Last week, Boston Celtics player Enes Kanter ripped the NBA during an interview with journalist Christiane Amanpour.

Amanpour first asked Kanter if the NBA was concerned about his outspokenness regarding Communist China — citing the kerfuffle with Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey and Hong Kong.

Kanter replied that he stands “for justice and freedom” no “matter who it’s for or against,” then offered a comparison between how he was treated for speaking out against Turkey versus how he is allegedly being treated when it comes to China.

“I have been talking about all the human rights violations and injustice [happening] in Turkey for 10 years, and I did not get one phone call. I talk about China one day … I was getting a phone call once every two hours,” the basketball player said.

Kanter then told Amanpour that when he first donned his “Free Tibet” sneakers on the court in Madison Square Garden, “two guys from the NBA” approached him and said that he needed to remove his shoes. When the officials allegedly told him that he wasn’t actually breaking any rules, Kanter kept his sneakers on, and the officials apparently later apologized

“[I’m] getting ready for my citizenship test, and I’ve been studying really hard, and there’s 27 amendments, and my First Amendment is the greatest amendment, is the freedom of speech,” Kanter reportedly told the officials.

Kanter also claimed that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told him that he and the organization were supportive of the player’s comments against China.

“I don’t know how much that is true because if they were really supporting me, they would have put something out there, they … would put like some kind of statement … because I told Adam this too: our team games, the Boston Celtics games, are banned in China, and this is unacceptable just because I talk about the human rights violence that happened over there,” Kanter said to Amanpour.

Enes Kanter has become an outspoken critic of Communist China and Chinese President Xi Jinping. On Friday, the Celtics players released a video defending the sovereignty of Taiwan, to which the president of Taiwan replied with a thankful message.

.@EnesKanter says that he doesn’t care about the cost that he may face from criticizing China. But are the NBA concerned? Kanter told me he has discussed it with commissioner Adam Silver. “I told him… am I breaking any rules?”

“He said, no, you’re not breaking any rules.” pic.twitter.com/v2pDNklsGS

— Christiane Amanpour (@camanpour) November 10, 2021

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

AMANPOUR: So, you say you do not mind about the money, about the influence, about anything, but what about the NBA? They must mind … because now, as we know, the Houston Rockets official who talked about Hong Kong a couple of years ago, they pulled all NBA from Chinese state television, and now Tencent, which is the streaming device, has actually pulled you all from the streaming device — and that is a lot of money. I think they pay … more than a billion dollars to the NBA. So, what do you say about that?

KANTER: I will just tell you this: I am for justice and freedom. It doesn’t matter who it’s for or against. I remember, you know, I have been talking about all the human rights violations and injustices [happening] in Turkey for 10 years, and I did not get one phone call. I talk about China one day … I was getting a phone call once every two hours.

AMANPOUR: Who were you getting phone calls from? Is it from the NBA? Have they said anything? Because they haven’t said anything publicly about you, as far as I can gather.

KANTER: I will tell you a story. I remember, it was the first time, it was our first game actually, it was in Madison Square Garden, and I wore “Free Tibet” shoes and went out there. I remember two, right before the game, it was two guys from the NBA came up to me and said, “You have to take your shoes off. We are begging you.” And I was like, “I’m sorry, what are you talking about?” He said, “You have to take those shoes off; we are getting so many calls,” and I was like, “Is there a rule that I’m breaking by wearing these shoes?” They said “no,” then I was like, “Okay I’m … getting ready for my citizenship test, and I’ve been studying really hard, and there’s 27 amendments, and my First Amendment is the greatest amendment, is the freedom of speech.” And I’m like, I know my rights; you cannot take my rights away from me. And I was like, “I don’t care if I get fined; I’m not going to take my shoes off.” And they told me, “We are not talking about fine, we are talking about getting banned.” I’m like, “Listen, I don’t care if you — whoever is your bosses, go tell them I’m ready to get banned. If I’m breaking any rules, tell me; I’ll be the first one to follow the rules, but if I’m not breaking any rules…”

Obviously, they came and apologized in half time, and they said “Sorry,” but I was like, “I’m not breaking any rules; I’m gonna do what I’m doing.”

AMANPOUR: So, do you think the NBA, therefore, has come to a different kind of understanding of all of this? Because back when the Houston Rockets official Daryl Morey, he tweeted, all he did was tweet in support of pro-freedom and pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and the NBA didn’t back Morey.

But subsequently, in the intervening time, they have said the NBA will not put itself in a position of regulating what players, employees, and team owners say or will not say on these issues. We simply could not operate that way. So, you must be satisfied with their stance.

KANTER: Let me just tell you this first. NBA made me do this, because every time, when one of the NBA teams or the commissioner came out and speak, they say, we are encouraging our players to talk about whatever they want to talk about; we are giving the freedom to our players to talk about all the injustices happening around the world, all the human rights abuse around the world. So, they give me this right; they told me to do this, basically.

But the other thing is obviously I sit down with people from the NBA, and I even sit down with Adam Silver, and had a conversation, and I told him, Adam, listen, am I breaking any rules? Because if I’m breaking any rules, please tell me, I’ll be the first one to follow every NBA rule because NBA gave me what I have and I don’t want to break any kind of rules that you guys have put on. He said, “No, you’re not breaking any rules.” Well, I told them, is the NBA against China? Is NBA and Adam Silver and the all the organizations … all the teams and owners, are they supporting Enes Kanter? He told me, “Yes, we are supporting you against China.”

So that is one. The second thing is, you know, I don’t know how much that is true because if they were really supporting me, they would have put something out there, they … would put like some kind of statement … because I told Adam this, too: our team games, the Boston Celtics games, are banned in China, and this is unacceptable just because I talk about the human rights violence [that are happening] over there. People think I do politics; I don’t do politics. I do human rights.

AMANPOUR: I just want to make sure, you’re not saying the NBA gave you the green light to say this stuff; you’re just saying that their rules are that freedom of expression is an American right, or are you saying they specifically gave you the green light? … So not specifically, but just the general commitment to freedom of speech, right?

KANTER: Right, yes.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/kanter-blasts-nba-claims-he-was-asked-to-remove-free-tibet-sneakers-for-fear-of-being-banned?itm_source=parsely-api&utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email

Alice Albright, recently tapped to lead a foreign aid agency in President Joe Biden’s White House, counts a six-figure investment in a private equity fund controlled by a Chinese Communist Party-run investment firm.

Albright was nominated to serve as Chief Executive Officer of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a federal agency focused on economic development in foreign countries with an operating budget of roughly $800 million. An alum of the Obama administration and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI), she is the daughter of Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who has a long track record of working with Chinese Communist Party influence groups and officials.

Albright’s 81-page financial disclosure reveals an investment worth $100,000 to $250,000 in the China-U.S. Industrial Cooperation Partnership. Formed in November 2017, the $5 billion private equity fund was jointly launched by the state-owned China Investment Corp (CIC) and Goldman Sachs.

CIC, a Chinese Communist Party sovereign wealth fund, describes itself as “a wholly state-owned company, with the mandate to invest and manage China’s foreign exchange reserves.” “We take advantage of Chinese Communist Party’s leadership,” notes the company in its description of its corporate culture.

CIC leadership ranks are also comprised of Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks.

Beyond backers of Albright’s investment being Chinese Communist Party officials, the fund seeks to use American capital to develop Chinese businesses.

Goldman Sachs outlined how the fund would “invest in American companies in the manufacturing, industrial, consumer and healthcare industries, among others, that have or can develop a material business connection to China” in an effort to “enhance commercial linkages and promote market access for US firms in China.”

Biden Climate Advisor Lauded ‘Global Benefit’ Of China’s Exploitative Belt And Road Initiative In Unearthed Op-Ed.

The Cooperation fund “was set up expressly to help U.S. companies penetrate the Chinese market” and “the fund is touting CIC’s involvement as a strategic advantage in accomplishing this goal,” notes Reuters. In confidential marketing documents obtained by the outlet, Goldman Sachs boasted to its clients how the fund would “bring new pathways for growth via China.”

Nick Perry – Joe Biden’s nominee for Ambassador to Jamaica – participated in a lawmaker’s delegation to China aimed at “building friendship” with Chinese Communist Party officials and establishing business ties.

Perry, who’s served as a member of the New York State Assembly for three decades, joined an Asian American Business Development Center’s (AABDC) “Trade Mission to China” in September 2006. Previous trip participant and New York State Senator Malcolm Smith explained the purpose behind the trip as “provid[ing] us with a foundation to build friendship and an ongoing dialogue with Chinese government officials and business leaders” in an AABDC document chronicling Perry’s delegation.

Among the projects AABDC highlighted as one of its successes – in addition to Perry’s China trade mission – was assisting with the outsourcing of American jobs, noting it was helping “an American manufacturer [that] is seeking Chinese factories for order fulfillment.”

A summary of Perry’s trip reveals the China visit aimed to “enhance understanding of the Chinese government’s role in the country’s economic development and growth”:

The delegates’ first-hand experience of China gave them an enhanced understanding of the Chinese government’s role in the country’s economic development and growth. This, in turn, has provided these New York State legislators with a greater ability to effectively address their own constituents’ interests and concerns regarding doing business with China.

To do so, Perry’s delegation “met with Chinese government officials” in “every city [they] visited,” including events such as private dinners hosted by the National People’s Congress. During the trip, Perry, his fellow delegation members, and AABDC executives also “presented a gift” to the Chinese Communist Party Secretary of the Haining Municipality.

MUST READ:  Biden State Department ‘UNABLE’ to Help U.S. Citizens Escape War-Stricken Ethiopia.

Perry provided a testimonial upon returning from the trip, praising the Chinese Communist Party’s development of China:

The economic development of China is remarkable. What stood out for me in all three cities was that even though they are ancient urban areas, I never had the sense that I was in an old city; everywhere, new construction and building is happening!

New Majority Trade Mission … by Natalie Winters

In October, roughly 20 months into the pandemic, China locked down a city of 4 million people. China has not “defeated” COVID-19, and yet Chinese leader Xi Jinping somehow convinced the world to adopt the China model of containment, despite the severe hardship and societal and economic damage caused by lockdowns, school closures, masks, and now forced vaccinations.

The United States and the world have never taken China’s advice on any other global problem in the past. So why was the pandemic response an exception?

Beijing’s original strategy was to cover up the virus. When that failed, it seemed the CCP believed that its legitimacy hinged on its ability to control the virus. Consequently, the CCP took a hard line. Authorities imposed draconian measures when they locked down Wuhan and other cities, which most of the world condemned as a violation of human rights. However, some Western media and politicians were less critical and said that the measures were effective, but they could never be applied to the West. And yet, within months, many countries followed suit.

China’s state media and internet trolls began publicly pushing CCP policies of mass testing, lockdowns, quarantines, masks, and school closures. ProPublica investigated Twitter accounts, supporting China’s pandemic response and its role as the “world’s savior,” and found 10,000 of them to be fake and linked to the Chinese regime. Twitter ended up deleting over 170,000 accounts that were linked to the CCP’s influence campaign.

In the West, mainstream media and some lawmakers began praising China for “flattening the curve” so quickly. In March 2020, scientific journal Nature ran an article about how the rest of the world could learn from China’s handling of COVID-19, suggesting that other countries should emulate China’s lockdowns.

Although Nature supported the Chinese model, it explained that travel bans would only delay the spread, not end the pandemic. It went on to say that the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended against travel bans at the time. The article also mentioned that Singapore had quickly adopted the China model of contact tracing and isolation, and thus brought the virus under control by March 2020. The reality is, however, Singapore was still under lockdown in the summer and has recently began to ease restrictions.

As for school closures, the Nature article made the claim that children were equally as likely to be infected as adults, something which has since been disproved. But the article also said that it was unclear if children could transmit the virus, so it was unknown if school closures would be beneficial. And yet, schools were closed around the world.

Perhaps the most important statement in the Nature article was “China is suppressing the virus, not eradicating” it. The article also goes on to say, “Lockdowns have to end at some point.” And yet, nearly two years later, COVID-19 restrictions are still being implemented.

Xi began touting China’s “success with the virus” as a form of nationalism, which the Chinese public appeared to buy into. The rest of the world also believed it, as they followed China’s lead, locking down their own populations, closing schools, and requiring citizens to wear masks.

The CCP believed that its handling of the virus would catapult China to a position of world leadership. Beijing bragged, through state media and online posters, about the “low death count” in China and mounting deaths in the United States. To appear as the “world’s savior,” Beijing offered concessionary loans to Sri Lanka and other developing countries, whose economies were wiped out by the same virus response that China had recommended. The CCP sent Chinese-made masks, personal protective equipment (PPE), and medical supplies to Spain, Italy, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

In Italy, Chinese health “experts” taught the Italian government how to implement the China-model of pandemic containment.

Thus, China exported contact tracing, masks, lockdowns, and school closures. China sent aid along the “Health Silk Road” to legitimize the debt ridden Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Beijing criticized the United States’ refusal to support the WHO, while widely publicizing China’s engagement with it and other world organizations.

Xi called on world leaders to talk about pandemic response. He held talks with the G-20, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the African Union. Chinese diplomats released media articles and op-eds in the various countries they were stationed in, to highlight the aid that China was dolling out and the expertise that China was imparting to the world regarding containment measures.

State-sponsored media articles stressed how grateful countries around the world were for China’s help in fighting the pandemic. Much of the aid that countries received was not actually aid. They had to pay for it. And a great deal of the equipment was defective. Slovakia received $16 million worth of defective test kits. And Finland purchased Chinese-made masks that turned out to be unsuitable for use in hospitals.

Capitalizing on its alleged successful handling of COVID-19, the CCP sought to take a leading role in global health organizations. Western media apparently bought into the notion that China knew the right way to address the pandemic and began supporting the CCP’s initiatives. China provided funding to the WHO, which then parroted Beijing’s recommendations about the importance of suspending civil liberties and locking down the global economy as a means of preventing the spread of the disease.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the WHO rejected reports provided by doctors in Taiwan, because Beijing opposes Taiwanese representation in international bodies. Instead, the WHO transmitted the CCP’s narrative, praising China’s alleged early response.

The WHO issued a China mission report, which stated: “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history” gaining valuable response time, utilizing an “all-of-government and all-of society approach.”

The WHO report did not include anything about the negative impact of China’s draconian measures. Instead, it endorsed the China strategy, recommending it to the world.

And one-by-one, countries adopted the China model, disregarding the negative impact and ignoring data, which suggested that these methods were not effective at ending the pandemic.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-did-china-get-to-dictate-the-worlds-pandemic-response-part-1_4091086.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

The CIA’s China ops have failed since at least 2010. Double them.

The CIA lags on China intelligence by at least a decade. Only in August did it moot the idea of a “China Mission Center,” which it finally announced on Oct. 7.

The center will reportedly make it easier to leverage agency resources to address the growing China threat, and intelligence failures of the last decade on all things Beijing, China, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But without significantly more resources, the new center will be yet another agency fail.

According to a Nov. 10 Bloomberg report, “A lack of top-tier intelligence on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s inner circle is frustrating senior Biden administration officials struggling to get ahead of Beijing’s next steps, according to current and former officials who have reviewed the most sensitive U.S. intelligence reports.”

The officials say American intelligence finds it increasingly difficult to penetrate Xi’s opaque decision-making and ever-more centralized control of the CCP.

The agency or other officials were surprised, according to Bloomberg, the Telegraph, and the Financial Times, about China’s hypersonic missile test that was reported on Oct. 16, the breaking of the Hong Kong treaty with Britain, the projection of military power over the South China Sea, limits of independent investigation into the COVID-19 origin, cancellation of Chinese IPOs, and increased Chinese hacking.

From 2010 to 2012, Beijing found and killed at least 12 CIA sources in China, through a mole or hacking the agency’s covert electronic communications. At least another half-dozen were imprisoned, according to a 2017 New York Times report.

Previously, a suspected Chinese mole escaped the United States and is now living abroad. CCP spies penetrated Taiwan’s National Security Agency. Chinese operators infiltrated the CIA’s hiring process.

According to The New York Times, “Some officers met their sources at a restaurant where Chinese agents had planted listening devices, former officials said, and even the waiters worked for Chinese intelligence.”

Amateur hour at the CIA costs lives.

Also in 2017, thousands of pages detailing the CIA’s most sensitive cybersecurity hacking tools were themselves hacked and released on Wikileaks. The source of the leak sought “to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons,” according to Wikileaks.

The agency’s current lack of Mandarin speakers, according to Bloomberg, is icing on Beijing’s cake.

The CIA and FBI have failed to address the many U.S. citizens who operate in gray areas of both business in China, the profit of which can be turned up and down by the CCP, and pro-Beijing political influence in Washington, which they can use to demonstrate their “friendship” for China.

These Beijing–New York business interests act to paralyze American defenses against the CCP by promoting the soft-on-China approach, which is therefore pro-business—in the short run. In the long run, America is selling the CCP $2.3 trillion worth of investments and over $600 billion in annual trade, which is plenty of rope to hang itself with.

The root cause of the CIA’s failure is therefore political, at both macro and micro levels. Successive American presidents and congresses are too influenced by U.S. corporations profiting from trillions of dollars worth of business in China. Corporations would rather have Washington ignore the China threat than overturn their applecart of profits. Our top American political leadership, including the CIA’s leadership over multiple administrations, is therefore at fault. China analysts who are closest to the intel have understood the threat all along.

The political problem is also personal, in that the occasional insider threats within the CIA and other powerful American institutions are insufficiently patriotic. They apparently don’t understand that the CIA and other U.S. military and intelligence entities are absolutely critical in the fight against Beijing’s totalitarianism. They see America’s military, intelligence, and police capabilities as a threat to liberty, rather than its defense. We need better vetting and more patriotic teachers—from primary through graduate and post-professional training.

Now America’s applecart is rolling toward the cliff of defeat at the hands of Beijing. It’s unclear whether a last-minute reorientation of intelligence resources will make any difference. But we must try. At this point, along with doubling defense expenditures related to China, especially in terms of large weapons systems with strategic effect, America should be multiplying intelligence expenditures.

We need more of all kinds of intelligence about China, including human intelligence, signals intelligence, and imagery intelligence. All of it costs lots of money. Instead, we’re plowing $1 trillion into the Biden administration’s “infrastructure” programs, some of which can be nabbed by Beijing, while our old China intelligence is getting bureaucratically reshuffled into the CIA’s new center.

Expect more failures down the road until President Joe Biden and Congress do what’s really needed—put real resources behind the CIA.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/penniless-cia-is-weak-on-the-ccp_4100540.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Zhang Gaoli linked to former leader Jiang Zemin’s order of live organ harvesting

News analysis

Zhang Gaoli, the former vice premier of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) State Council, was recently accused of sexual assault against Peng Shuai, a professional tennis star who is 40 years younger than Zhang. Although Chinese authorities have been scrambling to block all related posts, more and more of Zhang’s alleged scandals are being publicized online.

On the night of Nov. 2 in a Weibo post, Peng alleged that she had nonconsensual sexual relations with the 75-year-old Zhang. Peng said that Zhang’s wife was aware of it and “stood guard outside” while Peng was sexually assaulted. The post was deleted 20 minutes later, but a screenshot of the post has been widely circulated in China and abroad. The General Administration of Sports, the CCP’s State Council, and official media held a rare unanimous silence on the matter.

The New York Times noted in an article that Peng’s post was quickly deleted, and even her name and the word “tennis” were not searchable, “reflecting the extraordinary sensitivity within China of discussing misconduct by party leaders.”

As early as 2004, the CCP’s Central Discipline Inspection Commission received several reports about Zhang’s debauched lifestyle and family corruption. However, Zhang claimed publicly that “lifestyle problems and extra-marital affairs are, after all, minor … I am against promoting a puritanical life,” according to Secret China, an overseas Chinese media.

In August 2015, when Zhang was the CCP’s secretary of Tianjin, a chemical warehouse in the port of Tianjin experienced two major explosions. According to the China Earthquake Networks Centre, the first explosion was as powerful as if three tons of TNT had detonated, and the second was equivalent to 21 tons detonating. The two explosions killed a total of 173 people.

Huang Dong, a Macau military commentator, told Hong Kong Oriental Daily News on Aug. 22, 2015, that the Tianjin explosion was related to the city planning of the Tianjin Binhai New Area. Tianjin’s top official, Zhang, gave the green light at the time.

Zhang’s Real Estate and Financial Corruption Cases 

On Nov. 3, the Central Discipline Inspection Commission published eight major corruption cases in Tianjin, some of which are related to the real estate development that Zhang promoted during his tenure as secretary of the Tianjin Municipal Committee.

Since the 18th CCP’s National Congress, a number of officials in Tianjin’s urban construction group, the largest state-owned enterprise in this city, have been arrested including Ma Baiyu, who was known as the “female head of urban construction” during Zhang’s administration in Tianjin.

Zhang was also involved in fraudulently financing private entity funds with $15 billion in Tianjin, according to Liberty Time Net, a Taiwan media.

Like most corrupt CCP officials, Zhang has transferred huge amounts of assets to Hong Kong and overseas through his family.

Listed in the Panama Papers—more than 11 million leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm—are many family members of Communist Party leaders who have set up companies and purchased properties in Hong Kong, and some of them even have permanent Hong Kong resident identity cards.

The Panama Papers detail financial information for more than 214,000 offshore entities. The papers were published beginning on April 3, 2016, when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 300 reporters worldwide wrote a series of stories to expose the hidden infrastructure, political corruption, and the global scale of offshore tax havens.

Family members of at least eight of China’s current and former top-ranking political leaders appear in the Panama Papers as owners or shareholders of secret offshore companies.

Taiwan’s Apple Daily newspaper reported in 2018 that at least six current and former Standing Committee members owned properties in Hong Kong, most of which are owned by the family of Zhang, who purchased nearly $110 million in property under the names of his daughter Zhang Xiaoyan and her husband Li Shengpo. Li himself is listed in the Panama Papers as a shareholder of three offshore companies.

Zhang’s Links to Genocidal Persecution and Live Organ Harvesting

Zhang served in China’s petroleum industry for 14 years as a member of the once-powerful “petroleum gang”— part of former leader Jiang Zemin’s faction—to whom Zhang was very loyal.

According to a 2006 report by Hong Kong’s Apple Daily, the retired Jiang wanted to climb Mount Tai, so Zhang ordered Mount Tai to be “closed for two days” despite it being a public holiday. Zhang also asked local officials to “line up to welcome” Jiang as “the most beloved leader of the whole party, army, and country.” Zhang even specially prepared an eight-person palanquin to carry Jiang up the mountain, while Zhang followed behind.

Since July 1999, when Jiang launched the persecution of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, Zhang has closely followed Jiang’s genocidal policy. Zhang carried out the persecution in Guangdong Province, Shenzhen, Shandong Province, and Tianjin. He is suspected of committing the crimes of genocide and torture, as well as crimes against humanity, according to the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG).

On July 5, 2021, Wang Zhiyuan, the chairman of the WOIPFG, told The Epoch Times that he had spoken with Zhang by telephone on June 24, 2015. At that time, Zhang was on an official visit to Kazakhstan as a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Central Committee and Vice Premier of the CCP’s State Council.

Wang said that during the phone call Zhang indirectly admitted that Jiang was responsible for ordering the organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners—orders that Zhang faithfully carried out.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-former-vice-premiers-scandal-highlights-more-allegations_4091912.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Several provinces and cities in China have released official guideline prices for human vital organs, such as livers, kidneys, and hearts. This is one of the actions taken by local governments following a notice issued by central authorities in July on fees and financial management measures for securing organs for transplant.

According to medical experts familiar with China’s organ transplant market, the actions indicate that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is attempting to normalize the country’s less than transparent organ transplant system as it continues to face pressure to disclose its sourcing of transplant organs.

In a July notice, the CCP ordered provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions to set their own rates for human organs effective Sept. 1.

In Henan Province, for example, six related departments, including the Health Commission, the Department of Finance, and the Market Supervision Administration, jointly issued “standard rates for donated organs.”

According to the list, organs for transplant include livers at 260,000 yuan ($40,700), kidneys at 160,000 yuan ($25,000), hearts at 100,000 yuan ($15,600), lungs at 80,000 yuan ($12,500), corneas at 10,000 yuan ($1,600), pancreas at 50,000 yuan ($7,800), small intestines at 50,000 yuan, and other organ segments.

Price Tags for Human Organs That Make No Medical Sense

Dr. Wayne Shih-wei Huang, a surgeon and director at the IRCAD Taiwan, Asia’s largest training center for minimally invasive surgery, said that the CCP is hoping to whitewash its transplant abuses by putting a price tag on human organs.

Huang told The Epoch Times that the CCP document clearly states that the cost of obtaining what it says are donated organs is calculated based on resource consumption, technology, labor value, and public acceptability.

However, in the organ prices listed by province officials, a heart is much cheaper than a kidney, which makes no sense in terms of medical cost. The cost of obtaining a heart should be higher than that of a kidney, since the heart must be extracted, appropriately stored, and transported within hours.

Huang believes that the pricing of organs is instead a reflection of market value and demand, and nothing to do with medical cost.

In addition, both Hubei and Henan provinces listed different prices for organs for children and adults. The price in Henan province is 100,000 yuan ($15,600) for a child’s liver, less than half of the 260,000 yuan ($41,000) for an adult. The prices for single and double kidneys for children are also lower than those for adults by 60,000 yuan ($9,400) and 80,000 yuan ($12,500) respectively.

Dr. Alex Chih-Yu Chen, medical director of Novartis Japan, told The Epoch Times that in terms of medical costs, organ supply and transplants for children are more difficult and should be more expensive than for adults.

Questionable Donation Figures

Dr. Huang believes that the CCP’s organ transplant system, in which organs are obtained, supplied, and traded, is only open to organ transplant hospitals. The system is not open to the public and not transparent, and is for the hospitals to make money.

“The CCP cannot make its organ transplant system as transparent as that of Western countries,” he said, but it must have a system on the surface for others to see.

He explained that the Red Cross Society of China, which is actually under the control of Beijing, is one of the organizations that documents organ donations and releases data to the national database. It says that in China, “organ donation is voluntary and free.”

The CCP will ostensibly get some organ donation cases, which may be used for media coverage of heartwarming patient stories, Huang said, but China’s Red Cross’s figures cannot be trusted.

Hamid Sabi—an independent counsel on the London-based China Tribunal, which found that forced organ harvesting had taken place “on a significant scale” in China—told a press conference in Belgium on Oct. 27 that the Chinese authorities have used testimony from China’s Red Cross to counter pressure from Europe, the United States, and other countries to provide transparency on its organ donation program.

But the Red Cross Society of China has nothing to do with the International Red Cross, Sabi said—it is simply an internal organ of the CCP that will certify whatever the party’s authorities demand of it.

As for the CCP’s official organ donor database, Sabi said that China’s claims of being able to obtain 2.8 organs per donor—which is 180 times higher than what is achievable by donation systems in Europe and the United States—would still fall far short of providing for the 10,000 transplants officially recorded per year.

Many experts also estimate that the actual number of transplants being conducted in China is magnitudes higher than the official figures.

CCP’s Live Organ Harvesting From Falun Gong Practitioners

A June 2016 report by David Kilgour, the former Canadian Secretary of State for the Asia-Pacific; David Matas, a human rights lawyer; and Ethan Guttmann, a senior American investigative journalist, estimated based on multiple sources of evidence that China could be performing between 60,000 to 100,000 transplants a year. Many indicators point to the main source of these organs being Falun Gong students and other prisoners of conscience caught up in China’s politicized judicial system.

Falun Gong is a spiritual meditation practice that became widely popular in China in the 1990s until it was banned in 1999 and its practitioners became the target of media slander, illegal arrests, and torture.

Reports from the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) also suggest that since the CCP began persecuting Falun Gong, imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners have become a large bank of living human organs for transplants in China.

The WOIPFG searched and analyzed hundreds of thousands of public media reports, papers, and databases from across 891 transplant hospitals and 9,515 transplant surgeons in China over the past 15 years, and found that, between 2000 and 2006, the number of organ transplants being conducted in China experienced exponential growth.

During the same period, at least one million Falun Gong practitioners were arrested and detained in China’s labor camps, prisons, detention centers, and brainwashing centers.

Of note, in addition to the top-rated hospitals in China that are qualified to perform transplants, many unqualified hospitals were transformed into transplant centers or started offering organ transplant procedures.

Eyewitness testimonies, audio recordings from interviews with 45 directors or doctors at 41 of China’s transplant hospitals and centers, and other information and evidence collated by the WOIPFG all point to the widespread forced removal of organs from Falun Gong practitioners across hospitals in China.

William Wang contributed to this report.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/chinese-regime-publicly-prices-human-organs-to-normalize-what-has-partly-been-black-market-trade-experts_4092730.html?utm_source=News&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-11-12-1&mktids=21e17530bfe5dd08e5b39b4b3eb52146&est=LPbY%2BnNqO1rjhFznwCS%2BE3AbUlKD0N2%2B09%2FP9Gz8yliVu%2FF43DiGFnHzY2BJitVxCg%3D%3D

Join Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke in the latest episode of “Truth Over News” as they reveal the latest details surrounding Peter Daszak’s violation of NIH grant requirements and his admission that information regarding the experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are currently subject to censorship by the Communist Party of China.

The National Institutes of Health recently gave EcoHealth Alliance five days to submit any and all unpublished data from its experiments at the Wuhan lab. Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health and pandemic prevention, failed to submit the required material. In a letter to the NIH, Daszak revealed concerning information regarding the quality and integrity of these experiments that may explain why this information was not submitted to begin with.

On Oct. 20, the NIH admitted to Congress that they had funded dangerous gain-of-function experiments conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The NIH also sent EcoHealth a letter giving it five days to provide missing data that was required under the NIH grant. Instead of directly complying with their request, Peter Daszak sent a response to the NIH. He again failed to provide the data, which included a fifth year progress report that was required under the terms and conditions of the NIH grant. This missing report was only discovered due to a lawsuit against the NIH for documents related to EcoHealth. If not for this lawsuit, the unsubmitted progress report would likely remain undetected.

In his letter to the NIH, Daszak claimed the NIH had not pursued EcoHealth for the missing data, among a host of other excuses. He said they had uploaded the report, but the system did not allow them to officially submit it. He also said that the NIH never sent a request for the fifth year report. Daszak however failed to mention whether or not he or other members ever raised the issue to anyone in the NIH. Rather, he continued to point the finger at the NIH for not pursuing EcoHealth when it was his organization that did not submit the required report under their grant agreement.

In his letter, Daszak also revealed a progress report that extended beyond the period covered by the missing report. Daszak noted that the NIH had only required that EcoHealth stop funding work at the Wuhan Institute in April 2020, after President Trump terminated their grant. However, even when the funding was no longer available, Daszak said EcoHealth continued reporting its work, saying “even though the grant was terminated and then suspended, and funding is not available to us to work on this, we have continued to comply with NIH reporting requests, and submitted reporting for years six and seven of this grant.” What types of experiments, if any, were done during this period? As far as the hosts know, these year six and seven reports are not currently made public.

Under the original NIH grant, EcoHealth was supposed to immediately stop any experiments that showed evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 10 times. However, EcoHealth’s 2018 annual progress report described an experiment that exceeded NIH reporting thresholds. In these experiments, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had created a novel coronavirus with a 10,000 times higher viral load. This should have created a cessation of experiments and a review by the NIH. Instead, those experiments continued, even during the time when the fifth year progress report had failed to be submitted. Daszak defends his failure to report on these experiments by claiming that he was not under any duty to stop or report the experiments as the viral load data was based on genome copies per gram, not viral titer.

Daszak Admits Gain-of-Function Research Continued, CCP Censoring Data | Truth Over News [Full Episode]Play Video

Watch the full episode here.

