERS reports, spike protein data, and more.”
The CHD argues that its de-platforming by Meta came days after the CDC issued new and less restrictive COVID-19 guidelines while admitting it had made mistakes responding to the pandemic.
“Within hours of the CHD de-platforming, CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky shared her plans for overhauling how the agency works while admitting to a flawed response to COVID-19 and pandemic missteps,” the CHD said in a statement.
“Censorship is not only unconstitutional, [but] it’s un-American,” said Roger Teich, CHD lawyer for the Meta lawsuit.
The Vaccine Injury/Side Effects Support Group on Facebook is another site facing periodic censorship. The group recently appeared in the CHD’s news publication, The Defender.
“The day after our Defender article, I got banned for a week. When I contested it, they made it 28 more days without reason,” said Donna Zuk Adley, the site’s administrator.
Former President Donald Trump on Aug. 22 filed a motion asking a federal judge to bar the Justice Department from reviewing documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago residence until a third-party watchdog can be appointed.
In the first court motion from Trump’s legal team since the Aug. 8 FBI raid on his residence, the attorneys sought the appointment of a “special master,” a more detailed list of inventory taken, and the return of any item seized that was not within the scope of the search warrant, according to a filing on Aug. 22.
Special masters, often retired lawyers or judges, are appointed in certain cases where there is concern that materials seized by authorities include information that is protected by the attorney-client privilege or other forms of privilege. A special master was appointed in 2018 to review former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion and other felony charges later that year.
The FBI agents had taken “privileged and/or potentially privileged materials” such as photos, handwritten notes, and multiple Trump passports, the filing said, which they said were “outside the lawful reach of an already overboard warrant.”
“Law enforcement is a shield that protects Americans. It cannot be used as a weapon for political purposes,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in the filing.
The attorneys argued that the documents are “‘presumptively privileged’ until proven otherwise,” making it “unreasonable to allow the prosecutorial team to review them without meaningful safeguards.”
“Short of returning the seized items to Movant, only a neutral review by a Special Master can protect the ‘great public interest’ in preserving ‘the confidentiality of conversations that take place in the President’s performance of his official duties,’” the filing stated.
Trump released a written statement on his social media platform Truth Social after the complaint was filed.
“This Mar-a-Lago Break-In, Search, and Seizure was illegal and unconstitutional,” he wrote.
“And we are taking all actions necessary to get the documents back, which we would have given to them without the necessity of the despicable raid of my home, so that I can give them to the National Archives until they are required for the future Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum.”
According to Trump’s lawyers, three pages of property receipt that the FBI agents left had provided little detail on what was taken from Mar-a-Lago. The inventory, unsealed on Aug. 12, includes an itemized list of the materials taken, including more than two dozen boxes and 11 sets of documents that have various classified markings. Most items have general descriptions, such as “Box labeled A-1” and “Miscellaneous Secret Document.”
It is “a matter of fundamental fairness for the agents to at least identify from what locations” each of the boxes were seized, how the confidential labels were assessed, among other information for the former president to avail the protective rights entitled to him, the filing argued.
An aerial view of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. (Steve Helber/AP Photo)
In a statement to news outlets on Trump’s action, a spokesperson for the Justice Department said that the “Aug. 8 search warrant at Mar-a-Lago was authorized by a federal court upon the required finding of probable cause.”
“The Department is aware of this evening’s motion. The United States will file its response in court,” the spokesperson added.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhartseparately ruled on Aug. 22 that the U.S. government officials have not presented sufficient proof to keep the affidavit filed in support of the search warrant—which contains the DOJ’s reasons justifying the search—from the public. The Justice Department has asserted that the document requires extensive redactions to protect intelligence sources and the integrity of the ongoing probe.
Reinhart has directed the Justice Department to propose redactions about what information it wishes to keep a secret from the document. The submission is due at noon on Aug. 25.
“I cannot say at this point that partial redactions will be so extensive that they will result in a meaningless disclosure, but I may ultimately reach that conclusion after hearing further from the Government,” Reinhart said in the Monday ruling.
Findings revealed in a recent report raise serious concerns regarding Florida’s level of election integrity.
According to the “Pre-Election Observation Report” released by Floridians for Election Transparency (FFET) and obtained exclusively by The Epoch Times (pdf), there are numerous flaws, inconsistencies, and violations of Florida election laws that raise serious concerns about the election system.
FFET contacted the supervisors of elections in 28 of the state’s 67 counties for the study, and 18 agreed to participate. Ten others declined to comment.
FFET is a committee under Florida for America First, which is backed by Gen. Michael Flynn’s organization, The America Project, founded by Flynn, his brother Joe Flynn, and Patrick Byrne, founder and former CEO of Overstock.com.
Michael Thompson presented the report at a press conference in Naples, Florida, on Aug. 15.
With 30 “winner take all” electoral votes, Florida is now third in the electoral vote ranking, behind California (55 votes) and Texas (38 votes), and a recent surge in Republican voter registrations have made this swing state even more consequential in the upcoming 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential cycle.
Despite Florida’s successful adoption of election integrity legislation and Gov. Ron DeSantis’s establishment of the nation’s first Office of Election Crimes and Security, FFET pointed out in its report that “public faith in the integrity and fairness of elections has decreased significantly in recent years.”
The Concerns of Election Supervisors
When the SOEs were asked if they had concerns about administering the upcoming elections, 39 percent said they were worried about “misinformation and disinformation on the security and integrity of the election process” being spread throughout their community.
Screenshot of a graphic from Floridians for Election Transparency’s “Pre-Election Observation Report” showing areas of concern expressed by Florida election officials. (Courtesy of Floridians for Election Transparency)
The report stated that “one supervisor was concerned that the media will propose false narratives attempting to take away the confidence of the public in the security of the election process, and another worried about voters falling prey to media misinformation about election security.”
Another 28 percent of SOEs said they had no particular concerns about administering the upcoming elections, the second most common response to the question.
The remaining supervisors cited a myriad of other circumstances that SOEs must juggle while administering an election: redistricting, physical security, cyber security, voter education, the limited time available to adapt and train on new legislation and procedures, the tense political environment, and concerns that SOEs and poll workers might not respect the law or election integrity.
During the press conference, Thompson shared the concern expressed by Broward County Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott, who said he was most worried about physical security for election workers and feared that some voters might see it as “their patriotic duty” to “storm” the elections office to stop the workers from counting the votes.
Broward County’s then-Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes explains to the canvassing board the discrepancy in vote counts during the manual recount at the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office in Lauderhill, Fla., on Nov. 17, 2018. (Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)
Broward County made national headlines in 2018 after Gov. Rick Scott ousted former Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes for “misfeasance, incompetence and neglect of duty.” Snipes had a long history of losing thousands of ballots, allowing illegal immigrants and felons to vote, failure to report vote-by-mail counts on time, opening vote-by-mail ballots without the presence of a canvassing board, and illegally destroying thousands of ballots that were subject to a public records request.
Inconsistent Voter Roll Management
To get a better understanding of the process of updating voter rolls, FFET asked the election supervisors how often they updated their voter rolls, such as removing those who have died or moved out of the county. Unfortunately, the answers they received—once every two years, once every year, twice a year, every four months, and “not sure”—reflected a troubling inconsistency that has proven to elevate the potential for voter fraud.
Screenshot of a graphic from Floridians for Election Transparency’s “Pre-Election Observation Report” showing inconsistent answers from election supervisors about updating the voter rolls. (Courtesy of Floridians for Election Transparency)
Considering Florida’s high concentration of retirees and the elderly, with 20.5 percent of the population being over 65 according to the U.S. Census Bureau, so-called “dirty” voter rolls can be particularly problematic.
Despite consistent reports that some Florida voter rolls are “suspiciously” inaccurate and bloated with inactive or dead voters, every SOE questioned expressed confidence that their voter lists are accurate and up to date.
One of the most troubling things FFET learned was the number of SOEs who said they rely on the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) for updates to their voter rolls.
Before that, Becker was a lobbyist for the advocacy group People for the American Way—best known for its Right Wing Watch project, which categorizes and attacks conservative politicians and movements—funded by George Soros. Before that, Becker was a Justice Department attorney.
Florida joined ERIC in 2019 under DeSantis and is among the 33 states and the District of Columbia that rely on ERIC for voter roll reports, but FFET recommends in its report that the state leave the voter registration system.
Third-Party Voter Registration
Rather than having new voters register in person, Florida is one of 25 states that allows third-party voter registration. This means nongovernmental organizations are allowed to register voters.
According to an official state website, there are hundreds of organizations of all political persuasions collecting voter registrations throughout the state. Florida is also one of only four states that allows unfettered access to the state’s voter registration database, but new legislation proposes to shield certain information from view, such as a voter’s date of birth, email address, phone number, and party affiliation.
Screenshot of a graphic from Floridians for Election Transparency’s “Pre-Election Observation Report” showing low confidence that third-party voter registrations are collected without bribery, intimidation, and coercion in Florida. (Courtesy of Floridians for Election Transparency)
Asked if they are “confident that third-party registration takes place without bribery, intimidation, or coercion, and are confident that only qualified voters are registered through these third parties,” less than half (44 percent) of the supervisors said yes.
About 17 percent were not confident in the integrity of third party voter registrations, and 39 percent were unsure.
Because third-party voter registration is conducted primarily by organizations with clear political agendas, and takes place without any oversight or security protocols, FFET believes it “damages voter confidence in the voter list and election process.”
Since the primary obligation of any election administrator is to ensure the integrity of an election in their area, FFET recommends that Florida only allow in-person voter registration at county election and administrative offices.
Voting in Nursing Homes
There have been numerous reports of rampant voter fraud in nursing homes across the country, including those Florida. Because Florida has a large population of senior citizens and residents in care homes, FFET asked the SOEs to explain how their office manages voting in nursing homes.
The most striking aspect of the responses was how much their answers varied.
One supervisor admitted treating a nursing home as an official precinct. Several said they simply sent blank ballots to the facilities and collected them after the election. Others said they only sent ballots if they were requested, and one admitted taking ballots to the facility and leaving them for the staff to distribute and return.
These practices are in violation of ballot chain of custody requirements as outlined in a 2021 report (pdf) by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. When divulging these illegal practices, none of the SOEs mentioned the presence of poll watchers, elections staff, poll workers, or any other security measures.
Manual Ballot Counting
FFET then asked the SOEs if they thought it would be a good idea to go back to a manual voting process. All said no or did not respond at all. When asked why they didn’t think manual counting was a good idea, “the responses were fascinating,” the report stated.
More than half of the SOEs were concerned that manual counting would be less accurate, and many said it would be slower. Conversely, one supervisor said machines are more accurate, but the machine counting process takes longer than hand counting.
One supervisor said the state cannot go back to manual counting because Florida law requires machine counting.
According to Florida Statute 101.5604, “the board of county commissioners of any county, at any regular meeting or a special meeting called for the purpose, may, upon consultation with the supervisor of elections, adopt, purchase or otherwise procure, and provide for the use of any electronic or electromechanical voting system approved by the Department of State in all or a portion of the election precincts of that county.”
Trays of election ballots are seen at the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections warehouse in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Nov. 15, 2018. (Michele Eve Sandberg/AFP via Getty Images)
For those who do adopt the use of voting machines, Florida Statute 101.5612 requires that “all electronic or electromechanical voting systems shall be thoroughly tested at the conclusion of maintenance and programming. Tests shall be sufficient to determine that the voting system is properly programmed, the election is correctly defined on the voting system, and all of the voting system input, output, and communication devices are working properly.”
Ballot Issues
Concerns have been expressed about the production, secure storage, and chain-of-custody for extra ballots, so FFET asked several questions about blank ballots and marked ballots were handled.
A woman counts election ballots in this file photo. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
First, FFET asked how many extra ballots were available in each precinct. Again, the responses varied widely.
One supervisor said he ordered 50 percent more than the total number of registered voters. Four SOEs said 5 percent to 15 percent extra. Three SOEs said they requested a percentage of the precinct total of registered voters of 90 percent, 70 percent, or 65 percent, respectively. Five said they print ballots on demand, a practice normally used only during early voting. One said 50 extra ballots, and another said 400 to 500 extra ballots.
One supervisor simply said he “pads a little to make sure there are enough.”
Adjudication
During the process of tabulating mail-in ballots, there are times when the machine rejects a ballot due to voter error (more than one bubble filled in or not properly filled in) or because the ballot is damaged or flawed. These ballots are put through a process called manual adjudication. FFET asked the participating SOEs to briefly describe how ballots are adjudicated in their counties.
Most said their adjudication rate was between 0.5 and 1 percent, with Lee County being the outlier at 3 percent, and that they were adjudicated by a three-person canvassing board, as Florida election law requires.
But a few said they used two contract workers representing opposing parties. The law states that “during each meeting of the county canvassing board, each political party and each candidate may have one watcher able to view directly or on a display screen ballots being examined for signature matching and other processes.”
More than half said they have no poll watchers present during the adjudication.
Poll Watchers
According to the report, “poll watchers play an important role in deterring malpractice and reassuring the public that the voting and counting processes are free and fair, but there is increasing concern that the political parties are failing to recruit, train and deploy sufficient poll watchers to perform this essential function.”
Unfortunately, only a fifth of SOEs surveyed said they had poll watchers from both parties at every polling place. Most didn’t know how many poll watchers were present to observe elections in their counties, but the Bay County supervisor estimated 40 percent of their poll watchers are Democrats and 30 percent are Republicans. In Broward County, the supervisor said there were no Democrat poll watchers. And in Calhoun County, the estimate was about 30 percent Democrats and 10 percent Republicans.
One supervisor stated that poll watchers come out for the first day of early voting but often end up leaving.
Analysis and Recommendations
According to the FFET report, there are several steps DeSantis can take to improve the accuracy of Florida’s voter rolls and help rebuild public confidence in the state’s elections, with the following recommendations:
Florida should follow the example of Louisiana and withdraw from ERIC.
The governor must mandate that election supervisors conduct a comprehensive voter registration audit to accurately assess the quality of the voter lists, and to determine if there are areas that need improvement.
To enhance transparency and enable oversight, Florida should publish its voter list online, a measure promoted by the National Democratic Institute as international best practice.
Florida should adopt the international best practice of only allowing in-person voter registration at county election and administrative offices.
The Florida Department of Elections should develop standard procedures for voting in care homes and institutions with poll watchers present.
The Department of Elections should also review international best practices in manual elections, and prepare a plan for the legislature to revert to manual elections.
Poll watchers from both parties should be present during ballot adjudications.
A Catholic advocacy group recently launched a $1 million ad campaign with the aim of pressuring President Joe Biden into taking action against violence and attacks against churches and pro-life pregnancy centers.
The 30-second ad compares Biden to America’s first Catholic President, John F. Kennedy, and how the two leaders have reacted differently to “Churches Burning,” which is the title of the advertisement. The ad campaign was launched last week by Wisconsin-based CatholicVote, which expressed hope that “political figures and the Justice Department” would see their message and take action.
“The American people are disgusted by the inaction of our Justice Department,” said CatholicVote Communications Director Joshua Mercer. “This ad sends an important message, calling on our lawmakers to demand action against this vicious campaign of targeted violence against Catholics.”
Ads
The clip begins with the following narration: “In the 1960s, when churches were burned, President Kennedy stepped up, condemned it.” Then Kennedy’s voice can be heard saying, “To burn churches I consider both cowardly as well as outrageous.”
The narration continues, pointing out that Kennedy “pledged justice” after the attacks on churches.
“As soon as we are able to find out who did it, we’ll arrest them,” Kennedy says in the ad.
The ad then points out churches are being targeted now for a different reason, saying “Now churches are being burned again, because they protect unborn babies and women in need.”
“Our second Catholic president,” the ad continues, when Biden wearing a bicycle helmet appears, saying, “Keep protesting, because—keep making your point.”
That line from Biden happened on July 10, when the president was on a bike ride in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He made the comment a day after protesters marched to the White House demanding abortion rights.
According to CatholicVote, the ad is being aired in Wisconsin and Arizona, some “key districts” in other states, as well as Washington, D.C.
Recent Attacks
Brian Burch, CatholicVote’s president, criticized Biden for “not willing to pursue justice,” in a recent interview with Fox News.
“It is horrifying that our president and attorney general are not willing to pursue justice, and their unwillingness to speak out about these crimes only encourages the ongoing attacks and puts people of faith and those volunteering to help pregnant women in need in harm’s way,” Burch said.
Burch added, “They are politicizing law enforcement, seeming to determine which crimes they will prosecute based on the beliefs of the victims.”
According to lists maintained by CatholicVote, there have been 70 attacks on U.S. Catholic churches since May 2, when the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling was leaked. During the same time period, at least 65 pregnancy source centers and offices of pro-life groups have been attacked and vandalized as of Aug. 21.
One of the most recent attacks happened in Easthampton, Massachusetts, on either Aug. 17 evening or Aug. 18 morning, when vandals painted “if abortions aren’t safe, neither are you!” on the ground outside of a pro-life pregnancy center, according to The Daily Signal. Two benches outside of the center were painted with the words “Janes Revenge.”
Jane’s Revenge, a violent pro-abortion extremist group, began carrying out attacks on May 8, when it claimed responsibility for carrying out an arson attack against the headquarters of pro-life group Wisconsin Family Action.
And on Aug. 9, a pregnancy center in Pocatello, Idaho was vandalized with painted words including “forced birth center,” according to Idaho State Journal.
CatholicVote and other pro-life organizations sent a joint letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland in June, demanding the Department of Justice take action.
“We call on you to publicly condemn these unlawful attacks; to commit to vigorous efforts to prevent them, and to investigate and prosecute them; and to proactively engage with the affected faith communities to ensure their concerns and security needs are being met,” the letter states.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is stepping down from three government positions he holds, he announced on Aug. 22.
Fauci is resigning as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden.
The moves will take effect in December, Fauci said.
He indicated that he will leave the government, but not retire.
“While I am moving on from my current positions, I am not retiring,” Fauci said. “After more than 50 years of government service, I plan to pursue the next phase of my career while I still have so much energy and passion for my field. I want to use what I have learned as NIAID Director to continue to advance science and public health and to inspire and mentor the next generation of scientific leaders as they help prepare the world to face future infectious disease threats.”
Fauci, 81, has repeatedly hinted he would step down from his positions, but has not committed before to a specific time for resigning.
Republicans have vowed to investigate Fauci and other architects of U.S. pandemic policy if they gain control of either or both congressional chambers in the upcoming midterm elections.
“Dr. Fauci is conveniently resigning from his position in December before House Republicans have an opportunity to hold him accountable for destroying our country over these past three years,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said in a statement.
Longtime Government Official
Fauci has directed the NIAID since 1984. He has advised Biden since he took office in 2021, and was one of President Donald Trump’s chief advisers on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fauci has drawn ire for recommending lockdowns as a bid to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, acknowledging he deliberately misled the American public on mask-wearing, and defending NIAID funding for the laboratory in Wuhan, China, that is located near where the first COVID-19 cases occurred.
Supporters say Fauci has been a voice of reason during the pandemic and that his positions have evolved as the science has developed.
Dr. Lawrence Tabak, the acting director of the NIH, said in a statement that Fauci is “the model public servant” and “is always guided by the science.
“It’s been an extraordinary privilege and honor to have worked by his side and to have learned so much from him—I will miss him greatly. But I also look forward to seeing what Tony will do next. I have no doubt that he will continue to have an enormous impact on the world,” Tabak said.
Geez! We finally have folks that work hard and study even harder (though they don’t drive too well, it seems), and this is how they are rewarded? As a lazy American, I had 2 Uber Eats orders get messed up- the first due to Uber, the second due to the delivery person. I went for broke and ordered a 3rd time to support the restaurant and my big fat belly. A man of Asian descent delivered a perfectly bagged order (2 bags), and was the ONLY delivery person ever to be so kind as to put the bags in between the storm and the front door. Wow! I raised his tip and bragged about him in the feedback. [US Patriot]
Last year, I wrote a post about how Asian-Americans were buying guns. Their concern was anti-Asian hate crimes that seemed to be dominating social media. The mainstream media reported them as well but often dropped the story fairly quickly.
I’d like to say I don’t question the police’s willingness to deal with racially-motivated attacks, but after Uvalde, it’s hard for me to really do so. I know most officers will do what they can, but I have to question just how many others won’t make a move unless forced to do so.
Asian-Americans in the United States are buying guns in record numbers to fend off violent, racist attacks, a new report has revealed.
In a report on Tuesday, British daily The Guardian recounted the experience of a number of Asian Americans, among many, in arming themselves to counter increasing racial attacks in the United States.
Figures show that more than five million people in the US became first-time owners during the COVID-19 pandemic as gun sales to the Asian Americans community soared by about 43 percent, according to the trade organization National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF).
Gun ownership rates soared to record heights as videos of anti-Asian violence began flooding social media and cable news.
“I realized I have to take ownership of how I want to live my life,” said Vivian Moon, 33, a real estate agent and artist who lives alone in Buena Park, a small California city outside Los Angeles.
Moon, who describes herself as a brave woman in case of attacks, became disillusioned with the police’s ability, and also willingness. Therefore, since early last year, when violent attacks against Asian women and seniors increased across the US, she has decided to protect people who looked like her.
I’d like to say I don’t question the police’s willingness to deal with racially-motivated attacks, but after Uvalde, it’s hard for me to really do so. I know most officers will do what they can, but I have to question just how many others won’t make a move unless forced to do so.
Regardless, Moon’s decision, while motivated by tragic concerns, is most definitely a wise one.
One’s race should never actually matter. We’re all humans and there’s no difference between us based on anything we can call “race.” I mean, there’s no single gene for race. It’s a combination of adaptive features that we lump together when we’re all just the human race.
So racism is dumb.
However, we have a lot of really stupid people out there who actually do make determinations based on those adaptive features, and Asian-Americans have been targeted simply for possessing those features. As such, getting a gun and getting training only makes sense.
It also means those who would target such folks will be in for a rude awakening. Enough such awakenings may well result in such hate crimes coming to an abrupt halt, which is a win for everyone.
Racism is dumb, but even dumb people can sometimes become enlightened enough to realize attacking armed folks is a losing proposition.
Read the original article in its entirety at bearingarms.com.
NEW YORK CITY — In response to the rising cases of random New Yorkers being sucker-punched by thugs, Mayor Eric Adams has instituted a new city ordinance requiring citizens who leave their home to wear protective helmets.
“Crime is going up for some unknown reason,” Mayor Adams admitted during a scheduled press conference. “But not to worry, I have just the thing!”
Adams unveiled a picture of the new “pedestrian” helmet by removing the curtain he had previously draped over a nearby flip-chart easel. He proudly went over key details about the new helmets and described how they would help protect citizens when they are inevitably sucker-punched.
“David Farkel, New York Post,” said David Farkel from the New York Post. “Mr. Mayor, to be clear, are you really saying that everyone needs to wear a bicycle helmet when they leave their homes?”
“Thank you for the question. No, the city will not be requiring what you ask. You see, these are not bicycle helmets,” Mayor Adams answered. “Bicycle helmets are for bike riding. These are pedestrian helmets for walking around.”
“But aren’t they the same helmet?” interjected New York Times reporter Peter Mayhew.
“These come in business black,” clarified Adams.
The lone conservative in New York, who lives on 114th Street in Harlem, has been critical of the new mandate. Other citizens have voiced support for their mayor who they say is “at least doing something.”
At publishing time, Mayor Adams had been sucker-punched by a homeless convicted serial killer out on bail. The helmet did nothing.
FBI agents Scoulder and Mully hold a press conference where they reveal the incriminating evidence found in Trump’s safe. This raid was definitely justified.
Now the unlikely but charismatic politician hopes to do so again in an autobiography set for release on Sept. 13.
Robinson, 54, ascended to elected office later in life, following an April 2018 appearance at a Greensboro City Council meeting that’s been seen more than 150 million times.
“Come hell or high water,” law-abiding citizens will defend their constitutional right “spelled out in black and white” to bear arms, Robison bellowed into a microphone. His remarks came during the public comment period as the council considered canceling a gun show after a mass shooting in Parkland, Florida.
At that moment, Robinson became an inspiration to millions. Highly receptive to his message and undoubtedly aware of his appeal, the NRA asked Robinson to speak at their annual convention.
The captivating amateur speaker then made history for North Carolina Republicans in 2020 as his insurgent campaign for lieutenant governor broke through a field of seasoned political veterans to win the GOP nomination without a primary runoff.
Despite the North Carolina Democratic Party’s attempts to portray Robinson as a bigot and incendiary remarks capturing headlines, the political newcomer remained on the offensive — refusing to apologize for being an “unfiltered conservative culture warrior.”
The strategy worked remarkably well.
On Nov. 3, 2020, Robinson won a history-making general election with 51.63% of the vote to Democrat Yvonne Lewis Holley’s 48.37%. Holley also happens to be Black.
Robinson’s narrow but convincing victory came as incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper defeated his Republican challenger, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, by four-and-a-half percentage points. Robinson even outperformed President Donald Trump in the Tar Heel State, receiving 41,881 more votes than the former president.
Perhaps because of his candidness, his status as a bona fide outsider, his natural public speaking skills or a combination of all three, Robinson’s message resonated.
It’s a testament to the strength of that message, that he did all this in a state that’s almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.
Now, Robinson intends to take that very message nationwide with next month’s release of “We Are the Majority: The Life and Passions of a Patriot.”
Robinson told Greensboro’s News & Observer that his family never discussed politics growing up, but his mother instilled in him the value of faith and morality after she became a devout Christian.
These impromptu life lessons, characteristic of good parents everywhere, left a lasting impression on Robinson and an indelible imprint on his political views.
At the same time, he says he understands the pulse of North Carolinians. They seem to understand him, or at least connect with him in a way ordinary people don’t with the political elite.
Robinson readily acknowledges that he grew up in an extraordinarily dysfunctional family. He held honorable but unassuming blue-collar jobs until his wife’s daycare business took off. He planned to attend college and dreamed of becoming a history teacher (before his impromptu lesson for the Greensboro City Council).
