A coalition of 19 Republican attorneys general says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink prioritizes left-wing political initiatives over shareholder returns and is jeopardizing the retirement of middle class workers with pensions.

Fink’s embrace of environmental, social, and governance investment policies, known as ESG, potentially runs afoul of several laws, the AGs charge in a letter sent to Fink. Instead of managing state pension funds and finding the best returns on investment, the AGs write, BlackRock uses “citizens’ assets to pressure companies to comply with international agreements” such as various climate initiatives.

Republicans are increasingly targeting asset managers such as BlackRock over their pro-ESG policies. They allege that these asset managers are transforming into backdoor channels for liberals to implement policies outside of the legislative process and leaving aside their principle, legal duty: maximizing returns for shareholders.

Critics of ESG say the policies are often arbitrary and can hurt a company’s bottom line. Moreover, ESG metrics can be gamed. Many companies, such as Tesla, receive a high ESG score under one metric while they rank poorly on another.

“Rather than being a spectator betting on the game, BlackRock appears to have put on a quarterback jersey and actively taken the field,” the AGs write. “As a firm, Blackrock has committed to implementing an ESG engagement and voting strategy across all assets under management.”

BlackRock manages an estimated $10 trillion in assets, a number larger than many first-world economies. Billions of those dollars come from U.S. pension funds. That extraordinary amount of money also gives billionaire Fink, a large donor to Democratic Party candidates and causes, tremendous influence over companies BlackRock invests in. Should Blackrock pull investments from a company over its climate or racial policies, two categories often included in ESG metrics, the company’s stock price would plummet.

The AGs assert that when BlackRock engages with companies over climate practices, it violates the states’ law about maximizing financial returns. For example, if BlackRock representatives pressure a company CEO to adopt a more expensive way to source energy in order to meet climate goals, that company may post lower profits. That drop in profits may translate to a lower stock price and harm pension funds invested in that company.

BlackRock has emerged as an explicit leader in the push “to retire fossil fuels,” the AGs allege. Part of that may be purely ideological or because of a desire to “attract investment from European or left-wing pension funds,” the AGs add. Regardless of motivation, BlackRock is obligated per law to only seek the best financial return on their investments.

Pressure from asset managers such as BlackRock appears effective. Sixty percent of respondents to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey last year said “investor pressure” was the number one reason that oil companies such as Exxon are not expanding operations.

The Biden administration recently picked BlackRock Investment Institute chairman Thomas Donilon to co-chair the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. During his time at the BlackRock Investment Institute, Donilon called on Americans to triple their investments in China, the world’s largest polluter.

West Virginia announced last month that it would no longer do business with Wall Street firms that boycott the fossil fuel industry. One of those firms included BlackRock. The ban will cost the firms $18 billion a year, according to the state’s treasury office.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

New DCCC ad pans to menu that lists prices in euros as narrator touts support for local entrepreneurs

A new Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ad aimed at wooing Latinos says Democrats “strengthened Arizona by investing in small businesses.” The business to which the ad subsequently cuts is almost certainly not in Arizona, or even America—its prices are listed in euros.

The DCCC released the ad Monday as part of a “six-figure digital advertising campaign to reach Latino voters,” the group said in a press release. During the spot, a narrator says Democrats supported Arizona entrepreneurs by investing in local businesses. But the restaurant to which the ad cuts is by no means local—its menu lists an array of overpriced options in euros. A goat cheese platter, for example, will set customers back 11 euros, while an avocado option costs 10.50 euros. Should an Arizonan want to visit the eatery, however, the cost would be much higher. The cheapest flight from Phoenix to the European Union is $750, according to online travel agency Kayak.

The DCCC’s intercontinental Arizona ad—which the group said would appeal to Latinos as they are uniquely concerned about “protecting small businesses” and “creating good-paying jobs”—marks Democrats’ latest botched attempt to appeal to Hispanics.

Just weeks ago, in July, first lady Jill Biden compared the Latino community to breakfast tacos. Days later, the DCCC released a radio ad targeting Texas Hispanics, which argued that even though Democrats “seem so out of touch,” they aren’t as bad as “these Republican extremists.” The ad was routinely mocked by liberal Latinos in the Lone Star State—Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha called it “the worst ad I’ve ever heard,” while a Texas Young Democrats member said the spot was “so cringe.”

The DCCC did not return a request for comment. Its ad comes as Democrats hemorrhage Hispanic voters, particularly in South Texas. In June, Republicans flipped a Rio Grande Valley House seat for the first time in more than a century, a result that made Mayra Flores the first Mexican-born woman elected to Congress. Flores even defeated her Democratic opponent in deep-blue Cameron County, which is 90 percent Hispanic and less than two years ago backed Joe Biden by double digits.

Democratic lawmakers and liberal media outlets alike have responded to the Republican Party’s gains with Latino voters by attacking Hispanic Republicans. Flores’s opponent in November, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D., Texas), argued in June that he is more qualified than Flores because he “wasn’t born in Mexico.” Weeks later, Arizona representative Rubén Gallego (D.) said a female Hispanic Republican running for Congress in the state was not sufficiently Latina because she took her husband’s last name.

The New York Times, meanwhile, said Flores’s win marked the “Rise of the Far-Right Latina,” citing the Republican’s support for religiosity, strong borders, and traditional values. A Texas political blog that has received campaign funds from Gonzalez also attacked Flores last month, referring to the congresswoman as “Miss Frijoles,” “Miss Enchiladas,” and a “cotton pickin’ liar.”

“Who does this Mayra Flores think she is? Somebody said she was crowned Miss Frijoles 2022 in San Benito,” Texas political blogger Jerry McHale, who has received $1,200 from Gonzalez’s campaign, wrote on July 2. “She isn’t in congressman Vicente Gonzalez’s league. She isn’t even in the bush leagues unless she doesn’t shave her p**sy.”

The DCCC is no stranger to bungled political ads. In addition to the European menu included in its Arizona spot, the group’s latest ad in New Mexico shows a person taking pills from a bottle labeled “FOR ANIMAL USE ONLY.” It’s unclear if the person in the ad is taking an animal version of the drug Ivermectin, which CNN labeled a “livestock drug” and a “horse dewormer” after popular podcaster Joe Rogan said he took it to treat COVID-19. Rogan was prescribed a human version of the drug.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Matt Cartwright, who has a history of tax delinquency, endorses bill that more than doubles agency’s size

Congressman Matt Cartwright has a history of tax delinquency. That isn’t stopping the Pennsylvania Democrat from backing a plan that would sic an army of nearly 90,000 new IRS agents on the American people.

Cartwright last year owed $436.63 in penalties and interest that stemmed from late property tax payments on his Washington, D.C., condo, the Washington Free Beacon reported last week. The incident was not his first tax-related mishap—from 2013 to 2018, the Democrat racked up thousands of dollars in penalties and interest related to his tax delinquencies. Still, Cartwright on Monday announced his support for the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ $430 billion spending bill that does little to fight inflation and gives the IRS $80 billion to hire up to 87,000 additional employees.

Cartwright’s history of tax delinquency and subsequent support for the bill could haunt the congressman as he faces a difficult reelection bid against GOP challenger Jim Bognet. Cartwright trails the Republican by 1 point with 9 percent of voters undecided, internal polling obtained by the Free Beacon shows. 

Cartwright will also have to overcome Joe Biden’s historic unpopularity, which has even extended to the president’s hometown of Scranton. In Cartwright’s eighth district, which includes Scranton, just 38 percent of voters approve of Biden, compared with 60 percent who disapprove, the Free Beacon revealed Wednesday. Despite Biden’s hometown woes, Cartwright is standing by the president—unlike some of his House Democratic colleagues, the congressman has publicly backed Biden to run for reelection in 2024. Cartwright was also a staunch Biden supporter during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, having said in 2019 that he was “honored” to endorse his “friend, northeastern PA hometown boy, Joe Biden for president.”

Cartwright did not return a request for comment. His Monday statement voicing support for Democrats’ latest spending bill did not include a comment on its IRS-related provisions. Should that bill pass the House, the IRS will receive $80 billion to hire as many as 87,000 additional employees. The hiring spree would more than double the size of the agency’s workforce, making the IRS larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined, the Free Beacon reported. Bognet has railed against the proposal, arguing that the Inflation Reduction Act should instead be called the “Audit America Act.”

“With that many new IRS agents, every small business can expect to be audited,” Bognet said Monday. “We must stop this spending spree, and we must stop this auditing spree.”

Beyond the Cartwright-backed bill’s proposed IRS expansion, even liberal economists don’t believe the $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act will reduce inflation. Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, whom Biden himself routinely cites, said in a new report that the legislation will cause no change in inflation until the third quarter of 2023, when Americans can expect to enjoy a .01 percent decrease.

Cartwright is nevertheless touting the bill as a win for Democrats. In his Monday statement, he called the bill “landmark legislation” that “the American people have been waiting for.”

Cartwright’s race against Bognet is not his first. The Democrat narrowly defeated Bognet by roughly 3 points in 2020, a result that marked the tightest reelection bid of his career. Bognet has thus far raised $1.2 million to Cartwright’s $3.5 million.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

SO WHEN ARE REPUBLICANS GOING TO GET OFF THEIR BUTTS AND CODIFY THIS TREND?

A majority of American voters support states requiring audits “immediately after elections” to protect election integrity, according to a new poll by Rasmussen Reports sponsored by The National Pulse.

Asked, “Should every state require that ballots be available immediately after elections for bipartisan voter reviews to enhance election confidence and transparency?” 56 percent of likely voters supported the idea while just 23 percent of likely voters opposed it.

The Rasmussen data showed that 68 percent of Republicans – considerably more than just 45 percent of their Democrat-voting counterparts – supported the push for election integrity. 57 percent of Independents were also in support.

When divided into the three ideologies of “Conservative,” “Moderate,” and “Liberal,” the data showed a similar trend: 73 percent of Conservatives responded “yes,” 52 percent of Moderates responded “yes,” and just 34 percent of Liberals responded “yes.”

The news follows Democrats attempting to universalize vote-by-mail in America’s forthcoming elections while Republican officials have sought to halt these efforts with election integrity measures. It also comes as the 2020 election results continue to be subject to scrutiny due to the nefarious influence of private foundations funding ballot harvesting efforts and unmanned ballot “drop boxes.”

The Rasmussen poll also inquires with voters “How important will the issue of election integrity be in this year’s congressional elections?”.

80 percent of likely voters felt the issue would be important, with 59 percent of individuals polled believing election integrity would be “very important.”

The feelings appeared to be nonpartisan, as 87 percent of Republicans, 78 percent of Democrats, and 76 percent of Independents believed election integrity would be important in the upcoming midterms.

MUST READ: BREAKING: WA-3 Candidate Joe Kent Has *HIS OWN BALLOT* Rejected After Wildly Delayed Election Count.

The poll comes amidst ongoing investigations into several late-night ballot dumps during the 2020 election, all of which supported Joe Biden, and far-left activist groups linked to George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg using hundreds of millions of dollars to boost voter turnout rates for the Democratic Party.

Mainstream media outlets, social media platforms, and Democratic officials have set out to censor individuals discussing voter fraud, despite pushing similar claims about Russian election influence throughout 2016 and the entirety of Donald Trump’s presidency. Under Biden, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has also targeted officials and activists fighting for election integrity by threatening criminal prosecution.

The Justice Department has to respond to motions to unseal a warrant that triggered the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, according to a magistrate judge who reportedly approved the search.

Judicial Watch and the Albany Times Union newspaper filed a motion to unseal the document earlier this week, which was granted by a judge in the case.

“On or before 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on August 15, 2022, the Government shall file a Response to the Motion to Unseal,” wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart on Wednesday afternoon, referring to the Department of Justice.

“The response may be filed ex parte and under seal as necessary to avoid disclosing matters already under seal. In that event, the Government shall file a redacted Response in the public record. If it chooses, the Government may file a consolidated Response to all Motions to Seal,” he wrote.

Neither the FBI nor Justice Department has issued public comments about the raid, which was first confirmed by Trump on Monday evening.

The FBI declined to comment when contacted by The Epoch Times, and the Justice Department has not responded to several requests for comment.

As for the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden was not aware of the raid before Trump’s announcement. Her claim was refuted by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social.

“What I can tell you definitively and for sure, he was not aware of this,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden. “Nobody at the White House was. Nobody was given a heads up and we did not know about what happened yesterday.”

Requests

On Wednesday, the Times Union’s managing editor, Brendan J. Lyons, wrote to Reinhart to ask for the warrant to be unsealed.

“Given that the search warrant(s) have been executed, and the target of that search has full knowledge of what occurred, there is no impediment to any ongoing investigation from the disclosure of the search warrant order or the returns. As such, these records should be unsealed,” the letter to the Florida judge reads.

Judicial Watch asked for the warrant as part of an investigation into “the potential politicization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice and whether the FBI and the Justice Department are abusing their law enforcement powers to harass a likely future political opponent of President [Joe] Biden.”

“If the Court were to unseal the materials, Judicial Watch would obtain the materials, analyze them, and make them available to the public,” the letter said. “Unsealing the records therefore would further Judicial Watch’s mission of educating the public.”

It comes as Eric Trump, a son of the former president, told the Daily Mail that a Trump attorney at Mar-a-Lago, Christina Bobb, asked FBI agents Monday about seeing a warrant.

“They would not give her the search warrant,” he told the outlet, referring to Bobb. “So they showed it to her from about 10 feet away. They would not give her a copy of the search warrant.”

Top Republicans, meanwhile, demanded an investigation into the raid and argued that it was politically motivated to wound the GOP ahead of the 2022 midterms. Some have said the Justice Department immediately needs to release documents pertaining to the raid.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said there needs be a “thorough and immediate explanation” of how the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was approved. Legal historians have said that such a raid against a former president is unprecedented.

“Attorney General Garland and the Department of Justice should already have provided answers to the American people and must do so immediately,” McConnel added.

Trump on Monday said that federal agents entered Mar-a-Lago despite him having cooperated with federal officials for months to return documents that he allegedly took from the White House after leaving office last year.

Reinhart came under fire Tuesday amid reports from several news outlets that found he had a connection to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Reinhart left his job as an assistant United States in early 2008 before he began representing some of Epstein’s workers.

According to a 2018 Miami Herald report, two of Epstein’s accusers alleged Reinhart left his prosecutor job to give Epstein inside information. Reinhart denied those allegations.

As his connection to the Epstein case went viral on Tuesday, it appeared the U.S. Southern District of Florida removed the judge’s page from its website, according to archived versions of the website.

“Access denied,” Reinhart’s page reads. “You are not authorized to access this page.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

China and Russia are the clear winners of the the carbon-reducing provisions in the Democrats’ latest spending bill that aim to cut fossil fuel emissions by 40 percent by 2030, according to former President Donald Trump’s erstwhile economic adviser.

Stephen Moore, a Trump-era adviser and senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told NTD in a recent interview that the climate-related provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act—now en route to final House approval—would hamstring American energy production and benefit adversaries.

“The two big winners from this bill clearly are Russia and China,” Moore said, adding that he thinks the bill is not just bad for the U.S. economy but it’s “really bad for national security to give up our energy dominance.”

Moore pointed out that China—which is responsible for around five times more carbon emissions than the United States—is now building dozens of massive coal plants and “obviously, they don’t care about climate change.”

As a major exporter of fossil fuels, Russia also stands to gain from efforts to accelerate curbs on U.S. carbon emissions as that would keep crude prices elevated and bolster Russia’s revenue stream, Moore said.

The economist argued that the Biden administration has “basically declared a war on our fossil fuels,” while pointing to Germany’s “experiment” of going all-in on clean energy a decade or so ago that he said “basically led to a complete economic collapse.”

“Let’s not follow in their footsteps,” he said.

Markets or Government Subsidies?

The Inflation Reduction Act includes $369 billion in climate and energy provisions, with measures like tax credits for buying electric vehicles, making homes more energy efficient, and installing residential solar panels and battery systems.

The measure also reinstates the superfund tax on crude and imported oil, which could lead to higher energy bills for households, and it includes a fee of up to $1,500 per ton for methane emissions.

Overall, the bill is set to more than triple power production from wind, solar, and energy storage capacity installations, according to an analysis from the American Clean Power Association (ACP).

“More simply, it means that roughly 40 percent of the country’s electricity will come from wind, solar, and energy storage by 2030,” ACP said in the analysis, which projects that the Inflation Reduction Act will, overall, deliver an estimated 525 to 550 gigawatts of new non-fossil fuel power by the end of the decade, up from the current 211 gigawatts.

The bill is also expected to generate over $900 billion in economic activity via the construction of clean energy projects between now and 2030, according to the association.

Moore said that he doesn’t object to renewable sources of energy but argued that market forces rather than government subsidies should be their key driver.

“We didn’t have the government subsidize Henry Ford when he invented cars,” Moore said. “We didn’t have the the federal government subsidize Standard Oil when it started making … gas plentiful and cheap for everyone. So why do we need to have the government throw hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in this industry?”

Moore also argued that, contrary to what its name implies, the bill won’t reduce inflation.

Inflation Reduction?

The Inflation Reduction Act “will increase inflation,” Moore said, adding that, “the reason we have 9 percent inflation today is because of the massive Biden spending spree.”

“There’s two things you don’t want to do when you have massive inflation. You don’t want to spend more government money. And when you’re in a recession, you don’t want to raise taxes. This bill makes both those mistakes,” he said.

Some disagree with Moore about the bill’s impact on inflation.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said in an Aug. 9 interview in The Harvard Gazette that “the tendency of this bill will be to reduce inflation because over time it reduces demand by bringing down budget deficits.”

Summers also argued that it would bolster the supply of key commodities in the energy sector, helping push down prices.

Other backers of the bill, like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), say the government subsidies for clean energy will have a knock-on effect and boost private investment in the sector and so accelerate cutting carbon emissions.

“This is going to be more massive than people realize,” Khanna told Politico in a recent interview.

“If the government invests $300 billion in solar, wind, batteries, and heat pumps, that has the potential to unlock trillions of dollars in private sector investment in climate,” he added.

Moore argued that the bill is less about the environment and more about money.

“This is a massive, now trillion-dollar, industry. This is about money, folks, this doesn’t have anything to do about cleaning up the environment or keeping our environment safe,” he said.

“This is massive numbers of huge companies and huge investors. They’re going to get very, very rich off of these hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies,” Moore added.

The American Petroleum Institute (API), a fossil fuels industry group, identified six problematic provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that it argued would undermine the industry’s ability to promote energy security for American consumers.

Besides the superfund tax and methane emission fees, the API also noted additional costs imposed on energy companies with the bill’s minimum book tax provisions and increased rental fees on onshore leases.

The group also panned the bill’s omitting of comprehensive permitting reform, which API believes is key for bolstering domestic energy production, lowering costs for consumers, and helping the country meet its emission objectives.

“Glaringly absent in the bill is permitting reform, which is required for America’s infrastructure needs and to bolster critical oil, natural gas, and renewable supplies to meet our current and future energy demand,” said Mike Sommers, API president and CEO, in a statement.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Former President Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump revealed that FBI agents wouldn’t hand over the search warrant during their Aug. 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago and removed an attorney from the property.

“There’s 30 agents there,” he told the Daily Mail on Aug. 10 of the FBI raid. ‘They told our lawyer … you have to leave the property right now. Turn off all security cameras.

“They would not give her the search warrant. So they showed it to her from about 10 feet away. They would not give her a copy of the search warrant.”

Attorney Christina Bobb was confused as to why the FBI couldn’t present the search warrant, according to Eric Trump.

“It’s all a coordinated attack with the FBI,” he said. “Do you think that the FBI director is going to raid the former president’s house, especially a house as you know, kind of world-renowned as Mar-a-Lago … without getting the approval of President [Biden]?”

The younger Trump said security cameras weren’t turned off. FBI agents accessed areas of the property where they “shouldn’t have been,” he claimed.

The former president confirmed the FBI raid on his property on the evening of Aug. 8. Both the FBI and Department of Justice haven’t issued public comments about the matter; The Epoch Times has contacted both agencies for comment.

Unconfirmed reports and anonymous sources say the raid pertained to a Department of Justice probe into whether Donald Trump held onto government documents after he left the White House last year.

All presidential correspondence and documentation have to be handed over to the National Archives when a president leaves office, according to a 1978 law.

“[The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)] had ongoing communications with the representatives of former President Trump throughout 2021, which resulted in the transfer of 15 boxes to NARA in January 2022,” David Ferriero, who served as NARA director from November 2009 until April 2022, wrote to House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) in February.

Ferriero said NARA requested that Trump representatives “continue to search for any additional Presidential records that have not been transferred to NARA, as required by the Presidential Records Act.”

But Bobb told Real America’s Voice that the raid over the documents is a “completely unnecessary power flex” and a “weird flex.”

“It’s quite honestly sad to see what they have done to our country,” she said.

Top Republicans demanded an investigation into the raid and argued that it was politically motivated to wound the Republican Party ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an Aug. 10 statement. “When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of their department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Hiring practices driven by diversity are ‘a recipe for disaster’

Southwest Airlines Co. (AKA SouthWoke Air [US Patriot]) is basking in accolades for its “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) efforts, award-winning customer service, and record-breaking quarterly revenues.

Behind the scenes of that rosy picture, heartaches are afflicting Southwest, called “the airline with Heart” because of its heart-shaped logo and a corporate culture steeped in “The Golden Rule,” treating others the same way they’d like to be treated.

But eight current Southwest employees, including three minorities, told The Epoch Times that “woke, leftist” DEI policies, as implemented, have tarnished the cherished Golden Rule principle, fractured a once-cohesive workforce, and, ultimately, may put safety at risk.

Faced with pandemic-related staffing shortages and pressure to add minorities, the company has changed the way it hires, trains, and disciplines workers—mostly to benefit less-qualified new hires representing the diversity rainbow, the employees say.

One Southwest flight attendant, a Hispanic female, said: “They are compromising safety for the sake of race, gender identity, and sexual preference … They’re risking people’s lives because of agendas.”

Southwest, one of America’s largest air carriers, didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

Similar issues have spread industry-wide, according to 10 airline employees who agreed to be interviewed. Four are pilots and six are flight attendants; most have 20 or more years of experience. All of them, including two American Airlines pilots, spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.

While no one thinks the policies are causing an imminent threat of a plane falling out of the sky tomorrow, all of the interviewees agreed that each time a standard is lowered, or a less-qualified employee is hired, the risk that something can go horribly wrong inches forward a notch or two. In an industry that depends on a near-miracle integration of people, machinery, and computers, even a few deviations can culminate in catastrophe.

Still, some employees worry about what could happen if current trends continue to stress out and distract safety professionals. Said one flight attendant: “It’s a recipe for disaster. I just hope I’m not at work when it happens.”

Us-Versus-Them Mentality

While promoting diversity sounds like a great idea, the inclusionary policies have actually become exclusionary at Southwest, employees say. Disparate treatment has divided their ranks into two distinct camps: those with “desirable” or “approved” personal, social, or political characteristics—and those without.

Minorities or people with leftist political views, varying gender identities, and alternative sexual orientations appear to be given wide latitude. This “protected class” is allowed to bend or break rules, and new hires in these classifications may be given extra chances to pass required skills tests, the employees said.

At the same time, veteran workers—especially those who are white, heterosexual, and conservative—find themselves in the crosshairs for almost anything, including making a personal statement of religious or political beliefs, the Southwest workers said. Even minorities can be shifted into this targeted group if they espouse personal beliefs running counter to causes that the company supports.

“There are two sets of standards: One for us and one for them,” said an experienced flight attendant.

One of her colleagues said: “The company is trying to eliminate anybody who does not agree with their agenda. The last few years, anybody who speaks up against them, they want gone.” That flight attendant said she had no problems at work until she posted her Christian religious beliefs on her personal Facebook page, along with her support of President Donald Trump. A coworker reported the posts to Southwest, and the flight attendant said she has faced repercussions ever since.

She and others say the targeting of conservatives is common—and they point to the recently publicized case of fired Southwest flight attendant Charlene Carter as a prime example.

‘Targeted Assassinations’ of Conservatives

Last month, a federal jury in Texas awarded Carter more than $5 million after finding that Southwest wrongfully terminated her and that her union didn’t live up to its duty to represent her. The company fired Carter after she expressed her pro-life views to a union leader via social media and opposed the union’s pro-abortion activism.

The company supported the union’s political activism, Carter’s suit says, by accommodating work-shift changes for union members so they could participate in the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., in January 2017. Marchers were protesting Trump’s inauguration; one of the primary sponsors of the event was Planned Parenthood. Southwest also showed “solidarity” with the protesters by bathing its airplane cabins in pink lights on some D.C.-bound flights, Carter’s lawsuit says.

Documents in the case revealed that some union officials and political activists were singling out dissenting Southwest employees for “targeted assassinations,” meaning that they would try to get the company to fire them, using the company’s social media policy as a bludgeon.

In an interview with The Epoch Times on Aug. 8, Carter, who lives near Denver, Colorado, said she can’t believe that some leaders of Transport Workers Union of America Local 556, who helped set her up to be fired, are still working for Southwest.

Carter also validated her coworkers’ concerns about the disparate treatment of employees who dare to oppose leftist agendas. “I think there are a ton of cases out there just like mine,” she said. Terminated employees from Southwest and other airlines have been continuously contacting Carter for help after learning about the July 14 verdict in her case.

Carter spent five years fighting in court; she thinks she was one of the first casualties of the erosion of Southwest’s unique corporate culture, which she witnessed during the latter part of her 20-plus years at the airline.

“We all loved our jobs; we all loved each other—our CoHearts, that’s what we called each other,” Carter said, pointing out that the airline’s stock ticker is LUV, a nod to its birthplace at Love Field, Texas.

Corporate Culture Shift

But corporate leadership and philosophy shifted. Carter said, her former coworkers tell her the culture is now one where people are fired on a whim, and they’re encouraged to file complaints against each other over perceived insults, such as failure to use the “preferred pronoun” of a person asserting an alternative gender identity.

Employees who face such accusations are presumed guilty, a current flight attendant said, and they risk suspension or termination. “That is how we are treated now,” she said.

“It’s gotten ridiculous,” Carter said. She was astounded to learn that lapel pins, designating preferred pronouns, are being offered to staff.

A fellow flight attendant says the company’s priorities are misplaced.

“We used to be focused on hiring ‘the best of the best,’” she said. “So why is it now that we feel at Southwest Airlines that we have to use the right pronouns and we have to acquiesce to someone’s gender-fluid mentality?”

The DEI Effect

The interviewed employees blame DEI policies for sowing the seeds of division. Ironically, before DEI was implemented, “people were never labeled,” a flight attendant said. “I find it very divisive,” she said, “because now everyone is labeled, divided by race, gender sexual orientation … whatever.”

“This is wrong—all the way wrong,” she said.

The company’s annual report, in its DEI section, says, “Southwest Airlines recognizes, respects, and values differences. … At Southwest, DEI is and always has been a part of our DNA.”

All four major airlines—and many other American companies—publicly disclose DEI-related information, such as data on minority recruitment and the racial makeup of their workforce.

“Every airline is trying to push forward with minority hiring because they want to ‘show that they care,’” aviation analyst Jay Ratliff said. “They’re being asked, ‘How many women are within your pilot ranks? … How many pilots of color?’”

If an airline’s diversity metrics seem low in comparison to their competitors’ numbers, the company’s reputation and bottom line can suffer, Ratliff said.

That’s not necessarily fair, he said, because few people have the ability, interest, and financial means to qualify as a commercial airline pilot. Amassing the FAA-required 1,500 hours of flight time with an instructor can cost $75,000 or more, pilots said.

Last year, United Airlines announced its goals: to train 5,000 new pilots by 2030 at its new flight school, with “at least half of those students to be women or people of color.” The first class of new recruits “exceeded that goal,” with 80 percent of the 30 students fitting that category, the airline said in a report.

Considering that white males make up about one-third of the American population, a Southwest pilot said that composing a class with 80 percent minorities and women looks like “DEI special-status hiring on steroids.”

Scoring Systems Push Diversity

DEI data play a significant role in corporate ESG scores—ratings of a company’s “environmental, social, and governance” performance. It’s a complex—and controversial—way to assess which companies are considered “good corporate citizens.”

Most of the interviewed airline employees believe that the pursuit of ESG scores is driving corporate personnel practices, including ignoring well-qualified male applicants while eagerly hiring less-experienced female and minority candidates.

Increasingly, ESG scores can help determine whether a company sinks or swims. A good ESG score can attract investors, government contracts, and favorable loan-interest rates—benefits that are especially important for the airline industry, in which lucrative U.S. Department of Defense contracts are at stake and profit margins are razor-thin because of astronomical costs for equipment and personnel.

ESG ratings have existed in some form for decades, yet they barely registered a blip on internet searches until a few months ago, amid the Biden administration’s continued push for businesses to address environmental concerns and to institute “green” policies, which weigh heavily in ESG scores and DEI metrics.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently announced his intent to push back against ESG, calling it “leveraging corporate power to impose an ideological agenda on society.”

Refinitiv, a company that produces ESG scores, says its process for calculating the ratings starts with collecting more than 630 ESG measures from each company’s public disclosures. Other ESG assessors have their own rating systems, which means results can vary depending on which assessment method is being used. ESG advocates are now working on standardizing how these scores are calculated.

Several airline employees said it would benefit their company, their industry, and society in general if ESG scores and DEI programs were abolished.

One Southwest pilot with decades of experience said such measures create unnecessary complications with no positive effect on the airline’s core mission.

“Why do we need DEI programs? Why do we need ESG? A lot of the public isn’t even aware these things exist,” he said. “The passengers just want people like me to get them, and their bags, to the same place at the same time, safely … DEI and ESG do nothing to support that—zero.”

“I need these DEI programs and ESG scores to go out the back of the airplane like the jet fuel that we burn.”

Non-Pilots Hiring Pilots

Southwest’s annual report says it has been “evolving hiring and development practices to support diversity goals.”

Those changes are troubling to the interviewed employees and to the pilots’ union. In a letter to members last month, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association pointed out that, for the first time in the company’s 51-year history, a non-pilot is in charge of hiring pilots. The “system chief pilot” used to have that responsibility. “We are just a single step away” from hiring pilots based upon mere reviews of their resumes, association president Casey Murray wrote to union members. Southwest has about 9,600 pilots, the letter said.

Putting a non-pilot in charge of hiring pilots most likely will affect the quality of the pilots who are being hired, Southwest interviewees said. People who lack specific knowledge of this specialized job would have a hard time telling the difference between a good hire and a bad one, pilots said. One of the interviewed pilots said that the chief pilot told him: “The diversity department has a very strong voice in who gets hired.”

Southwest wants to hire more than 2,000 pilots in the next year, the union’s letter said, questioning whether those new hires will be required to meet Southwest’s traditionally high standards. “Across the entire commercial aviation industry, employers are fighting for an ever-shrinking pool of qualified pilots,” yet Southwest may be at a disadvantage to compete for those pilots. Contract negotiations with Southwest’s pilots are lagging, compared to progress with other airlines’ pilot unions, Murray said.

“Pilots are the fuel that powers Southwest Airlines, and right now Southwest’s supply of fuel is running low. Time is growing critical, and options are becoming limited,” Murray wrote.

Seeking the Best (Non-White) Pilots?

Current pilots also say they have learned that hiring decisions are being driven by a job candidate scoring system; they’re unsure how long it has been in place, how it works, or whether it unfairly elevates minorities. The company controls all of that information.

Still, the employees feel confident in anecdotal evidence suggesting that the scoring system, coupled with other hiring practices, could be producing a pattern of discrimination against men, especially white men who come from military backgrounds—previously highly sought-after job candidates. “We could be wrong, but I don’t think we are,” said one pilot who has military experience.

That pilot said he thinks the vast majority of his colleagues have heard accounts of possible discrimination similar to the following:

When a well-qualified former military pilot applied for a job, Southwest never contacted him for an interview. But the applicant learned that a woman was hired as a pilot, despite having half as much experience in the airline industry.

Further, the man had experience as a captain while the woman had only been a first officer, who sits next to the captain in the cockpit. “It’s a completely different world” when a person shifts into the captain’s chair, said the pilot.

“We’re leaving a lot of people behind who are better-qualified, just because they’re the wrong color, or they’re identified the wrong way. That’s concerning. We’re not putting the best up-front,” he said. “We have people’s lives in our hands. It’s just like with doctors. If you go to a doctor, you want to go to the best doctor you can.”

An American Airlines pilot with decades of experience said he was less troubled than some of the Southwest interviewees who worried about the effects of reduced standards as a result of the increased emphasis on diversity hiring. However, that pilot said he would become very concerned if standards are lowered “to the point where people aren’t flying as confidently.”

A second American Airlines pilot said he has observed that “training is not nearly as comprehensive as it used to be,” he said. “But these people who are starting out are flying with people who are supremely qualified to be flying airplanes—so mistakes can be covered.”

He thinks the reduced standards could eventually cause problems if the hyperfocus on diversity continues: “If you’re looking for a diverse workforce and not a qualified workforce, you’ve got issues. … You haven’t seen any accidents because of ‘diversity,’ but the potential is there.”

All 11 people who were interviewed for this story, including Carter, the ex-flight attendant, said personal traits such as gender and race shouldn’t be part of the equation at all.

“From the cockpit door forward, guys and gals of all ethnicities are after the same thing—and that’s a safe flight,” said one of the American Airlines pilots. “They don’t care who sits next to them as long as they can do the job.”

More Than Snack Servers

Most air passengers think of flight attendants as hospitality ambassadors who make them comfortable with beverages, snacks, blankets, and pillows. But their main purpose is to assist in the rare event of an in-flight emergency.

Six Southwest flight attendants, along with Carter, say they feel less able to perform crucial duties because of the climate in which they’re now operating—and new hires appear to be less equipped to shoulder those responsibilities.

“They have just made it such a hostile work environment. Southwest has made it that way, and flight attendants are afraid to do their jobs,” a flight attendant said. “But you’re supposed to put a smile on your face and pretend that everything is grand.”

The flight attendants describe feeling as though a backstabber is always ready to pounce, to report any action or statement that doesn’t fit the corporate ideology. They’re being held to strict conduct and uniform standards while “accommodations” are extended to people in protected classes, such as a minority woman who was allowed to wear a nose ring—which got a white female in trouble—and a male flight attendant who described himself as “nonbinary”—neither totally male nor totally female—being allowed to wear a skirt that appeared to be shorter than regulations allowed.

The nonbinary employee seemed to be using his position at the airline as a platform for LGBTQ activism and self-promotion, rather than focusing on benefiting the company or its customers, fellow flight attendants said. They shared screenshots of the nonbinary employee’s social media posts. One is a selfie of the mustached man posing in his Southwest uniform, with the comment, “My dress looks better on me than most chicks.”

That employee no longer works for Southwest, flight attendants said. Yet they said they were aware that a couple of employees faced disciplinary action for referring to the nonbinary employee as “he” in a members-only Facebook group for flight attendants.

Antics Embarrass Fellow Flight Attendants

One flight attendant perceives that the company is making skewed, unfair hiring decisions, and creating a level of absurdity that’s hard to stomach. She knows of people who are related to Southwest employees and have college degrees—which go beyond the high-school education requirement for flight attendants—“and they don’t get hired, and yet we have this guy, with a mustache, in a skirt, distracting us all because the company wants to fight over his pronouns.”

Being a flight attendant used to be considered prestigious and classy; Southwest was viewed as “Mount Rushmore,” a pinnacle for flight attendants, who felt proud just to be hired.

“Now the pride is not about the brand of Southwest Airlines,” a flight attendant said. “It’s about how different I can be as an employee of Southwest Airlines—like, ‘Y’all need me more than I need you.’”

Public perception of the role has diminished, not just at Southwest, but across the industry. Airlines grant diversity-based exceptions to people who don’t want to look or act professional, the flight attendants said.

It used to be unusual to see flight attendants behave in ways that brought embarrassment to their coworkers. Now, quite a few of the new hires who were prized for their diversity “are rather risqué,” a flight attendant said. “They become very emboldened; they feel they can get away with this because they are in a protected class.”

Still, Southwest has had to fire employees who pushed the envelope too far, including one minority flight attendant who solicited sex in a social media video and another who videoed herself twerking. In both instances, the videos, provided to the Epoch Times, show the employees in Southwest uniforms.

Such conduct disgusts the flight attendants, and their concern is more than superficial. “If we relax the appearance standards and we’re letting people lower their professional standards, then they obviously are not equipped to handle any type of safety issue that can happen on that plane,” a flight attendant said.

“Where do you draw the line and say enough is enough?”

Commitment, Skills Insufficient

One of the flight attendants who has been targeted for religious and political views said her commitment to her job boils down to this: “I will give my life for my passengers and my crew, if that’s what I need to do. My last words will be, ‘Let’s roll,’” she said, referencing the famous words spoken by a passenger on one of the U.S. airplanes that were hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

She doesn’t see that same level of grit from the new hires. “They don’t have the same tough mentality,” she said. Nor do they have the same work ethic, which might be attributable to differences between the younger and older generations.

The older flight attendant described being busy from the beginning to the end of each flight while many of the new hires tend to just serve one round of drink orders, “then they go back to the back (of the airplane) and sit down for the rest of the flight.”

The new employees aren’t demonstrating mastery of the skills they were supposed to have been taught, or willingness to perform them. A passenger was having a medical emergency but the flight attendant in charge of that section “wouldn’t even come out of the galley to assist,” said one flight attendant. Instead, she and a second colleague had to take care of the ailing passenger.

Such an incident stokes her worst fear: “Somebody’s gonna die. With the lack of training that we’re seeing in the new hires that are coming out … there’s going to be somebody who’s not trained, facing an emergency.”

The irony is that, because of conduct problems and lack of devotion to the job, many of the “check-the-box” new hires either quit or are discharged, the employees said. That’s why it would make more sense for Southwest to be more selective in its hiring decisions—and to make those decisions based on the applicant’s qualifications and commitment to doing a good job, both of which now seem to be lacking.

Too Many Hires, Too Fast?

A flight attendant who is familiar with hiring practices said she is concerned about the speed with which large numbers of new employees were hired in recent months. She is hearing that up to 10,000 employees have been added to the roster, so the airline is now up to pre-pandemic staffing levels.

Her concern: It’s doubtful that the company had the capacity to properly vet and train such a large number of employees, including flight attendants, in such a short timeframe. In fact, she says it’s “mathematically impossible,” (That’s OK, because mathematics is racist anyway [US Patriot]) based on past observations of failure rates among new trainees.

For each class of about 50 flight attendants, about 15 trainees would “wash out,” or not make it through the rigorous testing process, which includes mastering emergency evacuation drills. Considering that, it’s most likely that “the standards would have to be relaxed” to allow large numbers of new hires to complete the process rapidly.

“There’s a mindset that’s changed…it seems like they’re accepting almost any applicant—here’s a body and here’s a checkmark” on the diversity list, she said.

She’s puzzled as to why Southwest pushed so hard to hire so many new flight attendants. “We don’t have all the airplanes that we were expecting to get,” she said. “Then why are we hiring all of these flight attendants?”

Less-Rigorous Training

Today’s training is “a lot shorter and a lot simpler” than it used to be, she said.

Carter said it’s her understanding that flight attendants now must pass only a few tests. In years past, “there were about three tests a week for six weeks,” she said. “You were breathing through a fire hose all of this information.”

She also said that if a trainee flunked a test, that person was given one chance to retake it, “and if you failed, you were done.” Now, Carter has been told that people are being given multiple opportunities for do-overs.

As a result, “I’m hearing from flight attendants that these people don’t understand what our safety is about here.”

Employees say they feel as though core values and common sense are falling by the wayside when they are asked to give wide berth to people asserting that they are gender fluid, or identify with a gender that doesn’t match their biological sex.

“I don’t tell a pilot that I identify as a pilot, and I’m going to fly the aircraft—because there are no facts in that,” a flight attendant said.

While seeing a decline in the flight attendants who seem to be truly vested in their work, the flight attendants say the company is directing them to merely “inform” passengers about violations of safety rules, not to enforce the rules. This is in direct contrast to a few months ago, when flight attendants were required to function as the facemask police to enforce a federal pandemic restriction while it remained in effect.

Presumably in response to customer backlash over the much-despised mask mandates, Southwest has instructed flight attendants to cut passengers more slack. “We’re allowing customers to do as they please, and it’s causing safety issues,” a flight attendant said. People are refusing to remain seated during takeoffs and landings, for example. If something goes amiss, “You become a projectile; you can hurt other people,” the flight attendant added.

Airline Love Affair Ends

A longtime pilot described his passion for his job, and laments how the company killed it.

From the outset, “I was in a love affair with Southwest Airlines. They were smaller and scrappier. They were all bone and muscle. No fat. And I liked that,” he said. “We grew under the nose of American, Delta, and United, despite their tactics … We continued to grow and thrive around a very simple business model that revolved around the Golden Rule.”

That enabled the company to empower all employee groups so they could make decisions benefiting both internal and external customers. They didn’t get sucked into bureaucracies.

But the company crossed a rubicon last year when it took a stand on the COVID-19 vaccine and “woke” policies, he said. Employees were told: “You must get vaccinated and you must accept these diversity and inclusion principles even though it goes against the principles that you grew up with at this company.”

For the veteran pilot, that was a death knell, he said. “It was a complete and total divorce of the culture.”

“The company has destroyed the trust relationship. This is not the Southwest Airlines that I joined. … The love affair is over,” he said. “When you prioritize profits and special interests over people, this is what you get.”

Although the public perception is that many pilots lost their jobs because of vaccine mandates, pilots doubt that’s accurate. In the case of Southwest, many employees sought—and obtained—religious or medical exemptions.

The company still touts the Golden Rule, but that’s mostly lip service, the pilot said. “It’s the thing that allowed Southwest to rise to greatness. It’s less important now. What’s more important? I have to understand that a person’s gender can be on a sliding scale, or maybe they’re just a man who wants to dress as a woman.”

He resents the implication that “hopelessly bigoted pilots like me” need to take a new sexual harassment training module that encompasses LGBTQ considerations. He learned that if a person in that category believes they were looked at in a way that they felt was uncomfortable, “I could be written up, and I don’t even have to say anything,” the pilot said.

Southwest flight attendants were recently required to complete a DEI training or face being put on unpaid leave. That didn’t sit well. The flight attendants say they were already treating people as equally as possible—values embodied in the Golden Rule and basic human decency. “I say this as a minority: I don’t need to be told how to treat people with dignity and respect. I’ve been doing that all my life.”

Distractions Imperil Safety

These programs and the “woke” cultural shift are creating huge distractions, which by themselves pose a threat to safety in ways that most people never think about, the pilot said.

“People take it for granted that takeoffs equal landings. But I can tell you that there are close calls—regularly—where human intervention prevented things from getting really bad. … And the traveling public never knew about it,” the pilot said.

For everyone’s safety, all airline workers must be at the top of their game.

“We need the most qualified people in these safety-sensitive jobs. But it doesn’t stop at the cockpit door,” he said. If any part of the system breaks down because a person was distracted or wasn’t the most qualified person for the job, “the end result is the same if you had an unqualified pilot: the airplane is a smoking hole at the end of the runway and you have 170 people dead—and a lot of angry families.”

“If you crash one airplane, that one crash has the ability to put an airline out of business. When I go to work that weighs on me. All 170 of those lives are in my mind from the time we take off until we land,” he said. “In my mind, disaster is just around the corner.”

Ready for The Worst

Before each takeoff, pilots mentally rehearse how they would react to rare dreaded scenarios, which have actually happened: A maintenance guy doesn’t do his job and the engine falls off the airplane. Or the motor blows up. Or a fire erupts. There is an infinite number of things that can go wrong. But such incidents are exceedingly rare—and when they do happen, a miraculous interplay between humans and technology averts death and catastrophe.

“These are the things we think about,” the pilot said. “And instead, we’ve got people thinking about their special status and how they can get one of their coworkers in trouble?… When you’re cheating the laws of physics every day, DEI has no place.” (Great remark! [US Patriot])

Under these circumstances, it’s infinitesimally trivial to even give a moment’s consideration to a person’s race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or any other trait.

“I will treat that man, dressed as a woman, the same way I would treat a woman dressed as a woman, or a woman dressed as a man. I don’t care,” the pilot said. “Just do your job. Take care of those passengers. And then drag my sorry butt out of the airplane if it comes down to that, because I’m the last one to go.”

In one way, the “new” rules don’t really bother the pilot: He said he was already treating people well. That won’t change, he said.  He just hates knowing that at any moment, he could be “written up because I looked at you wrong.”

As a white male, the pilot recognizes he’s “the new minority.”

He says he has to go to work every day and prove “I’m not the hopelessly bigoted, homophobic, misogynist, sexist fossil that they think I am.”

And that’s OK with him.

“I’m fine with that. I don’t care,” he said. “Because I live by the Golden Rule.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Over two years of pandemic oversight, Johnson said he’s witnessed money being put before public health

From the early days of the pandemic, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has been trying to hold U.S. public health agencies accountable on many issues, including why the agencies censored early treatment options for COVID-19, pushed vaccine mandates, and demonstrated a lack of integrity and transparency involving the vaccine data and reporting.