However, the viral load was over 10,000 times greater when it should have remained under 10, making it far more pathogenic than the reporting requirements set forth in the NIH grant. Daszak argued that their work should have been ignored, noting that “given the small number of mice, it is also uncertain whether the survival and weight loss data were statistically relevant.” Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, a long time critic of gain-of-function experiments, responded to Daszak’s reasoning in a tweet, saying “EcoHealth has reached a point of such desperation that it now points to the slipshod character of its research, and the limited predictive value of its research, as defense.”

Daszak also claimed several times that he couldn’t hand over the genetic sequence data to the NIH because that information is currently going through an approval process by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities. In other words, U.S. taxpayers, through the use of a government federal agency, gave Daszak millions of dollars in grant money to conduct advanced gain-of-function experiments, only for the results of those experiments to be withheld and censored under the control of the CCP. This is a breach of the terms and conditions of the NIH grant, which demanded all genetic sequence data be made available, regardless of CCP involvement. The fact that this data remains under the control of the CCP discredits the NIH and Daszak’s claim that their Wuhan experiments could not have caused the pandemic. It is not knowable what viruses were studied because the data has not been released and because it is still being censored by the CCP.

What is known is that EcoHealth did not comply with the reporting requirements and the NIH did not hold them accountable. Even though the two organizations are currently engaged in a conflict of words, they are likely both fighting for the same outcome—to convince the world that they were not involved in the creation of COVID-19.

Watch the full episode for more in depth information on this important topic, and share this article so others can know the truth behind the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Truth Over News” premiers every Tues and Thurs at 5 p.m.—exclusive on EpochTV.

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https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv-review-letter-to-nih-reveals-unreported-dangerous-experiments-at-wuhan-lab-censored-by-the-ccp_4097969.html

They’re at it, again.

Jonathan Mantz – Hillary Clinton’s former Finance Director who’s “raised nearly half a billion dollars over his career for Democratic campaigns” – is now a lobbyist for the American Chamber of Commerce in South China, which seeks to craft policies favorable to American companies doing business in China and routinely partners with the Chinese Communist Party to do so.

Jonathan Mantz, a Principal at BGR Group, “leads the firm’s Democratic outreach efforts,” according to his professional bio and serves as a member of the Finance Committee of the Democratic Governors Association.

“Over the past three decades, Jonathan has held senior positions to elect Democrats to the White House, Senate, House of Representatives and governorships. A leading political strategist, he has raised nearly half a billion dollars over his career for Democratic campaigns,” the summary adds, including positions such as the National Finance Director for then-Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential campaign.

Mantz has also served as the Finance Director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) under Nancy Pelosi.

Following his long stint in Democratic politics, Mantz is now lobbying on behalf of the American Chamber of Commerce in South China. Lobbying registration documents reveal Mantz is lobbying the National Security Council (NSC) and providing “strategic counsel on bilateral issues.”

The chamber counts its primary objective as “promot[ing] the development of trade, commerce, and investment between the United States and the People’s Republic of China” and includes over 2,000 corporations as members. “Through engaging in dialogue with our more than 2,300 members, we formulate policy objectives that represent the immediate interests of the Chamber as a whole, and then pursue them at the local, regional and national levels in the United States and the People’s Republic of China,” asserts the group.

Senate Candidate Jim Lamon Talks Tough on China… While Doing Business With Them.

To do so, however, the group routinely partners with the Chinese Communist Party on events and conferences.

The upcoming China (Shanxi)–U.S. Symposium on Investments is sponsored by the American Chamber of Commerce in South China in partnership with Chinese Communist Party officials from Shanxi province. The group has also organized events in support of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which the U.S. State Department has warned that Beijing “to expand foreign markets for Chinese companies and as a means of drawing nations, particularly their political and economic elites, into Beijing’s geopolitical orbit.”

“Supported by Guangdong Provincial Party Committee and People’s Government of Guangdong Province, it is built as an important high-end platform for business and trade exchange and cooperation, corresponding to the Belt and Road Initiative,” notes the chamber’s event summary.

The American Chamber of Commerce in South China has also sponsored events connecting its members with Chinese Communist Party and military-linked companies such as BGI Genomics, Huawei spin-off Honor, and DJI Drones.

“The delegation will focus on healthcare, manufacturing, and technology industries and offers exclusive opportunities for our members to meet with government officials from the Commerce Bureau of Shenzhen Municipality, Shenzhen Municipal Health Commission, [and] the Drug Administration of Shenzhen Municipality,” notes a description of a recent chamber delegation to Shanghai.

One of the accomplishments of Donald Trump, among many, was that he “red pilled” many Americans on the issue of China, from unfair trade practices to the outright theft of intellectual property. If you were to ask most in the America First base what the top three or four issues are for them, behind election integrity and immigration, China is one of those top issues. 

Which makes it even more important going into the 2022 elections, especially in primaries, that an America First candidate who is consistent across the board on all issues wins the GOP nomination, which brings us to Arizona and the Republican primary for US Senate.

It was already going to be one of the top pick up opportunities for Republicans in 2022, and in the wake of the Virginia elections, Larry Sabato shifted the Arizona seat, currently held by Democrat Mark Kelly, from Likely Democrat to Toss Up.

Because of the critical nature of the race, the GOP primary has now taken on even more importance, which leads to one of the men currently in the race, Jim Lamon.

As a declared candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Arizona, Lamon has claimed that he will put America First and stand up to Communist China. But when it comes to his business practices, he clearly has no intention of putting his money where his mouth is.

Lamon has said that he will “defeat the Communist Party,” and that as a Senator, he will see to it “that goods coming into the U.S. are not made with cheap slave labor, unfettered environmental pollution, and unsafe working conditions.” He has even claimed that his own company, Depcom Power, focuses on buying “American First.”

“We don’t buy Chinese products,” Lamon said in May of 2021. But the records tell a different story.

Unearthed Wuhan Lab Docs Show ‘Bat Lady’ Shi Zhengli Isolating Coronavirus Strains For ‘Direct Human Infection.’

Yet as recently as October of 2020, Depcom had imported several million kilograms of solar supplies from a Chinese company called HT Solar; accounting for just over three-fourths of all trade with Depcom. HT Solar is far and away Depcom’s largest trading partner. It is a subsidiary of HT-SAAE, which is entirely owned and operated by the Communist Chinese government, operating under the China Aerospace Science Technology Corporation (CASC), a government-owned enterprise that was first established in 1956.

In addition to exporting solar power supplies to international buyers such as Depcom, CASC specializes in the manufacturing of ballistic missiles, precision-guided bombs, and other large-scale weaponry. CASC’s marketing arm for missile technology is the China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corporation (CPMIEC).

CPMIEC is currently under sanction by the U.S. government, forbidding all American citizens from doing business with them, after it was discovered that CPMIEC had been exporting ballistic missile technology to Iran and Pakistan. The broader umbrella of CASC was also the subject of sanctions during the Trump Administration, after President Trump determined that it had deep ties to the Chinese military.

On Lamon’s watch, Depcom has even taken legal action against several Chinese companies when it felt it was not provided with supplies that it was owed by such companies. Depcom filed a lawsuit in 2019 against Sunergy California LLC, a California-based subsidiary of China Sunergy Co., which is headquartered in Nanjing. Depcom ultimately reached a court judgment of $3.7 million, which was subsequently disputed; while the ruling was on appeal, Sunergy filed for bankruptcy in 2021.

But Lamon’s business dealings with China do not end there. Depcom has also done business with multiple Chinese companies that benefit from slave labor by Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region.

Biden Climate Advisor Lauded ‘Global Benefit’ Of China’s Exploitative Belt And Road Initiative In Unearthed Op-Ed.

One example is Longi Green Energy Technology, one of several companies that is known to receive supplies from Daqo New Energy Group, which has been documented as profiting off of slave labor by Xinjiang’s Uighurs. In addition to the human rights violations, Longi has direct ties to the Xinjiang Communist Party’s paramilitary wing, the XPCC.

Depcom was also directly involved in the construction of the Pawpaw solar plant in Georgia in 2015, a facility that utilizes over 137,000 solar modules acquired from Trina Solar. Trina is yet another Chinese company with ties to the XPCC and slave labor in Xinjiang. In another similar deal, Depcom was behind the construction ofthe 40MW Boise Solar Farm in Idaho in 2016. The Boise facility was provided with over 175,000 solar modules from Jinko Solar, a Chinese company that, like Trina and Longi, is connected to the XPCC and Uighur slave labor.

With all of Lamon’s Chinese dealings over the years, it is no surprise that Lamon was openly critical of both President Trump’s tariffs against China and his skepticism of “green energy” alternatives. Lamon was prominently featured in a Time Magazine article in 2018 in which he lamented President Trump’s cracking down on trade with China, and admitted to lobbying the Trump Administration to rethink its approach to solar power and trade with China.

Lamon’s track record has indeed been consistent on this issue, as in consistently in the complete opposite direction of an America First agenda. His words on China and America First ring hollow after years of business deals with numerous Chinese companies, and quite frankly, his frequent vigorous defense of such transactions. Hopefully the Republican voters in Arizona become more acquainted with Lamon’s actions before voting in the 2022 primary.

Sonia Aggarwal, a Senior Advisor to President Joe Biden on climate policy, lauded the Chinese Communist Party’s controversial “Belt and Road” Initiative in an unearthed op-ed.

Aggarwal, who’s worked in the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy since January, authored an op-ed for Forbes in December 2017: “The China Belt And Road Initiative Could Help – Or Hurt – Clean Energy In Emerging Economies.”

The article, which concludes that “recent developments suggest hope for China’s green Belt and Road Initiative,” evaluates the progress of the initiative based on its adherence to “green” energy goals. It fails to mention how the Chinese Communist Party has weaponized the Belt and Road Initiative to financially exploit developing countries and expand its global hegemony.

As the U.S. State Department has warned, Beijing “uses the Belt and Road Initiative and other undertakings to expand foreign markets for Chinese companies and as a means of drawing nations, particularly their political and economic elites, into Beijing’s geopolitical orbit.”

Its “infrastructure projects — ports, railroads, highways, dams, industrial parks, civil nuclear facilities and other energy related initiatives, and more — typically rely on imported Chinese workers rather than local labor, and sometimes involve 50- to 100-year business relationships that entrench China’s long-term access to local elites and confer power over key parts of the host country’s critical infrastructure,” warned the department.

Aggarwal fails to cite any of the aforementioned concerns, instead uncritically quoting  International Renewable Energy Agency Director-General Adnan Amin, who claimed “the [Belt and Road] Initiative can not only help to interconnect electricity grids and deploy more renewable energy, but it can also expand electricity markets to countries with extremely high renewable energy potential, including those in Central Asia. China has the technology and the resources, and it can help to achieve these goals by building partnerships and cooperation.”

As U.S. Gas Prices Skyrocket, A Hunter Biden-Linked Chinese Oil Firm is Building Its Largest-Ever Gas Storage Facility.

Aggarwal herself encourages the continued expansion of Chinese energy and increase international reliance on the country:

Due to domestic policy and market advancements, the Chinese grid is already getting better at maximizing energy from renewable resources, but this could be further helped by building out transmission lines within China as well as better integrating with neighboring regions.  And if excess power generation persists on China’s grid, it could be exported to neighboring regions to meet growing energy demand.  Certainly, using the Belt and Road-related overseas investments to build clean power plants rather than coal would help solidify China’s leadership in the global energy industry of the future.

“If China’s Belt and Road Initiative is truly green, it will have a global benefit,” Aggarwal concludes after describing “recent developments” as “promising.”

“Just as the United States looks to be forfeiting its seat at the negotiating table for international trade deals, China is stepping into the lead, going beyond the old-fashioned trade agreement to emphasize infrastructure and better energy connectivity over much of the globe,” she adds.

EcoHealth Alliance – the research group using funds from Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health agency to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology – counted several high-ranking American government officials as research partners during its controversial collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party-run lab.

The unearthed affiliation follows the National Institutes of Health (NIH) admitting the New York-based nonprofit carried out gain of function research with the Chinese military-linked Wuhan lab and failed to report its findings to the federal agency. Gain of function research, which counts support from EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, increases the virulence, lethality, and transmissibility of viruses including bat coronaviruses. Daszak has previously described the viruses he and his Chinese colleagues were manipulating as “killers” in video unearthed by The National Pulse.

In addition to receiving sizable grants from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and hosting Fauci repeatedly as a speaker at its events, EcoHealth Alliance also appears to retain close relationships to additional federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) through its research partnerships.

Three officials from the CDC are listed as active “partners” of EcoHealth Alliance along with one NIH official on the group’s website.

Since September 2012, two years before Fauci’s NIH agency funded EcoHealth Alliance’s bat coronavirus research with the Wuhan lab, Dr. Rima Khabbaz, the Director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases has been listed as on the group’s official partners.

Since April 2015, Dr. Heinz Feldmann, a Senior Investigator at the NIH, has also been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance. Feldman’s NIH biography describes him as a “laboratory expert on high containment viruses (BSL-4)” – the same biosafety level of the Wuhan Institue of Virology facility working on bat coronaviruses. Capt. Jason Thomas, the Biosurveillance Coordinator at the CDC, along with Dr. Stuart Nichol, Chief of the Molecular Biology Section of the Special Pathogens Branch at the CDC, have also been listed as EcoHealth Alliance partners since April 2015.MUST READ:  Here’s What Else Senator Rand Paul Should Have Grilled Fauci On.

All aforementioned federal officials are still listed as EcoHealth Alliance partners, classified as “Science and Policy Advisors,” at the time of publication. Among the group’s other advisors is the Deputy Director for Surveillance and Epidemiology at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and World Health Organization (WHO) officials.

Deleted webpages reveal Bill Gates praising a controversial Chinese Communist Party-backed influence group – the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries – for its efforts to build “friendship.”

Gates, who has a long history of collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party in his personal and professional capacities, visited the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) in June 2014 to deliver a speech on philanthropy.

The CPAFFC has been dubbed the “public face” of the United Front Work Department – a billion-dollar effort executed by the Chinese Communist Party seeking “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign individuals and the policies of foreign states to serve Beijing’s interests,” according to the federal U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission.

Also referred to as “avowedly an arm of the party-state,” CPAFFC has been flagged by the U.S. State Department for its campaigns to “directly and malignly influence” American officials and business leaders.

Despite the CPAFFC’s known efforts to malignly influence Americans, archived webpages from a subsidiary of the CPAFFC, the China Friendship Foundation For Peace And Development, reveal Gates speaking at the association’s headquarters.

Gates’s speech was titled “Invent For The Poor,” and a CPAFFC summary of the event reveals the association’s president was in attendance:

Under the auspices of President Li Xiaolin, Mr. Bill Gates, dressed in a red short-sleeved T-shirt with a smile and confidence on his face, shared his personal experience in philanthropy and called on people to pay attention to the world, especially in Africa.

“He emphasized the non-negligible role played by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries in the world’s friendship and mutual assistance,” noted the CPAFFC’s summary of Gates’s speech.

In 2017, Gates also sent a congratulatory letter to the CPAFFC amidst its World Philanthropy Forum, jointly hosted alongside Tsinghua University. The school is the alma mater of regime leader Xi Jinping and hosts a “Marxist” journalism school, training the next generation of Chinese state-run media propagandists with the assistance of the New York Times, CNN, and others.

On Oct. 26, TikTok executive Michael Beckerman was asked by members of U.S. Congress if the app shares data with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although Beckerman said no, there is reason to think otherwise.

With all this talk of Instagram, it’s easy to forget that other problematic apps exist. In fact, according to a comprehensive survey carried out by analysts at Piper Sandler, Instagram isn’t even that popular among U.S. teens.

Aptly titled “Taking Stock With Teens,” the 91-page report outlines the responses of 10,000 American teenagers. Just 22 percent of respondents listed Instagram as their app of choice; interestingly, 30 percent named TikTok as their favorite app.

The popularity of TikTok is particularly revealing—and, more importantly, particularly worrying. Launched in its current form three years ago, the social media app now has 1 billion active monthly users worldwide; rather incredibly, it has been downloaded in the United States more than 200 million times. Why should we be worried? After all, it’s just a harmless app, right?

Wrong.

As tensions between the United States and China continue to rise, the CCP has upped its cyberespionage game. Contrary to popular belief, TikTok is not a wholly unserious app designed to spread joy around the world. Created by ByteDance, a company with close ties to the CCP, TikTok should be viewed with a great degree of suspicion. As the Wall Street Journal reported back in June, the CCP now expects tech companies, including ByteDance, to share all its data with Party members.

At the very same time the CCP demanded access to data, TikTok introduced a new biometric policy solely catered to its U.S.-based users. The app now takes two key pieces of biometric data—“faceprints” and “voiceprints”—from every single U.S.-based user. The former involves the collection of digitally recorded representation of a person’s face; the latter involves recording different aspects of a user’s voice, including resonance, reverberation, intonation, rhythm, and pacing.

With at least 100 million users in the United States, that’s a lot of personal information. Also, why would TikTok, a company with headquarters in Beijing, require this sort of information from U.S.-based users? More importantly, why is this policy aimed solely at U.S.-based users? This is a question Congress needed to ask Beckerman. It didn’t.

Could the CCP Be Weaponizing TikTok?

According to former employees, the answer appears to be yes. By providing users with algorithmically tailored videos, TikTok can easily be used to disseminate disinformation.

According to Kara Frederick, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, this makes the app the perfect vehicle for spreading pro-CCP propaganda. Young Americans spend an inordinate amount of time on TikTok. In fact, American app users now spend more time on TikTok than they do on YouTube.

Instead of asking if the CCP would ever use TikTok to influence young, impressionable Americans, a better question to ask is this: why wouldn’t it use the app to influence Americans? After all, it already uses Twitter to spread harmful propaganda.

As the nature of warfare changes, with boots on the ground being replaced by cyberhacks and killware, the threats we face also change.

TikTok is now the fastest growing app in the world; it provides a window into the lives of millions of Americans. The CCP already uses similar apps to spy on its own citizens, according to a recent report by Cure53, a German cybersecurity firm. We must wake up to the realities now facing us: If something can be weaponized, it will be weaponized. The United States and China are currently engaged in a new cold war; with the latter busy spreading disinformation about the former. The U.S. government should be on full alert.

Which brings us back to the potential threat posed by TikTok. Congress is responsible for making laws that influence the daily lives of 330 million Americans; rather alarmingly, it doesn’t appear to understand the threat posed by social media apps. Furthermore, the Biden administration doesn’t seem to care. In June, at the very same time as the aforementioned WSJ story was published, President Joe Biden chose to revoke and replace executive orders banning TikTok.

Now, China, a country known for extensive cyberespionage operations, is free to use the app to further divide a country that has never been more divided. Charles de Gaulle, the former president of France, once called silence “the ultimate weapon of power.” Today, however, social media is the ultimate weapon. The Chinese Communist Party knows this. Sadly, the U.S. government doesn’t. Such ignorance could prove to be very costly.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-threat-from-tiktok-is-real-congress-needs-to-wake-up_4083636.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Focus on ‘genetically engineered,’ not on ‘accidental leak’

Let me just come out and say it: COVID-19 was engineered by China in cooperation with the democrats, deep state, elites of the world, etc. to oust Trump and take over and destroy the USA [US Patriot].

The recently declassified U.S. intelligence community report on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 muddies the water.

There had been months of open-source reporting from scientists around the world speculating that the likely origins of the virus was the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), not the so-called zoonotic disease theory (for example, a naturally-occurring virus jumped from an animal—supposedly a bat in a Wuhan “wet market”—to a human) that has been widely propagated by the state-run Chinese media, the highly politicized World Health Organization, and medical trade journals like The Lancet, and Western media anxious to divert attention from China.

Even a U.S. government agency, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, had concluded in a classified report in May 2020 “that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation.”

But on Oct. 29, an article in The Wall Street Journal quoted from a declassified intelligence report that made this incredible claim: “Researchers at a Wuhan, China, laboratory were probably unaware of the existence of the virus that causes Covid-19 before the pandemic began in late 2019, and if it leaked from the lab, it was likely the result of an accident not connected to deliberate genetic engineering.” Incredible, as in not believable at all!

Here is one item that was conveniently dropped down the memory hole in compiling that “intelligence report” and the Oct. 29 WSJ story that torpedoes the contention that the zoonotic theory is still possible. Back in June on its own pages, The WSJ reported that the CGG-CGG amino acid sequence found in the virus is manmade and can only have been inserted through gain-of-function research, as the CGG-CGG sequence is not found in nature.

How did the U.S. intelligence community sidestep that inconvenient truth in concluding that “U.S. government analysts cannot determine whether the global pandemic emerged when the virus passed to humans from an animal, or from a laboratory accident”? Did the 18 intelligence agencies that reviewed the final report neglect to review that study because the story reporting it was behind a paywall and not readily accessible?

A second item conveniently forgotten was the study completed by British professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sorensen in May 2021, which claimed “that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab.” The two scientists also claimed to have first-hand evidence of Chinese “retro-engineering” in hand for over a year, but were ignored by the scientific community and others. Another stake in the heart of the zoonotic theory!

The final inconvenient truth is from The Oxford Student, which provided this final stake in the heart of the zoonotic theory: “Research by Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Fellow, Professor David Macdonald, has shown that neither bats nor pangolins were sold at Wuhan’s wet markets between May 2017 and November 2019.”

To summarize:

1. The Oct. 29 WSJ article quoted a U.S. intel community report that claimed the following: a) that researchers at the WIV were “probably unaware” of the virus before “patient zero” contracted it, and b) the virus was not “connected to deliberate genetic engineering.”
2. The virus contains a CGG-CGG sequence not found in nature, ergo it was genetically engineered.
3. Evidence of Chinese virus “retro-engineering” has been suppressed for well over a year.
4. There were no bats or pangolins sold in the Wuhan wet markets between May 2017 and November 2019.
5. Conclusion: The zoonotic theory is a farce and complete misdirection.
6. Secondary conclusion: Open-source research-derived evidence trumps classified obfuscation by the U.S. intelligence community.

No facts have ever been presented by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that “patient zero” was anywhere other than in Wuhan city, Hubei Province. In fact, all clinical evidence gathered to date points directly to Wuhan as ground zero for the outbreak. The only question is whether the outbreak was mendacious and accidental, or mendacious and purposeful, because the CCP lies have persisted regardless of which is correct. Regardless of which is true, the virus was human-engineered through gain-of-function research.

The U.S. intel community cannot conclude which alternative is correct, either, and apparently want us to believe a theory that the lab researchers who handled virus-contaminated material were simply unaware of the potential dangers, and blithely went about their jobs in a biosafety level 4 laboratory without taking appropriate personal precautions. Who truly believes that fantasy?

Focusing on “accidental release” rather than the virus origin itself is a poor attempt to exonerate the CCP. Even though that U.S. intel community report concluded that almost certainly the virus originated in Wuhan, never mind pressing the CCP for accountability for that bio-engineered virus that is still destroying the world economy and the lives of many innocents around the world. If the virus had not been bio-engineered in the first place, whether it was “leaked” purposely or accidentally would be irrelevant because the ensuing damage would not have occurred.

The state-run Chinese media tell us everything we need to know about the true origins of the virus. They know perfectly well that the virus was engineered, with the WIV being its last port of call before it was released into the human population. Denial and blame-shifting, including by Xi Jinping and his wolf warrior diplomats, mask that reality as they seek to avoid the financial pain that is coming when world consensus develops that restitution from the Chinese regime for the damages inflicted by the CCP virus is warranted and lawful.

And denial and blame-shifting about the virus origins has continued unabated in Chinese state-run media from early 2020 to the present day. Here are a few recent headlines:

• “Objective, scientific, responsible attitude should be adopted for COVID-19 origins tracing: Chinese FM [Foreign Ministry]”—People’s Daily
• “China slams ‘declassified assessment on COVID-19 origins’ released by U.S.”—Xinhua
• “Stop scapegoating China! Chinese FM rejects US intelligence-led origins-tracing report”—Global Times

Conclusion

When all is said and done, and when all the CCP propaganda and denials are deconstructed, the facts remain—the communist Chinese regime and its media mouthpieces know that the human-engineered SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Biosafety Level 4 laboratory. And the CCP knows that the world will soon be knocking on its door, demanding restitution. Hence its continuing complete denials in the face of all evidence to the contrary, even when a U.S. intelligence community report provides them with a little bit of shade.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/covid-19-origin-was-it-an-accidental-lab-leak-of-a-genetically-engineered-virus_4088601.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Former Senator Cory Gardner – an establishment Republican and frequent critic of the MAGA agenda – is partnering with a premier Chinese Communist Party-linked influence group flagged by the U.S. government for its efforts to coerce American leaders to “take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing.”

Gardner, who called on Donald Trump to drop out of the 2016 presidential race and declared he would not vote for the candidate, is joining the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) less than one year after losing his Senate seat.

The former Colorado Senator is headlining a CUSEF webinar – “What to Expect from the Upcoming Biden-Xi Virtual Summit” – alongside Tsinghua University Professor Chen Qi. The alma mater of Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, Tsinghua University has a history of launching cyberattacks against the U.S. government.

CUSEF was founded by the Vice-Chairman of the “highest-ranking entity overseeing” China’s United Front, which the U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission identifies as Beijing’s effor “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.”

CUSEF has deployed this tactic on American journalists and former Congressmen, offering free trips to the country in exchange for “favorable coverage,” according to Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings. The trips function as part of a broader effort to “effectively disseminate positive messages to the media, key influencers and opinion leaders, and the general public” regarding the Chinese Communist Party. The November 9th CUSEF event is also held “in partnership with the Association for Former Members of Congress.”

The intelligence community (IC) recently declassified the detail backing its predictably inconclusive, highly equivocal analysis of the Chinese coronavirus’s origin. Remarkably, the sole point on which intelligence officials seem confident—that COVID-19 was not a bioweapon, the most disturbing theory of all—is the one on which they provide the thinnest, weakest, and most oddly-approached argument. To point this out is not to endorse the bioweapon theory, but to call into question the rigor of the intelligence community’s (IC) analysis.

According to the newly-released analysis, the “IC assesses China did not develop SARS-CoV-2 as a biological weapon.” It provides one bullet-point to justify this position, claiming that bioweapon allegations are rooted in “scientifically invalid claims,” and that proponents lack “direct access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” or “are suspected of spreading disinformation.”

Two of these three points do not actually refute the claim. They merely call into question the credibility of the claimants. One only counters the claim vaguely.

The IC points readers to an annex for further reading wherein the IC, in an apparent bid to bolster its case, combats the argument of a single unnamed Hong Kong virologist, who worked in a WHO-affiliated lab. Said virologist, presumably Dr. Li-meng Yan, contends that the coronavirus was a bioweapon created by Beijing and intentionally released by researchers. Analysts write that this doctor’s view is: “inconsistent with available technical information on coronaviruses … [and] that … [her] articles contain several technical inaccuracies and omit key data points …. The scientific community did not peer review these articles and some publicly rejected the articles’ claims as scientifically unsound.”

This is the entirety of the IC’s public case against the bioweapon theory.

Now, all else being equal, the inherent riskiness and unpredictability of a bioweapon gambit logically would make it an unlikely explanation.

And those U.S. government officials with even the most hardened and cynical view of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have never marshaled evidence for it. Perhaps the closest the federal government has ever come to implying that there might be anything malicious behind the coronavirus’s origin was a portion of the Trump State Department’s January 2021 fact sheet. It raised the point that “Secret military activity” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology merited greater scrutiny, invoking “concerns about China’s past biological weapons work,” and noting that WIV had “collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military.” This work included engaging in classified research on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017, some of which involved laboratory animal experiments.

It may well be that the evidence of the Chinese coronavirus’s natural origin or lab leak is far more compelling.

It may well be that the IC’s summary statement that most analysts assess that the Chinese coronavirus was not genetically engineered, and that “Chinese officials probably did not have foreknowledge” that it existed before its outbreak, indicate the bioweapon theory is bunk..

But the IC does not state it explicitly. It is silent on the points raised by the Trump State Department. It does not rule out the bioweapon theory by addressing the basic questions it ought to have considered such as:

• Do Chinese authorities have the will and capability to develop and deploy a bioweapon akin to the Chinese coronavirus?
• Would they have had a motive to develop and deploy one in late 2019?
• What would the cost-benefit analysis have looked like in the eyes of the ruling communist regime?
• What direct evidence is there, if any, to suggest or dispel the idea China intentionally created and/or released the coronavirus?

Maybe the IC is sitting on a much deeper analysis eliminating the most malicious theory. But if so, it has not shown it to the world.

It may well be that the IC believes that the bioweapon theory is so far-fetched and outlandish on its face that it is not even worth legitimizing or entertaining. Prior to its 90-day review back in May, it had already prejudged that the two most plausible theories were lab leak or natural occurrence, and it clearly directed its focus to those two theories.

This may all be reasonable.

But it is also reasonable to ask why it chose to make the case against the bioweapon theory in such an indirect, and therefore unpersuasive fashion.

Combined with other intelligence failures on measures large and small, and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s assessment that the IC had taken a politicized approach to China on another sensitive issue, the IC’s analysis becomes more questionable. One would think it would have wanted to have more persuasively dispelled this theory given the disinformation concern it raised.

Stealthy underwater explosions, drone fighter jets, and military AI reveal the CCP’s technological aggression

The Chinese military is unveiling a range of sophisticated military technologies, from underwater stealth attacks against foreign ports, to drone fighters and military artificial intelligence (AI).

China’s military is testing stealthy underwater explosions for purposes of the destruction of foreign ports, according to the Global Times, an ultra-nationalist news outlet controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“If we can use stealthy ways, like underwater explosions to destroy the ports, we can kill off the enemy’s war potential,” Captain Zhao Pengduo, the deputy director of the Naval Port Demolition Test Program, said on a China Central Television (CCTV) program.

Just in case the West missed it, the Global Times translated the comments and published them on Oct. 25. The testing and its publication, in English, could be an attempt to prove the credibility of China’s naval threat to the United States as tensions rise over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Japan’s Senkaku Islands, all of which Beijing claims as its territory. The CCP thus reveals that its intentions are not honorable.

Scientific sensors were placed on the small wharf for the test prior to its destruction. Chinese state media reported that “as the explosion took place, nearly 1,000 pieces of data were gathered, which were then analyzed to accurately evaluate how the wharf was damaged … noting that this will provide scientific support to attack hostile ports in a real war.”

According to a Beijing military expert quoted by the Global Times, “This tactic can play a significant role in many combat scenarios, including countering the US’ naval warfare aimed at China.”

The expert continued, “Since the US now understands its large vessels like aircraft carriers and large military facilities near China are vulnerable to attacks, it is scattering its forces to … smaller locations.”

The expert claimed that the scattering of the U.S. Navy would make logistics, command, and communications more difficult, presumably forcing U.S. ships to rely on numerous regional ports that are vulnerable to China’s stealthy underwater explosions. Beijing’s military strategy is apparently to force the failure of port-based logistics chains upon which the U.S. and allied navies rely.

Stealthy underwater explosions could be facilitated by AI enabled drones. So as concerning is a new report from Georgetown University that claims the Chinese military could be spending more on AI than the United States.

Based on publicly-available Chinese military procurement records, the Georgetown researchers conclude that the Chinese military spends between $1.6 billion and $2.7 billion annually on AI; while the United States only spent from $800 million to $1.3 billion last year. The Chinese military’s primary source of AI technology may be the United States, according to the report.

Georgetown researcher Ryan Fedasiuk, who coauthored the report, claims that the Chinese military bought AI systems “designed to identify undersea vehicles, wargame Taiwan operations, track U.S. Navy ships, and deploy electronic countermeasures.”

AI will be critical to the future of air combat as well. Simulations over the past couple of years have shown that AI-enabled fighter jets often out-compete their human-only cousins.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on Oct. 29 that China’s air force could test the world’s first two-seat stealth fighter within the next two weeks. One of the pilots would operate the plane, a variation of the J-20 Weilong Mighty Dragon, and the other will operate AI-enabled “loyal wingman” drones that accompany the J-20 into battle.