Instead of being a liability, those experiences made him sympathetic, relatable and inspiring to a broad coalition of supporters.
At a time when Republican candidates in must-win races are struggling, the GOP would do well to glean the lessons of what worked so well for Robinson, a novice, widely ridiculed by the opposition and initially overlooked by his party — who nevertheless prevailed on his own merits.
The clock is ticking.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
The idea that Putin is a “strongman” or that Russia is a major global player are still hotly debated topics. Writing in Foreign Affairs, the Carnegie Endowment’s Alexander Gabuev says Putin’s Russia is now little more than China’s vassal…and perhaps more pointed for the diminutive Putin, a “junior partner” in China’s globe-spanning plans:
Beijing is unlikely to bail Moscow out or significantly help modernize the Russian economy. China will, however, do enough to sustain a friendly regime in the Kremlin—and advance Chinese national interests—by purchasing Russian natural resources at knockdown prices, expanding the market for Chinese technology, promoting Chinese technological standards, and making the renminbi the default regional currency of northern Eurasia. Given its growing leverage, Beijing will be able to extract from Moscow something that was unthinkable a year ago: access to the most sophisticated Russian weapons and their designs, preferential access to the Russian Arctic, the accommodation of Chinese security interests in Central Asia, and Russia’s support—as a permanent member of the UN Security Council—for China’s positions in all regional and global issues, most notably in territorial disputes between China and its neighbors. In effect, the Kremlin will have protected itself from Western pressure at the expense of losing a very high degree of its strategic autonomy. This state of affairs is likely to persist potentially beyond Putin’s rule.
In other words, China gets the resources it needs to fuel its ambitions, while Russia gets…more economically and politically dependent upon that big friend. (RELATED: China’s Supersized Marines Could Invade Taiwan)
That’s how vassal states work. And for Russia, it puts them on a level of the old Warsaw Pact nations, say, East Germany (where Putin was a KGB agent in the last years of the Cold War), or Hungary, or Bulgaria…utterly dependent on a larger, stronger, richer patron.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
REVIEW: ‘Dr. Fauci: A Little Golden Book Biography’
Sometimes a book’s mere existence has an eminently greater cultural significance than its content. Such is the case of Dr. Fauci: A Little Golden Book Biography. The 24-page illustrated work, billed as “an inspiring read-aloud for young children,” does not exist to entertain America’s toddlers, but rather to soothe the secular souls of Millennial parents whose mental and emotional well-being have steadily deteriorated since November 8, 2016. It belongs in the adult “self care” section with a disclaimer urging prospective buyers to seek help.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a career bureaucrat who rose to national prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, is merely the latest liberal icon to be featured in a Little Golden Book. The children’s series dates back to 1942 but has only recently started targeting the aforementioned demographic of #Resistance nerds. Recent subjects include Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2020), Kamala Harris (2021), Betty White (2021), Sonia Sotomayor (2022), and Beyoncé (due out in 2023). Other titles are dedicated to more conventional religious figures such as God, Jesus, and Barack Obama.
This is the second children’s book published about the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The authors of Dr. Fauci: How a Boy from Brooklyn Became America’s Doctor got their product to market in June 2021, when President Joe Biden’s approval rating was still comfortably above 50 percent. Theirs is “the definitive picture book biography” of Fauci, who contributed a section outlining his “five tips for future scientists.” Tip number one—”Keep an open mind. Science is discovery, which means that from the beginning, you don’t know what the answer is. Leave open all the possibilities of what you might find”—is arguably more honest and sensible than anything he’s ever told American adults about COVID-19.
The biography itself is not particularly offensive. The illustrations are fine. But seriously, what kind of lunatic would subject a child to the details of Fauci’s conventional childhood in postwar Brooklyn, or his crippling work addiction? “He worked fourteen hours a day, as well as on weekends,” the author writes of Fauci. “His family waited until he got home at nine p.m. to eat dinner together. After his daughters went to sleep, Tony worked more.” It would take a special kind of psychopath to be able to hold a two-year-old child in one’s lap and read to them about AIDS, SARS, swine flu, Ebola, and COVID-19.
The book concludes with an astonishing pronouncement: “The world is a healthier place because of Dr. Anthony Fauci!” No one who buys this book would disagree, just as they would never admit that buying this book is a cry for help, that they aren’t any less deranged than Robert Kennedy Jr., author of The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Reasonable people might argue that Fauci and his fellow “experts” have put our health at risk by setting their credibility on fire.
Fauci’s so-called leadership during the pandemic enabled a cult of hysterical doomsayers whose greatest legacy will be the generation of children who suffered greatly from having their educations put on hold for the better part of two years. Throughout the pandemic, Fauci and other experts gave wildly conflicting opinions about the virus while maintaining an air of righteous certainty. Democratic politicians who claimed to “follow the science” were routinely exposed for violating their own safety guidelines. (Fauci himself was also busted.) At times, the scientific community shed all pretensions to objectivity by embracing left-wing activism. Not surprisingly, the federal response to the ongoing monkeypox outbreak has been disastrous, marred by “identity politics” and a reluctance to speak the truth for fear of promoting “stigma.”
Just last month, Fauci said he regrets that the government did not impose “much, much more stringent restrictions” to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Good luck with that in the next pandemic. It will be his own damn fault when Americans completely disregard what government “experts” are telling them. Then again, Fauci’s response to his improbable rise to elite liberal celebrity suggests he has no regrets. Last week, for example, Fauci accepted an award typically reserved for active Major League Baseball players and joked about creating COVID-19 in his kitchen.
While the past several years may have irreparably damaged the American public’s confidence in the scientific establishment, Fauci’s confidence in his own greatness and capacity for self-aggrandizement has not wavered. He’s appeared on the cover of countless magazines. “With all due modesty, I think I’m pretty effective,” he toldIn Style. Sick freaks are reading books about him to their kids. Last week, while being interviewed after accepting MLB’s Hutch Award in Seattle, the doctor discussed the “Fauci Effect,” explaining how he had come to symbolize “consistency,” “integrity,” and “truth” in this crazy world of ours.
Fauci, who turns 82 in December, refuses to set a date for his retirement. When that day comes, he will not be missed.
Tony Vargas supports tax hikes on individuals making $100K per year
A Nebraska Democrat running to unseat a Republican in a purple district is gunning to raise income taxes on anybody making more than $100,000, backing a plan that would make Nebraska’s income tax rate one of the highest in the country.
Tony Vargas, who is running against incumbent Rep. Don Bacon (R.) for Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, introduced a bill in 2019 that would give Nebraska the fifth-highest state income tax rate in the country, vaulting it ahead of blue states like Vermont.
The plan proved unpopular in Nebraska, where the state legislator never put it up for a vote after it faced steep opposition and where it remains “indefinitely postponed,” according to the Nebraska State Legislature’s office.
That bill also puts Vargas at odds with President Joe Biden, who has pledged never to support legislation that increases taxes on the middle class. Biden has defined the middle class as individuals making less than $400,000 a year. Few, if any, Democrats have called for targeting individuals with low-six-figure incomes to fund government programs. Even the party’s most radical lawmakers, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), direct their ire at millionaires or billionaires.
Vargas did not respond to a request for comment.
Vargas faces an uphill battle against Bacon in November. Although Biden won the district in 2020, Bacon beat his challenger by nearly 5 points. Despite Vargas’s low odds, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has included the race in its “Red to Blue” initiative.
Although Vargas framed his legislation as a tax hike on the wealthy, the first rate increase would hit individuals earning more than $100,000 a year or married couples earning more than $200,000 a year. An additional tax would be placed on incomes of more than $1 million a year.
Vargas said his plan would generate $478 million in new revenue over five years. Critics of his bill said revenue projections for tax hikes rarely come true and that many small businesses file as individuals. Those businesses, groups such as the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce said, would leave the state. Nebraska currently has the 16th-highest income tax rate in the country.
Both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed Vargas in 2020 during his run for the Nebraska state senate, and the candidate called their support “an honor.” Their endorsement came just days before Vargas donated $250 to Biden’s presidential campaign.
But Vargas now is mum on Biden, who has seen his approval rating plummet. Biden won the Nebraska second district by 7 points in 2020, although a recent poll found Bacon narrowly beating Vargas among likely voters there.
Vargas has also not taken any positions on Biden’s legislative agenda. His campaign website calls for tax cuts and mostly focuses on social issues such as abortion. Neither Biden nor the Democratic Party are mentioned.
Mandela Barnes, the Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate, has talked up his support for Israel on the campaign trail. Left unmentioned in his stump speeches is his membership, until 2019, in one of the most vocal anti-Israel groups in the state.
“I had an incredible opportunity to visit Israel 10 years ago, got to bear witness to the harsh reality of Israel’s national security,” Barnes told the Jewish Democratic Council of America forum in June, adding that he opposes the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) that seeks to isolate Israel.
But for years after his 2012 Israel trip, Barnes was a member of the Wisconsin chapter of Peace Action, a fringe anti-war group that has promoted boycotts of the Jewish state, defended Palestinian terrorist groups, and lobbied the U.S. government to open diplomatic ties with Iran and North Korea.
His work with the group raises questions about his stance on Israel—which has shifted during his Senate campaign—and is likely to increase scrutiny into his far-left foreign policy positions as he faces off against incumbent Republican senator Ron Johnson in the competitive race.
During Barnes’s first year as a state representative in 2013, he listed himself as a member of Peace Action Wisconsin in the “Blue Book,” the state government’s official handbook that includes legislator biographies.
“He used to come here and sit at our meeting table and be part of our meetings,” Pam Richard, Peace Action Wisconsin’s office manager, told the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday.
She said Barnes’s involvement ended around the time he became Wisconsin lieutenant governor in 2019. He has appeared to distance himself from the group since then.
Barnes skipped Peace Action Wisconsin’s “WI Senate Candidate Peace Forum” in July—which featured several of his long-shot former primary competitors—but told the organization that he would send a recording responding to its questions.
Richard said she is still waiting for Barnes to send his answers.
“He hasn’t sent it yet,” said Richard. “We’re kind of frustrated but I just have to wait for him to be ready to do it.”
Barnes’s campaign spokeswoman declined to comment on his membership in Peace Action Wisconsin, and referred the Free Beacon to “his on the record positions on the policy issues you reference.”
Barnes has appeared to shift his position on Israel during the course of the campaign. Last year, he indicated that he would oppose military assistance to Israel if it didn’t abide by certain conditions, which he declined to specify. But he appeared to walk back these comments in June, saying he would have voted to fund Israel’s missile defense system.
“Israel needs to be able to defend itself. And I don’t support movements that would deny that, like BDS,” Barnes said in June.
Peace Action Wisconsin has a long history of promoting boycotts of Israel. Since July, the group has posted calls to boycott Pillsbury and Hyundai for their work in the Jewish state. Earlier this month, the group published a press release on its website from Samidoun, a designated terrorist group in Israel.
The statement called for “resistance in all forms” and a “campaign to isolate the Israeli regime at all levels, including through boycott.” It also condemned Israel’s assassination of a military leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad—a U.S.-designated terrorist group funded by Iran—and described him as one of the “martyrs of the Palestinian cause.”
Peace Action Wisconsin’s anti-Israel activism was the subject of media attention before Barnes joined. The group organized a protest of the local Jewish Community Center’s Israeli Independence Day celebration in Milwaukee in 2008, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The next year, Peace Action Wisconsin sponsored a conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that promoted “boycott and divestment as tools to work toward equality for [P]alestinians.”
One of the speakers was the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Bob Ashmore, who told the audience that “Israel should be destroyed as a Jewish state just as South Africa was destroyed as an apartheid state,” according to the Jewish Chronicle.
In 2014, Barnes was photographed attending the group’s Lanterns for Peace event, a vigil for victims of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lanterns at the event featured slogans such as “Stop Supporting Israel.”
The most recent Peace Action Wisconsin event Barnes is listed as attending is a June 2019 potluck dinner, which protested U.S. travel and economic restrictions in Cuba.
At the time, Peace Action Wisconsin was lobbying state lawmakers to “repeal Wisconsin’s Anti-BDS Law,” which prohibited state funding from going to companies that boycott Israel. The group compared the BDS movement to Rosa Parks’s Montgomery bus boycott, and told its supporters to “contact your state legislator to urge them to repeal this unconstitutional law” in its June 2019 newsletter.
One month prior, Peace Action Wisconsin defended Minnesota Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s claim that U.S. support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins baby,” which was widely denounced as anti-Semitic by Omar’s own party.
“Ilhan Omar spoke the truth about the influence of [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and the state of Israel on United States elected officials,” said Peace Action Wisconsin’s May 2019 newsletter.
Two months before the event with Barnes, the group also hosted a film screening of TheOccupation of the American Mind, a documentary that claims “the U.S. government and the pro-Israel lobby” are colluding to “shape American media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Israel’s favor.”
As the religion of “wokism” continues to grow, censor, and demand sacrifices in the form of shame-induced public apologies at its alter, former leftist-turned-conservative podcasters seek to unapologetically question its pervading narratives.
“We are seeing young people grow up with the mindset that they need to reduce themselves down to race, gender, and their sexuality,” Amala Ekpunobi, host of the podcast “Unapologetic,” told The Epoch Times. “Those three very superficial identities have become so pivotal in how people introduce themselves and whether they are viewed as victims or champions. The more we go down the path of this false narrative, the more we are oppressing them and entertaining a culture of victimhood that is sheerly unsustainable.”
Ekpunobi found herself a voice on PragerU’s (Prager University) conservative media platform with her podcast after her left-leaning worldview began to crumble under the scrutiny of her own critical thinking.
“I think the most hard-hitting issue for me was race,” Ekpunobi said. “I grew up in a white family. I’m biracial. My father is from Nigeria, and my mother, who works with the political left, is white.”
As a child, Ekpunobi aligned herself with her mother’s views, becoming an activist throughout middle and high school, she said, until she became a paid activist after graduating.
‘A New Journey’
It was then when she began observing hypocrisy within the organization, she said.
“I heard a lot of racism toward white people behind the walls of this organization,” she said.
Ekpunobi confronted the organizers about it, asking how they could claim to be the tolerant, anti-racists when they themselves were making racist comments.
“I was told that I was simply unaware of how oppressed I was and that it wasn’t their fault that I wasn’t angry, but that I should be because of how I was treated in this country,” Ekpunobi said.
From there, Ekpunobi researched ideas that didn’t reinforce but instead challenged her preconceived notions, she said.
She discovered social theorists and commentators such as Thomas Sowell and PragerU co-founder Dennis Prager, she said, which, for her, “started a new journey,” she said.
“I had always grown up with the idea that white people carry these inherent biases and that they were a part of a structure of oppression that was working against me, whether they knew it or not,” Ekpunobi said. “So, it was really difficult there toward the end to justify having those opinions, then going home to a family who cared for me.”
‘I Was Becoming Increasingly More Conservative’
The worldview is limiting and distorted, Ekpunobi explained, and it’s robbing young people of their opportunity to have fulfillment in life and a vision of a future in which they can choose from a wide range of vocations, unlimited by their race and gender.
After leaving the left, Ekpunobi also exited the political conversation to pursue a nursing degree, she said.
“I did that for a while, but in the background, I was becoming increasingly more conservative,” Ekpunobi said.
The view from the conservative angle presented a new issue, she said, in that the majority of media platforms cater to cultivating a liberal mindset, even on seemingly insignificant social media apps such as TikTok.
“The app has a ‘For You’ page that shows content based on my demographic, and it was sending me videos that had a liberal political message,” she said. “This is a platform for millions of impressionable young people, and they’re all getting similar content.”
To provide an alternative message, Ekpunobi made her own videos in which she discussed her journey and how she arrived at her conservative belief system.
“Out of nowhere, they just blew up, and some of them landed on the desk at PragerU,” she said. “They reached out to me, flew me to Los Angeles to tell my story, and offered me this job.”
Open Discourse
On “Unapologetic,” Ekpunobi examines news stories, pop culture, and social issues through a rational lens in an attempt to make sense of what is becoming a social climate of irrationality that has infected too many facets of life.
One of the key problems, Ekpunobi said, is the absence of open discourse.
“When I started making these political videos with conservative takes, they were met with a lot of hate and censorship,” she said. “If ideas that are dissident to the wokeness that we are experiencing right now are unavailable, wokeness is going to thrive. That’s why we need to foster conversations, especially with people who have different values and beliefs.”
Questioning Everything
Like Ekpunobi, ex-Democrat Judith Rose’s shift from woke to awake took place after an investigation into her own programming and its sources.
For Rose, it began in 2020 when, just as media narratives weren’t adding up on the outside, her own personal narratives weren’t making sense on the inside.
“I had not been in a great place in my life, so I think that had a lot to do with why I was accepting of programming before that,” Rose said. “I think a lot of our popular social movements today capitalize on people’s mental illness.”
Similar to how Ekpunobi got on the radar of PragarU, Rose made a TikTok video in which she addressed her transforming belief system, which she described as “the hardest pill to swallow of the century.”
It went viral, and she found herself in the media limelight, giving several interviews on alternative media platforms throughout a six-month period in 2020.
Judith Rose, host of Questioning Everything, 2022. (Courtesy of Judith Rose)
‘I’m Coming Up for Air After not Even Realizing I Was Drowning’
Rose had begun to see an agenda behind every message broadcasted from legacy media outlets, she said, and those messages appeared to be making people sick.
Instead of clinging to old ideas that stopped working, she looked toward changing her perspective by listening to other views, such as conservatives, she said.
“I had to admit I was wrong on a lot of issues and re-examine things,” she said. “I’ve had to do that multiple times over the last couple of years, so it’s been quite a journey.”
It wasn’t only about researching new ideas, but also about making changes in her own life, she said.
“It wasn’t fun,” she said. “People I thought were my friends reached out to me to say it sounded like I was going crazy. The people I was around I just didn’t align with anymore.”
However, for Rose, she said she had never felt saner.
“I feel a lot better than I used to because it’s like I’m coming up for air after not even realizing I was drowning,” Rose said. “It’s bizarre to understand so many perspectives at once. A lot of people feel disconnected when that happens to you, and they don’t see you the same way because you don’t see them the same way.”
‘It’s Very Orwellian’
Like Ekpunobi’s discovery that TikTok was curating narratives to particular demographics, Rose observed that—just as she had been in her own life—certain websites were radicalizing people into believing and behaving in ways that weren’t congruent with reality.
“Even after getting off social media, I could see that I was being radicalized through fake media news that crafts these emotional, opinion-based headlines,” she said. “That’s what was happening to me: I had been flipping through these headlines and basing my opinions on those.”
What passes for so many as education and news, Rose said, is in fact propaganda designed as a component of manipulative social experiments with the endgame of dehumanizing and controlling people.
“People are being introduced to ideas that they normally would have no reason to look at, and then there’s this mechanism that’s adopting new terms and changing language,” she said. “It’s very Orwellian, and it’s very unsettling.”
A Spiritual Sickness
Rose also observed what she believed to be not only a mental illness, but a spiritual sickness behind the “extreme emotional reactions” in herself and in others when their ideologies came into conflict with opposing views.
“I had to sit down and acknowledge that I was overly angry and didn’t understand why,” Rose said. “I had to do a lot of meditating, and reaching out to God and say, ‘Hey, I don’t understand this world, can you help me?’”
In recognizing and addressing the spiritual side of her journey, Rose said she was eventually able to achieve wellness that brought clarity.
“I had this one meditation in which I felt like a weight had lifted,” she said. “Suddenly, I was more level-headed and ready to move forward in my life.”
Former beliefs turned inside out, perceptions changed, and her discernment increased, she said.
“I don’t know how that happened, but I credit God for that,” she said.
From this new place in her life, Rose said she believes that there’s a system working against the human race with the intent of dividing and conquering.
‘A Voice of Reason’
Since her shift, Rose said she’s felt called to share her insight on her platform, which includes her podcast, “Questioning Everything.”
On her podcast, she doesn’t shy away from going down the more esoteric and supernatural topics covered by journalists like the late Jim Marrs and connecting them to current events.
“I’m just trying to be a voice of reason to help people continue to question and discuss things so we don’t all feel so crazy and alone,” Rose said. “That’s been the main goal of my platform: to let people know, ‘Hey, it’s not just you. I see it, too.’”
WHICH BRINGS THE RUNNING TOTAL OF DEMOCRAT APPOINTEES WILLING TO SELL AMERICA OUT TO CHINA TO ABOUT 100%.
A chief advisor to the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the presidency of Barack H. Obama recently headlined an event sponsored by a Chinese Communist Party influence group targeting American farmers and farmland, The National Pulse can reveal.
The incident is the latest example of high-level, left-wing government aides ending up in the orbit of the Chinese Communist Party and comes amidst the regime’s attempt to purchase massive amounts of farmland in the U.S.
Joseph W. Glauber – who served as Obama’s Chief Economist at the Department of Agriculture from 2008 to 2014 – was a featured speaker for an August 15th event hosted by the U.S.-China Heartland Association (USCHA).
Glauber, who also served as America’s Chief Agricultural Negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative from 2007 to 2009, spoke on a panel hosted by the group titled “Finding Security: US-China Agriculture Trade in a Changing World.”
“As a global food security crisis is looming large over the horizon, what is the future of U.S.-China Ag trade, and how can the two countries collaborate to address global food security?” explained a summary of what participants would learn from attending the event.
The group hosting Glauber – who is now a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) – has deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party and its vast efforts to subvert American politicians, academics, and journalists. The D.C.-based IFPRI is also funded in part by U.S. taxpayer dollars and China.
Founded by former Democrat Governor of Missouri Bob Holden, the USHCA purports to be a “bipartisan organization committed to building stronger ties between USHCA Region (20 states located in the USA between the Great Lakes to the Gulf) and the People’s Republic of China.”
“Our focus will be on Trust Building efforts connecting government officials; business leaders; educational and community interests with like-minded institutions between the Heartland Region and the People’s Republic of China,” the group’s mission statement euphemizes.
In reality, the group is leveraged by several Chinese Communist Party-controlled organizations to gain access to American agricultural officials and company representatives.
Among the Chinese Communist Party influence groups that collaborate with USHCA are the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) and China United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), both of which are part of Beijing’s United Front Work Department.
The United Front Work Department is a billion-dollar operation executed by the Chinese Communist Party seeking “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign individuals and the policies of foreign states to serve Beijing’s interests,” according to the federal U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission.
Also referred to as “avowedly an arm of the party-state,” CPAFFC has been flagged by the U.S. State Department for its campaigns to “directly and malignly influence” American officials and business leaders.
The conference raises concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s intensive efforts to subvert American farmers, as United Front Work Department Groups have leveraged free trips to China and business deals to individuals working in other industries to have them push policies favored by the regime.
Former President Donald Trump responded to recent comments issued by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) about the GOP possibly not retaking the Senate during the 2022 midterms.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the Kentucky senator is a “broken down political hack” and challenged his loyalty to the Republican Party. “Why do Republicans Senators allow a broken down hack politician, Mitch McConnell, to openly disparage hard working Republican candidates for the United States Senate,” Trump asked on the platform.
He added: “This is such an affront to honor and to leadership. He should spend more time (and money!) helping them get elected, and less time helping his crazy wife and family get rich on China!” Trump was making reference to McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, owning a shipping company that does extensive business in China, according to reports.
Trump’s critical comment came days after McConnell told reporters that the GOP likely won’t retake the Senate because, according to him, there are problems with certain Republican candidates running for office in this election cycle. He didn’t elaborate.
“I think there’s probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate,” McConnell told reporters in Kentucky last week. “Senate races are just different, they’re statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”
McConnell did not say whether he has a plan or will try to help certain Republican candidates win their races.
Republicans need a net gain of one Senate seat to retake control of the congressional body. The Senate now stands at 50–50, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as a tie-breaker for the Democrats.
“In the Senate, if you look at where we have to compete in order to get into a majority, there are places that are competitive in the general election,” McConnell also said in April. “So, you can’t nominate somebody who’s just sort of unacceptable to a broader group of people and win. We had that experience in 2010 and 2012.”
Since he left the White House, Trump has often panned the leadership of McConnell, who in 2020 happily touted the former president’s endorsement to win his Senate race.
While McConnell has issued few statements in response to Trump’s criticisms of the senator’s leadership, he believes he will be reelected as GOP leader regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats take over in 2022.
“Well, look at it this way: I have been elected eight times without opposition. If I have an opponent—I don’t own this job, and there’s always an election every two years for leader—if anybody wants to challenge me, have at it,” McConnell told Fox News earlier this month. McConnell then said he is confident about being reelected as GOP leader.
Nearly 5 million illegal immigrants have crossed U.S. borders in the 18 months since President Joe Biden took office, according to a new report.
A total of 4.9 million illegal aliens, including some 900,000 “gotaways” who evaded apprehension and have since disappeared into American communities, have entered the country by the end of July, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) said in a statement on Aug. 16.
“Roughly the equivalent of the entire population of Ireland has illegally entered the United States in the 18 months President Biden has been in office, with many being released into American communities,” FAIR President Dan Stein said in the press release.
He blamed Biden for putting the unprecedented surge down to external factors, not the administration’s own “sabotage” of immigration laws. After rolling back key Trump-era policies, Biden presided over the largest number of apprehensions of illegal immigrants at the U.S.–Mexico border in a calendar year in history, recording almost 1.9 million arrests last year.
“The endless flow of illegal aliens and the incursion of lethal narcotics pouring across our border will not end until this administration demonstrates a willingness to enforce our laws,” Stein said.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
New Surge
Two million illegal aliens have entered the country in the first 10 months of this financial year, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In June, more than 207,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended attempting to cross the U.S.–Mexico border, making this the highest number of June apprehensions in history.
Although July saw a slim decline in CBP encounters at the southwest border of nearly 200,000, it turned out to be the 17th straight month with more than 150,000 encounters, representing a 325 percent increase over the average number of July apprehensions under the Trump administration, the statement reads.