After conducting two years of oversight, Johnson said that the U.S. medical system has been compromised by money from Big Pharma.

“We have a corrupt medical system in this country,” Johnson said in a recent interview for NTD’s “Capitol Report” program. “From the pharmaceutical companies down to the federal health agencies through to the research centers and medical journals. It should concern every American.”

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Agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration have not freely provided the public with accurate data about the vaccine’s origin, efficacy, and adverse effects, said Johnson, and he and others conducting oversight have had to rely heavily on other countries’ data.

“We’ve had to look to either Israel or Public Health England, Public Health Scotland. Now they’re shutting down their information streams as well,” he said. “One of my biggest concerns is our federal health agencies have not been honest. They’ve not been transparent.”

He called what the CDC is doing “willful ignorance.”

Public Health Agencies Contradicting Themselves

Johnson sent a letter to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in late July, demanding answers as to why there have been conflicting statements about the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

The Epoch Times reported that Dr. John Su, who heads the CDC’s Immunization and Safety Office, claimed that the CDC has been performing Proportional Reporting Ratio analyses on data from VAERS since February 2021. The CDC, however, told the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense that it not only did not conduct the analyses but that the method was outside of the agency’s purview.

“CDC’s assertion and Dr. Su’s statement cannot both be true,” Johnson said in the letter.

“The American people deserve the truth and you have not been providing it. That is why I, together with millions of Americans, have completely lost faith in the CDC and other federal health agencies. It is time to start regaining their confidence and your agency’s integrity by coming clean, being transparent, and telling the truth,” the letter states (pdf).

“It’s all BS,” Johnson said in the interview. “As soon as the safety signals started screaming at them through the VAER system, what do they do? They denigrated the VAER system.”

The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During the NTD interview, Johnson said he believes the health agencies don’t want to provide truthful information.

“I think, among many disappointments, one of the biggest disappointments in terms of the federal health agencies is they’re just not giving us the information, and I don’t think they really want to,” he said.

From the get-go, the vaccine mandates were “pointless, completely idiotic, and totally destructive,” Johnson said, adding that the agencies’ own data has long confirmed that vaccines do not prevent transmission or reoccurring infection.

Johnson implied that Big Pharma has had a role in pushing the vaccine mandates out of its own self-interest.

“I’ve always been supportive of the pharmaceutical industry,” because the drug companies need billions of dollars to develop new drugs that are important for improving lives, said Johnson. “But now I’ve just witnessed the capture of U.S. regulatory agencies by Big Pharma.”

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Former President Donald Trump released a dramatic political video, hours after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, in which he laments the “declining” state of America and says it’s “time to start talking about greatness for our country again.”

“We are a nation in decline … We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump over the ominous sounds of thunder and rain in the nearly four-minute video in which he lists the apparent failures of the Biden administration, before promising, “Soon we will have greatness again.”

Trump, who is expected to announce that he will run again for president in 2024, released the video on his Truth Social platform late Tuesday.

In the video, he says that America has the “highest inflation in over 40 years” and “highest energy cost in its history.” He adds that in the two years since Joe Biden took office, America has lost its energy independence and dominance.

“We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil,” Trump says. “We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving behind dead soldiers and American citizens and $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment in the world.”

Trump accuses the Biden administration of allowing “Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands,” and suggests that “it will only get worse.”

‘Weaponization of the Justice System’

“We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before. We’ve never seen anything like this,” Trump says in his video.

Late on Monday, Trump announced that the FBI was raiding his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, calling it evidence of “prosecutorial misconduct” and a “weaponization of the Justice System.”

The former president said the raid wasn’t announced and that it was motivated because Democrats do not want him to run again for president in 2024.

“They detest Donald Trump, not just on the Democrat side but the general establishment, because he’s not one of them. Because he doesn’t play their game,” his daughter-in-law Lara Trump told Fox News on Tuesday.

“They are terrified he’s going to announce any day that he’s running for president in 2024. And this is a very convenient way to just throw a little more mud on Donald Trump.”

America ‘No Longer Respected’

In his video, Trump also cites the legacy media as contributing to what he says is a nation in decline, saying America “no longer has a free and fair press. Fake news is about all you get.”

Traditionally, the media acts as a guardian of the public interest and a watchdog on government activities. But Trump has in the past accused legacy outlets of being partisan and colluding with “radical left Democrats … to hide the real facts.”

“We are a nation that is allowing Iran to build a massive nuclear weapon and China to use the trillions and trillions of dollars it’s taken from the United States to build a military to rival our own,” Trump says in the video.

“We are a nation that over the past years is no longer respected or listened to all around the world. We are a nation that is hostile to liberty and freedom and faith.

“We are a nation whose economy is floundering, whose stores are not stocked, whose deliveries are not coming, and whose educational system is ranked at the bottom of every list,” he says.

“We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump. “But soon we will have greatness again.”

‘Soon We Will Have Greatness Again’

Trump’s political video starts in black and white with only the sounds of rain and thunder underscoring it. This sequence features video representative of the Biden administration’s apparent failures, including oil fields, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

However, the last third of the video becomes colorized and the musical score uplifting as Trump shifts to speak about his promise of America having “greatness again.”

“It was hard-working patriots like you who built this country. And it is hard-working patriots like you who are going to save our country,” Trumps says in his video.

“There is no mountain we cannot climb. There is no summit we cannot reach. There is no challenge we cannot meet. There is no victory we cannot have.

“We will not bend. We will not break. We will not yield ever, ever, ever. We will never give in, we will never give up, and we will never ever back down. We will never let you down.

“As long as we are confident and united the tyrants we’re fighting do not stand even a little chance. Because we are Americans and Americans kneel to God and God alone. And it is time to start talking about greatness for our country again,” he says.

The video ends on a black screen with the words, “The best is yet to come.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

On Tuesday, only one day after the FBI’s controversial raid of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s Florida resort, federal agents seized the cellphone of Republican Congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.

Perry revealed as much via a statement Tuesday.

The congressman had been traveling with his family at the time. Then, federal agents approached him, issued a warrant and requested he turn over his phone.

“This morning, while traveling with my family, three FBI agents visited me and seized my cellphone. They made no attempt to contact my lawyer, who would have made arrangements for them to have my phone if that was their wish,” Perry said via his statement, according to Fox News.

“I’m outraged — though not surprised — that the FBI under the direction of Merrick Garland’s DOJ, would seize the phone of a sitting Member of Congress.”

“My phone contains info about my legislative and political activities, and personal/private discussions with my wife, family, constituents and friends. None of this is the government’s business.”

Perry went on to connect his encounter with the FBI to Trump’s on Monday.

“As with President Trump last night, DOJ chose this unnecessary and aggressive action instead of simply contacting my attorneys. These kinds of banana republic tactics should concern every Citizen — especially considering the decision before Congress this week to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to further persecute law-abiding Citizens,” Perry said.

Although it remains unclear if the seizure is at all connected to the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, Fox News noted that both Trump and Perry have both been targetted by the Democrat-led Jan. 6 House select committee.

The Department of Justice has yet to release a statement regarding either the seizure of Perry’s phone or the raid of Mar-a-Lago.

Regarding the raid, it is believed that FBI agents were looking for classified documents that Trump had taken with him after leaving the White House.

After news of the raid broke, conservatives and Republicans took to social media to voice their outrage.

Some supporters even went to Mar-a-Lago to support the former president.

Trump released a statement on Monday responding to the raid.

Related:

Trump Hits Biden with Major Accusation in Wake of Mar-a-Lago Raid

pic.twitter.com/1SqRDsVKLL

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 8, 2022

“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump wrote in a statement on Monday.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.”

“It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections.”

House members will be able to vote by proxy until the end of September, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) announced today, citing the COVID-19 pandemic even as cases, hospitalizations, and deaths continue to trend downward.

Proxy voting, which means that one member of the House can cast a vote on behalf on an absent member, started in May 2020, and Pelosi has extended it multiple times, citing “the public health emergency due to the novel coronavirus.” The proxy-voting period would have ended Aug. 12 had Pelosi not extended it to Sept. 26.

The pandemic did not stop Democratic users of the proxy-voting system from racking up travel expenses for their reelection campaigns. Pelosi’s fellow California Democrat, Rep. Eric Swalwell, last year voted by proxy 141 times while spending $45,000 at luxury hotels. Hawaii Democratic representative Kai Kahele voted in-person only 5 times between January and April, proxy-voting 120 times. Kansas Democratic representative Sharice Davids  cited “the ongoing public health emergency” to justify skipping in-person voting as she stayed in $1,000-per-night hotels for fundraisers.

The Senate has required in-person voting throughout the pandemic. Senate Democrats last week threw out COVID safety protocols to ensure the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) has promised to end proxy voting if Republicans win control of the House in November. McCarthy said in a statement last year that proxy voting is unconstitutional.

“Although the Constitution allows Congress to write its own rules, those rules cannot violate the Constitution itself, including the requirement to actually assemble in person,” McCarthy said.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

There’s reason to suspect that the FBI search of the Florida residence of former President Donald Trump was improperly intrusive, according to several lawyers. The raid prompted a rebuke from Trump and Republicans more broadly and further escalated political tensions in the nation.

About two dozen FBI agents entered Trump’s Palm Beach resort of Mar-a-Lago at about 9 a.m. on Aug. 8 and left about 10 hours later with “a handful of boxes of documents,” one of Trump’s attorneys on the scene, Christina Bobb, told Insight.

“I didn’t actually get to oversee the search, they wouldn’t let anybody see what they were doing,” she said.

It isn’t clear what legal basis the FBI had for the raid. The agents had a search warrant signed by a judge. However, the affidavit explaining the basis—its probable cause—was filed under seal, and Trump’s lawyers weren’t allowed to examine it, Bobb said.

In general, the agents were looking for “what they deemed to be presidential records,” she said.

“I don’t think there was anything of substance.”

Trump’s legal team will take steps to obtain the affidavit, according to Bobb.

There has been a dispute between the National Archives and Trump about whether he has documents that should be stored at the archives under the U.S. Presidential Records Act.

Trump has been cooperative on that front and had previously invited the FBI to Mar-a-Lago to examine the White House records he had in storage at the time, Bobb said.

“Nothing had been hidden, and nothing had been kept secret from them, which makes this all the more ridiculous,” she said.

Potentially Illegal

“I’m stunned and dismayed,” Marc Ruskin, a 27-year FBI veteran and former federal prosecutor, told Insight. “The disregard for traditional norms and apparent lack of concern with the appearance of impropriety is indicative of an abandonment of even a veneer of independence and objectivity.”

Former federal prosecutor Mike Davis went even further, saying the raid may have been illegally invasive.

“Under the case law, you can’t do a home raid if you can secure the documents through less intrusive means,” he told “Bannon’s War Room” on Aug. 9.

The FBI had to first determine that requests for the documents or even subpoenas wouldn’t be sufficient, said Davis, who formerly advised Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on judicial nominations and now heads The Article III Project.

“There’s zero evidence” that Trump wouldn’t have cooperated, he said.

“There was no allegation or evidence that he [Trump] was destroying any of this evidence or putting it into the wrong hands. This is banana republic-level tactics from the Biden Justice Department.”

Even if Trump took classified documents, he took possession of them when he was still chief executive and had the authority to declassify them, according to Davis.

Bobb suggested that the invocation of classified documents was a disingenuous attempt of “shrouding this in a national security blanket.”

“They don’t want to disclose what they’re doing, because what they’re doing is wrong. And so they want to hide it behind the premise of  ‘Oh, it’s a matter of national security and classified documents, so we can’t disclose to you what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. But just trust us. We’re not lying to you,’” she said. “Well, no, the American people aren’t going to stand for that anymore.”

Even if the DOJ tried to charge Trump with withholding documents, it wouldn’t hold up because the statute in question requires a “willful” violation, and Trump would have had to have “some malicious intent” to take specific documents, according to Bobb.

“They would have to lay the foundation that Donald Trump actually packed up his own office” or ordered somebody what specifically to take, she said.

History of Missing Documents

If Trump had documents that should go to the archives, it would add him to a lineup of former government officials.

Former FBI Director James Comey took his handwritten notes when he was fired by Trump in 2017. His home wasn’t raided. He handed the notes to FBI agents who came to interview him.

The Obama administration didn’t just fail to hand over documents, tens of thousands of its documents went missing or were destroyed. No homes were raided.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to hand over tens of thousands of emails and documents from her server, claiming that they were of a personal nature. The FBI was able to retrieve some of the documents, revealing that many were work-related. Moreover, the documents were under congressional subpoena at the time when a Clinton aide deleted them.

Immediate Skepticism

The raid prompted an immediate wave of skepticism, particularly because the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have a history of breaking protocol, misrepresentations, and even forging evidence in their case against Trump and members of his campaign.

“After six years of unfounded, absurd investigations of President Trump, the presumption is that any investigation of President Trump is politically motivated, and the burden of proof is on FBI/DOJ to prove otherwise,” Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the Internet Accountability Project, wrote in an Aug. 9 Twitter post.

In 2017, the FBI and DOJ obtained two extensions of a spying warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page even though the warrant was based on false or unsubstantiated allegations. The FBI later acknowledged that spying based on the extensions was illegal.

The FBI also has a history of harsh treatment of people associated with Trump. His aides have been arrested at gunpoint, handcuffed, and “perp-walked,” and their homes and offices have been raided in pursuit of trivial or nonviolent offenses, even when the targets were cooperating with the government.

Shoe on the Other Foot

The Trump raid increased the already polarized political playing field, as Republicans can now argue that home raids of former presidents are acceptable.

“They’re setting a very dangerous precedent where you can do a home raid of a former president of the United States,” Davis said, noting that such a thing has never happened “in our 250 years as a republic.”

Already, Republican lawmakers are promising to subject the DOJ and the FBI to intense scrutiny, with the expectation of reclaiming the majority in the House after the November midterms.

“When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an Aug. 8 statement. “Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”

Judge’s Epstein Connection

The search warrant was issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart in the Southern District of Florida. Reinhart was a senior prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida when the office reached a nonprosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein, who was later indicted for sex trafficking children and died by apparent suicide in a New York jail.

Upon leaving office, Reinhart went into private practice and represented multiple Epstein associates and employees in civil cases against Epstein by his alleged victims.

Reinhart was appointed a magistrate judge in 2018 by the district judges in the Southern District of Florida.

The warrant was issued on Aug. 5, the day after FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee and was questioned about multiple whistleblower reports alleging the politicization of the bureau. Wray cut the questioning short because he said he had to urgently travel. Flight records indicate he flew in the FBI private jet to his vacation retreat in the Adirondacks, according to New York Post columnist Miranda Devine.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the time around which the search of Donald Trump’s residence started. The raid started at about 9 a.m. Insight regrets the error.

Update: The article has been updated with a comment from Marc Ruskin.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

THE PLOT SICKENS.

Judge Bruce Reinhart – who is reportedly the most likely judge behind the warrant authorizing a raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar A Lago estate – is a former attorney who represented employees of convicted sex offender and notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, The National Pulse can reveal.

The National Pulse can also reveal that Judge Reinhart has donated to the campaigns of former President Barack Obama and to the establishment opponents of Donald J. Trump during the 2016 election, including Jeb Bush.

Politico – the news outlet closest linked to the establishment in Washington, D.C. – named Reinhart in their morning playbook e-mail on Tuesday, 9th August 2022:

As reported by the Miami Herald, Judge Reinhart began representing Epstein’s employees on January 2nd, 2008, just one day after departing the U.S. Attorney’s Office where he served as an assistant U.S. attorney closely involved on the convicted pedophile’s case.

Accused of leveraging “inside information about Epstein’s investigation to curry favor with Epstein,” in 2011, he was named as a prosecutor who allegedly violated the rights of an underage girl whom Epstein solicited sex from in the Crime Victims’ Rights Act lawsuit.

Reinhart appears to have exploited his role in the U.S. Attorney’s Office to launch a private criminal defense practice, according to the Miami Herald:

“On Oct 23, 2007, as federal prosecutors in South Florida were in the midst of tense negotiations to finalize a plea deal with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a senior prosecutor in their office was quietly laying out plans to leave the U.S. attorney’s office after 11 years. “On that date, as emails were flying between Epstein’s lawyers and federal prosecutors, Bruce E. Reinhart, now a federal magistrate, opened a limited liability company in Florida that established what would become his new criminal defense practice.”

Reinhart insisted that he never represented Epstein himself — “only Epstein’s pilots; his scheduler, Sarah Kellen; and Nadia Marcinkova, described by some victims as Epstein’s sex slave.”

MUST READ: Yes, The White House’s ‘Dark Brandon’ Memes Contain Nazi Imagery With CCP Influences.

Reinhart has also participated in Newsmax interviews, appearing to defend Epstein by downplaying allegations of the financier and his associates soliciting underage prostitutes.

Reinhart donated twice to Obama’s campaign in 2008 totaling $2,000. Reinhart, who was appointed U.S. magistrate in March 2018, also donated to the campaign of Trump rival Jeb Bush in 2015.

The unearthed links come as Reinhart is believed to have signed off on a warrant responsible for the raid on Trump’s Palm Beach estate. A “source said FBI agents obtained a search warrant from a federal magistrate judge in West Palm Beach,” reports the Miami Herald.

Politico explained that of the three magistrate judges in that office, two recent warrant applications, both of which were assigned to Reinhart, were entered into the system on Monday. The subject of the warrants, however, remains sealed.

Russ Vought, President Donald Trump’s former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director, had a plan, but too little time left in 2020 to restore the bureaucracy as a neutral tool for ensuring that federal officials do what American voters want done by their government.

But Vought will be ready from the get-go when, he hopes, the next Republican Chief Executive enters the Oval Office in January 2025. If he succeeds, Vought will accomplish something that has eluded presidents of both parties since before World War I, when Woodrow Wilson turned federal civil servants from neutral implementers into unaccountable policy-making “experts.”

Wilson upended the neutral federal workforce concept established by the Templeton Act of 1888, which replaced the former “to-the-winner-goes-the-spoils” system that had been in force for a century.

Wilson wanted policy experts in the bureaucracy in whom would be vested immense independent powers to regulate American society as they thought proper. That led to an explosion of regulations, including many intended to protect the newly muscular bureaucracy from electoral accountability.

Two of Wilson’s Democratic successors—Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society—expanded the federal bureaucracy into such an unwieldy, cumbersome, and costly regulatory monster that another Democrat, President Jimmy Carter, made it one of his administration’s chief goals to gain passage of the landmark Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978.

It fell to Carter’s successor, Republican Ronald Reagan, however, to implement the CSRA, which included multiple provisions designed to make bureaucrats more accountable for their individual performance and easier to replace poor performers.

“It worked for a few years but was fought throughout by OMB, which moderated CSRA during its legislative journey through Congress and then, afterwards, helped agency experts and allies in Congress to modify CSRA’s reforms,” Donald Devine, the former Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), who managed the CSRA implementation for Reagan, wrote recently.

“Today, we are basically back to the system Carter was elected to change—but worse, as aspects of his reforms are now forbidden by both law and regulation,” Devine continued.

That was the situation when Vought became Acting OMB Director under Trump in 2019. Having served on Capitol Hill in various Republican policy positions for two decades, Vought was already familiar with entrenched bureaucrats repeatedly undermining common sense, conservative policy directives. When the Senate confirmed him in the position the next year, Vought began taking concrete steps to address the problem.

What became known as “Schedule F” was a presidential Executive Order (EO) designed to extend application of CSRA’s basic principle of policy and performance accountability deeper into the bureaucracy by giving the president’s appointees throughout the departments and agencies more flexibility to replace recalcitrant bureaucrats in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating” positions.

But there were so many fires to put out during the Trump era, that Vought was only able to implement his plan starting 13 days before the 2020 election, and then only within OMB where he reclassified an estimated 90 percent of the agency’s employees.

“We had been working on it for about two years and we were really trying to think through when we do it,” Vought told The Epoch Times in an interview.  James Sherk, a Trump domestic policy adviser and former Heritage Foundation analyst, is credited with the original concept for Schedule F.

“A lot of my effort was to help get it across the finish line and then to show that an agency head was willing to use it, and then set down a marker that we would indeed do it in a second [Trump] term,” Vought said.

One of Joe Biden’s first acts in office after defeating Trump in the still-contested 2020 presidential election was to repeal the Schedule F EO. Since then, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt think tank discretely devoted to researching the case for and laying out policy frameworks for the continuation of the “America First” reforms first advanced by Trump.

That continuation could be carried out either by a resurgent Trump or by another of the GOP’s potential alternative presidential candidates such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

But a July 22 Axios story—”A Radical Plan for Trump’s Second Term” by Jonathan Swan—renewed worries throughout the Washington establishment that Schedule F will be among the top items on the policy agenda of any GOP president seeking to make significant headway toward reforming the Washington swamp.

One detail that gained particular notice was Swan quoting an unnamed source who estimated that full-scale implementation of Schedule F could affect as many as 50,000 civil service positions.

There are approximately 2.1 million civilian federal employees, but only about 9,000—or 0.43 percent of the total—of those positions are at-will, political appointees of a president. Assuming Swan’s 50,000 figure is accurate, it would still mean only 2.4 percent of the total workforce would be subject to Schedule F.

“I think any time you are setting policy within an agency, think about your entire regulatory departments, think of all those general counsels, and it’s not just the general counsels but those massive legal departments,” Vought said when asked to describe the kinds of positions that would be subject to Schedule F.

“I think it would be pretty sizable, given how many people you have working on policy these days in the agencies,” Vought added.

Under the Trump EO, the ultimate decision on whether to reclassify a career position to Schedule F status would be made by the OPM Director, a fact that would substantially elevate the importance of that presently obscure agency.

Vought has no illusions about the difficulties a future president will face if he or she attempts another run at Schedule F implementation.

Democrats in Congress who receive the overwhelming majority federal employee union political donations are already rallying against the possibility of a Schedule F renewal. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest such labor group, gave more than 94 percent of its contributions to Democrats in 2020, continuing a trend that has held for decades.

In the House of Representatives, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) whose district is made up almost exclusively of government employees and contractors, authored a provision adopted by the lower chamber to prevent implementation of Schedule F.

In the upper chamber of Congress, Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner of Virginia, and Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, plus Senators Diane Feinstein and Alex Padilla of California, are co-sponsoring the Connolly provision.

The mainstream news media inaccurately portrayed Trump’s Schedule F effort as an attempt to return to the old “Spoils System” that was abolished in 1888. Typical was an Oct. 23, 2020, Washington Post story headlined “Trump’s Historic Assault on the Civil Service Was Four Years in the Making.” In fact, Schedule F is based on the CSRA that was conceived and signed into law by a Democratic president, then implemented by a Republican chief executive.

Vought is confident as long as a GOP presidential aspirant makes reforming the federal bureaucracy a national issue, the Schedule F plan will go forward.

“How would they not? The only reason it wouldn’t be used is because no one would have wanted to take on the [opposition] forces, but in some respects that balloon has already been punctured,” he said.

“When you nationalize the issue heading into a presidential election, it makes it so this is part of the base of policy expectations in a way that it is not when someone just has a good policy idea and you’re trying to figure is this a good idea and will it sustain itself,” he added.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The FBI agents who raided former President Donald Trump’s Florida resort were looking for certain records, according to a lawyer for Trump who was on the scene while agents were at the resort.

“They’re looking for presidential records, what they deemed to be presidential records, and anything that could potentially be classified,” Christina Bobb, the lawyer, told The Epoch Times on Aug. 9.

“We had been very cooperative with them before. And it’s unclear to me why they went to such drastic measures to do this. But they did. And as far as the probable cause goes, they wouldn’t give that to us,” she added.

In mid-January, the National Archives and Records Administration arranged for the transport from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives 15 boxes that the archives said contained presidential records. Under the Presidential Records Act, the records should have been transferred in January 2021 as Trump left office, and some of the boxes contained classified information, the institution said in a statement at the time. The administration did not return an inquiry on Tuesday.

Approximately two dozen FBI agents arrived around 9 a.m. on Monday morning and remained at Mar-a-Lago, which is in West Palm Beach, for about 10 hours.

Agents initially resisted showing Bobb the warrant but ultimately did. But the agents would not allow any representatives of the former president to oversee the search, Bobb said. The justification for the search also remains under seal. Trump’s legal team plans on asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to unseal the search warrant affidavit, which would outline why authorities asked for the warrant.

“We don’t know what the probable cause is. I don’t think there is a good cause to do such a drastic thing. But they did,” Bobb said.

The FBI has declined to comment. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have not returned requests for comment. The White House has said the DOJ is independent and that Joe Biden and others in the White House were not notified of the raid ahead of time.

‘Peaceful’

Agents kept Mar-a-Lago neat while they were searching for documents, with one even picking up trash, according to Bobb. The agents “took a handful of boxes of documents,” she said.

“I don’t think that there was anything incriminating. I don’t think there was anything of substance. So I’m sure that they will say otherwise. But we’ll have to wait and see what they come up with, but it was all paper. I hear the conspiracy theories and the rumors that there were other artifacts or something taken—it was all paper,” she said.

Agents previously visited the resort in June, and were given access to a storage facility there, according to Bobb. “Nothing had been hidden and nothing had been kept secret from them, which makes this all more all the more ridiculous,” she said.

“Donald Trump didn’t commit a crime,” Bobb said, adding that prosecutors would not be able to show that Donald Trump knew about the boxes the FBI took.

“They would have to lay the foundation that Donald Trump actually packed up his own office, and Donald Trump was actually the custodian of these records, and that he actually moved them,” she said.

If the DOJ decides to press charges against Trump, then the effort would not get very far, she predicted.

“I just don’t see it making a bit of difference. I think President Trump is going to most likely run for reelection,” she said. “I can’t wait until he does. And he will be the next President of the United States.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Heather Lang steps down after allegations that Morningstar subsidiary blacklists companies that do business in Israel

A senior executive at the ratings giant Sustainalytics—who spent years working at an anti-Israel advocacy group—announced last week that she is stepping down amid scrutiny of the company’s reliance on sources that critics say lead to bias and discrimination against Israeli companies.

Heather Lang, a onetime official at the anti-Israel activist organization B’Tselem, announced last week her departure as a senior vice president at Sustainalytics, a subsidiary of the corporate-ratings giant Morningstar, after 18 years at the company.

“Tomorrow is my last day at Sustainalytics after an incredible 18-year journey!” wrote Lang in a social media post last week. “It’s been an absolute privilege to work with such wonderful colleagues and friends.”

The news comes as Sustainalytics—one of the major ratings agencies that score companies based on their environmental, social, and governance practices—has faced allegations that its scoring system is biased against Israel and that it downgrades companies that help the Jewish state’s national security operations. Prior to joining Sustainalytics, Lang worked at B’Tselem, a self-described human rights group that asserts that “Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations,” according to its website. NGO Monitor, a watchdog group that monitors Middle East organizations, describes B’Tselem as “part of a network of NGOs that promote artificial and manufactured definitions of apartheid to extend the ongoing campaigns that seek to delegitimize and demonize Israel.”

Morningstar enlisted law firm White & Case to conduct an internal investigation into potential anti-Israel bias at Sustainalytics. This came after the Illinois Investment Policy Board, a state commission, launched a probe into whether the company was in violation of Illinois laws against anti-Israel boycotts.

Lang’s presence at Sustainalytics raises questions about the neutrality of its executives, a week after the Missouri attorney general launched an investigation into allegations of anti-Israel bias at the ratings giant.

Lang did not indicate that her departure is related to the investigation or allegations of bias. But Israel advocates said the company should be cautious about anti-Israel activism among its leadership.

“If Morningstar is serious about rooting out anti-Israel bias in their ranks, it would behoove them to ensure no more of their officers have a history of demonizing the Jewish state,” a former Israeli government official told the Washington Free Beacon.

Sustainalytics referred a request for comment to Morningstar. Morningstar declined to comment on Lang’s departure, telling the Free Beacon that the company “does not support the anti-Israel BDS movement. Matters related to an individual’s employment are confidential.”

According to an online biography of Lang, posted by a conference at which she spoke, she previously worked as a “corporate social responsibility consultant and spent several years living in Israel, working for leading human rights watchdog organization B’Tselem.”

While at B’Tselem, Lang was the editor of the group’s 1999 Human Rights Report, which accused Israel of various humanitarian abuses, including blocking water from Palestinians and discriminatory deportations.

Lang’s prior work for B’Tselem was not mentioned in the White & Case probe.

According to the White & Case investigation, Sustainalytics has relied on research from Who Profits, a group that supports boycott campaigns against Israel.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Still looking for hand-outs despite the fact that African people have been immigrating here for over a hundred years. White workers in factories, mines, etc. could be considered slaves as well. Get over yourself and start working on improving yourselves instead of trying to further weaken what is (by far) the most free nation on the planet [US Patriot]

The ACLU and Human Rights Watch want the United Nations to demand that Joe Biden “take immediate, tangible measures,” including reparations, to “dismantle structural racism” in the United States.

The groups are recommending that the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which will meet later this month, order the United States to “provide effective remedies, including reparations for racial discrimination, including ongoing structural discrimination that flows from the legacies of slavery.”

The ACLU, which ostensibly advocates for Americans’ civil liberties regardless of politics, has a long history of defending left-wing policies. The group in April said it would use “the full force of the law” to allow children to undergo transgender hormone treatment. The ACLU is also a top advocate for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, the Washington Free Beacon has reported. Human Rights Watch also routinely criticizes the Jewish state, with Ben and Jerry’s basing its anti-Israel boycott on advice from a high-ranking Human Rights Watch employee. Ben and Jerry’s parent company overruled the anti-Semitic boycott following widespread criticism.

While the groups note that Joe Biden has criticized “systemic racism,” they say the president has not gone far enough.

“The Biden administration has shown it can name the problem, but the time has come to take bolder action to radically transform these abusive systems and fully implement U.S. human rights obligations,” ACLU human rights director Jamil Dakwar said in a statement.

One such “bolder action,” the groups say, is creating “a commission to study the need for reparations and develop specific remedies for the enslavement of people in the United States and its myriad legacies.” The ACLU and Human Rights Watch want the government to work against anything that has “a racist effect or impact,” such as “mass incarceration” and concentration of wealth.

Barrington Martin II, a national director of the patriotic group Our America, called the groups’ actions “preposterous” and “oxymoronic.”

“There is not one law on the books or any institution within the United States that seeks to oppress or subjugate any individual or group on the basis of race,” Martin told the Free Beacon. “People from all across the world have come to the United States for decades because of the freedom and equal opportunity America offers for all.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Cryin’ Brian Schatz

A Democratic senator was overcome with emotion on Sunday as the Senate prepared to pass legislation that would dramatically expand the IRS and permanently solve so-called climate change, the Washington Post reports:

Even before the vote was final, Democratic lawmakers on the chamber floor rejoiced and cheered, shaking hands and hugging, as their Republican counterparts cast their votes and headed for the exits for a month-long summer break. Manchin made a beeline for Schumer’s desk, as the two men leaned their heads together and clasped their hands. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), a proponent of climate change provisions, broke into tears.

Schatz praised the passage of what some are calling the “IRS Expansion” bill as a “historic victory for the United States and the planet.” The legislation, which is expected to pass the House later this week, solves climate change by giving Americans earning $300,000 a year tax credits to buy an $80,000 electric SUV for just $72,500. It also allocates $10 million to combat “racial equity issues” within the Department of Agriculture.

Cryin’ Brian is best known for supporting colonialism and exploiting indigenous land; he claims to “represent” Hawaii despite being a white man born in Michigan to a Canadian doctor.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Dem donor Lauri Strauss is behind debate that will allow Dem candidate to debate empty podium

A Joe Biden donor is the organizer behind a U.S. Senate debate in Georgia that will allow Democratic senator Raphael Warnock to symbolically debate an empty podium after Republican challenger Herschel Walker turned down the invitation.

Atlanta Press Club director Lauri Strauss, who is organizing the debate, and at least three other members of the group’s board have donated thousands to Democrats, including Biden, Georgia Democratic senator Jon Ossoff—and Warnock himself.

Strauss in 2020 donated $173 to Biden and $35 to Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), according to campaign finance records. Strauss is the organizer of the press club debate and personally extended the group’s invitation to Walker, according to an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

“Mr. Walker’s opponent has confirmed his participation in our debate, and we hope to have your confirmation as well,” wrote Strauss in a June 21 email to Walker’s campaign. “I look forward to hearing back from you.”

News of the donations comes after Walker declined to attend the debate, citing political bias at the Atlanta Press Club. The contributions could fuel criticism of the organization, which has said it will allow Warnock at the Oct. 16 event to debate with an empty podium symbolizing Walker’s absence. If one candidate does not show up, having the other candidate debate an empty podium is a long-standing policy for the APC.

Walker’s campaign has agreed to participate in a different debate hosted by Nexstar Media Group on Oct. 14, which Warnock declined.

“We’re not going to be bullied by their thinly veiled threat of an empty podium—because it’s not a podium, it’s a campaign prop. So we’re leaving the elite media behind and rejecting the partisan Press Club debate,” said Scott Paradise, Walker’s campaign manager, in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.

Other members of the Atlanta Press Club’s board also appear to be Democratic donors, according to campaign finance records. Keith Pepper in 2020 donated over $2,500 to Warnock and over $500 to Ossoff. Rene Alegria donated $500 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, $250 to Biden, and $60 to Ossoff. Deisha Barnett donated $500 to Warnock.

The Atlanta Press Club did not respond to a request for comment.

Strauss told the Free Beacon that she “made donations to Joe Biden and Mark Kelly in 2020, both of whom are longtime family friends.” But she said she has not contributed to any Georgia candidates and added that the other board members “do not have anything to do with our debates.”

She also said the Atlanta Press Club is “proud of our reputation [for] holding balanced and fair debates for all candidates” for the past 30 years and said the debate series was funded by an endowment from the late Charlie Loudermilk, a Republican philanthropist who passed away last week.

Former Georgia congressman and House speaker Newt Gingrich, a surrogate for Walker, told the Free Beacon the donations are an indication of the group’s political slant.

“Herschel Walker is exactly right to reject the Atlanta Press Club debate proposal as many of its leadership donated to Democrats, including radical-left Senator Warnock,” said Gingrich. “They are a one-sided, biased organization. Walker should continue to insist on open fair debates in front of Georgians. Let Warnock hide behind his liberal media supporters.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Florida Democrat Charlie Crist hired Jack Cocchiarella after college Dems chapter ousted young activist over troubling allegations

Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s (R.) top Democratic opponent paid thousands of dollars to a young liberal activist who is facing “campus-wide allegations of sexual assault” at his former Ivy League school.

On July 8, Democrat Charlie Crist’s gubernatorial campaign paid $2,250 to Politically Correct Strategies—a consulting company registered to Gen Z liberal activist and former Dartmouth student Jack Cocchiarella—for “digital consulting.” Just weeks later, on July 28, the prestigious school’s College Democrats chapter revealed it ousted Cocchiarella from the club “in late October 2021, following campus-wide allegations of sexual assault.” Those allegations emerged publicly in a string of December 2021 Reddit posts, which accused Cocchiarella of using “his Twitter notoriety and left-wing credentials to position himself as an ally. Then, once people let their guards down, he rapes them.”

Crist, who did not return repeated requests for comment, has remained silent on the accusations facing his campaign aide. By his own logic, that silence means he endorses Cocchiarella’s alleged behavior—in a June 29 tweet, Crist pressed DeSantis to condemn the January 6 riots, writing, “Is it just me, or do you agree that his silence = endorsement?”

Crist is not the only prominent Democrat to hire Cocchiarella following the troubling allegations. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R., Ga.) Democratic opponent, Marcus Flowers, has paid Cocchiarella’s firm more than $40,000 since October 2021, when the activist announced his “new role” as Flowers’s digital director.

Flowers has his own alleged issues with women. In July 2016, the Democrat attempted to dump his ex-wife—Russian national Svetlana Chudinova—at a local homeless shelter, court documents reported by the New Republic show. Flowers did not dispute the incident and instead defended his attempt to offload Chudinova, saying he “felt she had a personality disorder that was not previously disclosed.” In turn, Chudinova accused Flowers of threatening to strike her.

Flowers’s campaign did not return multiple requests for comment.

Cocchiarella, whose Twitter account boasts more than 250,000 followers and includes a photo of the activist smiling alongside Joe Biden, enrolled as a Dartmouth freshman during the 2021-22 school year. While it’s unclear what specific “digital consulting” services he provided Crist, Cocchiarella publicly endorsed the former governor over fellow DeSantis challenger Nikki Fried (D.) just days after Crist’s campaign paid him.

Flowers, meanwhile, routinely replies to Cocchiarella’s tweets to solicit campaign contributions. In October 2021, he called the young activist “an outstanding young man.” In addition to his work with Crist and Flowers, Cocchiarella has collaborated with the Lincoln Project, an anti-Republican super PAC founded by disgraced sexual predator John Weaver.

Cocchiarella reduced his public presence as allegations against him swirled. A notoriously avid Twitter user, Cocchiarella did not send an original tweet for more than a week after Dartmouth College Democrats confirmed the “campus-wide allegations,” instead opting to populate his feed by sharing posts from liberal politicians and journalists. The activist has also blocked users who raised the allegations in his replies.

Cocchiarella during an Aug. 1 podcast appearance did, however, confirm his decision to transfer from Dartmouth to fellow Ivy League school Columbia. The activist did not discuss why he opted to leave Dartmouth after just one year at the college and is yet to publicly address the allegations leveled against him.

Cocchiarella, Dartmouth College Democrats, and Dartmouth’s Title IX office did not return requests for comment.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

‘I don’t want to answer that question because we have not—that’s not—yeah, I don’t want to answer that question,’ Rep. Cori Bush (D.) told reporters

Joe Biden, whose average approval rating sits at just 39.6 percent, insists Democratic voters want him to seek reelection in 2024. Several members of Biden’s own party, however, are refusing to back the 79-year-old president.

“I don’t want to answer that question because we have not—that’s not—yeah, I don’t want to answer that question,” Rep. Cori Bush (D., Mo.) told reporters last month when asked whether she would back Biden in the next presidential election.

Source: The Washington Free Beacon

Multimillionaire Michael Bennet is working to cast himself as an outdoorsman. It may be a hard sell.

Sen. Michael Bennet’s (D., Colo.) latest reelection ad depicts him clad in outdoor gear, casting a fly fishing line into the Arkansas River. But the multimillionaire businessman isn’t exactly a regular fisherman, local records suggest. The campaign obtained a one-day fishing license in order to shoot the ad, according to Axios.

The new ad is the second in the last month featuring Bennet enjoying Colorado’s outdoors and a clear attempt to shake the image that the two-term lawmaker is a wealthy, D.C. insider.

“The worst sin any candidate can do is come across as insincere and phony and I think Bennet comes close to doing that,” said Colorado Republican strategist Dick Wadhams. “He’s going to have to answer for that on the campaign.”

Bennet’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Bennet, who has seen his net worth increase by the millions during his time in the Senate, is running for reelection against former carpenter and construction CEO Joe O’Dea. Republicans are optimistic that Biden’s historically low approval rating has made Bennet’s seat competitive. According to FiveThirtyEight, Bennet votes with Biden 98 percent of the time.

O’Dea’s campaign is working to characterize Bennet as a lawmaker who left his home state to profit off his position as a senator. As average Coloradans struggle to pay for groceries, O’Dea’s campaign said in a recent Tweet, Bennet is checking “his stock portfolio.”

Bennet’s net worth is valued up to $31 million, his financial disclosure forms show. A considerable amount of that money is located in Cayman Islands hedge funds, those same forms state, making a detailed accounting difficult. Bennet has also set aside hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment funds for his children.

The fly fishing guide featured with Bennet in the ad is not exactly a regular small businessman. Rather, he is Chaffee County commissioner Greg Felt, whom Colorado governor Jared Polis (D.) appointed in 2020 to the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Felt’s claim in the ad that he is “not a Democrat” is not entirely true, given that he voted as a Democrat in several election cycles starting in 2002, according to a review of Colorado’s voting records.

Bennet’s ad will air for two weeks across Colorado as part of a $1.2 million ad campaign launched in mid-July. None of his ads contain any references to Joe Biden or some of the landmark bills Bennet voted for, such as the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, which many economists say contributed to skyrocketing inflation.

The Free Beacon reported earlier this month that Bennet’s first ad misled voters on who funds his campaign. Bennet claims he does not accept campaign contributions from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists, despite his campaign finance records showing otherwise.

Bennet was appointed to his seat in 2009 after his predecessor, Ken Salazar, became secretary of the interior. He dropped out of the 2020 presidential race after receiving just 164 votes in the Iowa caucuses and fewer than 1,000 in the New Hampshire primary.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

In June, Toyota warned buyers of its bZ4X electric SUV not to drive their vehicles for fear the wheels could fall off. Toyota said at the time the cause was a mystery, but it would look into the glitch.

Toyota has not yet found a solution to the problem and is offering to buy back the SUV from its owners, according to CNN.

“We know that our customers have many choices when it comes to purchasing a vehicle. We appreciate their loyalty and are supporting them through this recall,” Toyota said in a statement, according to The Verge. “However, if a customer does not want to proceed with the provided options, we will offer to repurchase their bZ4X.”

Plan B for owners who want to keep a vehicle they may never be able to drive is to have free use of another Toyota vehicle until such time as Toyota figures out what went wrong and how to fix it.

Toyota offers to buy back recalled bZ4X fully electric SUV from customers | A headline writer’s dream. Toyota’s first full #EV recalled and a buyback offer literally because the wheels keep falling off! How can a car maker get something so basic, so wrong? https://t.co/lDJo4u43Zr pic.twitter.com/n9lcYPTgIo

— Martyn Dews (@Yorkie71) August 8, 2022

As part of that deal, Toyota will pay $5,000 toward an owner’s car payments or as a partial refund. Toyota also said that it will extend the factory warranty on the bZ4X by whatever length of time it becomes before an owner gets her or his vehicle back, according to CNN.

The offer for those who do not sell their vehicle back also includes free EV charging once the owners get the vehicle back and the cost of gasoline for their loaner, according to Autoweek.

It was unclear in the announcement how owners of the vehicle, whose price starts at $43,215, would handle dealer markups, according to Car and Driver.

In June, the company announced that all 2,700 of its new electric bZ4X SUVs were a danger to their drivers, with only 260 to date having been delivered in the United States.

“After low-mileage use, all of the hub bolts on the wheel can loosen to the point where the wheel can detach from the vehicle,” Toyota said in a June 23 statement on its website.

“If a wheel detaches from the vehicle while driving, it could result in a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash,” the company said. “The cause of the issue and the driving patterns under which this issue could occur are still under investigation. No one should drive these vehicles until the remedy is performed,” Toyota said.

“No remedy is available at this time,” Toyota said in its June release.

Toyota’s somehow gone from “The best built cars in the world” to “The hub bolts loosen which may cause a wheel to fall off, & almost two months later we don’t know how to fix it”https://t.co/wOJjNc44pW

— Thomas McGuire (@thommcg1980) August 7, 2022

Related:

E-Scooter/Bike Battery Sparks Apartment Blaze, Kills Woman and Child, Leaves Father in Critical Condition

In a column for Bloomberg, Anjani Trivedi, who covers industrial companies in Asia, wrote, “If that’s the level of quality and safety traditional auto giants are willing to commit to, then investors and regulators should increase their scrutiny.”

The bZ4X debuted in Japan in June, according to CNBC.

The company’s president, Akio Toyoda, said in December that Toyota planned “to roll out 30 BEV models by 2030.”

“Toyota has been under pressure to up its game in EVs, so will be very disappointed that a recall has been necessary on its first mass-market electric cars,” David Leggett, automotive editor at GlobalData, told CNBC.

House GOP leaders have pledged to take action on the “weaponized politicization” of the Department of Justice (DOJ) “when Republicans take back the House” in the midterm elections, after federal agents raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Monday.

“I’ve seen enough,” House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in a statement late Monday. “The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.”

“When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned,” McCarthy added.

“Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy’s comment came after the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Monday. Trump has characterized the raid as “prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical left Democrats who desperately don’t want [him] to run for President in 2024.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Ranking Member on the House Judiciary Committee, which provides oversight over the DOJ, called on House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) to bring FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland onto the House floor for questioning on Friday.

“What was on the warrant? What were you really doing? What were you looking for? Why not talk to President Trump and have him give the information you’re after?” Jordan asked in an interview with Fox on Monday night. “We deserve answers now, and this Friday would be a good time.”

“Jerry Nadler: call up Christopher Wray, call up Merrick Garland, bring them in front of the House Judiciary Committee, so we ask them the questions that the American people deserve the answers to.”

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Minority Whip, called the raid the “weaponization of the FBI by Biden’s DOJ against his political opponent.”

“Let’s be clear: This is a brazen weaponization of the FBI by Biden’s DOJ against his political opponent—while giving their political allies free passes,” Scalise said in a statement published late Monday. “It’s exactly why the IRS shouldn’t get an army of 87,000 more agents.”