“Experts said the variant showed China had beaten the US and other competitors,” according to the SCMP, which is owned by China’s Alibaba Group. Development of the J-20 variant “was an attempt to prove that the US concept of next generation air dominance (NGAD) could be successfully applied in Chinese aircraft technology,” the report said.

Prior news of China’s hypersonic missile development, and installation of hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missile silos in the Xinjiang region, add to more recent concerns of underwater explosion tests, AI progress, and stealth fighter jet development to paint a dim picture of the CCP’s intentions and willingness to execute goals such as the invasion of Taiwan.

U.S. lawmakers and regulators recently responded to Beijing’s increasingly threatening behavior, including through the essential disruption of China’s theft of American intellectual property that fuels the Chinese military-industrial complex. One effective way to approach this is by clamping down on some of China’s most important technology companies.

On Oct. 26, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) appealed to national security considerations in the revocation of a China Telecom subsidiary’s authorization to operate in the United States.

The U.S. Senate voted unanimously on Oct. 28 for legislation that prevents U.S. regulators from granting new equipment licenses to five companies designated on the FCC’s “Covered Equipment or Services List.” The companies include Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision, and Zhejiang Dahua, all of which are considered to be security threats.

In a vote of 420 to 4, the House had previously approved the law. The majority is veto proof in both houses, so President Joe Biden will likely sign the bill into law shortly.

But restrictions on Beijing’s ability to steal American technology are entirely inadequate to date. The Georgetown study found that the U.S. Commerce Department only restricts 22 of 273 firms that supply the Chinese military. Fedasiuk wrote in a tweet, “Almost none are subject to financial sanctions.”

The United States must get much more serious about defeating Beijing’s plans to steal American technology and use it to build the CCP’s economic and military strength against democracy and human rights on a global scale. More subsidies of American technology, before stopping the technology leakage problem, could only make it worse. The $250 billion U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, for example, is currently held up in the House. It includes massive technology subsidies geared for the competition with China, and should be revised to ensure that the CCP does not thereby benefit more than America.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-military-plans-foreign-port-destruction_4077629.html

Nearly 1000 U.S. funded grants from Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins have landed in the laps of collaborators of the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Over 20 American scientists who have received taxpayer funds from 637 grants by Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have also served as visiting lecturers and researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.

The unearthed affiliation between the nearly two-dozen Fauci-funded researchers at the controversial lab – believed to be at the heart of COVID-19’s origins – follows the National Institutes of Health (NIH) admitting that Fauci’s agency funded “gain-of-function” research at the institute in partnership with the American non-profit group EcoHealth Alliance.

In addition to EcoHealth Alliance researchers such as Peter Daszak working with the lab on “killer” viruses, several American professors and researchers who’ve received grants worth millions from Fauci have also collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Unearthed annual reports from 2011, 2012, and 2013 reveal a section titled “Visiting Scientists and Scientific Lectures,” which lists the names of various non-Chinese researchers who’ve taught at or worked with the Chinese Communist Party-run lab. The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Chinese language website also reveals the identities of several researchers from additional years.

Among the 21 researchers is Stuart Le Grice, who works at the NIH’S National Cancer Institute (NCI) and has received 16 grants from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who lectured on “Extending Small Molecule Therapeutics to Cellular and Viral RNAs” in 2018. “At the meeting, Professor Stuart Le Grice first briefly introduced the important impact and application prospects of small molecule drugs that bind to cell or viral RNA in the development of new therapeutic strategies,” explains the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s summary.

BOMBSHELL: National Institutes of Health Admits Fauci Lied About Gain-Of-Function Funding in Wuhan.

Another Wuhan Institute of Virology Visiting Lecturer, Professor Anne Simon, addressed the lab on the “Non-Template Functions of an RNA Virus Genome,” according to an unearthed annual report from 2012. Several visiting scientists have also taught the lab about vaccine development: Tian Wang, who has received 25 NIAID grants, lectured on “Flavivirus: Disease Mechanism and Vaccine Development” and Michael McVoy, who has received 26 NIAID grants, lectured on “Cell Culture Models of Cytomegalovirus Infection: Pitfalls and Epiphanies for Vaccine Development.” 

In some cases, Chinese Communist Party officials were in attendance at the Fauci-funded researchers’ lectures, as revealed on the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website.

Galveston National Laboratory Director James Leduc, who “discussed the prevention and control of new infectious diseases” and “research and cooperation in the field of biosafety management” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2014, had a “cordial talk” with the lab’s Chinese Communist Party Committee Secretary:

Researcher Yuan Zhiming, Dean of the Wuhan Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Secretary of the Party Committee and Deputy Director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, on behalf of the leaders of the Institute welcomed Professor James Leduc’s visit and had a cordial talk with him.

“Through this exchange, the two parties hope to jointly build a good contract platform, establish an efficient cooperation mechanism, further strengthen communication and exchanges, integrate resources, expand channels, and carry out extensive development in the field of new infectious disease prevention and biosafety management and training. Cooperation and exchanges will make positive contributions to the global fight against emerging infectious diseases,” notes the lab.

COVID-19 Vaccine Advisor To FDA, CDC Attends Wuhan Conference Featuring Chinese Military Researchers.

In addition to Fauci-funded researchers affiliating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, six additional researchers counting funding from separate National Institutes of Health (NIH) agencies have also taught at the lab.

Former National Cancer Institute Senior Investigator Dimiter Dimitrov and current NIH Senior Investigator Zheng Zhiming are among the NIH scientists who’ve shared their taxpayer-funded expertise with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

John Thornton has ties to Chinese propaganda group, Belt and Road projects

The namesake of the Brookings Institution’s China Center chairs a company that facilitates investments in China’s global infrastructure initiative and has served on the board of an alleged Chinese propaganda agency, facts that were not disclosed in Brookings literature on those topics.

John L. Thornton, the chairman emeritus of the Brookings board of trustees, has served since 2016 as chairman of the Silk Road Finance Corporation, a Communist Party-backed fund that develops projects for the Belt and Road Initiative, which the U.S. government considers a national security threat. He is on the board of China’s Confucius Institutes, which Beijing allegedly uses to advance propaganda in American schools. Scholars at Brookings’s John L. Thornton China Center have defended “Belt and Road” and Confucius Institutes without disclosing that Thornton serves on organizations that support the initiatives.

Brookings and other prominent think tanks in recent years have come under intense scrutiny amid concerns that they serve as shadow lobbying organizations for their corporate and foreign government donors. The Chinese government’s partnerships with think tanks have especially drawn scrutiny because of Beijing’s intense foreign propaganda efforts. The Washington Free Beacon reported that Brookings partnered with Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, which the FBI has investigated for spy activity. Brookings and the academy have hosted multiple forums in recent years to encourage Belt and Road projects in the Middle East.

Thornton, a former president of Goldman Sachs, has since 2004 given at least $16 million to Brookings, including $5 million to form the China Center, according to Brookings’s annual reports.

Thornton’s perch at Brookings and his ties to Wall Street have given him extensive access to Chinese government officials. He reportedly spent six weeks this summer meeting officials in Beijing and Xinjiang as part of unofficial backchannel diplomatic talks. Thornton reportedly consulted with the White House before he made the trip, suggesting that he had some approval from the Biden administration.

Thornton, who in 2008 was awarded China’s friendship medal, in 2018 formed a consortium of Wall Street bankers to maintain dialogue with their Chinese counterparts amid escalating tensions between Washington and Beijing. Wall Street sees China as an untapped investment opportunity, while critics fear that investments in China will create national security risks and make companies beholden to the authoritarian Chinese government.

A leading transparency watchdog group says think tanks like Brookings are vulnerable to foreign overtures because of their ability to influence public policy. At least 17 Brookings scholars have joined the Biden administration. Former Brookings China fellow Rush Doshi serves as director of the National Security Council’s China portfolio.

“The more prestigious you are, that means you’re more of an attractive target for an international player like China, Saudi Arabia,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the government affairs manager at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “The more well known you are, the more well-connected you are, the more prestigious you are, as a think tank, the more you’re likely going to have these overtures and entanglements.”

One intelligence analyst says that Thornton’s recent visit to China, during which he met with Chinese vice premier Han Zheng, undercut U.S. policy and aided China’s propaganda efforts.

“It’s very problematic for a soft-on-China individual with conflicts of interest to visit China for negotiations,” said Anders Corr, an intelligence analyst with the Journal of Political Risk. “Thornton did his own country a disservice while selfishly putting himself into the limelight,” said Corr, who also blasted Thornton for visiting Xinjiang, where the Chinese government carries out genocide against Uyghur Muslims.

While Brookings scholars have at times criticized China for its human rights abuses, scholars with the China Center have defended the institutions linked to Thornton.

David Dollar, a senior fellow at the China Center, in a report last year urged U.S. officials to “dial down anti-China rhetoric” regarding the Belt and Road Initiative. He also called the popular criticism of Belt and Road as a debt trap for poor countries “exaggerated.”

Jamie Horsley, another Brookings scholar, in an essay this year defended Confucius Institutes against allegations that they serve as espionage hubs for the Chinese government. Cheng Li, the director of the China Center, decried a growing divide between U.S.-China education exchange programs in a piece also published by the website for the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a think tank affiliated with the Communist Party. Li supports cultural exchange programs, which U.S. counterintelligence officials have said are hotbeds of Chinese espionage activity.

The China-United States Exchange Foundation has given Brookings at least $500,000 since 2005. CIA director William Burns testified this year that when he served as president of Carnegie Endowment, another Washington, D.C., think tank, he severed ties with the foundation over its influence activities.

Thornton’s position at Silk Road Finance Corporation may pose an even bigger conflict of interest for Brookings.

Silk Road Finance vice chairman Shan Li in 2016 and 2017 attended forums that Thornton hosted for an exclusive group of former American government officials, Chinese officials, scholars, and business leaders. Li serves on the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a Chinese Communist Party-backed advisory group that supports Silk Road Finance. The Chinese government says the conference is an “important organ” for the Communist Party.

Former U.S. government officials, including Jon Huntsman and Janet Napolitano, attended the 2016 event, as did Commerce Department official Stefan Selig. Then-Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe (D.) attended the 2016 event. The Chinese delegation consisted of several Chinese university officials, the director at the official think tank for the People’s Liberation Army, and then-Chinese ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai.

Cui has expressed gratitude to Brookings for the work the institution has done on U.S.-China relations. “I also want to thank the Brookings Institution for its long-term support for the development of the China-U.S. relationship,” he said at a webinar hosted by Brookings in August 2020.

Officials with the International Monetary Fund, which monitors the success of Belt and Road projects, attended the events alongside Li. The president of the China Development Bank, one of the largest funders of Belt and Road projects, attended the 2017 forum. Silk Road Finance in 2016 partnered with the China Development Bank and other investors to build renewable power plants in Kuwait.

Li’s position with Silk Road Finance is disclosed in literature for the forums, while Thornton is identified only by his position at Brookings.

Javier Solana, a distinguished fellow at Brookings, serves as international adviser for Silk Road Finance, though Brookings’s biography for Solana lists numerous other affiliations. Solana “provides counsel” on research programs at Brookings and participates in policy debate.

Andrea Risotto, a Brookings spokeswoman, said that the Brookings China forums were held to bring “together stakeholders from the United States and China to foster greater understanding on pressing issues of the day and to develop pragmatic and innovative ideas on how to solve problems facing society.”

Risotto also said Brookings prohibits its donors and board members from influencing its scholars’ research and policy recommendations.

“Moreover, our supporters, including our Board of Trustee members, have a responsibility to safeguard the independence of the institution,” Risotto told the Free Beacon.

“Our bylaws explicitly prohibit the Board or its members from determining, controlling, or influencing how research is conducted or the conclusions reached.”

But Brookings has faced accusations in the past of tailoring its research and programming to the demands of its corporate and foreign donors. The New York Times reported in 2016 that Brookings promoted a project to support Lennar Corporation after the home builder donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the think tank. Brookings officials also lobbied the State Department on behalf of the Norwegian government, another major donor to the think tank.

Brookings has faced other conflict of interest allegations for its China-related activities. The Washington Post reported in 2018 that Brookings published a report sponsored by Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant that has since been blacklisted by the U.S. government. The report praised surveillance equipment used in African cities but failed to disclose that the products were Huawei’s. Huawei donated $300,000 to fund the report.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/brookings-institution-boosts-china-initiatives-linked-to-board-member/

Neil Bush – son of former President George H. W. Bush – co-sponsored a forum with a Chinese Communist Party-controlled influence group, repeatedly asserting that it “doesn’t matter where” COVID-19 originated.

Neil Bush, the founder and Chairman of the George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations, co-hosted the online forum “50 Years of US-China Exchange in Retrospect: The Bush Legacy and Beyond” with the Center for China and Globalization (CCG).

The CCG is a key group within the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), a systematic foreign influence operation seeking “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and influence Westerners to “take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies,” according to the U.S. government.

Accordingly, Neil Bush downplayed the importance of the hunt for COVID-19’s origins – which many experts believe to be the Wuhan Institute of Virology – and dismissed the likely possibility that the virus escaped from the Chinese state-run lab.

“Who cares where it originated,” Bush asks before reiterating:

“Whether it originated in a lab or from a bat or from the United States or from wherever – who cares?”

“Throw away the crazy conspiracy theories and just assume there was an origin of some kind – doesn’t matter where it originated,” he later emphasizes.

Despite Neil Bush’s apathy towards unearthing the origins of COVID-19, he confidently debunks the theory that the virus was released intentionally.

“I reject the idea that there was some malicious effort to release a virus that causes a pandemic,” he asserts before adding, “I think that’s a crazy notion that there was some intent from one side or the other to do this on purpose.”

Lancet COVID Origins Investigator Wins $1 Million Chinese Prize For Claiming Virus Developed Naturally

David Firestein, the President and CEO of the George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations who also participated in the dialogue, affirmed Neil Bush’s stance on COVID-19’s origins while adding “the idea that this was something that was unleashed upon the world with intentionality is ludicrous and just not a serious idea.”

Watch:

Multiple potential witnesses pulled out of a congressional committee hearing on U.S.–China economic relations because of fear of backlash from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Entrepreneurship, and Capital Markets.

Sherman made the disclosure at the outset of the Oct. 26 hearing, which was convened to examine risks to U.S. investors posed by Chinese companies and other foreign issuers.

“We have great witnesses here today, but the most articulate witnesses are those who are not here today,” he said. “Their decision to pull out of this hearing due to pressure—economic pressure—speaks loudly to China’s strong economic power over politics and economics here in the United States.”

Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the committee, expressed shock at Sherman’s assertion, asking for more details. Sherman declined to identify the potential witnesses, but indicated they come from the finance sector.

“I’m not here to end any careers on Wall Street by explicitly identifying names,” Sherman responded. “There are those who we were in discussions with, some who actually agreed to come testify. But they notified us they decided that it was in the interest of their careers that they not appear before us.”

The witnesses who did appear were Karen Sutter, a specialist in Asian trade and finance at the Congressional Research Service; Samantha Ross, the founder of AssuranceMark, the Investors’ Consortium for Assurance; Eric Lorber, a director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; and RWR Advisory Group senior analyst Claire Chu.

The hearing touched on a wide array of China topics—including IP theft, espionage, and the CCP’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslims—but was focused on U.S. investors buying stock in Chinese companies. The hearing follows the disastrous initial public offering by Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Global Inc. in June, when it raised $4.4 billion in U.S. markets only to have the Chinese regime begin an investigation into the firm days later—causing Didi’s stock to tank.

China’s opaque corporate structures and legal system make investing in Chinese companies a risky business, the witnesses said.

China’s restrictions on foreign ownership of its companies are seen as a major reason for much of this risk.

Because they can’t accept investments that would result in foreign ownership, Chinese companies resort to raising capital through offshore corporate structures, witnesses said. For instance, a U.S.-traded entity might own a Cayman Islands shell company that has a contractual relationship with the Chinese firm.

“These structures arguably make it difficult for U.S. investors to assess potential risks,” Sutter said. “These complex corporate structures also separate the underlying company and its operations and assets from U.S. investors. This potentially limits the ability of U.S. investors to exercise their rights, including the right to seek full legal recourse if necessary.”

Ross said a particularly acute problem is Chinese firms not making proper audit disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ross was referring to the fact that China’s government has allegedly blocked its auditing firms from having their work inspected by U.S. regulators.

“China-based companies’ free-riding on U.S. markets, without complying with U.S. audit regulations, increases fraud risks for investors in those companies,” she said.

Congress aimed to address this issue in December 2020 when it approved the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act, which requires foreign companies to be delisted from U.S. markets if they fail to meet audit disclosure requirements for three straight years.

The legislation may also reveal which Chinese firms have direct ties to the CCP. Once the SEC has finalized its rulemaking on the law, Chinese firms “will be required to disclose the percentage of shares owned by government entities in which the company is incorporated and whether these government entities have a controlling financial interest in the firm,” according to a subcommittee memo on the legislation.

“Firms will also have to disclose information related to any board members who are officials of the Chinese Communist Party and whether the articles of incorporation of the issuer contain any charter of the Chinese Communist Party,” the memo says.

The Accelerating Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act—introduced at the Oct. 26 subcommittee hearing—would reduce the original legislation’s timeline for delisting to two years.v

https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-experts-allegedly-withdrew-from-congressional-hearing-over-fear-of-ccp-backlash_4069363.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Children should not get vaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19, according to Harvard University professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff.

“I don’t think children should be vaccinated for COVID. I’m a huge fan of vaccinating children for measles, for mumps, for polio, for rotavirus, and many other diseases, that’s critical. But COVID is not a huge threat to children,” he said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. The full episode will be released at 7 p.m. New York time on Oct. 26 on EpochTV.

“They can be infected, just like they can get the common cold, but they’re not a big threat. They don’t die from this, except in very rare circumstances. So if you want to talk about protecting children or keeping children safe, I think we can talk about traffic accidents, for example, which they are really at some risk.

“And there are other things that we should make sure to keep children safe. But COVID is not a big risk factor for children.”

Vaccinating older people and people of all ages with compromised immune systems against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, has drawn support from most medical experts. But vaccinating healthy young people, particularly children, has triggered more opposition, in part because of how little risk COVID-19 poses to them.

Children are more likely to contract serious disease or die from the annual influenza, or the flu, than COVID-19, according to data and studies that Kulldorff has reviewed. Just 195 children under the age of 4 and 442 between 5 and 18 have died from COVID-19 in the United States as of Oct. 20, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children are 15 times less likely to be hospitalized with the disease than individuals who are 85 or older, and 570 times less likely to die, the agency says.

“One example is from Sweden, during the first wave in the spring of 2020, which affected Sweden quite strongly,” Kulldorff said. “But Sweden decided to keep daycare and schools open for all children ages 1 to 15. And there are 1.8 million such children who got through the first wave without vaccines, of course, without masks, without any sort of distancing in schools.

“If a child was sick, they were told to stay home. But that was basically it. And you know how many of those 1.8 million children died from COVID? Zero. Only a few hospitalizations. So this is not a risky disease for children.”

When weighing whether to vaccinate children, the risk of vaccine side effects must also be taken into account, Kulldorff said. The main risk to young people seen so far is heart inflammation, which has occurred post-vaccination at much higher than expected rates. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added a warning label to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines over the summer about myocarditis and pericarditis, two types of heart inflammation.

“If you’re 78 years old, then it’s the no-brainer in my view, because the benefits are so great that even if you have a small risk for some adverse reaction, the benefit far outweighs the risk,” Kulldorff said. “On the other hand, if you have already have immunity from having had COVID, then the benefits of the vaccines are much, much smaller. If you’re a child, even if you haven’t had COVID, the risk of serious disease or death is minuscule … So it’s not at all clear that the benefits outweigh the risks for children.”

Kulldorff was speaking ahead of an FDA advisory panel meeting. Members on Oct. 26 were considering whether to advise drug regulators to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in children between 5 and 11.

Many federal health officials and some outside experts support vaccinating children. They say vaccinating children would help quicken progress toward herd immunity and protect household members, especially those most at risk from COVID-19, and that hospitalizations among COVID-infected children rose over the summer and into September.

“Kids need protection against COVID-19 and this vaccine is safe and effective,” Dr. Patrick Hickey, chair and professor of pediatrics at the Uniformed Services University, wrote on Twitter.

The FDA in a briefing document to the panel said that the rate of post-vaccination heart inflammation cases among young children is expected to be the same as those 12 to 15, who have been getting vaccinated for months, and that the benefits of Pfizer’s shot outweigh “the known or potential risks.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/children-shouldnt-get-covid-19-vaccines-kulldorff_4069255.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Finally, the corporate media is catching up to Peter Daszak.

The Washington Post editorial board has called for EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak – an American scientist whose collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology were funded by Anthony Fauci – to testify before U.S. Congress.

Daszak is singled out in the outlet’s recent op-ed, “One Person Who Might Know What Really Happened In Wuhan,” which questions the continued cover-up of his ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and involvement in “killer” gain-of-function research with coronaviruses. The article follows the National Institutes of Health admitting that Fauci lied about the manner of research conducted by Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance in cooperation with the WIV.

“Unanswered questions keep emerging about Mr. Daszak and the WIV,” the paper asserts before asking: “Why did he not disclose his 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for research on bat coronaviruses with the WIV and others, which called for engineering a modification onto spike proteins of chimeric viruses that would make them infect human cells in the way the pandemic strain did? What does he know about the databases of viruses that WIV took offline in 2019 and never brought back? Does he know what research the WIV may have done on its own, during or after their collaboration? What was being done at WIV in the months before the pandemic?”

Daszak, who did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment, “must answer these questions before Congress,” the paper argues. “His grants were federal funds, and it is entirely appropriate for Congress to insist on accountability and transparency,” it adds.

MUST READ:  REVEALED: Fauci’s Record-High Salary for ‘Vaccine Development’ and Bio-Terror ‘Research’.

The calls follow months of National Pulse reporting highlighting Daszak’s extensive conflicts of interest with the WIV and the Chinese Communist Party, which should have excluded him from serving on bodies such as the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 origins investigation team. The National Pulse, which called for Daszak to testify in front of Congress six months ago, has also revealed the close ties between Daszak and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Fauci.

• CONFLICT OF INTEREST: WHO’s COVID Investigator is Recipient of Chinese Communist Cash, Worked With Wuhan Lab for 18 Years.
• EXC: CCP-Linked Peter Daszak Has Long-Standing Relationship With “Incomparable” Dr. Fauci.
• WATCH: Explosive, Unearthed Video Shows Peter Daszak Describing ‘Chinese Colleagues’ Developing ‘Killer’ Coronaviruses.
• Peter Daszak Headlined Wuhan Lab Conference 2 Months Before Serving On World Health Organization COVID-19 Origins Team.
• EXPOSED: Fauci Headlined Conference With ‘Bat Lady’ and EcoHealth’s Daszak Despite Distancing Himself from Wuhan.
• Peter Daszak Led Conference Sponsored By Chinese Communist Party.
• EXCLUSIVE: WHO Investigator Peter Daszak Authored Over 20 CCP-Funded, Linked Studies.

There is plenty of evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 have protection against reinfection, Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) said.

“There’s ample scientific studies that show that natural immunity is absolutely one of the best things you could have—and some studies even show that it’s more effective [than vaccination],” Harshbarger said during a recent appearance on NTD’s “Capitol Report.”Play Video

Natural immunity refers to post-recovery antibodies that shield people against reinfection of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19.

Multiple studies have indicated that natural immunity among past COVID-19 patients is strong and similar or superior to the protection from COVID-19 vaccines. Some experts have pushed for federal health officials to take natural immunity into account when issuing recommendations and rules. But federal authorities currently recommend virtually everybody get a vaccine, including the recovered, arguing the strong protection gets even better when those people have a jab.

Harshbarger, though, says a number of Americans object to getting a vaccine while pointing out that natural immunity to other diseases is accepted as an alternative to vaccination.

She and 10 other members of the House of Representatives late last week introduced the “Natural Immunity Is Real Act,” a companion to a Senate bill from Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska).

It would require federal agencies to “acknowledge, accept, and agree to truthfully present, natural immunity pertaining to COVID-19 pursuant to promulgating certain regulations.”

The congressmembers are presenting the bill as President Joe Biden’s administration works to finalize a regulation that would force private companies with over 100 employees to mandate presenting proof of COVID-19 vaccination or have staff members be tested weekly for the disease.

There is no opt-out for natural immunity.

Other mandates are already in place on the federal, state, and local level that have led to some Americans losing their jobs.

“I’ve read some of the studies that show that natural immunity, in a lot of ways, can be more effective. And I know there’s one study that shows that the percentage of protection is even better than two doses of the vaccine, in some cases. There is ample scientific data out there that show that. Think about it. We have immunity against measles, and smallpox, and they accept that. Why won’t they do it for COVID?” said Harshbarger, a licensed pharmacist since 1987.

“Too many medical leaders are refusing to publicly recognize what overwhelming data has already shown—protection afforded to individuals with natural immunity is real, robust and durable,” Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) added in a written statement. “Denying science only contributes to existing confusion, misinformation, and mistrust among the American people. This bill helps restore trust and faith in the Public Health system, while maintaining our fight against COVID-19.”

The other co-sponsors are Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), Chris Stewart (R-Utah), Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Mary Miller (R-Ind.), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), and Chip Roy (R-Texas).

https://www.theepochtimes.com/ample-scientific-data-congresswoman-introduces-natural-immunity-is-real-act_4066937.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t like criticism.

We have seen this well demonstrated in the way its leaders testily sanction anyone who dares suggest that their internment of the Uighur Muslims is “genocide,” which doesn’t do much to signal to the global community that they’re open to accountability on this point, but certainly indicates that they do not want to be questioned as to how they choose to suppress their ethnic and religious minorities, thank you very much.

So when an Indian diplomat’s microphone cut out when she was in the middle of criticizing China’s Belt and Road Initiative during a United Nations conference hosted by China in Beijing, it was hard not to interpret the event as rather suspicious at best.

Priyanka Sohoni, the second secretary of India’s embassy to China, was in the middle of delivering pointed criticism of the Belt and Road Initiaitve and its encroachments on Indian sovereignty in the disputed territory of Kashmir when she experienced some rather interestingly timed technological difficulties at the United Nations Sustainable Transport Conference, which took place Oct. 14-16.

“As far as China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, is concerned, we are uniquely affected by it. Its inclusion of the so-called China-Pakistan Economic Corridor as a flagship project infringes on India’s national sovereignty,” Sohoni was saying before her microphone cut out.

“They must follow principles of openness, transparency, and financial responsibility, and be…” she continued before her voice abruptly faded away and she appeared to realize her microphone was no longer on.

“Dear participants, we are sorry. We are confronting some technical problems and played the video of the next speaker. I am sorry for that,” Liu said, according to The Print. He then addressed Sohani. “You are lucky. You are back and welcome back.”

Do you think the “glitch” was deliberate?

“We share the international community’s desire for enhancing physical connectivity and believe it should bring greater economic benefits to all in an equitable and balanced manner,” Sohoni said after continuing where she had left off.

As The Print explained, India has been vocally objecting to an economic corridor that is being developed in the Pakistan-occupied area of the Kashmir region, which has been disputed by India and Pakistan for decades. It is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s multi-billion-dollar infrastructure plan to essentially reopen and modernize the historic Silk Road.

According to The Print, China has been largely downplaying India’s concerns, maintaining that the economic corridor will not affect China’s “principled stand on the Kashmir issue.”

The Belt and Road Initiative is certainly far more than simply laying down roads — it has also turned out to be a system through which China is hooking economically unstable nations into impossible-to-repay debt, resulting in significant leverage for China.

In the case of Sri Lanka, for instance, the island nation in the Indian Ocean has been forced to lease out one of its ports to a Chinese company for 99 years.

Cutter Spots Chinese Fleet Near Americas, Third Officer Looks at Radar and Instantly Sees the Red Flags

Sohani noted during her speech that “there are also larger issues regarding how connectivity initiatives should be pursued.”

“We are of the firm belief that connectivity initiatives must be based on universally recognized international norms,” she said, according to The Print.

“They must follow principles of openness, transparency, and financial responsibility and be pursued in a manner that respects sovereignty, equality, and territorial integrity of nations. India for its part abides by these principles and stands ready to make collective efforts for sustainable development through a human-centric approach.”

The Print also noted that, prior to Sohani’s speech, a Pakistani diplomat had praised the Belt and Road Initiative, and Chinese President Xi Jinping himself touted the Belt and Road Initiative during a speech on the opening day of the conference.

“China’s door of opening-up will only open wider, and will never be closed. China will continue to advance high-quality Belt and Road cooperation, strengthen infrastructure connectivity with other countries, and develop a green Silk Road and a digital Silk Road at a faster pace,” he said.

In what sources cited by The Print said could have been a breach of diplomatic protocol, Sohani’s speech also received some personal feedback from the Chinese transport minister, Li Xiaopeng.

At first, Li apologized for the “glitches” that cut Solhani off right as she was sticking it to the nation’s questionable infrastructure expansion, but then went on to implicitly criticize her.

“I would like to extend my apologies for the technical glitch just now when the Indian delegate spoke,” Li said.

“I don’t want to be offensive. Just now you have mentioned a lot of topics. As for the topics you mentioned, I would like to make some complements,” he continued.

“The BRI is open and inclusive,” he stated, according to The Print. “We tried to improve the connectivity and seek the development of all countries. In the past eight years, all the international communities have welcomed this initiative. Up to now about 141 countries and 32 organizations have signed more than 200 agreements with China.”

“A lot of important and practical projects have been implemented, which includes a lot of important transport projects. I would like to invite all parties to contribute to the development of this project,” the minister stated, according to The Print.

It’s certainly possible that Sohani’s microphone did genuinely experience technical difficulties, but the incident still gave the appearance that someone was trying to undermine her pointed speech.

Again, China does not like criticism, and the way that the Communist Chinese Party mentality works, it would be entirely in line with its tactics to seek to shut her down and embarrass her right when she got to the crux of her arguments against China’s economic activities in Kashmir.

The fact that this took place in Beijing itself doesn’t ease suspicion either.

Modern-day China has demonstrated itself to be entirely ruthless in its quest to satisfy Xi’s vision of a great and glorious nation, capable of surpassing all others on the world stage economically … and perhaps militarily and culturally as well.

Chinese leaders will stop at nothing to shut down anyone who questions them, so it’s certainly easy to believe they’d do so in the middle of a diplomatic conference.

An admission by the National Institutes of Health that it funded what amounted to gain-of-function research in China undercuts assertions from Dr. Anthony Fauci and others that the federally funded agency did no such thing, according to one expert.

Such research is controversial because it allows virus that exists in nature to be manipulated in a lab to make it stronger — even more deadly. The research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was funded by the NIH, has taken on new importance in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Collins and Fauci lied to Congress, lied to the press, and lied to the public. Knowingly, willfully and brazenly,” said Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, according to the Washington Examiner. The “Collins” referred to is NIH Director Francis Collins.

NIH Contradicts Fauci, Admits Funding Gain-of-Function Research at Wuhan Lab https://t.co/8hIq5S3xNa via @BreitbartNews

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) October 21, 2021

After over a year of denials from the agency’s leadership, NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak admitted last week that the agency funded gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses in China.

Tabak said that its grantee, EcoHealth Alliance, notified the NIH in August that it conducted the gain-of-function experiments with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China between June 2018 and May 2019. Tabak said EcoHealth failed to immediately notify the agency that they created lab-generated chimeric coronaviruses that exhibited a greater than one log, or ten times increase, in growth.

NIH leaders have tried to say that just because the outcome took place does not mean the NIH funded gain-of-function research.

Bur Ebright called the letter a “bombshell” because it “corrects the untruthful assertions” by Collins and Fauci, the Washington Examiner reported.