Among the over 213,000 illegal aliens deported from the border in July, only 37 percent of the arrests led to expulsions under Title 42—a 7 percent drop from last month. Border agents processed the majority of the rest under Title 8, which oftentimes lets illegal aliens be released into the U.S. interior while their cases sit in backlogged immigration courts.
The Biden administration announced it would end the Trump-era Title 42, a border policy put in place on public health grounds amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which it had been forced to keep in place owing to a lack of notice.
CBP also reported 10 individuals on the FBI’s terror watchlist were apprehended in July between ports of entry at the southwest border, pushing the total for the current fiscal year to 66.
Meanwhile, CPB seized 2,130 pounds of the synthetic opioid fentanyl last month, more than three times that intercepted in June, and topping the previous monthly record of nearly 1,300 pounds set in April.
It nearly equals the total amount of fentanyl confiscated throughout 2019.
A veteran former police officer and former 2022 Republican candidate for Oklahoma governor said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the federal Department of Justice brought charges against Donald Trump following an “unprecedented” raid of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida by the FBI.
“You don’t go to this level with a person of this level if you don’t or are not thinking about filing charges. You don’t do it,” said Dr. Mark Sherwood, a retired 24-year veteran of the Tulsa Police Department and 10-year member of the department’s SWAT Team.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if some charges are filed—even if the evidence is not thoroughly vetted,” Sherwood said.
“The timing of it is curious, to say the least. You’re coming into the tail end of the mid-term primaries,” with Republicans poised to reclaim both chambers of Congress, he said.
Dr. Mark Sherwood, a veteran police officer, naturopathic doctor, and candidate for Oklahoma said the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s home in Florida was “unprecedented.” (Courtesy of Dr. Mark Sherwood)
As a former law enforcement officer, Sherwood served many search warrants and knew the legal process for obtaining them.
What he finds “highly unusual” was the FBI’s decision to search the home of a former sitting president against all historical precedent.
Sherwood told The Epoch Times that not even the Watergate scandal that surrounded former president Richard Nixon or the impeachment of former president Bill Clinton prompted such unprecedented action.
“I don’t know of anything else in history” that reaches the same level, he said.
“What we don’t know is the total contents of the affidavit” used to obtain the search warrant, Sherwood said.
“I know there’s a lot of discussion on what parts of the affidavit to release. We don’t know what precipitated this acceleration” leading up to the Aug. 8 raid.
‘Extremely Broad’ Scope of Search Warrant
Sherwood said that search warrants are specific and limited in their scope as a rule. “It has to be so specific that there can be no other residence like [Trump’s] in the world. It also has to be very specific about what you are looking for and where it is [located].”
Sherwood said that the search warrant signed by Florida Judge Bruce Rinehart was “extremely broad” in scope. Many Republican lawmakers accused the DOJ of conducting a “fishing expedition” to dig up incriminating evidence against Trump.
“What information is out there that we don’t know? There’s a lot. The question is, how much of the information out there is true? That’s up for debate,” Sherwood said.
“I would hope that wouldn’t be the case” regarding an alleged fishing expedition. “That would mean that the affidavit was completely falsified and that the person that did that is guilty of perjury,” he said.
“Every law enforcement in the land has the potential to get compromised. Nobody in this country would want to believe an entire agency is compromised. But as we all know today, there is a complete deterioration of trust in law enforcement. Part of that is pre-Donald Trump,” Sherwood said.
A local law enforcement officer in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
Political Backlash Brewing
Sherwood said he believes “absolutely” there could be compromised individuals within the FBI but is hesitant to paint the entire agency with a broad brush.
“I can’t get to the point where the whole batch is spoiled. A local FBI branch office did not make this decision [to search Trump’s home]. You don’t go doing this knowing the political storm that’s going to follow,” Sherwood said.
Federal investigators had permission to search the “45 Office,” all storage rooms and areas used by Trump and his staff to keep records.
The search warrant pertained to any classified government or presidential record created between Jan. 20, 2017, when Trump took office, and Jan. 20, 2021, when he left the White House.
During the raid, federal agents seized many items, including the Executive Grant of Clemency for conservative political consultant and lobbyist Roger Stone, and information regarding the president of France, Emmanuel Macron.
They also confiscated a handwritten note, two photo binders, a leather-bound box of documents, a potential presidential record, and three passports.
Trump also claims that investigators took privileged legal documents and executive materials kept in boxes and opened a safe.
“Grabbing passports that presumably are not part of the search—completely improper, shouldn’t do it. Never,” Sherwood said.
However, if there’s evidence in plain view that law enforcement believes is part of or connected to an investigation, “they can seize that.”
Sherwood said he views it as “highly irregular” that investigators turned off surveillance cameras during the raid.
“If it were me, I would want the camera on to protect the integrity of what I’m doing as an officer—as an agent,” he said.
Sherwood said federal agents seized large swathes of evidence without vetting what they were taking.
Issue of Probable Cause
What was the threshold of proof used to obtain the search warrant?
“That’s probably the trillion dollar question,” Sherwood said. “Probable cause is a preponderance of the evidence—51 percent of a crime would have been committed.”
“It’s always based upon what’s presented in front of a judge. The question to ascertain is whether the evidence presented is valid or not. That’s the real attack point here. That is not beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s for court purposes” to determine.
Security officers guard the entrance to the Paul G. Rogers Federal Building & Courthouse as the court holds a hearing to determine if the affidavit used by the FBI as justification for the search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate should be unsealed, at the U.S. District Courthouse for the Southern District of Florida in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 18, 2022. (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
Sherwood questioned the Department of Justice’s timing to launch the raid nearly two years after Trump’s departure from office.
“The unclear thing is what is exactly in the affidavit. [The DOJ] is probably going to release some of it.”
Sherwood said the media is mainly responsible for stoking fear and anger on both sides. However, the seeds of civil unrest began during the Obama administration and the riots of 2020.
He warned against any renewed acts of violence that might undermine positive conservative gains.
“In the court of public opinion, it’s a tough deal right now. In today’s world, it doesn’t take much to get people fired up about this issue,” Sherwood said.
“There’s going to be a lot of people rallying around this. If it’s politically motivated, it will backfire [and] galvanize both sides,” further dividing the country, he said.
The U.S. Department of Education said it has terminated Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS) as a nationally recognized college accreditor, capping the agency’s long-running battle with the federal government to retain its accrediting powers.
Deputy Secretary of Education Cindy Marten on Aug. 19 issued a final decision to deny an appeal by ACICS to retain its federal status as an accrediting agency.
Marten’s decision means that the two dozen or so schools approved by ACICS have to find a new accrediting agency or lose access to federal financial aid.
“Her decision is considered final and officially starts an 18-month period for schools currently accredited by ACICS to find another accreditor to continue offering federal student grants, loans, or work-study funds,” the Education Department said in a statement.
ACICS said it was “disappointed” with the decision, which the agency called “deeply flawed.”
“We believe it is deeply flawed and that ACICS has been in substantial compliance with any objective, consistent, and reasonable interpretation of the recognition criteria,” ACICS said in a statement, adding that it’s considering whether to appeal in federal court.
In her decision (pdf), Marten said that “despite its best efforts to improve its operations,” ACICS had failed to comply with a range of criteria for accreditors.
Marten said that the review leading up to termination was carried out properly and was not procedurally deficient, insisting that ACICS has received a “full and fair hearing on its petition for recognition.”
The federal government doesn’t accredit colleges directly but relies on accrediting agencies to do vetting and issue approvals.
ACICS, which was founded in 1912 and was once one of the biggest college accreditors in the country, currently accredits 27 institutions with some 5,000 students.
It accredited ITT Technical Institute and dozens of schools operated by Corinthian Colleges, both institutions that were shut down several years ago, at significant cost to taxpayers.
Federal authorities recently forgave over $10 billion in student debt for ITT and Corinthian students.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement that ACICS accredited “predatory” for-profit colleges like Corinthian, which he said targeted low-income California students with false advertising and “saddled them with debt.”
Marten’s decision caps a years-long process that began in 2016, when the Department of Education first stopped recognizing ACICS, prompting a lawsuit.
In 2018, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos reinstated ACICS after a federal judge ordered the Education Department to consider new evidence.
A staff report carried out by the Education Department and released in January 2021 recommended that the department revoke the recognition, prompting ACICS to appeal, with Marten’s decision bringing that process to an end.
Marten’s decision was hailed by Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
“ACICS has repeatedly showed that it is not a reliable authority on educational quality, which is why the Obama Admin rescinded its authority in 2016. I commend @usedgov for today’s decision to terminate ACICS’ federal recognition once again,” Durbin said in a statement.
A pediatric program at Yale University has sparked an outrage after its director said it helps children as young as 3 with their “gender journeys” through “medical intervention.”
Dr. Christy Olezeski, a clinical psychologist who co-founded and directs the Yale Pediatric Gender Program, was filmed describing the program as one that works with “gender expansive individuals, 3 to 25, and their families.”
“We help individuals who are questioning their gender identity or who identify as transgender or non-binary, and we help them with their gender journey,” Olezeski says in a video posted on Yale School of Medicine’s official YouTube channel. The video has been set to private.
Yale Pediatric Gender Program director says she treats kids as young as THREE on their “gender journey” including medical intervention pic.twitter.com/WoCrr9Utnb
Specifically, the program will help individuals “think through the risks and benefits of medical intervention, starting medical intervention, and also building supports around them,” according to Olezeski.
“I love what I do,” the professor continued. “It’s really, really wonderful to be working in this field and to be working with individuals who are gender diverse and gaining their support and helping them on their gender journeys.”
Yale Medicine launched the Gender Program in October 2015. According to its website, a family that brings their child to the clinic will first meet with a consultation team, including a pediatric endocrinologist and a mental health specialist, who are “experienced in dealing with gender variance” and will learn more about the family’s needs.
“We will discuss the risks and side effects of any proposed care options, and work together to learn what support systems are already in place and determine what else our patients may need,” the website states.
Following that, the child will be given a “readiness assessment,” which includes “obtaining information from patients and their families.” After the evaluation, the program will offer a variety of “care options related to gender affirmation,” such as puberty-blocking treatments, cross-hormone therapies, and “gender-affirming” surgeries.
The website specifies that the surgery options are only available to patients aged 18 and older, but doesn’t say how old a patient must be to get cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers.
A clip of the video featuring Olezeski became widely circulated on Twitter this week, triggering a backlash against the program.
“Society has lost its marbles,” commented Kelli Ward, chair of the Republican Party of Arizona.
“Kid’s memories are just starting to work at 3. Kids think they’re dinosaurs or a dog. There is no ‘gender journey’ at 3, this is child abuse,” wrote stand-up comedians the HodgeTwins.
The controversy comes as a growing number of pediatric health care providers embrace “gender affirmation care,” a concept rooted in the progressive gender ideology.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the national organization of pediatric health professionals, in its latest guidelines encourages pediatric providers to adopt a “gender-affirmative care model” and offer services that are “oriented toward understanding and appreciating the youth’s gender experience.”
In such a model, transgender identities and “diverse gender expressions” are not considered a mental disorder, but “normal aspects of human diversity.” The model also recognizes gender identity as something that “evolves as an interplay of biology, development, socialization, and culture.”
Yale Medicine didn’t respond to a request for comment. Dr. Olezeski couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.
“Same pollution. Better Marketing.” Great quote (see below). Climate change in a nutshell. [US Patriot]
Increased domestic lithium production plays a crucial role in President Joe Biden’s green energy plan, as 2021 marked the largest rollout of solar, wind, and electric batteries in the history of the United States.
Nevertheless, lithium mining has quietly revealed itself to be a significant contributor to environmental pollution in the frantic rush to abandon fossil fuels.
On May 2, the Biden administration announced the investment of more than $3 billion to make more lithium batteries and their components. It’s a pivotal part of the president’s goal to have at least half of all vehicle sales in the United States be electric by 2030.
Currently, there are two main ways to obtain the sought-after element: Hard rock ore mining and brine extraction.
Controlled Thermal Resources drilling rig in Calipatria, California. Lithium reserves have been discovered in the nearby Salton Sea on Dec. 15, 2021. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)
While much of the carbon emitted from mining depends on the rock it’s extracted from, this technique still produces at least 15 tons of CO2 for every ton of lithium harvested.
Generally speaking, mining is a dirty business. Mineral extractions like lithium and coal—a fossil fuel—both fall under this umbrella. Collectively, the mining industry generates between 1.9 and 5.1 gigatons of carbon emissions annually.
The other approach to accessing lithium involves removing the metal from brine in areas with salt flats. However, this approach requires, on average, 500,000 gallons of water to procure a single ton of lithium. While it’s a less carbon-intensive process, brine extraction still results in tens of thousands of gallons of highly toxic wastewater needing proper storage or disposal.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg of green energy manufacturing behind the scenes.
Elements like cobalt and nickel are also crucial for renewable technologies like electric car batteries, which is another pollution-heavy withdrawal.
Same Pollution, Better Marketing
Open pit hard rock mining is the method scheduled for use at Thacker Pass, the largest lithium reserve in the United States.
Wind, solar, and electric-car batteries are dependent on the world’s lightest metal to function.
In the meantime, some experts are sounding the alarm over the not so green reality of renewable energy.
“While lithium-ion batteries are light-weight and convenient for modern-day electronics, they not only emit a large amount of carbon dioxide to produce, but they also tap into precious water reserves,” chief operating officer of Greenly, Matthieu Vegreville, told The Epoch Times.
Vegreville explained the carbon footprint of lithium mining, in comparison to other fossil fuel extractions like coal and oil, typically produces more carbon emissions. That’s because lithium products such as batteries require a more material-intensive process.
“And as the demand for battery material increases, it doesn’t make the process any easier,” he added.
President of the National Mining Association, Rich Nolan, noted during a press statement that Biden’s push for ramped-up domestic lithium production will make America more energy independent as the country continues shifting away from fossil fuels.
Nolan added the United States needs to build on this green momentum and approve new hard rock mines or face the continuation of geopolitical mineral dependence that is “completely dominated by China.”
Workers at a factory for Xinwangda Electric Vehicle Battery Co., on March 12, 2021. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said Biden’s historic investment in electric battery production and recycling would give the United States “the jolt it needs to become more secure and less reliant on other nations,” in a May 2 press release.
Though some environmental experts believe that when it comes to lithium extraction, the end doesn’t justify the means.
“Our position is: mining is very destructive to the environment and communities. It needs to be approached judiciously,” John Hadder, director of Great Basin Resource Watch, told The Epoch Times.
Hadder has fought for Nevada to address regulation oversights and environmental blowback from the controversial Thacker Pass project in that state. He also maintains that if politicians were really concerned about reducing greenhouse gasses quickly, there are cheaper, faster, and easier ways to do it.
“If you want to reduce greenhouse gasses quickly, we can do that by changing existing energy and public transportation usage,” he said before adding, “We already know it’s possible. We did it during COVID.”
The Thacker Pass project has been met with considerable resistance from environmentalists.
In March, Hadder’s organization filed an appeal with the Nevada State Environmental Commission, challenging the state’s water pollution control permit. The appeal was denied on June 28 after the State Environmental Commission affirmed the contested permit.
Though due to concerns over groundwater contamination, the Nevada government only approved drilling above the water table for Thacker Pass.
Hadder added that the lithium ore extraction will use what’s called an acid-leech process, which requires the use of sulfuric acid.
Ironically, the majority of the sulfur needed for this will be purchased from the oil and gas industry since it’s the cheapest way to acquire the chemical.
Compounding this is the absence of a leak analysis for the project, which Hadder believes creates an environmental powder keg.
“How long will it be seeping and what does the management look like down the road? This hasn’t been adequately addressed,” he said.
Vegreville added that the problem with lithium extraction is similar to the problem with plastic, “Once it’s created, it can’t be destroyed.”
In November 2021, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres remarked, “We’re digging our own graves” with mining, drilling, and burning during a world leader’s summit on climate change.
Regardless, the data and impacts of lithium production have been ignored in favor of rebranding the same heavy polluting industries with the label “green energy.”
The Battery Problem
At the other end of the lithium debate are the spent electric batteries. Improperly disposed lithium batteries can be very unstable, causing landfill fires that can go on for years. The resultant toxic chemicals released into the air can also impact air quality and carbon emissions.
Vegreville explained batteries can be recycled, but lithium-ion units are especially dangerous due to fire hazards.
“One of the most ecologically friendly ways to dispose of a lithium-ion battery is to dismantle it,” he said.
Though the demand for lithium batteries is set to become a $116 billion industry by the year 2030, leaving some experts concerned that production may outstrip the industry’s ability to properly handle waste on the back end.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency admits special recycling and hazardous waste facilities are needed to deal with the influx of electric batteries. One standard electric car battery on average weighs over 1,000 pounds.
In other words, the recycling end will need to be a highly regulated, multi-million dollar industry in its own right to reduce pollution and fire hazards.
Moreover, Hadder says the current political demand for lithium could end with a push for more toxic, unsustainable projects in the long run. And while he supports a transition to renewable energy overall, the current gold rush mentality for lithium is anything but green.
“What we’re seeing now is a repeat of patterns and practices of the past,” Hadder said.
Today Gab received the letter below from Congress. We weren’t going to publicize it, but given that the Committee went to the press before we did there’s no point pretending that we didn’t get it.
We are considering our response to the House Oversight Committee.
For the rest of you, know that we cooperate with law enforcement regularly on public safety matters and we never comment on non-public communications with law enforcement, even when it would be convenient to do so for public relations purposes, such as today or in any response to Congress we may choose to send at a later date.
We will add one thing for the public and the media to chew on in the meantime, given that the relevant case is now public. The House’s letter makes reference to a Gab user who posted threats against law enforcement on our platform. The implication of the letter is that we are somehow complicit in those threats. The posts in question were made on or about August 11th and an arrest was made on August 15th.
In that case, as the now-public affidavit supporting the arrest warrant states, we received an emergency data request for the subject through our law enforcement disclosure portal at 6:10 PM on August 11th. We responded at 6:10 (i.e., within one minute) to inform the FBI the issue was being actioned. Responsive records were provided to the FBI by 8:20 PM, or 130 minutes later.
We know for a fact that this is orders of magnitude faster responding to law enforcement than companies like Twitter and Facebook, on whose platforms far more threats against law enforcement – and far more hate, pornography, and other unpleasantness – can be found. Just yesterday for example a man was arrested and found with “buckets of human organs and skin” which he purchased on Facebook.
We don’t scream about how seriously we take public safety. We don’t publicize it. We don’t use it to make political statements. We just do the work, try to be as responsible a corporate citizen as we can, and provide all lawful assistance to law enforcement as efficiently as we can given that Gab is a small business with limited resources. We like to think we do a good job at this.
We would recommend that the members of the Committee call up their friends over at the DOJ to verify our bona fides. In the meantime, as we consider our formal response, for all the commentators out there who have been calling for Gab to be shut down for years on end, just because you don’t know about the public safety work we do doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has ended a subgrant to the laboratory in China located where the first COVID-19 cases were identified in 2019.
U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance was granted $3.7 million, starting in 2014, to study bat-related coronaviruses. It conveyed some of the money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located in China.
The grant was renewed in 2019, but suspended in 2020 because of concerns the grantees were failing to comply with conditions attached to the money.
The NIH’s review of the concerns has concluded, Dr. Michael Lauer, an NIH deputy director, revealed in a letter on Aug. 19. It determined that all of the problems cannot be fixed.
Therefore, the NIH informed EcoHealth Alliance that the subaward to the Wuhan lab is terminated “for failure to meet award terms and conditions requiring provision of records to NIH upon request,” Lauer wrote to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee.
‘Cannot Be Remedied’
Grants from the U.S. government come with certain conditions, including timely reporting of results, and adequate monitoring of experiments.
The NIH asked for plans to correct the failures, which was provided on Feb. 4, Lauer said Friday, and the NIH determined that the plans were sufficient.
Separately, though, the NIH asked EcoHealth in late 2021, and again in January, for lab notebooks and original files from the research conducted at the Wuhan lab. It has not received them, according to the new letter.
EcoHealth executives have said that it passed along the request but have not heard back from WIV.
The refusal to provide the materials led to the just-announced termination of the subaward.
“NIH has determined that WIV’s refusal to provide the requested records, and EHA’s failure to include the required terms in WIV’s subaward agreement represent material failures to comply with the terms of award,” Lauer told Drs. Aleksei Chmura and Peter Daszak, the executives, in a letter released on Friday by Comer. “NIH has further determined that in these circumstances, WIV’s refusal to provide records cannot be remedied by imposing additional conditions, and that a partial termination of award (i.e., termination of the subaward to WIV) is the only appropriate action.”
EcoHealth did not respond to requests for comment. An email sent to the Wuhan lab bounced back.
Will Keep Funding EcoHealth
The NIH is not terminating any of the awards in question, R01AI110964, 1U01AI151797-01, and 1U01AI153420-01—at least for now.
When grantees are not compliant with requirements, the preference is to work with them to bring them into compliance rather than termination, Lauer said.
EcoHealth has successfully implemented the NIH-approved corrective plans for the latter two awards, according to the NIH. While EcoHealth will be forbidden to dole money out to WIV under the other grant, it will be able to renegotiate the objectives of the grant with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
If an agreement is reached, the revised grant will move forward. If it is not, the grant may be terminated.
EcoHealth was asked to outline within 30 days how it will accomplish the purpose of the grant without WIV. That will require a change in scope but the change may not depart significantly from the original project, Lauer said.
Comer said the NIH should have ended the award entirely.
“Terminating EcoHealth Alliance’s partnership with the Wuhan Lab is the bare minimum. It’s unacceptable that the NIH continues to allow EcoHealth Alliance to receive taxpayer dollars even though it is confirmed EcoHealth violated the terms of its grant contract,” he said.
“EcoHealth’s dangerous experiments in Wuhan and possible efforts to cover up any evidence may have started the pandemic. EcoHealth should not receive a penny of American taxpayer dollars for their gross mismanagement of Americans’ hard-earned money,” he added.
The motto “In God We Trust” is being displayed in a growing number of Texas schools thanks to a law that recently went into effect requiring its display in a prominent location in public schools and institutions of higher education in the Lone Star state.
Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican, co-authored Senate Bill 797, which was passed last year and requires schools to display the motto as long as the signs featuring it came from private donations, at no cost to taxpayers.
“The national motto, In God We Trust, asserts our collective trust in a sovereign God,” Hughes said in an Aug. 17 statement on Twitter following an appearance for a Northwest Austin Republican Women’s Club event earlier in the week.
Hughes shared a photo of one of the signs, saying he’s encouraged by people “coming forward to donate these framed prints to remind future generations of the national motto.”
The national motto, In God We Trust, asserts our collective trust in a sovereign God.
I co-authored the bill in 2003 that allowed schools to display the motto, and last year I authored the “In God We Trust Act,” which requires a school to display the motto if there… pic.twitter.com/YWyopJZ11f
The law states that Texas public schools and institutions of higher learning must display the national motto in a “conspicuous place,” and an increasing number of signs featuring the words have been donated to school districts across Texas.
Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company, donated several “In God We Trust” signs to Carroll Independent School District (ISD) campuses, saying in a statement on social media that they’re “proud to be a part of having our nation’s motto hung in our public schools.”
“Our mission is to passionately defend our God-given, Constitutional rights and freedoms, and to glorify God always,” the company added.
The company later clarified that they donated framed “In God We Trust” posters to “many other school districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and we will continue to do so until all the schools in the area receive them.”
“We are honored to be part of bringing God back into our public schools!” the company said.
Carroll ISD shared a photograph of the donated signs in a post on Twitter.
During the presentation, the Board receives a signage donation pursuant to SB 797 by Patriot Mobile LLC. pic.twitter.com/Gju3NP0xpR
Similar signs have gone up in Austin and the Houston area, according to the Houston Chronicle.
But not everyone is pleased with the law that requires the display of the “In God We Trust” signage.
Anya Kushwaha, founder of the Southlake Anti-Racism Coalition, told NBCDFW in an interview that the law is problematic as it blurs the line separating church and state.
“I feel like they don’t have a choice right now to put them up, but hopefully this will spark larger conversations about having more freedom of expression, so if they are allowed to put up signs like this there should be no reasons that other students or people can’t put up signs that have different messaging,” Kushwaha told the outlet.
Despite some objections, the signs are increasingly popping up in Texas schools, with The Yellow Rose of Texas Republican Women saying in a recent post on social media that they had donated a number of the signs to Houston area school districts.
“In God We Trust” became the official motto of the United States in 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower put his signature on a bill that gave it the force of law.
Christina Bohannan interned at Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection
Democrats lie effortlessly. I assume sociopathy is requisite for the role [US Patriot]
Democratic congressional candidate Christina Bohannan often boasts that she once worked as an environmental engineer. She always fails to mention it was an internship.
On Thursday, the Iowa state legislator, who is running to represent the state’s first district in Congress, told a Pella, Iowa, audience that she worked as an “environmental engineer with the Department of Environmental Protection in Florida doing water quality work.” Her résumé shows this was an internship Bohannan held for four years while studying at the University of Florida. No further experience in the field is listed, and she still holds just an engineering intern license in the state.
Bohannan did not return a request for comment.
As a swing-district Democrat facing off against incumbent Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R.), Bohannan has tried to cultivate the image of a pragmatic moderate, burnishing her apparent engineering credentials to speak to local concerns. In a 2020 letter to the Iowa City Press-Citizen, a Democratic official said Bohannan’s experience was of “critical importance for improving Iowa’s water quality issues.”
Bohannan’s campaign website also says she is a “former engineer.” One progressive group touted Bohannan’s “pro-science policies” and experience as an environmental engineer in its endorsement.
In October, a Wikipedia user who identified as Bohannan’s “State House campaign manager” edited the candidate’s page to add she was an “environmental” engineer, the site’s revision history shows.