“House Republicans will hold them accountable next year,” the lawmaker added.

Rep. Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, called Monday “a dark day in American history” and said that the “political weaponization of the FBI and Department of Justice is an actual threat to democracy.”

“There is a reason that Americans no longer trust these agencies,” Stefanik said in a Monday statement. “This is the same corrupt agency that illegally fabricated FISA warrants, knowingly deceived Americans about Russian ‘collusion’ for years, and weaponized itself to perpetuate this hoax with their all-too-eager mainstream media accomplices.”

“There must be an immediate investigation and accountability into Joe Biden and his Administration’s weaponizing this department against their political opponents—the likely 2024 Republican candidate for President of the United States,” the congresswoman added.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), vice chair of the House Republican Conference and a part of Trump’s legal defense team during the Democrats’ 2019 attempted impeachment of Trump, said Biden and Garland “completely weaponized the DOJ” and “eroded the people’s faith in our system of justice.”

“Today’s raid on the former President’s home in the middle of an election season looks like another egregious & unprecedented abuse of power,” Johnson said in a statement on Monday.

“We will restore order & accountability as soon as we regain the gavels for a Republican majority in November. It can’t happen soon enough!” he added.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Former President Donald Trump said his Florida Mar-a-Lago home is “under siege” and “occupied by a group of FBI agents” in a statement late Aug. 8.

“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

“After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” Trump said.

The FBI declined to comment on a press inquiry from The Epoch Times. Its parent agency, the Department of Justice (DOJ), did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb confirmed with CNN on Monday night that the FBI seized documents from Mar-a-Lago.

“President Trump and his legal team have been cooperative with FBI and DOJ officials every step of the way. The FBI did conduct an unannounced raid and seized paper,” Bobb said.

The alleged raid by the FBI came two days after Trump’s latest hint at a 2024 run, in which he stopped short of giving an official announcement.

“Well, it’s not a long period, regardless, whether you go before or after, certainly not a very long period of time,” the former president said when responding to questions from the press before he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, on Saturday.

“It’s coming,” Trump said, “and I think people are going to be very happy.”

“Our country has never been in a position like this. We lost everything. We’ve lost energy independence. We’ve lost our prestige. We’ve lost every single thing you can lose,” Trump said during the event, noting the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he previously called “the greatest tactical mistake in history,” and the border crisis.

Lawmakers React

‘Weaponized’ Justice System

The 45th president said during his speech that he may be the “most persecuted” person in the history of America.

“A friend of mine recently said that I was the most persecuted person in the history of our country,” Trump said during his speech at CPAC. “And then I thought about it, because I didn’t have time to think much because I’m always being persecuted, and I felt he may very well be right.”

Trump called the raid “prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want [him] to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls,” adding that Democrats “will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections.”

“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before,” Trump said.

During an America First Policy Institute event in July, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), who was part of Trump’s legal defense team during the Democrats’ 2019 attempted impeachment of Trump, told The Epoch Times in an interview that the Biden administration has completely “weaponized” the Department of Justice (DOJ).

By design, the American justice system “is a bulwark against tyranny,” Johnson said. “But if the Department of Justice, for example, is weaponized for political purposes—which is what we’re seeing right now in the Biden ministration—that jeopardizes that foundational pillar itself.”

“Today’s raid on the former President’s home in the middle of an election season looks like another egregious & unprecedented abuse of power,” Johnson said in a statement on Monday.

“We will restore order & accountability as soon as we regain the gavels for a Republican majority in November. It can’t happen soon enough!” Johnson added.

‘Third-World Marxist Dictatorship’

“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries,” Trump said in his Monday statement. “Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) echoed Trump’s comment.

“Using government power to persecute political opponents is something we have seen many times from 3rd world Marxist dictatorships,” Rubio said in a statement on Twitter late Monday. “But never before in America.

“After today[‘]s raid on Mar A Lago what do you think the left plans to use those 87,000 new IRS agents for?

“The FBI isn’t doing anything about the groups vandalizing Catholic Churches, firebombing Pro-Life groups or threatening Supreme Court justices. But they find time to raid Mar A Lago,” Rubio said.

Outcry from Republicans

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said in a statement on Monday: “The FBI raid on President Trump’s home is an unprecedented political weaponization of the Justice Department. They’ve been after President Trump as a candidate, as President, and now as a former President. Using the criminal justice system in this manner is un-American.”

“The DOJ & FBI are being weaponized like never before to target political opponents. This Admin has thrown the rule of law and faith in our democratic institutions out the door,” said Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) in a Monday Twitter post. “Joe Biden and Merrick Garland must answer immediately for today’s raid against an American president.”

“The inconsistent and partisan application of the law by the FBI has gone too far,” Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) said on Monday. “The Democrats, for too long, have used our government agencies from the FBI to the IRS to target their political opponents. This inconceivable raid is an attack on our Republic.”

“This action, a raid on a former President and political rival, is something we would expect from Putin on his rivals… not here, not in the USA,” Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.) said.

“The weaponization and politicalization of federal agencies is egregious and scary. These are Gestapo-like tactics. If the FBI can do this to President Trump, what do you think 87,000 new IRS agents will do to the American people?” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said. “Did Biden sign off on this raid? The American people deserve answers.”

“I stood up to America’s bureaucratic corruption, I restored power to the people, and truly delivered for our Country, like we have never seen before. The establishment hated it,” Trump said in his Monday statement.

“Now, as they watch my endorsed candidates win big victories, and see my dominance in all polls, they are trying to stop me, and the Republican Party, once more. The lawlessness, political persecution, and Witch Hunt must be exposed and stopped,” Trump said.

“I will continue to fight for the Great American People!”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

SURPRISE! THE LEFT STILL CAN’T MEME.

Dark Brandon’ is the Biden White House’s cringetastic effort to win back the “Let’s Go Brandon” meme that haunted the perennially COVID-hit President through late 2021 and early 2022. The efforts, shared by taxpayer-funded White House staff, combines an almost year-late rebuttal to the Brandon memes with the Byronic aethestic of the well established “Dark MAGA” movement.

One more problem: it’s extremely ‘Third Reich‘ in nature.

That’s right. On the day the media wants us to buy the idea that Donald Trump demanded his Generals behaved like Nazis, the current White House is actually promoting Nazi memes to hype its passage of the Inflation Recovery Act (IRA). The timing by the White House isn’t bad, to be honest, since the IRA (another irony not lost on us) does in fact empower the U.S. government with a Stormtrooper-style IRS to snoop through your taxes (all at your expense, of course).

But there’s more to this story than the White House using the Reichsadler or Parteiadler in its memes. 

The first thing to note is that this “Dark Brandon” stuff is actually being promoted by corporate media outlets. Check out Slate’s take, which concludes: “If he can muster a smidge of momentum from the al-Zawahiri assassination by pulling up the cowl of Dark Brandon, then that is surely better than whatever he’s got going right now. After all, Joe Biden’s approval rating is already cresting back toward 40 percent. Dark Brandon strikes again!”

MUST READ: REVEALED: CNN, CNBC, AP Met With Chinese Communist Party Propagandists in July.

Sycophantic though Slate may be, the author isn’t wrong. Rasmussen polling has consistently noted that when Biden is away in his basement, hiding from COVID-19, his approval numbers go up. No wonder the White House would rather use cartoon images of him on social media. The left’s pro-Nazi memes are literally more popular than the real Joe Biden.

Mel Magazine – which appears to be some kind of soy-sponsored blog site for, uh, funboys – offers, “Okay, I pledge my soul to Dark Brandon. What’s the worst that could happen? Not like Regular Brandon was doing such a bang-up job. Trust the process. We’re finally winning.”

Sounds totally normal.

Even Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper has been hyping “Dark Brandon,” alongside the Daily Dot, as well as the Independent newspaper (which ironically is hyper-dependent on Russia and Saudi oligarch largesse).

But there’s one more part of the Dark Brandon saga. The cherry on the cake. And that is the aesthetic origin of the entire thing.

“You have this very exaggerated image of a very ‘evil Biden,’ but also, his ability to mobilize these public intellectual zombies in an image is also kind of funny because it has long been China’s accusation of the U.S. government, that the U.S. is using folks like public intellectuals and scholars within China to carry out ‘peaceful evolution,’” Victor Shih, associate professor at UC San Diego, told POLITICO.

That’s right – it comes from China. Specifically, by an artist named Yang Quan, who sought to portray Biden in a negative light in early 2022.

Yes, the pro-Biden memes being disseminated from the hallowed halls of the White House are both Third Reich in nature, and hail from the Chinese Communist Party’s fellow travelers.

MUST READ: EXC: Wuhan Institute of Virology’s ‘Bat Woman’ Is Still Hunting Bats For ‘Recombinant’ Research.

Even when the left tries their very hardest to meme: they end up being utterly, utterly cringe.

THE CANDIDATE’S OWN BALLOT BEING RETURNED WILL SET ALARM BELLS RINGING.

Joe Kent, candidate for Washington’s 3rd Congressional district, has had his own ballot rejected by the state, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.

Kent, who is endorsed by President Trump, submitted his ballot to the county auditor’s office himself, on August 2nd 2022. It was originally sent to him on July 17th.

The National Pulse has obtained an image of the notification of Kent’s rejected ballot:

Kent told The National Pulse that he had to go into the offices of the election administrators on Monday, August 8th, in order to verify his own signature – a process that many older voters may be unable to attend to so easily – so that his vote would count.

“It’s a mess of a system,” Kent told The National Pulse.

The primary election in WA-3 is curious enough by itself, using a non-partisan, top-two system, “in which all candidates appear on the same ballot, for congressional and state-level elections. The top two vote-getters move on to the general election, regardless of their party affiliation.”

But Kent’s primary appears to have had especially strange problems, with the count still not concluded almost a week since election day. At the time of writing, around 81 percent of ballots (183,000) have been counted. Another twenty-odd thousand remain.

Kent is currently running 0.1 percent behind establishment Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach President Trump. Critics wrote off Kent’s chances on election day, but the former Green Beret who served 11 combat tours and won six bronze stars has clawed his way back as the votes have trickled in.

Now, critics suspect there could be foul play in certain counties, where votes for Kent are being rejected, including his own.

This is a developing story.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has criticized Democrats for pushing their so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which he warns is a “terrible bill.”

The bill will double the size of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). But IRS agents are not designed to go after “billionaires and big corporations,” Cruz said in an interview with Fox News. “They’re designed to come after small businesses and working families across this country … The Democrats are making the IRS bigger than the Pentagon, plus the Department of State, plus the FBI, plus the Border Patrol combined … This is a massive power grab.”

Senate Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act on Aug. 7 with a 51 to 50 vote, with Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris casting her tie-breaking vote in favor of her party. The estimated $740 billion package now heads to the House for vote.

Over $300 billion will go to climate change and energy, which is the largest clean energy investment made by a federal government in American history. It also includes tax credits for electric vehicles. The bill institutes a 15 percent minimum tax for corporations making over $1 billion a year.

Cruz warned that the Inflation Reduction Act will “drive up gas prices” and “kill manufacturing jobs.” The bill has “billions in new taxes” charged against U.S. gas and oil production, a decision that will raise gas prices at the pump, he said.

According to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the bill will “reduce” the U.S. budget deficit.

But a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CRO) shows that even though the budget deficit will be lowered by $101.5 billion over a 10-year period, the deficit will actually increase by $24.6 billion in the first six years between 2022 and 2027.

Widespread Criticism

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday, former president Donald Trump warned that the Inflation Reduction Act will worsen inflation, which is already at a four-decade high.

Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) will pay a political price for backing the spending bill, he predicted.

In an Aug. 8 Twitter post, Sen. Masha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) called the $80 billion set aside to double the number of IRS agents as practically giving “every American a personalized tax auditor.”

Instead of increasing taxes, the government should be focusing on reducing them, she insisted. The Democrats’ “socialist agenda” will make the life of Tennesseans “more difficult and expensive.”

“It’s a special kind of stupid to raise taxes during both a recession and inflation—that’s called stagflation, which is what we have right now as a result of Biden’s policies,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said on Twitter.

There are also worries about the 15 percent book minimum tax affecting small and mid-sized businesses that make below $1 billion a year.

An analysis of the tax rules by Americans for Tax Reform states that the minimum tax will be applicable to any company that has private equity in its capital structure, since the firm will be considered a subsidiary of the private equity firm for tax purposes.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors this week voted to add a November 2022 ballot measure that would allow the county to secede from California.

The measure, which was voted on 4–0 by the supervisors Wednesday, would ask San Bernardino residents: “Do the citizens of San Bernardino County want the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors to study all options to obtain its fair share of state and federal resources, up to and including secession?”

“Now, that last line is the most controversial,” said Supervisor Curt Hagman during Wednesday’s meeting about the proposal. “It’s a question we’re going to put to our residents. Do they want to include all options to go after [the] fight for their fair share of taxpayer dollars?” he asked.

Over the years, some California counties have evaluated the possibility of seceding from the Golden State due to monetary, cultural, and other differences. In 2016, a failed ballot measure would have split California into six states, while a 2018 proposition that also failed would have created three new states.

But San Bernardino County is the largest county in California and United States, spanning more than 20,000 square miles and home to well over 2 million people. Cities like Fontana, San Bernardino, Victorville, Hesperia, and other municipalities are within its borders, which stretch from Los Angeles County to the California-Nevada and California-Arizona state lines.

Reasons

Supervisor Joe Baca Jr. said he doesn’t want the county to split from California but is interesting in studying whether its residents should receive more state and federal funds.

“I do think we have to look at anything we can do to enhance services for our residents,” Baca said, reported The Herald Sun newspaper. “I’m not in favor of seceding. I’m proud to be from California. I love California.”

Hagman concurred with Baca’s assertion and noted that it would be acceptable “if the worst thing that comes out of this is a study that will be ammunition for our state representatives to fight for more money for us.”

2%40msn.com

“San Bernardino is a large county in both terms of size and population, with many pieces of critical infrastructure,” Barbara Rodriguez, an accountant who assists in state and local fund tax breakdowns, told the California Globe Thursday. “And the people there are feeling like they are being gipped. Like most counties, they are looking for more money coming in, and seeing their county be so low on the list has really incensed them.”

Supervisor Janie Rutherford, meanwhile, said she doesn’t “believe it’s feasible politically or financially to secede from California,” adding, “I absolutely joined with my constituents who have a growing palpable anger about everything.”

Many Californias are dealing with daily problems, including heavy taxes, the nation’s highest gas prices, and widespread homelessness, added Rutherford.

California, she said, has an “ineffective justice system, broken schools, [and] the state’s overreaching counterproductive regulatory schemes, housing and affordability to the ineptness of the state’s preparation for this drought.”

“People pay high taxes, and they do not believe those taxes are coming back to their neighborhoods to address the problems they’re most concerned about,” Rutherford said. “That’s what we heard from our public last week, and there is nothing crazy at all about being angry about those things.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Posts shared on Facebook that claim the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) classified monkeypox as an airborne virus, it can cause paralysis, and can last months are false, officials said.

Facebook posts containing the claims reviewed by The Epoch Times show they both have a BBC News logo and credit the World Health Organization and CDC. One of the posts says, “CDC has now classified this disease as airborne and anyone within 15 feet can catch it,” while it adds that it is now being classified as a form of herpes, the illness can last up to four months, and it can lead to paralyzation.

Under the Facebook post, some said the information is fake and one said that it’s “trying to scare us to take more vaccine shots.” The person added, “Only way it can spread is through contact from someone who has it, kissing, sex, cuddling.”

A spokesperson for the BBC told Reuters and The Associated Press the news outlet did not make the images. A spokesperson for the CDC told the Associated Press that the post’s claims “are not correct.”

The CDC, WHO, and other health organizations have not classified monkeypox as “airborne,” and they have said it spreads via close, prolonged contact from one person to another person. Homosexual males are the primary spreaders of the virus, officials say.

CDC spokesperson Kate Fowlie told AP that the virus “is not known to linger in the air and is not transmitted during short periods of shared airspace.” She added, “In the current monkeypox outbreak, we know that those with the disease generally describe close, sustained physical contact with other people who are infected with the virus.”

Transmission is primarily through skin-to-skin contact, and “direct contact with monkeypox rash, scabs, or body fluids from a person with monkeypox,” according to the CDC website.

“Touching objects, fabrics (clothing, bedding, or towels), and surfaces that have been used by someone” infected with monkeypox can also transmit the virus, the agency says.

Paralysis is not generally associated with monkeypox, according to health agencies, and the virus doesn’t last for four months, but rather between two and four weeks, officials say.

Symptoms of the virus include fever, swollen lymph nodes, malaise, and a rash or lesions that may initially be mistaken for chickenpox or a sexually transmitted disease.

As for the claim about it being a form of herpes, monkeypox is classified as a pox virus in the poxviridae family related to smallpox, cowpox, and others. Herpes, meanwhile, is within the herpesviridae family.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Republicans say a Democrat-backed bill worth $740 billion includes funding to hire 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents, which they say will target Americans.

The bill, known as the “Inflation Reduction Act,” was approved in a 51–50 vote as Vice President Kamala Harris served as a tie-breaker for Democrats. A provision includes the hiring of 87,000 agents, a move that was defended by Democrats, who said that the funding would target people who cheat on their taxes.

“Millions of Americans aren’t going to be impacted by that other than getting better service from the IRS having their telephone answer getting the questions they need in order to comply with our tax laws,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) told Fox News on Sunday. “The auditing is going to be focused on those of high income, the large corporations, etc.”

Meanwhile, Democrats have pointed to a May report from the Government Accountability Office showing that IRS audits have dropped over the past decade, including audits for the wealthy.

In a recent letter to Congress, IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said that if an additional $80 billion is given to the agency via the legislation, it would not increase audits for households that earn less than $400,000 per year.

“These resources are absolutely not about increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans,” Retting wrote in the letter. “As we have been planning, our investment of these enforcement resources is designed around Treasury’s directive that audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000.”

Warning

But Republicans warned that the IRS will target middle-class Americans with the tens of thousands of extra agents.

“Seriously, how out of touch do you have to be to brag about forcing a purely partisan bill through the Senate that raises taxes on the middle class, makes inflation worse, lowers after-tax income for Americans at every income level, decreases economic growth during a recession, and sends an army of IRS enforcers after grandma?” Republican National Committee spokesman Tommy Pigott asked, according to the Washington Examiner.

And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that those agents will “target Americans with 1.2 million new audits, more than half of which would be for people making less than $75,000 a year.”

“This bill is a give-away to the Democrats’ radical leftist base at the expense of middle-class Americans. It’s a betrayal of Biden’s promise to not raise taxes on the middle class. Make no mistake—this bill will hurt America and hardworking Americans at a time when we can least afford it,” Cruz wrote.

Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, disputed Democrat claims that the new funding will be used to target tax cheats and millionaires.

“My colleagues claim this massive funding boost will allow the IRS to go after millionaires, billionaires and so-called rich ‘tax cheats,’ but the reality is a significant portion raised from their IRS funding bloat would come from taxpayers with income below $400,000,” he said in a statement Sunday.

On Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that GOP claims about more IRS audits or changes to the U.S. tax code are false.

“This is just the latest example, again, of those who do nothing to protect tax welfare for the rich at the expense of everything else,” Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday on Air Force One. “They’re blatant lies.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A doctor who was banned from Twitter for posting about COVID-19 vaccines is willing to serve as the lead plaintiff in a potential class-action lawsuit against the social media company, his lawyer has informed the tech giant.

Dr. Andrew Bostom “stands with a growing number of similarly situated people who have had their Twitter accounts suspended for sharing their views and opinions on COVID-19,” James Lawrence III, Bostom’s lawyer, told Twitter in a letter dated Aug. 6.

“Dr. Bostom is ready, willing, and able to serve as a lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Twitter for breach of contract if that becomes necessary,” Lawrence added.

Bostom, with the Brown University Center For Primary Care and Prevention, was permanently suspended in June after sharing the results of a study that linked Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine with lower sperm and semen concentration in men.

After Lawrence contacted Twitter on Bostom’s behalf, the company reversed the suspension, admitting he did not appear to violate any rules with the post.

Just two weeks later, Bostom was banned for asserting that the only randomized controlled trial data on children shows zero hospitalizations prevented by COVID-19 vaccination, while trial data from adults showed the vaccines caused more severe adverse events than the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations it prevented.

Twitter told Bostom in the suspension notice that he violated the company’s policy on spreading misleading information related to COVID-19.

New Letter

But the post does not violate the policy, Lawrence told Vijaya Gadde, head of legal, policy, and trust at Twitter.

The first portion of the comment is backed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s briefing document (pdf) analyzing Pfizer trial data in children aged 6 months to 23 months, the lawyer said, noting that there were zero hospitalizations in the placebo arm but one in the vaccinated arm.

The second portion is supported by a recent paper that analyzed serious adverse events from the original Pfizer and Moderna vaccine trials and concluded that people who were vaccinated were at higher risk of an event than those who did not get a shot.

“His comments can be substantiated by actual pediatric and adult data. This is not ‘misinformation’ by any means, but rather a restating of actual scientific analysis of the data from clinical trials of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines,” Lawrence wrote.

Both the vaccines are built on messenger RNA, or mRNA, technology.

Even if the comment did violate Twitter’s policy, the company failed to follow its own five-strikes rule, which gives users five violations before a ban, the lawyer said.

He recently represented journalist Alex Berenson in a case against Twitter in which a judge said Twitter violated its own rule in its ban of Berenson. The suit was settled, and Berenson was reinstated.

Twitter is being urged to restore Bostom’s account by 8 p.m. on Aug. 12.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Former President Donald Trump has warned Americans to brace for something “a lot worse than a recession” while blaming the Biden administration’s poor stewardship of the economy for soaring inflation and denouncing the tax hikes in the latest Democrat spending bill.

Trump made the remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday, where the former president raised the alarm on the state of the union.

“Our country is being shot. It’s being destroyed,” Trump told attendees, while touting his administration’s record on the economy and national security.

Trump spoke of “creating the most secure border in American history, record tax and regulation cuts, $1.87 gasoline, no inflation, low interest rates, record growth in real wages, record growth in our economy.”

Soaring Inflation, Recession

During Trump’s tenure, the highest the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation gauge came in at was 2.9 percent in July 2018, while in his final month in office, January 2021, inflation clocked in at 1.4 percent.

Under Biden, inflation has climbed steadily, soaring 9.1 percent year-over-year in June 2022, a figure not seen in more than 40 years.

In his speech, Trump drew a contrast with the economy under Joe Biden, blaming the president for the highest inflation in decades that Trump estimates is costing American families as much as $7,000 a year.

“After the pandemic, we handed the radical Democrats the fastest economic recovery ever recorded, the history of our country, ever recorded,” Trump continued. “They’ve turned that into two straight quarters of negative economic growth, also known, despite their protestation to the contrary, as a recession.”

Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth are a common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession, although recessions in the United States are officially declared by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using a broader definition than the two-quarter rule.

Despite a number of economists arguing that the United States is in a recession based on the two-consecutive-quarters rule, the Biden administration insists that the economy isn’t in a recession, citing NBER’s consideration of a broader range of indicators.

A key argument against recession made by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others in the Biden administration is that the U.S. labor market remains tight, with unemployment at 3.5 percent and, at 10.7 million, the number of job openings remaining well above the 6 million or so people classified as unemployed.

Worse Than Recession

In his CPAC speech, Trump then issued an ominous warning that, absent a course correction, the recession could spiral into something even worse.

“Just hope that the recession doesn’t turn into a depression, because the way they’re doing things, it could be a lot worse than a recession,” Trump said, echoing similar remarks he made at a rally in Arizona at the end of July, where he warned that “we’re going to have a serious problem” unless political change takes place.

“We got to get this act in order, we have to get this country going, or we’re going to have a serious problem,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona, warning that “we’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession. We’ll have a depression.”

During his appearance at CPAC, Trump issued a call for urgent action at the polls in the upcoming midterms.

“The future of our country is at stake. We don’t have time to wait years and years. We won’t have a country left. What I used to say about Venezuela is true. We have to save the economy, defeat the Biden, Pelosi, Schumer tax hike, which is happening right now tonight,” Trump continued, referring to the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” that cleared the Senate not long after his speech.

Senators passed the sweeping bill, estimated at $740 billion, in a 51–50 vote on Aug. 7, with the package next going to the House for consideration.

During the deliberations, Senate Democrats rejected an amendment offered by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) that sought to ban any of the $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from being used to target Americans making less than $400,000 per year.

“My colleagues claim this massive funding boost will allow the IRS to go after millionaires, billionaires and so-called rich ‘tax cheats,’ but the reality is a significant portion raised from their IRS funding bloat would come from taxpayers with income below $400,000,” Crapo said in a statement.

Crapo’s amendment was rejected on a party-line vote, with the Democrat bill including softer language that features a non-binding statement of intention not to squeeze more revenue from America’s middle class.

Tax Hikes

According to an analysis by Americans for Tax Reform, a U.S. advocacy group, the spending bill includes a number of tax hikes on American households and businesses.

This includes a $6.5 billion natural gas tax that ATR says will increase household energy bills, a $12 billion crude oil tax that will end up being passed on to drivers in the form of higher gas prices, and a $52 billion income tax hike on mid-sized and family businesses.

In a separate analysis, ATR said that the Democrat bill’s changes to the book tax threaten small businesses.

Elaborating on that theme, economist and author Antonio Graceffo wrote in an op-ed for The Epoch Times that the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” would drive up prices for American households.

“Nearly half of these new taxes will be paid by manufacturers, creating disincentives to produce. Diminished industrial output will drive up the cost of goods and reduce the variety and quantity of goods available on store shelves,” Graceffo wrote.

“Beyond the manufacturing sector, the act increases taxes on businesses in general, which, combined with higher interest rates will decrease new investment and hamper job creation. Ultimately, these increased costs will be passed on to customers,” he added.

‘We Have to Win’

During his CPAC speech, Trump revealed what he sees as the key to bringing the country and its economy back on track.

“We have to win an earth-shattering victory in 2022. We have to do it, coming up in November,” Trump said.

“This election needs to be a national referendum on the horrendous catastrophes the radical Democrats have inflicted on our country,” he continued.

“The Republican party needs to campaign on a clear pledge that, if they are given power, they’re going to fight with everything they have to shut down the border, stop the crime wave, beat inflation, and hold the Biden administration accountable. They have to hold it accountable. Job number one for the next Congress,” Trump said.

The national midterm election takes place on Nov. 8, with 34 Senate seats and all 435 House seats up for grabs.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Amid Senate run, Val Demings whitewashes past support for Minneapolis’s far-left city council

Florida Democratic Senate hopeful Val Demings wants voters to know she would never support abolishing the police. Two years ago, she praised a group of radical activists working to do just that as “thoughtful.”

In a June 2020 interview with CBS, Demings voiced support for Minneapolis City Council members who pledged to “abolish the Minneapolis Police system as we know it” following the police killing of George Floyd. Demings had no doubt the council members and their activist allies would “come out with a plan” for a new policing system that would “keep Minneapolis safe but also bring the community and the police together in a much needed and long overdue way.”

But days after Demings’s interview, the council voted unanimously to eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department without establishing any kind of replacement. In December, the council voted to pull $8 million in police funding as part of its pledge to “transform our system of public safety.” All the while, the far-left groups that demanded those changes made it clear they would not be satisfied until lawmakers abolished “jails, prisons, detention centers, [and] immigration enforcement.”

Now, as Demings fights to unseat Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), the Democrat is running away from her praise for the council. The position earned her praise amid the riots that followed Floyd’s death, when two-thirds of Americans supported the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then, support has plummeted to 31 percent, prompting Demings to use her status as a former cop to argue that she’d never “call abolishing the police ‘thoughtful.'”

Still, many Florida law enforcement officials aren’t buying Demings’s turnaround. 55 state sheriffs have endorsed Rubio, and some say Demings “turned her back on law enforcement” in the wake of Floyd’s death. Demings did not return a request for comment.

On June 7, 2020, days after violent riots subsided in Minneapolis, the anti-police groups Reclaim the Block and the Black Visions Collective hosted a rally in Minneapolis’s Powderhorn Park. During the event, nine Minneapolis City Council members, including then-president Lisa Bender, stood behind a giant “DEFUND POLICE” sign on stage, and announced their “commitment” to “end policing as we know it.”

The next day, Demings defended the council to CBS, expressing confidence in the group’s ability to reimagine public safety in a “safe” and “thoughtful” way. During a CNN appearance that morning, Bender shared her hope for a “future without police.” Pressed on the prospect of having no cops to call during a break-in should Minneapolis actualize that future, Bender said the concern “comes from a place of privilege,” as “calling the police may mean more harm is done.”

Bender’s rhetoric closely resembles language in the Black Visions Collective’s “Minneapolis Without Policing” resource guide, which instructs crime victims to resist “the urge to dial 911,” as the police’s presence “will put people at risk of being jailed, abused, or killed.” The similarity is likely no coincidence—in August 2020, two months after the interview, Bender acknowledged her “long relationship” with the anti-cop group, which began its work to defund and disband police in 2017.

While the Black Visions Collective long had the ear of Bender and other council members, its radical vision for Minneapolis didn’t catch fire until after Floyd’s death. That event prompted the collective’s members to seize on growing anti-police rhetoric, harassing city mayor Jacob Frey (D.) and his liberal counterparts on the council to answer the call to defund police. Days before the nine city council members publicly caved to the collective’s demands in Powderhorn Park, the group planted gravestones with Floyd’s name outside council members’ homes.

It’s unclear if Demings was familiar with the Black Visions Collective when she praised the “community leaders” working with the council to reimagine law enforcement. But the group undoubtedly led the charge to abolish police in Minneapolis, giving politicians like Bender a guide to “eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance” and building “a police-free future.”

“As [prison industrial complex] abolitionists, we organize to dismantle and defund these systems,” the guide reads. “This looks like organizing to abolish police and all law enforcement, including ICE and the military; to stop jail/prison construction and close existing facilities; and to end racist, predictive policing practices that use zip codes to target Black and Brown neighborhoods. It also looks like not calling the police on people, ever.”

Bender and the rest of the City Council advanced many of these policies after the June rally. On June 26, the council unanimously approved a proposal that would have done away with the Minneapolis Police Department in favor of a “department of community safety and violence prevention.” The proposal gave the council overwhelming control over the new department. It also removed the city’s mandatory officer requirement, which meant the council did not have to hire a single cop.

Unfortunately for the Black Visions Collective, the community safety department never came to be. Minneapolis voters had a chance to approve the proposal through a November 2021 ballot measure, which came as the city experienced a surge in violent crime, including the highest number of homicides in two decades. Voters rejected the measure by a double-digit margin.

Following the vote, Bender retreated into privacy. After declining to run for reelection in November 2020, the former president announced she was “logging off for a while” and locked her Twitter account.

But for Demings, distancing herself from the summer of 2020 has proven more difficult. Rubio’s campaign has flooded airwaves with ads saying the Democrat “refused to condemn radicals.” In response, Demings released her own ad, which called the idea of defunding police “just crazy.”

That rhetoric is a far cry from Demings’s earlier comments. She claims her “very thoughtful” comments were directed toward the City Council, not their movement to dismantle police. For former Minneapolis-area police captain David Zimmer, that defense is not a convincing one, as the council in 2020 was well known as “an activist council that had it out for its own police department and was looking for ways to take more control.”

“They were pretty clear with what their intent was,” said Zimmer, now a criminal justice policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment. “They wanted to do away with the police department. And when the Floyd case came about, they felt like they had the power to do it.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The Senate approved the Democrats’ sweeping health care and climate bill on Aug. 7 in a 51–50 vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote.

The estimated $740 billion package next goes to the House for consideration.

“It’s been a long, tough and winding road, but at last, at last we have arrived,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. “The Senate is making history. I am confident the Inflation Reduction Act will endure as one of the defining legislative measures of the 21st century.”

Senators engaged in a round-the-clock marathon of voting that began on Aug. 6 and stretched into the afternoon of Aug. 7. Democrats voted against some three dozen Republican amendments to the legislation.

The bill ran into trouble midday over objections to a 15 percent corporate minimum tax that was disliked by private equity firms and other industries, forcing last-minute changes.

“It will close tax loopholes and it will reduce and reduce the deficit,” Schumer said. “It will help every citizen in this country and make America a much better place.”

Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a U.S. advocacy group, stated that the measure will increase taxes on thousands of mid-sized small businesses across the United States.

“Any business that has [private equity] in its capital structure is now considered a subsidiary of that firm and thus subject to 15 percent book tax,” John Kartch, a spokesman for ATR, wrote on Twitter.

“As written, the provision now appears restructured to define any company with private equity in its capital structure to be considered a subsidiary of that private equity firm for purposes of the tax,” the group said in a statement. “This means that these companies would now be swept up in the new 15 percent tax on book income. This provision would greatly expand the reach of the book minimum tax to apply to small and midsize companies that require capital investment to grow their business.”

Concerns over objections to the corporate minimum tax on private equity firms and other industries threatened to slow the progress.

Republicans said the measure would undermine an economy that policymakers are struggling to keep from plummeting into recession. They said the bill’s business taxes would hurt job creation and force prices skyward, making it harder for people to cope with the nation’s worst inflation since the 1980s.

“Democrats have already robbed American families once through inflation, and now their solution is to rob American families a second time,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the floor.

Spending and tax increases in the legislation would eliminate jobs while having an insignificant impact on inflation and climate change, the Kentucky Republican said.

Starting late on Aug. 6, the Senate began its so-called “vote-a-rama” that comes before the final passage in the Senate’s budget reconciliation process. Democrats used the process to pass the bill along party lines so as to avoid the 60-vote filibuster, and Harris served as a tiebreaker on several amendments in the 50–50 Senate.

More Details

The bill came to the floor about a week after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced he came to an agreement with Schumer in what is believed to be an attempt to boost Democrats’ and Biden’s chances during the 2022 midterms amid months of negative polling. Biden’s original climate and social measure collapsed after it was opposed by Manchin, who said it was too costly and would fuel inflation.

“The Inflation Reduction Act is the product of years of bipartisan conversations about the most impactful ways to produce more energy domestically, bring down energy and healthcare costs and pay down our debt. The IRA achieves this without raising taxes,” Manchin wrote on Twitter.

Around the same time, the West Virginia Democrat said he would vote down GOP amendments.

“Despite this, my [Republican] friends have made clear they’re completely unwilling to support this bill under any condition. None of their amendments would change that,” Manchin said.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) offered amendments to further expand the legislation’s health benefits, and those efforts were defeated. Most votes were forced by Republicans and many were designed to make Democrats look soft on issues such as U.S.–Mexico border security, gasoline and energy costs, and like bullies for wanting to strengthen IRS tax law enforcement.

Late on Aug. 6, Sanders said the measure won’t reduce inflation and said it also doesn’t go far enough with its climate-related measures.

“I want to take a moment to say a few words about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act’ that we are debating this evening,” he said from the Senate floor. “And I say so-called, by the way, because according to the [Congressional Budget Office], and other economic organizations that study this bill, it will, in fact, have a minimal impact on inflation.

“At a time when the drug companies are enjoying huge profits, the pharmaceutical industry will still be allowed to charge the American people by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

UPDATE: This article has been updated to include Sen. Joe Manchin’s full title. 

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

he Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose research into coronaviruses is believed by many to be the source of COVID-19, is engaging in similarly risky studies tracking bats and their ability to infect humans in caves across China.

The unearthed paper follows the controversial lab using funds from Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance to gather bat samples. Beginning in 2014, led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Bat Woman” Shi Zhengli, researchers used the samples to conduct risky “gain-of-function” research, as now-deleted webpages reveal the lab manipulating bat coronaviruses to “replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”

The new study, published in May of 2020, appears to be engaging in similar research methods.

Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including “Bat Lady” Shi Zhengli, tracked and sampled the Cave Nectar Bat since it is “known to carry both filoviruses and coronaviruses,” according to the paper.

“In this study, we tracked 16 bats in Mengla County, Yunnan Province, China, using miniaturized GPS devices to investigate their movements and potential contact with humans. Furthermore, to determine the prevalence of coronavirus and filovirus infections, we screened for the nucleic acids of the Měnglà virus (MLAV) and two coronaviruses (GCCDC1-CoV and HKU9-CoV) in anal swab samples taken from bats and for antibodies against these viruses in human serum samples,” explains an overview of the researcher’s work.

The study also shows that researchers worked with “recombinant proteins,”  a term that commonly appears in “gain-of-function” research.

MUST READ: REVEALED: CNN, CNBC, AP Met With Chinese Communist Party Propagandists in July.

The research was published in the journal Zoological Research and was funded by several Chinese Communist Party-run scientific organizations including the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The National Pulse has previously exposed the NSFC’s deep ties to China’s military.

The group’s 2020 funding guidelines identify “innovative research in defense and military and civilian integration” as receiving “preferential” funding. The foundation also inked a 2016 “strategic cooperative agreement” with the Science and Technology Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission – the regime’s paramount military policy-making body.

Annual reports from NSFC reveal several researchers from PLA-run institutions received millions in funding.

The paper also follows lies from EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak about the lab’s work with live bats, which were proved false through recovered footage from the lab. Deleted webpages and patents filed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology also show that researchers worked closely with bats despite the lab acknowledging that “the risk of being bitten by a bat still exists” even when protective gear is worn.

WASHINGTON—Lawmakers and experts highlighted the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) history of violence and bloodshed, while recognizing a new milestone reached by a global movement calling for people to relinquish their ties to the world’s largest communist regime.

The number of Chinese who have severed their ties to Chinese communist organizations reached over 400 million on Aug. 3, according to the Global Center for Quitting the CCP, an organization dedicated to processing and tracking online declarations denouncing CCP memberships. The global movement is known as “tuidang,” which means “quit the Party” in English.

“The Chinese Communist Party has the blood of tens of millions of Chinese on its hands, so it is no wonder that over 400 million Chinese civilians have left the CCP over the past two decades,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) in an emailed statement.

“Mao’s Great Famine, Tiananmen Square, the persecution of the Falun Gong, and the genocide of Uyghur Muslims are all proof that the CCP only cares about its grip on power,” continued Burchett, who sits on the Asia subcommittee of the House Committee of Foreign Affairs.

“Chinese people would be better served by an open and truly representative government, so I hope the tuidang movement picks up steam.”

A ‘Self-Healing’ Movement

In the past decades, more and more Chinese have been questioning the CCP’s representation of the people, according to Ryan, one of the authors of “Nine Commentaries of Communist Party,” a 2004 book first published by the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times that inspired the global movement. Ryan is an alias used to protect his identity and family in China.

Ryan described the tuidang as a “self-healing” and “self-redemption” movement. According to him, Nine Commentaries helped the Chinese people unwind decades of CCP propaganda that instilled the idea that the Party equates to China, and the Chinese civilization. People were finally able to separate the CCP from the people, and the nation.

Before the book systematically illustrated the Party’s history of deceit and use of mass struggle to solidify its power over society, the CCP had controlled the Chinese people and dictated their mentality without the people’s knowledge, said Ryan. While he himself grew up in this environment, Ryan credited his belief in Falun Gong for helping him to transcend the communist regime’s indoctrination.

Falun Gong is a spiritual practice involving meditative exercises and a set of moral teachings underpinned by the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

Putting these principles into practice helped Ryan to extricate himself from the CCP’s hold on people’s psyche. This is because the Party has been able to manipulate and control the populace by appealing to the ignoble parts of human nature: greed, fear, and jealousy, he said. Such a tactic is most clearly shown in the CCP’s continual efforts in its 100-year history to pitch one group of society against another for no other reason than to consolidate its own grip on power, and eliminate threats to its control.

Falun Gong, itself, became singled as a target of the CCP’s wrath in 1999, after the Party deemed the spiritual disciplines’ huge popularity—with up to 100 million people practicing—a threat to its hold on power. The CCP has sought to wipe out the spiritual discipline with an all-society-wide campaign of arrest, torture, and vilification for the past 23 years and counting.

“Whether Chinese people have read the ‘Nine Commentaries’ or not, they have begun to discuss social issues with the verbiage and logic presented in the book,” Ryan said about the book’s impact. “Their mentality change is as important as the action of quitting the Party.”

Chinese people have quit the Party or its affiliate organizations by submitting online statements to the Global Center for Quitting the CCP. Most use an alias to do so.

“Chinese as a group are rediscovering their identity, one that is separate from the CCP,” Ryan added.

‘An Exemplar’

Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a Washington-based advocacy group, highlighted the tuidang movement as a model for peaceful resistance against communist oppression.

“Congratulations to the Tuidang movement for reaching a new milestone. Tuidang is an exemplar of a peaceful, civil society movement where activists reach the conscience of their fellow citizens and persuade them to renounce communist ideology and control,” he said in an emailed statement.

“The efforts of the movement to end communist domination are admirable, and the free world must stand with the people of China in such brave acts of resistance against the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party,” Bremberg continued.

Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) on the House Energy and Commerce Committee welcomed the latest progress of the tuidang movement in an emailed statement: “This week’s milestone is a clear signal to the CCP that their oppressive ways will not stand forever, and personal freedom will eventually carry the day, even in their own country. This is progress for those who stand against communism and the harm its policies have across the globe.”

Ryan said he has also seen the knock-on effects of the movement in the United States. It’s now the norm for U.S. officials to clarify that they don’t target the Chinese people or China the nation when they criticize the CCP.

Communist Insider Decouples from the CCP

Cai Xia, a former professor at the CCP’s elite Central Party School in Beijing, was a Party insider.

Now based in Washington, Cai, in a January interview with The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet NTD, described her journey of how she walked away from the CCP.

The first time Cai thought of quitting the Party was in 2016. She had retired from teaching then and was living in Beijing. The impetus for her change in thinking was statements made by Ren Zhiqiang, an outspoken real estate tycoon in China, who questioned whether the government was the same as the Party and criticized the CCP for “taking the taxpayers’ money but not working for them.” That was his response to the CCP general secretary Xi Jinping’s statement that “the media’s last name is ‘dang’”—a term referring to the CCP.

Known as “Ren the canon” for being vocal in criticizing the Party, the real estate mogul is a “red princeling”, a term for descendants of former CCP senior officials. Thus many thought Ren would get into trouble but wouldn’t have to pay a hefty price. However, Ren was sentenced to 18 years in September 2020 for alleged graft after criticizing the CCP for its mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, which led to the global pandemic.

Cai told NTD that the Party school reprimanded her in 2016 for publishing an article supporting Ren. “I didn’t have a voice because the Party discipline bound me, and I was considered a CCP member first and foremost,” said Cai. “I would rather have abandoned my CCP member identity to keep my right to speak up.”

Cai had written a formal application to quit the CCP then. But her friends persuaded her not to submit it because of the expected financial retaliation, including losing her pension. When Ren was sentenced to 18 years in 2020, Cai again wanted to quit the Party. At that time, she was in the United States. Once again, her friends in the United States persuaded her not to leave the Party so that she could keep her pension income.

But the decision was ultimately made for her. The Party expelled her on Aug. 17, 2020.

Cai said she felt “completely relieved” upon receiving the news.

“I completely decoupled with the Party. From then on, I would have no relationship, economic or interest involvement, with the Party anymore,” she said.

Cai’s transition from a CCP insider to a member of ordinary Chinese citizens brought her sense of happiness mixed with relief. She acknowledged that she had to deal with some financial difficulties due to the loss of her pension, but it was something that she could overcome.

“Once you have joined the Party, you don’t have the freedom to quit it. They strictly forbid members from quitting the Party,” Cai told NTD, adding that this was equivalent to making people accomplices to the CCP’s criminal activities.

She urged people to have the courage to break this bind. Such an act doesn’t only amount to the liberation of a person’s mind and spirit, Cai said.

It will also “offer a person an added layer of protection when China goes through a transition in the future,” she said.

“The Party is evil; it doesn’t mean the 90 million members are all like that.”

Renouncing Their Pledge

Many Chinese who quit the communist organizations state their reason as wanting to rid themselves of the CCP’s control and avoid being considered an affiliate if or when the CCP is held accountable in or outside China.

These people also include those who were once members of the CCP’s junior organizations: the Young Pioneers for elementary- and middle-school-aged children, and the Communist Youth League for those who are middle- and high-school-aged.

Although memberships in these organizations are not mandatory on paper, they are in practice. Students who haven’t joined these two groups by a certain age face increasing pressure and even discrimination in being eligible to receive education benefits.

With each progressive level from the Young Pioneers up until fully-fledged Party member, the initiates’ pledge evolves from “contributing to” to “fighting for,” and eventually, “ready to sacrifice everything for” the CCP.

Even though the membership in the Young Pioneers supposedly ends at 14 and the Youth League at 28, members don’t go through a formal process to rescind their pledge to the CCP. Therefore anyone who has ever been a member of these youth organizations is encouraged to submit a statement withdrawing their affiliation at the Global Center for Quitting the CCP platform.

This explains why the 400 million figure who have quit the CCP organizations vastly outstrips the official number of CCP members, which is 90 million.