Has Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to Americans all along?

Ebright said there is more to this than an unexpected outcome.

“By failing to forward the proposal for the required HHS-level risk-benefit assessment, and then by funding the proposal without the required HHS-level risk-benefit assessment, officials at the NIH violated federal policies that were put in place to protect U.S. national security and U.S. public health … and put at risk U.S. national security and U.S. public health,” Ebright said.

“The NIH spokesperson — or preferably the NIH officials who funded the proposal without the required HHS-level risk-benefit assessment — need to explain how this violation of federal policy occurred and what steps are being taken to ensure that similar violations of federal policy do not occur in the future,” he continued.

Ebright said it was  “incontrovertibly correct” that the work conducted by EcoHealth for NIH “show that EcoHealth and its Wuhan partner constructed novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses — artificial, lab-generated viruses that do not have counterparts circulating in nature — that exhibited 10,000 times enhanced viral load and two to four times enhanced pathogenicity in infection studies in mice engineered to display human receptors on their cells (‘humanized mice’).”

That means renewing the grant funding for the research required reviews it was never given.

Group of Bipartisan Lawmakers Demands Answers from Fauci After ‘Reprehensible’ NIAD Action

“Therefore is correct that the proposal for the second 5-year grant term, which proposed to construct more such novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses — included research reasonably anticipated — indeed highly likely — to create, transfer or use potential pandemic pathogens resulting from the enhancement of a pathogen’s transmissibility and/or virulence in humans — and, therefore, it is correct that the proposal for the second 5-year grant term required HHS-level risk-benefit assessment under the HHS P3CO Framework,” he said.

HHS Deputy admits Fauci’s NIH funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan but says it was “an unexpected result.” If the experiment combines unknown viruses and tests their ability to infect and damage humanized cells, of course the result is ‘unknown’ before the experiment.

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) October 21, 2021

Ebright said efforts to downplay the research funded by NIH as only having infected animals are an exercise in misdirection.

“They have no shame. In essence, they are claiming that, because the NIH did not fund infection studies with lab-generated viruses and human subjects — Uyghur detainees? Falun Gong dissidents? — the NIH did not fund gain of function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement subject to the federal policies,” he stated.

Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources held a forum Oct. 22 to discuss how President Biden’s exit from Afghanistan left massive, untapped reserves of rare-earth metals, lithium, and other vital minerals in Taliban hands, potentially opening them up to exploitation by China.

Speakers said the Biden administration has simultaneously worked to hinder key mining projects in the United States, such as Minnesota’s Twin Metals copper-nickel project and Arizona’s Resolution copper mine, which would allow the United States to produce many of those minerals at home, thereby avoiding dependence on the Taliban or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“It’s almost like it’s intentional, to stop U.S. production of these critical minerals and elements,” said Ranking Member Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.).

Westerman’s remarks were later echoed by Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), who said that some of the environmentalist groups fighting mining “we think are getting money from Russia, China, and other countries that are foes of ours.”

Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.), whose district would include the proposed Twin Metals mine, spoke at length about the economic and security costs of relying on key minerals from abroad.

“For fifteen years, scientists from the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey], at a taxpayer cost of right around $81 million, found [in Afghanistan] massive amounts of lithium, gold, platinum, iron, coal, uranium, and more,” said Stauber.

“We know what happens next. The Taliban’s neighbor to the east, China, will swoop in and shortly thereafter control all of these mineral resources. There is no doubt at our current pace, the United States will have to purchase those minerals from China for our electric cars, our windmills, our iPhones, and our solar panels,” Stauber continued.

“Northern Minnesota has these minerals. We could look to union miners to supply them from my district. We have 95 [percent] of America’s nickel, 88 [percent] of America’s cobalt, and over one-third of America’s copper. It should be easy.”

Discussing the possibility of the imminent Chinese mineral exploitation in Afghanistan, Joe Felter of the Hoover Institute said it was plausible, though not certain.

“It depends. The challenges and calculated risks of mining rare earths and other minerals are significant in Afghanistan, and they could outweigh the opportunities in the near- and medium-term. One notable exception, I think, is China’s interest in getting increased access to lithium,” said Felter, who served in the Pentagon under Trump.

Felter recommended that the United States reduce its reliance on Chinese or Chinese-dominated supply chains.

Pressed by Stauber on where else the United States could source minerals, Felter responded that “almost any other country than China would be a better alternative” before noting that Australia was a U.S. ally with significant mining capacity.

Mary Hutzler, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, described the scale of the United States’ dependence on Chinese mineral resources for its renewable energy infrastructure, which dwarfs our past reliance on foreign oil before the United States achieved energy independence under President Trump.

“Our reliance on China is about 80 [percent] for these minerals right now, where the high for us in 2001 on oil from the Middle East was 23 [percent],” she said. “We’re going to be four times as dependent on China as we were on the Middle East.”

According to Hutzler, China’s competitive advantage in mineral processing and refinement stems in part from its reliance on cheap coal energy, which it is expected to expand.

Hutzler also stated that environmental permitting has stymied many recent mining projects in the United States, with the second proposed lithium mine in the United States, Nevada’s Thacker Pass, currently delayed by lawsuits.

In response to questioning from Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), Hutzler said that Europe’s present reliance on Chinese magnesium for automobile manufacturing offers a cautionary tale.

“With China’s crunch recently, they have closed 35 of their 50 magnesium plants. As a result, they are not exporting magnesium to Europe. Europe has only stockpiles to go through November. As a result, what’s going to happen is their automobile industry will become a standstill industry. That could happen to us because of our dependence on China,” said Hutzler.

Tiffany was among those who focused on the human rights abuses accepted by those who rely on minerals mined or processed in China.

He has introduced legislation aimed at preventing goods made with forced Uyghur labor from entering the U.S. market.

“We [Americans] are freedom-loving people. We do not accept that the Uyghurs should be enslaved,” he said.

Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.) asked Felter whether Chinese-mined or -processed minerals could be expected to rely on child labor, as in the mining operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“We shouldn’t expect anything different from China than their track record suggests—and it’s a pretty poor track record,” said Felter.

“When you’ve got these foreign-owned businesses run by the state that don’t have the same labor requirements we do, don’t have the same health and safety and environmental requirements, really, the only way I see you stop that is to penalize those imports coming into our country,” said Westerman.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) closed the forum by urging members to support his proposed legislation, the Stopping Terrorist Mineral Trade Act, which would prevent the importation of minerals, or mineral-derived products, originating in Afghanistan.

“I know that my colleagues at this forum wish this important topic was something we could approach on a bipartisan basis, grounded in factual discussions focused on solutions. Unfortunately, our Democratic colleagues see all American mining as unnecessary, and are hellbent on seeing that it doesn’t happen,” said Gosar.

“For some reason, they never can see the right mine or the right place in America for mining,” he added.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-abandoned-critical-mineral-reserves-in-afghanistan-while-thwarting-mining-at-home-gop-forum_4063931.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Rachel Esplin Odell’s views undermine Biden admin’s attempt to portray itself as tough on China

One of the Biden administration’s newest State Department hires has regularly downplayed the threat posed by China and argued against holding the Communist regime accountable for the coronavirus pandemic, comments that clash with an administration that has promised to play tough with Beijing.

Rachel Esplin Odell was hired in August to serve as a foreign policy analyst at the State Department, according to her LinkedIn profile. Odell believes “the military threat posed by China to U.S. interests is limited in nature” and that efforts to sanction the CCP for its efforts to hide the “coronavirus would harm America and the world.” These comments put her out of step with the Biden administration, which has increased sanctions on China for its interference in Hong Kong, its ongoing human rights abuses, and its efforts to spy on the United States and other countries.

Odell previously served as a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an isolationist think tank jointly funded by George Soros and Charles Koch. As a Quincy fellow, Odell routinely argued that China poses no threat and that the United States should surrender its presence in the region to appease the Communist Party.

Odell is one of some 100 progressive foreign policy hands who were pitched to the incoming Biden administration late last year as part of a push by isolationist and far-left advocacy groups to gain influence over the administration’s national security apparatus. That list, first published in full by the Washington Free Beacon, included notorious anti-Israel activists and progressive policy voices. Odell’s hiring signals that team Biden is willing to accommodate the Democratic Party’s far-left flank. Politico described the list in December as the “first comprehensive and coordinated effort by the left to influence the transition to appoint progressives” across the U.S. national security and diplomatic community.

Odell’s rhetoric on China puts her at odds with more moderate Biden administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House National Security Council adviser Jake Sullivan, both of whom have stated their support for countering an increasingly aggressive China, both economically and militarily.

Rebeccah Heinrichs, a national security expert and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, described the Biden administration’s China policy as “bipolar.”

“There are people who get that China is the pacing threat, and then there are people who are still downplaying the Chinese military threat in the Indo-Pacific and recommending we engage on climate and trade,” Heinrichs said. “Those are mutually exclusive. The latter group will facilitate the rise of China at America’s expense. Period. It is concerning when Biden hires and promotes anyone who has been trying to downplay the military dimension of the China challenge over the last few years especially. It’s inexcusable.”

Odell claimed in a March 2020 discussion hosted by Quincy—which has positioned itself as the go-to think tank for the Biden administration—that “China actually has not posed any threat to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea,” where the CCP routinely harasses U.S. and allied forces. The South China Sea has long been a flashpoint in the growing standoff between the CCP and U.S. allies in the region.

China’s foreign policy, which aggressively seeks to counter U.S. influence across the globe, is not extraordinary, Odell said during the same discussion. “My argument is that China abroad—its foreign policy behavior—is basically typical of a rising power. Of course, rising powers always want to revise some aspect of the system, but so does the United States.”

“The reality,” Odell argued in October 2020, “is the military threat posed by China to U.S. interests is limited in nature.”

America should not seek to hold China accountable for the coronavirus pandemic, Odell said in an April 2020 op-ed explaining “why retribution against China for coronavirus would harm America and the world.” In fact, “Chinese epidemiologists and public health officials have learned invaluable lessons from their experience grappling with the outbreak.” Efforts to sanction China for its role in covering up the coronavirus’s existence and lies to the international community actually are meant to “deflect blame from U.S. failures in responding to the pandemic,” Odell said.

In a May 2020 op-ed slamming Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah) for warning against U.S. reliance on Chinese medical equipment, Odell argued that Beijing “is not seeking a strategy of ‘domination,’ particularly not at a global level.” This claim is contradicted by China’s massive military buildup, as well as its escalating threats to seize Taiwan and interfere with its neighbors’ regional security.

U.S. military supremacy in the region “is likely a thing of the past,” Odell said in the same opinion piece. “China’s ability to project significant military power beyond its ‘near seas’ remains limited relative to the United States,” she wrote, adding that China cannot accept a U.S. presence in the waters near the country.

Odell also excused China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property and government secrets, saying, “The United States and other developed nations engaged in similar practices when building their own economies.” America should “facilitate China’s rise,” instead of seeking to contain it, she said in March of this year.

“Treating China as an enemy” endangers U.S. national security, Odell argued in an October 2020 Quincy Institute publication that called for “a new U.S. strategy in East Asia.”

“The current U.S. strategy in East Asia endangers U.S. national security interests by inflaming military tension with China that could provoke crises and escalate into war,” Odell and her colleagues wrote. “It wastes resources by diverting them from essential non-military uses at home and abroad. Treating China as an enemy also makes Beijing less willing to compromise in disputes and endangers bilateral cooperation.”

Odell also has argued against U.S. sanctions on China and for the United States to remain neutral in the CCP’s “territorial disputes” with its neighbors.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-state-dept-hire-downplayed-chinese-military-threat-deflected-blame-for-covid-pandemic/

Dr. Malik Peiris, who previously served on the Lancet medical journal’s COVID-19 origins investigation committee, received China’s “Nobel Prize” for research affirming the Chinese Communist Party’s false narrative that COVID-19 developed naturally.

Peiris, a Sri Lankan virologist working in Hong Kong, was one of 12 scientists leading the now-defunct Lancet probe into the origins of COVID-19. While the task force is no longer listed on the medical journal’s website, as it was forced to disband due to extensive conflicts of interests with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, archived web pages reveal Peiris’s participation in the effort.

Following Peiris’s stint on the task force, the Chinese Communist Party awarded him with the prize in life sciences in the 2021 Future Science Prize – dubbed China’s “Nobel Prize.” China’s top scientific honor is accompanied by a $1 million prize, which is funded by several Chinese Communist Party-linked companies such as Baidu, Hillhouse Capital, and Sequoia Capital China.

State-run media outlet Global Times claimed the award was for his “major discoveries of SARS-CoV-1 as the causative agent of the global SARS outbreak in 2003 with impact on combating COVID-19 and emerging infectious diseases.” Peiris shared the award with co-author Kwok-Yung Yuen.

In an exclusive interview with the Chinese Communist Party-run media outlet, Yuen asserted “this is one of the most important prizes not just in China but also internationally.”

Peiris’s research was praised by award reviewers as playing an integral role in tracing the origins of COVID-19, as reviewer Wang Xiaodong noted “Chinese scientists were able to quickly identify the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to their contributions.” The research bolstered the Chinese Communist Party’s fake narrative that COVID-19 developed naturally as opposed to escaping from a lab.

WHO’s New ‘COVID Origins Investigation’ Includes CCP Advisors & Wuhan Lab Collaborators.

As Global Times explains, Peiris’s research helped “support the bat origin of SARS-CoV-2”:

When asked how their discoveries affect people’s understanding of the cause of COVID-19, Yuen explained that since he and his team discovered in 2005 that the horseshoe bat was the natural animal reservoir for the ancestral SARS-CoV-1, they believe that SARS-CoV-2 “also went from bats to another mammal(s) before jumping into humans.”

Moreover, SARS-CoV-2 replicates very well in both bat and human intestinal organs, which further supports the bat origin of SARS-CoV-2, he said.

A former state senator shared his concerns over the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in California and how he became a “terrorist” to the Chinese government for advocating for human rights.

Joel Anderson, a San Diego County Supervisor and former state senator and assemblyman, said he was prohibited from entering China after he issued a recognition acknowledging the anniversary of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice composed of meditative exercises and moral teachings originating in China in 1992.

“I got a six-page letter from the Chinese government saying that I was now considered a terrorist, and if I go to China that I will be arrested and sentenced,” Anderson said during an interview with EpochTV’s “California Insider” program.

Anderson said he began looking into the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners after one of his constituents sent in a letter requesting him to rescue her mother, a U.S. citizen who practices Falun Gong, who was arrested in China for her beliefs.

Anderson said he was shocked when he learned about the CCP’s organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners.

“They were being harvested like cattle to sell their body parts to tourists who are on medical tourism,” he said.

Anderson found there were already five countries that have stopped all medical tourism to China.

“Because you could literally order a kidney, a lung, any body part you wanted, and you could show up and have the surgery,” he said.

The average wait time for patients who need a kidney transplant is between three and five years in the United States, according to the National Kidney Foundation.

“It’s wrong. It violates every human right,” he said.

Anderson later proposed a bill expressing support for Falun Gong practitioners in the United States and China.

After its proposal in 2017, the Chinese consulate in San Francisco sent a letter to members of the state legislature, denouncing Falun Gong and claiming the bill might “deeply damage the cooperative relations between the State of California and China, and seriously hurt the feeling of Chinese people and the vast Chinese community in California.”

After receiving the letter, many legislators no longer supported the resolution, including those who co-authored it.

Then-Senate Pro Tem Kevin de León, who now is a Los Angeles city councilman, shelved the bill without a vote or discussion.

Anderson said a similar resolution had been proposed three times in Congress, and some congressmen from California supported it, but legislators from the same districts refused to go near it after receiving the letter.

“It was shocking to me that the Chinese government had so much influence in our state,” he said.

Anderson said that many residents and politicians at the local level don’t understand the CCP’s influence in California because the Chinese regime is only interested in cities that exert a greater impact in society in relation to economy and politics.

“The influence of the Chinese consulate in San Franscico is overwhelming and is well known,” he said.

Anderson praised former President Donald Trump for being the first president to stand up to China and its hegemony as well as its influence throughout the world.

“Sadly, once he left the office, the new administration has embraced this and allowed them greater latitude, and I have great fear,” he said.

Anderson encouraged Americans to write to their legislators and ask them to call on China to stop the genocide against people of faith.

“California is an incredible state with wonderful resources. If we want to be the leaders we say we are, then our actions have to reflect it,” he said. “All I’m asking is that they stand up and be consistent with their policies and hold China to the same standard that they hold Texas.”

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Joe Biden’s U.S. Agency for International Development launched a new $125 million dollar project with Washington State University and foreign collaborators to discover over 10,000 novel viruses in nature.

The ambitious program follows the agency funding a similar form of research conducted by EcoHealth Alliance and its controversial partner: the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Many experts believe this Chinese Communist Party-run lab is the source of COVID-19.

The new program, announced by Washington State University (WSU) on October 5th, will endeavor “to collect over 800,000 samples in the five years of the project.”

“This process is expected to yield 8,000 to 12,000 novel viruses, which researchers will then screen and sequence the genomes of the ones that pose the most risk to animal and human health,” a summary adds.

The program relies on collaboration with foreign countries, as its description outlines its efforts to “build scientific capacity in partner countries” focusing on coronaviruses, filoviruses, and paramyxoviruses. While WSU’s foreign collaborators have not been identified yet, in the past, the school has partnered with Chinese Communist Party-linked technology firms including DJI for research.

DJI has admitted complying with Beijing’s data requests, leading the U.S. Army to ban their use in 2017, citing cyber vulnerabilities. The office of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles also sent a memo stating officials have “moderate confidence” DJI’s commercial drones and software are “providing US critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.”

“The project plans to partner with up to 12 targeted countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to carry out large-scale animal surveillance programs within their own countries, safely, using their own laboratory facilities,” a WSU summary explains.MUST READ:  EXCLUSIVE: New Fauci Email Proves He Funded Lab Training for Wuhan’s Most Deadly Lab.

“We will work to not only detect viruses but also build capacity in other countries, so the United States can collaborate with them in carrying out this important work,” said Felix Lankester, lead principal investigator for the project.

WASHINGTON—Republican U.S. senators led by Marco Rubio on Thursday called on the Biden administration to blacklist Honor, a former unit of embattled Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, describing the firm as a threat to national security.

In a letter dated Thursday, seen by Reuters, Rubio described Honor as essentially an “arm” of the Chinese government with newly unfettered access to the same prized U.S. technology currently denied to Huawei. The letter adds to a growing chorus of China hawks calling for the blacklisting.

By spinning off the Chinese telecom giant’s budget smartphone brand in November 2020, “Beijing has effectively dodged a critical American export control,” Rubio wrote in the letter also signed by Senators John Cornyn and Rick Scott.

“By failing to act in response, the Department of Commerce risks setting a dangerous precedent and communicating to adversaries that we lack the capacity or willpower to punish blatant financial engineering by an authoritarian regime.”

Honor and the Department of Commerce in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Huawei declined to comment beyond noting a prior statement that said it would not hold any shares or be involved in managing Honor following the spinoff. The Chinese Embassy in Washington said the U.S. had kept “smearing” Huawei without presenting solid evidence to support its accusations.

The Trump administration placed Huawei on a trade blacklist in 2019, arguing the company posed a national security threat, which Huawei denies. Putting the company on the so-called entity list has meant its U.S. suppliers have had to obtain special licenses to sell key items like semiconductors to the firm.

Google was also barred from providing technical support to new Huawei phone models and access to Google Mobile Services, the bundle of developer services upon which most Android apps are based.

As sanctions against the company began to bite amid tighter controls, Huawei announced the Honor sale to a consortium of over 30 agents and dealers.

In August a group of 14 Republican Congressmen led by Michael McCaul, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also called on the Commerce Department to blacklist Honor, alleging the company was spun off to evade U.S. export controls and to give Huawei access to blocked semiconductor chips and software.

On Monday, Honor said on Twitter it had “succeeded in confirming cooperation with a number of supplier partners in the early stage” and that its Honor 50 smartphones would be equipped with Google Mobile Services.

By Alexandra Alper

https://www.theepochtimes.com/rubio-calls-on-biden-administration-to-blacklist-huawei-spin-off-honor_4052261.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams met with a Chinese Communist Party-run foreign influence flagged by the U.S. government for seeking to “directly and malignly influence” officials to push pro-Beijing policies.

Adams, the Democratic Party nominee in the upcoming New York City mayoral election, met with leaders from the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) during a 2017 trip to China.

The CPAFFC has been dubbed the “public face” of the United Front – a billion-dollar effort executed by the Chinese Communist Party seeking “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign 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.

Also referred to as “avowedly an arm of the party-state,” CPAFFC has been flagged by the U.S. State Department for its campaigns to “directly and malignly influence” American officials.

Despite the CPAFFC’s track record of conducting foreign influence operations, Adams met with the group in October 2017 during his ongoing tenure as the Borough President of Brooklyn, New York. A CPAFFC press release – “Director Zhang Heqiang Meets with the Mayor of Brooklyn, New York City” – describes the meeting, which took place in Beijing.

The Director “introduced to him the work functions of [CPAFFC] and its work in the United States.”

“In the future, he hopes to further promote Brooklyn’s exchanges with China and enhance bilateral cooperation in the fields of youth exchanges, culture, and commerce,” CPAFFC summarized regarding Adam’s takeaway from the meeting.

Next time you see a climate change protest in the news, be aware it may be backed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Chinese Communist Party-linked foreign influence group sponsored a climate change conference seeking to mobilize youth advocates in America, the National Pulse can reveal.

The entity sponsoring the recent conference, the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), is part of Beijing’s “United Front” effort, which the U.S. government identifies as seeking 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.”

CUSEF’s website notes that it “sponsored” the Sino-American Youth Dialogue on Climate Change, carried out in collaboration with two schools: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Tsinghua University.

“Co-hosted by Tsinghua University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Sino-American Youth Dialogue on Climate Change (SAYD) will be held in October 8, a month prior to COP26. The aim of the event is to offer a platform for young people from China and the U.S. to put forward ideas and suggestions for the COP26 to address climate change and sustainable development,” CUSEF explains before posing the following questions to attendees:

What should governments do to confront climate emergency?

How should businesses develop sustainability strategies to achieve net zero emissions?

What are the actions that we, as individuals, could do to reduce wastage and gas emissions?

The conference explicitly seeks to mobilize youth activists, as its theme is “making carbon neutral, youth in action.”

“Through discussions and sharing among youth delegates and field experts, the forum hopes to reach consensus on the issue and form valuable policy recommendations,” the conference’s website adds.

Fauci Congratulates Wuhan Collaborator On ‘Deserved’ Xi Jinping Award.

Among the event’s speakers were CUSEF founder Tung Chee-hwa, Chinese Communist Party officials, and presidents from both MIT and Tsinghua University. Tsinghua University’s involvement in the conference also follows the school reportedly launching cyberattacks against the U.S. government and having a “clear connection” to the Chinese government on issues of technology and national security according to the U.S. State Department.

The school is the alma mater of regime leader Xi Jinping and hosts a “Marxist” journalism school, training the next generation of Chinese state-run media propagandists with the assistance of the New York Times, CNN, and others.

“We should be committed to a firm and correct political orientation. Our School has been actively exploring the theory and practices of Marxist Journalism, namely, to applying the Marxist theory in observing the world, selecting and handling news production,” the dean’s introduction letter reads.

Twitter’s recent banning of accounts critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is deplorable. But it also forces us to really start considering how Western social media and big tech companies can defend freedom of speech, instead of being used as tools against us by authoritarian states such as the Chinese regime.

The issue of tech-based freedom of speech platforms, and the damage they can do to free societies if left entirely unregulated, is not exactly a new one. In recent years, however, it has become even more troublesome, as authoritarian states have taken to using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even LinkedIn to wage disinformation campaigns, affect elections, split and divide a society, and in general, cause havoc.

When called upon to take proper action against authoritarian states that undermine free societies, the tech companies have had a rather consistent defense—namely that their platforms will ultimately bring greater freedom of speech, and therefore they should not be forced to take action. While it seems like an honorable argument, it’s a hollow and ignorant one, especially at this point in time. The prospect of making more money is what prevents the big tech companies from taking any real action. Mark Zuckerberg has tried to woo the Chinese regime by asking CCP leader Xi Jinping to name his unborn child back in 2015, or when he went jogging in a heavily polluted Beijing—these are images that no PR campaign will ever be able to counter. It showed Zuckerberg’s real allegiance to the CCP, and it certainly wasn’t freedom of speech.

These arguments, thoroughly debunked, are no different than when monarchists argue for keeping the monarchy because it brings undefined economic benefits, which has never actually been proven, or when business lobby groups argue against actions that counter Beijing’s economic and trade violations because they believe free trade will somehow lead to democracy, freedom of speech, and rule of law in China. We know that belief is hollow and false, but it keeps on repeating until some part of us just accepts it.

Dealing with fake news and disinformation within our societies will certainly be a long and difficult march. But when it comes to dealing with China, Russia, and other authoritarian or neo-totalitarian states that use our own tools of freedom of speech against us, the solution is actually really simple.

Take Twitter, for example. If a state blocks its people’s access to Twitter, then block the state’s access to the social media platform, including government officials. This should apply to the Chinese regime as it has officially blocked Twitter in mainland China. However, some citizens have been able to circumvent the “great firewall” and major Chinese companies can access Twitter through a government approved VPN.

Such a policy wouldn’t even have to touch upon the thorny issue of what can or cannot be said on such platforms. Instead, it would zero in on one simple question: Does the state using the platform allow its own people the same access? If not, then it’s out: access for access.

Not only would this policy add real pressure on authoritarian states to open up access to such tools for its people, but it would severely limit their abilities to use others to sow disinformation in the United States, affect outcomes in elections in the United Kingdom, or try to split and divide the European Union.

Safeguard Defenders has campaigned against China’s state broadcasters, CGTN and CCTV, and has seen them taken off the air in several countries. For China, it is a loss of prestige. But in reality, Beijing’s disinformation work is almost entirely carried out on social media, with few viewers of its stale news shows on TV. In fact, after CGTN’s license was revoked in the UK, an informant told Safeguard Defenders that the media company replaced its “social media first’ policy with a ‘social media only’ policy. It knows what really matters.

An “access for access” policy would be straightforward, fair, predictable, open, and as a bonus, rather easily applicable. No dictatorship could cry wolf, because with such an open and fair policy the outcome would be entirely on them.

Give those who block freedom for its people a simple choice, and leave that choice to them.

My greatest surprise is the fact that as an option and as a way forward, it is not even discussed. It seems, somehow, to be out of bounds, outside of people’s imaginations. Considering the resources needed in combatting bots, in seeking pedophiles and those committing cyber crimes online, implementing such a policy would be easy in comparison.

To better manage disinformation online is going to be a long and epic struggle, and at this time no one has all the answers. However, there are areas that are black and white, and while we ponder the bigger issues of disinformation, it’s a good place to start.

It’s time for our social media giants to take some actual steps to defend and promote freedom of speech, instead of merely giving us empty gestures.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. 

Peter Dahlin

Peter Dahlin is the founder of the NGO Safeguard Defenders and the co-founder of the Beijing-based Chinese NGO China Action (2007–2016). He is the author of “Trial By Media,” and contributor to “The People’s Republic of the Disappeared.” He lived in Beijing from 2007, until detained and placed in a secret jail in 2016, subsequently deported and banned. Prior to living in China, he worked for the Swedish government with gender equality issues, and now lives in Madrid, Spain.

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Of all the threats facing the United States, China and Facebook pose two of the biggest.

The United States, to some extent, is limited in its ability to address Chinese aggressions. Facebook, on the other hand, is an American company with an American founder—the United States can take appropriate action. The question, though, is what sort of action should be taken? In this short piece, I propose a somewhat novel solution to the “Facebook Problem.”

At first, Facebook and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appear to have little, if anything, in common. On closer inspection, however, they share striking similarities. The CCP has been labelled hostile and autocratic; Facebook, meanwhile, has been described as the “largest autocracy on Earth,” a “hostile foreign power” capable of destroying the United States. Both the CCP and Facebook Inc. are considered a threat to democracy; both are responsible for spreading dangerous disinformation; and both have a history of suppressing free speech. Lastly, both are run by men who appear to answer to no laws in particular. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg is not Xi Jinping. One is directly responsible for the torture occurring in Xinjiang, for example; the other is not. However, with Facebook, Zuckerberg created a Frankenstein Monster, albeit unknowingly. For this, he must be held accountable. The question, though, is how?

When we discuss Big Tech, we’re describing Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. The infamous 5, contrary to popular belief, are not created equally. People like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are wrong to view Big Tech as some sort of amorphous blob. After all, Apple and Facebook offer completely different services.

In a recent interview with “60 minutes,” a whistleblower by the name of Frances Haugen discussed the many ways in which Facebook harms society. Haugen, a data scientist from Iowa, called Facebook “substantially worse” than any other social media platform. Before joining Facebook, Haugen worked at both Pinterest and Google. Facebook, as many readers already know, has a notorious history. Since its launch back in 2004, it has been accused of a litany of offenses, from spying on customers to giving users’ data away without their permission. In the interview, Haugen accused decision makers at Facebook of ignoring research documenting the ways in which Instagram (owned by Facebook) fuels eating disorders and depression in young women.

In truth, Haugen’s revelations simply shed more light on a well-known fact—Facebook, in its current form, is deeply problematic. Along with the Chinese regime, it poses one of the greatest threats to democracy.

What Can Be Done?

Some, like the aforementioned Warren, are obsessed with the idea of breaking up Big Tech. This, however, is a fool’s game. The Big 5 are all conglomerates—they have acquired numerous other businesses, from AI research facilities to digital health startups. Facebook Inc. now owns 78 different companies. Ostensibly, it’s a social media company. In reality, though, it’s a multi-headed hydra worth $1 trillion. More importantly, breaking up Facebook Inc. would fail to address the core problem, namely its manipulation of algorithms.

Instead, the U.S. government should hone in on the regulation of algorithms. As Haugen explained in the interview, Facebook intentionally “games” the system so users are presented with the most outrageous content. This manipulation breeds anger; with anger, comes engagement; with engagement, comes greater profits.

Authors at TechCrunch made a bold suggestion: The FDA “must assert its codified right to regulate the algorithm powering the drug of Instagram.” By viewing algorithms as “a drug impacting our nation’s mental health,” the FDA would be in a strong position to rein in Big Tech.

The authors, however, failed to discuss the ubiquity of algorithms. Moreover, the vast majority of algorithms are helpful, rather than harmful. Without algorithms, Google’s search engine would be utterly useless. Need to book a taxi? Order a pizza? Book a flight? To do so, we require algorithms—lots of them. In many ways, without these computer-implementable instructions, modern society would grind to a screeching halt. Algorithms are the computational equivalent of water or air—in other words, they’re everywhere.

Instead, I suggest treating algorithms like vehicles. Just like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) regulates the safety of motor vehicles and related equipment, the United States stands to benefit from a National Algorithm Safety Administration. Perhaps an independent agency dedicated to “test driving” algorithms in the same way independent agencies test drive cars. Or, if this seems absurd, how about a National Algorithm Safety Board, like the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)? According to the NTSB’s website, this independent federal agency is “charged by Congress with investigating every civil aviation accident in the United States and significant accidents in other modes of transportation—highway, marine, pipeline, and railroad.” A National Algorithm Safety Board could perform a similar function with thorough, expert-led investigations of cases where algorithms cause psychological injuries. All investigations would be carried out by an elected team of independent analysts.

For this piece, I reached out to Facebook for comment on the matter; no comments were offered.