Bohannan’s effort to appear moderate has also led her to disavow past policy positions. In August, she scrubbed her old campaign site of endorsements for taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries and opposition to voter ID laws. Around 70 percent of Iowans support voter ID, a 2017 Des Moines Register poll found.
In 2019, Bohannan contributed to a bail fund for illegal immigrants maintained by a group that wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and work toward a “world without police.” She has also opposed school choice as a lawmaker while sending her daughter to a private school.
Before her run for Congress, Bohannan served as a legislator in Iowa’s heavily Democratic 85th district. She has been a professor at the University of Iowa’s law school since 2000. Her résumé lists publications on antitrust and copyright law but nothing about environmental issues.
In July, an internal poll by Bohannan’s campaign revealed the Democrat trailing Miller-Meeks by 1 point, the Iowa-based Gazettereported. About 22 percent of the voters surveyed remain undecided.
New York governor Kathy Hochul has directed state to investigate pro-life pregnancy centers
Gov. Kathy Hochul (D., N.Y.) has for weeks remained silent about pro-abortion activists firebombing a pro-life pregnancy center in her state. But when pro-life activists allegedly disrupted services at a Brooklyn Planned Parenthood, the Democrat condemned the “intimidation” from “anti-abortion extremists.”
“This is a shameful attempt to prevent New Yorkers from exercising their fundamental right to access reproductive care,” Hochul tweeted Thursday after New York attorney general Letitia James (D.) announced that pro-life activists harassed employees at a city Planned Parenthood clinic. “They won’t win.”
That reaction was a stark contrast with her muted response to a June incident in which pro-abortion activists firebombed a Buffalo, N.Y., pregnancy center that does not offer abortion services. The pregnancy center was also vandalized with graffiti that read “Jane was here,” a tagline for the extremist pro-abortion group Jane’s Revenge, which has vowed to attack similar pregnancy centers across the country. The Democrat has yet to comment on the attack. The governor’s office, meanwhile, told a local news outlet that Hochul “condemns violence of any kind.”
Hochul’s statement comes as Democrats look to crack down on the pregnancy centers following the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Just weeks after the Buffalo attack, Hochul signed a bill into law that directs state authorities to investigate pregnancy centers that do not perform abortions. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) has accused the facilities of “torturing” women and said the government should “shut them down all around the country.”
Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
New York Democrats have increased efforts to target pro-life activists in recent years. As attorney general, James filed a lawsuit against a Brooklyn pastor, as well as his followers, who protested outside of an abortion clinic in the city. Her office deployed private investigators and hidden cameras to spy on these pro-life activists but later dropped the lawsuit in November. James has a pending lawsuit against pro-life activists who protested at another Planned Parenthood in the state.
The pregnancy center bill Hochul signed directs the state’s commissioner of health to investigate pro-life pregnancy centers because they do not provide abortions, including a probe into whether these pregnancy centers provide a “comprehensive range of reproductive and sexual health care services.”
Hochul has received $9,750 from Planned Parenthood and its associated PACs between her 2014 campaign for lieutenant governor and her current gubernatorial reelection campaign.
The attack on CompassCare, the pregnancy center in Buffalo, is part of a larger trend of violence against pro-life institutions following the overturn of Roe v. Wade. There have been 93 attacks on pro-life groups since May, according to the Catholic News Agency. A majority of these attacks were against pregnancy centers.
Jim Harden, CEO of CompassCare, said he has received no assistance from his state’s government after the attack on his clinic.
“It appears Governor Hochul and the N.Y. Legislature are only interested in protecting those who agree with them and bullying those who don’t,” Harden said.
Gov. Kathy Hochul (D., N.Y.) has for weeks remained silent about pro-abortion activists firebombing a pro-life pregnancy center in her state. But when pro-life activists allegedly disrupted services at a Brooklyn Planned Parenthood, the Democrat condemned the “intimidation” from “anti-abortion extremists.”
“This is a shameful attempt to prevent New Yorkers from exercising their fundamental right to access reproductive care,” Hochul tweeted Thursday after New York attorney general Letitia James (D.) announced that pro-life activists harassed employees at a city Planned Parenthood clinic. “They won’t win.”
That reaction was a stark contrast with her muted response to a June incident in which pro-abortion activists firebombed a Buffalo, N.Y., pregnancy center that does not offer abortion services. The pregnancy center was also vandalized with graffiti that read “Jane was here,” a tagline for the extremist pro-abortion group Jane’s Revenge, which has vowed to attack similar pregnancy centers across the country. The Democrat has yet to comment on the attack. The governor’s office, meanwhile, told a local news outlet that Hochul “condemns violence of any kind.”
Hochul’s statement comes as Democrats look to crack down on the pregnancy centers following the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Just weeks after the Buffalo attack, Hochul signed a bill into law that directs state authorities to investigate pregnancy centers that do not perform abortions. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) has accused the facilities of “torturing” women and said the government should “shut them down all around the country.”
Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
New York Democrats have increased efforts to target pro-life activists in recent years. As attorney general, James filed a lawsuit against a Brooklyn pastor, as well as his followers, who protested outside of an abortion clinic in the city. Her office deployed private investigators and hidden cameras to spy on these pro-life activists but later dropped the lawsuit in November. James has a pending lawsuit against pro-life activists who protested at another Planned Parenthood in the state.
The pregnancy center bill Hochul signed directs the state’s commissioner of health to investigate pro-life pregnancy centers because they do not provide abortions, including a probe into whether these pregnancy centers provide a “comprehensive range of reproductive and sexual health care services.”
Hochul has received $9,750 from Planned Parenthood and its associated PACs between her 2014 campaign for lieutenant governor and her current gubernatorial reelection campaign.
The attack on CompassCare, the pregnancy center in Buffalo, is part of a larger trend of violence against pro-life institutions following the overturn of Roe v. Wade. There have been 93 attacks on pro-life groups since May, according to the Catholic News Agency. A majority of these attacks were against pregnancy centers.
Jim Harden, CEO of CompassCare, said he has received no assistance from his state’s government after the attack on his clinic.
“It appears Governor Hochul and the N.Y. Legislature are only interested in protecting those who agree with them and bullying those who don’t,” Harden said.
Austin Independent School District course says gender is ‘innermost concept of self as male, female, neither or both’
Instead of ruining life for everyone, just send these kids to a special needs facility. We do this for rowdy kids and ones with handicaps like autism. Enough of the attack on children and parents by Marxist enemies of the state (AKA Teachers’ Unions, teachers). They are guilty of child abuse and treason. [US Patriot]
A Texas school district encouraged K-12 teachers to take paid time off, at taxpayer expense, to take a course on “how to create supportive learning environments for LGBTQIA+” students as young as five years old.
The Austin Independent School District’s course material, obtained through a public information request, defined gender identity as the “innermost concept of self as male, female, neither or both,” calling it “one’s authentic identity.” The course also provided an example of a girl who questions her gender identity and asked how teachers should properly respond.
“A 14-year-old youth, who recently asked to be called Ronnie not Veronica, discloses to you a desire to go by ‘they’ pronouns,” one PowerPoint slide read. “Ronnie wants to cut their hair short but isn’t sure how their parents will react, making them feel anxious. Ronnie is also stressed because while they have been dating Julie and ‘came out as a lesbian’ in 7th grade, they have started to have feelings for Ted, who identifies as male, and this is confusing for them.”
The Austin public school district did not respond to a request for comment on the substance of the training course.
The district pushed the teacher training amid a series of fights nationwide over whether students should be taught about gender identity and transgenderism. The Free Beaconreported last year that these debates over sex education at the local level are fueled by liberal advocacy groups that push public schools to promote gender ideology to elementary students. One district spiked a sex education plan in Nebraska after parents discovered it was secretly advised by a Planned Parenthood activist, the Free Beaconreported.
The Austin public school district sparked controversy in June when it defied orders from Texas attorney general Ken Paxton (R.), who labeled its pride parade as “human sexuality instruction,” which requires parents to approve their children’s participation. The district rejected Paxton’s claim and followed through with the parade without parental approval.
The “Be a Beacon” gender course is run by Out Youth, which in a February Facebook post claimed that so-called gender-affirming care for transgender children “saves lives.” The training course cited resources from two prominentLGBT groups that also support children receiving puberty blockers and hormone treatment. The presentation cited a book titled, The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.
“Are you, or parts of you, both? How do you know?” the course asked teachers. “If your anatomy changed overnight to the opposite sex, would it change who you feel yourself to be?”
Sean Casten holds up to $500,000 in company that is expected to benefit from Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act
Illinois Democrat Sean Casten is very happy with his party’s “historic” green energy spending. His latest financial disclosure may show why: The congressman holds up to $500,000 in a green energy company that will likely benefit from the spending.
Casten has spent much of the last week touting Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which is not expected to have “any measurable impact on inflation” but does funnel nearly $400 billion toward green energy initiatives. Casten in a statement last week called that spending “a historic win for American families and for the future of our planet.” It could also be a historic win for Casten’s investment portfolio.
That’s because Casten, according to a financial disclosure he filed last week, holds between $250,000 and $500,000 in Greenleaf Power, a Sacramento-based green energy company that sells “carbon-neutral electricity” to utility companies. The Casten-backed green energy bill contains specific provisions that are likely to benefit Greenleaf. The legislation, for example, allocates roughly $30 billion toward “grant and loan programs for states and electric utilities” that obtain “clean electricity” like that offered by Greenleaf. The bill also provides generous tax credits to property owners who install equipment to harness alternative energy sources such as biomass, in which Greenleaf specializes.
Still, none of Casten’s many statements touting the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy spending disclose the Democrat’s six-figure stake in Greenleaf, which brought Casten up to $50,000 in “partnership income” in 2021 alone. Casten’s decision to fixate on Democrats’ work to “fight climate change,” meanwhile, may prove to be shortsighted as the congressman faces a competitive reelection campaign against Republican Keith Pekau. Only 35 percent of U.S. adults are “extremely or very concerned” about the effects of climate change, down from 44 percent just three years ago, according to an Associated Press poll.
Power the Future founder and executive director Daniel Turner called it a “shame that the American people are going to be on the hook” for “provisions that enrich this member of Congress.” He also argued that the “green energy” Greenleaf produces from biomass is not truly “green”—the company generates electricity by burning wood, a far cry from the wind and solar energy Casten has touted in the past.
“It just shows you the political motives behind this piece of legislation,” Turner told the Washington Free Beacon. “The fact that we consider biomass clean is really laughable, because biomass is really just burning trees. So why are we proud of that?”
Casten did not return a request for comment. The Democrat’s latest financial disclosure provides some clarity on his Greenleaf holding, as the congressman’s prior disclosure listed Greenleaf but claimed the asset had no value. Casten filed that 2020 disclosure as he urged Congress to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on “tax credits for clean energy.” In one case, Casten went as far as to attack fellow congressional Democrat Joe Manchin after the West Virginia senator expressed opposition toward the spending.
“We’re trying to drive a car into the future,” Casten said during an September 2021 MSNBC interview. “With all due respect to Mr. Manchin, until we’re lining up to take off the emergency brake this car ain’t driving very fast. It’s certainly not driving as fast as it needs to, and that’s the pressure we as Democrats have to keep focused on.” Casten’s past clean energy spending advocacy also excluded any mention of his Greenleaf investment.
Beyond the American public’s waning concern about climate change, it’s unclear if the Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed into law on Tuesday, will have a sizable impact on climate change. A climate scientist who led an independent analysis of the package told the Associated Press the legislation will reduce global warming “not a lot.”
Data suggests ‘economic weakness will intensify and spread more broadly’
America’s recessionary drumbeat just got louder as a key economic gauge from the Conference Board dropped for the fifth month in a row, weighed down by a slowing job market, weak manufacturing new orders, and deep consumer pessimism.
The Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States, which is a forward-looking gauge designed to predict business cycle shifts including recessions, fell by 0.4 percent in July, following a 0.7 percent drop in June, the Conference Board said on Aug. 18.
“The U.S. LEI declined for the fifth consecutive month in July, suggesting recession risks are rising in the near term,” Ataman Ozyildirim, senior director for economics at the Conference Board, said in a statement.
While the U.S. economy met the common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession when gross domestic product (GDP) printed negative for two quarters in a row earlier this year, recessions are formally called by a panel of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). They use a broader definition than the two-quarter rule, relying on a wide range of indicators, including the labor market, which has remained on a relatively solid footing.
The Biden administration has seized on the NBER’s criteria for declaring a downturn, insisting that the economy isn’t in a recession, with White House officials often citing labor market strength—though there are signs that it’s cooling.
Even though unemployment is at 3.5 percent and the latest non-farm payrolls report showed U.S. employers adding a forecast-beating 528,000 in July, a growing number of U.S. corporations have announced hiring freezes or layoffs, while the number of Americans filing for unemployment insurance has been slowly trending up.
Mild or Severe Recession?
The slowing labor market was one of the factors singled out by Ozyildirim in his comments on the LEI’s fifth consecutive monthly slump.
“Consumer pessimism and equity market volatility as well as slowing labor markets, housing construction, and manufacturing new orders suggest that economic weakness will intensify and spread more broadly throughout the US economy,” he said, adding that the Conference Board projects that the U.S. economy won’t grow in the third quarter and “could tip into a short but mild recession by the end of the year or early 2023.”
While the view that America’s recession will be short and mild has its advocates, economist Nouriel Roubini, who got the nickname “Dr. Doom” after correctly predicting the 2007–08 financial crisis, calls that view “delusional.”
Roubini said in a recent interview on Bloomberg TV that he believes persistently high inflation will force the Fed to keep monetary settings tight, which will tip the U.S. economy into a “severe recession and a severe debt and financial crisis” that will be long-lasting.
Similarly, former President Donald Trump recently warned that, unless the country changes course in key areas—including energy policy—he believes something worse than a recession is on the horizon.
“Not recession. Recession’s a nice word. We’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona at the end of July. “We’ll have a depression.”
After criticism from conservative lawmakers and backlash from citizens nationwide, the Fargo Board of Education on Aug. 18 voted to reverse course on its previous week’s decision to stop reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before its meetings.
On Aug. 9, seven of the board’s nine members, including four newcomers who took office in June, voted to cancel a previous board measure that was instituted in March before the election.
Board vice president Seth Holden said at the Aug. 9 meeting that the Pledge of Allegiance was contrary to the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion priorities.
“Given that the word ‘God’ in the text of the Pledge of Allegiance is capitalized, the text is clearly referring to the Judeo-Christian God, and therefore, it does not include any other faiths such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism,” Holden said, adding that this made the pledge of allegiance a “non-inclusionary act.”
Reciting the pledge is a “non-inclusionary act” and there is text within the pledge that is “simply not true,” Holden added.
“The statement that we are ‘one nation under God’ is simply an untrue statement,” Holden said. “We are one nation under many or no gods.”
Tracie Newman, who is board president, recommended that a member recite “a shared statement of purpose that would bring us all together” at the start of the meetings instead of the pledge, adding that it would be “unifying.”
“I’m just not sure that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is a useful way to begin every one of our board meetings,” Newman said at the Aug. 9 meeting.
North Dakota’s Republican Party called the board’s Aug. 9 vote “laughable” and an “affront to our American values.”
Republican State Sen. Scott Meyer told North Dakota media outlets last week that he would start work on a school voucher bill draft to allow public money to pay for private school tuition.
“These positions like by the Fargo School Board just don’t align with North Dakota values,” he said. “The logical solution is to just give parents that option to help educate their kids.”
Robin Nelson was one of two board members who voted on Aug. 9 to keep the pledge.
“It was a very easy ‘no’ vote from me from the get-go. I knew right away it would be controversial,” Nelson told Fargo’s Valley News Live.
“Our focus should be on our great students and teachers and education, but this is going to detract from that and really shed more negative publicity on the Fargo school district, and quite frankly, we don’t need that.”
Nelson’s words were proved correct. The decision prompted an outcry across the country, which led the board to hold the Aug. 18 meeting to discuss reinstating the pledge.
“That is perpetuating Critical Race Theory, which is against the law in North Dakota,” Fargo parent Jake Schmitz told Fox & Friends last week following the initial vote to ban the Pledge of Allegiance.
“The next logical step in the progression is [they’ll] want to remove it from schools because it’s a non-inclusionary act which is a bunch of [expletive].”
At the special meeting on Aug. 18, the board discussed the volume of angry emails and voicemails directed at members.
Nyamal Dei, a refugee from war-torn Sudan, was among those who received messages from irate citizens.
Dei was one of the seven members who voted on Aug. 10 to eliminate the pledge. At the special meeting, she was the only board member to vote no on reinstatement.
“We won’t be rewarding our children or students in our district for acting in this way,” Dei said at the special meeting.
“But know that this moment will pass. Let’s get back to the work that we are elected to do and that is to find a solution to our teacher shortages, mental health issues, and academic achievement for our students.” (Sounds like you must miss Sudan. Can I buy you an airplane ticket to the toilet from which you came? [US Patriot])
Greg Clark, who also serves on the board, said that less than 20 percent of the “angry messages” were from Fargo residents.
He admitted that his vote to reinstate the pledge was influenced by people who do not live in the district.
“But I hope you’ll forgive me because I truly believe it is in the best interest of our schools to do so,” Clark said.
“The disruptions and the threats must end so that we can have a successful start to our school year.”
Holden voted to bring back the pledge, but not before expressing reluctance.
“Do you concede the battle to win the war?” Holden said.
“I’m also concerned about what might happen to this board in the future because we’re going to have to probably be prepared to take more heat than we normally do for decisions that we make because that there may be a perception of success.”
David Paulson, a former board member who proposed that the pledge be recited before meetings in March when he was still in office, said that the current board members were “misinterpreting” what the words mean.
The March motion passed 6-2. Holden was one of the two who voted no.
“We are misinterpreting the Pledge of Allegiance,” Paulson said at the Aug. 9 meeting.
“The pledge isn’t a show of our patriotism; it’s an affirmation of our commitment and our loyalty to the greater cause, and that greater cause is freedom.”
Fargo Public Schools begins a new school year on Aug. 25.
Multi-agency investigation uncovers international smuggling operation
WINTER HAVEN, Fla.–A multi-agency investigation resulted in the breakup of an international drug ring, with the arrest of 85 suspects and the seizure of firearms and $12.8 million worth of drugs, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd announced on Aug. 19.
Judd said the drugs—including enough fentanyl to kill 96,000 people—were “smuggled in suitcases” using domestic flights out of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). They would book a flight from California to Orlando, then check the luggage, but “never get on the flight.” The receiver picked up the luggage filled with drugs that were then distributed onto the “streets of Polk County.”
The sheriff picked up a large bag of methamphetamine for all to see.
“On one occasion, on one airline, six suitcases with this drug were smuggled into Orlando,” Judd said.
The investigation began in September 2020 when the sheriff’s office received information about the “Jefferson family” and that one of the family members was smuggling “large amounts of drugs into Florida from Mexico.”
The wiretap investigation began in February 2022, “during which a court-ordered intercept of communications between suspects within the criminal drug trafficking organization was initiated and monitored,” the sheriff told reporters.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd shows the media pictures of suspects after busting an international drug ring on Aug. 19, 2022 (Jann Falkenstern, The Epoch Times)
“We brought and made predicate cases for the wiretap throughout the two ensuing years, but we couldn’t get to the top and link the organization together. This was a very different kind of operation. If you look at our chart there, you’ll notice … three distinct groups of people,” he said, pointing to a wall of mug shots.
He said 85 of the suspects had been arrested and three were “still at large.”
“There was a total of 355 felonies and 93 misdemeanors,” Judd said. “However, the suspects’ previous criminal histories included 690 previous felonies, 712 misdemeanors and 194 felony convictions.”
The investigation yielded 268 pounds of methamphetamine and 6.8 ounces of fentanyl.
“Now that doesn’t sound like a lot—just 6.8 ounces. But according to our DEA partners, 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be a deadly overdose,” Judd said.
“So what does all that mean? It means that 6.8 ounces of fentanyl could have killed up to 96,000 people.”
Forty-nine firearms were seized plus “all kinds of other assorted drugs and pills” plus $235,000 in cash. Judd said the entire bust was worth about $12.8 million.
The sheriff said that the investigation is ongoing and that LAX baggage handlers as well as other airline employees are being scrutinized.
“You think LAX just got a drug smuggling problem at the airport?” Judd said. “I believe that they do and they need to address it.”
Working together to make the arrests were several Florida law enforcement agencies, including the Orlando Police Department, Osceola County Sheriff’s Office, Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), as well as Fresno County, California Sheriff’s Office and the U.S. Border Patrol.
Illegal drugs, firearms, and currency seized:
· 268 pounds of Methamphetamine / 112,563 grams ($9,725,040 street value) · 31 pounds of Cocaine / 14,055.17 grams ($1,405,337 street value) · 180 pounds of Cannabis / 81,417.89 grams ($1,628,357 street value) · 3.4 pounds of MDMA (Ecstasy) / 1,692.02 grams ($84,601 street value) · 6.8 ounces of Fentanyl / 192.77 grams ($26,880 street value) · 68 Alprazolam (Xanax) pills · 173 Oxycodone pills · 49 firearms · 3 non-active grenades · 2 bulletproof vests · 1 stolen motorcycle · $235,000 cash
Once again, Woke clearly does not equate to Awake. [US Patriot]
The flood of illegal immigrants and drugs coming over the U.S.–Mexico border constitutes an “invasion,” a majority of respondents to a new poll say.
Respondents were asked to label the statement, “The U.S. is experiencing an invasion at the southern border” as completely or somewhat true, completely false, or don’t know.
More than half, or 54 percent, said it’s true. Republicans were much more likely to say the statement is true, with 76 percent agreeing compared to 40 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of respondents.
Democrats were most likely to say the statement was completely false, and independents were most likely to say they don’t know.
Under Joe Biden, the United States has recorded unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border. Due to relaxed immigration enforcement policies, many illegal aliens have been released into the U.S. interior, while deportations have plunged.
Amid the immigration crisis, a number of Texas counties have declared the situation an “invasion,” including Parker County. Officials also cited drugs being brought across the border.
Seven out of 10 Republicans in the new poll said the drugs being brought over the border are responsible for the increase in drug overdoses in America, along with 35 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of independents.
‘Open Border Policy’
A majority of Republicans also agreed with the statement the United States is implementing “an open border policy” along the border.
A person’s main source of news impacted their choices, pollsters found. Republicans who watched Fox News, for instance, were more likely to describe the border crisis as an invasion than those who have a different primary source.
Fox regularly reports from the border, including showing footage of migrants crossing the border between ports of entries, which makes them illegal immigrants.
The most cited source of news for Democrats and independents was ABC/NBC/CBS, while Republicans were most likely to source from Fox.
Respondents were also divided by political affiliation when answering whether there are enough immigrants in America already.
Six out of 10 Republicans agreed, versus 30 percent of Democrats and 37 percent of independents.
Democrats were the most likely to say immigrants are an important part of the American identity. Seventy-four percent agreed, compared to 49 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of independents.
Most Republicans, meanwhile, agreed with the statement that there is a “deep state,” or embedded political class, working to open the borders to more immigrants. Compared to 19 percent of Democrats and 30 percent of independents, 58 percent of Republicans agreed.
The NPR-Ipsos poll (pdf) was conducted online on July 28 and July 29. The sample of 1,116 adults included 516 Democrats, 317 Republicans, and 141 independents. (Now we know the reasons the poll only came up with 54% [US Patriot])
The margin of error was plus/minus 5.1 percentage points.
AIDS part 2. When neither sexual partner has brakes, neither does the spread of the disease. [US Patriot]
Growing scientific evidence suggests that Monkeypox is being spread via sexual intercourse between men, as opposed to skin-to-skin contact as stated by public health officials.
According to a report by NBC News, a string of scientific studies and reports from health authorities across the globe in recent weeks indicate that the narrative of public health experts may be “precisely backward.”
“A growing body of evidence supports that sexual transmission, particularly through seminal fluids, is occurring with the current MPX outbreak,” Dr. Aniruddha Hazra, medical director of the University of Chicago Sexual Wellness Clinic, told NBC.
NBC cited a Medium essay by Dr. Lao-Tzu Allan-Blitz, a resident physician in global health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in which he writes that there is “mounting evidence that sexual transmission is the most common mode of transmission” across the United States and Europe.
The essay noted that monkeypox, which up until now was endemic to Central and West Africa, is largely being transmitted through anal and oral intercourse between men.
Allan-Blitz told NBC: “It looks very clear to us that this is an infection that is transmitting sexually the vast majority of the time.”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) men who have sex with men are still those who are overwhelmingly affected by monkeypox, with 96.9 percent of those who have contracted the virus identifying as men who have sex with men.
Transmission Through Sexual Activity
More than three quarters, approximately 76.5 percent, of global monkeypox cases are among men 18 to 44 years old.
Overall as of Aug. 17, there have been a total of 37,736 laboratory-confirmed cases of monkeypox, and 179 probable cases, including 12 deaths, reported to WHO.
NBC also cited a study (pdf) published July 28 in the British Medical Association’s journal, which found that among the 197 monkeypox cases examined in London men, 56 percent had lesions in the genital area and 42 percent had them in their anorectal regions.
A separate study published July 21 in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that among the 528 infections diagnosed between April 27 and June 24, 2022, 98 percent were in gay or bisexual men.
“Transmission was suspected to have occurred through sexual activity in 95 percent of the persons with infection,” the study states, and 73 percent had anogenital lesions.
Elsewhere, a study published in the Lancet on Aug. 8 examined 181 monkeypox cases in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, of which 92 percent of patients identified as gay men, bisexual men, or other men who have sex with men. That study found that “participants reporting anal-receptive sex were more likely than others to have early systemic symptoms before developing skin lesions.”
“One explanation is that anal sex might damage the epithelium [a very thin layer of tissue] and enable blood entry, allowing greater viraemia at an early stage when local lesions have not yet developed,” researchers wrote.