The movement was also welcomed by Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.), a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology: “We spent decades fighting the Cold War to stop the spread of communism because we knew back then that it is evil and capable of great atrocities.

“The Chinese Communist Party is not only a great threat to democracy and freedom but also our national security. We must stop its growing influence around the world and here at home.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Twitter has permanently banned author James Lindsay for calling a transgender attorney a “child sexualization specialist” on the social media platform.

Lindsay said he made the comment after Alejandro Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic who previously worked as staff attorney for the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, accused him of being racist and sexist.

Caraballo celebrated and took credit for Lindsay’s suspension, saying, “Tell James, I want him to know it was me” in a post on Twitter.

Over the last two weeks, Lindsay said, trans activists have banded together, targeted him, and claimed responsibility for a “mass reporting” campaign—which is against Twitter rules.

“They not only launched a massive reporting [campaign], but they bragged that they did it,” he told The Epoch Times on Aug. 5, the day he was banned. “Twitter has a terms of service agreement that you can’t mass report or induce mass reporting. It’s considered targeted harassment, and it’s against the terms of service to do it, but nobody ever enforces it—ever.”

He was previously twice locked out of his @conceptualjames Twitter account, once on July 21 for responding “ok groomer” to Ari Drennen, an LGBTQ program director at Media Matters, and again on July 26 for using the word “groomer” in old Twitter posts that trans activists publicized.

Drennen, who took credit for getting Lindsay locked out of his account on July 21, wrote an article published online July 22 suggesting Twitter suspend users “slandering LGBTQ people as ‘groomers’” and calling Lindsay a “right-wing CRT alarmist.”

To get back into his Twitter account in that case, Lindsay said he was “forced to confess” the “ok groomer” comment violated Twitter rules because “it’s the only way to get your account back unless you want to get locked into appeal limbo.”

Lindsay has since appealed the permanent ban. When prompted to “describe the problem” to Twitter, he wrote: “The problem is that you arbitrarily changed the rules and suspended my account after repeatedly forcing me to lie to admissions of guilt for ‘violations’ that aren’t real. You should un-suspend my account and correct your biased and arbitrary policy enforcement.”

Ironically, Lindsay said that he felt like he was “let out of prison” after the ban.

“I don’t know why I want to go back. It’s so strange how immediate it is that I just feel relief that I’m not on there anymore,” Lindsay said. “The only reason I want it back as a matter of practicality, because it drives something like 80-something percent of my traffic to my website.”

He accused Twitter of using tactics similar to those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to coerce people into confessing to fake crimes.

“That is a tactic of Maoism—a communist tactic to force people to confess to crimes to be able to get leniency. That’s literally how Mao ran his prisons in CCP-controlled China in the ’50s,” he said.

The term “groomer” has several meanings, and although it can refer to pedophilia, it can also mean a recruiter who “grooms” someone into a cult, club, or organization, or a person who “grooms” another for a job or position, he said.

Lindsay contends he used the term “groomer” to describe someone involved in what he views the “cult indoctrination” of others into the trans activism or and gender ideology movement and was not accusing anyone of pedophilia.

“I would not accuse anybody of that without substantive evidence. It’s a horrific accusation,” he said.

He has admitted publicly that he openly criticizes those involved “defending and engaging in cult grooming into a gender ideology rooted in queer Marxist theory.”

“It’s weird because the cult indoctrination is sex, gender, and sexuality, and so they’re indoctrinating people with concepts of sexuality which sexualizes children, but that’s not the same thing specifically as pedophilia, which is also the sexualization of children. There is this weird double meaning, or two meanings to the word,” he said.

Lindsay has produced a series of podcasts called “Groomer Schools” for his website, New Discourses, which has been very popular, he said.

“So, I’ve been calling these people ‘groomers’ for months. I started doing it back in October,” he said. “[It wasn’t] ambiguous in terms of what it means until 10 minutes ago.”

Twitter did not respond to an inquiry about Lindsay’s allegations that activists had launched a mass reporting campaign against him, but told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement on Aug. 5 that his account was “permanently suspended” for “hateful conduct” according to Twitter policies.

While Lindsay opposes “cancel culture” on social media, especially for expressing an opinion on an issue, he said people who abuse their positions or power to impose an ideology on school children “should be fired.”

As the author of several books, including “Race Marxism” and “Social (In)Justice,” that delve deep into today’s culture wars, Lindsay is no stranger to controversy, but he has never been banned from Twitter for his opinions on critical race theory, for example.

“It’s not the broader constellation of things I’m calling out; it is specifically that they want to protect the transsexual ideological grooming of children, and it is huge and it is coordinated,” he said. “There is a vested interest in protecting this specific thing, and I don’t know why that is.”

Tiffany Justice, co-founder of national parental rights organization Moms for Liberty, was recently locked out of the group’s Twitter account for a week over a post condemning controversial proposed legislation that would make California a transgender sanctuary state, and for also challenging gender ideology.

She wrote on Twitter July 25, “Gender dysphoria is a mental health disorder that is being normalized by predators across the USA. California kids are at extreme risk from predatory adults. Now they want to ‘liberate’ children all over the country. Does a double mastectomy on a preteen sound like progress?”

After Justice deleted the post, the Moms for Liberty Twitter account was unlocked.

Media Matters has also accused Twitter account Libs of Tik Tok, Gays Against Groomers founder Jaimee Michell, and others of slandering people with the term groomer.

Last week, Twitter also locked the Gays Against Groomers account. The group had posted: “Damaged people damage people. The internet is a dangerous place for kids, especially when you have radical alphabet activists openly grooming them. Protect your children from these people at all costs.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

President Donald Trump said on Aug. 7 that if he returns to the White House in 2025 he’ll rehire the service members who lost their jobs by refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine.

“I think it’s a disgrace what happened to them,” Trump said, answering a reporter’s question.

Trump was responding to questions from the press before he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday.

“I’d let them back. I’d give back pay,” Trump said. “So I would give them their back pay and I would let them back, and they understand that. They know it.”

Back pay is “a common remedy for wage violations” where “the employer makes up the difference between what the employee was paid and the amount he or she should have been paid,” according to the Department of Labor.

Trump’s comments came weeks after the U.S. army announced plans to cut more than 60,000 guards and reserve soldiers for refusing COVID-19 vaccines.

“Soldiers who refuse the vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to service, and official reprimands,” a July 1 statement on the U.S. Army’s website reads.

More than 19,000 U.S. Army personnel have refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine, as of July 14, 2022, according to U.S. Army data. The Army approved a total of 24 medical and 19 religious exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine.

Jan. 6 Pardons

In response to another question, Trump said he’ll “very strongly” consider pardoning nonviolent political prisoners who have been indicted as a result of participating in the January 6 Capitol breach.

“We’ll certainly be looking at it, and very strongly,” Trump said, adding that he has made previous statements about potentially pardoning January 6 political prisoners.

“I think many people are being treated very unfair … having to do with that. And we will be looking at that very strongly,” Trump said. “I think you know the answer.”

The president hinted strongly at but stopped short of announcing a 2024 run.

“Well, it’s not a long period, regardless, whether you go before or after, certainly not a very long period of time,” the former president said. He raised the same point in an interview with the New Yorker earlier this year, when he said he’s undecided on whether to announce his decision on a 2024 run before or after the midterms.

“It’s coming,” Trump said, “and I think people are going to be very happy.”

“Our country has never been in a position like this. We lost everything. We’ve lost energy independence. We’ve lost our prestige. We’ve lost every single thing you can lose,” Trump said, noting the withdrawal from Afghanistan—which he previously called “the greatest tactical mistake in history“—and the border crisis.

“So we’ll be making an announcement in the not-too-distance future.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Won’t allow recording of meeting with Mastriano

Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, is scheduled to meet on Aug. 9 with the House’s Jan. 6 committee. While it was to be a voluntary interview, the committee is now demanding a compelled deposition.

“Your committee is not legally able to conduct compelled depositions, which is why all of my clients have all offered to participate in voluntary interviews,” Mastriano’s attorney, Timothy C. Parlatore, wrote in an Aug. 5 letter to the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol breach.

“Although Senator Mastriano is happy to cooperate with your committee, as he has nothing to hide, I do have concerns that are particular to him, given the conduct of the committee up to this point.”

Parlatore believes the Jan. 6 committee may try to influence Pennsylvania’s election.

“Given the committee’s demonstrated propensity for releasing edited clips of interviews without the requisite context to support a false partisan narrative,” Parlatore wrote, “I am concerned that there is a risk that your committee will do the same to Senator Mastriano.

“Members of your party like Sean Patrick Maloney, Democratic Campaign Chair, have openly admitted that the goal of the hearings you are conducting is intended to paint the Republican party as irresponsible and power hungry ahead of the midterms.

“For this reason, my client has legitimate concerns that your committee may attempt to influence the outcome of the Pennsylvania state elections through the dissemination of disinformation.”

A spokesperson for the Jan. 6 committee didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

Parlatore’s letter indicates that he’s willing to allow the meeting if he can make his own recording of the interview, which could be released if the committee releases edited recordings of Mastriano that need more context.

“I was informed by your staffer that you rejected this proposal and refused to make any counterproposals because you wish to retain sole dominion over the public narrative,” the letter says.

“Obviously, your refusal to even discuss this is concerning, as there is no downside to me holding a second recording of the interview, unless the committee does, in fact, intend to engage in disinformation with Senator Mastriano’s interview and is afraid of any accountability for that disinformation.”

The lack of a truly bipartisan committee infringes on the rights of the witnesses and serves no legitimate investigative purpose, Parlatore said.

“My client has significant concerns that he is being set up for sanctions due to the Committee’s refusal to respect the bounds of privilege and lack of any opposing viewpoints to act as a counterbalance,” the letter states.

Parlatore said Mastriano would appear for a deposition if the committee gets a ranking minority member designation from the Republican steering committee.

But before Mastriano would testify in that scenario, Parlatore said he would review the Regulations for Use of Deposition Authority to determine if all provisions had been met. If not, he and Mastriano would leave the session and return only in the event that all provisions in the rules are met the by committee, a judge rules that the committee doesn’t need to comply with the rules, or they agree to a voluntary interview.

Mastriano attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally in Washington with numerous other people. He has cooperated with the committee so far, providing documents that have been requested.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Senate’s rules expert has approved provisions in a major bill Senate Democrats want to pass soon called the Inflation Reduction Act, according to top Democrats in the body.

Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that tax incentives for renewable energy and other related provisions can stand, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said.

“I’m especially pleased that our prevailing wage provisions were approved,” Wyden said in a statement. “These provisions guarantee wage rates for clean energy projects. Clean energy jobs will be good-paying jobs.”

Another piece that would enable Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs with pharmaceutical companies was also cleared, according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

“This is a major victory for the American people,” Schumer said.

Medicare is a health insurance program run by the federal government that primarily covers people aged 65 and older. About 64 million people are covered by the program.

Private insurers are already allowed to negotiate prices with drug companies.

MacDonough did strike down another portion of the bill, which would have essentially forced companies not to raise prices higher than inflation.

“While there was one unfortunate ruling … in that the inflation rebate is more limited in scope, the overall program remains intact and we are one step closer to finally taking on Big Pharma and lowering Rx drug prices for millions of Americans,” Schumer said.

Additional portions have not yet been fully vetted.

All Democrats Support Bill

The mammoth $433 billion bill has the backing of all 50 Democrats in Congress after swing Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) threw their support behind the legislation.

“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” Sinema, the last Democrat to announce her support, said in a statement this week. “Subject to the Parliamentarian’s review, I’ll move forward.”

Joe Biden and other Democrats have said the bill will help Americans save money, but experts are divided on the potential impact.

The bill is aimed at reducing energy costs, transitioning to “cleaner production” by incentivizing solar and other alternative forms of production, lowering health care premiums, increasing taxes on the rich, and reducing the deficit to “fight inflation,” according to Democrats.

Most Republicans appear opposed to the bill.

“Congressional Democrats are pushing a massive tax-and-spend proposal that will crush Americans already struggling under record-high inflation. Cutting wasteful spending would ease inflation. Spending more money will only make it worse,” Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) said in a statement.

“If a truth-in-advertising law were applied to the ‘Inflation Reduction Act,’ Democrats would be guilty. Their proposal would do nothing to tame inflation,” added Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).

Democrats hold a majority in the upper chamber because the party controls the White House. That means, in the event of a 50–50 tie, Vice President Kamala Harris can cast a tiebreaking vote.

Schumer has said the Senate will vote on Aug. 6 to advance the bill, triggering hours of debate. A final vote can happen as soon as Sunday.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are trying to reinstate the federal assault weapon ban that was in effect for 10 years because—they claim—it reduced gun crime. The bill, which just passed the House, will soon get a vote in the Senate.

In the effort to get it passed, Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made some grand claims, which they called “facts,” about the previous ban on rifles leading to decreasing crime. But those facts don’t appear to be backed up by evidence.

“Supporters of the bans are calling their assertions ‘facts,’ in an effort to mislead the public,” Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) told The Epoch Times. “Many of the Democratic Members of Congress were purposefully misleading in their assertions that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban reduced crime. This level of willful ignorance would be comical if the effects of what they are trying to do wasn’t so blatantly unconstitutional.”

The ban was in effect from 1994 to 2004.

Pelosi

During that time, “we witnessed gun crime with assault weapons drop by up to 40 percent,” Pelosi said on the House floor during the recent debate.

“The number of murders with rifles actually increased slightly when the ban went into effect,” John R Lott Jr., the president of Crime Research, told The Epoch Times, referring to data from the FBI’s annual release of reports from law enforcement agencies on homicides by weapon type. Lott also pointed out that no one collects data on all crimes committed with so-called assault weapons.

The term “assault weapon” is a political phrase referring to semi-automatic rifles with various cosmetic features. The House bill calls an “assault weapon” a rifle that has one feature such as a pistol grip, folding stock, or grenade launcher.

While Pelosi makes it sound like there’s a grave risk of being killed by a rifle, it’s actually a rare crime. Lott has reported that the percentage of firearm murders with any type of rifles was 4.8 percent prior to the ban starting in September 1994. During the 10-year ban, homicide by rifle was 4.9 percent of all murders. Then rifle homicides dropped to 3.6 percent after the ban expired in 2004.

The speaker did not cite the source of her statistics. She could be referring to how all violent crime went down since the spike in the 1980s, which would include the small number of murders by rifles.

You can see this in this graphic of the FBI data. The decrease was dramatic.

There were 15,463 homicides by gun in 1994 when the ban went into effect and 724 were by rifles. When the ban expired in 2004, there were 9,385 homicides and 403 of them were by rifle.

“The falling crime rates are more likely due to many other factors than firearm ownership, including a concerted effort and focus on prosecuting criminals,” explained Keane.

Pelosi’s press office did not respond to a request for information on the source of her data.

Studies

Furthermore, there is no study that has proven that the gun control law had a direct effect on crime reduction. Quite the opposite, Rand’s “Study of Gun Policy” in 2018 (pdf) looked at various studies on the impact of the law on violent crime and concluded that “available evidence is inconclusive for the effect of assault weapon bans on total homicides and firearm homicides.”

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) also published a report in 2003 on evaluating the effectiveness of firearms laws and studied the assault weapon ban. It said that studies were “inconsistent” and thus concluded that, “evidence was insufficient to determine the effectiveness” of the law.

Ownership of these so-called assault weapons increased during the ban. Keane, the powerful gun lobbyist, pointed out that during the ban, what his organization calls Modern Sporting Rifles continued to be legally manufactured and sold if they did not have two of the cosmetic features necessary for the rifle to be banned.

Biden has been pushing incessantly for it to be reinstated since he took office on the basis that it decreased mass shootings. He said in July: “Assault weapons need to be banned. They were banned. I led the fight in 1994. And then, under pressure from the NRA and the gun manufacturers and others, that ban was lifted in 2004.”

NRA stands for National Rifle Association.

Biden also said on June 2, “In the 10 years it was law, mass shootings went down. But after Republicans let the law expire in 2004 and those weapons were allowed to be sold again, mass shootings tripled. Those are the facts.”

But an Epoch Times investigation into mass shootings showed that they are extremely rare and went up and down during the time period in question. As you can see in this graphic, there was no pattern of mass shootings in that 10-year period.

The White House press office did not respond to a request for the source of the president’s data.

Pelosi echoed Biden with her own statistic, saying in a speech that “since the ban expired, the number of mass shooting deaths has grown by nearly 500 percent.”

That’s not true.

“Mass public shootings with assault weapons in the ten years after the ban sunset increased to six compared to the four that occurred in the ten years during the ban,” Lott reported in his analysis. He also reports that total mass public shootings increased between those two ten-year periods, almost doubling, but the increase occurred with non-assault weapons.

“If Pelosi’s claim is correct, we should see a drop in the percent of attacks with assault weapons during the federal ban period and then an increase in the post-ban period, but the exact opposite is true,” said Lott, the author of the new book Gun Control Myths.

Furthermore, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service studied the impact of the 1994 assault weapon ban and concluded: “Significantly while tragic and shocking, public mass shootings account for few of the murders or non-negligent homicides related to firearms that occur annually in the United States.”

Motivation?

Why are top Democrats focusing public attention on legislation from so long ago that had no impact on violence?

“They are living in a 1994 mindset because we have an anti-gun political class that is still using the same old talking points when it comes to assault weapons,” said an insider at a group that aims to protect Second Amendment rights. “They are highlighting the most emotionally compelling crimes [mass shootings] that are extremely rare—less than 1 percent of all gun deaths—to confuse and scare the public, but it’s not working anymore.”

Keane echoed this, saying, “These are the same politicians that manufacture terms to scare the American public with the term ‘assault weapon’ to purposefully mislead the American public and confuse Modern Sporting Rifles with the military’s automatic rifles.”

While these kinds of scare tactics on “assault weapons” worked back in the days of the first ban, modern-style rifles have become much more popular and are in common use. The NSSF, reported this month that there are now 24.4 million Modern Sporting Rifles in circulation in America. The trade association for gun manufacturers noted that means there are more of the AR-15 and AK-style rifles “in circulation today than there are Ford F-Series trucks on the road.”

This is a large part of the reason that the polls now work against the old talking points that Pelosi and Biden are using. Quinnipiac reported in June (pdf) that support for a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons—50 percent—was the lowest level of support among registered voters since the poll question was first asked in February 2013.

Now that so many Americans own or know friends and family who own AR-style rifles, they don’t seem as scary. So when this bill gets voted on in the Senate, the public should be aware that banning these commonly owned rifles will not do anything about the serious crime problem in America.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Critics say the bill will slash economic growth and spur further inflation

I’m with the critics. Just because you have checks in your checkbook…and who in the hell thinks you can spend your way out of inflation? Oh yeah. I forgot. Mathematics is racist, so we can’t use it anymore. [US Patriot]

Despite Democrats’ claims that the Inflation Reduction Act (Destroy America Act) will ultimately serve to reduce consumer prices and spur economic growth, experts remain divided, with some predicting that the bill will worsen inflation and lead to stagnation in growth.

The bill, hammered out as a compromise agreement between moderate Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), serves to fulfill a series of broad Democrat aspirations: increasing federal revenue by closing so-called tax “loopholes,” climate change policies, expansion of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as “Obamacare,” and reducing prescription drug prices.

The act, according to its supporters, will also help to slow the growth of the ballooning U.S. national debt by decreasing the deficit.

Though it authorizes around $433 billion in new spending, Democrats’ internal estimates suggest that the bill will bring in around $725 billion in new revenue to the federal government, thus reducing the federal deficit and slowing the growth of national debt. Specifically, Democrats estimate that the bill will reduce the deficit by around $292 billion annually.

Joe Biden issued a statement on July 27 expressing support for the new proposal, which he called “the action the American people have been waiting for.”

“This addresses the problems of today—high health-care costs and overall inflation—as well as investments in our energy security for the future,” Biden said.

IRS to Receive $80 Billion for Stricter Tax Code Enforcement

Proponents of the measure hope to offset the cost of new spending in the bill by altering the tax code, which would then be enforced by a substantially bulked-up Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which is set to gain around $80 billion through the package.

Among other provisions, the bill would impose a new 15 percent minimum tax rate on all corporations that bring in more than $1 billion per year. Though the current corporate tax rate is technically 21 percent, Democrats say that the new minimum tax rate will target large corporations who pay substantially less than 21 percent by using loopholes.

This change, Democrats estimated in a one-page summary of the bill, will bring in an additional $313 billion annually for the federal government.

Proponents of the bill suggest that, in addition to the new tax code changes, a bulkier IRS will bring in an additional $124 billion annually through the enforcement of the package’s tax code reforms.

Broken down, the roughly $80 billion appropriation to the IRS will go toward “necessary expenses for tax enforcement activities … to determine and collect owed taxes, to provide legal and litigation support, to conduct criminal investigations (including investigative technology), to provide digital asset monitoring and compliance activities, to enforce criminal statutes related to violations of internal revenue laws and other financial crimes … and to provide other services.”

In addition, the funds would go to hire tens of thousands of new IRS agents to further aid enforcement of the new tax rules—which likely will mean far more audits across the board.

Unsurprisingly, the effort to expand the IRS is not popular with Republicans, who have generally opposed such efforts in the past.

“Democrats are scheming to double the size of the IRS by hiring an army of 87,000 new agents to spy on Americans,” wrote House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in an Aug. 4 tweet.

In their one-page summary of the bill, Democrats insisted that the tax code changes would have no effect on families making less than $400,000 annually, a position carried over from the original effort to pass the Build Back Better Act (BBB).

“There are no new taxes on families making $400,000 or less and no new taxes on small businesses—we are closing tax loopholes and enforcing the tax code,” the summary says.

Some critics have expressed doubt about this claim, however, noting that the increased scope and funding of the IRS will affect people across income levels, including some individuals and small businesses making less than $400,000.

Prescription Drug Pricing Changes

Further helping to cushion the cost of the bill, Democrats say, are new provisions designed to lower the amount that the federal government pays for Medicare recipients’ drugs.

Currently, Medicare is not allowed to negotiate the price of prescription drugs with pharmaceutical companies, in contrast to private insurers who do have such power. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, Medicare will be authorized to begin such negotiations on the cost of 10 “high-spend” drugs, beginning in 2026.

In addition, the bill would cap out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries, who are largely senior citizens, to $2,000 per year, or around $150 per month.

These changes, Democrats claim in their summary of the bill, will bring in an additional $288 billion in revenue to the federal government.

However, critics have questioned the focus on prescription drug pricing, noting that spending on pharmaceuticals only comprises around 15 percent of Medicare spending. Topping the list of Medicare expenditures are things like hospital inpatient care.

Further, the bill contains provisions designed to lower Americans’ premiums under the Affordable Care Act.

New Climate Policies, Spending

Since the failure of the BBB in December, Democrats have remained as desperate as ever to make wide-reaching changes to climate policy, and the Inflation Reduction Act would create a series of new programs and appropriations to that end.

The top line price of the climate policies in the bill comes out to around $369 billion.

Among other elements, the Inflation Reduction Act emphasizes tax incentives for companies and individuals who switch to renewable energy sources.

For instance, the bill would dole out as much as $28,500 in tax incentives to American households who buy more energy-efficient electric home appliances, install solar panels on their homes, and buy new electric vehicles. Though households would need to do all of these to come close to that $28,500 figure, it represents one of the largest government climate incentives ever put forward for individual households.

According to a study by Rewiring America, families who take advantage of all of these programs could see energy savings of as much as $1,800 per year.

Proponents of the bill have also pointed to an Energy Innovation study that suggests that by 2030, the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate incentives could create as many as 1.5 million new jobs.

Also, front-and-center for Democrats in the bill is its potential effect on reducing U.S. carbon emissions.

During negotiations on the bill, Manchin insisted on including several provisions designed to help the energy sector in West Virginia—which is dominated by coal mining.

In addition, the bill would require the reinstatement of three oil and natural gas leases that were halted by the White House near the beginning of Biden’s term. Solar and wind project permits on federal lands would also only be permitted if these oil and natural gas leases are retained.

Nevertheless, a key focus for Democrats was to de-incentivize fossil fuels as much as practicable.

Just as the bill would incentivize individual households to switch to renewable and efficient energy sources, corporations also stand to gain tax incentives, loans, and grants to do the same on a larger scale.

Proponents of the bill have cited various analyses suggesting that these policies would cause a net reduction in U.S. emissions of somewhere around 40 percent over their 2005 levels.

Democrats supporting the bill have said that the effects of pro-fossil fuel provisions in the bill—which angered environmentalists—would ultimately have a negligible effect on emissions. Proponents say that for every additional ton of greenhouse gas emissions in the bill, 24 tons of emissions would be cut.

This section comprises by far the largest chunk of spending in the new bill, and critics have pointed to it with concerns that it will reduce U.S. energy competitiveness and have suggested that the new spending may serve to worsen inflation.

Some Experts Applaud Bill as Much Needed, Anti-Inflationary

Marc Goldwein, senior director of policy at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, applauded the bill during an appearance on Yahoo news.

At the beginning of the segment, Goldwein was asked what effect the bill will have on inflation.

“Look, this bill is not gonna get us from nine percent inflation down to the two or three percent it should be,” Goldwein said. “What this bill does is it’s gonna make the Federal Reserve’s job just a little bit easier, so they can fight inflation with fiscal policy moving in the same direction, not the opposite direction.”

Later in the interview, Goldwein reaffirmed this position: “No matter how you look at this bill, it’s gonna be good for inflation.”

“Macro-economically, it’s gonna take some excess money out of the economy, which we need when demand is so overheated, [and] it’s also gonna lower drug prices.

“Micro-economically, it’s gonna reduce the sticker prices that people and businesses see for energy, updates to their homes, for health care, for drugs—and all of that is gonna hopefully feed the inflation expectations.

“I don’t expect the effect to be large, but the direction is pretty clear and it’s gonna help to make the Fed’s job easier.”

However, Goldwein emphasized that, despite Democrats’ hopes that the bill will aid their dismal outlook for the midterms later this year, Americans won’t see any real effect on inflation in calendar year 2022.

“Really this is a 2023, 2024, 2025 game,” Goldwein said. “What this is supposed to do is stop inflation from persisting over the long term—again, make the Fed’s job a little bit easier. It’s not gonna provide relief next month, and we shouldn’t expect that.”

Asked about the implications of the bill on the federal deficit, Goldwein affirmed Democrats’ claims that through the new 15 percent minimum tax and expansion of the IRS, the bill would greatly increase revenue and reduce the deficit by about $300 billion, which, Goldwein noted, is “the largest deficit reduction since 2011.”

Over two decades or so, Goldwein added, that comes out to around $1.5 trillion spared from being added to the national debt.

“That’s not gonna fix our debt just like this isn’t gonna fix inflation,” Goldwein admitted, “but it’s gonna help with our debt, just like this is gonna help with inflation.”

Republican and conservative critics of the bill have argued that through the new corporate taxes, capital investment will diminish, slowing the growth of the economy.

This, Goldwein acknowledged, is true. But, he said, limiting growth is exactly what the economy needs right now.

“The reality right now is that the economy is overheated,” Goldwein said. “We have too much money chasing too few goods. … There’s a lot more we can do. But this is a piece of the puzzle. This is gonna help make it a little bit easier for the Fed to get inflation under control.”

Larry Summers, an inflation expert and former Treasury Secretary often quoted by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), shared Goldwein’s sanguine assessment of the bill.

“This bill is fighting inflation and it’s got a whole set of collateral benefits as well,” Summers said during an appearance on CNN. “It’s fair to call it the ‘Inflation Reduction Act.’”

Bill Will Shrink GDP, Cause Thousands of Lost Jobs: Tax Foundation

These sanguine assessments are far from universal, however. Several conservative and Republican-leaning experts and organizations have been critical in their analysis of the bill, which they have said would at best have a negligible effect on inflation while stagnating economic growth.

In its analysis of the bill the Tax Foundation, a tax information nonprofit, estimated that the bill “would reduce long-run economic output by about 0.1 percent and eliminate about 30,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the United States.”

Further, they estimated, “it would also reduce average after-tax incomes for taxpayers across every income quintile over the long run.”

“By reducing long-run economic growth, this bill may actually worsen inflation by constraining the productive capacity of the economy,” the group argued.

Later down their report, the Tax Foundation explained the claim, noting that while the bill would avoid some of the direct tax increases contained in the original iteration of the BBB, it would nevertheless have a pronounced effect on capital investment.

“While the latest proposal steers clear of some of the major tax rate increases contained in the House-passed Build Back Better Act, this proposal would raise taxes on work and investment, disincentivizing productive activity,” the organization wrote.

“The bill would increase long-run American incomes (as measured by gross national product, or GNP) by less than 0.05 percent, which is entirely driven by the bill’s reduction in the budget deficit over the long run. The bill would reduce the capital stock by about 0.3 percent and wages by about 0.1 percent, while eliminating about 30,000 full-time equivalent jobs.

“The proposed 15 percent minimum tax on corporate book income is the most economically damaging provision in the bill, reducing GDP by 0.1 percent and costing about 23,000 jobs. The tax increase on carried interest also eliminates about 5,000 jobs.”

Bill Will Disincentivize Capital Investment, Causing Long-Term Stagnation: Heritage Foundation Tax Expert

Preston Brashers, a senior tax policy analyst for the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, shared the Tax Foundation’s pessimistic appraisal in an interview with The Epoch Times.

Specifically, Brashers emphasized the negative effects that the new tax laws, including the new corporate minimum tax, will have on capital investment.

The problem, Brashers said, is the way that the bill would change the rules about determining whether a corporation meets the standard for the minimum tax.

Under the Inflation Reduction Act, corporations with an annual income of $1 billion or more will be subject to a 15 percent minimum tax. Though current tax law sets the corporate tax rate at 21 percent, many corporations ultimately pay less once write-offs, exemptions, and workarounds in the tax law are taken into account. Through the corporate minimum tax, Democrats hope to end these practices.

However, rather than using tax income—which takes into account exemptions and write-offs—to determine whether the minimum tax applies, the Democrats’ bill would use the “book income” to determine applicability.

The “book income,” reported under standards developed by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission, is the figure handed to investors to show a company’s annual income before any taxes paid or written off are taken into account.

Under current rules, when corporations reinvest their income into the business—by purchasing things like new equipment, machinery, factories, and other types of capital—they are permitted to write the cost of such investments off as a matter of tax income.

Book income, on the other hand, does not take such expenses into account—it is simply a report of the net revenue a corporation brings in over an annual period.

“If I’m a business, and I buy some new machinery—put some new machinery in my factory—that expense, under the book income system, I wouldn’t be able to deduct that [from book income] right away,” Brashers explained.

“The whole point of book income is totally different from taxable income,” Brashers argued.

Because of this, the new corporate minimum tax is “a major disincentive for companies to invest. So what’s gonna happen then is they’re gonna invest less—there’s gonna be fewer factories.”

Brashers said that those hardest hit by these new rules will be manufacturers and other capital-intensive industries like mining, which, by the nature of their enterprises, necessarily have far more capital expenses if they hope to continue growing.

However, new and growing firms will also be hit hard, to the benefit of older and more established firms. Older firms often see dwindling opportunities for reinvestment, and instead opt to pay investors dividends while they run “on autopilot,” Brashers said. Newer and growing companies, on the other hand, often have many capital investment needs.

Thus, this bill will also serve to make it harder for new competitors to enter established markets.

Brashers said that the new rules will also muddy the waters around FASB-compliant financial statements in a way that may drive investors away from investing in U.S. companies. Because companies will have tax incentives to reduce their book income, Brashers explained, the figures investors see may be somewhat bleaker financially than the actual facts on the ground at the firm.

“What companies are gonna be doing for their financial statements is gonna be driven more by tax incentives—which is not a good thing,” Brashers said. “It’s gonna lead to investors having worse information about what’s going on with companies, because now [companies] have an incentive to reduce their financial statement income if it’s just gonna cause them to have this book minimum tax.”

In addition, Brashers predicted, basing these new tax rules on FASB financial statements could lead to a new genre of lobbyists who, instead of lobbying Washington lawmakers, lobby the FASB to encourage it to change its financial statement rules.

On an international scale, these changes could drive investors out of U.S. markets, Brashers suggested, to countries like China, where these rules are not in place.

Taking these things together, Brashers contended: “there’s gonna be fewer jobs, and the people who are working in those jobs are gonna have less capital around them—less tools, less equipment—which means that each worker [will be] less productive.” Workers producing less, in turn, will lead to lower wages and slowing wage growth—meaning that individual Americans will also be hit by the unintended consequences of the bill.

In summary, Brashers said: “This bill is exactly the wrong approach. We’re heading into a recession—and they wanna raise taxes; we’re dealing with inflation—and they want to add to the cost of doing things in this country. This approach is exactly wrong because rather than unfettering the economy and allowing businesses to produce and workers to work more and do more, we’re just making it harder.”

Bill on Track to Pass the Senate in Coming Days

Whatever the truth of the varied expert assessments of the bill, it now appears to have a straight shot through the Senate.

Because the Inflation Reduction Act uses the reconciliation process, it is exempt from the normal 60-vote filibuster threshold that kills most partisan bills in the Senate. Instead, only 51 votes are needed for the passage of a reconciliation bill.

Currently, Democrats hold just enough seats to pass the bill, including 50 Democrat senators and the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.

In the past, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Manchin, the two swing-voting members of the Democrats in the upper chamber, have been the largest threat to the passage of any overly ambitious reconciliation bill from their party. As soon as the agreement was unveiled by Manchin and Schumer, Manchin vowed his support for the legislation, leaving a question mark only on Sinema.

Despite some hopes among critics that Sinema would hold out against the bill, denying it of the 50 votes needed to activate Harris’ tie-breaking vote, her office announced late in the evening on Aug. 4 that Sinema had decided to back the bill.

The original draft of the bill would have closed the “carried interest loophole,” a tax code workaround that allows money managers to pay a lower tax rate than normal on profitable investments. This proposal, which was part of the original BBB plan, would have brought in another $14 billion in revenue, Democrats said.

As part of committing her support for the bill, Sinema demanded that this provision be removed, despite Manchin’s expressed demands that the provision remain in the bill. Democrat negotiators acceded to Sinema’s request, paving a way forward for the bill.

“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” Sinema said.

Only the approval of the Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan referee in the upper chamber whose go-ahead is necessary for reconciliation bills, remains left for the quick passage of the bill through the Senate.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has expressed support for the bill, and it is likely that the House will take up and pass the bill following its passage in the Senate.

Biden, likewise, is likely to sign it upon its approval by both chambers of Congress.

Source: The Epoch Times

Gay pride in action (pun intended) [US Patriot]

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday updated its monkeypox advice to suggest people most at risk, namely men who have sex with men, “take a temporary break” from those behaviors to help “contain … the outbreak.”

Among the updates are suggestions that people “take a temporary break” from sexual activity until considered vaccinated; limit their number of sexual partners; avoid “spaces” for anonymous sex with multiple partners; use condoms; and wear gloves during particular sexual activities.

These five suggestions to reduce the chance of spread were added to the seven that appeared on the webpage when it was updated on July 12. In that previous update, the CDC offered suggestions for sexual activities for people who have (or think they have) “monkeypox and … decide to have sex.”

Friday’s update contains stronger messaging, with the CDC now saying “the best way to protect yourself and others is to avoid sex of any kind … while you are sick.” People should especially “avoid touching any rash.”

Public Health Emergency

The updates come a day after the Biden administration declared a public health emergency for monkeypox in a bid to unlock funding and more powers to deal with the virus. Some states, including New York, California, and Indiana, have declared their own public health emergencies for similar reasons.

The updated advice appears on the CDC’s “Safer Sex, Social Gatherings, and Monkeypox” webpage which contains detailed and specific information tailored to lowering the risk of transmission during particular sexual activities.

“While CDC works to contain the current monkeypox outbreak and learn more about the virus, this information can help you make informed choices when you are in situations or places where monkeypox could be spread,” reads a statement on the webpage which wasn’t there in July.

“Monkeypox is not considered a sexually transmitted disease, but it is often transmitted through close, sustained physical contact, which can include sexual contact.”

The CDC has also advised people to consider the chances of skin-to-skin contact when attending festivals or raves.

“Festivals, events, and concerts where attendees are fully clothed and unlikely to share skin-to-skin contact are safer. However, attendees should be mindful of activities (like kissing) that might spread monkeypox,” the CDC webpage reads.

“A rave, party, or club where there is minimal clothing and where there is direct, personal, often skin-to-skin contact has some risk. Avoid any rash you see on others and consider minimizing skin-to-skin contact.”

The CDC especially noted the increased risk of spread at these events in “enclosed spaces” where people go for “intimate, often anonymous sexual contact with multiple partners.”

LGBT Community Outreach

The White House has identified a vital need for education about monkeypox and outreach to the LGBT community, which is most affected by the outbreak, in order to combat the virus.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that there is a need to make sure the LGBT community and public health officials “know exactly what to look for and what the treatment is.”

The CDC’s updated suggestions come three days after President Joe Biden picked Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who runs the CDC’s HIV prevention division, as one of two officials to lead the nation’s response to the monkeypox outbreak.

Daskalakis, who will be deputy to FEMA’s Robert Fenton, has expertise with issues that impact the LGBT community, making him an appropriate pick, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser.

The 2022 monkeypox outbreak has so far primarily spread via the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men, a major study has found. The virus can also spread through contaminated bedding, clothing, towels, according to the CDC and World Health Organization.

After the United States’ fifth pediatric monkeypox case was reported in Long Beach on Thursday, a Californian health department has also said transmission can occur via household items such as cups and utensils.

The CDC’s updated webpage for safer sex amid the monkeypox outbreak noted that vaccines will be “an important tool in preventing the spread of monkeypox.”

“But given the current limited supply of vaccine, consider temporarily changing some behaviors that may increase your risk of being exposed,” the webpage reads. “These temporary changes will help slow the spread of monkeypox until vaccine supply is adequate.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Joe Biden, 79, remains on Death Watch™ with COVID-19

Democratic lawmakers spent the better part of two years assailing their Republican colleagues for not taking the COVID-19 pandemic seriously enough for their liking. Nevertheless, these same Democrats are flagrantly disregarding COVID safety protocols to ensure the timely passage of a massive tax-hike and spending bill before Congress adjourns for the summer recess.

“Senate Democrats, some of whom have decried their G.O.P. colleagues’ lenient attitude toward masking, have adopted an unofficial ‘Don’t Test, Don’t Tell,’ protocol of late, particularly as they endeavor to pass the historic Inflation Reduction Act this weekend,” Tara Palmeri of Puck reports.

(Note: It is not clear what the word “historic” means in this context. There is no evidence to support this claim.)

A senior Senate aide told Puck the upper chamber would not delay a vote on the Inflation Reduction Act in the event that a senator tests positive for COVID. Some members have even said they plan to stop testing themselves for the virus. “It’s not an official mandate but we all know we’re not letting COVID get in the way,” the aide said. “The deal is happening. Less testing, just wear masks and get it done.”

(Note: We are literally shaking right now.) 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has said there is no “plan B” when it comes to passing the controversial spending package, insisting that Democrats are “going to stay healthy.” Another source told Puck that senators who contract COVID, which has killed more than 620,000 Americans on Joe Biden’s watch, could “bring [their] ventilator and still vote.”

(Note: This is reckless behavior and should not be condoned. People are going to die.)

Speaking of Biden, the 79-year-old president remains on Washington Free Beacon Death Watch™ as he continues to test positive for COVID-19, a virus that is most likely to be fatal for individuals over the age of 65. Biden, who will turn 80 in November, has already outlived the average life expectancy for American men (75.1 years).

READ MORE: Joe Biden Death Watch, By the Numbers

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

New York Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney draws scrutiny for personal relationship with “bodyman”

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Sean Patrick Maloney (D., N.Y.) could face scrutiny from the Office of Congressional Ethics after another New York Democrat filed an ethics complaint over his personal relationship with a former staffer who was on the campaign and congressional payroll.

New York Democratic county chairwoman Elisa Sumner on Wednesday filed a complaint with the congressional ethics office alleging Maloney paid staffer Harold Leath to provide personal services for himself and his family, which would constitute a misuse of campaign and federal funds. The complaint, filed in the wake of a New York Post report on the congressman’s relationship with the staffer, asserts that Leath “outright admitted that [he] performed nongovernmental, noncampaign work for Maloney, and also provided services for Maloney’s family—which by definition was not related to his government responsibilities.”

“When I first started, my main responsibility was to make sure the congressman and his family never needed anything,” Leath, who served as Maloney’s “body man” until 2018, told the New York Post. “I was to be there.”

Social media posts flagged by the New York Post corroborate the claim that Leath spent extensive time with Maloney and his family, showing the staffer attended sports events that Maloney’s children participated in, was a guest at Maloney’s wedding, and swam in his pool. Leath also registered to vote at Maloney’s house when he moved to New York, though he denied that he ever lived there.

Leath had no experience in politics before being hired by Maloney. Leath told the Post that he got the job through the congressman’s husband, which Maloney’s office denied.

Ann Ravel, a former Democratic chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, told the Post she was “stunned” by Maloney’s arrangement with Leath and called Leath’s description of his responsibilities under Maloney “unseemly” and “unusual.”

While Leath initially appeared to admit to providing personal services to Maloney and his family, he walked back his comments in a second interview with the Post, denying that he did any nongovernmental work for the congressman.

Sumner charged in her complaint that Leath likely changed his tone because Maloney or someone close to the congressman coerced him “in an attempt to cover up his behavior.” 

Maloney, who faces a competitive primary and general election, has overseen the DCCC’s controversial strategy this election cycle of boosting controversial candidates in Republican primaries, in what some have called a “cynical” ploy for Democrats to pick up congressional seats. 

The Washington Free Beacon reported last year on Maloney and his husband’s maskless vacation at a billionaire’s estate in France that defied State Department COVID-19 guidance warning against travel to France.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Sen. Maggie Hassan plays up her appeal to independents. NH voters say she’s a reliable vote for the Biden admin.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Sen. Maggie Hassan’s reelection campaign ads tout that the Granite State Democrat is the “most bipartisan” lawmaker in the Senate. But state residents across the political spectrum say they consider Hassan a reliable vote for the Biden administration.

Sean Chambers, a 43-year-old construction worker and registered independent, said Hassan’s time in the Senate has been “nothing but broken promises.” He said he has yet to decide on whether he will vote Republican in November but refuses to back Hassan.

“She says she’s for the worker but hasn’t done anything,” Chambers told the Washington Free Beacon. “I don’t buy the bipartisan talk. There’s a big divide and nothing is getting done.”

Hassan won her seat in 2016 by just about 1,000 votes in a $120 million campaign battle largely focused on her appeal to independents, who make up roughly 40 percent of the state’s registered voters. Her reelection campaign is set to be equally competitive as residents grow frustrated with the Biden administration’s handling of the economy—only one-fifth of state residents want Joe Biden to seek reelection in 2024, according to a University of New Hampshire poll released last month.

Hassan has attempted to distance herself from the Democratic Party establishment, but New Hampshire voters who spoke to the Free Beacon, including Republicans, Democrats, and independents, share the view that the Democratic senator is a reliable supporter of the White House’s agenda.

Al Macaloan, a retired project manager and an independent who voted for Biden in 2020, said he will vote for the New Hampshire Democrat, who has voted with the president 96 percent of the time, for just this reason.

“In the present environment I don’t think you can be bipartisan,” Macaloan told the Free Beacon. “I would like to see it, but it’s not possible.”

Democrats and their allies are prepared to make the race a top spending target: Hassan has raised $26 million, including $3.2 million in individual contributions between April and June alone—88 percent of which came from out of state. These funds helped her launch a series of campaign ads in recent weeks that tout her “bipartisan” record on issues such as small businesses and federal budgets. Hassan declared in one campaign ad that “fiscal responsibility is the New Hampshire way.”

The ad comes after the senator voted to pass Biden’s American Rescue Plan and infrastructure bill, which total more than $3 trillion in spending. She also backed the $739 billion climate spending bill that gained traction with Democrats in recent weeks. Many economists point to these price tags as sources of the four-decade-high inflation rate—an issue that led two-thirds of voters in the state to disapprove of Biden’s economic policies.

Hassan said in another ad that she is “taking on members of my own party to push a gas tax holiday” and “pushing Joe Biden to release more of our oil reserves.”

But as governor, Hassan signed a gas tax increase in 2014 and proposed a budget in 2015 to increase taxes and fees by $100 million, the New Hampshire Journal reported. As a senator, she voted against former president Donald Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, which saved an average of $1,400 for New Hampshire residents.

The Hassan campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

T.J. Duffy, a 26-year-old U.S. Postal Service driver, plans to vote for Republicans up and down the ballot in November. Hassan’s campaign message, he said, is a desperate reversal to appeal to blue-collar workers in the state.

“If you’re going to vote one way for the majority, it’s pretty unfair to say you’re bipartisan,” Duffy told the Free Beacon. “The people who don’t see gas prices as an issue don’t drive to work every single day.”