In a recent interview with NY Magazine, Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, discussed the many ways in which Big Tech giants like Facebook and Amazon have learned to completely disregard specific regulation and laws. According to Galloway, tech companies are willing to do “whatever is required to scale,” including abusing employees and lying to Congress. As Galloway warned, until an “algebra of deterrence” is implemented, then Big Tech companies will continue to operate in immoral—even criminal—ways. With Facebook, an algebra of deterrence is possible—it starts with a National Algorithm Safety Board.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/facebooks-business-model-is-monstrous-heres-how-we-fix-it_4044960.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

The Hong Kong of just a decade ago is unrecognizable from the Hong Kong of today. With the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) busy revising university curriculums, collective patriotism has replaced individual freedom; loyalty to Beijing is not just expected, it’s compulsory. Refusal to comply, more often than not, results in punishment.

To date, the CCP’s crackdown in Hong Kong has been as brutal as it has been all-encompassing. In July, five speech therapists were arrested over an alleged “conspiracy to distribute seditious materials.” In reality, the five individuals, all members of the General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists, published a number of children’s picture books. According to the CCP, the therapists were attempting to “stir hatred” among children. “Don’t think that these are simple story books,” Hong Kong Police Senior Superintendent Steve Li told members of the press. “These three books have a lot of seditious materials inside,” he said. They didn’t. The five therapists simply painted an accurate picture of Hong Kong. Authoritarian regimes, as we all know, have little regard for truth.

Hong Kong, a place once celebrated for tolerance and open-mindedness, is fast becoming a place of intolerance and parochial, partisan politics. On Sept. 19, it spiraled further into the undemocratic abyss. In accordance with the CCP’s “patriots only” system, the political elite, little more than “puppet showmen” for those in Beijing, began selecting a new committee that will eventually select Hong Kong’s new, CCP-backed leader.

Once Beijing passed the Hong Kong law, the territory began to morph into a “society approaching the Orwellian descriptions attributed to mainland China, where dissent is promptly extinguished and penalized,” according to Kevin Drew, assistant managing editor at U.S. News. In other words, Hong Kong is no different from anywhere else in mainland China.

Drew spoke with Dennis Kwok, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and former lawmaker in Hong Kong. When asked about the territory’s demise, Kwok said, “I think the international community obviously sees Hong Kong as … a warning about international agreements that you signed with China and the implications of that.” He continued: “I’m not sure we should be looking at Hong Kong in isolation. We should look at the whole situation regarding China’s policy domestically, whether in Xinjiang, in Hong Kong, or … its policy to Taiwan and the South China Sea.”

Kwok also discussed the CCP’s antagonism toward Australia, as well as the arbitrary detention of two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor (last month, the two men were allowed to return to their homeland). “I think all of those need to be looked at in the full context in order to understand what China is doing,” he added.

Kwok is, of course, correct. What happens in Hong Kong no longer stays in Hong Kong. The CCP’s desire for global dominance is not a figment of our imagination. It’s a reality. With its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as “One Belt, One Road”), China has a number of countries eating out of its sizable hand. According to a report issued by the Green BRI Center, over the past 18 months, “accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic,” an increasing number of BRI clients, “have seen their sovereign debt become unsustainable.” Countries like Congo, Djibouti, and Angola are heavily indebted to Beijing. They’re not alone: Pakistan owes $20 billion to Beijing; Kenya owes 7.5 billion; Ethiopia owes $6.5 billion; and Lao PDR, with a GDP of $18 billion, now owes $5 billion.

To paraphrase the French writer François Rabelais, debts and lies are often two sides of the same coin. With its BRI, China has sold a number of countries expensive lies. The victims have no option but to foot the bill. Then again, like Evergrande, they could opt to default on their payments. Let’s hope they do.

Either way, whether or not the aforementioned countries repay their enormous debts, Beijing’s influence is undeniable. In fact, the CCP’s presence can be felt in almost every country around the world. To make matters worse, as the journalist John Xie noted, Beijing now controls “more shipping ports than any other country.” With “100 ports in at least 60 nations,” the CCP is busy seeking out more. The importance of these transportation hubs cannot be emphasized enough. As research shows, ports play an essential role in a country’s economic stability. After all, he who controls the water controls the world.

The CCP’s vice-like grip over society knows no bounds. Not only does it control a number of powerful nations, but the CCP also exerts a nefarious influence over some of the world’s most powerful organizations. As the Observer Research Foundation has shown, the World Health Organization (WHO) and China are intimate partners in crime, with the former helping the latter to cover up the origins of COVID-19.

Last year, China, one of the worst offenders of human rights on the planet, was awarded a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council. Fiction simply can’t compete with reality. Granting China a place on the council is the equivalent of giving Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, a Nobel Peace Prize. More recently, according to a number of highly credible reports, staff members at the World Bank changed data to improve China’s ranking. We’re told the changes were made at the behest of Jim Yong Kim, then-World Bank President, and Kristalina Georgieva, then-Chief Executive. One assumes that Beijing applied a great degree of pressure on both Kim and Georgieva.

This brings us back to the deteriorating state of affairs in Hong Kong—events there shouldn’t be viewed in isolation. In fact, nothing the CCP does should ever be viewed in isolation. People who doubt the Chinese regime’s growing international clout would do well to remove their heads from the sand.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-chinese-regime-plans-to-destroy-our-civil-liberties_4029872.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Despite his repeat denials, we’ve got the paper trail linking Anthony Fauci to Wuhan’s BSL4 lab.

New Anthony Fauci e-mails obtained by The National Pulse reveal that a lab he funded through his National Institutes of Health agency was training researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s biosafety level four facility.

Biosafety level four (BSL4) facilities handle agents that can be aerosol-transmitted and/or cause severe to fatal disease in humans. The news follows yesterday’s revelation that Fauci lauded Xi Jinping awards for U.S. researchers.

Now, a new e-mail confirms a previous National Pulse report on the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party-run institute and the Galveston National Laboratory (GNL), which describes itself as “constructed under grants awarded by [Fauci’s] National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).”

The National Pulse can reveal a 2017 e-mail exchange between Fauci and GNL director James LeDuc confirming the existence of the lab’s partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In brief, the e-mail shows Fauci’s funding of GNL via NIAID was doing directly towards training Chinese BSL4 staff.

Collaborations with ‘Important Leaders of China’

LeDuc sent an email [below] to Fauci on October 31st, 2017 titled “China BSL4 labs” where he reminds Fauci how they conversed “regarding collaborations with the new Chinese [biosafety level 4] labs.” Among the labs referenced by LeDuc are the “Chinese Academy of Sciences (Wuhan BSL4).”

LeDuc notes that “the directors of each of these 3 new labs has agreed to come to Galveston”:

Tony,

In follow up to our brief discussions at the UT meeting regarding collaborations with the new Chinese BSL4 labs, the US National Academy of Sciences will be hosting a meeting here at the GNL Tuesday, 16 Jan to Thursday, 18 Jan 2018 with counterparts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Wuhan BSL4), the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (Kunming BSL4), and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (Harbin BSL4). Each of these labs has been constructed and they are about to begin operations. The directors of each of these 3 new labs has agreed to come to Galveston, as has George Gao (if his schedule permits) and about 6-8 other accomplishes [sic] Chinese scientists.

MUST READ:  EXC: Fauci Authored Article For Wuhan Lab Collaborator Peter Daszak.

The GNL Director continues, noting that the goal of the meeting is to facilitate “collaborations” and train the Chinese researchers in “practices in safety and security”:

The meeting will focus on a balance of science and operations with the goal of building collaborations and ensuring that the new labs are exposed to US best practices in safety and security. I’m wondering if you would be interested in joining us.

LeDuc concludes the email by adding that “important leaders of China” would attend the meeting:

This is not a “command performance” so no pressure is intended, but it would be a good opportunity for you to meet and interact on a personal and informal basis with these important leaders of China. We expect about 10-12 senior Chinese and a comparable number of senior US scientists from outside UTMB, plus several UTMB folks. I will be hosting a dinner at our home on Tuesday evening to facilitate informal discussions. Let me know if you’re interested and we can work to accommodate your schedule—again, no pressure. Happy to chat if you like.

On the same day Fauci receives the email, he forwards it to a contact – “NIAID OD AM” –  while adding “let us discuss.”

The following day, Fauci informs LeDuc he is unable to attend due to scheduling conflicts, adding “thanks for the note and the invitation” and expressing no concern over the program:

Jim:

Thanks for the note and the invitation. Unfortunately, that week in January, 2018 is all tied up for me and so I regrettably will not be able to come to Galveston. Thanks for thinking of me.

SCALP: Lancet Scrubs ENTIRE COVID Origins Investigation Team After National Pulse Exposés.

Best regards,

Tony

Previously unearthed presentations from the Texas-based lab show its researchers training counterparts at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on how to handle the “world’s most dangerous pathogens.” American researchers funded by Fauci, such as University of North Carolina’s Dr. Ralph Baric, have visited the China-based lab as part of the program.

Baric is a proponent of gain-of-function research, calling the controversial form of virus manipulation “a crucial tool,” and was referenced by Senator Rand Paul as a partner of the Wuhan lab’s top bat coronavirus researcher Shi Zhengli while she carried out the risky form of research.

Fauci denied any involvement – via funding or personnel– from his NIAID on the research.

Another National Pulse scoop proving Fauci’s fealty to China’s leaders.

In their quest to prevent another SARS-like outbreak, Chinese and Western scientists pursued new viruses from bat caves in Southern China. Their efforts would lead them to a mine in Mojiang, China, where six miners had fallen ill with COVID-like symptoms.

N THEIR QUEST TO PREVENT another SARS-like outbreak, Chinese and Western scientists pursued new viruses from bat caves in Southern China. Their efforts would lead them to a mine in Mojiang, China, where six miners had fallen ill with COVID-like symptoms.

It was here that Shi Zheng-li of the Wuhan Institute of Virology found the closest known relative to COVID-19. This virus, along with thousands of other virus samples, would be brought back to several labs in Wuhan.

The Chinese labs were partially funded by Western organizations including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance. When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in Wuhan, efforts to promote a natural origins theory while dispelling any discussion of a potential lab leak were spearheaded by Fauci and involved a number of leading Western scientists.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/infographic-covid-19-outbreak-cover-up_4025512.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-10-01-3&est=lwwlb6lGCymag6R58fMyCQ9WDLAdRXMK1I1flkNx441JuS05Rh4EOJ8CwOp04iQZ8Q%3D%3D

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) on Sept. 30 called on the Biden administration to blacklist Chinese biotech companies, citing U.S. national security concerns, and the Chinese regime’s ambitions to “dominate biotechnology.”

In a letter (pdf) to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the Republican lawmakers called for Shenzhen-based company Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), and others, to be added to the Treasury Department’s Non-SDN Chinese Military Industrial Complex Companies List, the Department of Commerce’s Entity List, and the Department of Defense’s list of Chinese military companies.

The pair argued that Beijing intends to use biotechnology for military purposes against U.S. interests and that BGI, which manages China’s national gene database, has a history of acting on behalf of and collaborating with China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as part of the Chinese regime’s strategy of “Military-Civil Fusion.”

Beijing has for years been collecting large amounts of American health care data, using illegal methods such as cyber hacking, investments in American biotech companies, and partnerships with hospitals and universities to gain access to sensitive information.

BGI “is involved in activities contrary to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States, and it is a clear military-civil fusion contributor to China’s defense industrial base,” they wrote.

Further, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) focus on biotech extends to its potential military application, the lawmakers cautioned, citing a 2017 publication that detailed how the former head of the PLA National Defense University identified biology as one of seven “new domains of warfare,” including the possibility of “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”

The pair said BGI has purchased U.S. companies and is working to “undercut the global DNA sequencing market” using state subsidies.

“BGI and at least 14 other Chinese companies perform genomic sequencing for U.S. health care patients. As mandated by Chinese law, these companies have almost certainly shared this data with the Chinese government,” they wrote. “Joint BGI-PLA research could have an application in future bioweapons—which is especially concerning because BGI’s national gene bank is presumably made available for military research.”

“The United States must not turn a blind eye to the threat posed by Chinese biotechnology companies operating at the CCP’s behest,” Cotton and Gallagher added in their letter. “Blacklisting BGI and its fellow biotech companies will help the United States counter the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to capture Americans’ most private information—their DNA.”

In February, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) said in a fact sheet (pdf) that vast amounts of genomic information (a person’s entire genetic sequence) can fuel developments in the cutting-edge field of precision medicine (or personalized medicine), allowing China to overtake the United States to become a global leader in biotech.

Such data can also be weaponized to target individuals in the country for intelligence and military operations, according to the NCSC.

The Epoch Times has contacted the White House for comment.

Cathy He contributed to this report.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/cotton-gallagher-urge-biden-administration-to-blacklist-chinese-biotech-companies_4026361.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Yet more Fauci e-mails shed light on the closeness to the CCP of U.S. healthcare officials.

ew e-mails from Mr. Anthony Fauci – obtained exclusively by The National Pulse – reveal the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director congratulated epidemiologist Dr. Ian Lipkin, a key Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborator, on receiving personal awards from Chinese Communist Party dictator Xi Jinping.

Lipkin – a Columbia University Professor – received the China International Science and Technology Cooperation Award from regime chief Xi in 2016 before going on to claim another award from China’s Central Government, Central Military Commission, and State Council.

The 2016 award is the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) top science honor for foreign scientists, and, as quoted in a Columbia University press release, Lipkin remarked that “it solidifies my relationship with dear friends and colleagues in the Chinese Academy of Science, Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Health” – all of which are wholly-owned and operated Chinese Communist Party entities.

In 2020 he commented, “It is a great honor to receive this medal… I will cherish it as a reminder of my dear friends and colleagues in China and all we have accomplished together for the health of the Chinese people and all people around the world.”

The latter award came just days before Communist China told the world of the human-to-human transmission of the then “novel coronavirus” which came to be known as COVID-19.

As the virus spread Dr. Lipkin became one of the most frequent media talking heads on the subject.  Lauded by the New York Times in 2010, Lipkin’s work in covering for his Chinese Communist friends became apparent just 6 days after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a “pandemic.”

EXC: Fauci Authored Article For Wuhan Lab Collaborator Peter Daszak.

Without much evidence at all, Lipkin and four others produced a paper on “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” wherein they speculated that “[i]t is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.”

A few months later Lipkin even thanked Fauci for his dismissal of the lab-leak theory. Today, almost 18 months later, that view is no longer credible.

Congrats!

In addition to his close links to China’s hardline Marxist regime, Lipkin has also received nearly 100 grants from Fauci’s own National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency to fund his research.

The press release, included in the email sent from Fauci, touches on Lipkin’s long history of collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

A summary of his professional experience reveals he even “consults” for the regime and has lectured and accepted grants from Chinese state-run scientific bodies, as previously revealed by The National Pulse.

Fauci exclaimed “Congratulations!” before adding, “Very much deserved” in an email sent to Lipkin the day following the January 8th, 2016 press release.

The email obtained by The National Pulse follows Lipkin’s stark denial of a lab origin for COVID-19. Lipkin was quoted by outlets including CBS and USA Today as a means by which to “debunk” Dr. Redfield’s explosive claim linking the virus to a Chinese lab.

“We should be moving away from finger-pointing,” Lipkin told CBS after adding there is “no evidence to suggest that it was created in a lab.”

Lipkin has also given several interviews to state-run Chinese news outlets including China Global Television Network, where he insisted “I have so many friends in China, in universities, and in government that I can help people to talk to one another and work together.” “Renowned epidemiologist Walter Lipkin lauds China’s transparent and professional approach against coronavirus outbreak,” reads a headline from the state-run outlet Global Times.

Chinese state propagandists have wormed their way onto Marxist political NYPD groups.

The New York Police Department’s newly launched hate crime review panel includes Fred Teng, who runs a Chinese Communist Party-linked influence group and has repeatedly praised regime leader Xi Jinping, The National Pulse can reveal.

Teng is one of the five members of the panel, which was inaugurated in April, and will advise the New York Police Department (NYPD) on which crimes should be classified as hate crimes. The group will also advise the District Attorney’s office on the hate crime classification.

Teng, who was born in Shanghai and now resides in New York, has several executives roles at Chinese Communist Party-linked groups including serving as the President of the America China Public Affairs Institute (ACPAI), a visiting professor at the Chinese government-run Sichuan University, and the senior U.S. representative of the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF).

Teng is also the former CEO of China Newsweek, a regime-controlled propaganda magazine based in Beijing under the control of the State Council. Teng has defended the spread of Chinese state-run media in the U.S. in a 2012 BBC article, insisting:

“I think they abide by journalistic guidelines and report their news according to their accuracy, timeliness, proximity and so forth.”

CUSEF was founded by C.H. Tung, the Vice-Chairman of the “highest-ranking entity overseeing” China’s United Front, which the U.S. government identifies as seeking 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.”

Tung himself has spoken at a 2016 ACPAI event in addition to CUSEF Governor Ronnie Chan, who has spoken for the group three times. ACPAI has also hosted events featuring several Chinese Communist Party officials, Chinese state-run media hosts, and People’s Liberation Army (PLA) leaders

Biden Govt, Secret Service, FBI Purchase Drones From Firm Complying With Chinese Government Data Requests.

Teng has also met privately with Chinese Communist Party officials such as Consul General Luo Linquan.

In addition to running ACPAI and advising CUSEF, Teng frequently appears on Chinese state-run media outlets in favor of the Chinese Communist Party. In response to Xi’s removal of term limits, which allowed him to lead for life, Teng told China Global Television Network (CGTN) that “I think they are doing a critically good job right now” in reference to the regime.

“In order to carry out the agenda and the reform, we need a continuous leadership,” he added in defense of Xi’s move.

Teng has expressed similar sentiments on i24 News, where he insisted that “most of the people like it because he’s doing a good job” when asked about the cessation of term limits.

“I mean why change someone when they’re doing a good job?” he added in defense of Xi.

How do the Chinese view the plan for President Xi to stay in power indefinitely, @MichelleMakori asks Fred Teng, the president of the America China Public Affairs Institute pic.twitter.com/Dew7U4vEWm

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) February 27, 2018

League hopes to build ‘baseball ecosystem’ in China

Major League Baseball is expanding its partnership with the Chinese Communist Party, coming at the expense of U.S. jobs and growing Chinese influence over America’s pastime.

The country’s leading propaganda outlet China Daily on Aug. 20 touted the MLB’s attempts to build a “baseball ecosystem” within the country. The league has grown its network to more than 100 Chinese baseball teams in 20 cities, with a growing fanbase of millions. The league’s operations in cahoots with Beijing are not just limited to play—quality U.S. jobs are also at stake. Miken Sports, a baseball equipment brand that provides business to the league, folded a Minnesota production plant and moved its nearly 70 jobs to China.

The league’s interest in exporting jobs and resources to China is drawing fierce rebukes from lawmakers. Rep. Jim Hagedorn (R., Minn.), whose district includes the Miken plant, introduced a resolution on Wednesday obtained by the Washington Free Beacon blasting the MLB for taking away American jobs.

​​”Baseball is considered to be America’s national pastime, so it is completely outrageous that the MLB has decided to shut down the Miken Sports plant in Caledonia and outsource American jobs to communist China—directly defying the MLB’s position as an American sports league,” Hagedorn said. “Miken has been one of the largest employers in Caledonia for decades, and this community will face major hardships and job losses due to this closure. We are urging the MLB to reverse this decision, purchase products that are made in America, and work to keep these jobs at home.”

The MLB has also tapped savvy business professionals with deep ties to Chinese industry to oversee production. Tony Qi, the managing director of MLB China, leads the league’s operations in China. The MLB tapped Qi to grow activities in China in 2019, citing his work with Chinese state media, tech supergiant Tencent, and other Chinese conglomerates. In an August interview, Qi praised the Chinese government for its cooperation and assistance in establishing the MLB brand in China.

“Government policy is also a huge help,” Qi said. “China is now aiming to let the next generation enjoy various sports, and has implemented a series of preferential policies. So more and more baseball clubs are growing in China. … The baseball environment has changed dramatically since MLB entered the Chinese market.”

The MLB did not return a request for comment. The MLB Players Association did not return a request for comment.

Ambitious efforts from the league come shortly after the MLB appealed to Chinese tech giant Tencent—noted for its surveillance activities, human rights abuses, and ties to the military—to grow its brand. The league signed a three-year contract with the Chinese company in 2021 to stream games across Asia. Chinese state media framed the agreement as a step forward for Sino-American relations, even as the two countries feud over issues such as the genocide of Uyghur Muslims, economic espionage, and military buildup.

The MLB’s cooperation with the Chinese regime also comes amid Beijing’s criticism of American domestic political figures for alleged civil rights abuses. The league moved its All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in protest of a voting law signed by Gov. Brian Kemp (R., Ga.), citing the need for the league to express its “values.”

Michael Sobolik, a fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, said the values expressed by the league more resemble a “cynical PR campaign” than a stand on principle.

“It’s telling that Major League Baseball pulled out of Georgia for the All-Star Game over concerns with voting legislation, but is entirely comfortable with operating in a nation with an ongoing genocide,” Sobolik said. “If your corporate values abroad don’t match your corporate values at home, you aren’t standing on principle; you’re just running a cynical PR campaign. The CCP routinely exploits this inconsistency in U.S. companies eager to access China’s market. Every time American businesses choose their own economic wealth over human rights, they write the Party’s propaganda for them.”

Rep. Drew Ferguson (R., Ga.) told the Free Beacon the MLB is another example of big business “playing politics” and caving to the “woke mob.”

“This year, the MLB along with CEOs from several Fortune 500 companies have decided to start playing politics, picking and choosing where they’ll do business according to the whims of the woke mob,” Ferguson said. “Unfortunately, when it comes to issues of real human rights and genocide, they fall silent. It’s time to hold American organizations and companies accountable for their roles in propping up communist China on the global stage. Congress must set aside partisan politics and stand united against the CCP’s malign influence and activities at home and abroad.”

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/mlb-ships-jobs-to-china-to-build-closer-relationship-with-ccp/

James O’Neill, previously tapped by Bill de Blasio for Police Commissioner of New York City and his current COVID-19 Senior Advisor, has repeatedly spoken at the America China Public Affairs Institute (ACPAI), which is closely tied to top Chinese Communist Party-linked influence groups seeking to “co-opt and neutralize opposition” to the regime.

O’Neill, who served as the 43rd Police Commissioner from 2016 to 2019, addressed the America China Public Affairs Institute (ACPAI) three times during his tenure, speaking at the “Police Commissioner Luncheon” in August 2016, September 2017, and November 2018.

The ACPAI website reveals the group “strongly supports a Security Partnership between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China” on areas including “law enforcement cooperation”, “military consultation”, and “pandemic disease control.” Similarly, ACPAI “strongly supports a Mutual Visa Waiver Program between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China” along with free trade agreements between the two counties.

Fred Teng, the president of ACPAI, doubles as the senior U.S. representative of the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF).

CUSEF was founded by C.H. Tung, the Vice-Chairman of the “highest-ranking entity overseeing” China’s United Front, which the U.S. government identifies as seeking 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.”

Tung himself has spoken at a 2016 ACPAI event in addition to CUSEF Governor Ronnie Chan, who has spoken for the group three times. ACPAI has also hosted events featuring several Chinese Communist Party officials including United Nations Ambassadors, Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation Vice Ministers, and the Consul General along with Chinese state-run media hosts.

MUST READ:  Chinese Reporter Demands ‘Iron Fist’ Against ‘Arrogant Countries’ Challenging China.

The group has also hosted a “private breakfast forum with Dr. Yao Yunzhu,” who is a retired Major General of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) along with a “Security Partnership Symposium” hosted by the PLA Academy of Military Science.With the help of the aforementioned Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks, ACPAI seeks to “gather our expertise and our network of friends to facilitate a transformational United States-China relation,” according to its mission statement.

“For the twenty-first century, a cooperative partnership with the People’s Republic of China is important and necessary for the United States of America,” it continues.

Despite O’Neill affiliating with the group, de Blasio rehired the former Police Commissioner to serve as a COVID-19 Senior Advisor in April 2020.

“In this role, O’Neill will oversee the supply and distribution of personal protective and medical equipment within New York City hospitals as demand continues to surge due to the COVID-19 crisis. O’Neill will create, operationalize and manage a supply inspection regime within the hospitals to ensure the rapid turnaround of new supplies and verify each hospital is pushing needed equipment to frontline health care workers,” explained the Mayor’s office.

Shortly before the U.S. presidential election that Joe Biden won, the New York Post published a bombshell story based on emails from Biden’s son, Hunter, that indicated corruption by his father. The October 2020 story, neatly encapsulated by the quote, “ten percent for the big guy,” which the Bidens never denied, was castigated and largely ignored by the left mainstream media, and censored by Twitter. That left censorship might well have led to the election of Biden instead of Donald Trump. Apparently, getting Biden elected was more important to them than his alleged China-linked corruption. Now almost a year later, a Politico writer has finally confirmed the story.

This adds an additional confirmation to the Wall Street Journal’s corroboration and expansion of the Post story, through emails obtained from Hunter’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski. “They showed that Hunter was seeking to cash in on his name via a business deal with a Shanghai-based company with ties to the Chinese government and military. One email noted that the deal envisioned ‘10 held by H for the big guy,’ whom Mr. Bobulinski identified as Joe Biden,” according to the Journal editors.

What might Beijing have gotten for its money? In May 2019, Biden was busy denying that China was a threat, against sentiment in both parties.

“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man … they can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west.” Biden continued, “They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not, they’re not competition for us.”

Not bad folks? The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) runs the country with an iron fist, to the point of a triple genocide against Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Falun Gong. The CCP has been capturing territory from neighboring governments since the 1930s, including all of China in 1949 and a claim to the entire South China Sea in 2009. Since 2016, the Xi Jinping regime has threatened war against the United States, Australia, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

Even the leftist Washington Post news team, which edited out Biden’s east-west gaff, confessed that it was perplexed about which mountains the presidential hopeful referred to.

Then in February, Biden tried to divert concerns about China’s military competition with the United States, into a fear over infrastructure competition. He apparently did not want to significantly increase military spending to defend against China, so he tried to reframe the competition as one over infrastructure.

While the United States is busy building, say, $2 trillion worth of solar-lighted roads across the nation, with imported Chinese concrete, steel, and silicon, China would be using the money it made from us to build amphibious assault vehicles for an attack on Taiwan, and hundreds of silos for nuclear missiles that could reach the American mainland.

“If we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch,” Biden said of China. “They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.”

The money that China was investing in the environment, at the time, was in coal-fired power plants. Was Biden trying to get America to compensate for China’s pollution by building costly solar farms at the expense of the American taxpayer?

Biden had proposed, during the campaign, a $2 trillion infrastructure package to be spent over four years, including on jobs and clean energy. In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), which could be biased given their profession, estimated the existence of an “infrastructure gap” in the United States of $2 trillion. They claimed that the economy would lose twice that amount if these funds were not invested.

Be that as it may, the Wall Street Journal was the only mainstream news source that took Hunter’s emails seriously at the time of the election. They wrote of the New York Post’s vindication this month: “A press that was interested in telling the truth about both candidates would have pressed to confirm the Post’s story and examined the emails for themselves. Instead they rose nearly as one to denounce the Post and claim without evidence that the emails might have been Russian disinformation. That was a sorry repeat of the Russia collusion narrative from 2016, which the press flogged for more than two years but we now know was concocted by the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

In the same opinion, the Journal’s editors allege that the FBI colluded with Clinton’s campaign in 2016, which is “cause for even more Americans to assume that the U.S. intelligence community is a partisan interest group that can’t be trusted. This is damaging to those institutions and the country.”

The Hill’s John Solomon also argued that the FBI colluded with Democrats during the 2016 election. If true, this should be taken seriously. The FBI must maintain its neutrality between the parties in order to maintain its integrity and legitimacy in the eyes of the American citizen.

However, tendentious arguments to “abolish the FBI” go so far as to be ludicrous. The FBI serves critical counter-intelligence and law enforcement functions that maintain the stability of the world’s most powerful democracy. Such arguments may be taking an extreme position in order to get the attention of political leadership, but they are the height of irresponsibility, and play into the hands of the world’s most powerful dictators, including Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

But neither are Democrats blameless. They fuel such arguments by ignoring the FBI’s lapses, and claiming that evidence of Biden’s China corruption doesn’t matter. They deflect blame by pointing to President Trump’s own alleged transgressions, for example, payments by foreign governments to Trump-branded hospitality businesses.

The truth is that both parties compete so strenuously as to have a legalized corruption problem. To win elections, politicians need money and support, which they can seek from big corporations, government insiders, and powerful dictators, like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

To fix the problem, we need bipartisan electoral reform, which removes the influence of foreign money and powerful interests from election campaigns of either party, including through American intermediaries. We need laws that forbid high government officials from using their office, and the revolving door between government and industry, to enrich themselves and their families.

Hunter Biden China Emails Are Real, As Is Bias of Mainstream Media (theepochtimes.com)

Part 2 of the 3-part series ‘World Summit on Forced Organ Harvesting’

The World Summit on Combating and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting is highlighting media silence on one of the greatest atrocities of our time: a billion-dollar forced organ harvesting industry in China.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used its gatekeeper role over the immense economic power of China, and its political influence campaigns abroad, to silence global media and influence nations and international organizations globally, on the human rights atrocity of forced organ harvesting. The summit, held between Sept. 17 and Sept. 26, sheds light on not only this, but on what one participant calls a “diplomacy of silence.”

Despite incontrovertible evidence, Beijing denies that it is currently conducting forced organ harvesting and has gotten the World Health Organization (WHO) to support the CCP’s denials. But the WHO assessment is faulty. According to Lord Hunt in the United Kingdom, “it was revealed by the UK government in 2019 that the World Health Organization’s assessment is based on China’s own self-assessment and that the WHO has not carried out its own assessment of [the] Chinese organ transplant system.”

Organizers of the World Summit demonstrate that CCP pressure has decreased media coverage of forced organ harvesting in China, leading nations and international organizations with little incentive to take the costly steps necessary to address the problem.

“Many members of the news media have failed to report truthfully on this atrocity but bowed to CCP pressure and published paid propaganda instead,” the organizers wrote on the summit website. “Societies around the world are kept ignorant of the dangers of becoming complicit with forced organ harvesting crimes.”

The founder of the nonprofit group Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) and host of the summit, Dr. Torsten Trey, stated on Sept. 17 that the summit looks “into the role of the news media and the issue of censorship. By default, the first task of the news media is to report facts and truths, however, another important aspect of the media is to connect people. Over the past fifteen years [since the New York Times broke the story of forced organ harvesting in China], the mainstream media has failed to connect the people in the free world with the victims of forced organ harvesting in China. This separation between the readers and the victims is another, often neglected aspect of censorship.”

Trey noted that the World Summit is an attempt to bridge the divide between citizens and victims of forced organ harvesting.

Dr. Weldon Gilcrease, director of Oncology at the University of Utah School of Medicine, told the summit that the extensive evidence of forced organ harvesting has gone unrecognized by “most of the medical community, and indeed most of the world.”

When Gilcrease attempted at his own university to stop training Chinese doctors in transplants, arguing that they would likely use the knowledge to murder unwilling donors, his administration opposed him, saying that “there’s no doubt that forced organ harvesting is happening, but that taking a stance against a large, strong country such as China could be dangerous both to our institution, as well as the undergraduate and graduate schools that we serve at our university.” He was told that “if we said anything [about these atrocities], China would simply send all of its students to Texas.”

Several other summit participants called for an end to the international training of doctors from China in transplant techniques. Dr. Andre Gattolin, a senator from France and co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), criticized “developed countries which, in the name of sacrosanct medical and health cooperation, have proceeded without precaution to transfers of skills and technologies which have led to the shameful abuses observed today in China.”

Gattolin noted that France has “widely taken part in the training of numerous Chinese surgeons in the very delicate technique of organ transplantation.” As a result, “our trust—granted too naively—has been betrayed. We failed to demand a right of supervision over what might have resulted, and those who were tricked in the name of sharing knowledge and a certain scientific humanitarianism still refuse to acknowledge their share of responsibility.”