As a result of the growing evidence which supports that Monkeypox is predominantly being spread through sexual intercourse between men, scientists told NBC that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health authorities need to update their communication strategies regarding the virus to “more strongly emphasize the centrality of intercourse among gay and bisexual men.”
People wait in line to recieve the Monkeypox vaccine before the opening of a new mass vaccination site at the Bushwick Education Campus in Brooklyn, New York City, on July 17, 2022. (Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)
WHO, CDC Narrative
Currently, the CDC and the WHO state that Monkeypox can be transmitted via “close, personal, often skin-to-skin contact” which includes contact with fabrics such as clothing or bedding that have been used by someone with the virus, as well as contact with respiratory secretions.
Despite the mounting evidence, the WHO says it’s too early yet to know if the virus is predominantly transmitted through intercourse.
“Completely reading the situation as uniquely due to anal or oral sex is highly likely to be overreach,” Dr. Rosamund Lewis, technical lead for monkeypox at the World Health Organization, told NBC News. “The correlation may appear to be strong, but that does not explain the whole picture of disease caused by this virus. So we need to keep an open mind.”
The latest report comes amid a shortage of Monkeypox vaccines amid a surge in cases.
On Thursday, vaccine maker Bavarian Nordic warned it was no longer certain it would be able to meet demand as cases of the virus continue to surge across the globe, even with an upgrade to its existing manufacturing site in Denmark.
As a result, the Denmark-headquartered company is now looking into transferring its technology to a third-party producer in the United States in an effort to enable bulk production.
Since receiving Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, Bonnie Eisenberg experienced relapse of her breast cancer 8 years after being in remission.
The 73-year-old was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer in 2012. After successful treatment, she had been in remission since 2014.
Ever since then, her doctor has measured tumor marker levels in her body to monitor for relapse.
Tumor markers are usually proteins that indicate possible tumor or cancer growth. High levels of tumor markers may indicate cancer but it is not definitive.
There are many markers that can be tested, but the one that her doctor particularly focused on was the carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), a tumor marker common to cancers of the breast, colon and rectum, prostate, ovary, lung, thyroid, and liver.
Since 2014, Eisenberg dutifully took monthly CEA tests along with others. The tests continuously returned with numbers in the normal range, which her doctor said was from 0 to 4.0 ng/mL.
Eisenberg’s average CEA results had been at 0.4 ng/mL, indicating her cancer was under control.
“Everything’s been going fine,” Eisenberg told The Epoch Times, “I was one of his best patients. He never worried about me.”
However, that changed after she got vaccinated. She received her first Moderna shot in January 2021 and experienced various common adverse effects including fever, shakes, “you name it, I had it,” she said.
Bonnie Eisenberg and her husband. (Courtesy of Eisenberg)
That month, her CEA test rose to 3.7 ng/mL.
However, since it was still within the normal range, both Eisenberg and her doctor were not concerned.
After all, tumor cells are not limited to cancer patients. It is a known fact that everyone can have cancerous cells; what matters is whether the immune system can keep the cancer in check.
Eisenberg took her second shot in February 2021 and again suffered the same adverse effects.
Her CEA numbers jumped to 5.2 ng/mL that month.
This took her out of the normal range. Yet because Eisenberg has been such a stable patient, and because her result was so close to the normal range, both she and her doctor dismissed the results.
“Maybe I should have been a little more on the doctor. Since I was so good. We weren’t really that concerned about it.”
Boosters became available in October 2021. Eisenberg was not happy to take it given her previous adverse reactions, but she and her husband took it anyway. She experienced the same terrible adverse reactions.
In October 2021 and December 2021, she had CEA tests taken.
On Dec. 13, 2021 at 8 o’clock in morning, she received a call from her doctor. He was very concerned.
“When you’re getting a phone call that early in the morning, something’s wrong. He says to me: ‘Bonnie, we have to scan you.’ What’s the matter? [I asked]. My mark was up to 17.6 [ng/mL]—I was in trouble.”
Eisenberg was immediately sent for a CAT scan, as well as MRI and PET scans.
On the PET scans, it showed that her previously dormant breast cancer has “metastasized,” meaning that it has spread to locations outside the breast.
“When he hit me with this, even now … it’s just a very hard thing to accept. It’s just something that should have never taken place.”
“[The cancer] went to all my bones … it didn’t go to any of my body organs, but it was over every bone you could think of. On the PET scan I lit up like a Christmas tree.”
A metastasizing breast cancer would automatically put her in stage 4, the worst stage for cancers.
Eisenberg is convinced that the vaccine is responsible for her cancer recurrence. The increase in CEA levels correlated well with her vaccine timeline, and she is adamant that she will not get any more vaccinations, fearing that she will really die from it.
In the same month (December 2021), Eisenberg started targeted therapy. The main medication she takes for her cancer costs about $14,000 a month “but I just have a little copayment coverage for it.”
She also has a hormone blocker as well as a monthly injection of denosumab ($3,000 each) to prevent bone fractures. Luckily, her insurance covers the cost of denosumab.
Eisenberg has responded very well to her drugs, and her cancer is back in remission now.
Since she started treatment again, her CEA numbers dropped from 4.7 in January 2022 to below 1 ng/mL in June 2022. Her numbers are just like how she was before vaccination.
The bright spots representing cancer cells are also gone on her new PET scans.
Nonetheless, things have not returned to normal; the drug side effects Eisenberg complains of are likely to accompany her for the rest of her life.
“I have to be on [medication] for the rest of my life. I can’t stop it … he [the doctor] can lower the milligrams and stuff like that … but you always have to be watched. What I have is not going away.”
Her breast cancer medication reduces white blood cell counts, significantly weakening her immune system and puts her at risk of infections. This new worry hangs on Eisenberg’s mind, and in crowded places, she feels compelled to put on a face mask.
The drug also causes her hair to thin, and as a “hair girl,” Eisenberg is bothered by the reality that she can no longer straighten her hair.
The denosumab injections can also cause loss of bone mass leading to eventual breakdown. Eisenberg is glad to have greater intervals introduced between each injection and possible reduced dosages for her medications.
Given her stage 4 relapse, Eisenberg is considered fortunate to be back in remission.
Eisenberg shared her experience with other women also in remission who have not been recommended to do monthly tests, or women who responded very poorly to potent breast cancer treatments.
She hopes that her story will be able to help others so that the same does not happen to them.
“Whatever erupted inside me from the shot, something happened because they don’t even know what it does to the immune system … [the doctors, people at Moderna] don’t even know; there’s no answers. Nobody has any answers. I don’t care who you talk to. You’re not gonna get an answer. They don’t know.”
“There’s possibly other girls like me now. They don’t even know what’s happening inside them because if they’re not tested properly, they’re not going to know.”
In the history of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a total of 93 breast cancer cases have been reported as an adverse effect of a vaccine, of which 77 of the cases are reported after COVID-19 vaccines.
What Current Research Shows Us
The current research suggests the COVID shots altered the innate immune system, which is likely to alter the adaptive immune system.
Within the body, we have the innate immune cells that are quick-acting, inflammatory, and target all foreign molecules the same way.
Some of these innate immune cells will eventually activate adaptive immune cells, called the T and B cells. These cells begin to work a few days after infection and require activation from innate immune cells to function properly. These T and B cells target infections and cancers through specific and varied pathways. They create an immune memory afterwards so that the immune system will be able to act faster the next time.
Innate Immune System Alterations: Interferons
Interferons (IFN) are antiviral proteins. There are three major types: type I, II, and III, categorized based on the receptors each IFN binds to.
One of the most important IFN is type 1 IFN; it acts globally, targeting many tissues and organs to protect from infections, autoimmune diseases, as well as cancers.
Studies show that they are particularly important in the early response to infection and cancer.
“Impaired type I IFN signaling is linked to many disease risks, most notably cancer, as type 1 IFN signaling suppresses proliferation of both viruses and cancer cells by arresting the cell cycle,” the authors, led by Dr. Stephanie Seneff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote.
Dr. Stephanie Seneff. (Courtesy of Stephanie Seneff)
IFN-alpha and IFN-beta are type 1 IFNs; these molecules alert other cells of a virus or cancer, and also stop infected and cancerous cells from proliferating, causing diseased cells to die.
However, research on spike protein and mRNA vaccines suggests that IFN-alpha action may be impaired when exposed to spike protein.
A study that exposed human cells to spike protein DNA to induce the cell to produce spike protein found that the cell shipped out the spike protein with two forms of microRNAs (miRNAs) that inhibited molecules that activated IFN-alpha/beta.
miRNA are short strands of RNA molecules that bind to the DNA in cells and can therefore regulate cell activity. These two miRNA inhibited an essential protein that activates the IFN-alpha/beta pathway. This implies that vaccinated individuals will have a reduced IFN-alpha/beta response and poorer immune clearance.
Seneff said that the reduced symptoms in the vaccinated are likely because of this reduced pathway, since the initial symptoms of COVID-19 are caused by actions of the interferon action. This is why many vaccinated individuals are getting infected with rebound symptoms.
“[The vaccinated] don’t get the symptoms … don’t feel as sick, but actually, you’re spreading the disease like crazy because you’re not fighting it off.”
This also means that the virus will stick around in vaccinated individuals for longer, and if the disease is not cleared after a long period of time, it can cause severe disease down the line.
This hypothesis also concordant with hospitalization and mortality rates in New South Wales, an Australian state where over 95 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, with many people receiving one or two boosters.
Hospitalitization rates and mortality rates are significantly higher in the boosted and fully vaccinated cohort, with lower rates in the unvaccinated and patients that have only received one dose.
Reduced T-Cell Response
T-cells and B-cells are adaptive immune cells, meaning that they engage in specific and targeted attacks rather than attacking all foreign invaders the same way, which is what innate immune cells do.
Both cell types are very powerful, but both need to be activated first through innate immune system pathways to develop strong, specified attacks.
Killer T-cells engage in close combat with diseased and cancerous cells by punching holes into them whereas B plasma cells work long-range, releasing antibodies into fluids in the body to surround and neutralize toxins, bacteria, and viruses. B-cells also play a role in cancer, though their function and importance are not well understood.
T-cells have been extensively studied for the important role they play in cancer by killing cancer cells directly. The activity of T-cells have often been used to predict disease outcomes in cancer patients.
However, recent studies have shown that innate immune function has been altered in those injected with the COVID shots. A preprint study found receptors that activate T-cell action, including TLR7/8 (toll like receptors 7 and 8), are reduced in vaccinated individuals.
Further, a Chinese study of people who have been vaccinated with the spike protein-inducing COVID-19 shots found that gene activity for what proteins and pathways are turned on and off have changed across most immune cells.
This raises questions about our traditional understanding of the innate immune cell to T-cell activation pathway and whether vaccinated individuals will have an immune system that responds similarly to how it was before vaccination.
The study found T-cell activity was reduced as well as an increased inflammatory response in the immediate weeks following vaccination, which, in the long-term, puts people at risk for cancer.
“These data suggested that after vaccination, at least by day 28, other than generation of neutralizing antibodies, people’s immune systems, including those of lymphocytes (T-cells, B-cells, natural killer cells) and monocytes (innate immune cells), were perhaps in a more vulnerable state,” the authors wrote.
These findings overlap with pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole’s observations at his medical laboratory, Cole Diagnostics.
Cole told Jan Jekielek on American Thought Leaders that after vaccinations started rolling out in the older population, he noticed the reappearance of Molluscum contagiosum, a parapoxvirus that most people get in childhood and is kept in check by the immune system from the teenage years onward.
Though the uptick is unusual, as Cole saw more cases he grew concerned that the vaccines may be driving a form of “immune dysregulation,” meaning a possible breakdown to established immune controls. Since these viruses are normally kept in check by T-cells, which also keep cancers in check, a loss of immune memory against viruses could be a sign of loss of control in cancers.
“About a month or two later, all of a sudden there are certain types of cancers that I commonly see in the laboratory, after 500,000 patients … I started seeing endometrial cancers go up and there’s certain type … Melanomas, I started seeing thicker and earlier as well.”
Since then he has shared his findings in other lectures and found that other doctors and nurses around the world have made similar observations of increased rates of cancer cases.
An analysis by The Expose on VAERS data also indicated an uptick of cancer after COVID-19 vaccines by 143,233 percent.
An undated photograph of Cheryl Rolf and her late husband John Rolf (Courtesy of Cheryl Rolf).
Developing Cancer After Vaccination
In addition to cancers relapsing, there are also cases of sudden cancer development in previously cancer-free people after vaccination.
Cheryl Rolf shared her late husband John Rolf’s experience with a sudden onset of esophageal cancer within a month or two after vaccination.
“He was vaccinated with the first vaccine March 1st of 2021, and then the second vaccine on March 29th,” Cheryl Rolf, his wife told The Epoch Times during a phone call.
A few days after his second vaccination, John, who had always been healthy, started to cough, and soon he would sporadically choke on his food, and “that gradually increased in frequency over time.”
In August, John’s doctor sent him for a scan, showing suspicious growth at the base of the esophagus, and by late August, John was diagnosed with stage 3 esophageal cancer.
“The oncologist said he marked [John] curative,” Rolf said. “He planned for him [John] to fully recover from this.”
Esophageal cancer is a rarer form of cancer that predominantly affects men aged 45 to 70. Smoking, long-term heavy consumption of alcohol, bile reflux, nerve problems in the esophagus, and obesity are all risks of esophageal cancer.
Considering John’s age of 68 years at the time, he was at risk. However, he had no medical or family history of cancer. He also did not have stomach reflux, nor did he smoke, and only drank alcohol occasionally. He was not obese.
In early September, John started his chemo and radiotherapy and it was a particularly tortuous experience for him.
John’s trouble with swallowing soon worsened, coupled with nausea and an altered sense of taste from chemo, he soon “seemed to have given up trying to eat or drink.”
“[John] was supposed to be taking more food and fluids in—he was getting some in—but he was also spitting up an awful lot of yellow phlegm … he couldn’t just drink things like you and I do. He gets to take a sip and try to get it down.”
Dehydration and weight loss meant that he also needed hydration once every three days.
John finished his treatment regimen in mid-October 2021 and doctors planned for him to make a physical recovery from the therapy, gain his strength back, and then remove his tumor through surgery.
However, on Oct. 25, three days after he received his last hydrofusion, John passed away in his sleep.
“I got up and he said ‘I want to sleep some more’ and he didn’t get up. I went and looked [later] and he had passed away.”
Rolf called 911 and moved John onto his back and gave compressions until the paramedics came, but John was gone.
“It was a horrific experience.”
Fourteen cases of esophageal cancers have been reported to VAERS in total for all vaccines, of which one included metastatic cancer (stage 4). Eleven esophageal cancer cases were reported as an adverse event of COVID-19 vaccine, including the single stage 4 cancer case.
Multiple Myeloma After mRNA Vaccination
Stanley Pruszynski also shared his wife’s sudden development of multiple myeloma after two doses of the COVID-19 Moderna vaccine.
Multiple myeloma is a “cancer in the blood … there’s no cure for it because you can’t cure blood cancer,” Pruszynski said.
It affects immune cells, making patients particularly at risk of dying from infections.
The majority of multiple myeloma patients in remission relapses in a few years, and most will later succumb to complications of the disease, particularly infections.
Pruszynski’s wife, Bonnie, then 69 years old, has been very healthy throughout her life. She was adopted into her family, therefore it is unknown if her family has a medical history of cancers, but she had no medical history of previous cancers.
Pruszynski said that Bonnie was very fit. The two would go on walks of five miles a day, and usually it would be him who would want to take a break.
However, two weeks after her second Moderna dose in February, Bonnie developed flu symptoms with constant coughing and night sweats and would get little sleep.
These symptoms persisted and medication did little to improve her condition. She began to feel weak and would ask for breaks on walks before Pruszynski did. She was often scared, she would fall and need to hold onto the walls when navigating their apartment.
In April, Bonnie fell and was taken to the emergency room.
On admission, her hemoglobin level was so low that she was given a blood transfusion.
“They [doctors] tried running some blood tests; the blood wasn’t separating properly to do the testing … well, it turns out that it was because of her hemoglobin levels,” Pruszynski said.
In June, Bonnie was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and started chemotherapy. She started stem cell therapy in December 2021 and spent Christmas in the hospital.
Stem cell therapy is a dangerous yet ambitious therapy to reset the immune system.
First, stem cells will be harvested from the body and stored. The other white blood cells in the body will then be wiped out, often using chemo and radiotherapy. Once the immune system is obliterated, the stem cells will be transferred back into the body to restart the immune system anew.
Bonnie’s fatigue improved and her cancer went into remission, but she still feels weak. The two now walk a quarter of a mile a day, compared to the five miles they used to.
Bonnie now works remotely with reduced hours. Pruszynski estimates that her salary is likely halved.
Pruszynski said that Bonnie has had high blood protein levels for many years. This condition can be a precursor to diseases and often comes with symptoms, though Bonnie was not affected.
Pruszynski therefore suspects that the vaccine, particularly the spike protein it generates, which is known to be toxic, may have triggered something in Bonnie’s immune system leading to blood cancer.
“They give her an estimate of maybe five to 10 years, maybe less. They don’t really know. They don’t have a clue but eventually it will kill her.”
There are a total of 89 multiple myeloma cases reported to VAERS, including plasma multiple myeloma, recurrent myeloma, and recurrent plasma multiple myeloma for all vaccines, and 65 of the cases were reported for COVID-19 vaccines.
The FBI division overseeing the investigation of former President Trump’s handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence is also a focus of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the bureau’s alleged abuses of power and political bias during its years-long Russiagate probe of Trump.
The FBI’s nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the former president’s Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington—not Miami, as has been widely reported—according to FBI case documents and sources with knowledge of the matter. The bureau’s counterintelligence division led the 2016–2017 Russia “collusion” investigation of Trump, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”
Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau’s disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.
In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team—Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten—has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of Biden’s son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian “disinformation,” an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.
Auten has been allowed to work on sensitive cases even though he has been under internal investigation since 2019, when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred him for disciplinary review for his role in vetting a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier used by the FBI to obtain a series of wiretap warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz singled out Auten for cutting a number of corners in the verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into warrant affidavits and mislead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.
In congressional testimony this month, Wray confirmed that “a number of” former Crossfire Hurricane team members are still employed at the bureau while undergoing disciplinary review. In the meantime, Wray has walled off the former Russiagate investigators only from participating in FISA wiretap applications, according to the sources.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has asked Wray for copies of recent case files and reports generated by Auten and whether he is included among the team the FBI has assembled to determine which of the seized Trump records fall within the scope of its counterespionage investigation and which fall outside of it.
Some former FBI officials worry that Auten, a top bureau expert on Russia and nuclear warfare, will have a hand in analyzing the boxes of documents agents seized from Trump’s home on Aug. 8 to help determine if any of the alleged Top Secret material he kept there might have been compromised, potentially putting national security at risk.
“It is a disgrace that Auten is still even employed by the bureau,” said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello. “I would substitute other analysts and agents.”
An examination of the bureau agents involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid reveals other connections between them and FBI officials who played key roles in advancing the Russiagate hoax.
Sources told RealClearInvestigations that Jay Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in Justice’s national security division, who happens to be a Democratic National Committee donor, has been coordinating the Mar-a-Lago investigation with Alan Kohler, who heads the FBI’s counterintelligence division.
Kohler replaced Bill Priestap in that post after Priestap stepped down from the bureau amid criticism of his role in the Russiagate probe. Kohler had worked at FBI headquarters under Priestap, specializing in countering Russian intelligence threats.
Before that, he worked in London as the FBI’s liaison with British intelligence and law enforcement. The sources say Kohler was close to Stefan Halper, an academic and longtime FBI contractor whom the bureau ran as an informant in a failed effort to suborn Trump campaign officials. He also worked closely with Stephen Somma, a lead case agent in the Crossfire Hurricane probe whom Horowitz said was “primarily responsible” for some of the worst misconduct in the FISA warrant abuse scandal. Somma is a counterintelligence investigator in the FBI’s New York field office, where he has been reassigned to the China desk.
In 2019, Kohler was promoted to special agent in charge of the counterintelligence division at the FBI’s Washington field Office, where he worked alongside then-assistant agent-in-charge Timothy Thibault, who was reassigned by Wray just days prior to the Mar-a-Lago raid, after whistleblowers raised questions about political bias. They asserted that Thibault, who has taken aim at Trump and Republicans on social media, worked with Auten to falsely discredit evidence of alleged money laundering and other activities against Hunter Biden and prevent agents from investigating them.
The Washington field office’s counterintelligence division is now run by Anthony Riedlinger, who previously worked at FBI headquarters as a section chief under Priestap. Some of the agents involved in the raid on Trump’s home came from that Washington field office, according to the sources and FBI case documents.
Bratt, the top counterintelligence official at Justice, traveled to Mar-a-Lago in early June and personally inspected the storage facility while interacting with both Trump and one of his lawyers. Trump allowed the three FBI agents Bratt brought with him to open boxes in the storage room and look through them. They left with some documents. After leaving, Bratt made a request to Trump’s lawyer for increased security at the facility and asked to see surveillance footage from the security cameras. The lawyer complied with the requests. Months went by before the Justice Department took the politically explosive step of sending FBI agents unannounced to Trump’s home, seizing documents, photos, and other items not just from the storage facility but from multiple rooms on the property, including the former president’s office.
Former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker said the search warrant that agents obtained is quite wide-ranging. He pointed out that it authorized the seizure of any information in any form related to “national defense information,” which he said “does not necessarily include classified material.”
“This is a huge, broad search warrant and a huge, broad investigation leveled against the former president,” Swecker said.
What’s more, he said the physical search of the former president’s residence was far more sweeping than first reported and included unsupervised snooping in several dozen bedrooms, as well as numerous storage rooms and closets, including those of the former first lady. FBI agents took numerous boxes and containers of documents and other material, including several binders of photos and even three passports held by the former president.
Although Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that the DOJ seeks to “narrowly scope any search that is undertaken,” details of the warrant reveal agents had the authority to seize entire boxes of records—including those potentially covered by attorney-client privilege and executive privilege—if just a single document inside the container were marked with a classified marking.
Agents were allowed to also seize any containers or boxes “found together with” ones containing classified papers, according to ATTACHMENT B (“Property to be seized”) of the warrant. In addition, the FBI agents were given the authority to confiscate “any government and/or presidential records created between Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2021,” which covers Trump’s full term in office. That meant they were able to take any item related to the Trump administration.
All told, dozens of boxes and containers were removed from Trump’s residence, very few of which actually contained classified information, the sources said.
According to Federal Election Commission records, Bratt has given exclusively to Democrats, including at least $800 to the Democratic National Committee. The sources said he is close to David Laufman, whom he replaced as the top counterintelligence official at Justice. An Obama donor, Laufman helped oversee the Russiagate probe, as well as the Clinton email case, which also involved classified information.
A Senate investigator told RCI that Laufman was the “mastermind” behind the strategy to dust off and “weaponize” the rarely enforced statutory relic—the Foreign Agents Registration Act—against Trump campaign officials, a novel legal move that the investigator noted is similar to the department’s current attempts to enforce the Presidential Records Act against Trump—which is a civil, not a criminal, statute—by invoking the Espionage Act of 1917.
Laufman signed off on the wiretapping of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which the Department of Justice inspector general determined was conducted under false pretenses involving doctored email, suppression of exculpatory evidence, and other malfeasance.
Suddenly resurfacing as a media surrogate for the Justice Department defending the Mar-a-Lago raid, Laufman has been a key source for stories by the Washington Post, CNN, and other outlets.
On CNN, for instance, he claimed the documents seized from Trump’s storage were “particularly stunning and particularly egregious,” and their discovery ”completely validates the government’s investigation” into the former president—though he quickly added, ”Whether this investigation transforms into an outright criminal prosecution remains to be seen.”
Swecker said that there is strong reason to fear that the FBI’s counterintelligence division might politicize this case.
“For sure, the FBI has dug themselves into a huge hole because of how they handled the Clinton (email) case and then Crossfire Hurricane and Hunter Biden,” Swecker said. “Myself and many of my colleagues think they are treading on very thin ice here.”
“Unfortunately,” he added, “you can’t recuse an entire FBI division.”
Patel: ‘It’s Just Insane’
Former federal prosecutor and Trump administration official Kash Patel said the FBI may have a personal interest—and a potential conflict—in seizing the records stored by Trump.
He noted that Trump in October 2020 authorized the declassification of all the investigative records generated from the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane as well as the Clinton email investigation, codenamed “Midyear Exam,” and he said that the FBI may have confiscated some of those records in its raid, ensuring they won’t be made public. In addition, he said, the agency may be digging for other documents to try to justify, retroactively, their questionable, politically-tinged 2016 opening of the Trump-Russia “collusion” case, which came up embarrassingly short on evidence.
“Tragically, the same FBI characters that were involved in Russiagate are the same counterintel guys running this ‘national security investigation’ against Trump,” said Patel, who deposed Crossfire Hurricane team members as a former House Intelligence Committee investigator.
Patel noted that the Horowitz report indicated FBI analyst Auten hid exculpatory information about Trump’s adviser Page from other investigators and the FISA court, which should be more than enough to keep him at arm’s length from other investigations involving Trump.
“And to top it all off, this guy admits [to Horowitz’s investigators] he’s unrepentant about his role in making up the biggest hoax in election history, and Wray still lets him be a supervisor at the FBI,” he said. “It’s just insane.”
The Justice Department’s national security division has ultimate authority over the grand-jury probe of Trump for possible violations of the Espionage Act, including alleged mishandling of classified material—the same statutes invoked in the Clinton email investigation. (In that case, in contrast, the FBI never searched the former secretary of state’s Chappaqua, N.Y., mansion, where she set up an unsecured basement server to send and receive at least 110 classified emails and where she also received government documents by fax.)
Former FBI counterintelligence official and lawyer Mark Wauck said he is troubled by signs that the same cast of characters from the Russiagate scandal appears to be involved in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
“If these people, who were part of a major hoax that involved criminal activity and displays of bias and seriously flawed judgment, are still involved, then that’s a major scandal,” he said in an interview.