Hassan’s campaign message relies in part on her award from the Lugar Center, which in May crowned her the “most bipartisan” senator in 2021. The organization noted that Hassan rallied a Republican cosponsor on all 48 bills she introduced last year. Only two of these bills passed, though, both of them directing the Department of Health and Human Services to bolster public health programs.

Danielle Ovellette, a 32-year-old waitress, wore a “fuck Trump” bracelet as she served several Trump supporters last week at Ryan’s Place, a veteran-themed diner in Epping, N.H. Ovellette supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) in the 2020 presidential primary and refused to vote for Biden in the general election. She said she plans to vote for Hassan because of her support for a progressive agenda.

“You vote for what’s best for you,” Ovellette told the Free Beacon.

Polling data show Hassan has a narrow lead against her potential Republican challengers. Hassan ran a series of campaign ads that criticize the Republican candidates’ pro-life records after the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June. The New Hampshire primary is not until Sept. 13—a little more than a month before the election.

Paul Lessard, a 58-year-old former New Hampshire Department of Transportation employee born and raised in Manchester, N.H., said Hassan’s bipartisan message will fall flat come Election Day.

“She’s full of shit,” Lessard, a registered Republican, told the Free Beacon. “She only sides with Democrats.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Manchin-backed Inflation Reduction Act would more than double agency’s size

If Democrats have their way, one of the most detested federal agencies—the Internal Revenue Service—will employ more bureaucrats than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.

Under the Inflation Reduction Act negotiated by Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), the agency would receive $80 billion in funding to hire as many as 87,000 additional employees. The increase would more than double the size of the IRS workforce, which currently has 78,661 full-time staffers, according to federal data.

The additional IRS funding is integral to the Democrats’ reconciliation package. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found the hiring of new IRS agents would result in more than $200 billion in additional revenue for the federal government over the next decade. More than half of that funding is specifically earmarked for “enforcement,” meaning tax audits and other responsibilities such as “digital asset monitoring.”

That would make the IRS one of the largest federal agencies. The Pentagon houses roughly 27,000 employees, according to the Defense Department, while a human resources fact sheet says the State Department employs just over 77,243 staff. The FBI employs approximately 35,000 people, according to the agency’s website, and Customs and Border Protection says it employs 19,536 Border Patrol agents.

The money allocated to the IRS would increase the agency’s budget by more than 600 percent. In 2021, the IRS received $12.6 billion.

Although Democrats say the hiring of additional IRS agents will help root out tax cheats and other criminals, federal tax revenues have steadily risen over the past several decades. Federal tax receipts are projected to hit $5.7 trillion in 2027, up from just over $4 trillion last year without additional IRS agents.

But the roughly $450 billion in new spending proposed by Democrats requires new funding mechanisms. Some of the new spending includes $161 billion for clean electricity tax credits and $64 billion in new Affordable Care Act subsidies.

The majority of new revenue from IRS audits and scrutiny will come from those making less than $200,000 a year, according to a study from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. The committee found that just 4 to 9 percent of money raised will come from those making more than $500,000, contrary to Democrats’ claims that new IRS agents are necessary to target millionaires and billionaires who hide income.

Senate Republicans argue that the roughly $45 billion the bill puts towards hiring IRS agents could be better spent on other priorities, such as helping students rebound from the learning loss suffered during COVID school closures. A proposal by Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) would amend the spending bill to put the IRS money towards education tax credits.

“When faced with the decision to spend $45 billion on America’s largest revenue collection agency, or give it back to parents to help them get their kids the help they need, the Senate needs to choose the latter option every single time,” Scott told the Free Beacon.

The Washington Free Beacon previously reported that, despite White House claims to the contrary, the Inflation Reduction Act does little to combat inflation. A report from Moody’s Analytics found the Democratic bill will shave just .33 percent from the Consumer Price Index over the next decade.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used COVID-19 for biological warfare, according to a new report by nine experts with the Center for Security Policy (CSP).

Generals, medical experts, and foreign policy experts including former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra and former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin contributed to the report, which is available in book form on Amazon.

The report, titled “The CCP is at War with America,” stated that there is no evidence COVID-19 was a natural virus, arguing that there is significant evidence it came from a CCP lab. It also stated that the CCP deliberately allowed the virus to spread worldwide by allowing international flights while locking down movement within China.

The CSP describes the report as an “exercise in competitive analysis that strongly challenges the Director of National Intelligence’s September 2021 conclusion.”

The Plague War

U.S. intelligence experts in 2021 concluded that they might never know for certain where COVID-19 came from. But the CSP put the blame squarely on the Chinese communist regime.

“The preponderance of evidence indicates that SARS-CoV-2 was lab-manufactured,” the report stated. “In any event, Beijing acted with murderous intent in spreading the disease beyond China’s borders.”

As proof of these claims, the report pointed to genetic features of COVID-19 not found in natural viruses. It noted that China’s military has a biological warfare program.

Finally, it highlighted that the Chinese regime restricted internal travel to stop the spread of COVID-19 but kept its international borders open. At the same time, it bought up global supplies of personal protective gear.

Even if the original release of the virus was an accident, its worldwide spread was intentional, the report stated. The likely motive was to ensure that the rest of the world would be set back economically by the virus to the same degree China would be.

“Xi’s regime clearly saw the imperative need to ensure that it would not suffer economic privation alone, to the advantage of its enemies, especially the United States,” the report read. “Actively spreading the virus was, thus, a means of waging economic warfare, and the Chinese Communists applied themselves to doing so with a vengeance.”

According to the report, the CCP worked to spread its COVID-19 quarantine policies around the world so it could weather the pandemic at an advantage. The damage COVID-19 measures did to America’s economy put the CCP ahead.

“A principal beneficiary of such economic trauma would be the Chinese Communist Party,” the report read.

Weapons of Choice

The report also stated that the Chinese regime has a history of biological warfare. In the early 1990s, Chinese general Chi Haotian told China’s biological weapons program that it should depopulate America so China could take it over, according to the report. But China kept these plans secret.

“Right now, it is not the time to openly break with [America],” the general said. “Our reform and opening to the outside world still rely on their capital and technology.”

Biological weapons could be China’s road to world domination, the report stated. Chinese military journals have openly published articles about genetically-targeted biological warfare. China has collected genetic profiles of foreigners while keeping a close guard on the genetic profiles of Chinese people, it added.

“If Chinese scientists succeed in designing pathogens targeting only foreigners, the next germ, virus, or microbe from China could end non-Chinese societies,” the report stated.

“Xi will be the first supremo to possess a weapon making worldwide Chinese rule possible,” it read.

The report suggested that COVID-19 fatalities outside China should be considered “murder victims.”

The paper offered several conclusions. These include that the CCP and any who colluded with it must be held accountable for the pandemic’s results; the government shouldn’t impose vaccine mandates on the vulnerable; the United States should develop deterrents against Chinese bioweapons; and future medical health measures shouldn’t follow Chinese totalitarian lockdown advice.

“We must never again allow our constitutional freedoms to be denied on the pretext of a public health emergency, especially at the insistence of foreign powers, let alone our mortal enemy,” the report stated.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

China’s ruling communist regime announced Friday that it would cancel or suspend dialogue on several issues with the United States ranging from military communications to climate change initiatives.

A statement from the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign ministry said that the regime would cancel all direct communications between military theater leaders, working meetings between defense departments, and maritime security dialogues with the United States.

Additionally, the CCP would suspend all cooperation with the United States related to illegal immigrant repatriation, criminal justice assistance, climate talks, transnational crime, and anti-drug programs.

The announcement is part of a suite of retaliatory measures by China against the United States and its partners following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier in the week.

Moreover, the canceling of communications between military commanders in the Indo-Pacific is likely to be seen as a major escalation by the international community, as such contact is often a key tool in helping militaries avoid miscommunication or harmful accidents.

The CCP statement follows a barrage of explosive rhetoric and hostile actions from Beijing this week.

On Thursday, the CCP launched 11 ballistic missiles into the waters around Taiwan, some of which passed over the island and into the exclusive economic zone of Japan. The regime has also seemingly launched a sustained series of cyberattacks on Taiwanese infrastructure, and has implemented import bans on more than 2,000 items from Taiwan. The Chinese military’s encirclement of Taiwan has also formed a sort of blockade, forcing international air and sea traffic to back up as it attempts to wrap around the most dangerous areas.

International forums including the G7 and ASEAN have called on the CCP to end its provocations and pursue a peaceful solution to ongoing tensions.

The White House, meanwhile, summoned the Chinese ambassador for a reprimand over the unprecedented escalations.

The U.S. leadership said that it would not give in to China’s erratic and dangerous behavior and that, in spite of CCP threats to regional stability, it would pursue deescalatory measures including postponing one of its own missile tests.

“As China engages in destabilizing military exercises around Taiwan, the United States is demonstrating instead the behavior of a responsible nuclear power by reducing the risks of miscalculation and misperception,” said White House National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby during an Aug. 4 press conference.

“This is how we’re going to defend America’s national security interests and our values.”

The CCP maintains a so-called One China principle, which states that Taiwan is a breakaway province that must be reunited with the mainland. The regime has not ruled out the use of force to achieve this goal. Taiwan has been self-governing since 1949 and has never been controlled by the CCP, however. And Taiwan maintains a democratic government and thriving market economy.

U.S. relations with Taiwan and China are governed by a series of treaties and diplomatic cables stretching back to the 1970s. Notably, the United States adheres to a One China policy, which provides an acknowledgment, but not endorsement, of the CCP’s One China principle. The policy also mandates extensive unofficial ties with Taiwan. The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 further mandates that the United States will provide the arms to Taiwan necessary for its self-defense.

At the heart of the ongoing tensions between the CCP and the United States is their long-standing agreement that neither side will attempt to unilaterally change this status quo through force or coercion.

CCP authorities maintain that Pelosi’s visit was intended to unilaterally change that status quo. U.S. officials say the same of China’s increased military and economic aggression in the region, and have accused the CCP of manufacturing a crisis to justify military expansion around Taiwan.

“Beijing’s provocative actions are a significant escalation in its long-standing attempt to change the status quo,” Kirby said.

“We’re not going to accept a new status quo. And it’s not just the United States, but the world as well.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Sen. Josh Hawley grilled FBI Director Christopher Wray on the allegations at a Senate hearing

Two GOP senators have urged the Department of Defense (DoD) to immediately investigate whistleblower allegations that hundreds of Afghan evacuees who appeared on official watchlists were not properly vetted before they were released into the United States.

According to the DoD whistleblower, the Biden administration failed to properly vet 324 Afghan evacuees who appeared on the DoD’s Biometrically Enabled Watchlist (BEWL), which includes known suspected terrorists, said U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Thursday.

The BEWL identifies individuals whose biometrics have been collected and determined by analysts to be threats or potential threats to national security, including known suspected terrorists.

Hawley and Johnson said the whistleblower also alleges that White House and DoD officials instructed agency personnel to “cut corners” and not conduct full fingerprint tests on the evacuees at staging bases in Europe, “in order to promote the rushed evacuation from Afghanistan.”

Further, the whistleblower alleges that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff were authorized to delete old biometric data at their discretion, said the senators, who went on to say that this is a “troubling development that could threaten national security and public safety.”

Whistleblower Allegations Raised in Letter

Hawley and Johnson raised the DoD whistleblower’s allegations with DoD Acting Inspector General Sean O’Donnell in a letter on Thursday (pdf).

“We write to you with concern over new allegations raised by a Department of Defense (DoD) whistleblower. This information may show the Biden Administration’s failure to vet those evacuated from Afghanistan was even worse than the public was led to believe. The following allegations demand an immediate investigation by your office,” the senators wrote.

The DoD has previously admitted in a report that the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) did not vet all Afghan evacuees “using all DoD data prior to arriving in” the United States.

NEW whistleblower allegations – hundreds of Afghan evacuees who appeared on DOD terror watch list allowed to enter the U.S. ⁦@SenRonJohnson⁩ and I lay out what we’ve learned pic.twitter.com/zBHlVB0ujE

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) August 4, 2022

The DoD earlier this year said that it identified 50 Afghan individuals in the United States whose records indicate they might pose a significant security concern.

Hawley and Johnson said they “understand that number has risen to at least 65,” and declared that the individuals “need to be immediately located, fully vetted, and, if appropriate, deported.”

The senators noted that the 324 Afghan individuals allegedly on the watchlist are in addition to the 50 or 65 already identified.

Answers Sought From DOD

Hawley and Johnson asked O’Donnell to confirm how many BEWL matches were generated by biometric submissions from Afghan evacuees.

Of these matches, if any, the senators asked the DoD acting inspector general to clarify if any were denied entry, admitted entry, or currently in the United States.

The senators also sought information about the allegations that NSC or DoD staff instructed personnel to cut corners in processing the evacuees’ fingerprints, and asked for clarification on the circumstances under which agency personnel may delete biometric data.

Hawley and Johnson also asked O’Donnell to clarify the number of BEWL matches generated by Afghan evacuees after they arrived; what steps have been taken toward identification, vetting, or deportation; and how many were known suspected terrorists.

Additionally, the senators asked if the FBI or other law enforcement were investigating the individuals.

Hawley Grills FBI Director

At a Senate Judiciary Committee Oversight Hearing on Thursday, Hawley confronted FBI Director Christopher Wray about the whistleblower’s allegations.

Wray wasn’t able to give a clear answer about the FBI’s efforts to track down and interview the 324 Afghan evacuees, but noted that “there are a number of individuals, through our joint terrorism task forces, that we are actively trying to investigate.”

The FBI director noted that the agency had disrupted a number of actions related to the evacuees, but did not specify what they were.

Regarding the allegations of cutting corners, Wray said: “I will say that this was a massive number of people to be vetting in an extraordinarily short period of time and that in my view inevitably raises concerns.”

“Oh, I think you’re absolutely right about that,” Hawley responded. “‘Inevitably raises concerns’ I think is the is the nicest thing that could be said about it.

“We know that the basic procedures were not followed. We know that the screening process was not followed. And now we know that potentially hundreds of people connected to terrorism are loose in this country as a result,” the Missouri senator said before conceding his time.

The Biden administration brought around 77,000 Afghans to the United States during its chaotic military withdrawal last year. The airlifts were for Afghans and their family members who risk Taliban retaliation for helping the United States during its 20-year war. The execution of the withdrawal has been widely panned.

The Afghans were being granted Special Immigrant Visas entitling them to bring their families.

The Epoch Times reached out to the DoD for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Viktor Orban kicks off CPAC in Dallas

Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, told hundreds of conservatives in Texas on Thursday that his country defeated communism—and now America must do the same.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Orban told the crowd that America is fighting for its life against progressives and globalists, which are communists.

“Don’t be afraid to call your enemies by their name,” he said. “They hate me and slander me and my country, as they hate you and slander you and the America you stand for.”

Orban said the Democrats in the United States were not fond of him and wanted Hungary to move away from being a Christian nationalist state.

“They did not want me to be here, and they made every effort to drive a wedge between us,” he said.

Orban has been criticized as a right-wing Christian nationalist. His anti-immigration stance drew condemnation from the United States and the international community recently after he said Hungarians did not want to become “peoples of mixed race.”

Orban later clarified that the issue isn’t as much about race as it is about culture. While not mentioning the controversy directly, he noted that a Christian politician “cannot be racist.”

‘Lone Star State of Europe’

Orban’s anti-immigration policy earned him a warm welcome in Texas, which is overwhelmed with illegal immigrants under Joe Biden’s border policies.

Orban praised CPAC’s host state of Texas for its independence and freedom, calling Hungary the “Lone Star State of Europe,” much to the delight of the crowd.

The prime minister said that massive immigration is a globalist goal. George Soros, a Hungarian by birth, has an army of followers in institutions across the globe who want to create a post-Western world.

In 2015, Orban said 400,000 illegal immigrants came to Hungary’s borders, but Hungary built a wall and reduced illegal immigration to zero.

Orban’s speech outlined how America and Hungary, which he sees as fighting a common enemy on two fronts, can win against the Marxist movement trying to destroy western civilization. For better or worse, the world looks to America as a great power that will lead the world into the future, he said.

“The West is at war with itself,” he said. “The globalists can all go to hell. I have gone to Texas,” he said, prompting wild clapping and cheers.

Orban said the fight against the far-left starts with understanding that they want to drive a wedge between people and their faith and destroy families. Nazi Germany was able to succeed in a godless environment, he said.

“You must play to win. Play by your own rules,” he said. “This war is a culture war.”

Progressives change language to disguise their Marxist agenda, he said. The ideology wants to destroy the family because Marxism sees it as an oppressive patriarchal system.

Gender ideology and the sexualization of children is an idea of the left meant to harm families. In Hungary, a mother is a woman, and a father is a man. Order is necessary for any free country, meaning law enforcement is respected, he said.

In Hungary, large families are encouraged through tax breaks for having more than two children. With those policies in place, Hungary has seen marriages double and abortions cut in half over the past decade, he said.

“We need a strong America with a strong leader,” he said, adding America must lead the world to defeat the globalists.

The path to victory starts with taking back institutions and turning to faith in God. Orban said America has two years to get ready, alluding to the next presidential election.

Enemies in the media would not view his speech in a favorable light, said Orban, who met with former President Donald Trump before his appearance at CPAC.

“I can already see tomorrow’s headlines: Far-right European racist, anti-Semite strongman, the Trojan horse of Putin, holds a speech at the conservative conference,” he said.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Democrat Logic: Spend hundreds of billions of dollars to reduce inflation. Are you F-ing kidding me?! [US Patriot]

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) has reached a deal with Democrats over a multi-pronged spending package that lawmakers say would reform the tax code, lower the federal deficit, lower health care costs, and invest in energy and climate change programs.

The spending package appeared to be a revised, alternate version to the Build Back Better (BBB) bill, which would fulfill a major agenda of Joe Biden.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) previously announced on July 27 that he had reached a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on energy, taxes, and health care to advance the bill, which is dubbed the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

Sinema, who previously held out on the deal, said in an announcement on Thursday she would support moving forward with the measure and begin debate on the bill.

“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” Sinema said. “Subject to the Parliamentarian’s review, I’ll move forward.”

Sinema was referring to a provision that would have closed the so-called carried interest loophole and generate an estimated $14 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years. The loophole is said to help wealthy private equity and hedge fund managers pay less taxes.

She was also separately referring to an agreement to protect manufacturing from the impact of a proposed 15 percent corporate minimum tax, which opponents say would jeopardize economic growth.

“Following this effort, I look forward to working with [Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.)] to enact carried interest tax reforms, protecting investments in America’s economy and encouraging continued growth while closing the most egregious loopholes that some abuse to avoid paying taxes,” the Arizona senator said, referring to tax concerns that affect hedge funds.

Schumer said in a statement on Thursday that the agreement “preserves the major components” of the original bill, which includes “reducing prescription drug costs, fighting climate change, closing tax loopholes exploited by big corporations and the wealthy, and reducing the deficit by $300 billion.”

“I am pleased to report that we have reached an agreement on the Inflation Reduction Act that I believe will receive the support of the entire Senate Democratic conference,” he also said. “I have had many productive discussions with members of our conference over the past three days and we have addressed a number of important issues they have raised.”

Schumer said the final version of the bill will be introduced on Saturday.

The Democratic leader seeks to pass the measure through a procedural tool called “reconciliation” that allows a bill related to taxes, spending, and debt to be passed in the chamber by a simple majority rather than having to pass the 60 vote filibuster threshold. The reconciliation process also limits debate on the bill to 20 hours. That could allow the bill to be passed with only Democratic votes, if necessary, if every Democrat is on board.

The bill is expected to include about $370 billion on energy and climate programs and $64 billion to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums for three years through 2025.

It also seeks generate about $700 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years, which would leave roughly $300 billion in deficit reduction.

A large portion of the $700 billion—an estimated $313 billion—is expected to be generated by increasing the corporate minimum tax to 15 percent, while the remaining amounts include $288 billion in prescription drug pricing reform and $124 billion in Internal Revenue Service tax enforcement.

Support of All 50 Democrats in Senate

Sinema’s announcement means all 50 Democrats in the 50–50 split Senate will support the measure. Democrats hold a majority due to Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote.

Biden said in a statement from the White House released late Thursday that “we’ve taken another critical step toward reducing inflation and the cost of living for America’s families,” adding, “I look forward to the Senate taking up this legislation and passing it as soon as possible.”

In a Twitter post on Thursday afternoon, Schumer said the legislation “will be the largest package to fight the climate crisis ever passed by Congress.”

“Republicans want to take away people’s health care, cut taxes for the rich, put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block, raise taxes on working families,” he said in a separate Twitter post. “Democrats are working to lower inflation, lower Rx drug costs, close tax loopholes exploited by big businesses.”

Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) signaled opposition to the spending package.

“Even the Democrats’ favorite estimate says their so-called inflation bill will take nine years to cut the same amount of inflation that our country added every week in June,” he wrote on Twitter on Aug. 3. “Nine years of huge tax hikes and big spending to remove literally one week’s worth of inflation. A joke.”

“Democrats want to raise families’ electricity, gas, and heating bills so they can send rich people rebates for buying $80,000 electric cars. New taxes on American oil and gas,” he said in another Twitter post. “Costly virtue signaling with no meaningful emissions impact as China keeps emitting more and more.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A report from Joe Biden’s Department of Justice released in June includes a fact that the Biden administration likely regrets publishing.

As it turns out, according to the report, domestic violence is more common in LGBT relationships.

Titled “Violent Victimization by Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, 2017-2020,” the report sought to prove the pervasiveness of anti-LGBT violence.

After listing off a number of stats meant to show this supposed pervasiveness, the report dropped a domestic violence truth bomb: When compared to straight couples, domestic violence is eight times higher among bisexual couples and more than twice as high among lesbian and gay couples.

A 2018 review of studies analyzing “intimate partner violence” published in the National Library of Medicine reached the same conclusion. According to the review, IPV among LGBT couples is “comparable to or higher than heterosexual cases.”

If true, these inconvenient facts would be devastating to the left’s narrative that all family structures are equivalent (because men and women are the same, fathers and mothers are the same, so it doesn’t matter if a kid has a mom and a dad, two dads or two moms).

That being said, it could be the case that the DOJ’s report is completely fallacious. Chad Felix Greene of The Federalist has researched LGBT violence extensively and seems to believe as much.

“I’ve been following [anti-LGBT violence statistics] for years and it is always the same manipulation techniques. The data has never been improved or accurate. It’s maddening,” Greene told The Western Journal.

According to Greene, the biggest problem with these numbers is missing context. In his opinion, there is no reason to assume that “all people have equal opportunity to experience violence.”

The proponents of the LGBT movement seem to be constantly changing the goal posts, underlying assumptions and definitions key to many such statistics in order to further their ideological narrative.

For example, Greene pointed out that in recent years, murders in Puerto Rico have been categorized as U.S. murders, “disregarding the significant cultural differences that cause them.”

Additionally, terms like “simple assault” can be used to inflate “violence” statistics. Physical violence is not necessary for something to qualify as a “simple assault.” If someone were to merely make a gay or trans person “feel or believe they will be harmed,” that could be categorized as simple assault.

Lastly (although many other forms of statistical manipulation are likely used), Greene pointed out that much of the LGBT violence data is “self-reported,” making the numbers more difficult to verify.

“In my experience, these numbers are inflated, not based on objective, measurable data and lack sufficient context to make any determination. The term ‘violence’ is too broad to understand what is being presented,” Greene told The Western Journal.

Major Dem-Run City’s Police Chief Begging for the Violence to Stop

So either the Biden administration is right and LGBT couples tend to produce more dangerous family environments, or it is wrong and completely fudging the numbers in order to fuel an ideological agenda.

Either way, know that when officials in the Biden administration talk about “LGBT rights,” you can’t trust a single word they say.

Revisionist powers, nations whose leaders seek to undermine American leadership in the world, seem to be on the march.

Russia persists with its heavy bombardments in Ukraine. Its army holds on, at least for now, not only in eastern Ukraine but also on the Black Sea coast, shutting off Ukraine from supplies and trade with the rest of the world.

China is threatening retaliation for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. The regime of President Xi Jinping may be mollified for the moment by the Biden White House’s hints that it wasn’t their idea, or deterred by the staging of U.S. naval forces nearby. But there’s no doubt that China has much more military capacity to attack Taiwan and inflict damage on U.S. forces than when Speaker Newt Gingrich visited Taiwan in 1997.

Iran, meanwhile, is showing little interest in Biden administration efforts to reinstate the JCPOA, the nuclear pact signed by the Obama administration in 2015 and from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018. The mullah regime seems unblushingly intent on achieving nuclear weapons capability.

In reflecting on these threats, I am struck by how much longer the leaders of each of these revisionist polities have been in power, how secure their hold on it has been, how short the tenure has been and how weak the hold of elected leaders here in the United States and among our allies.

Consider Vladimir Putin. When he took power in the last hours of 1999, he was unknown beyond Moscow and not expected to be around a generation later. Yet he’s still there 22 years and eight months later, longer than the reign of Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917) and not that many years less than the 29 years of Joseph Stalin (1924-1953). There’s speculation that the 69-year-old Putin’s hold on power has been endangered by the failure of his apparent plan to absorb Ukraine, but last year, he signed a law that would allow him to serve until 2036.

Speaking of changing term limits, China abolished its limit of two five-year terms in 2018. Xi is expected to be granted another 10 years in power this fall. Those term limits were established by Deng Xiaoping, a close observer and sometime victim of the violent lurches in the nearly 27-year rule of Mao Zedong (1949-1976).

Now Xi, at age 69, is positioned to challenge that record, though not that of the 18th-century Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796). But Xi may want to stick around for the 100th anniversary of the Communist takeover in 2049, at which point the regime hopes to become the world’s dominant power, according to Michael Pillsbury’s “The Hundred-Year Marathon.”

The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, is already a record-setter. He has held that position since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989, 33 years ago. That’s nearly as long as the 37-year reign of the Shah Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979).

There’s an obvious contrast here with Western leaders. The two most recent American presidents won a majority of electoral votes by margins of 77,000 and 42,000 popular votes in three states. Though there’s some continuity in their administrations’ policies, they’re not on speaking terms. Oh, and they’re also currently 76 and 79 years old.

Other Western countries are in similar flux. Britain awaits a vote of some 160,000 Conservative Party members that will determine who becomes prime minister next month. France’s Emmanuel Macron lost his parliamentary majority last month. Germany’s Olaf Scholz, in office since December, leads an unwieldy coalition. Japan’s prime minister lacks the counsel of his long-lasting predecessor Shinzo Abe, assassinated July 8.

Successive Western leaders have supposed that they can change the behavior of revisionist leaders. American China policy since Henry Kissinger assumed that China could be prodded to be more open, more democratic, less aggressive. It didn’t work much before Xi, and under Xi, China has been moving in the opposite direction.

The first three presidents this century sought some kind of reset with Russia, and Donald Trump had some positive words for Putin (but the charge he colluded with Russia was always a hoax). But these approaches never worked out better than Hillary Clinton’s mislabeled reset button. As for Iran, presidents including Reagan, Obama and now Biden have reached out for better relations — and have gotten nothing for their concessions.

Putin and Xi are both 69, and Khamenei, the only one older than Biden and Trump, is 83. None will last forever. But deaths are hard to forecast and regime change even harder. There are underlying geopolitical forces behind Russia’s and China’s challenge to American leadership, and a religious motivation behind Iran’s.

The downside risk is that revisionist leaders, or Western mistakes, may plunge much of the world into destructive war. That has happened in Ukraine, although the violence is minuscule next to the carnage of the 20th century’s two world wars. The negative potential in Taiwan could be worse, and the reverberations of communist conquest more profound, as defense analyst Elbridge Colby argues. But those are subjects for another column.

In the meantime, let’s hope recent events have made the West’s wobbly buttressed leaders skeptical of the possibilities of enticing the revisionist leaders to see things our way. They’ve played this game before.

SOURCE: Right and Free

Rep. Matthew Cartwright has a history of tax delinquency

Rep. Matthew Cartwright (D., Pa.) was hit with tax penalties for late condo payments in 2021, just three years after facing media scrutiny for repeated tax delinquency.

Cartwright last year owed $436.63 in penalties and interest, stemming from the late property tax payments on his Washington, D.C., condo he shares with his wife, according to D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The news could be a problem for the congressman, who is locked in a competitive race against Republican challenger Jim Bognet. Cartwright on Tuesday declined to say if he supports a Democratic-backed inflation bill that is expected to raise taxes on middle-income earners, according to Fox News.

Cartwright did not respond to a request for comment from the Free Beacon.

Cartwright’s late taxes have been fodder for political attacks in his past campaigns. In 2018, Cartwright’s opponent ran an ad that slammed the congressman for supporting tax hikes “while refusing to pay taxes on his luxury Washington condo.”

At the time, Cartwright defended his years of late payments as an “oversight.” He had racked up $3,700 in penalties and interest related to delinquencies between 2013 and 2018, according to the Associated Press.

Cartwright in 2015 received a notice from the city threatening to put the condo up for sale if the delinquency wasn’t resolved, the AP reported.

“This is a very busy job that I have and I’m working really hard at it,” Cartwright told the news outlet, noting that he eventually paid the taxes and penalties in each of these cases.

Cartwright’s race is one of two tossup House elections in Pennsylvania this year, which could determine party control in the lower chamber.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Iran and al Qaeda have quietly forged a strategic terror alliance

The man likely to become al Qaeda’s next leader has spent decades using Iran as a base of operations and maintains deep ties to the hardline regime, signaling that two of the globe’s leading terrorist forces could exponentially expand relations in the near future.

Saif al-Adel, al Qaeda’s number two leader and longtime head of its security arm, fled to Iran in the early 2000s, along with other senior leaders, following the September 11 attacks. From there, he helped relay orders from the just-killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and orchestrate terrorist operations that killed dozens of people, including Americans, according to former U.S. officials and information on the Iran-al Qaeda axis published by a watchdog group.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) protected al-Adel during his time in the country, and the regime permitted him to plan deadly terror attacks, including a May 2003 operation in Saudi Arabia that killed eight Americans. “Adel’s suspected presence in Iran has raised further questions regarding Iranian influence on al Qaeda if Adel were to be named leader,” according to United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), an advocacy group that closely tracks Iran’s regional terror operations.

These ties have only deepened since Joe Biden’s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan that left the Taliban in power and the country in shambles. Senior leaders in Iran’s Quds Force, an elite IRGC branch, remain in close contact with al Qaeda leaders, “and since the fall of Afghanistan, have provided some al Qaeda leaders with travel documents and safe haven,” according to a European intelligence analysis. The Iran-al Qaeda alliance, former U.S. officials told the Free Beacon, has quietly grown for many years, making the prospect of a new nuclear deal with Iran—which will provide Tehran with billions in cash—beneficial for its allies in al Qaeda.

“When the U.S. government enriches Iranian terrorists through sanctions relief or a lack of enforcement, that money ultimately goes back to support al Qaeda,” Gabriel Noronha, a senior Iran adviser for the State Department during the Trump administration, told the Free Beacon. “We know that Saif al-Adel has not just been living in Iran for most of the past 20 years—he’s been hosted there by the regime along with other al Qaeda operatives. Since 2015, the Iranian regime has allowed al Qaeda to establish an operational headquarters in the country, providing them with documents, passports, funding, and logistical support like safe houses.”

Al-Adel and his network of al Qaeda confidants used their time in Iran to build close “operational coordination” with Tehran’s security forces, including the IRGC. While Iran was once at odds with al Qaeda due to religious differences, that has not been the case for many years now, according to Noronha and other former U.S. officials familiar with these ties.

“These are not totally separate and distinct terrorist groups or even rivals anymore—they are part of an anti-American and anti-Western alliance,” Noronha said.

From his perch in Iran during the mid-2000s, al-Adel “was allowed by Iran to travel to Pakistan and open more contacts with other al Qaeda leaders,” according to UANI’s research, which is based on intelligence and open-source reporting. Iran’s decision to permit al-Adel and other al Qaeda operatives to freely move in the region “opens up speculation that al-Adel could establish a ‘satellite office’ for the group in Iran,” according to a 2011 AP report.

Nathan Sales, former U.S. ambassador-at-large and coordinator for counterterrorism, told the Free Beacon that “contrary to expectations and contrary to conventional wisdom, the Iranian regime and al Qaeda have maintained a mutually beneficial relationship for many years.”

Iran, Sales noted, recently hosted senior al Qaeda leaders and operatives, “which is exactly what we should expect from the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.”

The depth of these ties was first unveiled by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo in January 2021, when he disclosed publicly that a U.S. operation killed one of al Qaeda’s top leaders on the streets of Tehran in 2020.

“Al Qaeda has a new home base: the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Pompeo said in a speech at the time, marking one of the first public disclosures about Iran’s deepening relationship with the terror group.

Hans-Jakob Schindler, a senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, which tracks jihadi groups, noted that al-Adel “has become very high value” since al-Zawahiri was killed, “and the Iranians usually take advantage of such situations.”

Al-Adel’s “existence in Iran and his freedom to act while in Iran will solely depend on what the Iranian regime think his value and usefulness for their aims is,” Schindler said.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

A group of Republican lawmakers put forth a proposal on Thursday that it says would relieve student debt crisis without using taxpayer dollars to fund a massive debt forgiveness program.

The Responsible Education Assistance Act would limit the amount of interest borrowers could accumulate on federal student loans to help them more effectively pay back their loans. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), who co-sponsored the bill with Reps. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) and Jim Banks (R., Ind.), said the bill will help in-need Americans without shifting debt onto taxpayers.

The plan serves as an alternative to plans championed by prominent Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) to forgive all outstanding student debt. The Biden administration has already mobilized so that it is prepared to implement forgiveness to millions of Americans in debt once the White House announces its plan, according to Politico. The mass forgiveness proposals would cost the federal government at least $197 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Foxx told the Free Beacon it’s “grossly unfair” to force Americans to bear the burden of other people’s loans, especially those who already paid back loans of their own.

“Under the Biden administration’s blanket student loan forgiveness agenda, taxpayers bear the burden of paying back other people’s loans,” Foxx told the Washington Free Beacon. “This is grossly unfair to the two-thirds of Americans who never went to college or those who already paid back their loans.”

Experts say the Democratic proposals to forgive student loan debt fail to address the underlying issues that led to the current situation. If Joe Biden instituted his loan forgiveness plans, Americans would hold the same amount in three years as today, the Free Beacon reported in July.

The Republican bill takes a different route: the proposal would cap interest on federal student loans after 10 years, in order to help borrowers pay down their principal. It would also cap the amount of money students could borrow from the federal government and block the secretary of education from imposing costly student loan forgiveness plans without congressional approval.

It is highly unlikely the bill will advance to the House floor as long as Democrats remain in control of the House of Representatives. The legislation, however, serves as an example of the type of legislation Republicans would put forward should they win the majority back in November.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The Biden administration is poised to deny free school lunch funding from a Florida Christian school that refuses to comply with the administration’s LGBT mandates, despite the school’s qualification for a religious exemption.

Grant Park Christian Academy in Tampa, Fla., represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, is suing Joe Biden and Florida agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried for enforcing the Biden administration requirement that schools comply with its LGBT mandates or lose federal school lunch funding.

In May, the Biden administration redefined the meaning of “sex” in Title IX to include sexual orientation and gender identity, forcing schools to permit transgender students to use male or female bathrooms and play sports with either sex in order to receive National School Lunch Program funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More than half of state attorneys general rejected the memorandum, with Florida attorney general Ashley Moody saying the Biden administration was “using hungry children to advance a political agenda,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The Florida school refused to substitute gender identity for biological sex, costing them their ability to feed two meals and snacks daily to their 56 students when the fall semester starts. If Grant Park’s application is not approved by Aug. 10, the school will not be reimbursed for the meals it serves students. ADF legal counsel Erica Steinmiller-Perdomo said Fried should not block Grant Park’s school lunch funding, as Title IX provides a religious exemption.

“For five years, this Christian school has received funding to provide nutritious meals to dozens of low-income children in the community,” Steinmiller-Perdomo said. “Commissioner Fried and the Biden administration are trying to rewrite the law and ignore the exemption in an attempt to force this school to choose between violating its religious beliefs or providing lunches to children.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Unqualified diversity hire Xavier Becerra is really bad at his job

Glad to see someone else use the “Affirmative Inaction” phrase [US Patriot]

Joe Biden still hasn’t fired Xavier Becerra, the unqualified health and human services secretary whose failed leadership has exacerbated the administration’s botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the ongoing monkeypox outbreak.

Alas, Becerra probably won’t be fired for the same reason he was hired. Because of his race and the so-called diversity he brings to the administration.

READ MORE: White House Afraid To Replace HHS Secretary Because He’s Hispanic

The White House has been fed up with Becerra’s job performance for months and has “openly mused” about replacing him, according to a Washington Post report published in January. Health experts inside and outside the administration complained about his “low profile” and “passive” approach to complex problems. “He hasn’t shown up,” one COVID-19 analyst told the Post. “[He’s been] like a ghost.”

Nevertheless, administration officials were “loath” to give Becerra the axe because doing so “would likely draw the ire of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other grass-roots groups that pressed Biden to appoint more Latinos to his Cabinet.”

New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns recounted this racially charged pressure campaign in their recently published book, This Will Not Pass. Biden’s search for a health secretary, they wrote, was a “fraught” process characterized by “hurt feelings and [racial] grievance.”

While attempting to assemble “the most diverse cabinet in history,” Biden’s team “panicked” in response to criticism from Hispanic lawmakers who wanted more Hispanics nominated for cabinet-level positions. They “scrambled” to offer Becerra the job—a “hasty choice” explicitly intended to “calm the situation.”

So much for Biden’s campaign pledge to “follow the science” and “shut down” COVID-19 by putting the experts back in charge of the government’s pandemic response. Becerra, a former congressman, was woefully unqualified for the position of health secretary. His most relevant experience involved a lawsuit he filed as California attorney general to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide birth control to employees. More than 620,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 on his watch.

Some Democrats complained about the “harried selection process” and viewed Becerra as a “baffling” nominee. They were ignored. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) was especially annoyed because she “had worked closely with Becerra in the House and viewed him as untrustworthy.” Meanwhile, Biden chief of staff Ron Klain grew “weary” of the Democratic coalition’s insistence on “treating the cabinet as an identity-politics Rubik’s Cube.”

Becerra’s inability to helm the nation’s health department was glaringly obvious in January, when the Post reported on White House “frustrations” with his leadership. In recent months, the federal government’s response to monkeypox has further vindicated Becerra’s critics who contend the health secretary has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.

The New York Times on Wednesday published a damning report on Becerra’s botched handling of the monkeypox outbreak, which has been hobbled by a vaccine shortage “caused in part” by his department’s failure “to ask that bulk stocks of the vaccine it already owned be bottled for distribution.” The release of the vaccine doses was also delayed because the Food and Drug Administration, under Becerra’s purview, took months to inspect and approve the Danish factory producing the vaccine.

Lawrence Gostin, a renowned public health expert from Georgetown Law who has consulted with the White House on monkeypox, said the government’s response to the outbreak has been “deeply frustrating.” Federal health agencies have been “kind of asleep at the wheel on this,” and continue to struggle with “the same kinds of bureaucratic delays and forgetfulness and dropping the ball that we did during the COVID pandemic,” he told the Times.

The article includes a familiar critique of Becerra’s leadership. Detractors fault his “hands-off approach to an increasingly serious situation,” but weren’t willing to speak on the record. Biden is reportedly “upset” by the vaccine shortage and “stung by criticism that a lack of foresight and management has left gay men—the prime risk group for monkeypox—unprotected.”

Josh Barro, a pro-Biden journalist, observed that the Times article “really makes Xavier Becerra sound incompetent and out to lunch. How did he get the HHS Secretary job anyway? He doesn’t have relevant qualifications.”

Indeed.

Michael Bennet claims he doesn’t accept corporate PAC contributions. He’s taken thousands from groups that accept corporate PAC money.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D., Colo.) claims he doesn’t accept contributions from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists. A Washington Free Beacon review of his campaign finance records tells another story.

“I’m not taking a dime in corporate PAC money,” Bennet says in his first reelection campaign ad. “Washington could learn a lot from Colorado. That’s why I approve this message.” But the Colorado senator accepted more than $60,000 from PACs that accept corporate PAC contributions last quarter alone. Bennet also accepted $3,500 from the Blackstone Group’s corporate PAC in 2021. The same quarter he accepted that donation he claimed on Twitter that his campaign was “setting records without taking a cent from corporate PACs.”

On multiple occasions Bennet has also claimed that he has never taken any donations from lobbyists. Yet lobbyists have given him more than one million dollars since he entered the Senate in 2009, according to his campaign finance records.

Bennet taking money from corporations and lobbyists highlights how Democrats struggle to meet purity pledges demanded by left-wing activists. Such pledges help give the impression to voters that the candidates are free from outside influence. Other Democrats who say they swear off corporate PAC money, including Sens. Mark Kelly (Ariz.) and Raphael Warnock (Ga.), have exploited corporate donation loopholes.

At least 16 PACs that accept donations from corporations donated money to Bennet last quarter, according to his campaign finance records. Those PACs include the Real Estate Roundtable PAC and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

Similar to Democrats such as Kelly, Bennet also accepted tens of thousands of dollars from PACs funded by trade associations. Some of those PACs include the National Structured Settlements PAC and the American Council of Life Insurers PAC.

Much of Bennet’s other donations come from those connected to financial firms. From 2009 to the second quarter of 2022, Bennet accepted more than $5 million dollars from the securities and investment industry. Employees from the investment management firms Blackstone Group and Oaktree Capital Management have given Bennet over a half million dollars.

Bennet will face Republican challenger Joe O’Dea in November.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

The need for medical patients to have their own advocates has become critical in light of increasing reports from family members who believe their loved ones died in the hospital because of the COVID-19 treatment protocols prescribed by doctors.

To assist in breaking up what Priscilla Romans called “an unhealthy co-dependency” between patients and the health care system, Romans launched Graith Care, a patient advocacy business that takes the ultimate authority out of the hands of the “white coats” and returns it back to the patient.

“People have believed the hospitals are going to take care of them, only to find that this isn’t always the case,” Romans told The Epoch Times.

Many hospitals mechanically adhere to treatment protocols outlined in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), but with the help of patient advocates, patients and their families can override these one-size-fits-all treatment plans.

It’s a solution to a problem long overdue, Romans said.

Romans is launching Graith Care at a time when many health care professionals are leaving a medical system that they say was broken long before COVID-19 brought its corruption to the surface.

The tipping point has caused some doctors and nurses, including Romans, to find alternatives outside of the system.

‘It Was Worse Than I Thought’

As a nurse who later worked in the health insurance industry, Romans said she’s seen the many faces of the medical industrial complex, only to find that “it was worse than I thought.”

Among the issues is the fact that hospitals are paid large incentives by health insurance companies to follow a pre-set treatment plan, she said, which has led to hospitals exchanging patient care for lucrative payoffs.

For example, hospitals that receive federal funding from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act receive a 20 percent increase in reimbursement for inpatient stays resulting from COVID-19, she said.

There there are also incentives for treating COVID-19 patients with sedatives and the antiviral drug remdesivir, and then putting them on a ventilator, which often ends in death.

Even before the pandemic began, Romans said, she had been feeling a spiritual calling to step out of the comfort zone of a steady paycheck after years of observing the mechanics of a machine fueled by money, not by compassion.

“I launched Graith Care from my own home not knowing what was around the corner with all the vaccine mandates, protocols, and the use of drugs like remdesivir that, in many cases, have been deadly,” Romans said.

Since then, she’s expanded her business through word-of-mouth to help people throughout the United States and internationally, she said.

“I just felt like this was the right thing to do for people at the worst time in their lives,” she said.

Rescue Operations

Patient advocacy requires quick, critical thinking skills and a good understanding of the health care system to properly advocate for the average person, who may not understand that starving patients while keeping them on drugs like remdesivir, fentanyl, and precedex only makes them sicker, Romans said.

“These hospitals will make it seem like they are giving an individual plan of care while the patient and the family have no clue what is happening, and they just go along with what the white coats tell them,” Romans said.

Patient advocacy is about helping families understand their rights, she said, and how to navigate through the bureaucracy of the system that tells them they only have one option, like remaining trapped in the hospital.

In the case of the Anne and Scott Quiner in January 2022, Graith Care had Anne’s husband Scott flown out of a hospital in Minnesota to another hospital in Texas that allowed patients to choose a COVID-19 protocol recommended by America’s Frontline Doctors, which involved hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and vitamin C.

Anne Quiner had to seek legal counsel to file a restraining order to prevent the Minnesota hospital from taking Scott off a ventilator. The hospital responded by objecting on the basis that Anne’s position wasn’t “supported by medical science” before requesting that the court issue an order authorizing the hospital to take Scott off the ventilator, which would have killed him.

The judge sided with the Quiners’ lawyer, and on Jan. 15, it was Graith Care that helped organize a team to transfer Scott.

When Scott arrived in Texas, it was reported that he was malnourished, dehydrated, and 30 pounds underweight, and that his doctors there were “horrified” at his condition, but on Jan. 20, he reportedly became responsive and was “making tremendous progress.”