Carlos Iglesias Jimenez, an international human rights lawyer from Spain, said at the summit that Western governments and international organizations have not been tough enough to confront the CCP and condemn forced organ harvesting.

“We have many examples of this, the CCP has infiltrated so many international organizations: the United Nations Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, the United Nations itself, managing to ensure that everything goes unnoticed, that everything is concealed, that these events can never be generally and publicly known by society and the whole world. And they are succeeding with the complicit silence of Western governments and international institutions and international organizations,” he stated.

According to retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general Robert Spalding, the CCP’s use of carrots and sticks against international democratic processes and deliberations on forced organ harvesting amount to “political warfare.” He told the conference on Sept. 19 that political warfare, in the form of influence through economic elites, is used to immobilize democracies to these atrocities.

Spalding said, “Political warfare is used to desensitize, to deflect any criticism on understanding of things like the genocide of the Uyghur population, the lockdown and control of the people of Hong Kong, the mass incarceration and organ harvesting of the Falun Gong, and the outright oppression of … certain elements of the Chinese population, particularly those that … the Chinese Communist Party fears.”

Françoise Hostalier, a member of the French Parliament, explained that the failure to acknowledge that Chinese leaders are operating on discrepant moral and ethical principles is because “China is an unavoidable economic partner, which is increasingly successful in many scientific fields, and which is bringing more and more territories and countries under its domination. There is a great risk that our researchers, doctors, laboratories, industrialists, and students, through scientific or economic exchanges, will find themselves complicit in the inhuman and criminal practices of their Chinese counterparts, which are contrary to all ethics, but without being aware of it.”

Hermann Tertsch, a member of the European Parliament from Spain, criticized the mainstream media for failing in its duty to cover the crimes of the CCP. “The criteria of the media world, which has hegemony over the world’s communication, are criteria that have been increasingly defined in one direction over the last 50 years, and it is in this direction that the crimes committed by the Chinese dictatorship are treated in such a benevolent way.”

Tertsch said that images critical of the CCP “have been disappearing from the networks, not only in the Chinese networks where nothing can be found about that tragedy of 32 years ago [the Tiananmen Square massacre], [but] also in the Western media, by Chinese desire or by the desire of so many of China’s partners, as we have among those who applaud in Davos, with those who applaud Xi Jinping, the great giants of the big takers of the big technology companies, of the big networks, we all know their names.”

He continued by saying that we are indulgent of CCP crimes because “they manufacture a lot there, because they have many economic relations, because they admire the model, because they want to apply a similar model.”

Democracies in the West could hold the CCP accountable, according to Tertsch, but “they prefer a big globalist regime where every person is anonymous and interchangeable, and we can take organs from one person and give them to a higher bidder or to someone who suits us for some reason.”

Economic interests, according to Tertsch, “lead these Western elites to be complicit with the Chinese Communist Party … to hide the monstrosity of the transplants, which are taking away, we do not know how many thousands of political prisoners, of common prisoners, of people from the Falun Gong movement, of dissidents.”

The world has a responsibility to face squarely the atrocity that is forced organ harvesting. That it is mostly imposed on highly vulnerable populations in China, namely the Falun Gong and potentially the Uyghurs as well, and that these populations have been targeted for cultural eradication, brings forced organ harvesting to the level of a means of genocide, per the U.N. definition. As forced organ harvesting is also a commercial medical procedure, those who support human rights face an entirely new type of crime against humanity: medical genocide for profit. The mainstream media must do a better job of covering this issue, or it loses any claim to be an unbiased conscience of the community.

Read part 1 here.

Beijing Silences Global Media on China’s Forced Organ Harvesting (theepochtimes.com)

Part 3 of the 3-part series ‘China’s Web of Geopolitical and Economic Goals and Objectives’

Since 2013, the Chinese communists under the leadership of Xi Jinping have been diligently pursuing two strategic initiatives focused on building a worldwide colonial empire and restoring China to world leadership: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as “One Belt, One Road”) and Made in China 2025.

In the wake of the economic devastation wrought on the world economy by the COVID-19 pandemic, Xi announced on Sept. 21 at the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly a third grandiose program—the so-called “Global Development Initiative (GDI)” that is intended to “steer global development toward a new stage of balanced, coordinated and inclusive growth.”

According to China Daily, Xi’s new initiative involves six areas: “prioritizing development, a people-centered approach, benefits for all, innovation-driven development, harmony between man and nature, and a commitment to results-oriented actions.” Apparently, the only standard Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda phrase missing from Xi’s announcement was the euphemism “toward a shared future,” which underscores all ChiCom “altruism” that has been trumpeted in recent months by the CCP’s media.

If Xi was truly serious about GDI and his vision for the future, he would have reined in the myriad of secondary initiatives and goals that the CCP apparatchiks have been relentlessly pursuing at the world’s expense over the past several years. A number of these were previously summarized in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.

But maybe Xi merely “forgot” to mention that GDI, BRI, and those secondary initiatives and goals are meant to result in the world bowing to CCP leadership in all spheres of human endeavors because that is the ultimate objective of the sticky Spider Dragon web of ChiCom “benevolence” being offered to the world.

This third part of the series completes the exposure of the CCP’s secondary initiatives and goals and lays bare the ChiComs’ real intentions: to control all aspects of human endeavors. The scope and diabolical synergy across those initiatives is breathtaking.

Conquer Space

The goal is to dominate space in every way, but especially in military and economic domains. The Chinese missions to Mars and the moon are window dressing used to advertise ChiCom scientific prowess and leadership in advanced space technologies, as well as to masquerade the weaponization of space by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), as noted here.

Win Without Fighting

The ChiComs seek to achieve all of their objectives, ultimately leading to economic and military global dominance, without the need for kinetic warfare. Rather, they exploit political and psychological warfare to achieve a fait accompli in the minds of their adversaries, mainly the United States and its allies.

Exploit the United Front Work Department to Win Overseas Friends

The United Front Work Department provides cover for intelligence agents (spies) operating under the Ministry of State Security and has tentacles reaching into the Confucius Institutes, Thousand Talents program, Chinese news services, Overseas Chinese Affairs Offices, and the Cyberspace Administration of China aimed at influencing foreign opinion and winning friends for ChiCom policies.

Oust the US From the Middle East

This objective is a “two-fer” for Beijing: destroy U.S. influence in the Middle East and gain access to massive supplies of oil and gas. Energy-poor China is investing billions under their BRI to develop the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor consisting of highways, rail lines, and pipelines from the port of Gwadar on the Indian Ocean to Xinjiang (East Turkestan). This corridor will be the transmission belt to China for Middle East oil, including oil from Iran, with whom the ChiComs have also established a strategic relationship, as noted here.

Exploit Merchant Seamen to Control the World’s Shipping

The goal here is to dramatically expand the number of qualified and experienced merchant seamen and subsidize their employment by other nations’ shipping industries in order to monitor, surveil, and influence shipping operations around the world.

Implement Global Ocean Governance

The CCP objective here is to substitute China’s standards, technology, and protocols for the international conventions such as UNCLOS that presently determine conduct, responsibilities, and maritime law on the seas of the world. The effort also involves developing a network of surveillance satellites capable of monitoring sea-going traffic around the world, as well as convincing other nations to use the Beidou Navigation Satellite System in lieu of other commercial satellite navigation systems.

Collect and Exploit the World’s DNA

U.S. government advisers warned that the Chinese regime has been collecting genetic data in order to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and this effort could “potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the U.S. population or food supply,” according to a Reuters report.

Dominate the Indo-Pacific Region

This goal is to expand Chinese military bases throughout the region in order to counteract U.S. geopolitical dominance, as well as to place additional pressures on key U.S. allies in the region, including India, Australia, and Japan (which together with the United States comprise the Quad).

Replace US Brands With Chinese Labels

The ChiComs seek to displace U.S. brand names with Chinese labels. While this might seem to be simply standard competition, the issue is much more complex and important, as popular brands provide cultural and psychological influences that can be exploited because each one is linked with the country of origin.

Become the Dominant Producer of Industrial Goods in the World

Acknowledging the great strides made in recent decades toward this goal, Beijing’s mouthpiece People’s Daily crowed that “China is the world’s largest producer of over 220 types of industrial products.” Production leadership translates to geopolitical influence and leverage—the underlying objective.

Replace Western-Style Democracy With Chinese ‘Whole Democracy’

This is a ChiCom psychological play to leverage the West’s support for democracy, but with “Chinese characteristics” controlled by the CCP. The word “whole” implies that traditional Western democracy is somehow incomplete and deficient, and that the ChiCom version is better.

Control All Data and Information

The objective here is to limit the exchange of data and information among citizens and entities to that which is approved by the state—and only the state! In other words, George Orwell’s “1984” writ large on the rest of the world but with Chinese characteristics.

Convert the South China Sea Into a ‘Chinese Lake’

Beijing’s goal is to seize control of natural resources in the area and to simultaneously intimidate China’s neighbors. Chinese efforts involve sovereignty disputes and the building of artificial islands controlled by the People’s Liberation Army.

Promote ‘Common Prosperity’ Through Total Control of the Private Sector

Common prosperity is another one of those meaningless Marxist euphemisms that sound good as they roll off the tongue but whose meaning is murky and obfuscated. The CCP has been using it to describe their domestic efforts to deliver improved living standards through the “wise leadership” of ChiCom collectivism.

Exploit the Natural Resources in the Deep Seabed

China has a stranglehold on rare earth element (REE) production and seeks to dominate new REE sources, including those in the deep seabed. Control of REE production provides considerable economic and geopolitical leverage with other industrial nations through “supply chain disruption,” particularly the REE-poor European Union nations.

Subvert International Green Advocates While Masking Domestic Economic Expansion

This goal is about reducing U.S. competitiveness while increasing China’s competitive advantage and expanding the world’s dependency on Chinese manufacturing and production—in this case for “green products” such as solar panels, electric vehicles, and batteries. Only the Western greenies believe ChiCom propaganda that China will achieve its publicly stated goal of “net zero emissions” by 2060. The rest of us know that it’s just another feint in the CCP’s scheming to achieve world economic dominance.

Achieve Information Dominance Around the World

China has invested enormous resources to gain total information dominance in the international arena in order to improve decision-making related to the achievement of all of its goals and objectives. Information dominance involves consuming and understanding all relevant data and information in order to support decision-making. This secondary objective is highly synergistic with all of Beijing’s other secondary objectives.

Foment Discord in the US

Fomenting discord and division in the United States—China’s main rival on the world stage—has been an ongoing ChiCom objective for decades, as reported here and here. Pitting Americans against each other, exploiting economic disparities and “unfairness,” and promoting cultural Marxism throughout American society have been continuing prongs in the relentless ChiCom attack on America.

Build the Infrastructure of a ChiCom World Empire Through Property Acquisition Overseas

Beijing has been making strategic investments in overseas property for years for a variety of purposes, including providing security for the BRI investments, constructing bases for China’s military and navy, acquiring natural resources for future exploitation, and intimidating and pressuring other nations to accommodate Chinese interests. All of those acquisitions over time will form the core infrastructure and network for a ChiCom “colonial world empire.”

Implement the Dual Circulation Model

The objective is to make the Chinese economy less dependent on foreign advanced technologies and supply chains. Chinese companies would become independent of “foreign know-how” while creating domestically produced Chinese products that would be in demand around the world.

Monopolize and Control the World’s Energy Supply

The ChiComs understand that controlling the energy supplies of the future provides them with geopolitical leverage to achieve other objectives. That is why they are exploiting their competitive advantages to capture the energy production market around the world. Controlling the world’s energy resources means controlling the economies of the world.

Dominate the Small Nuclear Reactor Marketplace

Despite all the caterwauling about “green energy,” the only real energy production technology capable of achieving the carbon dioxide reductions desired by green energy advocates is nuclear power (refer to heat exchange ratio comparisons among green energy technologies and the laws of thermodynamics, as well as the German experience with wind and solar as described here). China is moving rapidly to corner the market on exportable nuclear energy capabilities that could be feasibly budgeted by many nations.

Control and Manipulate the World’s Strategic Commodities

Beijing has been successfully acquiring control of strategic commodities for years while building up strategic reserves as both an inflation hedge and also as a means of market manipulation to influence targeted countries. A strategic commodity is a raw material or agricultural product that is considered critical to a nation’s economy such that the economy would suffer significantly if that commodity’s trade and supply is interrupted in any way.

Control Foreign Narratives Through the Use of Artificial Intelligence and Fake Social Media

Beijing has been using aggressive information warfare tactics to influence foreign leaders, diplomats, and other key decision-makers in order to achieve CCP strategic goals and objectives. Part of their information warfare campaign involves the exploitation of social media and artificial intelligence technologies to create fake accounts, bots, and social networks aimed at influencing foreign decision-makers.

Conclusion

This series summarized 52 interlocking initiatives and goals being pursued by the CCP around the world. The ever-expanding Spider Dragon’s web aims to ultimately control and direct all human endeavors: economic, geopolitical, financial, legal, medical, security, travel, individual expression, culture, psychological, ideological, and much more. “Chinese benevolence” and “Chinese altruism”—as expressed by Xi Jinping and the CCP cadres—are oxymorons that camouflage their real objectives. Unbeknownst to many people, the world is meant to pay handsomely for that “benevolence” at the expense of personal and economic freedoms.

The Chinese Regime Aims to Influence and Control All Human Endeavors (theepochtimes.com)

I seem to have been fortunate enough to stumble upon the latest vaccine shaming “copy and paste” post some people have decided to share on social media. If you’re vaccinated, good for you. If you’re not vaccinated, good for you. I honestly don’t care what you do with your body because the only person I have any control over is myself.

That being said, I’m honestly tired of staying silent while everybody else, including Joe Biden, go off on their tangents.

You’re vaccinated, and you don’t know what’s in it? You don’t know what’s in hot dogs or treatments for cancer, AIDS, MS, etc.? You don’t know what’s in Tylenol and Ibuprofen and tattoo ink and shampoo and your food? Well, the great thing about living in the information technology age is a lot of that information is available right at your fingertips, presuming of course it hasn’t been censored. We live in a time where we have the ability to know a lot of things that we didn’t know before. There may be a lot of things you don’t know right now, but you have the ability and opportunity to educate yourself. If you decide not to take the time, that’s your business. But that also makes you incredibly lazy and ignorant.

Life is short. And it passes quickly and can change on a dime. I believe all of us still have a lot of things we want to do in this life and experiences we want to share. Places we want to go. People we want to see.

If you seriously think the answer is shaming people who HAVE done their research into getting injected with something that isn’t even a vaccine is going to allow you to get your life back, you’re wrong.

The problem is, we’ve been putting our lives on hold for almost 19 months now. We’ve listened to the science. We kept our kids home from school for a year. We shut down businesses, some forever. We closed our churches, our parks, our gyms, our hiking trails, our beaches, pretty much everything. Obesity of U.S. children increased among 5- through 11-year-olds from 36.2 percent to 45.7 percent. Where’s the outcry over that? How about the excess consumption of processed sugars like high-fructose corn syrup? Where’s your passport for being allowed to be a parent or a human being for that matter? Maybe it’s time for you to remedy that for your fellow man.

And yet some still keep believing the next hurdle you jump over will get you back to your normal lives. But the goalposts keeps moving!

Guess what? You can’t comply your way back to freedom. This will never end if we keep submitting to the latest and greatest “scientific suggestion” that’s being forced on us. Label me a conspiracy theorist? I don’t care. The stats are in my favor as I’m currently at about 50-0 as far as how things are going down. If anything, I identify as a walking spoiler alert.

Personally, I’m appalled and offended that certain people in certain occupations are having to choose between getting injected with an experimental gene therapy (yes, that’s what your “vaccine” is, read the FDA “approval”), or lose their jobs, livelihoods and ability to support their families. It’s abhorrent to think in order to have a place in society, we’d have to inject ourselves with this and show proof to anyone and everyone. I’m sure the Germans in the 1930s allowed fear and division to make them think what was being done to the Jews was fair and justified as well. It’s taken almost 90 years for history to repeat itself. The Nuremberg Code is still in effect and these people enforcing these mandates are in violation of it.

Are these hospitals seriously going to fire nurses and doctors for NOT getting a vaccine in the middle of a pandemic? That’ll be a sight to see. It may resemble our exit from Afghanistan! These medical professionals worked through COVID for 18 months on the frontlines and were last year’s heroes and are now deemed expendable because they don’t want to inject themselves with an experimental vaccine. How about teachers? Are we going to shut down schools again? Parents will LOVE that. Or maybe we should eliminate the teaching certification so any random person can teach our kids? In Oregon you no longer need to show proficiency in reading and math. Will that become the new standard?

I advise you all to read The Thirty Tyrants. There is a ton of corruption in this world and in our government. Our Founding Fathers NEVER meant for our representatives to make lifelong careers in Washington, DC. Some of these younger representatives show promise but if they’re there too long, it’s only a matter of time before their soul and morals obtain a price tag and they’ll be bought and sold to the Devil himself.

How is it okay for these politicians to mandate how we live our lives and lock us down and torment our kids while they go out to expensive dinners indoors unmasked nor socially distanced at The French Laundry? How is it okay to have a 60th birthday party with 600 guests when my father’s funeral was limited to 10 people? How is it acceptable to enforce mask mandates and no social gatherings and be caught at a backyard BBQ doing exactly what was mandated NOT to do? How is it acceptable to say we can’t travel while politicians are off vacationing abroad? How is it okay to close hair salons and most of us went without getting a haircut for a year when you parade maskless inside a salon you had opened especially for you?

I also advise you all to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Turn off the news, the television and the radio. FOLLOW THE MONEY. There’s a medicine that costs 12 cents that could eradicate this virus but instead the $300 billion option is being forced on us. Stop shaming people for the decisions that they make. Stop buying in to this ridiculous rhetoric. This won’t end until we say it ends. People all over the world are starting uprisings because they have had ENOUGH.

I’ve been affected by loss from COVID. I’m not denying the reality or severity of the virus. But Fauci is not my God. Bill Gates’ software and computers get viruses all the time! What is he doing working on and funding vaccines? Ultimately, the only person who knows how many days I have left on this earth is Jesus Christ, and that’s who I’m choosing to put my faith in. Not Fauci, not Pfizer, not Moderna, or whomever else is trying to dictate how I live my life. I do not consent. I will not comply.

For those doctors and nurses who have blatantly stated they won’t treat people who aren’t vaccinated, for the nurse who posted on social media recently that they’ll mess with your ventilator if you’re not vaccinated, I’m sorry, didn’t you all take an OATH when you became licensed? It’s your duty to do your job no matter what state or condition a person is in. Those lives lost are on YOUR hands, not the unvaccinated. And for those people who say the unvaccinated deserve to die? You’re no better than the dictators and tyrants. And even with your vaccine you can still get and spread the virus so YOU also should have to submit to regular tests.

I woke up about 18 months ago. Waking up is painful and disillusioning. But honestly, walking around awake in a world that’s still asleep is more painful and creates a righteous anger inside of you. I pray every day that darkness comes to light, that the truth comes out, and most importantly that those who have committed these crimes against humanity be held accountable.

Danielle Price

Letter to the Editor: ‘You Can’t Comply Your Way Back to Freedom’ (theepochtimes.com)

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry appeared to be indifferent to the plight of Uyghurs in China when he said “life is always full of tough choices” in a recent interview with Bloomberg.

Kerry was asked, “Clearly a priority of the Biden administration is really addressing climate, but it’s not the only priority. There are other things as well, such as the Uyghur situation in the West. What is the process by which one trades off climate against human rights?”

In response, Kerry said: “Life is always full of tough choices in the relationship between nations.”

To back up his argument, Kerry pointed to former President Ronald Reagan—who according to Kerry “thought the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire”—but went to Iceland to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavík Summit in October 1986.

The meeting ultimately resulted in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States.

“The point I’m making is that, even as there were egregious human rights issues, which Ronald Reagan called them out on, we have to find a way forward to make the world safer, to protect our countries, and act in our interests,” Kerry continued.

“We can do and must do the same thing now,” he added. “Yes, we have issues, a number of different issues [with China], but first and foremost, this planet must be protected.”

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is committing genocide against Uyghurs in China’s far-western Xinjiang region, subjecting them to forced sterilization, forced abortion, torture, forced labor, and the removal of children from their families. Additionally, the communist regime has detained more than one million Uyghurs in internment camps.

Uyghur and Kazakhstan national Gulbakhar Jalilova, 54, a former detainee, told The Epoch Times in 2018 that detained Uyghurs were psychologically and physically tortured, poisoned, and even killed by injection of unknown drugs.

Also in 2018, another former Uyghur detainee, a Kazakhstan national aged 54, who spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity, said young girls were being raped inside these camps and were given pills to stop them from becoming pregnant.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has since issued a statement criticizing Kerry’s remarks.

“Special Envoy John Kerry’s ghoulish response dismissing genocide is divorced from American values and interests, and I strongly urge him to immediately retract it,” McCaul stated.

He added: “The United States should never ignore atrocities and genocide in exchange for commitments made by the CCP on climate, especially when the CCP has a proven track record of ignoring their international commitments.

“I call on Secretary Blinken to provide a full reporting of exactly what commitments Special Envoy Kerry is making to China on behalf of the United States.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called Kerry’s remarks “horrific” in a Twitter post.

“Biden Dems: We care about $$ much more than human rights, slavery or Chinese concentration camps,” Cruz wrote.

The Munich-based World Uyghur Congress did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this month, Kerry traveled to China seeking Beijing’s cooperation on climate change. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi used his meeting with Kerry to demand Washington “pay attention to and pro-actively respond to China’s ‘two lists’ and ‘three bottom lines.’”

One of the lists asked the United States to correct its “wrongdoings,” including revoking its sanctions on CCP officials, which were announced by the United States in response to widely reported human rights abuses.

John Kerry Draws Criticism for Brushing Off Question on CCP’s Crimes Against Uyghurs (theepochtimes.com)

U.S.-based advocacy group Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) is calling on the United Nations to take action against China’s state-sanctioned practice of killing prisoners of conscience to supply organs for its lucrative transplant market.

“The failure of the United Nations to address and thoroughly investigate the forced organ harvesting from living people in China is an unacceptable omission that needs to be resolved,” said Dr. Torsten Trey, founder and executive director of DAFOH, in a Sept. 23 press release (pdf).

The 76th session of the U.N. General Assembly began on Sept. 17 in New York City, as world leaders and foreign ministers gather to discuss issues such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

DAFOH stated that China’s horrific practice should be on the agenda of the world body. It also called on participants of the U.N. summit to “treat this issue like any other crimes against humanity.”

“After more than two decades of forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience, DAFOH believes the UN has fallen short in taking the lead in stopping these crimes against humanity,” according to the press release.

China is one of the top destinations for those in need of vital organs as its transplant industry boasts an extraordinarily short waiting time. To explain such a phenomenon, the communist regime has claimed that there are many voluntary donors in China while locals have a low demand for transplant organs. Beijing has also said it relies on its national organ donation system to procure organs.

In 2019, evidence surfaced that Beijing was killing innocent people to drive its transplant market. That year, a London-based people’s tribunal published a report concluding that forced organ harvesting was happening on a “significant scale” in China, with Falun Gong practitioners being the main source of organs.

Adherents of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice also known as Falun Dafa, have been targets of persecution by the Chinese regime since 1999. Several years later, the Chinese regime allegedly began harvesting organs from detained Falun Gong adherents.

China’s public transplant data has also been debunked, according to a 2016 report by David Matas, a human rights lawyer; David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific; and Ethan Gutmann, a U.S. investigative journalist. The report estimated that Beijing carried out between 60,000 and 100,000 organ transplants a year, as opposed to 10,000 claimed by Beijing.

The report concluded that most of the organs came from Falun Gong adherents, while the remaining originated from other prisoners of conscience—House Christians, Uyghur Muslims, and Tibetans.

“Given the scope of China’s organ harvesting crimes with an unknown number of victims and the nature of the crime itself, a commercialized murder for transplants, condemning this inhumane practice remains an unfulfilled task for the largest organization in the world,” Trey added.

The United Nations, the Office of Spokesperson for the U.N. Secretary-General, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

In June, OHCHR special rapporteurs and several other human rights experts said they were “extremely alarmed by reports of alleged ‘organ harvesting’ targeting minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims, and Christians, in detention in China.”

They called on China to “promptly respond to the allegations of ‘organ harvesting’ and to allow independent monitoring by international human rights mechanisms.”

China’s forced organ harvesting is now being discussed at the World Summit on Combating and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting, which began on Sept. 17 and resumed on Sept. 24, ending on Sept. 26. DAFOH is one of five NGOs sponsoring the online event. 

US Rights Group Calls on UN to Address China’s Forced Organ Harvesting (theepochtimes.com)

Beijing Biden is letting China back into U.S. federal infrastructure after Trump banned their drones.

Despite the Trump administration blacklisting DJI – a controversial Chinese technology company – several branches of the federal government under have purchased drones from the firm under President Joe Biden.

DJI Innovations – formerly Da Jiang Innovations Science – currently leads the world’s market drone market, first catching the attention of U.S. intelligence officials in 2015. The organization has admitted complying with Beijing’s data requests, leading the U.S. Army to ban their use in 2017, citing cyber vulnerabilities. 

The office of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles sent a memo stating officials have “moderate confidence” DJI’s commercial drones and software are “providing US critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.”

Now, America is buying these drones again, giving the Chinese Communist Party yet another entry into U.S. federal infrastructure.

The purchases follow the appointment of two high-profile Biden campaign officials who previously worked for a consulting firm lobbying for DJI: Senior Spokesman for Biden Inaugural Committee Matt Hill, and Director of State Communication Meira Bernstein.

Following stints at the Global Strategy Group, Hill began serving as the Senior Associate Communications Director, and Bernstein is now Deputy Assistant Secretary for Media Operations at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Deleted client lists from the Global Strategy Group’s website reveal the firm working on behalf of DJI.

As Axios notes, the Secret Service bought eight DJI drones on July 26th, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) purchased 19 drones a few days earlier.

In contrast, under the Trump administration, the DHS – the Secret Service’s parent agency – asserted that DJI was “providing U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.”

The New York Times reported on a 2016 DJI press briefing in China where company spokesman Zhang Fanxi described how DJI “is complying with requests from the Chinese government to hand over data”:

Biden Govt, Secret Service, FBI Purchase Drones From Firm Complying With Chinese Government Data Requests. (thenationalpulse.com)

Dr. David Asher said the ‘lies’ propagated by China and the U.S. NIH ‘have now been defeated’.

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6273913107001

Newly leaked documents obtained by private research group DRASTIC “completely contradict” claims made by both China and American immunologist Dr. Anthony S. Fauci about the reality of gain-of-function research being done inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology that may have caused the coronavirus pandemic, according to a former State Department COVID-19 investigator.

On “The Story“, host Martha MacCallum reported the documents released by DRASTIC revealed a plan to create a coronavirus – in this case SARS-CoV-2 – that would be more infections to and transmissible via humans. The virus would then be released in batcaves where researchers would test the flying mammals with vaccines to see if they could cure the virus.

The Chinese researchers planned to inject the “super-charged” virus into “humanized mice” to see what the effect on them would be.

Dr. David Asher, the ex-State Department official, told Fox News the biggest takeaway from the new documents is that there is a “smoking gun that explains the specific features of the [virus] sequence that are so peculiar.”

“The most genetically unusual piece of the puzzle and the sequence is a ‘furin cleavage site’, which allows the virus to spread from bats to humans, and among humans in a highly pathogenic way,” he said. 

“The fact that the Wuhan Institute – with EcoHealth Alliance as their US partner – were applying for funding to do gain of function research, explicitly to endow a bat-borne Coronavirus related to SARS with a furin cleavage site so it could essentially kill humans.”

EcoHealth alliance, a New York-based NGO, is run by Dr. Peter Daszak, whom Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently discussed on his program.

Carlson previously reported on Daszak’s group’s funding of bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, with the help of the taxpayer funding the federal government directed to EcoHealth Alliance.

“We learned that the guy directly tied to bat virus experiments in the lab in Wuhan was the same guy telling the entire world that there was no possibility this virus could have come from the Wuhan lab. Conflict of interest, anyone? It’s absurd,” Carlson said of Daszak in June, noting that the doctor organized a letter published in The Lancet that downplayed the possibility the virus could’ve come from the Chinese lab.

On Thursday, Asher told Fox News he is relieved that in the end, DARPA, the Pentagon’s research & development arm, turned down direct funding to the coronavirus project in the Wuhan lab on account of “weapons of mass destruction concerns.”

According to Asher, DARPA also felt concerned the research was “pure gain of function – which contradicts Fauci.”

“It looks like the Chinese got into a global viral project, which works with this EcoHealth Alliance, and used China’s own funding to conduct the research into advancing the pathogenecity of COVID. Now we have all of the pieces genetically that account for Covid-19 being manufactured in that lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan institute by the bat lady (Dr. Shi Zhengli),” Asher said.

“All the lies that the Chinese had put out — and all the lies and the cover-up at the NIH and others have been complicit in have now been defeated,” he said, as the Bethesda, Maryland federal institute is the umbrella organization of Fauci’s NIAID.

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Asher called for a formal FBI investigation into the entire situation, calling it a likely “criminal cover-up.”

“The fact that the U.S. Government has any relationship still to the Wuhan Institute is criminal in my mind,” he said.

New Wuhan COVID docs ‘completely contradict Fauci’ on gain-of-function claims, ex-State Dept official says | Fox News

Jared Huffman, Rashida Tlaib aim to ‘abolish’ military branch

House Democrats on Wednesday introduced a measure in the 2022 defense budget to eliminate the Space Force.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D., Calif.) led a resolution, cosigned by fellow Democratic representatives Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Maxine Waters (Calif.), Mark Pocan (Wis.), and Jésus García (Calif.), to “abolish” America’s newest military branch. The measure received support from the Koch-funded National Taxpayers Union and radical anti-war groups such as Peace Action and Demand Progress.

“Since its creation under the former Trump administration, the Space Force has threatened longstanding peace and flagrantly wasted billions of taxpayer dollars,” said Huffman. “It’s time we turn our attention back to where it belongs: addressing urgent domestic and international priorities like battling COVID-19, climate change, and growing economic inequality. Our mission must be to support the American people, not spend billions on the militarization of space.”

Huffman and his allies are far-left on the vital issue of defense spending. Pocan in March proposed a major cut to the defense budget, but fellow Democratic caucus members shot it down. National security officials and experts have called President Biden’s proposed defense budget insufficient to meet the challenges posed by Russia and China.

The House Armed Services Committee this month approved Republicans and some moderate Democrats’ plan to increase the Biden defense budget by $24 billion.

The push to defund the Space Force comes as China increasingly threatens the United States. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said Monday that China is developing means to bombard American targets from space.

China has launched satellites and a space station, threatening American dominance in space. Simulated war drills show that Beijing would likely exploit American vulnerabilities in space as a first move in a takeover of Taiwan.

Dems Plan To Scuttle Space Force (freebeacon.com)

Part 1 of the 3-part series ‘World Summit on Forced Organ Harvesting’

New details are emerging about the billion-dollar forced organ harvesting industry in China that has resulted in as many as a million deaths, or more, of unwilling “donors.”

The World Summit on Combating and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting, held between Sept. 17 and Sept. 26, brings together academics, lawyers, and politicians from around the world to discuss overwhelming evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) transplant abuse, mostly against prisoners of conscience.

But the CCP is not the only perpetrator, according to summit participants. Political, academic, and media silence in the West amounts to complicity for reasons of commerce. The CCP’s goal of eroding international norms of consent in order to maximize its profit from this industry must be stopped, participants argued, by more forcefully speaking out and legislating against the abuse, including through individualized sanctions against those CCP members who are most responsible, as well as an end to the international training of transplant surgeons from China.