Cases of the polio virus are re-emerging across the world, including in the U.S., and appear to be attributed to strains of the virus resulting from vaccination.
In July, A 20-year-old man residing in New York was diagnosed with polio, resulting in paralysis in his legs. While mainstream media outlets covered the story, journalists and commentators exploited the incident, blaming it on an individual’s decision to not receive a polio vaccine.
As Dr. Leana Wen, a notorious advocate for face masks and placing restrictions on people who opted out of receiving a COVID-19 jab, wrote in The Washington Post:
“Because of low vaccination rates, polio is back and appears to be spreading in at least one part of the country. Other vaccine-preventable diseases will also reemerge unless we take urgent steps to reverse this tragic trend. In July, an unvaccinated 20-year-old man residing in Rockland County, N.Y., was diagnosed with polio, which resulted in paralysis in his legs.”
Similarly, NBC News ran a story alleging the case was directly linked to low vaccination rates titled: “Polio Vaccination Rate For 2-year-olds is as Low as 37% in Parts of N.Y. County Where Paralysis Case Was Found.”
“Polio has been circulating for months in New York City area and poses an ongoing risk to the unvaccinated, CDC says,” reads the headline of another CNBC story.
The New York man, however, was actually infected with a type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus, a result of an oral polio vaccine, according to the New York State Department of Health.
The vaccine responsible for crippling the individual is what’s known as a “live-attenuated vaccine,” which in contrast to inactivated vaccines, retains the ability to become more deadly and infectious if mutates while replicating. The virus can then be shed into the environment, enabling it to infect vulnerable individuals.
Despite the re-emergence of polio being triggered by a vaccine, health officials and mainstream media outlets have continued to push vaccination as the solution to a potential outbreak.
“‘Silent’ spread of polio in New York drives CDC to consider additional vaccinations for some people,” claimed CNN.
In other words, the re-emergent case of polio being used by journalists and public health agencies to push vaccination is actually a direct result of an individual receiving a polio vaccine.
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, a key figure in a December 2020 White House meeting seeking to encourage then President Donald Trump to investigate allegations of election fraud, has filed a motion in the Department of Justice’s investigation of Trump, calling for the release of the key document justifying the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Agents on Aug. 8 seized more than two dozen boxes of records from Trump’s Florida resort, which contained 11 sets of documents with classified markings, according to an FBI property receipt made public on Aug. 12.
Trump has said that he had declassified all the confiscated records before leaving office and demanded the immediate release of unredacted affidavit behind the FBI warrant.
Byrne, who recently testified before the House Jan. 6 Committee, argued in his Aug. 18 motion that Trump had such powers to declassify as president, citing a meeting in the Oval Office in December 2020 where he said the former president twice exercised the same presidential authority.
The affidavit should be unsealed along with other records shedding light on the raid to promote transparency and accountability in government, Byrne argued in the court filing.
“Trump’s position was that … if this was not just some police state raid but there was a good reason for this raid, then, let’s see it,” Byrne told The Epoch Times.
“If Trump was telling the truth” and he in fact declassified all the documents, and the FBI submitted an affidavit accusing Trump of mishandling classified documents, “that means they were lying to the court,” he said.
“Trump was only mishandling classified documents if those documents were in fact, classified, but if he declassified then he was not mishandling classified documents.”
Byrne during the closed door meeting at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020, urged the former president to launch a probe into the election fraud allegations.
Frustrated with the suggestion of having former Trump attorney Sidney Powell appointed special counsel to spearhead a limited investigation into alleged fraud, then White House Counsel Pat Cipollone allegedly told Trump: “Hey if you want to do this you don’t need my permission. You don’t even need a pen or a piece of paper. You can just say, ‘I hire Sidney Powell as White House Special Counsel,’ and it’s done,” Byrne wrote in the filing.
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne is surrounded by private security as he arrives at the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. House Office Building to be interviewed by the House select committee investigating the events on January 6, on July 15, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Later, responding to questions about Powell’s lack of a security clearance, General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who was present at the meeting, allegedly told Trump that he could “ do the same thing with a clearance.”
“You can grant any clearance you want, on the spot, verbally,” according to a sworn affidavit by Byrne filed with the court.
According to him, Trump acted on the suggestions, verbally appointing Powell a White House special counsel and granting her top secret security clearance. He says after that the White House attorneys angrily left the room but didn’t dispute Trump’s actions.
Trump ultimately rescinded the decision upon the persuasion of his then-personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, according to Byrne.
“He doesn’t have to sign anything, if he gives an order, that makes it legally effective,” Byrne told the court, describing it as “the Trump White House standard operating procedure.”
Backing Trump’s Claims
Mike Davis, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, has also backed Trump’s claims.
Trump “has the constitutional authority to declassify anything he wants,” he told NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times, in a recent interview. “And so, when he sent boxes out of the White House, he declassified them.”
Davis said the Justice Department should have released the affidavit but would likely try to “hide it as much as they can.”
A federal judge on Friday signaled a willingness to release a redacted version of the affidavit despite opposition from the government lawyers, who argued that doing so could undermine ongoing investigations and imperil the safety of witnesses involved.
Secret Service personnel in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Aug. 8, 2022. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
Byrne saw the judge’s move as a “judicious decision.”
“The FBI should not have to reveal whoever was their sources, they should protect their sources,” he said. “But beyond that, they shouldn’t be able to keep this affidavit a secret.
“I think the country needs to know what the FBI is saying that caused the attorney general to sign off on this extraordinary application. Unprecedented.”
Because of the raid and activities of the kind, the FBI has become “so delegitimized now in the eyes of so much of the public,” Byrne said. “It’s creating a terrible fear and oppression in the minds of the American public.”
“I talked to a lot of non-Republicans and they’re all starting to sound like Republicans. They see this as police state tactics.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray has come out in defense of his agency, saying agents have received “deplorable and dangerous” online threats in the wake of the raid.
“I like Christopher Wray,” said Byrne. “But I think he’s got a very narrow window to save his organization. And I hope he does.”
Dr. Robert Malone on Aug. 19 sued the Washington Post, alleging statements in an article about him were defamatory.
The Jan. 24 article says Malone offered “misinformation” when he said during a speech that the COVID-19 vaccines “are not working” against the Omicron virus variant.
As proof, the paper linked to studies by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from January that found a booster shot on top of a primary series was protecting well against severe disease. The studies were published in the agency’s quasi-journal, which has a stated goal of being aligned with the agency’s messaging. The centers have repeatedly promoted COVID-19 vaccination during the pandemic.
Later in the speech, Malone said that the vaccines “do not prevent Omicron infection, viral replication, or spread to others.” That quote was not included in the Post’s article.
“I said nothing about disease and death at that point in time,” Malone told The Epoch Times, accusing the Post of taking a “selective misquote” and using the CDC study to contest an assertion he never made.
The Post did not respond to a request for comment while an automatic message from the article’s author, Timothy Bella, said he’s on parental leave until December. Bella provided no evidence in the article that the vaccines were protecting against Omicron infection.
An interview request from Bella to Malone before the article was written, reviewed by The Epoch Times, shows Bella telling Malone that “I have respect for you and your body of work” and that he hoped to “shadow you” during Malone’s time in Washington, where the doctor delivered the speech at a protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Ten Statements
Ten of the statements in the article were defamatory, including the statement that Malone’s claims have been “discredited;” that Malone during the speech “repeated the falsehoods that have garnered him legions of followers;” and that Malone’s claims are “not only wrong, but also dangerous,” according to the 19-page suit, filed in federal court in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“The qualities WaPo disparaged—Dr. Malone’s honesty, veracity, integrity, competence, judgment, morals and ethics as a licensed medical doctor and scientist—are peculiarly valuable to Dr. Malone and are absolutely necessary in the practice and profession of any medical doctor and scientist. WaPo ascribes to Dr. Malone conduct, characteristics and conditions, including fraud, disinformation, misinformation, deception and dishonesty, that would adversely affect his fitness to be a medical professional and to conduct the business of a medical doctor,” the suit states.
“Dr. Malone’s statements concerning COVID-19 and the purported ‘vaccines’ were 100% factually accurate. He has never committed fraud on [sic] engaged in any medical disinformation or misinformation. Further, the so-called ‘vaccines’ do not work, as is abundantly clear from both the scientific and anecdotal evidence to date,” it also says.
Malone previously served the Post with a written notice threatening legal action if it did not retract and/or correct the allegedly defamatory statements, but it refused to make any retractions or corrections, according to the filing.
Malone has also threatened to sue other media outlets, including the New York Times, but decided to start with the Post because the case “is really straightforward,” he said.
A document made public on Aug. 18 for the first time shows that an FBI agent authored the request for a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s resort in Florida.
The document, an application for a warrant (pdf), was made by an FBI special agent.
The document also shows that an agent, possibly the same one, authored the affidavit, or a sworn statement that outlined to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida why it should grant the application.
The identity of the agent who signed the application and the name of the agent who signed the affidavit are redacted.
The application was made on Aug. 5, and approved the same day by U.S. District Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the unsealing of the application on Aug. 18.
Agents executed the warrant on Aug. 8, taking boxes of items and documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
While opposing the release of the affidavit, government lawyers said in a recent filing that they did not object to making public other documents related to the raid, including the application, as long as minor redactions could be made “to protect government personnel.”
Releasing the affidavit, on the other hand, would harm an ongoing investigation into potential criminal conduct by Trump, the lawyers argued.
Reinhart on Friday ordered them to produce a redacted version of the affidavit to him by Aug. 25 at noon. He said he was leaning towards releasing a redacted copy, though a lawyer for media outlets calling for its release said the process will take weeks.
“I find that on the present record the Government has not met its burden of showing that the entire affidavit should remain sealed,” Reinhart said in a written order after a hearing.
A slew of documents have been filed under seal in the case. Some, including the warrant itself, were unsealed by Reinhart with light redactions on Aug. 12.
Neither federal lawyers nor Trump’s counsel opposed the release of those documents, which indicated that the FBI’s Washington Field Office was running point on the raid. The warrant was predicated on the belief that Trump has likely violated laws governing the transmittal of defense information, concealment of records, and destruction of records. Trump has said he is innocent and being politically targeted.
U.S. lawyers filed the application with the court on Aug. 15. Until Friday, none of its details could be viewed by the public.
Other documents were also unsealed: a criminal cover sheet showing U.S. Attorney Juan Gonzalez or the Southern District of Florida stating the case did not originate from several pending matters, a motion to seal the warrant and related documents, and the approval of the motion to seal.
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify the government did not object to the release of some warrant materials, and to show the judge approved the unsealing of the application on Aug. 18. The Epoch Times regrets the errors.
For a damning picture of the modern left, it doesn’t get much clearer than this.
The Democratic Party, which spent the 2020 presidential election year trashing the police and cheering on rioting mobs wreaking havoc on American cities is now desperately trying to rebrand itself for the midterm election year as the party of loyalty to federal law enforcement agencies hellbent on pursuing former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
But as a Twitter post published Wednesday by a member of the previous Democratic administration shows, all it’s really proving is basic ignorance, or utter contempt, for the foundations the country was built on.
The post was published by Tommy Vietor, now a co-host of the blasphemously liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” but a man who rose to public attention as one of the more abrasively juvenile members of the Obama administration.
The tweet included a link to a CNN report (of course) about the surveillance footage that was taken of last week’s FBI raid on Trump’s home in South Florida’s Mar-a-Lago Club, and a comment from Vietor that probably said more about the mindset of the modern left than Tommy ever intended.
The staff at the Trump household had refused an FBI request to turn off surveillance cameras in the home, which would have left the agents free to do anything they chose without fear of exposure.
“Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information,” Vietor wrote.
Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information. https://t.co/J6l1gtMpMc
He’s “very confused” about an American household disobeying an order from the FBI? And a “direct order” at that?
It’s a good bet he wasn’t at all confused by the George Floyd rioters failing to follow the orders of local police as they set about looting and torching businesses in the name of “social justice” in the summer of 2020.
For many Democrats, anarchy in the streets, theft and destruction of property, even outright murder are completely acceptable (just ask the gangsters who benefited from the bail organization Vice President Kamala Harris supported).
But failing to fall into lockstep obedience with the feds when they show up armed with a search warrant and plenty of weaponry? That passes Vietor’s comprehension.
Naturally, being a blue-checked liberal, Vietor has plenty of simpering sympathizers in the social media world (even the Twitter bots Elon Musk talks about have more brains than that herd), but fortunately for the future of the republic, there were more than a few responses to set Vietor straight:
You say, “No thank you, I prefer to film my home during your official duties.” The official duties of the officer are not private, and first amendment permits filming officers.
Now, it’s easy to dislike Vietor and the rest of the coterie of sophomoric arrogance that surrounded the Obama White House. (The State Department’s Marie Harf was another, along with Harf’s old boss Jen Psaki.)
With Obama administration posts that included membership in the National Security Council and special assistant to the president, Vietor helped saddle the country with the bogus Iran nuclear deal that even Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to the Obama White House, admitted had been sold in an “echo chamber” of mainstream media ignorance. (And to New York Times Magazine, no less.)
But he’s worth paying attention to, if only to see where the leftists of the Obama years are leading their party and — regrettably — the country today.
His podcast is an influential voice in leftist politics — the DigitalTrends website ranked it as the third-best political podcast for 2022. (No. 1 was NPR’s “The NPR Politics Podcast,” which says everything that needs to be said about DigitalTrends’ political preferences.)
To his marginal credit, Vietor appeared to learn something from his Twitter post, as one respondent explained a search warrant does not give law enforcement — even the big, bad FBI — powers to do more than search the premises involved.
“A search warrant authorizes…a search, per 4th Amd. It does not create other powers or cancel out civil liberties,” the user wrote.
“I remember when people used to be skeptical of the police, *especially* when they were dealing with someone we thought was a criminal.”
Vietor seemed to get the message — or maybe he’d just finally realized how cringingly submissive his initial tweet came off and remembered that he’s supposed to be a man.
“Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this ‘order’ because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous,” he wrote.
Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this “order” because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous.
“A little ridiculous” should have been a first reaction to the blatantly political operation. “Outrageous!” “Infuriating!” “Totalitarian BS!” would have been even better.
But for the leftist mindset of 2022, steeped in the openly anti-American tradition birthed by the disastrous Obama years, the initial reaction is not to defend American freedoms but to question why Americans can refuse a “direct order.”
This is a man who served in the Obama White House, remember, where the abuse of power at federal agencies — such as the IRS, with the likes of Lois Lerner; the FBI with the “leadership” of James Comey; and the Justice Department under political grifters like Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch — had to have been considered almost commonplace.
It’s a basic distortion of the country’s foundation of law and order, pervasive among leftists in the mainstream media, in popular culture and in the Democratic Party from local governments through the House, the Senate and the White House:
They have nothing but contempt for the law; they worship orders.
There are many sorry countries, with many sorry histories, where that attitude is the norm. The United States isn’t one of them.
EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Burgess Owens and Sen. Tim Scott introduced legislation in the U.S. House and Senate this week to combat learning loss incurred during COVID.
Owens, R-Utah, introduced the Raising Expectations with Child Opportunity Vouchers for Educational Recovery (RECOVER) Act in the House on Friday, which would allow unspent funds from the American Rescue Plan to be used to issue child opportunity scholarships directly to parents.
Owens told Fox News Digital there is a “group who has been really negatively impacted by the last two years, and those are the low-income and minority students.”
“It allows parents to take scholarship funds… and use it, so their kids can catch up,” he said. “Whether it be tutoring, whether it be books — whatever it takes to make sure their kids are able to catch up is what this is being used toward.”
Elementary students wearing masks in the classroom (iStock)
These scholarships can be used by low-income families for qualifying educational opportunities, including tutoring services, private school tuition, testing fees, educational therapies for children with disabilities and books or other curriculum materials.
Districts have yet to spend 93% of the $122 billion allocated for K-12 education in the American Rescue Plan, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.
Owens predicted the legislation will encounter opposition from the unions, but said parents have become more involved in their kids’ education in the past two years, and begun pushing back on unions.
“The key point is this, we have an educational system that is not trying to rescue our kids, is not trying to educate our kids,” Owens said.
Rep. Burgess Owens. Photographer: Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Photographer: Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The federal funds have already been allocated, meaning the legislation includes no new spending, and gives school districts and families flexibility in how the funds are spent, Owens noted.
“The key point is, this is a bipartisan conversation,” he added. “All of us want to make sure our kids are taken care of, and educated, and competitive. We need to have educational freedom, and we’re now seeing the places that lack it most are those who are at risk most.”
Scott, R-S.C., who introduced companion legislation in the Senate on Thursday, told Fox News Digital “while kids struggle to recover from months of learning loss, school districts continue to sit on billions of dollars in federal funding.”
The legislation, Scott added, gives the unused funds to parents “who won’t let a penny go to waste.”
“They’ll use every resource to ensure their kids live up to their God-given potential — just like my mom did for me,” he said.
(Tim Scott, REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/Pool)
Students performed lower in the 2021–2022 school year when compared to the 2020–2021 school year, according to a report from education software company Renaissance.
For students in first grade or below, reading results were “concerning,” according to Renaissance, which noted that school closures might have disrupted foundational reading skills for students around the ages of 5 and 6. Early literacy scores for pre-readers at this grade level were 19 points lower on average during fall 2021 and 17 points lower over the winter, the study showed.
The media has been hiding economic reports over the last few weeks. As we get closer to the midterms, they will be doing what they can to protect Democrats.
But Americans continue to suffer from inflation, high gas prices, and other stains on their wallets. And now, another sign has come out that the recession is already on us.
From Washington Examiner:
Housing starts measure the annualized change in the number of new residential buildings that began construction. Last month, they declined by a hefty 9.6% to a 1.45 million annualized rate after posting slight gains in June, according to a Tuesday report from the Commerce Department.
If the rising price of ground beef or unleaded regular didn’t tip you off that the economy isn’t great, this will.
The number of housing starts in July fell a steep 9.6%. This number measures how many new residential buildings begin construction.
Even a slight drop suggests a weakening economy. The housing market is always the first industry to suffer in a recession (or a depression).
When things are bad, people cut back on spending. The bigger expenses, like houses and cars, are cut first.
Then everything else quickly follows. These cutbacks force companies to make cuts themselves. In some cases, they lay off as many workers as possible.
So, this number is much more important than you might realize. New housing products dropped last month.
That’s consistent with other numbers that have come out recently. Inflation is hitting construction, as everything is costing more.
The housing bubble from 2020 long burst. Americans don’t want to risk moving or buying a new home, because it’s just too expensive.
The rest will come shortly, whether Biden believes it or not.
UPDATE: And just in, now housing sales just smashed through the floor. From CNBC:
Sales of previously owned homes fell nearly 6% in July compared with June, according to a monthly report from the National Association of Realtors.
Sales dropped about 20% from the same month a year ago.
“In terms of economic impact we are surely in a housing recession because builders are not building,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors.
The fallout from Biden’s leadership just keeps piling up, folks.
A new report connects a case involving tapes made by former President Bill Clinton with the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
“Judge’s ruling over audio tapes hidden in Bill Clinton’s sock drawer could significantly impact Donald Trump’s effort to contest FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago,” journalist John Solomon tweeted Thursday.
Judge’s ruling over audio tapes hidden in Bill Clinton’s sock drawer could significantly impact Donald Trump’s effort to contest FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago | Just The News https://t.co/MBCisbJ1rg
The ruling involved audio tapes Clinton stashed in a sock drawer that he used for his autobiography and that were also mined by writer Taylor Branch in Branch’s book, “Wrestling History: The Bill Clinton Tapes,” about Clinton, according to CBS.
The tapes became controversial when the watchdog group Judicial Watch went to court to demand the tapes be given to the National Archives and Records Administration, so the American people could hear them.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson rejected the suit in March 2012.
In a report for Just the News, Solomon pointed to a few paragraphs of the 27-page ruling as significant because they indicated a president had wide latitude concerning documents under the Presidential Records Act.
“Under the statutory scheme established by the PRA, the decision to segregate personal materials from Presidential records is made by the President, during the President’s term and in his sole discretion,” Jackson wrote.
“Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records,” the judge wrote.
“Because the audiotapes are not physically in the government’s possession, defendant submits that it would be required to seize them directly from President Clinton in order to assume custody and control over them,” Jackson noted. “Defendant considers this to be an ‘extraordinary request’ that is ‘unfounded, contrary to the PRA’s express terms, and contrary to traditional principles of administrative law.’ The Court agrees.”
So how does that connect to Trump? As Solomon noted, the former president has said records that were seized were both declassified and personal.
Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, said the connection between the cases is profound.
“The government, the lawyer for the Archives, said, ‘You know what? If documents are in the former President’s hands, where they’re presumptively personal, we just, you know, we presume they’re personal,’” Fitton said, Just the News reported.
“The Justice Department previously had told us in response to a question about Bill Clinton: ‘Tough luck, it’s his.’ But they changed their mind for Donald Trump?” he said. “The law and court decision suggests that Trump is right. And frankly, based on this analysis, Trump should get every single document they took from him back. It’s all personal records.”
As noted by Politico, Fitton felt differently at the time.
“We respectfully disagree with the Court,” he said then. “The idea that a president could spirit official recordings and documents out of the White House and that there is nothing that can be legally done about it is a misreading of the Presidential Records Act. It is ironic that a law passed in response to the Nixon tapes controversy would allow Bill Clinton to keep tapes of his official actions secret and unavailable to the American people.”
Kevin Brock, former assistant FBI director for intelligence, said the search warrant used by the FBI was faulty and over broad, according to Just the News.
“Specificity is important in order to protect Fourth Amendment rights from exuberant government overreach designed to find whatever they can,” he said.
The warrant “apparently makes a novel legal assertion that any presidential record kept by a former president is against the law,” Brock said.
“You have to wonder what the other living former presidents think about that. They have the right and, apparently, clear desire to remain silent.”
In a master-level stroke of inversion, former President Donald Trump has found a new use for his ability to all but ensure the success of Republican candidates.
On Wednesday via Truth Social, Trump unleashed his “endorsements” against three Democrats: Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who is campaigning for New York’s 10th Congressional District, Carolyn Maloney of New York and Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Both Maloney and Nadler are competing for a redrawn 12th Congressional District.
Based upon context, these “endorsements” from Trump can be considered to be either darkly disingenuous or delivered sarcastically with a proverbial wink to his supporters. Judge for yourself.
On Truth Social, Trump wrote first about Goldman, “Lawyer Dan Goldman is running for Congress, NY-10, and it is my great honor to Strongly Endorse him. I do this not because of the fact that he headed up the Impeachment Committee and lost, but because he was honorable, fair, and highly intelligent. While it was my honor to beat him, and beat him badly, Dan Goldman has a wonderful future ahead….”
“….He will be very compassionate and compromising to those within the Republican Party, and will do everything possible to make sure they have a fair chance at winning against the Radical Left Democrats, who he knows are destroying our Country. I would like to thank Dan for fighting so hard for America, and for working so tirelessly to stop “Trump.” He was not easy to beat, but winning against him made me realize just how very talented I am!” he continued.
Trump suggested that Goldman will be a moderate “very compassionate and compromising to those within the Republican Party” a damning descriptor in the uber-radicalized far-left of the 2022 Democrat party.
Minutes later, a similar “endorsement” for Maloney, with some kind words for her opponent Nadler appeared on Trump’s account.
“A vote for Carolyn Maloney in NY-12 is a vote for the future! She is a kind and wonderful person, who has always said terrific things about me, and will support me no matter what I do, just as I supported her very early on. She begged for a check with no quid pro quo, and I gave it to her. In fact, I gave her many….”
According to the Federal Elections Commission, Trump did in fact donate to Maloney’s campaign in 1993, 1994, 1998, 2006 and again in 2009 for a total of $4,000.
He continued and even took aim at Jerry Nadler. “….On the other hand, Jerry Nadler is likewise a hard driving man of the people, whose energy and attention to detail is unlike anyone else in Congress. He is high energy, sharp, quick-witted, and bright. You can’t go wrong with either, but Carolyn Maloney is the better man. She will lead our Country into a very GREEN and prosperous future. Carolyn has my Complete and Total Endorsement, she will never let our Conservative Movement down!”
The highlight of the snarky message is definitely the combined swipe at both Maloney and Nadler, “You can’t go wrong with either, but Carolyn Maloney is the better man.”
Naturally, Goldman and Maloney both vehemently rejected the “endorsement” from the 45th President. Goldman’s campaign attempted to turn the joke around on Trump in a statement reported by The Blaze.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Thursday that 20 serious felons will face arrest for allegedly illegally voting in the state’s elections.
“The state of Florida has charged and is in the process of arresting 20 individuals across the state for voter fraud,” DeSantis said at a news conference.
DeSantis and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement are identifying those charged as convicted murderers and sex offenders who voted without receiving restoration of voting rights from the governor.
A 2018 ballot amendment restored the voting rights of Florida felons who serve their sentences.
However, this amendment made an exception for those convicted of murder and felony sexual assault.
Criminals in those categories don’t automatically get their voting rights back.
“They are disqualified from voting because they’ve been convicted of either murder or sexual assault, and they do not have the right to vote. They’ve been disenfranchised under Florida law.”
A majority of the alleged illegal voters cast ballots in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, according to the governor.
DeSantis did not specify whether the charges stem exclusively from the 2020 election or subsequent state or local contests.
They’re facing a charge of voter fraud — a third-degree felony punishable by five years in prison in the state.
DeSantis alluded to the possibility of more charges for election crimes.
The governor referenced ongoing investigations into illegal aliens voting in elections, as well as voters who cast more than one ballot in multiple jurisdictions.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated the cases of alleged fraud.
DeSantis is touting his state’s commitment to election integrity and pointing to the charges as a warning to those who would exploit the system.
The governor signed a bill to strengthen voter ID requirements in April, as well as creating an entity to investigate and prosecute violations of the state’s election laws.