Scott Quiner later died on Jan. 22.

“He had already been put through too much and had so much thrown at him without the proper nutrition,” Romans said. “After a period of time, all of his organs were just suffering.”

‘Nobody Ever Flies Out of This Hospital’

Graith Care had another patient flown out of a top-tier hospital in South Dakota where the doctor was refusing a patient alternative treatment, Romans said.

The physician there said that a ventilator was the only option, so Graith Care worked to have the patient transferred, she said.

“The doctor told me, ‘Nobody ever flies out of this hospital—they fly to us,’” she said. “I told him we were going to try because it’s what the family wants.”

Within about 24 hours of his stay at the new hospital, the patient was healthy enough to return home, she said.

“He probably would have died at the other hospital because the only option they gave him was to be put on a [ventilator],” Romans said.

But there are many people who didn’t have the option to transfer their loved ones out of hospitals where they were receiving poor care.

Katrin Crum, Aletha Chavez, and Ashley Wines said their husbands were each isolated and given a combination of sedatives and the antiviral drug remdesivir, a drug reported to cause acute kidney failure. The doctors said the kidney failure was a symptom of COVID-19.

Though individual treatment had previously been left up to the physician and was an open discussion between the physician and the patient, Crum told The Epoch Times that all of that was “thrown out the window” when it came to her husband’s care.

“My 58-year-old husband in Washington received the exact same treatment as a 40-year-old woman in Florida who had none of the same health issues that my husband had,” Crum said.

For Romans, the pandemic has exposed the frayed wires of a medical system that can’t be fixed. The behavior of some physicians and nurses in the face of families who have had their lives turned upside down has revealed a disconnect in health care, she said.

“I think the system is going to implode on itself,” she said. “As a result, people are going to start shifting where they get their advice and medical care.”

As with all change, she said, it won’t be comfortable.

“It’s been painful, but it’s opened our eyes so that we can start looking for better solutions,” she said.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

An illegal alien has been charged with first-degree kidnapping, three counts of capital murder, and two counts of abuse of a corpse, after a gruesome discovery in rural Alabama on Aug. 1.

José Paulino Pasceul-Reyes, 37, who had previously been deported, is accused of murdering Sandra Vasquez Ceja, and her son, who was under the age of 14, as well as kidnapping Ceja’s 12-year-old daughter in Tallapoosa County, Alabama.

The complaint alleges that Reyes killed Ceja by smothering her with a pillow and her son “by bludgeoning him with his hands or feet” on or about July 24. Reyes is also accused of cutting both bodies into “small pieces at the joints in order to hide evidence.”

Reyes then allegedly tied Ceja’s 12-year-old daughter to the bedposts for about a week, plying her with alcohol to keep her in a drugged state, and abusing her. The girl eventually chewed through her restraints and escaped from the house.

A passerby called 911 after seeing the girl wandering down a road early on Aug.1.

“The information she provided us was that she had been bound and held at the residence that’s located near where she was at,” Tallapoosa Sheriff Jimmy Abbett told The Epoch Times.

“As we proceeded through it, a warrant was issued for [Reyes] on that offense—the kidnapping in the first degree—and then as our investigation continued, we determined that there were two decomposed bodies in the residence.”

Abbett said the bodies are still with forensics for formal identification and cause of death.

He said Reyes and Ceja were a couple and had moved into the residence in February.

Abbett said the young girl is now in state custody and “she’s protected and, and she is being provided all the needs.”

He’s calling her a hero. “What she had to endure and also provide us enough information where we could actually arrest this individual,” he said.

She’s doing as well as can be expected, he said. “No life-threatening injuries but you know, you got the anguish and the mental part she’s got to deal with.”

The sheriff said he hasn’t had border-related issues in his county prior to this. Tallapoosa has a population of about 41,000.

“This is really our first one. We’ve had some minor stuff, traffic stuff and things of this nature, but not to the magnitude of this,” he said.

Reyes is being held in custody without bond and had his first court appearance on Aug. 3, when he was provided attorneys.

He ended up with three capital murder charges due to Alabama laws adding an extra charge for killing two or more persons.

ICE didn’t respond by publishing time to a request for more information on Reyes.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

GOLIAD, Texas—Three stash house operators, a raft guide, two walking guides, a bush hiking guide, a taxi driver, and at least three other drivers were coordinated to smuggle Martin Lazaro Bieya from Reynosa, Mexico, to Houston—his first major city after running the gauntlet through U.S. Border Patrol and law enforcement.

His final goal was Detroit, where he said an uncle had a job lined up for him.

Bieya’s trip was cut short in Goliad County, some 200 miles north of the border and 150 miles shy of Houston, after the vehicle in which he was being smuggled crashed into a culvert as the driver attempted to flee local law enforcement.

He initially fled the scene, but was picked up by the sheriff that evening after walking to a road to look for water and food.

The Epoch Times spoke with 17-year-old Bieya through a translator on June 23 as he sat in the Goliad jail.

Bieya said he’s from Veracruz in eastern Mexico, where his family owns a small ranch, but he “can’t make enough money there.”

He says that in late May, he made the decision to come to the United States and called his uncle in Detroit.

“He told me he would get me to the United States,” Bieya said.

A couple of weeks later, Bieya and his father took a bus to Reynosa, a major city separated from McAllen, Texas, by the Rio Grande, which marks the international border.

In central Reynosa, the duo waited at a restaurant. They provided to the uncle their GPS location and what they were wearing, and a taxi soon arrived to take them to a stash house.

At the house, Bieya’s father bid him goodbye and got back in the taxi to return to Veracruz.

Inside the house, which Bieya said was good-looking, “not a trashy house,” four other Mexicans waited to be smuggled across the border. These weren’t the illegal crossers who turn themselves into Border Patrol for asylum, but rather, the “gotaways”—the tens of thousands who evade capture every month because they’re unlikely to qualify for any type of legal entry.

A Mexican man in his mid-20s was running the house, Bieya said. He said that he didn’t have to pay anything for food, accommodation, or transport at any stage, but suspects that his uncle paid about $7,000 to have him smuggled to Detroit.

“He said he paid a lot of money, but he never told me how much he paid,” he said.

Bieya said he spent the night in the house, and around noon the next day, the five migrants were transported by car to “the end of a long road,” after which he estimates they walked about three miles to the bank of the Rio Grande.

There, they crossed the river in an inflatable raft and disembarked into the United States.

Two Mexican Americans appeared and escorted them further from the river.

“They knew what they were doing. They were just there to pick us up,” Bieya said. The group walked until nightfall, then stopped for a while before resuming at about 1 a.m. They arrived at a stash house in McAllen, Texas, in the early morning, he said.

Three other illegal immigrants were already at the stash house, bringing their group to eight.

Several hours later, the group was transported to a second stash house in McAllen, where they waited until evening before squeezing into a Ford pickup truck. By now, there were 14 people to transport, including two Honduran nationals and one female.

“There were seven of us” jammed into the truck bed under a sheet of plywood to hide them, he said. “It was tight.”

“After about an hour on the road, the truck stopped and they told us to get out.”

Bieya said he didn’t know where they were, but the timing fits with where smugglers drop off illegal immigrants so they can walk through the brush to skirt the Border Patrol highway checkpoint near Falfurrias, Texas.

It’s one of the deadliest paths for illegal immigrants, where many die from heat-related issues. Guides, or “coyotes,” leave sick or injured people to fend for themselves.

The original two coyotes were still with Bieya’s group, and at this point, a third was present to lead them in their ensuing seven-night trek.

“We walked from 4 in the afternoon until 5 in the morning,” Bieya said. At the time, the temperature in South Texas was hitting the high-90s to 100s during the day, while the night cooled to the mid-70s.

The group carried 1-gallon jugs for water, and when they ran dry, they’d find a livestock trough to refill. They ate only once a day.

“We all talked about what we would do if we made it safe into the United States,” he said. “I wanted to work for a couple of years and hopefully get citizenship.”

Helicopters with spotlights passed over several times, and they had to scurry into the brush to hide. He said he also saw drones three times during the trek. Two rattlesnakes met their demise during the trip.

After seven nights, Bieya said the group arrived at a paved road and waited for the pickup vehicle to arrive. Within an hour, a Chevy Tahoe SUV stopped, and they all crammed in. The next stop was supposed to be Houston, but in Goliad County, Sheriff Roy Boyd spotted them and attempted to pull the vehicle over.

The driver tried to escape, but lost control and crashed into a culvert. All of the occupants, including Bieya, fled into the brush. But he was the last one to exit the vehicle and never saw the main group again. He said members of the group had told him they planned to go to New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Houston.

“I didn’t know what to do because I was so hungry, so thirsty,” he said. Later that evening, he said he decided to turn himself in.

Bieya found some workers near a road and asked them for water.

“They gave me two bottles of water and a beef taco,” he said. Not long afterward, the sheriff was passing by, saw him on the side of the road, and apprehended him.

Eight other members of the group were later apprehended in a nearby county. They were turned over to Border Patrol and taken back to Mexico, but Boyd has issued warrants for their arrests, should they reappear. The warrants include felony charges for engaging in organized crime, as well as several misdemeanors, including evading arrest, Boyd said.

The Cartel

The Gulf Cartel coordinates all the logistics of the human smuggling from the eastern part of Mexico right through the Texas corridor and deep into the United States, said Boyd.

“Just think of the logistics that go into it,” Boyd said. Bieya was just one person in a system that handles thousands of illegal aliens per day.

Officials in El Paso, Texas, recently estimated there were 60,000 people across the border in Ciudad Juárez waiting to enter the United States illegally. Boyd said he’s heard estimates of a half-million waiting to cross along the 1,254-mile Mexico–Texas border.

“As you move those people, where you’re moving them to has to be vacated by the people who are already there,” he said.

“It’s almost like warfare, the logistics of feeding and transporting and housing and having water and the toiletries and all of the things that are required. It’s a phenomenal task just on the logistics side.”

He said working factories and warehouses in Mexico are common locations that cartels use to stash people until they’re ready to take them across the border.

Boyd said the cartels pay the Mexican government each month for the use of the “plazas,” which are the staging and border crossing areas. The government will allow a certain volume of drugs or amount of people to flow through per month, and if it exceeds that, the cartel is taxed, or the government will raid a warehouse and sit on the commodity until the cartel pays.

“It’s how they work with the drugs, so I suspect they work the exact same way with humans,” Boyd said.

If too many people get stacked up waiting to cross, it causes a cash flow issue for the cartels, he said, “because now, the cartels have got to pay extra manpower, they’ve got to pay for water, they’ve got to pay for food, they’ve got to pay for toilet paper, they’ve got to pay for medicine—they’ve got to pay for all the things because it’s in the cartel’s interest to keep these people alive.”

“What these people don’t know at this point is that that payment to get across to Texas is not the final payment. The final payment gets told to them when they get to Houston,” he said.

Inside Texas, and beyond, the Gulf Cartel has an extensive network, with Atlanta being the next major hub beyond Houston.

“The cartel owns car dealerships, restaurants, various businesses, and it helps them launder their money, move their slaves, and maintain a foothold within the communities,” Boyd said. “That’s how it functions, and it’s very complex, but it ensures the cartel’s total control of their operational area within the United States.”

The smuggler drivers are now often recruited via social media such as TikTok, WhatsApp, and Facebook, Boyd said.

“They were targeting Hispanic teenagers from the metropolitan areas like Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas,” he said.

“They show wads of money. And so you have a teenager who sees somebody with $10,000, and they’re told, ‘You can drive down to Falfurrias, pick up eight people, drive up here, and you get this amount of money.’ It’s quick, easy money.”

Boyd said there’s a large Hispanic community in Houston, of which a portion “sympathizes with Mexico and works for the cartel—and so they’re the operatives that get hired to go back and forth.”

Boyd’s goal is to deter the cartel from entering Goliad County. Within the 852 square miles of the county, he monitors 16 cartel sites that are currently dormant, but tactics change quickly.

“We can’t stop it. The federal government wants it. The federal government encourages it through their policies and procedures,” he said.

“All I can do is try to make it as uninviting as possible for them to come into Goliad. And that’s what we’ve been trying to do.”

Boyd started putting up large billboards on the county line last year.

“Warning! Drug and human traffickers: Turn around, do not enter Goliad County,” the signs read. “Go around. Or we will hunt you down and put you in Goliad County jail.”

He said they worked—when the signs were up, cartel activity decreased, and when the Texas Department of Transportation (DOT) removed the signs, cartel activity picked up again.

Boyd had to stop putting up the signs after an attorney general opinion came back saying a county isn’t authorized to place signs without approval from the DOT.

“We have a whole list of rules, we have a Constitution, we have laws,” Boyd said.

“The cartel only has one: to make money. So it makes them very quickly adaptable to whatever situation they find themselves in. They’re constantly morphing.”

Boyd arranged a deal with Bieya that if he gave him as many details about his journey as possible, he’d recommend that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allow him to stay in the United States. Boyd said Bieya will likely be released—with the 3,000 pesos (about $150) he brought—within the next two weeks, to his uncle in Detroit.

“Hopefully, it’ll save him from winding up in indentured servitude [to the cartel],” Boyd said.

SURPRISE! ANOTHER BIDEN HIRE IS A CCP SHILL!

A Co-Chair of Joe Biden’s forthcoming White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health has appeared in documentaries produced by Chinese Communist Party-run outlets; lauding the regime’s agriculture and food policy as an approach that should be “learned by the whole world.”

Ertharin Cousin, one of five individuals selected by Biden to lead the conference, has also repeatedly praised the Chinese Communist Party’s agricultural policies, with her quotes frequently appearing on regime-run media.

Set to take place in September, the White House’s conference is slated to address nutrition and health in addition to food security and agriculture. It comes as inflation and food shortages plague the economy, dovetailing with efforts by left-wing activists and billionaires to eliminate meat from Western diets to supposedly combat climate change.

Cousin, who was a former executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, appeared on an episode of China Global Television Network’s (CGTN) show Full Frame titled “The Hunger Paradox.”

Cousin is the sole interviewee in the 20-minute program aired by CGTN, which is entirely owned and operated by the Chinese Communist Party. It has been described by the Freedom House think tank as “a long-standing weapon in Beijing’s arsenal of repression” whose “mission is to attack designated enemies of the Communist Party.”

The episode peddles Chinese Communist Party talking points surrounding the success of its agriculture methods despite the regime’s notoriety for famine and food rationing during the Cultural Revolution.

“In China, agricultural reforms ensured most rural farmers had land to grow on, allowing them to be food self-sufficient. China’s poverty reduction efforts have contributed to 70 percent of the world-wide poverty reduction since the 1980’s,” asserts the host, who makes no mention of China’s history of famine.

MUST READ: REVEALED: Pelosi-Linked Lobbyists Are Pushing China’s Social Credit System For American Citizens.

“One of the things I’ve heard you say, which I think is fascinating and true, is that policies do make a difference and you point to China. So many people lifted out of poverty, so many people hungry that now have meals, so policies do make a difference don’t they,” he continues.

“Yes they do,” responds Cousin, adding “You would often hear me use China as an example of a country that the world said would never feed itself. That it would always depend upon assistance from the global community because 50 years ago, China was WFP’s largest recipient, and that all evolved to the point where President Xi now says that he will eradicate poverty by the end of 2020.”

“I’m looking forward to that,” Cousin exclaims.

Cousin proceeds to explicitly praise the actions of the Chinese Communist Party, praising the regime for its “commitment”:

“It did take commitment from government to developing the programs, investing in the activities that were necessary to ensure the agricultural system was one that could provide access to food, but also ensuring that people who could not afford food had access to food. And that made a difference in the evolution of China, and there are many other factors involved there but the reality of it is is it began with a commitment by leadership to ensure that they were self-sustained in food access.”

Cousin, who served in the Obama administration as the Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, has made similar comments throughout her public service tenure.

MUST READ: EXC: Anthony Fauci Is STILL Funding China’s Military-Run Labs With U.S. Taxpayer Cash.

“China has made enormous progress in dealing with hunger and its experience can be learned by the whole world,” Cousin said during a visit to China in 2013, which was hyped in an article by state-run media outlet China Daily.

In 2016, speaking with another state-run media outlet Xinhua, she claimed that “China has created significant lessons for the world and established a true benchmark for what the world can achieve.”

As recently as July 2021, while delivering a keynote address at a conference, Cousin again praised the Chinese Communist Party for “despite the fact that some 60 years ago, the world said China would never be able to feed itself, not only does it feed itself today, but it is also a donor country, supporting food access across the globe for developing countries.”

In addition to Cousin’s praise for China potentially complicating her leadership role for the upcoming White Conference, she has also served on the Advisory board of pharmaceutical giant Bayer since 2019.

The Biden administration declared a public health emergency for monkeypox on Aug. 4 in a bid to unlock funding and more powers to deal with the virus, which officials say is primarily spreading among homosexual males.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra issued the declaration, saying in an Aug. 4 conference call with reporters that the move will allow for quicker distribution of the monkeypox vaccine. Becerra was joined by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf on the call.

“I will be declaring a public health emergency on monkeypox. … We’re [taking] our response to the next level,” Becerra said, stating  that Americans should take “monkeypox seriously.”

Walensky said the public health declaration will provide more “access to resources” and will “enable personnel to be deployed to the outbreak” in some localities. The emergency will also “further raise awareness” and encourage testing for it.

In the United States, there are “1.6 to 1.7 million” people who are at the “highest risk” of contracting monkeypox, according to the CDC director. She reiterated that homosexual men, namely those who are HIV-positive, appear to have the highest chance.

The declaration comes after officials in New York, Illinois, California, some cities, and the World Health Organization declared respective health emergencies for monkeypox, which is part of the same family of viruses as the one that causes smallpox. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, reportedly overruled an expert advisory committee to make the declaration on July 24, while the U.N. agency confirmed that the virus is in about 70 countries outside of Africa.

Along with Ghebreyesus, the heads of various federal, state, and local health agencies have stated that the large majority of cases are found among homosexual males. However, they’ve also stated that the virus is spreading among other groups, including children.

Earlier this week, the White House named Robert J. Fenton Jr., a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) official, to serve as the U.S. monkeypox response coordinator. That move echoes one made in early 2020 to name a response coordinator for COVID-19, with the first being former Vice President Mike Pence.

What It Means

Becerra said the Aug. 4 declaration was done because there has been an increase of about 1,500 new monkeypox cases across the United States in the past week or so.

More than 6,600 monkeypox infections have been reported across the United States, according to the CDC’s data, although the data show that no deaths have been reported so far. Only a handful of deaths from the virus have been reported outside the United States.

Earlier this week, Los Angeles and San Diego counties, as well as New York City, became the latest municipalities to declare local health emergencies over the virus.

But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he’ll resist declaring an emergency for monkeypox, saying that such policies—such as the mandates and lockdowns around COVID-19—are designed to create a climate of fear. It’s not clear if any other Republican governors will follow his lead.

“I’m so sick of politicians—and we saw this with COVID—trying to sow fear into the population,” DeSantis said during an Aug. 3 press conference. “We are not doing fear.

“You see some of these states declaring states of emergency. They’re gonna abuse those powers to restrict your freedom. I guarantee to you that’s what will happen.”

The virus may cause fever, body aches, chills, fatigue, and pimple-like bumps on many parts of the body. The United States saw its first case of the monkeypox virus confirmed on May 18 and now has more than 5,800 confirmed infections.

Scientists say that mass vaccinations against monkeypox won’t be needed and that targeted use of the available doses, along with other measures, could be enough to shut down the expanding epidemic that was recently designated by the WHO as a global health emergency.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

DeSantis’s office has expressed ‘serious concerns’

With less than a week to go before the official kickoff of Florida’s 2022 primary election cycle, documents obtained exclusively by The Epoch Times expose how one supervisor of elections has repeatedly overstepped his authority to implement COVID-19 mandates and voting procedures that appear to challenge numerous Florida laws.

Early voting in Florida runs between Aug. 13 to 20, and “Each county Supervisor of Elections may offer more days of early voting from one or more of the following days: August 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 21.” Florida’s Primary Election day is Aug. 23.

In a letter dated Nov. 4, 2021, Paul Stamoulis, Supervisor of Elections for Florida’s Charlotte County informed “all applicants interested in serving as a Poll Worker” that they were “required to complete an enclosed Certification form,” verifying that they had “been inoculated for the COVID-19 virus.”

Applicants were told they had to identify the type of vaccine they received and the dates the vaccine was administered. By signing the form, applicants were also acknowledging that they understood they would be required to wear a mask or a face shield, covering their nose and mouth, “at all times.” Applicants who could not “comply with this new policy” for “whatever reason,” were told they were “ineligible to work the 2022 Elections.”

On April 2, 2021, seven months before Stamoulis mailed his letters, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Executive Order 21-81 (pdf), banning vaccine mandates and “so-called COVID-19 vaccine passports,” saying it “would create two classes of citizens based on vaccination.”

On May 3, 2021, six months before Stamoulis mailed his letters, DeSantis issued Executive Order 21-101 (pdf), which suspended all local COVID-19 restrictions and mandates on individuals and businesses, and further stated that “no county or municipality may renew or enact an emergency order or ordinance, using a local state of emergency … that imposes restrictions or mandates upon businesses or individuals due to the COVID-19 emergency.”

The order was effective immediately. The same day, DeSantis signed Executive Order 21-102 (pdf) suspending all remaining states of emergency effective July 1, 2021, four months before Stamoulis mailed his letters.

Due to immediate backlash, Stamoulis rescinded this vaccine mandate policy.

Pandemic Procedures

But after his failure to force a vaccine mandate on local poll workers, Stamoulis has released a new set of polling room procedures that would prohibit voters from entering any one of their three early voting locations.

According to Page 8 of Stamoulis’s “Polling Location Pandemic Procedures 2022” manual, Stamoulis wants poll deputies to take the temperature of every voter—including accompanying children or any assistors they bring to help mark and cast their ballots—who wants to cast a ballot during Charlotte County’s 15-day early voting period.

Under the heading, “CHANGES DURING COVID,” the new manual says “each location would be provided with a thermometer,” and “Deputies stationed at the entry to the polling location” will be responsible for that thermometer throughout the day.” Deputies will also “instruct that “EVERYONE WISHING TO ENTER A POLLING LOCATION IS TO HAVE HIS OR HER TEMP CHECKED (kids, assistors, poll watchers, etc.).”

If anyone registers a temperature of 100 degrees or more, “claims to be uncomfortable entering the location” or “claims to feel ill and does not want to enter the polling location” or “refuses to have their temp taken,” a costly, resource and time-consuming procedure ensues.

‘Alternate Voting’ Procedures

When any of the aforementioned situations take place, the “Alternate Voting” procedures are to be implemented.

The deputy must stop attending to their other outside duties—which include ensuring that only voters and qualified individuals are admitted into the polling room, maintaining the peace outside, and ensuring enforcement of the 150 feet “No Solicitation Zone”—in order to find the clerk, at which time the clerk must also stop performing their many inside duties, such as assisting voters casting a provisional ballot, providing assistance to the EViD Operator/Inspector who operates the electronic poll book when they are unable to locate a voter in the registry, ensuring the maintenance of adequate supplies, filling in for poll workers who are on breaks, and managing the overall voting process within the polling location.

Under the heading, “DEPUTY AND CLERK RESPONSIBILITIES,” it describes how the clerk must next go outside and approach the voter, “wearing a mask and single use gloves.” Then, the Clerk is to “explain the new Alternate Voting process” and “request the voter’s photo/signature identification and inform the voter they will be right back.” The clerk must then go back inside and interrupt the check-in procedure of a voter—who already went through the temperature screening process—in order to have the EViD Operator/Inspector force the machine to issue a voting pass, as the voter has not yet provided a signature for verification purposes.

One Voter, Three Poll Workers

Now the clerk goes back outside, with the voter’s ID, Voting Pass, Signature Slip, ballot, and secrecy sleeve. After having the voter sign the Signature Slip, the clerk then compares the signature with the signature on the voter’s ID. If all is well, the voter is directed to a voting booth that has been set up outside, in the Florida summer heat, to mark their ballot.

The deputy must now juggle their normal duties with monitoring the voter to make sure they don’t leave with the ballot and/or that they aren’t approached by a third person. Once the voter has completed their ballot, they are told they must take their ballot to the deputy, who is not permitted to touch the ballot, so the deputy can go inside to get the clerk, who must again stop what they were doing inside in order to go back outside to get the voter’s ballot.

Now the clerk must explain to the voter that they are going to take their ballot away from them and go inside the polling room where they will cast the voter’s ballot into the tabulator. In the meantime, a third poll worker, the assistant clerk, must also stop their inside duties, which consisted of covering for the clerk in their absence, in order to document the procedure for the voter with a “recording device,” leaving no one left to assist voters and other poll workers with ballot casting and check in issues. “The Assistant Clerk records the ballot going from the voter to insertion into the DS200,” the manual describes. Then the clerk “returns to show the voter the video that their ballot was tabulated.”

“Once the voter sees the video it is deleted (in front of the voter).”

Florida Election Laws

According to Fla. Stat. § 102.031, “No photography is permitted in the polling room or early voting area.” Florida’s Voter’s Bill of Rights states that an elector has the right to “Vote free from coercion or intimidation by elections officers or any other person.”

According to Fla. Stat. § 104.20, “Any elector who, except as provided by law, allows his or her ballot to be seen by any person; takes or removes, or attempts to take or remove, any ballot from the polling place before the close of the polls; places any mark on his or her ballot by which it may be identified; endeavors to induce any elector to show how he or she voted; aids or attempts to aid any elector unlawfully; or prints or procures to be printed, or has in his or her possession, any copies of any ballot prepared to be voted is guilty of a misdemeanor of the first degree.”

Forcing a voter to have possession of their ballot outside of the polling location, where anyone could walk up and see it, subjects the voter to committing a third-degree felony.

Stamoulis Responds

When asked by The Epoch Times about his policies and procedures that appear to violate at least three executive orders and several statutes in Florida’s election laws, Stamoulis said in an email: “Regarding the sanitizing and social distancing issues, please see Governor Ron DeSantis’ Executive Order cited, in part, below.” He then pasted the following:

STATE OF FLORIDA
OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR
EXECUTIVE ORDER NUMBER 20-149
Section 3.  Election Administration Coordination A.  Each Supervisor of Elections shall ensure proper social distancing and cleaning procedures are implemented for Early Voting and Election Day, insofar as is practicable.  This may include, but is not limited to, spacing out voting stations, the use of physical barriers for poll workers interacting with voters, providing personal protective equipment to poll workers and making hand sanitizer and other cleaning products readily available.

DeSantis signed Executive Order 20-149 (pdf) on June 17, 2020. The three aforementioned Executive Orders superseded that one.

“Masks are optional but not required of voters or poll workers in Florida,” Stamoulis said further.

However, his manual clearly states on Page 6, under the heading, “WHAT WE EXPECT OUR VOTERS TO DO FOR OUR COMMUNITY,” that voters are expected to “Arrive with sanitized hands and a face mask.” Under the heading “WHAT WE WILL DO FOR YOU,” it says poll workers will “Provide masks for those without.”

“We are awaiting a ruling on the temperature issue,” Stamoulis added.

However, on the last page of his manual, Stamoulis insists “THE SUPERVISOR OF ELECTIONS IS THE FINAL AUTHORITY WHEN IT COMES TO DECISIONS SURROUNDING COVID IN OUR OFFICES AND POLLING LOCATIONS.”

“In response to me being the final authority on COVID issues, please be advised that I follow the law in all matters, including Executive Orders, no exceptions,” Stamoulis insisted.

Rebuttal from DeSantis Office

The office of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis disagrees.

“Florida law is the final authority when it comes to elections in the state,” DeSantis’s Executive Press Secretary Christina Pushaw told The Epoch Times. “Supervisors of Elections must follow state law. If a supervisor is found to be in violation of the law, the governor has the authority to suspend that person from office.”

Under state law, Pushaw asserted that Floridians cannot be required to wear a mask by any government official or entity, which means that a mask mandate for voting would not be permissible.

“Beyond the mask issue, this document as a whole is concerning because it could scare citizens into thinking they must comply or simply not show up,” Pushaw explained. “In other words, this could be seen as voter suppression. It needs to be rectified to be clear to voters about their rights. We do not accept ‘COVID protocols’ that could suppress legal votes or prevent anyone from voting in person.”

Florida Department of State Weighs In

The Epoch Times also reached out to the Florida Department of State for comment.

“We were made aware of the document and reached out to Charlotte County Supervisor of Elections (SOE) Stamoulis to discuss,” FLDOS Director of External Affairs, Mark R. Ard, told The Epoch Times. “After our conversation, Supervisor Stamoulis understands the concerns presented within the document in question and is revising his policy so that all voters in Charlotte County will [have] equal access to ballots and there are no restrictions on voting. We appreciate Supervisor Stamoulis for being very collaborative throughout the process as we continue to work together to ensure safe, transparent elections in Florida.”

The Epoch Times has asked for an update on how the policy has been revised, but has not heard back from either Stamoulis or Ard as of press time.

Questionable Equipment Security

During the course of the investigation, The Epoch Times also received another manual, which raises serious questions regarding election equipment security at “polling locations that do not have a secured/locked room to store equipment.” According to the “2022 Election Cycle” training manual for “Clerks and Assistant Clerks,” the Charlotte County SOE’s security procedure for storing EViDs and ballot tabulators at unsecured locations consists of laying a large tarp “flat on the floor,” placing the equipment on the tarp, pulling the tarp over the equipment and fitting the U-bar of a combination lock through grommeted holes.

While the manual indicates “there should be no holes to allow access” to the equipment inside the tarp, there is nothing to prevent anyone with a pair of scissors from cutting through the tarp to access the equipment. Should any of the seals be found broken, the equipment would have to be replaced. This is not a simple matter as there is a complicated procedure involved in staging an EViD for an election.

A meticulous and time-consuming Logic and Accuracy Testing procedure must also be performed with ballot tabulators, including the DS200 (pdf), used by Charlotte County, and the ritual must be witnessed and verified by a canvassing board. Considering the high cost of election equipment, odds are that there are limited spare ready-to-go ballot tabulators and EViDs sitting around in some other secure location ready for use when security measures at a polling location have failed.

‘Serious Concerns’

Pushaw said that given the Pandemic Procedures manual is already in the hands of poll workers, some of them are still going to believe that they must enforce the outlined rules.

“Our position is that these policies need to be revised to make clear that voters cannot be required to participate in COVID protocols in order to exercise their right to vote,” Pushaw asserted. “More broadly, no official anywhere in the state is permitted to enact policies that violate Florida law. To summarize, we have serious concerns about this document and this Supervisor’s approach to elections administration.”

Correction: The headline of this article has been updated to more accurately describe the election concerns.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Small businesses seeking to grow their overseas sales are supposed to be the primary beneficiaries of loan guarantees by the U.S. Export-Import Bank (EX-IM), but a new analysis by a nonprofit government watchdog finds most of the funds go to corporate giants and corrupt regimes overseas.

“Small businesses, supposedly the intended beneficiary of the Export-Import Bank, received only $54.8 billion of the over $234 billion in total assistance since 2007, or about 23 percent” of the bank’s total funding, according to the report by Open The Books (OTB), a Chicago-based nonprofit that monitors government spending.

By filing more than 40,000 federal Freedom of Information Act requests and posting the checkbooks of 49 state governments, OTB has posted to the internet more than $6 trillion in public spending. The non-profit’s goal is to “post every dime in real-time.”

By far the biggest beneficiary of EX-IM lending is the Boeing Corporation, the largest U.S. aircraft manufacturer and one of the world’s most successful designers and builders of commercial airliners.

Boeing’s headquarters is currently in Chicago, but the company is planning a move to Arlington, Virginia, in the near future.

“The Export-Import Bank has been nicknamed ‘Boeing’s Bank’ by critics, and it is easy to see why. From 2007-2021, the aircraft giant received 33 percent of all of the Export-Import Bank’s assistance, totaling over $66.4 billion, while the second largest vendor received just over $5 billion. That’s more than all small businesses received combined,” the OTB report said.

“Boeing subsidiary Boeing Satellite Systems International reaped another $1.4 billion in assistance. Major international airline companies like Ryanair, Emirates Airlines, and Air Canada have all received assistance for Boeing purchases. Boeing employs a small army of 18 lobbyists to advocate for the Export-Import Bank,” the report said.

The second largest beneficiary of EX-IM funding is the Reston, Virginia-based Bechtel Corporation, which ranked only behind Boeing despite getting assistance for only seven contracts since 2007.

“The engineering and construction company received just over $5 billion from the bank for petroleum engineering in wealthy countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and India, as well as with governments like Serbia and Kenya,” according to the OTB report.

General Electric Corporation and its subsidiaries whose exports of industrial engines and machinery in over 265 transactions earned them third place on the list of top vendors. The report said GEC got $4.7 billion in assistance between General Electric International Operations Company and General Electric Energy Parts alone.

About EX-IM’s overseas funding activities the report said, “the mandate of EX-IM is ‘filling the gaps’ to provide liquidity—facilitating the wheels of commerce. [A total of] 147 countries have received some amount of aid since 2007.

“While the United States sent billions of aid to some of the most corrupt countries and repressive regimes in the world, equally disturbing is the amount that went to wealthy countries that don’t need our aid.”

Ranked by countries, the largest beneficiary of U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed EX-IM loans is Nigeria, ruled by a regime that is ranked among the world’s most corrupt. “Ranked 149th in the world on a scale from least to most corrupt by Transparency International in 2020, importers in Nigeria received over $570 million from the Export-Import Bank.

“It would be a miracle if any of those dollars actually reached their intended recipient,” the OTB report said.

China, with the world’s second-largest economy, was also a large beneficiary of EX-IM resources.

“Second to only the United States in [Gross Domestic Product] GDP, businesses in China nonetheless received more than $6.4 billion in U.S. Export-Import Bank assistance. Even amidst Donald Trump’s trade war with China, $128,062,638.20 flowed to China from 2017 to 2020,” the report observed.

Russia and Turkey are also big beneficiaries of EX-IM funding.

“At least part of the over $1.9 billion that went to Russia likely went to line the pockets of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s oligarchs, who control most of the commerce in the country.

“Sberbank, Russia’s largest financial institution, was recently sanctioned by the United States for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though they were approved for $29,103,807 of assistance from the Export-Import Bank,” the report said.

“Human Rights Watch warned in 2021 that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been ‘dismantling human rights protections and democratic norms in Turkey on a scale unprecedented in the 18 years he has been in office.’ Still, the Export-Import Bank has sent over $6.2 billion to Turkey since 2007,” OTB reported.

The EX-IM bank currently has 396 employees, with 321 of them, or 81 percent, being made more than $100,000 annually. The highest paid employee made $199,300.

The bank has been the source of controversy for nearly a decade, with conservative Republicans demanding it is abolished as a corrupt example of crony capitalism, and Democrats defending it as an essential tool of U.S. foreign policy.

The then-Republican-led Congress allowed EX-IM to expire in 2015 but reversed itself five months later.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Didn’t he already admit it does not prevent the spread of infection? WTF? [US Patriot]

Dr. Anthony Fauci has once again sounded the warning bell over COVID-19, saying in an interview on Tuesday that those who are not up to date on vaccines will “get into trouble” this fall and winter.

“If they don’t get vaccinated or they don’t get boosted, they’re going to get into trouble,” Fauci told Los Angeles radio station KNX-AM.

A large part of the U.S. population is not up to date on the COVID-19 vaccines.

The Kaiser Family Foundation found that as of July 21, 227.8 million Americans either had not received a primary series of shots or had not gotten a booster dose. That is about 70 percent of the population.

“In each state, at least half the population is not up to date on COVID-19 vaccines. In Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia, over 80% of people are not yet up to date on COVID-19 vaccines,” KFF noted.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 107,924,198 Americans have gotten the first booster. That makes up 48 percent of vaccinated people.

The number of Americans who have received the second booster shot is even lower.

The CDC recommends that people over the age of 50 receive the second booster. Only 19,935,913 members of that demographic — about 31 percent — have done so.

In the Tuesday radio interview, Fauci called the overall vaccination and booster rates “quite discouraging.”

“If you want to get your arms around — metaphorically, as it were — the outbreak, you want to get as many people in our community — and by community I mean our nation and the world — vaccinated and boosted so you don’t give this virus such ample opportunity to freely circulate,” Fauci said.

He insisted that the only way to get the virus under control and to keep it from continually mutating is to get everyone vaccinated.

Fauci called getting vaccinated and boosted a “communal responsibility.”

“People say, ‘Well, the risk to me is low, so why get it?’ It is about you as an individual, but it’s also about the communal responsibility to get this outbreak under control.”

A Minnesota school district is spending millions of dollars to racially diversify elementary school math lessons as student proficiency scores plummet.

Minneapolis Public Schools will spend more than $2 million to incorporate “ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity” into the K-5 math curriculum, according to a June school board presentation reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The new curriculum, which will be implemented in the fall, “reflects the lived experiences of our Minneapolis students and develops positive math identity,” a school district executive director said at a June 14 school board meeting, by adding “cultural and linguistically responsive materials.”

Less than half of Minneapolis Public School elementary students, 43 percent, are proficient in math, 14 points lower than the Minnesota average.

Minneapolis is not the first school district to prioritize “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives over academics. Public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, in July amended their fourth- and fifth-grade social studies curriculum to include “Social Justice Standards” for “antiracist” education, even though about half of its students lack proficiency in math and language arts, the Free Beacon reported. Seattle’s school district spent $5 million on DEI initiatives, allotting only $4.5 million to math, science, and literacy. Virginia Democrats have proposed eliminating most advanced math courses in the name of equity.

Minneapolis Public Schools approved two contracts with the Math Learning Center to purchase the DEI curricula, one to buy the K-2 math curriculum for an amount not exceeding $1,149,539.35 and one to buy the Grades 3-5 curriculum for an amount not exceeding $1,028,960.55.

The school district solicited parent feedback by dividing parents by race and ethnicity to discuss the proposed changes in “culturally specific” focus groups.

The diversified curriculum has been a “shared priority for a number of years,” Superintendent Ed Graff said at the meeting. The school district told the Free Beacon the math curriculum will “contribute to an understanding of ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity” and “create culturally inclusive materials and learning experiences.”

Update 4:08 p.m.: This piece has been updated with comment from the school district.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

University has not said whether it will open a full investigation into Kevin Kruse

Princeton University is “reviewing” the plagiarism allegations against progressive history professor Kevin Kruse, the university’s student newspaper reported on Tuesday—over half a year after they were first raised.

“We are carefully reviewing the concerns that have been shared with the University, and will handle them in accordance with University policy,” Princeton University spokesman Michael Hotchkiss told Daily Princetonian. Hotchkiss did not say whether Princeton would open a full investigation into the allegations.

The review follows months of silence by the university, which says it “overlooked” a December 6 email from the economic historian Phil Magness about possible instances of plagiarism in Kruse’s academic work. Magness didn’t receive a substantive reply from the university until June 17, three days after he published an article in Reason outlining the evidence that Kruse repeatedly plagiarized other scholars’ books.

“We take such allegations very seriously, and we will carefully consider the concerns you have raised,” Deputy Dean of the Faculty Toni Turano told Magness in an email reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. “Please feel free to send us any additional information to explain and support your allegations.”

In public, Princeton has been much less solicitous. It has not posted an official statement on any university website, nor did it reply to Reason‘s or the Free Beacon‘s requests for comment when the story first broke.

The hushed delays accentuate the contrast between Princeton’s treatment of Kruse and its treatment of Joshua Katz, the star classics professor who criticized the school’s racial politics. University officials condemned Katz—and implied publicly they were investigating him—days after he published his criticisms in a July 2020 essay for Quillette. When they received “new information” about a consensual relationship he’d had with a student over a decade earlier, it took them less than a month to launch a formal investigation, which resulted in his dismissal in May.

The contrast between Katz and Kruse has raised eyebrows among alumni and current students, who say it suggests a political double standard at the Ivy League school.

“​​Will Professor Kruse face Katz’s fate—stripped of tenure and fired?” Princeton senior Abigail Anthony asked in National Review. “If so, Princeton students will learn a lesson in whom not to copy from. If not, they will learn instead that the rules don’t apply to the people with power and the ‘correct’ opinions.”

Kruse has made a name for himself by accusing conservatives—especially Christian conservatives—of distorting history, prompting the Chronicle of Higher Education to dub him “history’s attack dog.” Those attacks became less frequent after the plagiarism allegations came to light: Kruse, who would regularly post Twitter threads attacking Republicans, has not been active on the platform since June 14.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Georgia governor Brian Kemp (R.) and the state’s Department of Revenue unveiled policies this week aimed at supporting pregnant women and children in the foster care system. The move comes amid accusations from Democrats in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade that Republicans d0 not prioritize the well-being of mothers or children after they are born.

Georgia’s Department of Revenue updated its guidance Monday to allow women to claim their unborn children as dependents on their tax returns. Per Georgia state law, this entitles pregnant women to a $3,000 tax exemption for each additional dependent. Georgia defines an unborn child as a fetus that is at least six weeks old and has a heartbeat.

The next day, Kemp announced that the state would pay for a marketing campaign “to help recruit and retain more foster parents” in Georgia.

“Our state believes in protecting life at all stages,” Kemp said in a statement. “And we’re committed to achieving this goal. We hope this new campaign reaches more who are ready to answer this call.”

Georgia’s new slate of pro-family policies comes following criticism from progressives alleging that Republicans who support regulation of abortion do not care to support pregnant mothers or children in the foster care system.

“Not only do [Republicans] want to force women to have children if they are pregnant,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) said, “but when they do have them, they don’t want to provide any support for them.”

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) similarly argued that “Republicans don’t care about helping children after they’re born with child tax credits, affordable education, or removing guns that kill kids in schools. They’re more focused on controlling women’s health care choices through government mandated pregnancies.”

Nationally, the GOP has advocated measures that would extend benefits to pregnant mothers. Congressional Republicans introduced a bill in July, for instance, that would require men to pay child support starting at conception. 

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Gabriel Nadales and Barrington Martin II say young Americans should ‘speak confidently about why they love this country’

After turning away from left-wing politics, a former Antifa activist and Democratic politician are launching a new campaign to challenge what they see as pervasive anti-Americanism among the country’s youth.

Gabriel Nadales, an Antifa protester turned conservative activist, and Barrington Martin II, a former Democratic congressional candidate, launched a half-million-dollar ad buy last week through their new group Our America, aimed at empowering young people across the United States to “celebrate a pride in, connection to, and a responsibility for our community and country.” The organization, whose advisory team includes conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, will also spend $2 million to produce online content that promotes what they say are America’s unifying values: patriotism, freedom of expression, respect, dignity, and equal opportunity.

“Our America is specifically here to give people the full faith and confidence to be able to speak confidently about why they love this country,” Martin, who primaried the late Democratic congressman John Lewis (Ga.) in 2020, told the Washington Free Beacon. “When I say ‘I love this country, it’s one of the greatest gifts in the world,’ you shouldn’t scoff at me when we are all Americans.”

Just 58 percent of Americans ages 18-29 believe the United States is “one of the greatest countries” in the world, according to a Pew Research survey in December, compared with 75 percent of Americans across all age groups. Nadales and Martin aim to bolster patriotic views among young Americans by challenging the narrative, promoted by left-wing media, politicians, and activists, that America is systemically racist and oppressive. Left-wing pundits like MSNBC host Al Sharpton, for example, spent Independence Day criticizing the United States, saying, “We’ve gone from Jim Crow to Jane Crow.” Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes that same month called the founding of the United States “awful.”

Still, almost 90 percent of Americans of all races “love” the United States, Our America polling shared with the Free Beacon shows. Yet the minority of the population who believe America is racist and evil are the loudest voices in the room, Martin said.

Nadales, who came to the United States from Mexico as a child, said his public school education encouraged him to believe that America hates immigrants like himself. Nadales said he was recruited by the left-wing movement Antifa, known for its violent rioting and looting in cities such as Portland during the Trump administration, before he graduated high school.

After he became disillusioned with the group’s political extremism, however, he said he realized the far-left movement is a symptom of the division plaguing America.

“They’re incredibly dangerous, and they represent what is wrong with America today that people are so divided that they’re willing to go fight on the streets and recommend violence against one another,” Nadales said.

Nadales said Our America hopes to provide an uplifting message about the United States, bridging political differences with peaceful civil discourse.

“The American dream is not about having a fancy car,” Nadales said. “It’s the idea that we are not subject to the government. We are free people who are masters of our destinies. We can make our choices and we have the ability to choose to succeed. Your life is up to you and no one can take that away from you.”

Our America, which has 125,000 email subscribers after launching two months ago, will air its ads on TBS, TNT, BET, Univision, and MTV.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Two doctors and a former Harvard Medical School professor have signed onto the lawsuit that alleges the U.S. government and Big Tech colluded to censor dissenting voices.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, who authored the Great Barrington Declaration, on Aug. 2 joined the states of Missouri and Louisiana in the case, which is moving forward with discovery after a recent ruling.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who was fired for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccine, also joined the legal action.