‘Medical Genocide’

As many as 1 million or more have fallen prey to forced organ harvesting, in what could be considered “medical genocide,” according to organizers of the World Summit on Combating and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting. The killings meet the U.N. Genocide Convention definition of genocide, which includes attempts to eradicate not only races, but religions, when there is state-level intent to do so.

“The mass killing of prisoners of conscience for their organs serves a dual purpose for the [Chinese Communist] Party,” according to David Matas, an international human rights lawyer from Canada. “The killings eliminate what the Party sees as its political enemies.”

Carlos Iglesias Jimenez, an international human rights lawyer from Spain, agreed. He said, “The CCP’s aim is to eradicate, to physically eliminate people because of their spiritual beliefs—these prisoners of conscience such as Christians, Tibetans, Buddhists and especially the millions of Falun Gong practitioners. The priority objective is their elimination, their eradication, and this logically has the connotations of a crime of genocide.”

According to Theresa Chu, a lawyer with the Taiwan Falun Gong Attorney Group, “forced organ harvesting is not only used to carry out the cleansing and genocide of Falun Gong practitioners and ethnic minority groups, such as Uyghurs, but also implicated in massive economic profits from organ transplantation, transnational organ sale, transplant tourism, and organ brokerage.”

The cause of forced organ harvesting in China has a pecuniary root, as it has likely produced billions of dollars of revenue for China’s hospitals, and hundreds of millions in taxes for use by Beijing. Lord Hunt called the practice “commercialized murder.” It is mass murder carried out on an industrial scale, with the involvement of China’s military. A close read of the evidence of forced organ harvesting in China sounds a lot like genocide, given that it is focused against a particular religion that the state seeks to eradicate.

Dr. Declan Lyons at Trinity College explained that “organ transplantation is … estimated to be a billion dollar business per annum in China and up to 60,000 to 100,000 transplants occur on an annual basis in the People’s Republic [of China].”

China’s organ transplant customers are global. Dr. Huang Shi-wei, from Taiwan, explained that “over the past 20 years, over 4,000 Taiwanese went to China for liver or kidney transplants. Besides Taiwan, people from South Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and even Western countries flocked to China to receive transplant surgeries after 2000.”

Dr. Weldon Gilcrease, director of Oncology at the University of Utah School of Medicine, said that “this kind of egregious, and mass crime has never really been at the hand, so largely, of the medical community in history.”

Huang stated that from 2000 to 2006, China’s military maintained the country’s organ banks, which hold data about organ “donors.” After evidence was first published in 2006 that Falun Gong practitioners were being targeted for forced organ removal, the CCP started to more effectively hide the practice. That year, David Matas and David Kilgour, a former member of the Canadian parliament, published their book “Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China.”

According to Chu, a woman named Annie helped reveal the existence of forced organ harvesting in China that singles out Falun Gong practitioners. “Annie, the ex-wife of a Chinese physician harvesting corneas from living Falun Gong detainees” exposed the crime and caused a global uproar, Chu said.

Transplants provide the primary source of income for some hospitals in China, according to Huang, with one in Beijing registering an increase in transplantation revenues from $4.5 million in 2006, to $30 million in 2010. He claimed that after 2007, Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities were added to Falun Gong as victims of forced organ harvesting.

Falun Gong, Uyghurs Targeted

Dr. R. Scalettar, former chair of the American Medical Association, noted at the summit that the World Medical Association has taken a stand against forced organ harvesting, including against Uyghurs, who the United States and the United Kingdom have recognized as the victims of genocide. “The WMA in 2020 issued a declaration to prevent and battle transplant related crimes,” he said. “Previous resolutions condemned the many reports of continued violations of these ethical standards by the PRC with imprisoned members of Uyghurs and the Falun Gong.”

An international coalition of five nonprofit groups—Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) in the United States, CAP Freedom of Conscience in France, the Taiwan Association for International Care of Organ Transplants, the Korea Association for Ethical Organ Transplants in South Korea, and the Transplant Tourism Research Association in Japan—organized the event.

The founder of DAFOH and host of the summit, Dr. Torsten Trey, alleged on Sept. 15 that Beijing’s goal with organ harvesting exceeds the bounds of China’s borders. It is to erode international norms requiring the consent of organ donors, he told Epoch TV. Such an erosion would advantage China’s organ transplant industry, which depends upon a massive and ready supply of organs from living prisoners of conscience. “So China is highly interested in tearing down this system of [Western medical ethics] to basically make forced organ harvesting the common standard in transplant medicine,” Trey said.

DAFOH was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2019, received the Mother Theresa Social Justice Award.

In 2019, the London tribunal on forced organ harvesting in China heard evidence that the practice is widespread and state-sanctioned. Falun Gong practitioners, who the Chinese regime seeks to eradicate as a religion, are imprisoned and made the main source of organs, as recognized by many at the World Summit.

A key component of the Falun Gong religion is truthfulness, which makes them easy targets for Chinese authorities, who simply knock on their doors and ask for admissions of guilt on the spot, according to a Falun Gong source.

Falun Gong practitioners also avoid substances, such as alcohol and tobacco, that could harm their organs, making them optimal targets of unethical transplant surgeons.

In 1999, there were as many as 100 million Falun Gong followers in China, according to its state media. They were seen as a threat to the state because they exceeded the number of CCP members at the time, and organized demonstrations against misrepresentation in China’s state media. According to a Human Rights Watch report, the persecution began in earnest after an April 25, 1999 mobilization. “From all reports, more than 10,000 practitioners, most of them middle-aged, lined up in an orderly column around two sides of Zhongnanhai, the compound in the heart of Beijing where China’s leaders live and work.”

While the U.S. government and establishment media has paid extensive attention to China’s genocide against the Uyghurs, less attention is being given to a similar genocide against Falun Gong. This is arguably due to three reasons. First, Falun Gong is seen by some scholars as a relatively new religion, which therefore is less known, and gets less sympathy, from members of the public. Second, the Uyghur genocide targets the more established Muslim religion. And third, CCP authorities have made a concerted propaganda push to label the Falun Gong with the derogatory term of “cult.”

Dr. Andre Gattolin, a senator from France, is co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC). He explained to the summit that the CCP tactic of smearing Falun Gong as a “cult” was effective at chilling debate in France about forced organ transplants. “[T]he fact that the victims of these forced removals are most often followers of religious minorities such as Falun Gong, presented by the Chinese government as a cult, always provokes distrust within our population, where a sometimes rather intolerant conception of secularism has prevailed for more than a century,” he said. “The accusation of sectarianism sounds like an anathema and often leads to a dismissal without appeal. This is the case even though the Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Combat against Sectarian Abuse has already pointed out several times that Falun Gong does not fall into this category.”

The Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Combat against Sectarian Abuse is a French government agency charged with analyzing cults and protecting their victims.

“Beijing has played a master stroke of propaganda in order to cover Falun Gong with an image of being unacceptable and therefore indefensible,” said Gattolin.

The CCP has likewise tried to tar Uyghurs as anathema, labeling their legitimate protest activities as “terrorism,” even though the CCP themselves are the terrorists, according to an authoritative reading of U.S. law. American human rights lawyer Terri Marsh and University of Chicago academic Teng Biao make this argument forcefully in a 2020 article in the Journal of Political Risk, which includes a discussion of forced organ harvesting as one kind of terrorism committed by the CCP.

U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) noted that the CCP is the “principal perpetrator of forced organ harvesting.” As the lead Republican on the Foreign Affairs subcommittee, Chabot said he closely monitors “Beijing’s efforts to remake the world in the image of the Chinese Communist Party.” Given the CCP’s brutal repression of Uyghurs and Tibetans, Chabot said, “It should come as no surprise, then, that the PRC under communist leadership is engaged in one of the most barbaric practices in human history—forced organ harvesting—to bring health and wealth to the CCP and its cronies.” He said that “in the face of this barbaric persecution, the number of Falun Gong practitioners has dwindled, and I’m afraid the CCP’s next source of organs may be the Uyghurs.”

As identified by Dr. Trey, a danger for the West is that the CCP could become so powerful that it is able to export its lack of medical ethics globally.

Chabot added: “A world that conforms to the values of the CCP is one in which those who don’t tow the Party line can be put in a concentration camp or have their organs harvested. That’s a vision for a world that nobody wants to live in. And that’s the vision of the world that we are all fighting against.”

Dehumanization, which forced organ harvesting executes in an almost literal fashion, is an integral part of the CCP’s terror campaign and genocide against Falun Gong. 

One does not need to be an international lawyer to realize that the brutal suppression of Falun Gong that began in 1999 meets the U.N. definition of genocide. And the rise in transplant tourism to China in the early 2000s corresponds to the start of the genocide against Falun Gong. The two are connected. Forced organ harvesting against Falun Gong is a medical and profit-driven means of genocide. 

Forced Organ Harvesting in China Is Medical Genocide for Profit (theepochtimes.com)

A U.S. government committee that reviews foreign investment in telecom is probing videoconferencing company Zoom’s $14.7 billion deal for cloud call center company Five9.

In an August filing with the Federal Communications Commission, the Justice Department, which chairs the committee, said it would review the deal “to determine whether this application poses a risk to the national security or law enforcement interests of the United States.” The Justice Department “believes that such risk may be raised by the foreign participation (including the foreign relationships and ownership) associated with the application.” The Wall Street Journal first reported the probe.

The Justice Department did not say in its filing what the foreign ties of concern were and spokesperson Wyn Hornbuckle declined to answer questions Tuesday.

Five9 spokesperson Allison Wilson declined to comment. Zoom said in an emailed statement that it anticipates getting the required regulatory approvals and closing the Five9 deal in the first half of 2022. Zoom spokesperson CJ Lin did not respond to further questions.

Zoom is based in San Jose, California, and says more than half of its employees are in the United States. But it has a “sizable number” of research and development workers in China, which the company has noted has exposed it to government and media scrutiny. Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan, was born in China and became a U.S. citizen in 2007.

The company said in a late August regulatory filing that it is cooperating with ongoing investigations by prosecutors in New York and California, who last summer had sent subpoenas that asked about interactions with the Chinese regime, among other things.

Zoom last year drew attention for blocking online meetings related to Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and temporarily suspending the accounts of three U.S. or Hong Kong-based activists at the request of the Chinese communist regime. The company then said it would no longer “allow requests from the Chinese government to impact anyone outside of mainland China.”

Tensions in recent years have increased between Washington and Beijing, with disputes over trade, technology, cybersecurity, and human rights. The U.S. government has taken a tougher stance on Chinese investment, with more scrutiny of deals.

Zoom has said that buying San Ramon, California-based Five9 will accelerate its growth and give it access to more business clients. Zoom Video Communications Inc. went public in early 2019, before the pandemic made the company a household name with the shift to online school and work.

US Government to Probe Zoom’s $14.7 Billion Five9 Deal for National Security Risks (theepochtimes.com)

These are the kinds of numbers that could add up to trouble for President Joe Biden’s Democrats.

A Morning Consult poll released Wednesday shows the president’s approval rating has dropped among the party’s most loyal voting bloc.

And, as usual, Biden has only himself to blame.

The poll found Biden’s disapproval rating among black voters had risen to 24 percent since his Sept. 9 announcement that any business with more than 100 workers would have to require employees to receive a COVID-19 vaccine or impose weekly COVID-19 tests.

For Biden’s slavish supporters in the establishment media, it was a way to telegraph strength in the face of the continuing pandemic — and signal very clearly to Americans still resisting the vaccine that his “patience is wearing thin.”

Trump’s Surgeon General Says He Tried to Refinance His Mortgage, But Biden Admin Pulled a Dirty Move to Stop It from Happening

It turns out his support among black voters is wearing thin, too.

According to Morning Consult, “the president’s net approval rating — the share who approve of his job performance minus the share who disapprove — has fallen 12 percentage points among Black voters, driven by a 17-point drop among unvaccinated Black voters.”

Polling was conducted from Sept. 6 to Sept. 8, before the vaccine mandate, and from Sept. 18 to Sept. 20 among more than 1,000 black voters. The margin of error was 3 points among those who reported being vaccinated and 4 percent among those who reported not being vaccinated.

Of course, Biden has healthy support among traditionally Democratic black voters. He still has a 71 percent approval rating among them, according to Morning Consult.

But the poll has to be worrisome for Biden’s party looking ahead to 2022. As Morning Consult put it, the results provide “a stark warning sign for Democrats ahead of next year’s midterms.”

“While Black voters, who helped push Biden over the top against President Donald Trump in key states last year, are unlikely to abandon the Democratic Party en masse to back Republicans on the ballot next year, low turnout from the group could have dire consequences for Democrats in Congress, who already face an early enthusiasm gap,” Morning Consult noted.

Black Americans have the lowest vaccination rate of any American ethnic group, according to Morning Consult.

Fifty-three percent of blacks have gotten the shots, compared to 66 percent of whites and 61 percent of Hispanics. A group Morning Consult characterized as “other,” presumably mostly Asians, leads with a reported vaccination rate of 72 percent.

(Other sources, such as Bloomberg, show different vaccination numbers by race, but the overall trend holds: The black population is trailing.)

Watch: This 83-Second Video Is Absolutely Devastating for Joe Biden’s Presidency

A variety of reasons have been offered for the lower vaccination rate among blacks — from the longstanding distrust of the medical establishment (see the Tuskegee experiments) to the questionable claim by rapper Nicki Minaj that the vaccine made her cousin’s friend impotent.

Obviously, some explanations have more validity than others, but there’s no denying Biden’s heavy-handed approach to vaccine skepticism is hurting his chances with an electorate he and his party rely on.

It’s no secret that Biden’s floundering presidential campaign was revived in the Democratic primary in South Carolina, where an endorsement from Rep. James Clyburn, a leader of the country’s black political establishment, powered Biden to a blowout victory in February 2020 and essentially won him the party’s nomination.

If Biden and, by extension, his party are losing support among black voters, it could wreak havoc on Democratic campaigns in the 2022 midterms.

Democrats have a majority in the House by a handful of votes; that could easily change if swing districts go red next year.

With the Senate tied and Democrats controlling it by virtue of Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote, it would only take a net loss of one seat for Democrats to forfeit the chamber — and doom the progressive agenda (if West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin hasn’t done that already).

The plight of Democrats has certainly not been helped by an incident in New York City this week, where three black women were arrested following a melee at a restaurant that started after members of the women’s party could not show proof of vaccination.

The fracas led to a Black Lives Matter group demonstrating against vaccine mandates.

"Cancel Carmen" Chant as BLM marches through and confronts UWS restaurant Carmines accusing them of lying about what happened in a viral video

WATCH: New Carmine's fight footage shows moments leading up to altercation at UWS restaurant

Read more:

Originally tweeted by PIX11 News (@PIX11News) on September 21, 2021.

FULL VIDEO FROM THE PROTEST

Originally tweeted by Scootercaster (@ScooterCasterNY) on September 20, 2021.

In short, for Biden and the de facto totalitarians who make up his party’s leadership and radical left wing, a serious hemorrhaging of black voters means serious trouble.

Biden spent his presidential campaign alienating conservative Americans, and he’s spent recent months alienating our allies abroad.

His disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan infuriated the U.K. government, and his ham-handed handling of a submarine deal with Australia led France — France! — to recall its ambassador from Washington for the first time in the two countries’ long shared history.

Of course, a year is an eternity in politics.

But Biden and his gang have done nothing over the past nine months to indicate they’ve learned anything, or care to learn anything, from the administration’s dismal record of failure — from the southern border to Afghanistan to the stalled economy.

If Biden continues to alienate his party’s most dependable voting bloc, election night next November could be a nightmare for Democrats.

It may seem too convenient to be true, but this event actually happened in 2017. The full video follows the article.

Speaking at the 2017 Consortium of Universities for Global Health conference on a panel alongside Anthony Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak admitted his controversial “work on coronaviruses in China” was carried out with “funding through” Fauci’s National Institutes of Health agency.

The unearthed conference follows Fauci’s repeated attempts to distance his agency from the controversial New York-based non-profit, which, as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant registry shows, used the money to collaborate with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The National Pulse has previously uncovered footage of Daszak describing the viruses he manipulated as part of his “longtime” collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party-run lab as “killers.”

The 2017 event, the “Healthy People, Healthy Ecosystems” conference hosted by the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH), took place in Washington, D.C. In its description of the conference, CUGH notes that the conference supports its vision for a “world without borders”:

“CUGH believes in a world without borders, because the desire for health and well-being is universal and doesn’t change based on race, ethnicity, national, socioeconomic status, sexual identity, or geographic location.”

The conference’s unearthed agenda reveals the attendance of EcoHealth President Peter Daszak, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci, and Principal Deputy Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Anne Schuchat. The three individuals participated in a panel – “Future of Infectious Disease Pandemics: From Ebola to Zika, and Beyond” – where they discussed pandemic preparedness.

“Although much is known about how to detect and respond to existing infections, more research is needed to predict the likelihood of their emergence and spread, and to improve the precision and timeliness of public health responsiveness,” notes the panel description.

During Daszak’s presentation, given with an accompanying slideshow, he states his coronavirus work in China was carried out with “funding” from Fauci’s NIAID along with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) program:

“Working with the USAID EPT PREDICT Program and funding through NIAID to work on coronaviruses in China, we were able to test out this idea of predicting what the next emerging diseases might be. So we’ve all heard of SARS. We know that SARS is carried by civets. Well, actually, the host of SARS-like viruses, the viruses that the SARS coronavirus emerged from are bats.”

– Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, 2017

“We worked in China to go out and do surveillance in other bat species and say how many other SARS-like viruses are there. Is there something even close to SARS? And sure enough, there was,” he adds.

Fauci-Funded Wuhan Research Relied On Human Blood Samples Provided by China’s Military.

“We’re now doing surveillance of the people and we’ve found using NIAID funding that actually there is potential of spillover into those peoples,” he reiterates while outlining the global increase of human-animal interaction.

“Even the international grants, the bulk of those funds go through U.S. organizations like ours before we send any abroad,” Daszak answers in response to a question about federal funding posed by Cornell Medicine’s Oliver Fein, who asserts “the worst virus that we presently have is the Trump administration.”

During the panel, Schuchat, a CDC official, also praises the Chinese Communist Party’s response to China’s first SARS outbreak:

“A key lesson was that cover-ups are not worth it. You may recall the Minister of Health and the Mayor of Beijing were both removed during the SARS epidemic and that being transparent and open with your situation is a lot better.”

– Principal Deputy Director of the CDC, Anne Schuchat

“Beijing did an incredible job of responding once the political level let them respond. They took over the healthcare system,” she adds.

Another panel at the event – “The Global Virome Project: A First Step Toward Ending the Pandemic Era” – featured Daszak and the Chief Scientific Officer of Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm whose lead financial backer was a Hunter Biden-led investment group.

Biden served as Managing Director of Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), which led the company’s first round of funding worth $30 million.

The panel summary predicts that “over the coming century we will witness spillover from a pool of more than 1,000,000 “unknown” viruses into human populations”:

America Has Given Millions for ‘Research’ At Chinese Communist-Run Facilities Since COVID Outbreak.

“The frequency of pandemics is increasing, driven by surging populations, environmental change and globalized trade and travel. Disease outbreaks illustrate that we are ill-prepared to mitigate the impact of a novel virus or prevent its emergence. Only a small proportion of viral threats have been identified. Over the coming century we will witness spillover from a pool of more than 1,000,000 “unknown” viruses into human populations. A global initiative to identify and characterize every significant viral threat circulating in the world is achievable over the next ten years – a critical and essential step towards ending the pandemic era.”

Both Daszak and Fauci have repeatedly lied about the type of research occurring at the Chinese Communist Party-run lab, as a host of Fauci’s emails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal the facility was carrying out “gain-of-function” research and deleted articles reveal the lab worked with live bats despite Daszak stating otherwise.

Daszak, who failed to disclose his extensive ties to the Wuhan lab and the Chinese Communist Party, was recused from the Lancet medical journal’s COVID-19 commission yet still appears on mainstream news networks.

REVEALED: Daszak Admits Fauci Funded Chinese Coronavirus Research at Conference Featuring Hunter Biden-Linked Pandemic Group. (thenationalpulse.com)

Beltway raconteur Bob Woodward has a track record for sensationalizing gossip in order to create buzz and sell books.

In American high schools and the Washington Beltway—is there a difference?—“buzz” is a term for manipulating emotional and social responses to achieve a goal. Woodward? He wants to sell books and demonstrate he matters, years after Watergate made him a Washington Post legend.

In the case of high school, the buzz creators are usually Mean Girls decapitating Nice Girl rivals or punishing boys and girls who ignore or abhor Mean Girl deceits, scams, and deceptions.

Washington? Hey, in the Beltway, Mean Girl is an asexual term for a power-mad, self-serving politician practicing perception warfare, no matter the on-the-ground reality (Afghanistan; Haitians under a Del Rio bridge), no matter the cost to American taxpayers, no matter the damage to American national security.

Woodward and co-author Robert Costa have a new book out named “Peril.” According to their buzz, the authors claim that shortly after the Jan. 6 Washington semi-riot, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was so deeply concerned by President Donald Trump’s behavior he decided he simply had to—absolutely had to—take personal action outside the chain of command in order to prevent an out-of-control Trump from starting a nuclear war or whatever against Communist China.

Since Woodward and Costa’s publicists started buzzing, Milley has acknowledged something happened.

The something: One of Milley’s public affairs officers, Col. David Butler, said that Milley’s “calls with the Chinese and others in October and January were in keeping with (his) duties and responsibilities conveying reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability.”

Col. Butler’s something sounds like a concession, though note he employs bureaucratic rhetorical camouflage—a classic perception warfare technique. Still, Butler admits Milley spoke with senior Chinese military officers. Missing in action: the subject Milley addressed was potential U.S. military action against the nation that is America’s most potent adversary. More missing facts: Milley spoke to the Chinese officers without approval from Trump. Reflect for a moment and it sounds like Milley acted on his own self-serving Hollywood script, not on evidence Trump was preparing to start a war.

The Beltway is a vicious high school of a sort, but unfortunately its viciousness isn’t Mean Girls wrestling with fantasy crises. In Milley’s case, we’re confronting the abrogation of the constitutional order of the military under civilian control and ultimately the U.S. military’s duty to defend America regardless of the party or personality of the president.

Fact for Milley: Senior Chinese military officers are members of the Chinese Communist Party. Tiananmen Square. Hong Kong absorption. Uyghur genocide. The Chinese military is a Party tool, Mark, a violent tool.

Milley’s short-sighted and, I argue, savvily self-serving action weakened U.S. national security and put the U.S. constitutional system at risk.

Milley’s actions are another example of the destructive perception warfare waged against the American people by powerful Beltway elites—and the worst examples of this war are perpetrated by power elites in the Democratic Party, to include President Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.

It’s a benevolent coincidence that last week Special Counsel John Durham indicted former Hillary Clinton campaign paid lawyer Michael Sussman. The Clinton campaign’s Russia collusion lie compromised and ultimately sacrificed the FBI’s counterintelligence security function and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court’s credibility to Hillary’s personal political goals. Her goals superseded American security. Hillary’s collusion crock was hatched to distract from her criminal abuse of classified information. The payoff for some of the actors? According to Durham’s indictment, positions in her administration. For the New York Times and Washington Post? Media Pulitzers for pushing a total lie.

Mark Milley violated constitutional order and subverted the chain of command. Why? His goal doesn’t matter, but here’s my guess: to secure the largesse of Biden and the Beltway media.

Try Milley by court martial, convict and sentence him to Fort Leavenworth’s Long Course. At Leavenworth, he can discuss perception warfare with his sledge while he whacks a rock.

Mark Milley’s Perception Warfare Deserves a Leavenworth Long Course (theepochtimes.com)

Cheerleaders for gun control have oft-cited Australia as the “gold standard.” Now their government is literally shooting them in the back.

Harrowing footage from Australia reveals police enforcing lockdown laws with all the fervor of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The images we watched out of China – at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic – are now being replicated on the streets of Western nations.

After 35 people were killed in the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, the Australian government moved swiftly to ban pump-action shotguns and semi-automatic rifles. While – as Matt Palumbo notes – the number of guns in the country actually failed to decline all that much in the proceeding years, the types of guns available to the public along with the groups of people owning them prove the importance of America’s Second Amendment.

Per the University of Sydney, “the proportion of Australians who hold a gun licence has fallen by 48 percent since 1997,” and “the proportion of Australian households with a firearm has fallen by 75 percent in recent decades.”

It’s not much use, in the face of authoritarianism, to have a prevalence of handguns owned by a small section of society. Congressman Matt Gaetz made this point in a Fox News interview in 2019, rattling the cages of the pseudo-fact checkers whose gloating words are now staring them right back in the face.

“Nobody would suggest that in the United States we would want Australia’s solution. There they went and confiscated all the guns. You know who did what Australia did? Venezuela. And now their people can’t fight back when they are having to fight their way out of a socialist dictator.”

– Rep. Matt Gaetz, 2019

Indeed the left media has gloated about disarming Australians for the past 25 years, op-eds in The Atlantic, Fortune magazine, and studies by left-wing think-tanks have tried to foist Australia’s gun laws on America. The Guardian called Australia’s laws a “gold standard.” Vox has been hyping them, too:

“Semi-automatic rifles and shotguns were prohibited, with a few exceptions, all firearms were required to be registered, a proof of reason would be required for all gun-licence applicants and gun purchases, with self-defence not considered a reason.”

– The Guardian, April 2021

All this despite Australia’s own Ambassador to America admitting such moves had no place in the United States.

“Australia and the United States are completely different situations, and it goes back to each of our foundings. America was born from a culture of self-defense. Australia was born from a culture of ‘the government will protect me.’ Australia wasn’t born as a result of a brutal war. We weren’t invaded. We weren’t attacked. We weren’t occupied. That makes an incredible difference, even today.”

–  Australian Ambassador to the United States Joe Hockey

Now, just 25 years after Port Arthur, Australians are being shot on the streets by their own government.

The bullets may be rubber, or “non-lethal” as they euphemistically call them. But they’re being fired at Australian citizens who have the audacity to want to… go outside. To leave their homes. To live life as normally as they can despite the state’s insistence of locking people in their own homes and creating a culture of fear around the Chinese Communist Party’s virus.

Naturally, The Guardian is now siding with the jack-booted thugs firing into the backs of their own people as they run away. This is the same Guardian that called the police break-up of a violent riot outside the White House a “brutal” dispersal.

Quite the different tone between the Guardian’s headline when police dispersed violent rioters outside the White House and when thugs shot their fellow countrymen in the back for protesting lockdowns.

Go figure! pic.twitter.com/2jau97Xjz5

— Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) September 22, 2021

Of course holding the left to its own standards is a hiding to nowhere. But every American should consider it their duty to hold their fellow citizens to the standards outlined in the nation’s founding document – the Constitution of the United States:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

– Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, 1791

Americans, let Australia be a lesson, but not in the way the left has suggested for nearly three decades.

Never, ever, never give up your guns.

The Left Cheered When Australians Gave Up Their Guns. Now They’re Being Shot By Their Own Government in the Streets. (thenationalpulse.com)

How to protect yourself and your kids from the harmful effects of technology

Every generation worries about the upcoming youth, but does the age of smartphones and digital addiction pose a more serious threat than ever before? In an episode of NTD’s “The Nation Speaks,” host Cindy Drukier interviews teacher and author Jeremy Adams, as well as psychologist Hilarie Cash, to answer this question.

It has only been 14 years since we’ve had computers in our pockets that are available every moment of our lives. In his book “Hallowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation,” Jeremy Adams, a civics teacher of 24 years, brings awareness to what he is seeing in the classroom and how he believes the younger generation is negatively affected by technology.

Adams says when you work in the classroom, you get to know kids and you notice if there are troubling trends. He believes the most disturbing thing about kids today is the value system they are embracing. The way they look at their country, the way they spend their time, and the values they hold are not helping them live purposeful and meaningful lives. In fact, they are hindering them.

Being a civics teacher, Adams says he worries about the American experiment.

“America is not like other countries. We can’t have a single lost generation that doesn’t understand what it means to be an American and what those values are and how you perpetuate the American experiment,” he says.

He is worried about the values that have emerged in young people over the past 10 years. These include the extent to which young Americans live their lives completely untethered to adult values, influences, or role models.

Adams says that although it doesn’t matter to him whether the youth are religious or not, he is bothered that young people don’t seem to know anything about religion.

Other troubling trends are that the younger generation is extremely unpatriotic, they don’t have the desire for relationships, marriage, or family, and they are radically individualistic.

He says that when you think about the things that make life enchanting and grand, you think of friendships, love, learning, and going out and seeing and doing things. Yet today’s youth are lonely and isolated.

Adams stresses how unhappy this generation is, citing rising suicide rates.

“It is shocking,” he says.

He was worried about these things prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but now these problems have been amplified and accelerated.

Kids today don’t go out and socialize, they don’t have meals with their parents, and they often spend 9 to 10 hours a day on their phone.

Adams says kids post-COVID-19 are zombies in the classroom and don’t know how to engage in academic and social environments.

Adams believes the reason for much of this falls on the adult generation. He says that we have given young people freedom but haven’t stepped forward and given them the values, knowledge, or insight needed to use that freedom well. If adults give youth the freedom to do whatever they want, we have to also teach them that freedom allows them to commit to what is important and meaningful. When we fail to do that, we are left with a generation that sees freedom as tantamount to indulgence or licentiousness, and doesn’t connect it to important things.

Being a parent, spouse, teacher, or person of faith, is hard. It may be the hardest thing a person does, but it will also likely be the most meaningful. Youth today often aren’t able to make the connection between struggle and purpose.

Acknowledging that high expectations usually come from adults, Adams points out that the parent generation, in our zeal to be compassionate and empathetic, have actually let our youth down. Being kind is a good thing, but it should help students feel secure so they can achieve good things.

Now in schools, teachers are also friends, counselors, and often act as parents to their students.

Teachers today need to understand that compassion and empathy should serve youth in a way that prepares them to show up, study, work hard, and have success. Adams says many teachers think they’re being compassionate by giving students a diploma without making them learn anything.

Any form of success requires diligence, knowledge, and skill. Robbing young people of what they need to stand tall in the world and achieve what they want in their lives is not kind.

Thankfully, Adams does believe there is still time to turn the situation around. He says we all want to do better. Young people know they are addicted to their phones and need to live life more. The adults know better and know they need to do things like insist on family time, church, and community. He says parents and teachers need to start “adulting” again, which means putting ourselves in the physical, intellectual, and moral spaces of young people. Awareness is the key to breaking the phone addiction, because once we are aware, we can intervene.

Teacher Warns of Troubled Next Generation; Tackling Digital Addiction | The Nation Speaks [Full Episode]Play Video

Watch the full episode here.

To learn more about how bad the digital addiction in our youth is and what can be done about it, Drukier interviews psychologist Hilarie Cash, co-founder of reSTART: Internet Addiction Recovery Program.

Cash, who has been seeing addicted patients for over 25 years, says the addiction problem has been growing steadily as technology has entered everyone’s lives. The software is designed to be addictive, and kids are now exposed to technology from early ages, which affects their development.

Cash says there are tell-tale signs if there is an addiction problem. One of the disorders is called “Gaming Disorder,” which often happens to people who become addicted to video games. It can be recognized when gaming begins to take over a person’s life: they no longer have control over how much they use it, they lose interest in other things, and they continue with their behavior despite negative consequences.

Cash says that grades going down, not getting enough sleep or exercise, not having many friends or offline activities, or fighting with family about technology-use rules, are all indicators that there is a problem.

Cash says technology affects brain development in young children. Today, many parents are handing devices to their babies, which has never been the case in past generations. This impacts social development substantially, because a person doesn’t develop good social skills unless they are actually interacting socially with other people.

Cash also explains the attachment issues that result from being exposed to too much technology. A child needs to be attached to their caregivers, but if the caregivers are on their devices too much, or putting the kids on devices to keep them distracted, this affects the attachment a child develops with their caregiver, which in turn affects mental health later on down the road.