“Today’s actions send a clear signal to those who are thinking about ballot harvesting or fraudulently voting. If you commit an elections crime, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler may have violated basic ethics rules for United States representatives, a government watchdog group said.
Americans for Public Trust told Fox News it believes a senior staffer for Naddler may be providing legal services for him, which would violate House rules.
“The outside employment restrictions define certain activities for which senior staff (as well as House Members and officers) may not receive any compensation whatsoever,” the House Committee on Ethics states on its website.
“The restrictions prohibit senior staff from, among other things, (1) receiving compensation for practicing any profession that involves a fiduciary relationship, including, for example, law or accounting, and (2) serving for compensation as an officer or director of any entity.”
This could be a problem for Nadler because district director, Robert Gottheim, received money from Nadler while he was a senior staffer between 2019 and 2021.
According to Federal Elections Commission data, Gottheim was paid a total of $81,345.00 between 2019 and 2021 for what was categorized as “legal and political consulting.”
It sounds dangerously similar to “fiduciary services,” for which Nadler is expressly prohibited from compensating Gottheim, according to House ethics rules.
Speaking to Fox News, a representative for Nadler’s campaign denied wrongdoing and said Gottheim “doesn’t practice law in any capacity, including the campaign.”
“He’s a campaign advisor, which doesn’t have any fiduciary responsibility. When the campaign files the quarterly reports the treasurer must choose a category to list his expenditures, so they chose ‘legal & strategic advising.’ He’s a strategic advisor, not a lawyer.”
Gottheim is listed on the New York City West Side Democrat’s website as the organization’s treasurer, and his bio says he has been working as a Counsel for Nadler for Congress since 1997.
Specifically, it said Gottheim has been “handling all campaign finances & compliance issues with the FEC.” Again, this would be prohibited for a senior staffer.
While Nadler’s campaign paid Gottheim for services from 2003 to 2018, he did not meet the senior staff threshold until 2019, Fox News reported.
APT executive director Caitlin Sutherland slammed Nadler for what she said was a violation of the law.
“Jerry Nadler brags about being the ‘conscience of the House,’ yet he can’t even ensure that his top staffer is in compliance with simple House ethics rules,” Sutherland told Fox News.
“It is absolutely against the law to be compensated for campaign work that involves fiduciary duties, and accordingly, we will look into filing a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics.”
If the allegations against Nadler are true, they would be especially disturbing given his position. As the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Nadler is supposed to uphold justice and fairness for all, especially himself.
In addition, Democratic leaders have frequently praised Nadler for having outstanding character. When she was serving as House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi even called Nadler “the conscience of the House,” Fox News reported.
A full investigation should be launched into Nadler’s finances because Americans deserve to know our political leaders are being held accountable. If he is determined to have broken ethics rules, it would be a massive blow to the Democrats and any remaining credibility they have.
Several establishment media giants have asked a court to unseal all of the documents related to the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last week.
The move came after the Justice Department filed its own request for some of the materials to be released, CNN reported.
Lawyers representing major media outlets like CNN, The Washington Post and NBC News appeared on Thursday before Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the warrant for the Mar-a-Lago raid, according to The Epoch Times.
Reinhart said he was “inclined” to release some of the affidavit from the raid and instructed the DOJ to redact any parts of the document that would undermine its investigation, The Washington Post reported. The judge said he would make a decision after the department submits its proposed redactions next Thursday.
Trump himself has said that he wants the affidavit unsealed.
“In the interest of TRANSPARENCY, I call for the immediate release of the completely Unredacted Affidavit pertaining to this horrible and shocking BREAK-IN,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday.
The news outlets cited “the public’s clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred in these circumstances” in their filing with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
The DOJ itself set things in motion last week when Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the department’s request for documents to be released. Garland said the DOJ wants the search warrant and property receipt from the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago.
However, unlike the media companies, which asked for all the documents to be unsealed, the DOJ did not seek the release of the affidavit filed in support of the search warrant.
In fact, federal prosecutors investigating Trump asked a judge on Monday not to release the affidavit for national security reasons, The Hill reported.
“There remain compelling reasons, including to protect the integrity of an ongoing law enforcement investigation that implicates national security, that support keeping the affidavit sealed,” a filing from the prosecutors reads.
But the media companies argued in their request that “the tremendous public interest in these records in particular outweighs any purported interest in keeping them secret.”
For once, these outlets may be correct.
Though they wave the flag of “public interest” in requesting the unsealing of the documents, make no mistake — the media would simply make more money and be able to drag this story out longer if all the documents were revealed.
But though the media’s motivation may be selfish, it actually would benefit the American people to have access to the documents.
The raid is a very public issue, and since it concerns a former president, the citizenry should (at least in principle) have the information, particularly surrounding what led to the search warrant.
Some have suggested that federal prosecutors’ attempt to keep the affidavit sealed is actually just an attempt to cover up some sort of corruption in the process of the search.
The media outlets are even being reasonable in their request for the documents. If national security is at risk, the government has the right to redact parts of the documents. But that doesn’t mean they should be sealed altogether.
“Even when the government can demonstrate compelling interests, the court must examine ‘whether there are alternative means available’ to address them, such as redaction of a document rather than sealing it in its entirety,” the filing reads.
It doesn’t make sense any longer to keep all the documents sealed. The details of the raid, how it was conducted, the nature of the documents searched for and more have already been made very public. Trying to hide anything else at this point smells of corruption.
The media outlets are right. It’s time to unseal the documents.
“Transparency serves the public interest in understanding and accepting the results. That’s good for the government and for the court,” Charles Tobin, a lawyer representing the outlets, said in court on Thursday, according to The Washington Post.
Mike Franken also took money from disgraced former senator Al Franken
Iowa Democratic Senate candidate Mike Franken pledged to run for office “without taking one dime of corporate PAC money.” That promise didn’t preclude him from taking thousands from corporate-funded groups.
“I don’t take any corporate PAC money,” Franken said in June. “Not a penny.” But that same month, the Iowa Democrat received $5,000 from Sen. Tim Kaine’s (D., Va.) Common Ground PAC, which accepted donations from Pfizer, Capital One, and Amazon. Franken took $2,500 from Sen. Mark Kelly’s (D., Ariz.) Liftoff PAC, which is funded by the National Association of Realtors, and another $2,500 from Sen. Tina Smith’s (D., Minn.) Velvet Hammer PAC, which boasts contributions from Wells Fargo, Delta Air Lines, and Goldman Sachs.
The donations could spell trouble for the Senate candidate, who has decried “corporate greed” and accused incumbent Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) of being beholden to “corporate donors.”
The Senate candidate also took $2,500 from disgraced former Democratic senator Al Franken’s Midwest Values PAC. The ex-comedian resigned in 2018 following accusations of sexual harassment, but said last year he is open to running again for office. His PAC raised hundreds of thousands of dollars even after his departure.
A Franken campaign spokesman said the candidate “has never taken a dime from corporate PACs.” He did not comment on any other corporate donations.
Franken, a retired Navy vice admiral, came under fire in July when he said he “did not serve” to defend the rights of people who criticize Joe Biden. He is the third Iowa Democrat to skirt a self-imposed corporate PAC donation ban after Rep. Cindy Axne and Abby Finkenauer, whom Franken bested during the Senate primary.
Finkenauer lost by 15 points in June during the Democratic primary to Franken, who was defeated in 2020 by failed Democratic Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield. Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) beat Greenfield in the general election by 6 points, though the Democrat raised twice as much money for her campaign.
Franken raked in $1.7 million during the last fundraising period, outraising Grassley by more than two to one. The Republican still holds more cash in hand, and won his last election by a nearly 25-point margin.
Grassley campaign manager Matt Dailer told the Washington Free Beacon that Franken should either return the donations or “admit his pledge was nothing more than a hollow stunt.”
“Mike Franken hasn’t even been elected to office and he’s already breaking his word to Iowans,” Dailer said. “He can make up any excuse he wants, but Iowans see through his dishonest word games.”
University ‘fully aware of the situation,’ did nothing to protect students from harassment
Two Jewish students at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz say they were booted from a support group for sexual assault victims and harassed by members of the group due to their Jewish identity, according to a complaint filed with the Education Department.
One of the victims, student Cassandra Blotner, says members of the support group threatened to spit on her in public for proudly being Jewish, while others called her a “dumb bitch” who supports “mass genocide” due to her support for Israel. The complaint alleges the university was “fully aware of the situation,” yet did nothing to protect the students from the anti-Semitic hate campaign.
“These students have been thrice victimized: first, by sexual predators; second, by the anti-Zionist leaders of a support group who expelled the students, including one of its founders, from the organization; and third, by the University which failed to hold accountable those who had discriminated against the students and failed to satisfactorily address the hostile climate on campus for Jewish survivors of sexual assault,” the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law, an advocacy group that helped file the complaint, said in a statement issued on Thursday.
The complaint is another sign that anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist forces on U.S. college campuses are fueling an unsafe environment for Jewish and pro-Israel students. The Education Department is already investigating the University of Southern California for fomenting “a hostile environment of anti-Semitism” and many other schools have experienced a significant rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes. Jewish and pro-Israel students say they are routinely targeted based solely on their support for the Jewish state.
At SUNY, the trouble first began in December of last year. Blotner posted a message on her personal Instagram account: “Jews are an ethnic group who come from Israel. This is proven by genealogical, historical and archeological evidence. Israel is not a ‘colonial’ state and Israelis aren’t ‘settlers.’ You cannot colonize the land your ancestors are from.”
The message allegedly angered fellow members of the New Paltz Accountability group (NPA), which Blotner and another student founded to help combat sexual assault. Members of the group allegedly “denounced the post and demanded Blotner defend her views, arguing her personal post ‘concerns the organization as a whole,’” according to the complaint and other information provided by the Brandeis Center.
While Blotner offered to meet with the group and explain her views, “NPA leaders refused the offer to meet and told her that Zionists were not welcome in NPA,” according to the complaint.
As “the only Jew of the group … it seems that I am being held accountable for the actions of a foreign government (which is something that I am not and is anti-Semitic),” Blotner said in comments to the Brandeis Center. “I am worried for the future of the group and other survivors who come seeking support. Will they too be made to feel this way due to misperceptions of shared posts, lack of cultural/religious understandings, or general difference of opinions?”
Blotner’s original post was also shared by another support group member, Ofek Preis, who is a Jewish-Israeli student. Soon after, Preis was allegedly banned from the group’s lists and barred access to its online portal. The support group also made clear to Preis that it “was only open to those who reject Zionism,” according to the Brandeis Center’s complaint.
Both Preis and Blotner were then subjected to anti-Semitic harassment and bullying online by the group’s members.
The support group “went on to publish numerous statements doubling down on its stance that Zionists are not welcome,” according to the complaint. The group extended “its exclusionary and discriminatory stance to all Jewish Zionist and Israeli sexual assault survivors at SUNY New Paltz,” and promoted “the anti-Semitic narrative that Zionism is a form of racism and white-supremacy.”
Some members posted threatening messages online, saying they would spit on Blotner. Another allegedly called Blotner a “dumb bitch” who supports “mass genocide.”
Blotner and Preis both contacted SUNY with fears about their safety, but the schools did not take any action, according to the complaint.
“The university declined Blotner’s request for a security escort to accompany her to class and advised her not to attend,” according to the Brandeis Center. “Unable to attend class safely, Blotner left campus to be with her family. The hostile anti-Semitic atmosphere for Jewish Zionist sexual assault survivors brewing on campus after [the support group’s] posts caused Preis … to feel so anxious about her safety she was also unable to attend class.”
Denise Katz-Prober, Brandeis Center’s director of legal initiatives, said in a statement that the situation parallels those on other college campuses, where Jewish and pro-Israel students are increasingly concerned about their safety.
“Students are being marginalized and excluded from campus activities on the basis of their Jewish identity, which in some cases is deeply connected to Israel,” she said. “At the same time, Israeli students are being targeted by anti-Zionist hatred that invokes classic anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish power and control.”
“When Jewish students, like Ms. Blotner and Ms. Preis, are cast out of social justice spaces and campus activities because they express pride in their ethnic or national identity, that is a form of unlawful discrimination, not political speech,” Katz-Prober said. “This case is not about the awful things that were said to these women. Rather, it is about the awful things that were done to them.”
Employees at Google’s parent company are urging the search engine to suppress results for pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, according to a petition sent Monday by the company union to Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, more than 650 employees at Alphabet Inc. signed the petition, which demands that Google remove “results for fake abortion providers” and what the union considers “misleading information” about reproductive health care services. The petition also demands that Google stop collecting users’ data on abortion-related searches, saying that users’ data would be “used against them” in states that have banned or restricted abortion.
Abortion providers often vilify pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, which provide counseling, resources, and often medical services to pregnant women. Planned Parenthood calls such centers “fake clinics” that have the “shady, harmful agenda” of talking women out of getting abortions.
The petition, circulated by the Alphabet Workers Union, urges Google to institute data privacy controls for “health-related activity,” such as searches for “reproductive justice, gender-affirming care, and abortion access information.” These data, according to the petition, “must never be saved, handed over to law enforcement, or treated as a crime.”
Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Google have faced political challenges on data disclosure since a draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was leaked in May. Twenty-one congressional Democrats in June urged Google in a letter to “limit the appearance” or add “user-friendly disclaimers” to search results for pro-life pregnancy centers.
Google states in its Privacy Policy that it must respond to a government subpoena, court order, or search warrant but pushes back on requests for information it deems too broad.
A Nebraska police department this month used legally acquired information from Facebook to prosecute 17-year-old Celeste Burgess for violating Nebraska’s ban on abortions after 20 weeks, the Nebraska Examinerreported.
Google stated in July it will automatically erase visits to abortion facilities from a user’s location history, the Wall Street Journalreported.
Alphabet executives have not yet responded to the petition.
A student claimed that the Ivy League school obtained her therapy notes without her consent and shared them with a professor who’d assaulted her. That’s not what happened.
On February 8, Lilia Kilburn, a graduate student at Harvard University, made an explosive claim: In the course of a Title IX investigation, the university had obtained notes from her private therapy sessions without her consent—then shared them with a professor who she alleged had sexually assaulted her. The professor, John Comaroff, in turn used the notes to “gaslight” Kilburn and undermine her credibility, she said in a lawsuit against the Ivy League school. Harvard, the lawsuit alleged, “opted to protect its star professor over vulnerable students.”
Six months later, it appears Kilburn’s allegation was bunk.
Between May and July, Harvard filed dozens of documents in court telling its side of the story, including several email exchanges between Kilburn and university investigators. They show that Kilburn urged Harvard to get in touch with her therapist, gave the therapist permission to release the notes, and received repeated warnings that anything disclosed would be shared with Comaroff, per Harvard’s Title IX procedures.
None of the national media outlets that amplified Kilburn’s explosive claims have reported on these revelations. Though her story has quietly collapsed in court, it remains the official narrative in the press.
“This is an important case that we continue to follow closely,” the Chronicle of Higher Education told the Washington Free Beacon. “However, we don’t comment on our future coverage plans.” The Daily Beast said that its original story was “accurate and fair” and that it planned to “follow up when there is a significant judicial decision in the case.” Gawker—which all but assumed Harvard’s guilt—did not respond to a request for comment.
Harvard is now asking a Massachusetts district court to dismiss Kilburn’s allegation without a trial. Such a request, known as a motion for summary judgment, is “very unusual this early in a case,” said Ruth O’Meara-Costello, one of Comaroff’s attorneys, who is not a party to the lawsuit. “Harvard is plainly very confident about the facts here and its ability to document them.” Kilburn’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
The lack of media follow-up means that students will be hesitant to report misconduct, Harvard argued in its filings, out of a mistaken belief that the university will raid their medical records. It also means the original narrative—that Comaroff is a sexual predator protected by powerful men—still hangs in the air.
In fact, the university found no evidence that the 77-year-old anthropologist had committed sexual assault. His critics have nonetheless painted Harvard as a hotbed of misogyny, one hell-bent on silencing women by any means necessary.
Such portrayals pervade stories about campus sexual misconduct, even when the allegations underlying them are weak. The New York Times in 2018 published a 2,600-word article about another Harvard professor, Roland Fryer, whom the university was investigating for sexual harassment. The report—”Star Economist at Harvard Faces Sexual Harassment Complaints”—omitted numerous findings from the investigation that cast doubt on the allegations, including that the complainant “broadly mischaracterized” Fryer’s conduct.
Comaroff is an example of the damage that this sort of reporting can inflict. In May 2020, Kilburn and two other graduate students, Amulya Mandava and Margaret Czerwienski, filed Title IX complaints against the elderly anthropologist, which the Harvard Crimson framed as referenda on “decades-old power structures.” At every turn, coverage of the case has raced ahead of the facts, maligning a professor whom Harvard’s own Title IX process cleared of sexual assault.
That coverage didn’t just besmirch Comaroff but also put tremendous pressure on Harvard to figure out a way to punish him. The school’s initial investigation, completed in August 2021, found only a minor violation of Title IX—an allegedly off-color comment Comaroff made during office hours. But amid continued coverage of the case, Harvard began investigating some of Comaroff’s other comments—which the school determined did not violate Title IX—as potential breaches of its “professional conduct” policy.
“I think it’s clear that Harvard didn’t like the results of the first investigation, which mostly exonerated Professor Comaroff, and was determined to punish him as harshly as possible,” O’Meara-Costello said. The university placed Comaroff on a semester of unpaid leave in January for allegedly violating both its sexual harassment and professional conduct policies and barred him from teaching required courses for at least a year. Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.
The sanctions are part of a broader pattern, O’Meara-Costello told the Free Beacon, of universities punishing professors who are exonerated in Title IX investigations but crucified by the media—or by their own students and colleagues. “Once a faculty member is accused of sexual misconduct, even a finding of non-responsibility in the Title IX process is no guarantee that a university will not impose career-ending consequences,” O’Meara-Costello said, adding that she was aware of “multiple cases” like Comaroff’s.
Such cases reflect an ongoing clash between Title IX regulations and the schools that are subject to them. In 2020, the Trump administration put in place rules that strengthened due process protections in campus sexual assault proceedings. Though the Biden administration is trying to claw back those rules—with the support of many universities, including Harvard—there are still limits on how Kafkaesque Title IX offices can be. That’s created an incentive for schools to refer harassment allegations to other bureaucracies, where there is often more wiggle room to mete out punishment.
In May, for example, Princeton University fired a tenured classics professor, Joshua Katz, whom the university’s Title IX office had cleared of sexual misconduct. Rather than accept the results of that investigation, Princeton punted the case to another office—one with fewer due process protections for the accused—which found that Katz had violated a vague “honesty and cooperation” policy. Like Comaroff, Katz had been portrayed in his university’s student newspaper as a serial predator protected by powerful faculty.
These sorts of portrayals were a recurring headache for Harvard. The university made several unflattering appearances in the 2015 documentary Hunting Ground, which claimed to unmask coverups of sexual assault on college campuses. In February 2018, the Chronicle of Higher Educationreported that Harvard had turned a blind eye to decades of harassment by a prominent government professor, Jorge Domínguez. Later that year, the New York Times came out with its exposé about Roland Fryer, who has since been barred from supervising graduate students.
Then in May 2020, the Harvard Crimsonreported that three anthropology professors, not just Comaroff, had weathered sexual misconduct allegations over the past decade. Comaroff, the Crimson suggested, was but one node in an “old boys’ network” that preyed on vulnerable women. Though the article noted that three students were “in communication with Harvard’s Title IX office,” it did not name Comaroff’s accusers or detail the allegations against him, which only became public in an August 2020 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
That story, like the Crimson‘s, framed Harvard as a bastion of regressive power structures that protect “powerful men.” With the bad press mounting, Harvard placed Comaroff on paid leave in August 2020 pending a “full review” of the “allegations that have been reported.”
The most serious allegations came from Kilburn, who claimed that Comaroff had fantasized aloud about her being raped and touched her without her consent. Notes from her therapist, she told university investigators, could corroborate those allegations.
“I think [the therapist] should have a bunch of notes or memories for you,” Kilburn said in an August 2020 interview with the university’s Office of Dispute Resolution, a transcript of which Harvard filed in court.
Though media reports have suggested that Kilburn was blindsided by the university’s decision to get in touch with her therapist, the court filings show that she explicitly listed the therapist as a witness Harvard should contact. In a September 2020 email to investigators, she provided the therapist’s contact information, writing that it would “make sense” for “you to speak to” her.
By this point, the court filings suggest, Harvard had warned Kilburn seven times that any material shared with investigators would also be shared with Comaroff, a disclaimer Kilburn acknowledged in writing.
“Both parties have the right to review and respond to all information” that the university “may rely on in the investigation,” one email from investigators said, including “any written information provided by a witness.” On July 6, 2020, Kilburn replied: “Thank you for this information—it is helpful.”
Later in July, Kilburn had two Zoom meetings with the Office of Dispute Resolution, which reiterated that each party would have access to everything the other submitted. Those meetings are recounted in an affidavit from a senior Title IX investigator and in transcripts of the meetings taken by a second Title IX official.
In October, per Kilburn’s written request, the university contacted her therapist, who turned over two sets of notes from her sessions with Kilburn, the court filings show. As the investigation progressed, Harvard continued to remind Kilburn that it was sharing all of the evidence it gathered, including the therapy notes, with Comaroff. There is no record of any objections to those disclosures until after the investigation concluded—and after it became clear that the university hadn’t bought her most lurid claims.
Harvard determined in August 2021 that Comaroff, a scholar of African society, had violated Title IX by warning Kilburn not to travel with her same-sex partner to Cameroon, where lesbians are frequently the target of rape. He conveyed that warning in an inappropriate tone, the investigation found, but not with a sexual intention.
The school dismissed all of Kilburn’s other allegations, including the allegation of sexual assault. It also dismissed the allegations of the other two graduate students, Amulya Mandava and Margaret Czerwienski, who claimed that Comaroff had retaliated against them when they sought to expose his harassment of Kilburn.
But the pressure on Harvard was mounting. All three students were active in Harvard’s Graduate Student Union, which for years had waged a highly publicized campaign for stronger sexual harassment protections. That campaign escalated in fall 2021, energized by the allegations against Comaroff, and received glowing coverage in both the Harvard Crimson and the Boston Globe.
Amid the firestorm, Harvard notified Comaroff in October 2021 that it was hiring an outside lawyer, Alexandra Thaler, to determine whether some of his comments to Mandava had violated the school’s “professional conduct policy,” according to a detailed statement O’Meara-Costello provided to the Free Beacon.
Like at Princeton in the case of Joshua Katz, the second investigation had fewer due process protections than the first one. Harvard did not let Thaler interview any witnesses or consider additional evidence from either party, O’Meara-Costello’s statement said; the university required that she make her determinations based on a truncated excerpt of the evidence that Title IX investigators had gathered, which did not include several findings favorable to Comaroff.
Having reviewed this curated set of findings, Thaler concluded that Comaroff had violated the professional conduct policy by making remarks that Mandava perceived as threatening. The perception was what mattered: Thaler’s report said that Comaroff’s intent was irrelevant to whether he’d violated the policy, according to O’Meara-Costello’s statement.
Thaler did not respond to a request for comment. On January 20, Comaroff was placed on unpaid leave for the spring semester.
The sanctions—and the procedural hijinks that produced them—shocked 38 professors at the Ivy League school who on February 4 issued an open letter defending Comaroff. The signatories questioned how Comaroff could have violated Title IX by “informing students of the risks of gender-based violence.” And they attacked the university for subjecting their “excellent colleague” to double jeopardy, saying it set an ominous precedent for faculty.
Then came the lawsuit.
The complaint against Harvard, filed on February 8 by Kilburn, Mandava, and Czerwienski, didn’t just accuse the school of mishandling Kilburn’s therapy records. It also attacked Harvard’s “deliberate indifference” to Comaroff’s “decades-long pattern of harassment,” and lodged a number of allegations—many of them based on secondhand information—that were not included in the original Title IX complaints.
Those allegations were everywhere in a matter of hours. The New York Timespublished a piece on the lawsuit the same day it was filed—one of the few that acknowledged Harvard had cleared Comaroff of the worst charges against him. Other outlets were more one-sided. Some, like Gawker and the Daily Beast, seemed to take everything the plaintiffs said at face value.
Within 36 hours, 35 of the 38 professors who’d defended Comaroff withdrew their support, writing in a retraction letter that “we were lacking full information about the case.”
The only ones who did not sign the retraction letter were law professors, who argued that the new allegations—none of which had been investigated—didn’t negate the due process concerns.
But the damage was done. On February 20, more than three-quarters of Harvard’s tenured anthropology professors called on Comaroff to resign. And on July 26, over 250 students and professors signed a petition demanding that Comaroff be barred from teaching, even after his semester-long suspension was up. The petition repeated the allegations that Harvard’s Title IX investigators had dismissed, as well as the others that were breathlessly reported in the press.
It wasn’t just Comaroff’s reputation that was in tatters. It was the Title IX bureaucrats’. Throughout February, students inundated the university with concerns about their own medical records, which Harvard’s Title IX coordinator, Nicole Merhill, tried in vain to quell. On February 10, Merhill issued a statement disputing the media coverage and assuring students of her office’s commitment to confidentiality. A week later, she issued an apology, saying that her initial statement had “contributed to further concerns around trust.”
Those concerns, she added, “included some indicating their hesitancy to seek out resources, including counseling resources,” from the university.
The about-face reflected the lesson of the Comaroff saga: Once a media narrative sets in, it can be very difficult to dispel.
“When Harvard filed its motion for summary judgment, I thought—naïvely, in retrospect—that we would see reporting about whether Ms. Kilburn’s story was actually true,” O’Meara-Costello said. “That completely did not happen.”
Why? Because one of the above headlines is unlike the others. The first two stories reveal the nature of the Iranian regime—a gang of criminal theocrats that since 1979 has spread chaos and murder throughout the world. The third headline reveals the gullibility of Western politicians and diplomats who, despite never-ending reminders of the Islamic Republic’s aims and capacities, persist in trying to appease it.
Negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal have been taking place in Vienna since April 2021. They have gone nowhere. Yet the Biden administration insists on playing a starring role in this diplomatic farce. Nothing that happens in the outside world penetrates the bubble where the diplomats reside.
Some history:
• Iran refused to speak to the United States directly. We obliged. The talks are indirect—a sign of American weakness.
• Ali Khamenei ensured that his potential successor, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric sanctioned by the United States, was “elected” president last summer. Not only did we continue negotiations. We are also now debating whether to provide Raisi an entry visa so he can spout regime propaganda at the U.N. General Assembly next month.
• America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, one year old this week, seriously undermined our credibility and our security. It weakened our influence in the Greater Middle East. Yet Biden didn’t change his foreign policy. He doubled down on his Iran gambit.
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February was a hinge of history—a moment when, we have been told, “everything” changed. Everything but the Iran negotiations. Russia, despite its outlaw status on the international stage, continues to serve as Iran’s intermediary. Maybe we should take the hint?
All this happened in the months before the Bolton assassination plot and the attack on Rushdie. And those violations of U.S. sovereignty and rule of law are related to Iranian malfeasance. The Justice Department charged a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for attempting to hire a hit man who would target the former U.S. national security adviser. Rushdie’s assailant may have been in contact with the IRGC, as well, and was unquestionably inspired by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s first Supreme Ruler, Ayatollah Khomenei, who called for the British-American novelist’s death in 1989.
And what, you ask, does Iran continue to demand of the United States as a condition for reentry into the nuclear deal? In a piece for CNBC headlined, “A renewed Iran nuclear deal appears closer than ever. Here are the final sticking points,” Natasha Turak writes, “Iran wants the Biden administration to remove its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from its [i.e., America’s] designated terrorist list, which so far Washington seems unwilling to do.”
Imagine that.
Biden would be committing political seppuku if he removes the IRGC from the terror list. Even he can see the danger there. He’d be handing the beleaguered Republicans an issue in the final months before the midterms. It has the potential to taint media coverage of his supposed diplomatic triumph.
The IRGC “sticking point” is politically troubling. Another sticking point is impossible. Iran wants the United States to guarantee that future presidents will abide by the deal. However, the only constitutional way to do this would be to submit the nuclear agreement to the Senate for treaty confirmation. Of course, Biden can’t do that, because the treaty would fail. Leaving Biden at an impasse.
One he refuses to acknowledge. Perhaps the Biden team is now so full of themselves after a string of legislative victories at home that they are ready to make additional concessions to get what they mistakenly believe will be a victory abroad. The press will love this narrative, of Biden going from strength to strength and win to win, no matter the costs to U.S. security and stability in the Persian Gulf and Shiite Crescent.
Another scenario is that, while neither Iran nor America agrees to this latest proposal, the talks continue intermittently because they serve each party’s goals. Iran is using this time to build its nuclear infrastructure. America doesn’t want to face the hard choices that follow from a recognition that diplomacy has failed.
That is why all peace processes or arms control negotiations continue despite the evidence that they achieve nothing. The process itself becomes an end for the West. Meanwhile, the process serves as cover for the West’s enemies.
“We have a miserable, bipartisan track record of not responding to Iranian aggression and terrorism,” Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies observed the other day. Biden has an opportunity to correct the record by demonstrating American strength in response to Iranian outrages. It’s an opportunity he won’t take.
The page, titled “Understanding mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines,” says it was last updated on July 15. But archived versions of the page show that key portions were removed on July 22 or July 23.
The version captured on July 22 includes the claim, “The mRNA and the spike protein do not last long in the body.”
“Our cells break down mRNA from these vaccines and get rid of it within a few days after vaccination,” it says. “Scientists estimate that the spike protein, like other proteins our bodies create, may stay in the body up to a few weeks.”
A CDC spokesperson acknowledged to The Epoch Times that the removal happened, despite the page still saying it has not been updated since July 15.
“CDC routinely reviews our webpage information to ensure we have consistent and up-to-date recommendations. In an effort to make all COVID-19 vaccine webpages consistent, information on the Understanding mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines webpage was adjusted and a portion was removed,” the spokesperson said in an email.
The removal drew criticism from some, including scientist Ray Armat, who first noticed the stealth edit.
In a social media post, he described the alteration as done “in a tacit/underhanded way.”
“The CDC is quietly deleting misleading information from their website,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) added.
The Claims
Messenger RNA is the technology utilized by both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, the most administered vaccines in the United States and a number of other countries.
The vaccines deliver the mRNA into muscle cells, where the mRNA triggers the production of the spike protein. The spike protein is a component of the virus that causes COVID-19. The spike protein remains on the cell’s surface, which trains the immune system to produce antibodies against the virus.
After that process is finished, the cells break down the mRNA and it leaves the body as waste, according to the CDC.
The agency makes several challenged claims about mRNA vaccines, including alleging the mRNA does not affect or interact with a person’s DNA.
For one, the CDC could not provide any documents supporting that claim, nor several related claims. And some studies have indicated that the mRNA does interact with DNA, including one from Swedish researchers, while others have found the mRNA lingers for weeks after vaccination.
Pfizer has maintained that its vaccine “does not alter the DNA sequence of a human cell” and the CDC spokesperson said the alteration to the webpage “was not a change to the science of how the mRNA vaccines work.”
“The mRNA from these vaccines are broken down by the cells that interpret this coding, and the process takes a few days after vaccination,” the spokesperson said.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reacting to the recording-breaking number of illegal immigrants walking through the southern border.
The world’s richest person was replying to reporting from Fox News’s Bill Melugin, who posted on Twitter drone footage of a group of hundreds of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border at Eagle Pass, Texas, into the United States.
In his post, Melugin cited Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics showing border agents to have encountered 400,000 illegal immigrants so far in the Del Rio sector in fiscal year 2022 (since October 2021), a number that’s already more than double the total number of encounters in fiscal year 2021. This number doesn’t include “gotaways”—illegal crossers who evaded apprehension.
Strange that this receives very little attention in the media
“Strange that this receives very little attention in the media,” Musk wrote in response to Melugin on Aug. 14.
Musk, a self-portrayed political moderate and a design engineer by trade, has shared his perspective with his 100 million-plus followers on a wide range of issues beyond cars and rockets.
The billionaire’s comments on the border crisis, for example, were the latest in his series of criticism of the current administration and the Democratic Party in general; others include his comments on the influence of labor unions on the Democratic party, the Spygate collusion scandal involving Clinton-affiliated Democrats, and the Biden White House’s alleged sidelining of Tesla’s role in the electric vehicle market.
The Bigger Picture
The backstory to the exchange between Musk and Melugin features an ever-increasing surge in illegal immigration, overextended Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) resources, and an administration that actively strives to undo Trump-era “America First” immigration policies.
Eagle Pass is only one of the regions along the southwest border where hundreds of illegal immigrants pour into the United States. From the beginning of fiscal year 2022 on Oct. 1, 2021, to early August this year, border patrol agents apprehended 1.8 million illegal crossers. That’s more than the population of Phoenix, Arizona, the fifth-most populous city in the country, and about 40 percent higher than the total number of apprehensions in the previous fiscal year.
BORDER: Border Patrol agents organize hundreds of illegal immigrants who have streamed across the border from Mexico near Eagle Pass, Texas, on May 20. pic.twitter.com/ftZyyhfTc0
— Charlotte Cuthbertson (@charlottecuthbo) May 21, 2022
The head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), meanwhile, insists that the border is secure, while the Biden administration is kept busy by legal disputes with border states about key Trump migration policies.
One of the policies that the Biden administration began pulling back—following a Supreme Court decision that ruled in its favor—was the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required non-Mexican migrants seeking asylum in the United States to wait in Mexico for processing.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration will continue to enforce the Trump-era immigration and public health policy known as Title 42, a policy instated as a COVID-19 countermeasure that allowed the United States to quickly expel migrants who unlawfully entered the United States and bypassed health screening in the process. A judge blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to lift Title 42 in May.
A Border Patrol agent organizes a large group of illegal immigrants near Eagle Pass, Texas, on May 20, 2022. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Another legal battle that will be consequential to border security will play out in the Supreme Court in the fourth quarter of this year, when the highest court will hear a case on whether Biden’s immigration enforcement guidelines constitute executive agency overreach. In July, the Supreme Court allowed a federal judge in Texas to block the Biden administration’s immigration guidelines that, according to the border states’ prosecutors, limit the ability of border agents to detain and deport illegal aliens.
“The Biden Admin’s border record is an absolute failure,” Chad Wolf, former acting DHS secretary in the Trump administration, wrote on Twitter on Aug. 17, following reports of anonymous CBP sources saying that a record-setting 2 million illegal crossers were apprehended since the beginning of fiscal year 2022.
“I encourage Republicans next year to enact strong oversight in this area – specifically how DHS leadership executed an intentional plan to endanger migrants and American communities by refusing to enforce the law,” Wolf wrote.
State CFO proposes 4-pillar protection plan to fight back
The IRS has already been tracking annual sales of $600 or more on eBay and other selling platforms. eBay sent me a letter regarding this change (AKA a warning notice). What person making over $400,000 is going to bother selling items on eBay? [US Patriot]
PUNTA GORDA, Fla.–On Aug. 16, small business owners and independent contractors across Florida became fearful of their futures as Gov. Ron DeSantis questioned the sanity of Washington.
On that day, Joe Biden signed into law the “Inflation Reduction Act,” giving the IRS nearly $80 billion, with $45.6 billion going towards “enforcement,” which requires hiring more agents.
But what stood out the most among Florida’s small business owners was who the expanded agency would target for auditing.
At a press event on Aug. 17, DeSantis expressed frustration.
“What have they done? … 87,000 new IRS agents and they are going after you.”
They will be unleashed on American taxpayers, he said. ” … they are gonna go after independent contractors.”
Uber drivers, handymen “and others” are identified as independent contractors and all are “contenders” for audits, DeSantis said. “They’re going to crush a lot of people by doing that.”
Not only will small businesses be targeted, but also “people that the government doesn’t like,” the governor said.
“Let’s just be honest,” he said. “We’ve seen how this operates–you have these enforcement agencies that basically represent one faction of the country and they are going after the other.”
Even though IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said in an Aug. 4 letter to Congress that the billions in funding won’t increase “audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans,” others beg to differ.
Bobby Gross Jr. is part owner of his family’s 50-year-old paving company located in Port Charlotte and believes that the IRS is coming after small businesses like his.
“They’re (IRS) there to hunt, and we’re the prey,” Gross told The Epoch Times on Aug. 17. “The government is going to pay for the Inflation Reduction Act on the backs of small businesses.”
Gross believes small businesses are the key to raising the $750 billion price tag for the new law because “there aren’t that many billionaires in the country,” that can “generate enough money to pay for it.”
Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, Jimmy Patronis in April 2022. (Courtesy, CFO Jimmy Patronis)
Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis agreed and will propose in the upcoming legislative session what he calls the “Four Pillars of IRS Protection.” He is doing this to “get in front of” whatever the IRS has planned. But make no mistake, he says, “Florida is a target,” especially conservatives.
“Even though the Free State of Florida cannot control the insanity of Washington we must do what we can to protect our small businesses,” Patronis told The Epoch Times on Aug. 18. “This massive super expansion of the IRS is concerning to me. I think Washington is totally disconnected from what real Americans and Main Street is feeling.”
The four pillars of protection Patronis is suggesting involve requiring state-chartered banks to generate a regular report on IRS engagement in order to identify if patterns of “targeting the middle class and small businesses are ongoing. Second, establishing a Civil Liability Trust Fund to help small businesses defend themselves–or sue the IRS–in cases of politically motivated audits or any federal overreach. Third, requiring new IRS agents coming into the state to have a Florida license. And last, establishing criminal penalties by enforcing laws based on viewpoint or political discrimination.
Political discrimination, as Patronis called it, is a concern for Carl Mottler, who owns a land-clearing company in Southwest Florida.
“I think every conservative, every conservative business, every conservative-run state and city will be targeted because that’s exactly what we have seen in the past,” Mottler told The Epoch Times on Aug. 17. “We saw it with the IRS targeting the Tea Party when Obama was president.”
In 2013 Lois Lerner “retired” from her position as the director of Exempt Organizations of the IRS. She was found guilty of “neglect of duties” after she testified in a Congressional oversight committee hearing that the IRS had “wrongly scrutinized conservative groups” and that it “had been going on for years.”
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the IRS projects to bring in almost $204 billion in revenue from 2022 to 2031. In the fiscal years 2015 and 2019 IRS audits declined by 44 percent, according to a 2021 Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report.
Mottler said the process in any IRS audit is “unfair” and that the IRS has an “unfair advantage.”
“The problem with the IRS is that they are judge, jury, and executioner of all things financial,” he said. “There’s no due process, they can take and seize everything you have, and you have to try and show that you’re in the right; and you have to because they’re the ones who judge whether you’re right or wrong, and then they’re the ones who impose the sentence.”
Mottler said the IRS needs an “overhaul” not hiring more agents–especially ones that carry firearms.
Nurse practitioner Lisa Ransom said she has the same fears and doesn’t understand why IRS agents would carry a firearm and be asked to possess the “fortitude to pull the trigger.”
“These political people who held office … being arrested and strip-searched. Well, look at Trump—if they can do that to him and other people what will they do to us? “she asked. “This is still America. Are they really going to force their way onto your private property?”
Ransom who began her private medical practice three months ago said she is bothered and upset at the prospect of losing everything she has worked for because of the new law.
“Without any notice, they can just seize your assets and bank accounts before you have had a chance to defend yourself,’ she said. “They can put you out of business.”
Above all, Ransom said she worries about what IRS scrutiny could do to the economy.
“People will just stop using their bank accounts and go straight to operating on a cash basis,” she predicted. “I guarantee that’s what’s going to happen because you can’t track cash.”
Patronis said Ransom’s concerns are justified.
“Lisa is right, it’s gonna have a chilling effect on commerce,” Patronis said. “You will have people hoarding cash, out of just a simple fear.”
Gross said he wonders if cash apps like PayPal will be affected by the new legislation.
“What if you want to sell your couch on Craigslist to pay bills,” he said. “Will the IRS track that and wonder what you did with the money?”
“What strikes me as odd is the way the government is going about this … like World War II stuff where they are tracking our every move and we will be labeled and targeted based on our political views and affiliations,” he said. “What happens after the audit—financial concentration camps?”
Thanks to the Inflamatory Reinforcement Act, the poor and conservative will be attacked by the weaponized IRS. This regime sucks so much Chinese wienerschnitzel their eyes are fully white. [US Patriot]
The IRS audited 197 low-income families for every high-wealth family in 2019, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a number that some experts expected to climb under an IRS turbocharged with more money and manpower.
Over the next decade, the Democrat’s new “Inflation Reduction Act” will provide the IRS with 87,000 new agents and $80 billion in funding, with nearly $46 billion earmarked for enforcement.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the tax and spend bill is projected to bring in $203.7 billion in revenue from 2022 to 2031.
Joe Biden’s administration has promised no new taxes or audits on households making less than $400,000 per year.
But experts say that promise may be hard to keep.
A previous CBO analysis using a similar funding plan featured in the Inflation Reduction Act found audit rates would be restored to levels around 10 years ago. The analysis showed the audit rates would rise for all taxpayers, but the ones with higher incomes would face the biggest increase.
The oldest data available in the 2022 GAO report released this year were from 2010. That’s when the IRS was better funded and staffed with some 95,000 full-time employees.
From 2010–2019, the IRS audited 0.9 percent across all income groups compared to 0.25 percent now.
Rachel Greszler, a budget and entitlements senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told The Epoch Times that even returning to the 2010 audit levels for those making more than $400,000 per year, would still fall short of the IRS’s revenue goal.
“My rough estimate shows that returning to the 2010 audit levels for all income groups would only generate a little over 20 percent of the bills’ estimated enforcement revenues in 2031,” she said.
In her commentary on the Heritage Foundation’s website Aug. 12, Greszler wrote the numbers don’t add up using 2019 data either without the lower- and middle-class.
Even increasing recent audit rates 30-fold for taxpayers making over $400,000—including 100 percent audit rates on taxpayers with incomes over $10 million—still would fall more than 20 percent short of raising the estimated $35.3 billion in new revenues by 2031, she wrote.
So it stands to reason that taxpayers can expect audit rates more like those about a decade ago.
GAO statistics show a larger number of audits in 2010 for taxpayers in the $0–$24,999 tax bracket than the high wealth households. About 579,000 audits were performed on the lowest tax bracket in 2010, compared to 197,000 in 2019.
Yet for the wealthy, high wealth audits of $10 million or more stood at 2,800 in 2010, dipping to 1,000 in 2019.
While a higher percentage of high wealthy households is audited more than poor ones, the lower class sees more audits overall.
A better-funded IRS in 2010 audited the poor much more aggressively than the super wealthy—at a rate of 207 to 1.
In recent years, the IRS audited taxpayers with incomes below $25,000 and those with incomes of $500,000 or more at higher-than-average rates. But, audit rates have dropped for all income levels—with audit rates falling the most for taxpayers with incomes of $200,000 or more, according to the GAO report.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which is a scaled-down version of Build Back Better negotiated by Democrats Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), took Republicans by surprise. The measure passed the Democratic-controlled Senate and Congress last week through a reconciliation process.
Joe Biden (C) signs the Inflation Reduction Act with (L-R) Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington on Aug. 16, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Alarm bells sounded for Republicans after Democrats shot down an amendment to the bill proposed by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) to protect the working class from more audits. Crapo’s amendment stipulated that none of the funds from the Inflation Reduction Act could be used to audit taxpayers making under $400,000 a year. Still, all 50 Democrats in the Senate voted against it.
Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee said CBO calculated the monetary impact of Crapo’s amendment. Calculations confirmed that had lower- and middle-income taxpayers been protected by the amendment, revenue in the Democrats’ bill would have been reduced by at least $20 billion.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen attempted to clear up “misinformation” about the bill in a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig. She wrote new resources allocated to the IRS “shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen testifies before the Senate Finance Committee in Washington, on June 7, 2022. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
However, her directive isn’t included in the bill, meaning it won’t have the power of law. Tax experts and analysis from the nonpartisan scorekeeper at the CBO indicate Yellen’s promise will likely be broken if the IRS sticks to its income expectations.
“Again, this has no teeth behind it,” said Preston Brashers, a senior tax policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation.
Brashers said it would take time for the audits to start rolling, increasing as the tax agency adds tens of thousands of new agents. Proponents of the bill say a large number of those 87,000 employees will fill jobs lost through attrition, but Brashers said it appears that the agency will almost double in size.
In a press release, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) estimated that the Democrats’ bill would amount to 1.2 million new audits of taxpayers per year. Over 710,000 of these audits would fall on Americans who earn $75,000 a year or less.
House Ways and Means Minority Leader Kevin Brady (R-Texas) speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on May 13, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“If you’re an American worker making $75,000 a year, you are 4x more likely to see a tax hike from this bill than any tax relief at all. You’re hitting middle class families directly and through higher energy prices as well,” Brady wrote on the Ways and Means GOP Twitter feed.
Audits of Least Resistance
Another taxpayer category likely to be audited more is rural, low-income households claiming an Earned Income Tax Credit, according to the IRS.
Those who claim the EITC credits often make mistakes or don’t understand the rules, which makes auditing these returns low-hanging fruit for the IRS because they don’t require many man hours. The opposite is true of audits of wealthy families who can afford accountants and lawyers.
A much larger number of returns claiming EITC credits are audited compared to the wealthiest households. In 2019, the number of audits of low-income families claiming the EITC credit compared to high wealth audits of $10 million or more was 205 to 1.
In 2010, that ratio was somewhat lower at 177 to 1. However, the number of EITC audits was much greater at 496,000 in 2010 compared to 205,000 audits in 2019.
These refundable credits can provide a sizable refund if the taxpayers are qualified.
Families with three or more children can receive a maximum of $6,242, and households making under $21,000 without children can receive a maximum of $503, according to a 2016 GAO report on refundable tax credits.
James R. McTigue, a director in the GAO’s strategic issues team, told The Epoch Times the IRS and members of Congress are concerned about fraud when it comes to EITC credits because of their value. Tax prep businesses may also give low-income taxpayers bad advice, triggering more audits.
“So the IRS does audit those claiming the EITC credit at a slightly higher rate than they do for people in those lower income categories,” he said.
The GAO report noted that audits of the lowest-income taxpayers, particularly those claiming the EITC, resulted in higher amounts of recommended additional tax per audit hour, compared to all income groups except for the highest-income taxpayers.
But the premise that the IRS isn’t performing well due to lack of funding seems false based on recent revenue numbers, Brashers said, adding that new technology should make the agency more efficient even with lower full time positions.
Tax revenue is on track to reach a whopping 19.6 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 2022, he said.
“The truth of the matter is we are on pace for the second highest year as a percentage of GDP for taxes,” Brashers added.
Please understand that in an area that is 85 percent democrat, I see the most inconsiderate moves and attitudes possible. In small town America, the people are nowhere near this rude, and actually speak to you in a friendly fashion, even though you’re unknow to them. I think the way that people can be so thoughtless of others (blue states) is because of sociopathic tendencies beat into their nervous systems after years and years of self-absorbed thought pathing. Many are beyond rescue. We should abort them instead of innocent un-borns, as they have had years of chances and always choose evil. [US Patrtiot]
Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff took up several handicapped parking spaces during a Whole Foods shopping trip over the weekend.
Emhoff’s motorcade blocked off more than one handicapped parking spot for his shopping errand in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood.
The entertainment lawyer sauntered from the entrance of Whole Foods with two bags of groceries.
Emhoff bantered with a man who he assumed was a fan in the video, his Secret Service evidently deciding that the accommodation for the disabled didn’t apply to their protectee.
The move merited criticism on a Monday Fox News segment.
“Grab the privilege and ride it home, cowboy,” @HARRISFAULKNER decries “oblivious” Second Gentleman after his motorcade blocks handicapped parking spaces. pic.twitter.com/YDtDFS9zbh
Secret Service protectees often rely on their detail to do their grocery shopping for them.
It’s unclear why Emhoff decided it was necessary to travel to the luxury market himself, incurring additional difficulty and expense on members of the community.
Fox host Harris Faulkner took particular exception with Emhoff’s decision to help himself to a space reserved for the disabled.
“Just grab the privilege and ride it home, cowboy,” Faulkner said of Emhoff’s selfish move.
“I really don’t think it was mean-spirited, but it is another thing that that is politically dangerous — it’s oblivious,” the Fox host said.
Douglas’ detail was in the handicapped parking spots for more than 20 minutes, according to the Daily Mail.
🤡 “Secret Service detail blocks off handicap parking for 20 minutes while Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff shops at Whole Foods in Los Angeles” https://t.co/Vv9muqCSDN
Emhoff is the first person in history to hold the title of Second Gentleman. There’s never been a female Vice President before his wife, Kamala Harris.
This isn’t the first time that a federal protectee has used their Secret Service detail to avoid the inconveniences of everyday life in Los Angeles.
A Los Angeles neighborhood was swarmed with homeless encampments after Hunter Biden moved away from a luxury rental home.
Hunter’s Secret Service detail had seemingly kept third-world style urban camping out of the area.
A new video that focuses on the gender-transition madness sweeping America has resonated with the Twittersphere with more than half a million views as of Wednesday.
The video, posted to Twitter on Sunday on the Libs of TikTok account, shows an unidentified man sitting in the front passenger’s seat of a car as he recounts an experience he said he had with a doctor.
The date the video was made isn’t clear.
“So we just took my 3-year-old son to the doctor for a checkup — my 3-year-old son,” the man begins. “And there’s a reason why I’m emphasizing that, and you’re about to know why.
“So my wife and I are waiting in the room with our son, and the doctor comes in, and he sees my son sitting there at the table, and the first question that he asks him is, ‘Are you a boy or are you a girl?’”
The man said he and his wife exchanged “what the f***” looks of concern and bafflement.
This is really scary. Dad claims doctor asked his 3-year-old if he’s a boy or a girl at a routine check-up pic.twitter.com/rwOVNJeDHU
“So luckily my son understands obvious tenets of biology at 3 years old and says that he’s a boy, just like his chart says,” the man said.
“The rest of the appointment I couldn’t even focus because I’m wondering why in the world this guy is asking the question. And then I remembered, ‘Oh, yeah, I live in California.’”
The man noted that his concern is not just based on his experience, but what is taking place around him.
“Call me paranoid, but this is where I think we’re heading based on other things that have happened,” he said.
This is sick & evil.
Boston Children’s “gender clinic” sees toddlers as young as 2 & 3 years old.
Claims babies in the womb know they’re transgender.
Warns parents if they don’t “support” gender identity & trans, it will lead kids to suicide.
The man referenced a 2018 story from The Washington Times headlined “Religious parents lose custody of transgender teen for refusing hormone treatment.”
In the clip, the man also referenced a 2019 BBC story with the headline, “Texas parents battle in court for custody of transgender child.”
The man also cites a 2019 Heritage Foundation article that said the Equality Act “could lead to more parents losing custody of kids who want ‘gender transition.’”
Reminds me of this video where this mom explained how her toddler came out as trans after the doctor asked if he’s a boy or a girl. https://t.co/8oq461Ntlc
“So again, call me paranoid, but I’m wondering if the doctor’s asking the question of my son to see if he can establish a pattern over time that shows that my son wants to be a girl,” the man said in the video.
“But here’s the thing: My son is 3. I’m not even going to let him choose what he wants for dinner. And some days, my son thinks he’s a dinosaur. But I’m not going to let him transition to a dinosaur. …
“I don’t think it’s going to be long before we start seeing parents lose custody of their young kids because they’re not letting them transition to the opposite gender. And I think pediatricians are going to be the ones who are going to start calling it out.”