All three say they have been affected by Big Tech censorship, and believe the punitive measures have been influenced or directed by government officials.

In April 2021, for instance, Google-owned YouTube deleted a video of Bhattacharya and Kulldorff questioning whether masks were effective in stopping the spread of SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19.

Kulldorff, a former Harvard Medical School professor who now works at the Brownstone Institute, was also suspended by Twitter for several weeks after positing that masks give people a false sense of security, which makes them more likely to expose themselves to the illness. That’s the same theory put forth by top U.S. officials until they pivoted to endorsing widespread mask-wearing months after the pandemic started.

Kheriaty also says he was censored by Twitter.

“I have always shared peer-reviewed research findings as well as my own opinions and perspectives on Twitter and LinkedIn. It was not until I began posting information about COVID and our COVID response policies, however, that I encountered censorship on the Twitter platform,” he wrote in a declaration filed in the new case.

Multiple platforms, meanwhile, took action against the declaration, which called for focused protection of the elderly while letting the rest of society live their lives normally and was vociferously opposed by top U.S. health officials, including then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.

Search results on Google initially placed the declaration’s website near the top but soon ranked it lower than articles that were critical of the document, according to declarations from Bhattacharya and Kulldorff. Reddit removed links to the declaration and Facebook removed a page dedicated to the document, though it later restored it.

‘Self-Censor’

The scientists say they’ve had to “self-censor” in order to try to remain on the platforms.

That has sometimes meant not posting at all, and other times posting by using “imaginative phrasing,” Kulldorff said.

They also say the timing of the censorship decisions support the assertion that the moves were induced by the government, including how censorship of the declaration happened soon after Collins called for a “quick and devastating … take-down” of the document in private and disparaged it in public.

“These are clear indications to me that government is in collaboration with Big Tech to suppress scientific dissent,” Bhattacharya told The Epoch Times.

Government officials such as former White House press secretary Jen Psaki have openly admitted to flagging “problematic posts” for Facebook and raising issues with posts on Twitter, the complaint notes, while some of the platforms have acknowledged consulting with government officials on content moderation.

“The government’s sweeping campaign to suppress the perspectives of the plaintiffs, and others like them, represents the most severe abrogation of the First Amendment in modern times, and we look forward to seeing this constitutional atrocity rectified in a court of law,” Jenin Younes, a lawyer for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is representing the new plaintiffs, said in a statement.

The plaintiffs were added in an amended complaint, filed in response to the government’s motion to dismiss.

More Defendants

The revised effort drops one defendant, Psaki, who is no longer with the federal government, and adds a number of others.

Carol Crawford with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); the U.S. Census Bureau; Jennifer Shopkorn, a senior adviser for the bureau; the Department of Commerce; Robert Silvers and Samantha Vinograd, Department of Homeland Security officials; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; Jen Easterly, director of the agency; and Gina McCarthy, a White House national climate adviser were named as defendants.

None were named in the original filing.

Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas were among the defendants named in both complaints.

The additions came after new information came to light, including emails between the CDC and top executives at Big Tech companies like Twitter.

The messages show Crawford and colleagues met with and discussed taking action against alleged COVID-19 misinformation.

The Census Bureau was involved in the coordination, according to the missives.

The messages, the amended filing states, “confirm the allegations of collusion between [government] officials and social-media platforms to censor disfavored speech, speakers, and viewpoints, as alleged herein.”

Source: The Epoch Times

PUNTA GORDA, Fla.—Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he won’t declare a state of emergency over the monkeypox outbreak even though the state currently has more than 500 reported cases.

The governor said at a news conference on Aug. 3 that he doesn’t believe issuing a public health emergency is necessary, nor does he think Floridians should fear the disease.

“Any of the politicians trying to scare you about this, do not listen to their nonsense,” he said. “Anything we deal with from a public perspective, we are not doing fear. We are going to do facts.”

States that declare emergencies are going to eventually “abuse those emergency powers to restrict your freedom,” DeSantis said. “You have to deal with this rationally and do not use it for political gain.

Florida Surgeon General Joe Lapado, who stood with the governor, said that the “efficacy” of the Jynneos vaccine being given out as protection from monkeypox “remains uncertain.”

“You should know there’s very little data on this vaccine,” he said. “We need to learn more and we need to make rational decisions.”

Ladapo said a small study done in Africa in the 1980s showed the Jynneous vaccine was at least 85 percent effective against monkeypox.

He reported that Florida has received about 24,000 doses of the vaccine from the national stockpile and distributed about 8,500 doses.

Florida asked for and received 36,800 doses through July 27, Ladapo said.

The federal government has allocated a little over 109,000 doses to Florida.

The Jynneos vaccine consists of a two-dose series given four weeks apart.

California, New York, and Illinois have declared states of emergency over the monkeypox outbreak. The announcement of an emergency has been known to help with logistics and coordination between state and local departments working to respond to the emergency.

Florida has 525 reported cases, including 372 concentrated in the Miami-Dade and Broward County areas.

Ladapo said “he is certain there are many more unknown cases,” with most being male.

“Somewhere around 98 percent, maybe 99 percent, are men. Just a handful of cases are women,” he said. “All those cases have been transmitted by physical contact, basically sexual contact for the most part.”

“There have been some reports of cases in kids that are connected with adults who have acquired the infection probably from sexual contact,” Ladapo added. “In Florida, we have one case of a health provider who contracted it through a needle stick. There have been no fatalities.”

In July, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared monkeypox a global health emergency with more than 25,000 monkeypox cases reported in at least 78 countries, according to WHO data.

The Biden administration is considering whether to declare a public health emergency in the United States in order to make treatments easier for patients to get.

There are currently 6,326 confirmed cases of monkeypox in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Florida has the fourth-highest number of cases in the country.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Finally…a bit of truth about black culture. Stop blaming; start listening; start learning. [US Patriot]

Black Americans in urban areas are suffering the consequences of the progressive Democrats’ anti-police “soft on crime” policies, despite the fact that these are the communities the policies were supposedly going to help, said Horace Cooper, senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, in a recent NTD interview.

Cooper told NTD that because progressives Democrats are too soft on crime and conservatives are afraid of being called racist by the left, crime has come to an all-time high in urban areas and is disproportionately harming black people.

The black community wants criminals to be prosecuted, said Cooper.

“I would argue that it would be smart to stand up, find out where black Americans are, and champion the kinds of policies and issues that interest them,” he said. “On the issue of crime, black Americans are ready to bring in law enforcement, are ready to increase penalties, and they are ready to stop the violent wave of crime that we see.”

Cooper is also chairman of the board for Project 21, which established a network of black conservative and libertarian leaders in 1992 to highlight the diversity of viewpoints within the black community.

Project 21 has identified 10 key areas for reform that, if accomplished, would help black Americans reach their potential and attain the American dream.

Black Americans Want Less Crime

Cooper said that out of the 10 areas, one of the key issues that need to be addressed is the crime in black communities.

“We have a ‘Blueprint for a Better Deal for Black America’ that we’re releasing this fall, and one of the core issues is going to be the idea of crime control,” said Cooper.

Crime disproportionality affects black communities, and the people who live there don’t support policies like “Defund the Police,” he said.

“During the Rodney King riots, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, there were a lot of voices that came out that said when you saw this violence, when you saw this mayhem, that it was justifiable. It was a natural outworking. ‘This is what blacks just do,’” Cooper said.

“In fact, most black Americans don’t believe that this kind of behavior is acceptable.”

In a Gallup poll conducted in June 2020 at the height of the George Floyd riots, 61 percent of black people surveyed said they wanted to keep the same level of policing in their neighborhoods, and another 20 percent said they wanted more police presence.

In late 2021, a consortium of news organizations surveyed 800 voters in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died in police custody, and asked them what they thought of the city’s police department. Three-quarters of the black respondents said the city shouldn’t reduce its police force.

Cooper said that Democrats and the Biden administration do not understand what the black community really wants, and instead perpetuate racist ideas about blacks.

“We’re seeing the outworking of that during the Biden administration, this tacit idea that it’s criminals who are the victims, and if you really want to support blacks, you’ve got to support criminals.”

In addition, Democrats install radical prosecutors who double-down on this narrative in Democrat-run inner cities, he said.

“We’re seeing what I would call the ‘woke prosecutors’ who actively say to criminals, ‘there will be no accountability. There will be no punishment.’”

‘Woke’ Prosecutors Won’t Punish Criminals

Cooper said that while black men make up just 7.5 percent of the American population, they commit 40 percent of all violent crime.

“That’s staggering,” he said. “But these woke prosecutors and their supporters, they say, ‘Well, the truth is just America’s unfair, America is bigoted, America systematically mistreats,’ and that these people who prey on the rest of us, ‘They’re not predators. They’re just fighting back.’”

The problem with this narrative is that there is no evidence to support those claims, Cooper said. The way to stop this type of predatory behavior is to punish it, he added.

“Increase the penalty, increase punishment, decrease bad behavior,” he said.

Cooper said that under President Donald Trump, black Americans were doing much better economically, and the number one issue for the community as a whole is not racism, but inflation, and how to give their families a great quality of life, “kitchen table issues,” said Cooper.

Under Trump, black Americans prospered, Cooper said, adding that as a whole, they were able to purchase new vehicles, open new businesses, put aside money for savings, and even take real vacations.

“In the last 18 months, all those trends have reversed,” he said. “And black Americans are being the hardest hit.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

• Leaked document is labelled as “Unclassified/Law Enforcement Sensitive” that is for “FBI Internal Use Only.”
• Under the “Symbols” category of the document, “2A” is listed with the following explanation: “MVEs justify their existence with the Second Amendment, due to the mention of a ‘well regulated Militia,’ as well as the right to bear arms.”
• “Revolutionary War imagery” such as the “Gadsden Flag” and the “Betsy Ross Flag” are cited in the document under “Commonly Referenced Historical Imagery or Quotes.”

[WASHINGTON, D.C. – Aug. 2, 2022] Project Veritas released a newly leaked document today provided by an FBI whistleblower, which shows how the Bureau classifies American citizens it deems to be potential “Militia Violent Extremists” [MVEs].

In the document, the FBI cites symbols, images, phrases, events, and individuals that agents should look out for when identifying alleged domestic terrorists.

The “Unclassified/Law Enforcement Sensitive” document says it is for “FBI Internal Use Only.”

Of note, under the “Symbols” section, is a prominent citation of the Second Amendment, where it explains that “MVEs justify their existence with the Second Amendment, due to the mention of a ‘well regulated Militia,’ as well as the right to bear arms.”

Right below that, under the “Commonly Referenced Historical Imagery and Quotes” section, Revolutionary War images such as the Gadsden Flag and the Betsy Ross Flag are listed. Each flag displayed in the document comes with a brief description of what it means.

Under the “Common Phrases and References” section of the leaked document, Ashli Babbitt is cited as a person that MVEs consider to be a Martyr.

The same document also refers to Ruby Ridge, Waco, and even Timothy McVeigh, tying in traditional American ideas and symbols with radical and/or violent events in the past.

About Project Veritas

James O’Keefe established Project Veritas in 2010 as a non-profit journalism enterprise to continue his undercover reporting work. Today, Project Veritas investigates and exposes corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions to achieve a more ethical and transparent society and to engage in litigation to: protect, defend and expand human and civil rights secured by law, specifically First Amendment rights including promoting the free exchange of ideas in a digital world; combat and defeat censorship of any ideology; promote truthful reporting; and defend freedom of speech and association issues including the right to anonymity. O’Keefe serves as the CEO and Chairman of the Board so that he can continue to lead and teach his fellow journalists, as well as protect and nurture the Project Veritas culture. 

Project Veritas is a registered 501(c)3 organization. Project Veritas does not advocate specific resolutions to the issues raised through its investigations.

SOURCE: Project Veritas

Democrats and Republicans need to rein in spending: Heritage Foundation’s Joel Griffith

With raging inflation and the Democrat-led Congress gathering enough Senate support to pass billions more in spending, Joel Griffith, a research fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for economic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, told NTD TV that if the United States does not rein in its irresponsible fiscal actions, the nation is headed for a worse economic crisis.

Griffith said that raising taxes on the wealthy will not get the federal government out of the financial hole it’s dug for itself over the past few decades, particularly the spending that’s occurred in the last two years.

“The only way to pay for all this would be to print the money, to borrow the money, or to raise taxes on the middle class. There’s no easy way out of this,” Griffith said during the interview. “And politicians don’t have an appetite to correct the problem. So, there’s going to be a crisis if we do not correct our ways. It’s just a matter of time.”

By technical definition, the United States already has entered a recession, but the Biden administration continues to deny the facts.

“Everybody loves the goodies, and now we’re suffering the consequences. And it’s so important for people to realize that the economic misery that we’re feeling right now is directly related to the mistakes that were made in the past two years, with shutdowns, with spending, and with printing,” said Griffith.

The U.S. government’s debt now amounts to more than $30 trillion, which calculates to $100,000 per person, and with current interest rates, it’s an additional $1,000 in debt, per person, being added each year, said Griffith.

Democrats’ ‘Inflation Reduction’ Bill

Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced on July 27 that they had enough votes to pass a measure called the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” (pdf), which seeks to spend some $433 billion—about $369 billion toward energy and climate programs over the next 10 years, and $64 billion toward extending federal subsidies for three more years for some people buying private health insurance.

Meanwhile, many from both sides of the aisle viewed Manchin as a fiscal moderate who would not opt for further government spending, especially during a recession.

Griffith, however, said that he is not surprised by Manchin supporting liberal legislation that will expand the federal government, and hurt his own state of West Virginia, because he has observed that the senator supports liberal policies.

“We know what [Manchin has] supported in the past. And he has been for expanding the size and the scope of government. So I’m disappointed that he has agreed to a package that is going to dramatically increase taxes on businesses, [that] it’s going to actually include more taxes on fossil fuels. And it’s going to even further socialize our health care sector,” said Griffith.

The U.S. consumer is already paying, via taxes and inflation, the trillions of dollars the government spent and printed in the name of pandemic relief, said Griffith. This new package will only make the economy worse off.

“We are suffering through the consequences of too much spending … and to see the Senate now moving forward on a package that’s going to increase taxes and increase [the] costs on fuel production,  it’s unfortunate,” said Griffith.

Not Putin’s Fault

Griffith said for a family with a middle-class income, “We’ve seen your real take-home pay decline by more than $6,000 annually because of all this inflation.”

And even if inflation were to revert to normal tomorrow, about 2 percent annually, it will not negate the economic damage, only lessen it for the future, he said.

“Putting the blame on [Putin] and his actions in the war in Ukraine for rising prices—that’s simply, largely untrue,” said Griffith.

Gas prices were already on the rise long before Russian President Putin invaded Ukraine, said Griffith, adding, “Same thing goes with our food costs, commodity costs, fertilizer costs—all of those were rapidly increasing long before Putin decided to invade Ukraine.”

“Let’s remember, it was our own politicians who shut down our economy. It was our own Congress in the United States that voted to spend $6 trillion that we don’t have. And it was our central bank, our Federal Reserve, that printed $6 trillion out of thin air. That is what is largely responsible for this inflation, not Vladimir Putin,” said Griffith.

Another contributing factor to the poor economy is an aspect of the employment rate called the participation rate (i.e., the percentage of people who are working age and are either working or looking for work), which more accurately describes who is working, said Griffith.

“The [participation rate] is near generational lows. In fact, if we were to have a participation rate that would have remained steady over the past three years … it shows that more than a million people have actually dropped out of our workforce entirely.”

“That’s part of the reason why if you go to a restaurant, a bar, a retail store, you notice the service isn’t so good right now,” added Griffith. “And that’s because relative to our overall population, we have fewer people working today than there were just two and a half years ago.”

There has been some increase in the participation rate in the United States, said Griffith, because “as people draw down on those savings [accumulated during the time when the government was doling out pandemic relief funds], they’re finding it necessary to return to the workforce.”

Middle-Class Most Impacted

Griffith said the money the government is spending is coming from the taxpayer and that this will affect the middle-class the most because they won’t be able to save and “build wealth” because of the current and rampant inflation.

“And that’s what I’m very fearful of—that as we continue to spend far beyond our means, that it’s not just going to have an impact this year, and next year, [but] 10 years and 15 years from now, [and] we’re going to see even fewer opportunities [like the creation of new jobs] for typical American families,” said Griffith.

Mimi Nguyen Ly contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

If Republicans aggressively communicate the details of the Manchin-Schumer bill, it will become prohibitively expensive for any Democrats to vote for it.

During the August break, every Republican House and Senate candidate should challenge their Democrat opponents to defend the new, destructive, and unpopular Joe Manchin-Chuck Schumer bill.

Democrats hope to camouflage the bill by calling it the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.” In the business world, this title would lead to a lawsuit over false advertising. As I wrote in my latest best-selling book, “Defeating Big Government Socialism,” this kind of dishonest branding is standard procedure for the Orwellian party that modern Democrats have become. An accurate title of the bill would be the “Higher Taxes, Bigger IRS, and More Inflation Act of 2022.”

If Republicans aggressively communicate the details of the Manchin-Schumer bill, it will become prohibitively expensive for any Democrats to vote for it.

Scott Rasmussen highlighted the American public’s opposition to this bill once it is accurately explained. In a poll this weekend, Rasmussen discovered that 55 percent of Americans favor cutting government spending and taxes, while only 23 percent favor higher taxes and spending. Just on this overview Republican candidates will have a more than 2:1 majority opposing higher taxes and bigger spending. And by 44 percent to 17 percent Americans believe higher taxes and government spending will increase inflation.

According to Rasmussen, “when told half the tax burden will fall on manufacturing industries, 63% say it is likely to make supply chain problems worse.” Only 19 percent of Americans think the bill’s so-called book tax will not affect the supply chain. I would add that increasing taxes on our manufacturing industries when we are competing with China is totally backward-thinking – and virtually suicidal in terms of national security.

Democrats should also take notice: The pain caused by the bad energy policies supported in the bill is undermining support for green policies. Some 66 percent of Americans now think reducing the price of gas is more important than reductions carbon emissions.

In fact, according to Rasmussen, 46 percent say more spending on climate change and clean energy programs will increase the price of gasoline, while only 21 percent think it will lower the price of gas.

When told the new Manchin-Schumer bill will lead to 86,000 additional Internal Revenue Service agents (the IRS currently has 78,661 full-time staff) the American people oppose it by 53 percent to 31 percent. But the intensity factor is huge. Some 29 percent strongly oppose the plan while only 9 percent strongly favor it. That is a more than 3:1 opposition at the extremes.

When people realize most of these IRS agents will not be going after billionaires and big companies – but instead will be auditing waitresses, uber drivers, self-employed people, and small businesses – I expect the opposition will grow even more intense.

As Rasmussen described it, “The new legislation being considered would double the size of the IRS so that the agency can conduct audits on an additional 1.2 million taxpayers every year. The agency has set a goal of increasing the audits of small business owners by 50%.”

Finally, despite the Democrats’ deeply dishonest title, the bill will increase the rate of inflation in the near term – not reduce it.

As the Daily Wire reported, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania found that the bill “could lead to a slight increase in inflation over the next two years.” While the bill is expected to eventually reduce inflation after 2024, the Wharton School study found: “These point estimates are statistically indistinguishable from zero, thereby indicating low confidence that the legislation will have any impact on inflation.” So, not only will the bill increase inflation over the next few years, it will ultimately have no impact long-term.

The Manchin-Schumer bill is an enormous opportunity for Republicans – and a genuine learning moment for the American people.

It is crystal clear that the current economic performance failures of the Democrats are caused by the underlying destructive policies they promote. Further, Republicans should also clearly expose the consistently dishonest and hypocritical language Democrats use to try to fool Americans.

Every Republican candidate for House and Senate should challenge his or her Democratic opponent to a series of focused debates during the August recess. Republicans should assert that the Manchin-Schumer bill is a higher tax, bigger IRS, more inflation bill which will be bad for America. Every Democrat should be made to debate the point.

When Democrats try to hide behind the bill’s phony title and dishonest talking points, Republicans should be ready to challenge them on substance with clear examples.

Republican Georgia Senate Nominee Herschel Walker has already challenged Sen. Raphael Warnock to defend the bill. After saying for weeks that Walker was afraid to debate, Warnock is now avoiding his opponent.

Take note of every Democrat who refuses to defend the bill. Their reluctance will demonstrate just how bad it is.

This is a great opportunity for Republicans to define the real choice for November.

They should grab it now and not let go.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has claimed that there was no known association between heart inflammation and COVID-19 vaccines as late as October 2021.

CDC officials made the claim, which is false, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request for reports from a CDC team that is focused on analyzing the risk of post-vaccination myocarditis and pericarditis, two forms of heart inflammation. Both began detected at higher-than-expected rates after COVID-19 vaccination in the spring of 2021.

The team focuses on studying data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a passive surveillance system co-run by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The date range for the search was April 2, 2021, to Oct. 2, 2021.

“The National Center for Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases performed a search of our records that failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request,” Roger Andoh, a CDC records officer, told The Epoch Times. The center is part of the CDC.

No abstractions or reports were available because “an association between myocarditis and mRNA COVID-19 vaccination was not known at that time,” Andoh added.

Both the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are built on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.

Earliest Myocarditis Reports

Reports of heart inflammation after COVID-19 vaccination were first made public in April 2021 by the U.S. military, which detected the issue along with Israeli authorities well before the CDC.

While Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, said that month that the agency had looked for a safety signal in its data and found none, by the end of June CDC researchers were saying that the available data “suggest an association with immunization,” and in August described (pdf) the issue as a “harm” from vaccination.

The claim that the link wasn’t known “is provably false,” Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, told The Epoch Times via email. “Either the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing at CDC, or federal health officials are disseminating misinformation about what they knew about myocarditis following mRNA COVID vaccines and when they knew it.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that the FOIA response “raises even more questions about the agency’s honesty, transparency, and use, or lack thereof, of its safety surveillance systems, such as VAERS, to detect COVID-19 vaccine adverse events.”

“I have sent two letters to the CDC about the agency’s inability to find records demonstrating its use of the vaccine surveillance systems. To date, the CDC has failed to respond to my letters,” he added.

‘Correction’

“Apparently CDC needs to make a correction!” a spokeswoman for the agency told The Epoch Times in an email.

The agency is acknowledging that by June 2021, data began to indicate a link between the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and heart inflammation, outlined that month in two presentations made to government vaccine advisory panels.

“Additional data accumulated in subsequent months, ultimately leading to the conclusion that a causative association did indeed exist. However, such a conclusion required time to accumulate and analyze data,” the spokeswoman said.

It remains unclear how the CDC looked for a signal in April 2021. The CDC has declined to provide any details.

The CDC’s records office did not respond to a request for comment.

The correction is the second time in recent weeks that the agency has backtracked on a claim.

Andoh in June told the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense that staff from the agency’s Immunization and Safety Office informed him that the agency would not perform data mining on VAERS, even though several CDC documents said the agency would perform the analyses.

Questioned about the matter, Dr. John Su, a CDC official, told The Epoch Times that the agency started performing the data mining in February 2021.

Noting the conflicting statements, Johnson wrote to Walensky asking her for answers. “CDC’s assertion and Dr. Su’s statement cannot both be true,” he said.

Source: The Epoch Times

Rayne Barton, 62, didn’t expect that her first visit to the doctor in months would end in arrest, but there she was on July 22, in the waiting room with her wrists handcuffed behind her back.

She would not be seeing the doctor that day.

Barton, of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, would not leave as requested after she refused to wear a COVID-19 face mask, which is required at Hypertension and Kidney Specialists in Lancaster.

Hypertension and Kidney Specialists is an independent practice with an office on the Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health Suburban Pavilion property.

At the request of the office manager at Hypertension and Kidney Specialists, the East Hempfield Township Police removed Barton from the building, according to a criminal complaint. She was taken in a wheelchair, put in a squad car, and driven to the police department to be fingerprinted and photographed.

On the way to the police station, the car rounded a corner and Barton fell on her side and hit her head on the car door.

“The officer looked in his rearview mirror, saw me gone, and he said, ‘Are you okay?’ I said ‘Yeah, I’m just fine.’ And then I went to get myself up, and I’m like, ‘oh no, I can’t get up,’” Barton told The Epoch Times.

Her back is compromised due to spinal stenosis, and with her hands still cuffed behind her back, she was unable to pull herself up.

“They pulled over off the road to lift me upright in the back of the cruiser,” she said.

After she was processed at the police department, Barton was released and told that charges would arrive in the mail. She was charged with defiant criminal trespass, a misdemeanor, and must appear in court in September.

It is unknown when she will see a doctor.

Past Issue With Masks

This wasn’t Barton’s first confrontation with medical office staff who told her she couldn’t see her providers unless she wore a mask.

The Epoch Times published a report in March 2022 about Barton’s struggle to receive medical care throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. She is unable to wear a mask due to childhood trauma stemming from an assault during which she nearly suffocated.

Barton has been banned from all Penn Medicine facilities since Feb. 17, 2022, because of the mask dispute.

Since then, she has not seen a doctor nor had her prescriptions filled. Her pacemaker must be checked every four months but hasn’t been looked at in over two years.

However, she has tried to be seen by her long-time doctors. She is not sure where else to turn.

When she’s really needed medical care in recent months, Barton has called her former doctors’ offices and tried to set appointments, but until recently, the computer system wouldn’t allow schedulers to add her to the calendar.

Then one day, when she called to request an appointment at Hypertension and Kidney Specialists, the receptionist on the phone added Barton to the calendar on July 22 without issue, she said.

Barton said she figured it would be OK to see the doctor again, and that it was a relief because she needed care. She did not intend to get arrested.

But when she arrived at the office, it was the same situation as before.

“The office manager called the police because I wasn’t going to leave. I was there for a scheduled appointment,” Barton said. “I was not going to be bullied into leaving.”

Extensive Medical Needs

In addition to spinal stenosis, Barton has a painful cyst about the size of a grapefruit on the back of her knee that must be removed. She also suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, and kidney issues, and she has a pacemaker.

Before she was banned in February, Barton had been seeing the same group of physicians for 40 years at Penn Medicine, which is part of the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

Barton was served without a mask a few times, but most offices refused her care without the mask.

She was once offered the accommodation of taking a COVID-19 test in her car. If negative, she could have used a separate entrance for a planned medical procedure. But because the test involved a swab being pushed into her nose, Barton couldn’t take the test and didn’t have the procedure.

A few times in late 2021, she entered medical offices without a mask and was told to mask up, but she refused. Barton explained her trauma history, which she had kept private for years, and demanded to be seen by her doctors.

Office staff called the police once, but Barton was not arrested that time.

Soon after that, Barton tried to set an appointment with a Penn Medicine doctor and the scheduler told her the computer would not let her. She could not get in to see her general practitioner, cardiologist, or any other doctors.

In February 2022, Barton received a letter saying Lancaster General Health Physicians had terminated the provider–patient relationship.

The letter stated: “You have refused our offers to accommodate and have been rude and argumentative to staff. We no longer believe that we are able to work together regarding your health care needs. You are prohibited from being on the property or entering any LG health facility with the exception of Lancaster General Hospital emergency department. In the event of a medical emergency you may always seek care at Lancaster General Hospital emergency department. We will happily facilitate the transfer of your records to an alternative provider.”

But Barton didn’t know where she could go when the medical providers in her community all required masking. She wanted to stay with the close-to-home doctors she had been working with for decades. They knew her case.

Barton says she made 30 to 40 calls to Lancaster General Health CEO John Herman, but never received a return call or connected with him directly.

Then in March, she got a letter from Kathryn Weinrich, executive director of legal services at Lancaster General Health, warning Barton that her calls to Herman were harassment and that she was to have no further contact with the organization.

She was not to call or step foot in any facility related to the University of Pennsylvania Health System, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Lancaster General Health, and other named satellite offices.

Trauma Survivor

At age 5, Barton was playing with other little girls near the train tracks in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when a large group of teenage boys came upon the girls, separated them, and assaulted them.

They threw Barton down on her back in the dirt. Two boys held her legs, and another sat on her waist and held her down at the elbows.

Barton recalls how they put their fingers down her throat and smashed dirt in her face, up her nose, and in her ears. They stepped on her face, then flipped her over and rubbed her face in the dirt.

She recalls how she couldn’t breathe and thought she was going to die. There was a police report at the time. After that, her parents moved out of the neighborhood to get away from the scene of the crime.

The attack left an imprint in Barton’s mind to always protect her face.

She has discomfort when she’s pulling a shirt over her head and it takes too long to slip past her face. Turtlenecks are out of the question because they are too restrictive. She never wore a Halloween mask, and before sleeping, she makes sure the blanket is clear from her face.

She has sought counseling through the years but still guards her face and avoids situations that would require her to cover it. Once COVID-19 mask requirements were implemented, she stayed home, except to see the doctor.

Accommodations for Trauma Survivors

Trauma-informed care is not a new concept.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration published a 2014 booklet, titled “SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach.”

It describes a trauma-informed approach to care, including ensuring that individuals feel physically and psychologically safe, share in decision making about their care, are able to self-advocate, and are offered service that is healing and responsive to their traumatic experiences.

The Epoch Times asked Penn Medicine to describe its current masking policy and any trauma-informed services for survivors of rape, child abuse, and other trauma. Penn Medicine did not respond.

But the regional health care provider is not unfamiliar with trauma-informed care, and it trains others on how to care for trauma victims.

Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health offered a 2019 community training titled, “Trauma 101: Understanding Trauma, Resilience and Trauma Informed Care.”

A July 19, 2021, press release announced that the City of Lancaster and Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health jointly received a $300,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency “to Build a trauma informed Lancaster City.”

The grant was for Penn Medicine to train community groups using a dedicated Lancaster City trauma-informed training specialist.

“A trauma informed community strives to do no harm and recognizes past and ongoing traumas such as historic and structural racism, exclusion, isolation and the chronic, daily stressors of concentrated poverty and exposure to community violence,” the Penn Medicine press release said.

“Penn Medicine LG Health has served as the backbone organization convening the community and providing education and training on the impact that positive and adverse childhood experiences have on health and well-being, and steps organizations can take on the path to become trauma informed.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

My blood is boiling.

The Deep State Cabal inside the DOJ and FBI went out of their way to hinder the investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 Presidential election. By blocking the disastrous news, it kept America in the dark and aided Biden’s so-called victory.

When America was being distracted with COVID, mandates, lockdowns, and BLM riots, our freedom was being taken away without most people noticing because our government was conspiring against us.

How can we trust our so-called “top law-enforcement” agency to do their job when they actively hid Hunter’s investigation in a RESTRICTED SUBFOLDER on their network?

Now Biden’s handpicked Attorney General has no problem turning a blind eye to the actions of the Biden family. This isn’t just refusing to investigate Hunter’s laptop, this is ACTIVELY HIDING EVIDENCE so no one else would investigate.

That’s why you and I must continue to stand up to them.

If you want to see Hunter investigated and the Big Guy impeached, then I need your URGENT Contribution of $25, $50, or $100 today!

We need to let these Deep State hooligans know that we’re going to do the job they were supposed to do. I’m opening up a congressional investigation into the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and exposing the criminality of Hunter and the Big Guy. I told you my blood is boiling, right?

If the DOJ didn’t cover up Hunter’s crimes and the intelligence officials didn’t peddle the lie that Hunter’s Laptop was “Russian Disinformation,” Donald Trump might still be President.

The 18-month-long nightmare we all have been living under Biden’s illegitimate reign would not have happened.

No hyper-inflation. No borrowing trillions of dollars to pay for Marxist social programs. No baby formula shortages or selling of oil reserves to Hunter’s friends in China.

That’s what the DOJ took away from us when they covered for the Biden family’s criminal enterprise.

If you’re as upset as I am, then chip in $50, $100, or $250 today to help me investigate and expose the truth behind Hunter’s and the Big Guy’s criminal enterprise… and those who helped cover it up!

Here’s the problem. The Swamp knows I’m a woman of my word. They know that I will not rest until Congress finally investigates Hunter and impeaches Joe Biden.

That’s why they have been working overtime to make sure I’m not in Congress after November. From filing lawsuits to kick me off the ballot to donating millions to my Democrat opponent, I’m having everything AND the kitchen sink thrown at me.

Do you really think Nancy Pelosi has ignored the behavior from AOC and the Jihad Squad by mistake?

Do you think the Democrats accidentally forgot to sanction their own member who gave the middle finger on National TV to GOP Members of Congress at the Congressional Baseball game the other day?

Somehow no one is being held accountable for their actions… except me. Because in Washington, some people do as they’re told while I’m fighting to do what Americans expect from their duly elected Representatives—SERVE THE PEOPLE!

That’s why I URGENTLY need your help to fight back and win this November with your $100, $500, or $1,000 donation today. Otherwise, Hunter and Brandon are going to keep enriching themselves off the backs of the U.S. government and no one will stop them.

But if I win in November, all bets are off.

That’s why we can’t let Hunter and Brandon get away with it simply because I wasn’t there to lead the charge in Congress. Help me win so I can investigate Hunter and impeach Joe Biden! Please donate today.

Thank you. God Bless America.
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Congresswoman (R-GA)

Joe Biden touted the killing of al-Quaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri as a win for his administration on Monday, but experts said he was ignoring some major facts.

“On Saturday, on my direction, the United States successfully concluded an air strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed the emir of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri,” Biden said on Monday.

“You know, Zawahiri was [Osama] bin Laden’s leader. He was with him all the…whole time. He was his number two man, his deputy, at the time of the terrorist attack on 9/11. He was deeply involved in the planning of 9/11.”

The United States has killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda and one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists, who oversaw the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, alongside the group’s founder, Osama bin Laden, announced Biden. pic.twitter.com/lfX0yY5wDs

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 2, 2022

Biden went on to tout the killing as the fulfillment of a promise he made to Americans when pulling out of Afghanistan nearly a year ago.

“I made a promise to the American people that we’d continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and beyond,” Biden said. “We’ve done just that.”

“I made a promise to the American people that we’d continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan…We’ve done just that,” Biden says on the killing of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri nearly one year after U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/61fUv6ahZY

— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 2, 2022

While eliminating this terrorist is undoubtedly a positive development for the country, the fact that he was even in Afghanistan highlighted Biden’s previous failures.

In trying to justify his hasty withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan on Aug. 20, 2021, Biden declared al-Qaeda was no longer in Afghanistan.

“Look, let’s put this thing in perspective here,” Biden said according to a White House transcript. “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al-Qaeda gone?

“We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, as well as — as well as getting Osama bin Laden. And we did.”

Of course, Biden’s botched withdrawal ultimately led to the Taliban gaining control in Afghanistan and cost the lives of 13 American soldiers.

Related:

As Afghanistan Vet Defends Home with AR-15-Style Rifle, Invaders Realize They Chose the Wrong House

Given that the leader al-Quaeda leader was in Afghanistan on Saturday, it seems the group is in the country at this point. This means one of two things, neither of which are good for Biden.

Either Biden was lying when he said al-Quaeda was “gone” from Afghanistan last year, or the group has re-entered the country since Biden’s botched withdrawal. In both scenarios, Biden failed to achieve the stated goal of “getting rid of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.”

As Biden celebrated the killing of Zawahiri, some terrorism experts pointed out this inconvenient fact.

“The killing of Al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri will be sold as a counterterrorism success,” Long War Journal terrorism analyst Bill Roggio wrote on Twitter. “But that narrative masks the undeniable truth that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is a safe have for Al Qaeda.”

1) The killing of Al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri will be sold as a counterterrorism success. But that narrative masks the undeniable truth that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is a safe have for Al Qaeda. https://t.co/CGc5Fs8oMw

— Bill Roggio (@billroggio) August 2, 2022

In another tweet from the same thread, Roggio explained the implications of Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul.

“Zawahiri could not operate in Afghanistan — particularly in Kabul — without the consent of the Taliban,” Roggio wrote. “He wasn’t in the remote mountains of Kunar, Nuristan, or Nangarhar, or distant provinces of Ghazni, Helmand, or Kandahar. He was in the Taliban’s capital.”

4) Zawahiri could not operate in Afghanistan – particularly in Kabul – without the consent of the Taliban. He wasn’t in the remote mountains of Kunar, Nuristan, or Nangarhar, or distant provinces of Ghazni, Helmand, or Kandahar. He was in the Taliban’s capital.

— Bill Roggio (@billroggio) August 2, 2022

International security professor Max Abrahms made a similar point in a tweet of his own.

“Taking out #Zawahiri isn’t the categorical win Biden says,” he wrote. “The Taliban was supposed to prevent Al Qaeda leaders from hiding out there for goodness sake.”

Taking out #Zawahiri isn’t the categorical win Biden says. The Taliban was supposed to prevent Al Qaeda leaders from hiding out there for goodness sake.

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) August 1, 2022

Once again, Biden is attempting to take credit for taking steps to solve a problem he created, at least in part. While Zawahiri’s death is a good thing, it is not the end of terrorism problems in Afghanistan, and we have Biden himself to thank for that.

Executives at CNN’s parent company are struggling to set a new direction for the network amid declining viewership and the lowest profits in years, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

With former President Donald Trump mostly out of the political picture, CNN has struggled to retain an audience that tuned in for a reliable stream of partisan content directed against Trump.

It has had an average primetime viewership of 639,000 this quarter, a 27 percent drop from a year ago.

The network’s ratings trail even those of MSNBC, which itself has seen a decline in primetime viewership of 23 percent, according to the Times.

Meanwhile, Fox News — the only large media company in the United States generally critical of Joe Biden — has increased its viewership, with a primetime increase of 1 percent relative to 2021.

Executives now expect CNN to make a profit of $950 million this year, well short of the original goal of $1.1 billion, the Times reported.

That would be the network’s lowest yearly profit since before the network reinvented itself with 24/7 criticism of Trump in 2016.

Executives of the media company Discovery have sought to set a new course for CNN after merging with the network’s former parent company, WarnerMedia, earlier this year.

Warner Bros. Discovery management wanted CNN to eschew the network’s “red-hot liberal opining” and instead focus on hard news, Axios reported in February.

Some of the network’s most partisan commentators, such as Brian Stelter and Jim Acosta, are on shaky ground, according to a report in June.

Chris Licht, an experienced television news executive appointed as CNN’s chairman after the departure of Jeff Zucker, has faced questions about his long-term plans for the network.

Some of Licht’s advisers have suggested that CNN sell sponsorships to tech corporations and other advertisers, potentially jeopardizing the network’s claims of editorial independence free of corporate influences, the Times reported.

CNN also is considering expanding its operations in China, a country where freedom of speech is severely curtailed by the communist government.

The collapse of failed streaming service CNN+ has taken a chunk out of the network’s profits. Some personalities the company hired for the service came at a significant expense.

Related:

Former CNN Cameraman Sentenced for Threatening to ‘Put a Bullet’ in Rep. Matt Gaetz, Harm His Family

The Times said the network “finds itself facing big questions about how it can continue to expand its business with its moonshot streaming service dead and the traditional TV business in structural decline.”

Warner Bros. Discovery could implement wide-ranging cuts at CNN if the network’s bottom line doesn’t improve.

Licht emphasized at a recent meeting that the network wasn’t considering job layoffs.

“No one has said to me, ‘You’re going to have to go cut this,’” he told employees, according to the Times.

“I think there’s an acute understanding that they don’t know our business,” Licht said of Warner Bros. Discovery executives.

Michael Shapiro joins Blackstone from the Department of Transportation

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s son-in-law has joined private equity giant Blackstone as a “managing director of government affairs,” the latest addition to the New York Democrat’s family lobbying empire.

Michael Shapiro, who recently served as Joe Biden’s deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Department of Transportation, will focus on infrastructure investments and projects at Blackstone, according to the firm. Shapiro lands the new gig as Schumer is poised to decide the fate of legislation on infrastructure spending and tax loopholes of interest to Blackstone. The move was first reported by Capitol Account, a newsletter founded by two former Bloomberg reporters devoted to covering the intersection of Wall Street and Washington.

Schumer is already under fire for blocking a vote on legislation opposed by companies that employ other members of his family. Progressive groups and Republicans have unsuccessfully pressured Schumer to schedule a vote on antitrust legislation that would rein in Big Tech firms. Schumer’s daughters, Jessica and Alison, are lobbyists for Amazon and Facebook’s parent company Meta, respectively. Shapiro married Jessica Schumer in 2016, after meeting at the Obama White House. The New York Times described their courtship as a “real West Wing romance.”

Blackstone said Shapiro, who advised Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, will not lobby his father-in-law on issues related to the firm. But the private equity behemoth, which manages nearly $900 billion in assets, has lobbied the Senate on the Build Back Better Act, the massive infrastructure spending program. Blackstone also lobbied the Senate on carried interest, the loophole by which private equity firms obtain lower tax rates for income. Schumer is leading negotiations on the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes language to close the carried interest loophole.

Schumer has ties to other lobbyists for Blackstone. Steve Elmendorf, a prominent Democratic donor who runs the firm Subject Matter, in the past has defended Schumer over the senator’s ties to Wall Street. “In working with him for 25 years, he very aggressively represents the state of New York. Sometimes that means he’s representing one interest over another,” Elmendorf said in 2015.

Schumer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Thomas Friedman criticized Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman last month hosted a delegation from a think tank helmed by a Chinese government adviser deeply enmeshed in Beijing’s propaganda operations.

Friedman met in July with Wang Huiyao, the president of the Center for China and Globalization, to discuss “megatrends and the transformation of globalization in the post-pandemic era.” Friedman also hosted the group at Planet Word, a Washington, D.C.-based language museum run by his wife, Ann.

Wang advises the Chinese government, is an official at two united front organizations, and helped develop China’s controversial “Thousand Talents” program, which the FBI says Beijing uses to steal trade secrets from American companies and create national security risks for the U.S. government. The think tank has been linked to China’s united front system, which the Communist Party uses to influence “universities, think tanks, scholars, journalists,” and government officials, according to a Trump administration report.

Friedman, reportedly one of Joe Biden’s favorite newspaper columnists, wrote in a Times column on Tuesday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D., Calif.) trip to Taiwan is “utterly reckless.” The columnist has repeatedly urged government officials to take a softer stance toward Beijing. Chinese state media last year touted Friedman’s remarks in an interview with Wang that America could not succeed without a “healthy relationship with China.” He conducted a glowing interview in 2019 with the head of the Chinese tech giant Huawei, in which he asked what “America loses” by blocking the company from building 5G infrastructure because of its links to Chinese intelligence.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist has also made inaccurate claims about China’s efforts to deter Russia’s actions in Ukraine. While criticizing Pelosi’s trip in an interview last week, Friedman said that “China is helping us” in Ukraine and cautioned against “poking the bear right now.” But U.S. officials have publicly criticized Beijing for supporting Russia, as the Times reported last month. The State Department said in May that Chinese Communist Party media outlets “routinely amplify Kremlin propaganda, conspiracy theories, and disinformation.”

Like Friedman, Wang also criticized Pelosi for her Taiwan visit, calling it a “very, very bad move” in an interview with Bloomberg News over the weekend. And he portrayed China as a potential peacemaker in Ukraine in a Times op-ed in March. The Gray Lady came under fire for the piece for failing to disclose that Wang is a Chinese government adviser.

The Center for China and Globalization has downplayed its links to the Chinese government, saying that it is “independent from direct government control.” But the organization acknowledges that Wang advises several Chinese government agencies and serves on two organizations—Western Returned Scholars Association and the China Overseas Friendship Association—that are both part of the CCP’s united front.

The Biden administration in an intelligence memo last month sounded the alarm about the united front. The director of national intelligence called the united front “a coalition of entities working towards CCP goals” that plays a leading role in China’s “foreign influence efforts.”

The center touted the stateside trips as an overseas think tank “engagement mission … filled with productive meetings.” Wang met with leaders of several groups known for sympathetic views toward China, including the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the Asia Society, and the U.S.-China Business Council. After meeting with Friedman, Wang visited with the head of CGTN America, a TV station controlled by the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Two Maine organizations slated to receive funding from a controversial Biden administration grant program for groups that support a “harm reduction” approach to drug treatment are actively distributing crack pipes to addicts, the Free Beacon learned at visits to these sites.

The Church of Safe Injection, which bills itself as a “nonprofit that fights for the health, rights, and dignity of people who use drugs (PWUD),” will receive funding through a $1.2 million grant the Biden administration awarded to a coalition of Maine groups. A Free Beacon reporter last week picked up a crack pipe and meth pipe at its Lewiston, Maine, office. The organization did not provide a smoking kit, which often includes a mouthpiece, copper wool, and alcohol wipes along with the pipe.

Maine Access Points, another organization set to receive funding through the grant, provided a Free Beacon reporter a bag of a dozen crack pipes in Sanford, Maine, along with foil and a smoking kit that contained a mouthpiece, copper scrubber, lip balm, and instructions on how to smoke crack cocaine. The organization also handed out three meth pipes, a snorting kit, naloxone, fentanyl test strips, and a condom. Maine Access Points has a phone number for each of its five harm reduction facilities in the state. When a Free Beacon reporter texted to ask if the Sanford location distributed crack pipes, an employee responded, “Yes💯😊🥰.”

The explanation emerging from the organizations—which cop to distributing crack pipes and receiving taxpayer funding, but insist they are not using taxpayer funds to purchase the crack pipes—paints a far messier picture than the Biden administration’s haughty dismissal of initial reports on the grant program as “misinformation.”

When the Free Beacon reported in February that the Biden administration was set to fund the distribution of crack pipes through a harm-reduction program intended to advance “racial equity,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra—facing blowback—said that “no federal funding will be used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to put pipes in safe smoking kits.” Likewise, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that crack pipes were “never a part of the kit” and that “we don’t support federal funding, indirect or direct, for pipes.”

The two Maine groups that provided the Free Beacon crack pipes did so separately from their smoking kits. This distinguished the groups from the five harm reduction locations along the East Coast that provided the Free Beacon with crack pipes within their smoking kits.

A spokeswoman for the Church of Safe Injection, Zoe Brokos, told the Free Beacon that the organization has yet to receive the federal funds it was awarded, and plans to use them to purchase “wound care kit supplies such as alcohol pads, gauze pads, and bandages.” Brokos added that her organization will continue to distribute crack pipes and meth pipes but will not use federal grants to fund them.

Maine Access Points did not respond to a request for comment.

Church of Safe Injection and Maine Access Points—in collaboration with MaineHealth, the state’s largest health system, and Amistad, a peer support group for drug addicts—are using the taxpayer-funded grants to facilitate the distribution of drug paraphernalia in each of Maine’s 16 counties, with a focus on LGBT and homeless drug users, according to HHS grant information. The grant is set to be renewed annually through 2023.

Although Church of Safe Injection and Maine Access Points help oversee the HHS grant award funds, the department omitted the two harm reduction groups from the grant recipient announcement, listing only MaineHealth. A local CBS affiliate reported in June that both harm reduction groups are grant recipients, and the groups celebrated the award funding in separate Facebook posts. The government’s omission raises questions as to why the groups were left off the Biden administration’s list of grant recipients. Neither HHS nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

“So bittersweet to share the news that we received this grant in collaboration with Maine Access Points, Amistad, and MaineHealth,” the Church of Safe Injection posted on Facebook in May with a link to the HHS grant announcement. “Bittersweet because so few harm reductionists were chosen throughout the country even though we know that the services provided by syringe service programs and naloxone distribution orgs save lives and make a HUGE difference.”

MaineHealth did not respond to a request for comment.

The Church of Safe Injection launched in 2018 and operated without legal approval from the state before it was certified through Maine’s syringe exchange program in February. The group hosts a “trans harm reduction group” twice a month for “trans and non-gender conforming people who use drugs.” Its founder, Jesse Harvey, died of an overdose in 2020. Kari Morissette, who took over as executive director of the group after the death of Harvey, died in May.

Despite the Biden administration’s assurances that taxpayer funds would not underwrite the distribution of crack pipes, Congress passed bipartisan bills in June and July that bar the administration from funding it.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

News Analysis

Mass shootings are extremely rare in America. But you wouldn’t know that if you listened to politicians and much of the media. Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a recent Senate hearing on gun control that there had been 309 mass shootings in America so far this year. CNN reported that “U.S. mass shootings are on pace to match last year—the worst ever.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on the floor that there were 13 mass shootings across the country in just one weekend. Major media outlets like The New York Times, NBC News, and ABC News all reported on the—allegedly—“hundreds” of mass shootings this year.

All of this sounds like a national crisis and terrifying to the public, but fewer than 100 people a year are killed in mass shootings in America. While the horrific murder of young children in their school in Uvalde and the innocent people killed in a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park are terrible tragedies, those events do not mean people are at a high risk of being mass shooting victims.

The way in which politicians who want more gun control bills deliberately scare people about mass shootings is by citing a made-up definition and using statistics from an unofficial database called the Gun Violence Archive.

“Obviously, they are trying to broaden the definition to get as large a number as they can to scare the public,” said Alan M. Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, said in an interview. “But the public cares more about stopping these incidents before they happen. The way to prevent them is not to take away people’s Second Amendment rights, but to make sure those people don’t get the guns to start with—and that is where we are failing.”

Defining ‘Mass Shooting’

The standard government definition of “mass shooting” is four or more people killed in a public place who are chosen indiscriminately.

This definition, crafted by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Center (CRS) in 2013 (pdf), doesn’t count domestic violence and gang or drug-related violence because CRS explained those crime activities already have “federal policies, law enforcement structures, and laws tailored in many instances to specifically address them.” The definition matters for law enforcement and others who study and report on crime and look for solutions.

But then unofficial groups started making up new definitions for “mass shootings” that changed the methodology for counting them, which made the numbers higher. Mass shootings leads to more gun control legislation and increased media attention, according to a Harvard University study.

The left-wing magazine “Mother Jones” has a widely cited database, and it made the definition as three or more killed, which of course increases the data. It also includes domestic violence killings, which CRS explained should not be included because “a killer’s relationship to his or her victims is important” when “driven by a desire for revenge and/or power.” Those two changes in the definition have doubled its count for 2022.

“This oversimplification of ‘mass shootings’ treats all incidents as the same problem when they are different issues that require different solutions,” said Mark Oliva, managing director of public affairs for the National Shootings Sports Foundation, which lobbies for gun companies, told The Epoch Times. “This is what is seized upon by those calling for bans and complete disarmament of law-abiding citizens. The answer they turn to is getting rid of all guns, even for those who obey the law.”

Gun Violence Archive

The biggest change came when the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) changed the definition in its widely cited online database. It considers a “mass shooting” any incident in which there are “four victims shot”—not killed.

Also, it includes the crime categories the CRS said are not relevant.

“The Gun Violence Archive’s definition of ‘mass shooting’ can be misleading since it counts among their numbers gang-related crimes, officer-involved cases, and self-defense usages,” said Oliva. “That leads to a much larger figure being used by Gun Violence Archive, but presents the information without context. This can be confusing for readers since many accept the information as an instance of a lone individual preying on multiple people. That isn’t always the case, especially when looking at gang-related and drug-related incidents.”

GVA did not respond to a request for comment about its methodology. However, when the group’s executive director, Mark Bryant, was asked by the Second Amendment Foundation about the media’s “overhyping and misuse of his data,” Bryant responded, “If the numbers are misleading, the journalist didn’t do their homework.” He added that “When a journalist uses the mass-shooting numbers as their lead, they’re not looking at the whole situation.”

Mass Shooting Statistics

The Rand Corporation did a study on the various groups that count mass shootings and looked at how their definitions changed the results. In 2019, the seven main trackers reported mass shootings for the year ranged wildly from six to 503. Those same groups reported victims of mass shootings that year were as far apart as 60 and 628.

The government does not track mass shootings every year. The FBI releases an annual report on “active shooters” which it defines as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. There were 61 active shooter incidents in 2021 and 40 in 2020.

But for mass shootings, the first statistics came from the CRS report in 2013. It looked at the previous three decades and identified a total of 78 public mass shootings that claimed 547 lives.

This year, the Department of Justice released a database of mass shootings in a report from the National Institute of Justice and a group called “The Violence Project.” The database, which can be downloaded by request, shows a total of 176 mass shootings from 1966 to 2021 with a total of 1,259 people killed. That is an annual mean of 23 victims of mass shootings in 55 years.

This graphic shows the data for the most recent 10 years from DoJ and the Violence Project. You can see there have been a total of 55 mass shootings and 516 victims in a decade. (The total number of victims was 108 in 2017 because of the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas in which 58 people were killed.)

Then there are the GVA statistics. It says there have been 369 mass shootings so far in 2022. It reports there were 692 mass shootings in 2021, 610 in 2020, and 417 in 2019. Even if you were to take all the fatal homicides that the GVA calls “mass shootings” for 2022, there were 379 victims.

Now that so much of the media use the GVA numbers, there is more political and media attention on the rare events. Mass shootings get drastically more focus than the bigger issue of the enormous homicide and crime spike in America. Victims of mass shootings are a tiny percentage of all people killed by firearms each year, as seen in the following graphic.

Media Hype Over Mass Shootings

“It bleeds, it leads” is a common saying in the news business to describe how crime is good for ratings. This is partly why the media has been doing such extensive coverage of the three mass shootings this year in Buffalo, Texas, and Illinois.

While major TV networks use the GVA statistics now, the print media is not as sold into the new system.

The Washington Post is seemingly split on whether it will spin the statistics to create a more dramatic narrative or be accurate. Its Fact Checker column recently wrote that mass shootings occur six times a year on average (based on a 2021 study), but then the paper published a news story with the headline “300 mass shootings so far this year”—based on the GVA.

The “more than 300 mass shootings this year” story has been run repeatedly by media around the country because it sounds terrifying. But the stories don’t say how many victims are involved.

Before the GVA existed, the 2013 congressional report concluded that “While tragic and shocking, public mass shootings account for few of the murders related to firearms that occur annually in the United States.”

Mass shootings are horrible and terrifying for the communities where they occur. The Rand study said the impact of mass shootings is damaging to citizens’ mental health, anxiety, and perception of safety. However, the fact is that the risk of dying in one is extremely unlikely.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with a citation to the 2021 study.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

NEW YORK CITY—An email recently sent from New York City’s Human Resources Administration (HRA) to all names on its distribution list, and obtained by The Epoch Times, urged all staff who can work overtime to do so, to deal with a “drastic influx of asylum seekers” in Manhattan and the outer boroughs.

The internal request came about a week after the city’s Mayor Eric Adams described the growing stream of illegal aliens coming into the Big Apple as a “real burden on New Yorkers,” adding that the city already had “an overburdened shelter system.”

Dated July 28, the email stated: “Dear DSS/HRA Leadership and Staff, In recent weeks, we have seen a drastic influx of asylum seekers coming to our shelter intake sites. As a result, DHS is standing up several emergency shelters to ensure we have the capacity for these individuals.”

The Department of Social Services (DSS) is charged with administering public assistance programs in the city, and is composed of the HRA and the Department of Homeless Services (DHS).

The email showed urgent internal efforts by social services agencies to grapple with the surge in illegal aliens arriving in New York City amid an ongoing border crisis that is vexing the Biden administration.

It continues with a plea for staff of the agency to commit to working overtime in order to help deal with the massive influx. “While we implement a longer term solution, there is a critical immediate need for Agency staff members to volunteer to work overtime to help manage these sites. Eligible employees who volunteer for this opportunity may earn cash overtime in accordance with contractual guidelines,” it stated.

“If you have availability to assist outside of your regularly scheduled hours, please speak with your supervisor to confirm and then enter your information via the link below. Participation is subject to final approval by Agency senior staff,” the email continued.

On July 29, the day after the email, the HSA and DSS declared an emergency, noting in a letter (pdf) to Comptroller Brad Lander and the city’s top lawyer Sylvia Hinds-Radix that as of July 28, some 4,000 asylum seekers had entered New York’s shelter system in the past three months, driving up the DHS census by roughly 10 percent.

Influx

For some experts and advocates, the developments suggest that not even recent public statements by Adams, in which the mayor acknowledged the problems resulting from the huge influx of asylum seekers south of the border, have provided a full and accurate measure of the strain that local authorities are experiencing.

On July 19, the mayor’s office issued a plea for federal help, issuing a statement that read: “New York has experienced a sharp increase in asylum seekers from Latin America and other regions, with more than 2,800 individuals entering New York City’s shelter system.”

“In some instances, families are arriving on buses sent by the Texas and Arizona governments, while in other cases, it appears that individuals are being sent by the federal government,” Adams said in the statement.

The mayor then issued an urgent plea: “In order to meet both the legal mandate as a right-to-shelter city and provide high-quality shelter and services for those who enter our system, New York City needs additional federal resources immediately. If we do not get these urgently needed resources, we may struggle to provide the proper level of support our clients deserve.”

Criticism

Adam’s response has not satisfied some local advocacy and social services organizations, who have sharply criticized the mayor for what they characterize as his lack of preparedness and for trying to deflect blame for the situation to the federal level.

The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless released a joint statement on July 21 addressing what they called Adams’s “misleading and problematic comments” on the surge.

“The Mayor isn’t speaking the whole truth. We spoke to eight families with children this morning who slept on the floor last night at the City’s shelter intake center in the Bronx, in addition to the four families the Mayor acknowledged who had slept there Sunday night. This humanitarian crisis shows no sign of abating anytime soon regardless of how many press conferences the Mayor holds to conceal this reality.”

The mayor and his officials knew what was brewing on the southern border and could have taken action months ago to avert the crisis, the advocates alleged.

“As City officials just acknowledged, they have known about this influx of families, a portion attributable to those seeking asylum, for months. But, despite this knowledge, the Administration still lacks a plan to ensure safe shelter placement, and officials failed to detail any specifics for a viable path forward at today’s press conference, opting instead to heap praise on each other,” the statement continued.

“The City is also failing to use its resources to move people into permanent housing,” it added.

Conflicting Priorities

Stephen Eide, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank who studies the homelessness issue, told the Epoch Times that the Adams administration has struggled to fulfill the terms of the right-to-shelter mandate in the midst of the unexpected arrivals.

The impact has been particularly acute for people who were already homeless on the streets of New York, Eide said, pointing to comments that a few residents of the Bellevue Men’s Shelter made recently to the New York Post. One of them told the Post: “You gotta take care of the home first. This is our home first.”

In Eide’s view, it will require further investigation to establish just how much federal policy contributed to the current situation, but it is unusual for normal levels of immigration to fuel a crisis like the one that the city is now grappling with.

“I think the federal role in how these adults and families wound up in New York’s shelter system remains murky. But, normally, this would not require much coordination. Immigration, normally, does not contribute much to New York’s homelessness challenge, at least not in a direct way,” he said.

For 2,800 immigrants to enter the shelter system so abruptly in just a few weeks is an “unsustainable” situation, Eide continued.

“Affordable housing—often seen as the exit strategy from shelter—is even scarcer than shelter. There are native New Yorkers who have been waiting for years for affordable housing units,” he added.

In other cities, the directors of organizations overseeing efforts to alleviate homelessness have complained about the lack of coordination between local and federal approaches to the issue and the chaos resulting on the streets, though they do not necessarily hold the current administration responsible.

“There is a disconnect between local and federal housing policy. The federal government played a major role in creating homelessness by cutting tens of billions of dollars from affordable housing programs beginning in the early 1980s,” Tyler Kyser, policy director of the San Francisco-based Coalition on Homelessness, told The Epoch Times.

“Even in San Francisco, as we have made really great strides by investing in housing, we have not seen these efforts matched on a federal level. I think municipal, state, and federal officials could fund more affordable housing,” Kyser said.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the mayor’s office, and to HRA and DSS for comment.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

CURIOUS TIMING, WOULDN’T YOU SAY?

Major U.S. news outlets including CNN, CNBC, and the Associated Press recently met with Chinese Communist Party propagandists flagged by the U.S. government for seeking to “malignly influence” U.S. politics, The National Pulse can reveal.

Bureau chiefs for the Associated Press, CNN, and CNBC took a meeting with the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), which is part of China’s billion-dollar “United Front” effort.

The United Front aims to “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies,” according to the federal U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission – U.S. government initiative from 2018.

United Front groups such as the China United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) have used tactics including free trips to China to garner “favorable coverage” from mainstream media outlets according to Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings.

The CPAFFC has been dubbed the “public face” of the United Front Work Department and “avowedly an arm of the party-state” in addition to being flagged by the U.S. State Department for its campaigns to “directly and malignly influence” American officials and business leaders.

Journalists met with the President, Lin Songtian, at the group’s Beijing headquarters on July 26th, 2022.

As a press release from the group’s Chinese-language website reveals, the meeting “enhanced mutual understanding and friendship”:

“On July 26, President Lin Songtian met with Mori Tsijian, Director of the Greater China News Department of the Associated Press (AP), Jiang Xin, the Beijing Bureau Chief of CNN, and American Consumers at the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. Representative of mainstream American media in Beijing, including CNBC. The two sides had a candid and friendly exchange of views on China’s domestic and foreign policies, China-US relations, non-governmental exchanges between the two countries and issues of common concern, which enhanced mutual understanding and friendship.”

The CPAFFC President appeared to instruct the media representatives to portray China as an ally as opposed to a “major competitor” to avoid “misjudgment and misleading public opinion”:

“In today’s era of political multi-polarization, economic globalization, and democratization of international relations, the United States still views China from the outdated perspective of “you lose, we win, and either friend or enemy is an enemy”. Positioning China as a major competitor will inevitably lead to strategic misunderstandings, misjudgment and misleading public opinion.”

The unearthed webpage follows The National Pulse linking other individuals and organizations, who are often publicly soft on China, affiliating with the CPAFFC. Similarly, mainstream media outlets have repeatedly published stories lauding the Chinese Communist Party and uncritically echoing the regime’s propaganda and talking points.

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of military intelligence and national security adviser, will file a motion against a penalty imposed on him by the Pentagon for allegedly violating the Emolument Clause by giving a paid speech in Russia in 2015.

“I’m fighting back against that,” Flynn told EpochTV’s “Facts Matter” host Roman Balmakov during a recent interview.

The Department of Defense decided to charge Flynn’s retirement account for nearly $40,000 he was paid in cash and in-kind services for attending and giving an on-stage interview at a 2015 anniversary event of the Russian state-sponsored RT television.

Flynn previously said his attendance was arranged by his speakers bureau. The Pentagon acknowledged that Flynn informed the department of his attendance, was briefed before, and debriefed after.

“I went and did a classified briefing prior. I did a classified briefing after, which means, you go get a counterintelligence assessment,” he told Balmakov, explaining that people from the relevant government agencies would convey what kind of information they’re looking for from the people he might talk to during the trip.

“Then you try to get the answers for those people. And you come back and you give those answers back,” he said. “That’s normal, you know. Diplomats, retired government officials, like me, would do stuff like that routinely.”

Now, the Pentagon says Flynn violated the Constitution’s Emolument Clause, which prohibits military members from receiving anything of value from foreign governments without authorization.

Flynn said he’s planning to file a motion against the penalty.

“We’ve got to do things by letter, right? And it comes at a legal cost. I mean, this is what they do. They tried to wear us out—all of us. They’re going to try to wear the American people out,” he said.

The RT event was visited by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who briefly sat next to Flynn at a table before giving his speech and leaving, several other attendees previously told The Epoch Times.

Flynn’s attendance was later used by the FBI to open a counterintelligence case against him as part of the Crossfire Hurricane probe of alleged collusion between Russia and the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The probe failed to establish any such collusion. The FBI used false information paid for by the campaign of Trump’s opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to get spying warrants on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. At least two of the warrants were invalid and resulted in illegal surveillance, the bureau acknowledged.

The Flynn case was riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. FBI agents had already decided to close his case by early January 2017, but higher-ups intervened to keep it open on the justification that Flynn may have violated the Logan Act by discussing with foreign diplomats the priorities of the incoming administration during the transition period. DOJ officials at the time rejected the legal theory. The 1799 Logan Act, which prohibits unauthorized diplomacy, has never been successfully prosecuted. The government had only used it twice, more than a century ago.

Flynn was charged in 2017 with lying to the FBI during a January 2017 interview. He pleaded guilty later that year, but then withdrew his plea. The DOJ dropped the charge in 2020, after Attorney General William Barr ordered an outside prosecutor to review the case. Then-head of the District of Columbia U.S. Attorney’s Office, Timothy Shea, concluded that it seemed the FBI’s purpose for interviewing Flynn was to “elicit … false statements and thereby criminalize Mr. Flynn,” which isn’t a legitimate investigative purpose.

Then, in an unusual move, the judge trying the case refused to grant the dismissal, only dropping the case after Trump pardoned Flynn.

Flynn is now suing the FBI and the Department of Justice for their alleged efforts to oust him as Trump’s national security adviser.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the prosecutor who made the conclusion regarding the dismissal of Michael Flynn’s case. The prosecutor was Timothy Shea. The Epoch Times regrets the error.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Republican lawmakers want to stop the agency from purchasing more

Apparently, the IRS needs a little firepower to help with those audits.

The IRS has stockpiled five million rounds of ammunition and spent $725,000 on bullets this year, according to Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who has introduced a bill to block future ammunition purchases by the agency.

The Republican lawmaker announced his sponsorship of the Disarm the IRS Act in a July press release. The bill would ban the IRS from acquiring ammunition through direct purchase or otherwise. The bill awaits a potential vote in the House Ways and Means Committee.

Cosponsors of the bill included three additional U.S. House of Representative members: Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.).

The issue drew national attention after Gaetz appeared on Fox News’ Jesse Waters Primetime last week, saying that the IRS had spent $750,000 in 2022 alone on ammunition.

“Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the heaviest artillery an IRS agent would need would be a calculator, not $725,000 worth of ammunition,” Gaetz said during his appearance on Fox News.

Other bill cosponsors took to social media, questioning the need for a heavily armed tax agency.

“Why is Biden trying to weaponize the IRS?” Rep. Jeff Duncan posted on Twitter on July 7, adding that while the IRS builds up its arsenal, citizen Americans face ammunition shortages.

Rep. Gosar commented on Twitter July 14 that it was time to disarm “this band of highwaymen and stop them from taking our money under the threat of violence.”

While people may not think of the IRS needing weapons and ammunition, it has a criminal investigation division with armed law enforcement to pursue tax felons.

A 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office said the IRS’s Criminal Investigation Division had 2,148 law enforcement officers, 4,461 weapons—including 15 fully automatic firearms—and 5.05 million rounds of ammunition.

According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, four officers with the IRS have died since 1989 from medical conditions or accidents. None was firearm related.

Government Amassing Firepower

But the IRS isn’t the only governmental agency building up massive caches of guns and bullets.

OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit government watchdog group, released a report called “The militarization of the U.S. Executive Agencies” in December 2020, detailing how agencies that people wouldn’t normally associate with law enforcement were stockpiling weapons and ammunition.

The Environmental Protection Agency owns 600 guns. At the same time, special agents at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are equipped with machine guns and AR15s. Even the Smithsonian Institution employed 620-armed “special agents,” up from zero officers in 2008, according to the report.

Adam Andrzejewski, CEO & founder of OpenTheBooks.com, told The Epoch Times via email that the public should question why these agencies are armed to the teeth. Not only do they wield legal power, but they are also amassing firepower.

“Just who are the federal agencies preparing to battle?” Andrzejewski wrote.

Andrzejewski said there is no public purpose for rank and file, paper-pushing federal agencies to load up on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment.

“Our data shows that the federal government has become a gun show that never adjourns. Taxpayers need to tell Washington that police powers belong primarily to cities and states, not the feds,” he stated.

Source: The Epoch Times

A social media channel affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced that the hardline regime is “one step away” from constructing a nuclear weapon that can “turn New York into ruins and hell.”

The video, posted Saturday on a Telegram channel affiliated with the IRGC, details preparations underway at Iran’s Fordow nuclear site—which housed the country’s atomic weapons program and is a key cog in its program—to construct a bomb.

Nuclear work being performed at Fordow has “brought Iran one step away from having a nuclear deterrent and entry into the group of nuclear-armed states,” according to the video, which was posted on Twitter by regional observers who track the online regime’s rhetoric. Iran can turn its nuclear program “into a nuclear weapons program in an instant” and target Israel and America with missiles, according to the video.

THREAD

1)#Iran IRGC’s Telegram channel posted a video saying regime is now able to quickly build nuclear weapons & its ICBMs can “turn New York into ruins & hell!”

And still Biden & Europe want to sign a “deal” with Tehran’s ayatollah!#No2Appeasementpic.twitter.com/Bb641rFKNH

— Heshmat Alavi (@HeshmatAlavi) July 31, 2022

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Mohammad Eslami, on Monday appeared to confirm many of the details included in the video, saying that Iran already has the “technical ability to build an atomic bomb” but has not yet made the political decision to do so, according to the BBC.

“Iran has the technical means to produce a nuclear bomb but there has been no decision by Iran to build one,” senior Iranian adviser Kamal Kharrazi said last month in an interview, one of several in recent weeks that Iranian officials have participated in that suggest Iran is on the threshold of a bomb.

The threats come amid talks between Iran and the Biden administration surrounding a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear accord. The talks have long been stalled due to Iranian demands, including that the IRGC be removed from the U.S. terror list. While Iran’s latest claims may be exaggerated for propaganda purposes, the United States says the country’s nuclear program is just weeks away from producing enough fissile material to fuel an atomic bomb.

“The start of uranium enrichment at a secret facility deep in the deserts of Fordow has frightened the West and the Zionist regime,” a narrator said in the video. “Iran has obtained enough material for building a nuclear bomb.”

“If the United States or Zionist regime resorts to any stupidity, the Islamic Republic of Iran will begin producing atomic bombs as soon as possible,” a caption accompanying the video states.

Saeed Ghasseminejad, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Free Beacon that Iran’s supreme leader may be inching closer to giving the green light on the construction of a nuclear bomb.

Iranian leader Ali Khamenei “sees two options in front of him. Option one is what Biden is offering him: JCPOA 2 which basically says you accept some limited and temporary restrictions on your nuclear program and in exchange we allow you to have more than one trillion dollars by 2030 and a patient pathway to nuclear bomb,” Ghasseminejad said. “Option two is for Khamenei to go nuclear while Biden is president, then negotiate and force the world to accept a nuclear Islamic Republic. I think option two is looking more and more appealing to Khamenei because he perceives the Biden administration as a weak adversary.”

Bryan Leib, executive director of Iranian-Americans for Liberty, an advocacy group, said Tehran’s threats should be a sign to the Biden administration that it is time to end its talks with the country.

“This latest threat of an attack by the IRGC on U.S. soil should serve as the straw that breaks the camel’s back regarding Biden’s diplomacy and appeasement strategy with the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” Leib said. “I am beyond disgusted with the Biden administration that instead of responding to this provocation with strength, they will likely ignore it all together. Shame on this administration for emboldening Tehran.”

The video also states that the most sensitive portions of Iran’s nuclear program are kept in a bunker dug into the side of a mountain. This site can withstand an attack from either the United States or Israel, it claims.

Along with Iran’s ballistic missile program—which is not being addressed as part of ongoing negotiations with the West—the video claims the country has “the capability to turn New York into ruins and hell.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

‘Nation’ correspondent Elie Mystal says Georgia candidate Herschel Walker is ‘what Republicans want from their Negroes’

Far-left political commentator Elie Mystal, a correspondent at The Nation, said in an interview Saturday that Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker (Ga.), who is black, is “what Republicans want from their Negroes.”

Mystal, who is also black, said in an MSNBC interview that Walker is “so clearly unintelligent” and “so clearly doesn’t have independent thoughts” that, if elected, he will “do what he’s told.”

“That’s what Republicans like,” Mystal went on. “That’s what Republicans want from their Negroes.”

This is not the first time Mystal, who has said the Constitution is “actually trash,” has attacked Walker on the basis of race. In an April essay published in The Nation, Mystal called Walker’s candidacy “an insult to Black people” and a “political minstrel show” and said the candidate himself is “an animated caricature of a Black person drawn by white conservatives.”

Mystal is not the first high-profile liberal to take jabs at minorities for going against the Democratic party line. Joe Biden said on the 2020 campaign trail any African American undecided between voting for him or Donald Trump “ain’t black.” Multiple Democrats launched racist attacks against Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas following his concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

More black voters say they “somewhat” or “strongly” disapprove of Biden than say they “approve strongly,” a Washington Post-Ipsos poll found in June.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Elaine Luria calls criticism over Nvidia holding ‘hollow political attack’ days after Pelosi sells

Virginia Democratic congresswoman Elaine Luria is defending her multimillion-dollar stake in a company that even prolific stock trader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) thinks is too controversial.

Luria holds up to $25 million in computer chip designer Nvidia, the same company Pelosi’s husband invested up to $5 million in June as Congress moved forward on legislation that would provide billions of dollars in subsidies to the chip industry. On Tuesday—the day before the Senate passed that legislation—the Pelosis quietly sold their $5 million stake amid conflict of interest concerns. Luria, however, is not following suit. In a Friday interview with Norfolk’s NBC affiliate, the Democrat defended her stake in Nvidia just one day after she voted for the chip subsidy bill, even though the company’s stock shot up more than 10 points after Congress approved the legislation.

Luria joined Congress in 2019 and is a top Republican target in November, when she will face state legislator and fellow Navy veteran Jen Kiggans. Kiggans called on Luria to sell her Nvidia holding in a Thursday press release, which accused the Democrat of putting “her bottom line ahead of her constituents’ well-being.”

“Elaine Luria has used her power to enrich herself by tens of millions of dollars since taking office,” Kiggans said. “If Elaine is serious about reforming Washington, she should lead by example and immediately sell her stocks in the Nvidia Corporation after her vote.”

Luria’s defense of her stock portfolio comes just months after she called a bipartisan push to ban lawmakers from trading stocks “bullshit” and dismissed the notion that members of Congress are “inherently bad or corrupt.”

“I think this whole concept is bullshit, because I think that, why would you assume that members of Congress are going to be inherently bad or corrupt?” Luria told Punchbowl News. “I mean, the people that you’re electing to represent you, it makes no sense that you’re going to automatically assume that they’re going to use their position for some nefarious means or to benefit themselves. So I’m very strongly opposed to any legislation like that.”

Three in four voters support banning lawmakers from trading stocks while in office, according to a December Trafalgar Group poll.

During her Friday interview, Luria called criticism of her Nvidia holding a “hollow political attack.” She claimed the company does not benefit from the chip legislation as it is not directly eligible for the subsidies offered through the bill—those subsidies are for chip manufacturers, not chip designers. But Nvidia’s increase in value after Congress passed the Luria-backed chip bill is a reflection of the fact that the company will indeed benefit from the legislation, a Republican congressional aide with knowledge of the bill told the Washington Free Beacon.

“If there’s a higher demand for chips there will obviously be a higher demand for chip designers,” the aide said. “Luria’s excuse is like saying if the government gave a lot of money to shoe manufacturers, shoe designers wouldn’t also benefit. That’s pretty dumb.”

Still, Luria spokesman Jayce Genco told the Free Beacon Luria’s vote in favor of the chip bill had nothing to do with her portfolio.

“To suggest that her vote on the anti-China bill is anything but for strengthening our national security is absurd,” Genco said. “Our national defense remains one of Rep. Luria’s top priorities as a member of Congress.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Quincy Institute scholar Jessica Lee has lambasted the administration’s rhetoric toward China, arguing it fuels anti-Asian hate crimes

The State Department is tapping a China apologist who has blamed the Biden administration’s rhetoric toward the Communist country for a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and called for “a cooperative relationship” with North Korea, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Jessica Lee, a scholar at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an isolationist think-tank bankrolled by George Soros and Charles Koch, is joining the administration as senior adviser for legislative affairs at the State Department, two sources familiar with the matter told the Washington Free Beacon on Monday. Lee sent an email to her Quincy Institute colleagues Sunday advising them of the move.

Lee has been one of the most strident critics of what she called the Biden administration’s “anti-China” foreign policy, advocating for closer ties with the CCP and arguing that “over-the-top” warnings about China’s malign activities—including widespread hack attacks and domestic spying incidents—increase the likelihood of war with the country.

“The continual naming and blaming of China as a bad actor on seemingly every front, as the source of all of America’s problems, cultivates real fear and insecurity among Americans,” Lee said in a May 2021 video. “And it directly fuels violence against Americans of Asian descent. From physical attacks to outright murder, evidence of violent racism fueled by our anti-China policy is alarming.”

Lee’s move from the Quincy Institute to the State Department is a sign the American foreign policy community’s most dovish voices are making inroads with the Biden administration. She is one of several Quincy Institute members to join the administration, including Rachel Esplin Odell, a State Department employee who has claimed “the military threat posed by China to U.S. interests is limited in nature.”

The move comes at a precarious time for the organization, which has seen two top staff members resign over its calls for a speedy resolution to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its opposition to the Biden administration’s support for the Ukrainian resistance. In addition to China and Russia, the think tank is also home to several scholars who are calling for a more accomodationist posture toward Iran.

Lee has been one of the most prominent pro-China voices working at the Quincy Institute. In a May 2021 video posted online, Lee claimed that “a hostile relationship with China will make Americans less safe.” She also bemoaned the potential to lose “cultural and student exchanges” with China, but did not mention that the CCP uses these programs to infiltrate U.S. institutions and spy on them.

The “most troubling” result of America’s “anti-China” foreign policy, according to Lee, is the rise in racist violence. “There is a clear link between the militaristic foreign policy that we’re seeing today and the rise of anti-Asian discrimination and hate crimes,” the Quincy Institute wrote in an introduction to Lee’s video.

Lee’s rumored hire comes at a pivotal point in the U.S.-China relationship and against the backdrop of the White House’s softening stance toward China. While Joe Biden has said in the past that the United States would defend Taiwan if it is invaded by China—comments that administration officials walked back—Biden recently warned Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi against visiting the contested island during her trip to Asia this week.

Lee also has advocated for the United States to end the Korean War and develop a “cooperative relationship” with the country’s dictator, Kim Jong-un.

“Over the long-term, Washington should also be open to the possibility of not just normalization of relations but to a cooperative relationship with Pyongyang as part of closing the chapter of the Korean War and stemming the growing arms race between the two Koreas,” Lee wrote in a July 2022 analysis for the Quincy Institute.

Lee said that North Korea’s nuclear missile testing “makes sense” and that “over-emphasizing the nuclear threat fosters deterrence-centric solutions.”

Lee, who will liaise with Congress as part of her role at the State Department, publicly griped in 2021 that Capitol Hill staffers are unable to comprehend North Korea policy issues.

“I saw firsthand the inherent challenges of getting 545 Hill offices to play a constructive role in [North Korea] related matters,” she tweeted. There is a “lack of expertise, high staff turnover, and lack of sustained attention to Asia, just to name a few.”

The State Department would not comment on personnel matters.

Update 3:57 p.m.: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that Sasha Baker, a senior official at the Pentagon, was a former Quincy Institute official.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

West Virginia senator’s deal provides tens of billions of dollars in electric vehicle tax credits.

Sen. Joe Manchin’s $485 billion budget reconciliation package includes a provision he once called “ludicrous” and counterproductive to fighting inflation, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of the bill.

The deal Manchin struck with Senate Democrats to fight inflation includes tens of billions of dollars worth of electric vehicle tax credits, a policy once considered a non-starter for Manchin. As recently as April, Democrats thought negotiations reached an impasse after he said electric tax credits “make no sense to me whatsoever.”

“There’s a waiting list for EVs right now with a fuel price at $4.00, but they still want us to throw $5,000 or $7,000 or a $12,000 credit to buy an electric vehicle,” Manchin said on the Senate floor. “We can’t produce enough product for the people that want it and we’re still going to pay them to take it. It’s absolutely ludicrous, in my mind.”

Despite those words, the Inflation Reduction Act includes electric vehicle tax credits for up to $7,500 per vehicle. Those tax benefits apply to any family making up to $300,000 and can be used on any electric vehicle that costs up to $80,000.

The electric vehicle provision is the latest reversal for Manchin, who held up Democratic Party spending plans for more than a year over a litany of concerns that have been seemingly tossed aside. Last week, the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation concluded that the budget reconciliation package would raise taxes by billions on Americans making less than $200,000. Manchin previously said he would never support tax hikes during a recession, which the U.S. economy entered in July. Why Manchin caved on electric vehicle subsidies is unclear. Manchin said in March that he was “reluctant to go down the path of electric vehicles” over concerns about the ability for manufacturers to meet demand.

“I’m old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas. I remember those days,” he said. “I don’t want to have to be standing in line waiting for a battery for my vehicle, because we’re now dependent on a foreign supply chain, mostly China.”

Republicans are unanimous in their opposition to the spending package. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted Manchin over hypocrisy last week and called the Inflation Reduction Act a “reckless taxing and spending spree that will delight the far left and hammer working families even harder.”

“They want Americans to be faced with skyrocketing prices and higher taxes and fewer jobs, all at the same time,” McConnell said. “Democrats have outlined a giant package of huge new job-killing tax hikes, Green New Deal craziness that will kill American energy.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Tehran slated to sell China $27 billion in oil this year

Iran’s illegal oil trade has boomed under the Biden administration, with the hardline regime selling more than $44 billion worth of its heavily sanctioned oil to malign regimes like China, Syria, and Venezuela, according to figures published by a watchdog group.

From January 2021, when Joe Biden took office, to June 2022, Iran sold around $44.7 billion in oil primarily to China. The regime’s export revenues between March 2021 and March 2022 from oil, gas, and related products “totaled $39 billion, compared [with] $22 billion for the previous year—a rise of 77 percent and an extra $17 billion,” according to United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), a watchdog group that tracks Iran’s network of illegal oil tankers.

“This drastic increase in revenue is not surprising when you look at the increase in oil exports that have occurred under the Biden administration,” UANI chief of staff Claire Jungman told the Washington Free Beacon. “This is the result of terminally lax sanctions enforcement.”

In addition to looser sanctions on Iran, the Biden administration has turned a blind eye to enforcement as it seeks to ink a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal. These moves are meant to appease Iran and cajole it into signing a deal that will remove virtually all sanctions on the hardline regime, including its oil trade. China is the primary beneficiary of this policy, with Iranian oil imports quadrupling to the country in 2021 to $23.1 billion. The China-Iran oil pipeline is on pace to hit around $27 billion in 2022, according to UANI’s figures.

If sanctions on Iran are lifted as part of a new nuclear deal, Iran-China trade could reach around $60 billion per year, according to one former U.S. official.

“China made a mockery of the credibility of our sanctions programs and emboldened rogue actors across the world to follow suit,” Gabriel Noronha, a State Department special adviser for Iran during the Trump administration, told the Free Beacon.

Iran’s foreign currency reserves— which were nearly drained under the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign—will have “increased nearly tenfold by the end of this year,” according to Noronha.

“The United States refused to enforce its sanctions even while Iran was continuing to advance its nuclear program and its regional terror attacks,” Noronha said. “The result was that Iran’s economy revived itself.”

This financial relief gave Iran a cushion and lessened pressure that could have forced it into accepting a more stringent nuclear deal.

“The Iranian leadership does not feel pressure to finalize the nuclear deal because they’ve already enjoyed the benefits of effective sanctions relief,” Noronha said. “The fact that the Biden administration can’t even manage a return to the notoriously weak [nuclear deal] is evidence of the sheer diplomatic malpractice carried out by the Biden administration, particularly Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. envoy for Iran Rob Malley.”

As Iran and China boost their oil alliance, the U.S. emergency crude stockpiles dropped to their lowest levels in 37 years. This comes after the Biden administration agreed to sell China several million barrels from the U.S. stores, sparking a congressional investigation.

In July, Iran sold 746,915 barrels of oil per day to China, according to UANI.

Under pressure from watchdog groups like UANI, the Biden administration is beginning to issue new sanctions on Iran’s oil trade.

The State Department announced on Monday that it is “designating six entities” for their role in “facilitating illicit transactions related to Iranian petroleum.”

The administration says it is committed to reviving the nuclear deal, but will issue sanctions until the agreement is signed.

“The United States has been sincere in pursuing a path of meaningful diplomacy to achieve a mutual return to full implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” the State Department said, referring to the 2015 deal by its official name. “Until Iran is ready to return to full implementation of the JCPOA, we will continue to use our sanctions authorities to target exports of petroleum, petroleum products, and petrochemical products from Iran.”

UANI’s Jungman said the new sanctions are a good first step, but that “there are many gaps that need to be filled.” The administration still has not designated several oil tankers known to be ferrying illicit Iranian oil.

“Without designation on the vessels, the tankers will just register under new companies and continue to assist Iran in exporting its oil,” she said.

Noronha says these sanctions have come too late.

“China took advantage of the Biden administration’s weak posture and blatantly flouted our sanctions on Iran for over 16 months before the United States made any attempt to stop the trade,” he said.

The State Department says that it continues to engage China diplomatically as part of its efforts to crack down on its oil partnership with Tehran.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Several pathogenic microbes were identified and quantified on masks worn during the pandemic, according to a Japanese study that was published in Scientific Reports.

The study is one of the first to address the probable hygiene issues caused by bacterial and fungal growth on masks worn daily in the community.

“Since masks can be a direct source of infection to the respiratory tract, digestive tract, and skin, it is crucial to maintain their hygiene to prevent bacterial and fungal infections that can exacerbate COVID-19,” the authors wrote.

The study involved 109 participants aged 21 to 22 years who were asked about the type and duration of mask used and their lifestyle habits. Bacteria and fungi were collected from the three types of masks—gauze, polyurethane, and non-woven—worn between September and October 2020.

The researchers found that the face side of the masks had more bacteria, whereas the outer side of the masks contained more fungi.

In addition, longer use of the mask resulted in an increase in fungi but not in bacteria because “fungi and their spores are resistant to drying, they can survive under the condition where masks dry out.”

Non-woven masks were found to have fewer fungal colony counts on the outer side compared to the other two mask types. Non-woven masks have three layers, two-layer fabric with a non-woven middle layer filter.

Researchers said they were surprised to find that there were no significant differences in the numbers of bacteria or fungi on washable or reusable masks that had been washed.

“The proper cleaning method for cotton face masks has been recommended to reduce the microbial load on the masks,” the authors wrote. “However, in the current experiments, we did not find significant differences in bacterial or fungal colony numbers on the masks based on washing.”

Lifestyle Habits

The researchers also examined whether certain lifestyle habits such as gargling, consumption of natto, and use of the different modes of transportation—public transportation, personal vehicle, and walking or biking— had any effect on the microbial counts on the masks.

“We found no differences in the bacterial or fungal colony counts on both sides of the masks among the three transportation systems,” the authors wrote.

There were also no differences in microbial counts on masks of participants who gargled once a day. Gargling is a Japanese custom believed to prevent respiratory infections. The practice is often recommended by the Japanese health authority alongside hand washing as a preventative measure against influenza.

A study from Penn State College of Medicine published in the Journal of Medical Virology in September 2020 found that several types of mouthwash and nasal rinses were effective at neutralizing human coronaviruses, suggesting that the products may have the potential to lessen the amount of SARS-CoV-2 load, or the amount of virus inside the mouth. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.

A small pilot study is currently being conducted by the University of California, San Francisco on whether gargling with certain mouthwash or gargling solutions will reduce viral load in patients diagnosed with COVID-19. The study is expected to complete this September.

Gargling with antiseptic mouthwashes is part of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance’s protocol for “both chronic (ongoing) prevention as well as to avoid getting sick” after an individual has been exposed to the virus.

FLCCC Alliance is a nonprofit organization consisting of critical care specialists who’ve dedicated their time to developing treatment protocols to “prevent the transmission of COVID-19 and to improve the outcomes for patients ill with the disease.”

As for the consumption of natto, soybeans that are fermented with a bacterium called bacillus subtillis or B. subtilliss, the researchers said that the participants who consumed the sticky soybeans, “had a significantly higher incidence of large white B. subtillis colonies on both sides of the masks than those who did not.”

B. subtillis is a bacterium found in soil, water, decomposing plant residue, and air. It is used for “industrial production of proteases, amylases, antibiotics, and specialty chemicals” and is “not considered pathogenic or toxigenic to humans, animals, or plants,” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (pdf).

Pathogenic Microbes

While most of the bacteria and fungi cultured from the masks were not harmful to humans, some were opportunist pathogens, while others were found to cause diseases like bacteria that cause food poisoning and staph infections, and a fungus that causes ringworm, athlete’s foot, and jock itch.

From their findings, the authors of the study suggest that people with a weakened immune system should “avoid repeated use of masks to prevent microbial infection.”

The CDC says that immunocompromised people or those at high risk for severe disease should wear a mask or respirator when there is a high community level of COVID-19.

The health agency did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment on the findings of the Japanese study.

Supporters of universal masking during the pandemic say that masks help to prevent or reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Scientific Evidence

Epidemiologist and researcher Dr. Paul Alexander disagree. He says that there are over 150 studies and articles that conclude cloth and surgical masks are not effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19 and does more harm.

“To date, the evidence has been stable and clear that masks do not work to control the virus and they can be harmful and especially to children,” Alexander wrote in a February op-ed for The Epoch Times.

In a critical review (pdf) of cloth masks used during the pandemic, the authors stated that evidence does not support community masking with cloth masks to limit the spread of the virus.

“The available clinical evidence of facemask efficacy is of low quality and the best available clinical evidence has mostly failed to show efficacy, with fourteen of sixteen identified randomized controlled trials comparing face masks to no mask controls failing to find statistically significant benefit in the intent-to-treat populations,” the authors wrote.

“Although weak evidence should not preclude precautionary actions in the face of unprecedented events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, ethical principles require that the strength of the evidence and best estimates of amount of benefit be truthfully communicated to the public,” they added.

Prior to the pandemic, researchers conducted a small randomized controlled study in 2008 among health care workers in Japan to examine whether surgical masks reduced the incidence of the common cold.

They found that participants in the mask group “were significantly more likely to experience headache during the study period” and concluded that “face mask use in health care workers has not been demonstrated to provide benefit in terms of cold symptoms or getting colds.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times