She says that from ages 13 to 20, many have intimacy disorders, not having the skills and confidence to initiate, develop, and maintain emotionally intimate relationships.

Sexuality is also impacted because there is a blending of activities online, with many users looking at pornography, gambling, gaming, and social media all at the same time.

On top of this, there are physical problems, such as sleep deprivation, inadequate exercise, and poor diet.

In regards to social development, there is a lack of skill in communication, as well as attention problems.

Technology gives us immediate gratification, which negatively affects academic work by not having the ability to stay focused, persevere to get projects done, and look forward to getting a good grade.

So what can we do? Cash says there are apps that help at least monitor phone use, and these can be helpful if a person is actually motivated to make changes.

She recommends that parents don’t give smartphones to their children before high school. The software parents can put on phones to monitor kids is easy for smart kids to get around. She says to make sure kids don’t have smartphones until they have developed a well-rounded life and can sustain that once they get a smartphone.

Cash also says it is wise to have boundaries around phone and screen time, such as checking your phone at certain times and otherwise leaving it off, and making sure times at home are intentional and not surrounded by screen time and devices. Make sure kids are getting time outdoors, exercising, doing their chores, having down time, and in-person social time.

Cash says the key is to focus on giving your kids the proper rules and guidance so they can live a well-rounded life.

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News Analysis

Should children be required to wear masks at school? A review of the costs and benefits, including some of the latest science, does not add much to the case for mandating school masks.

First, some basics.

The risk of death from COVID-19 among schoolchildren is very, very low.

How Low?

A Nature study estimating the COVID-19 infection fatality rate (IFR), or proportion of those infected who die, found IFRs of just 0.001 percent in children aged 5–9, and IFRs well below 0.01 percent in all those aged 19 and under.

That’s less than one in 10,000 among teenagers and less than one in 100,000 in 5- to 9-year-old children.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which has advocated masking children aged 2 and up, found that only 460 children had died of COVID-19 between late May 2020 and Sept. 9, 2021 across 45 states, New York City, Guam, and Puerto Rico—0.08 percent of the total number of deaths they counted.

Looking again across multiple states, the AAP found that COVID-19 cases among children have surged in recent weeks, growing by 10 percent from 4,797,683 to 5,292,837 between Aug. 26 and Sept. 9—a trend that could be related to the start of in-person schooling.

Yet the AAP’s own data shows children are just 0.9 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations, a rate on par with previous weeks, and down from reported hospitalization rates of 3.8 percent in mid-2020.

With all that in mind, what are the benefits of masking children?

According to the AAP, those benefits include the “protection of unvaccinated students from COVID-19,” as well as “reduc[ed] transmission.”

Yet as described above, COVID-19’s risks for schoolchildren have been, and remain, extremely low.

What’s more, vaccines have been made widely available or are even mandated among teachers, who belong to age groups more vulnerable to COVID-19 than children—and despite efforts to restrict access to ivermectin, individuals may still be able to obtain the drug, identified as an “essential medicine” by the World Health Organization, as well as other potential therapeutics.

Like the AAP, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends universal masking in schools, a change from its previous stance that vaccinated students and teachers do not have to wear masks. (Neither the AAP nor the CDC mention natural immunity in their school masking guidance).

They, too, point to transmission as a justification for universal indoor masking, citing the highly transmissible Delta variant.

Concerns about transmission come down to two questions: First, how much is widespread COVID-19 transmission driven by children in school, and second, how well do masks and mask mandates limit transmission?

While some scientists have provided evidence that children might play a significant role in community spread, researchers generally agree that children, and especially young children, are not the primary drivers of it.

An observational study in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that children up to the age of 9 attending school were not major contributors to COVID-19 spread, though the study’s findings on teenagers were more equivocal.

A 2020 meta-analysis, or analysis of multiple studies, on COVID-19 susceptibility among young children and adolescents concluded susceptibility was lower in those groups than in adults and offered “weak evidence” that they play a lesser role in population-level transmission.

More recently, a 2021 meta-analysis on COVID-19 transmission clusters concluded that children infected in school “are unlikely to spread SARS-CoV-2 to their cohabiting family members.”

While the Delta variant appears to be more contagious, driving a rise in CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus-related cases and deaths, many have argued that it is less deadly than the original Alpha strain.

This would be in line with the hypothesized trade-off between transmission and virulence, which suggests that pathogens evolve in the direction of spreading farther while also becoming less damaging to their hosts.

The effectiveness of masks, and mask mandates, in schools is also a matter of dispute, with mask mandates for students apparently lacking clear support.

In his July 30 executive order against mask mandates in Florida schools, Gov. Ron DeSantis argued that “forcing students to wear masks lacks a well-grounded scientific justification,” citing a 2021 preprint that found no correlation between mask mandates and COVID-19 case rates among students and faculty across schools in Florida, New York, and Massachusetts.

Yet the authors of that study stressed that their research was limited to just three states, meaning their conclusions may not apply elsewhere. They also emphasized that the masking variation they identified in Florida schools could make their findings “even less generalizable to all U.S. students.”

A 2020 report by the CDC itself on elementary schools in Georgia noted that “COVID-19 incidence was 37% lower in schools that required teachers and staff members to use masks.”

Crucially, however, the CDC found that mask mandates for students did not have a statistically significant impact on COVID-19 incidence.

Here too, the study’s authors noted some limitations to their work; notably, their findings were based on self-reporting, and investigators did not directly examine whether people were using masks.

What About Masks More Generally?

An early randomized controlled trial of 4,862 adult participants from Denmark did not find that surgical masks reduced COVID-19 infection, although the authors noted that some results were “inconclusive.”

On Sept. 1, however, researchers released a working paper detailing a cluster-randomized trial of mask promotion across communities in rural Bangladesh, which involved 600 villages and more than 300,000 individuals, that appeared to support masking.

After surveying “all reachable participants” and testing blood from symptomatic individuals, the researchers linked mask promotion to a slight reduction in symptomatic COVID-19 infections.

Yet similar to the Danish study, the Bangladesh study was explicitly intended to examine mask-wearing among those “who appear to be 18 years or older”—not the young children or adolescents to whom school mask mandates apply.

What, then, are the potential costs of requiring children to be masked at school?

An obvious one is cleanliness.

“We were almost all taught as children that disposable tissues are good because handkerchiefs are unhygienic and disgusting,” wrote Michael Brendan Dougherty in an article for National Review Online. “But for young children, toddlers in particular, the cotton-jersey masks that they most often wear in schools are just that, a handkerchief pulled over their mouth and nose constantly. They often are disgusting at the end of a day of use.”

Unsurprisingly, children’s masks may be a breeding ground for bacteria and other microorganisms, some of them potentially dangerous.

One recent analysis from the University of Florida revealed that most masks worn by children in 90-degree-Fahrenheit heat were contaminated with parasites, fungi, and bacteria, including a virus known to cause a fatal systemic disease in deer and cattle.

Masks, particularly disposable masks, are also harmful to the environment. With billions of single-use masks being thrown out every day, researchers believe that discarded masks and respirators are adding to plastic pollution—a problem to which school mask mandates can only contribute.

Masking and other interventions may also have knock-on effects related to the frequency of other respiratory diseases.

The recent, out-of-season spike in pediatric hospitalizations for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has been tied to the COVID-19 response, with infants and young children who would have otherwise been exposed to RSV at an earlier age now falling ill from it.

Masking may also have significant psychological and developmental effects on children.

A 2004 article on masking in a pediatric hospital, authored long before the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the scientific debate on masking, expanded on some of the psychological hazards for children.

“Imagine the impact of a hospital filled with “faceless” people on a young child. Who is smiling? Who is frowning? How do I recognize my doctor? How does my nurse recognize me? Why is everyone so scared of me and my germs?…”

“When wearing masks, goggles and/or face shields, non-verbal communication is impaired. Subtle facial cues are absent or can be misread and lip-reading is impossible.”

More recently, in a roundtable with Governor DeSantis and other scientists, Stanford professor Dr. Jay Battacharya argued that masking children is both medically unnecessary and “developmentally inappropriate.”

“I mean, how do you teach a child to read with a face mask on Zoom? I think children develop by watching other people,” Battacharya said.

The controversy over the developmental impact of masking children has even impacted the AAP.

In August, Internet users unearthed an AAP webpage emphasizing the developmental importance of face time between parents and babies that had apparently been removed from the organization’s website, along with other AAP webpages describing how babies and young children learn through looking at faces.

The AAP responded by explaining that the web pages disappeared as a result of website migration, telling Just the News that “some content areas, including Early Brain and Child Development, are still being organized before they go live on the new platform.”

Finally, the practice of mandating masks could be argued to compromise individual and parental autonomy.

Advocacy groups such as Utah Parents United have spoken out against school mask mandates, saying that they undermine parental rights and are unnecessary for such a low-risk group, particularly given the availability of vaccines to adult teachers and staff.

With all that we know so far, how can we answer these parents?

If the benefits of mask mandates do not outweigh the costs, it’s hard to find fault with opposition, or at least skepticism—especially for young schoolchildren, who are at the lowest risk of serious illness and death, and who may be most vulnerable to the uncertain and understudied costs of universal masking and other stringent measures.

Science Shaky on School Mask Mandates While Harms Ignored (theepochtimes.com)

A Twitter post from the account of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that said the United States would “stand with the people of Hong Kong” was recently taken down and replaced with a more subdued version.

Blinken’s statement was addressing news on Sept. 15 of how seven democratically elected Hong Kong opposition district councillors were disqualified after their oaths of office were deemed invalid. That determination came after a loyalty test in the form of a vetting and screening mechanism implemented by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that ensures Hong Kong politicians are “patriotic.”

The initial post, shared on Sept. 16, reads, “Beijing should let the voices of all Hong Kongers be heard. The PRC’s disqualification of district councillors only weakens Hong Kong’s long-term political and social stability. We stand with the people of Hong Kong & continue to support their human rights & fundamental freedoms.”

The post was deleted on Sept. 16, and a separate message addressing the same issue appeared on Blinken’s Twitter account on Sept. 17: “The PRC’s disqualification of seven pro-democracy district councillors undermines the ability of people in Hong Kong to participate in their governance. Governments should serve the people they represent. Decreasing representation goes against the spirit of Hong Kong’s Basic Law.”

The PRC’s disqualification of seven pro-democracy district councilors undermines the ability of people in Hong Kong to participate in their governance. Governments should serve the people they represent. Decreasing representation goes against the spirit of Hong Kong’s Basic Law.

— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) September 16, 2021

The message, posted at 5:29 p.m. ET, did not express that the United States would “stand with the people of Hong Kong,” and was interpreted by many online as being a more subdued message compared to that in Blinken’s initial Twitter post.

State Department Spokesperson Ned Price later shared the same message as Blinken’s initial post with the phrase “We stand with the people of Hong Kong.” It was shared at 6:05 p.m. ET on Sept. 17.

Beijing should let the voices of all Hong Kongers be heard. The PRC’s disqualification of district councilors only weakens Hong Kong’s long-term political and social stability. We stand with the people of Hong Kong & continue to support their human rights & fundamental freedoms.

— Ned Price (@StateDeptSpox) September 16, 2021

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that Price’s Twitter account had also previously shared the same message on Sept. 16, but deleted it that day. The Epoch Times could not verify the report.

In a emailed statement to The Epoch Times, the State Department spokesperson said, “The team that manages the Secretary’s twitter account mistakenly sent the tweet intended to come from the spokesperson. We fixed that error and tweeted from both accounts, speaking out about Hong Kong authorities’ disqualification of pro-democracy district councilors.

“Suggestions that this administrative change was somehow motivated by political concerns is patently untrue. The tweets affirm—in words and in meaning—that the United States stands with the people of Hong Kong. We urge the PRC to allow the people of Hong Kong to meaningfully participate in their governance.”

Blinken previously used the phrase “We stand with the people of Hong Kong” on Aug. 5. He has also previously repeatedly issued criticisms of the CCP’s actions toward Hong Kong.

The Chinese foreign ministry’s Hong Kong office issued a statement on Sept. 17, condemning “irresponsible comments from certain U.S. politicians” on Hong Kong, reported the SCMP. The statement said that “no U.S. slanders” would deter the CCP from ensuring “patriots administering Hong Kong.”

The statement also accused the seven now-disqualified Hong Kong opposition district councillors of having “smeared the Chinese central government and the HKSAR government, stood on the side of anti-China, destabilizing forces in Hong Kong and interfered in Hong Kong affairs and China’s internal affairs as a whole.” HKSAR is the acronym for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Blinken Replaces ‘We Stand With the People of Hong Kong’ Message With Milder Version on Twitter (theepochtimes.com)

With advisers like Joint Chiefs of Staff head Gen. Mark Milley, former President Donald Trump hardly needed enemies — at least, if Bob Woodward and Robert Costa are to be believed.

Woodward and Costa’s new book “Peril,” about the events surrounding the 2020 election and unprecedented instability encompassing it, isn’t even out yet and the allegations contained therein have led to calls for Milley’s resignation.

In one excerpt from the book, Milley is alleged to have talked to the Chinese twice to assure them the United States wouldn’t launch an attack — and if they did, he would give Beijing a heads-up. Milley also reportedly told senior officers that if there was any move toward a nuclear launch, while a president could give the order, he needed to be consulted.

That whole series of episodes, if true, skirts with treason when you consider he would be warning an enemy of an attack. Perhaps more crucially, it undermined the bedrock principle of civilian leadership of the military, one of the principles that separates us from an authoritarian state.

When it came to domestic threats, however, Woodward and Costa say Milley was considerably less concerned — so much less that he called the George Floyd riots “penny packet protests.”

According to an excerpt from the book obtained by Fox News, Milley pooh-poohed White House fears that the riots were insurrectionary and “burning America down” during the summer months last year.

“Mr. President, they are not burning it down,” Milley reportedly said. “They used spray paint, Mr. President, that’s not an insurrection.”

According to the book, the conversation took place near the end of May. The date isn’t given, but the protests had spread well beyond Minneapolis by May 27, according to a timeline of events from The New York Times. That’s just two days after Floyd’s death.

A May 30 timeline from Fox News mentions protests or riots in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix and St. Louis, among many others.

“More than a dozen cities instituted curfews and thousands were arrested, while thousands of National Guard members were deployed in at least 15 states,” Fox News noted.

“When Milley spoke to Trump, however, he reportedly cited data at that time that said there had only been two cities with major protests, while elsewhere it was 20-300 protesters.”

According to Woodward and Costa, Milley then pointed to a portrait of former President Abraham Lincoln and said the protests and riots couldn’t be compared to the attack on Fort Sumter which started the Civil War in 1861.

“We’re a country of 330 million people. You’ve got these penny packet protests,” Milley said, adding that it couldn’t be compared to the riots which engulfed the country in 1968, according to the book.

Milley also reportedly blamed systematic racism for the protests and said anger had “pent up in communities that have been experiencing what they perceive to be police brutality.”

Milley was, if nothing else, a bad prognosticator.

The George Floyd riots would go on to cost America up to $2 billion in insurance claims, according to estimates obtained by Axios in September of last year. That would likely make them the most costly riots of all time, surpassing the Los Angeles riot of 1992; that cost $775 million in insurance claims at the time, which would be $1.42 billion in 2020 dollars.

The three most costly riots of 1968, meanwhile, barely topped $300 million in damage when adjusted for 2020 dollars.

More importantly, the George Floyd riots would rend our national fabric more than any domestic event in recent memory. It would enable the worst elements in the Black Lives Matter and antifa movements.

The protests — and the so-called anti-racist movement they supercharged — also became an avenue for expressing explicitly anti-American sentiments. How many times, for example, did we witness scenes like this?

Protesters cheer as they burn American flags at the guillotine outside the police bureau #PortlandProtest #Portland pic.twitter.com/R9I6dobNiv

— Brendan Gutenschwager (@BGOnTheScene) August 23, 2020

Those weren’t the riots that Milley was worried about, though. According to the book, he was more concerned with the Capitol incursion, which the book alleges he perceived as being “indeed a coup attempt and nothing less than ‘treason.’”

The book goes on to say Milley was afraid Trump wanted a “Reichstag moment” — referring to the Reichstag fire, a relatively minor incident in 1933 which Adolf Hitler used as an excuse to consolidate power in Nazi Germany — and that the attack was “so unimagined and savage, could be a dress rehearsal for something larger” for Trump supporters.

It’s not that Milley was the only man expressing these overheated sentiments about the Capitol incursion — but if these reports are true, at some point during the past year, Milley became one of America’s wokest generals, if not the wokest. There’s a clear throughline from his remarks about the George Floyd riots to his testimony before Congress defending his inclusion of critical race theory in military education, and it’s one that doesn’t bode well for the future.

Everything in the report comes with a huge asterisk, of course, given Bob Woodward’s history of problematic investigative journalism. If true, however, it’s more evidence Milley needs to resign posthaste.

Calling the George Floyd riots nothing more than graffiti artists and “penny packet protests” doesn’t rise to the level of treason, but it’s more evidence that this isn’t the man who should be one of the president’s top military advisers.

What Gen. Milley Secretly Revealed to Trump About George Floyd Riots: Report (westernjournal.com)

Fear of economic retaliation from Beijing has in part led the world to turn a blind eye as the Chinese regime kills innocents and forcibly harvests their organs for profit, a physician told a global human rights summit.

The World Summit on Combating and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting, consisting of six webinars over two weeks, took off on Sept. 17 with over 2,000 virtual audience members attending the live-streamed event on the first day.

The state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting has taken place in China for years “on a significant scale,” and a principal victim of the abuse is adherents of the persecuted faith group Falun Gong, according to findings from an independent London-based tribunal in 2019.

Not long after the tribunal released its final report, Dr. Weldon Gilcrease, a gastrointestinal cancer specialist at the University of Utah, approached the leaders of the school’s healthcare system, hoping to have a discussion on how they should respond to such abuse as an institution.

“He essentially said to me that there was no doubt in his mind that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was capable of such atrocities and that it was indeed happening, but that if we said anything, China would simply send all of its students to Texas,” Gilcrease said during a Friday virtual panel discussion.

Gilcrease, the vice executive director at Washington-based medical advocacy group Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, later told The Epoch Times that he was “a little surprised that there was such fear of saying anything” because of the financial ties.

“You definitely get support on an individual level, but when you try to raise that to the level of the institution, that’s where it gets deafeningly silent,” he said in an interview.

What Gilcrease found over the years, he said, is that often the medical professionals he met were reluctant to take a stance on organ harvesting—not because they were in doubt that is happening. Rather, they were trying to distance themselves to avoid the perception of “getting political.”

For the CCP, “that’s the weapon that they use to try to maintain silence,” Gilcrease said. “If you say anything, you are getting political. Stay out of it.”

But Gilcrease believes the opposite to the regime’s claims holds true.

Staying free from politics “doesn’t mean avoiding making uncomfortable positions, and in fact, it means we should say something against the Chinese Communist Party if it is going to … co-opt our field, our experts, our physicians, and our surgeons,“ the doctor said during the webinar.

Collaborating with “a medical system that’s under the thumb of an evil regime is dangerous,” he said, noting that a number of individuals that helped build China’s transplant centers received medical training in the United States and other Western countries.

On diplomatic and economic fronts, similar U.S. collaboration with China has come to “detrimental ends,” he said. A flurry of Chinese scientists and physicians have had to leave their posts in recent years for not properly disclosing their financial ties with the regime—that includes three from Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center and another six from Tampa’s Moffitt Cancer Center in 2019.

Concerns over such engagement go beyond the integrity of U.S. biomedical research, according to Gilcrease. “It’s about being tied to a system that has proven over and over again, using the medical system, to carry out crimes.”

Chinese doctors appeared to have continued forced organ harvesting practices through the pandemic and used findings from such transplants to build credentials in international medical journals.

The Annals of Surgery in July 2020 published a study involving two elderly patients with end-stage COVID-19 symptoms, both got lung transplant surgeries around three days after enrolling in the country’s transplant system.

The second patient, aged 70, received double-lung transplantation on March 8, three days after a comprehensive evaluation was conducted prompting doctors to register the patient in the transplant allocation system.

Ray Scalettar, emeritus professor at George Washington University Medical Center, said the article “raised serious ethical concerns as to how the lungs for the recipients were obtained” in so short a time, adding that in the United States, which has a “much larger” donor pool than China, “the minimal wait for this type of donor” is 15 days.

Scallettar ended up writing a critique of the article to the authors, but the response “has been non-existent or evasive.”

The greater medical circle has continued to suffer from a “drastic lack of awareness” on forced organ harvesting—only around 5 to 10 percent have heard of it—according to Gilcrease. But the regime’s ongoing coverup of the pandemic has likely brought a mindset shift, he said.

“The medical community at least has more of an understanding of who we’re dealing with,” he said.

US Medical Bodies Silent on China’s Organ Harvesting Over Fear of Regime Retaliation, Doctor Says (theepochtimes.com)

The White House and federal health officials are standing by the decision to announce the plans for COVID-19 booster shots for many Americans back in August ahead of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) and Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) approval for the extra doses.

The announcement issued by eight top government doctors on Aug. 18 notes clear evidence the COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness decreases over time and reveals a plan to roll out booster shots in response. The Biden administration then laid out plans to begin giving booster shots to more Americans starting Sept. 20.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) met Friday morning to discuss whether booster doses will be recommended. It voted 16–3 against providing the booster for most people, but recommended it for those over 65 years old and those at high risk. The CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will hold a two-day meeting next week to make its recommendation.

The decision to make the announcement in August has raised questions of whether the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) put undue pressure on the regulatory agencies to approve boosters by making the potential need for a third dose public.

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said Friday the announcement was made for two reasons: transparency and planning.

“If we saw a signal that indicated to us that protection was starting to wane and that additional shots might be required, that we would be transparent and open to the public about that,” said Vivek, adding, “You want to roll out booster shots to the population. You can’t flip a switch and make that happen overnight. There’s important planning that needs to take place.”

The White House also backed the August announcement this week when press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters: “Our objective is to be prepared should all of this process move forward. It’s always been pending the approval of the ACIP and the FDA.”

The recent resignation of top vaccine officials within the FDA seems to suggest stark disagreement within the regulatory agency on the plan to roll out booster shots. Dr. Marion Gruber, the director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review, and her deputy, Dr. Philip Krause, announced late last month their plans to leave the FDA in October and November.

The two were co-authors on a paper released this week in the scientific journal The Lancet saying that booster shots may only be appropriate for certain at-risk populations.

The article reads, “although the benefits of primary COVID-19 vaccination clearly outweigh the risks, there could be risks if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects … If unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions, there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Thus, widespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate.”

Officials say there is plenty of supply of boosters should they be approved.

White House, HHS Defend Announcing Booster Shot Plan Ahead of Approval (theepochtimes.com)

The federal government’s sudden rationing of monoclonal antibody treatments, which keep Americans who get COVID-19 out of hospitals, is hitting Alabama hard, with some sites already running out of or projected to run out of supply soon.

The antibodies are highly successful at stemming the effects of COVID-19 when given to patients soon after they contract the disease, which is caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. But a huge jump in demand in recent weeks has left what some officials have described as a national shortage, triggering the federal government to intervene and start doling out what’s left.

Stringfellow and Regional Medical Center in Anniston didn’t have any of the antibodies left on Wednesday, according to Dr. Almena Free, vice president of medical affairs and chief medical officer. Other facilities in Jefferson and Huntsville counties are struggling to source enough of the treatment, Dr. David Thrasher, a pulmonary critical care physician in Montgomery, said a day later.

“Some entities are very low on product and some project running out of product over the weekend,” Dr. Karen Landers, a health officer with the Alabama Department of Public Health, told The Epoch Times in an email on Friday.

The shortage is hitting at a critical time. Intensive care unit capacity is “beyond full,” Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama’s health officer, told reporters in a Sept. 16 virtual briefing. That means there are more people in the state that require critical care than there are beds to take care of them.

COVID-19 isn’t entirely to blame, as many patients don’t have the disease. But the monoclonal antibody (mAb) shortage will likely contribute to the issue. Some 70 percent of patients who get the treatment soon after their diagnosis don’t need hospital care, according to clinical studies and experts like Thrasher.

“We were originally told [by the federal government] we were only going to get 70 percent of our allocation. That means 30 percent of people are not being treated, and some of them will die,” the doctor said.

“That is not acceptable. … This is not right, what the federal government’s doing,” he added.

The federal government has dominated the supply of monoclonal antibody treatments from Regeneron and Eli Lilly. Under the model in place until early this month, hospitals and other facilities could order directly from the Biden administration, which would send doses straight to the healthcare centers. States didn’t have to worry about costs, because the administration paid. The new model has the government ration the doses, deciding how much to give each state. The change comes as, according to experts, supply dwindles and new production isn’t enough to meet the booming need.

The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services have defended the change, saying it provides for a more “equitable” distribution.

“Our role as the government overseeing the entire country is to be equitable in how we distribute. We’re not going to give a greater percentage to Florida over Oklahoma,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Thursday.

“Transitioning to a state/territory-coordinated distribution system gives health departments maximum flexibility to get mAbs where they are needed most,” an HHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email.

Several options are in play for states that are facing a shortage. They can draw on existing supply, taking doses from sites that have plenty and sending them to others that don’t. Or they can reach out to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a United Kingdom-based company that hasn’t sold any of its product to the U.S. government.

Florida is the only state that has started the process of sourcing directly from GSK, according to health officials across the United States. Health officers in some states, such as Mississippi and Arkansas, said they had enough supply and didn’t project being affected by the distribution model switch. Others, like Texas and Alabama, are but aren’t pursuing the direct sourcing method.

Some suggested getting antibodies from GSK would prove too expensive.

“At this time we have not had any requests for it and it is quite costly,” a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Health told The Epoch Times via email.

One course of treatment costs $2,100, a GSK spokesperson told The Epoch Times. That’s the same price per dose in Regeneron’s latest two contracts with the federal government. Eli Lilly’s is about the same.

The federal government has locked up hundreds of thousands of doses of the Regeneron and Eli Lilly medicines, and GSK’s is the only other monoclonal antibody treatment authorized for use at this time in the United States. U.S. drug regulators rejected an application for emergency use authorization for a fourth drug earlier this month.

Michigan and Alabama officials told The Epoch Times that hospitals and other providers can order directly from GSK if they wish. In the meantime, the states, like many others, are scrambling to try to redistribute supply to make sure there’s enough at each facility.

‘Some of Them Will Die’: Alabama Hit Hard by Monoclonal Antibody Rationing (theepochtimes.com)

“That’s it. I’m outta here.” So a friend told me after the blowout recall loss Tuesday. This friend long has been wavering on whether to leave California for relief from taxes and the general “Crazifornia” atmosphere. If the recall had been close, with Gov. Gavin Newsom still winning, my friend might have stayed because there was hope of reform. But a 64 percent “No to Recall” vote decided the issue.

Several other friends also said they’re leaning more toward the “leave” option.

All these folks would be following the roughly 650,000 who are skedaddling every year. Of course, folks still come here: tech hotshots to Silicon Valley, wannabe movie stars to Hollywood, illegal aliens to everywhere. But as everyone now knows, in recent years more people, for the first time in history, are leaving than coming.

I provided details in my Aug. 25 Epoch Times article, “California Businesses Exiting Faster Than Ever.”

The Babylon Bee just ran a spoof, “Gavin Newsom Named U-Haul Salesperson of the Year.” It quoted the firm’s fictional Western Regional Director, Fennick Buggstein: “We are deeply grateful to Gavin for our success in 2021. The only problem now is that we’re all out of trucks. And no one is willing to drive a U-Haul back to California. And I’m leaving with my family as well. So I guess this is it! Bye everyone!”

Seriously, if that’s possible, with the recall now in the past, what issues now are facing the Golden State?

1. A $1 trillion public unfunded liabilities debt hanging over the state from pensions and retiree medical care. It currently costs $8 billion from the state general fund just to service that debt, not to mention billions more from local and school pensions. The amount only will grow, requiring tax increases.

2. A school system that perennially scores 48th on national tests. “Better than Mississippi” is not a great selling point. The powerful California Teachers Association and California Federation of Teachers continue to oppose school choice, merit pay for the best teachers and other reforms.

3. A record high tax burden. Income, sales and gas tax rates top those in any other state.

4. A crumbling infrastructure. The $5 billion yearly gas tax increase from 2017 only partly has filled potholes because there are so many of them. And the tax increase only was “needed” because of other foolish spending priorities. See No. 1, above. And see the High-Speed Rail boondoggle, still choo-chooing along despite Newsom’s promise in 2020 to get rid of it.

5. Punishingly high housing prices. What young couple can afford a home when the median housing price is $800,000 statewide, even higher in coastal areas? Efforts to reform the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and other barriers to more construction never get far.

6. Environmental unrealism raises the price of everything. As I detailed in “California Wildfire Greenhouse Gases Dwarfed by China’s” from Aug. 12, the problem is not in CA, but the PRC. Yet our residents keep getting punished for something not our fault. Newsom banned selling gas-powered cars by 2035, just 14 years from now. He couldn’t totally ban older, gas-powered cars. So California increasingly will resemble Communist Cuba, where cars like ’57 Chevys just keep getting older, patched up more ingeniously each year.

7. Not just the teachers unions, but the other unions will keep getting stronger, devouring more of the state economy. These include AFCME, the SEIU, the Correctional Peace Officers Association (prison guards), the numerous sheriff and cop associations and the surprisingly powerful California Nurses Association.

After the Newsom victory, AFSCME Local 3299—University of California service workers—sent out this gloating email: “We rose to defend our state from the anti-union and anti-science extremism at the heart of this recall. Together, we united behind a Governor who has prioritized our health, the safety of essential workers and school children, and an economy that works for all of us because California deserves nothing less.”

And you can bet they’re going to expect big-time payback during next year’s pay negotiations.

8. Critical Race Theory and other schemes to continue to pit Americans against one another will be advanced. Shouldn’t we be coming together to provide opportunity for all, making the pie bigger instead of dividing it up into ever more divisive pieces?

Hope From Latinos

Finally, let me end on a hopeful note. Especially as we now already have begun the next cycle racing toward the November 8, 2022 election.

Latinos, although opposing the recall, voted more in the GOP direction than in recent elections. Some are calling it the “canary in the coal mine,” warning Democrats they ought to stop taking for granted that Latinos will keep backing a party that does nothing for them.

As Larry Elder brought up many times during his campaign, Latinos and blacks are being shafted by the horrible California schools system, which benefits the teachers’ unions at the expense of students.

In a July 18 ET column, I urged, “The Only Way Republicans Could Displace Gavin Newsom” was to emphasize education almost exclusively precisely to garner these Latino and black voters. I’m not blaming Elder. He ran a valiant campaign.

He’s hinting at a run next year. I hope he, or whomever the GOP ends up pushing past the senseless, anti-democratic Top Two system, adopts that strategy. Sure, there are so many other things one could address, and Elder did address—most listed above.

But for a Republican to have any chance, there should be one topic: education. Hammer it home.

Newsom Recall Aftermath (theepochtimes.com)

General Milley is captured on camera lauding the brutal, oppressive, genocidal regime.

General Mark Milley – who participated in secret phone calls with Chinese military leaders while pledging to not carry out then-President Donald Trump’s orders – revealed he “hesitates” to call China an enemy, insisting he trusts the Chinese Communist Party to be forthright with its military ambitions in remarks unearthed by The National Pulse.

Milley – who used a treasonous backchannel to inform Chinese Communist Party officials that he would alert them ahead of U.S. military actions – divulged his view of the regime while speaking at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Land Warfare Conference in 2017.

“I would hesitate to call China an enemy. Some would say adversary. Others would say enemy. Some would say hostile. I think they are what the slide implies.”

– General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2017

The slide referenced by Milley reads: “The Modernisation of Land Forces to Deliver Land Power Decisively in an Era of Constant Competition.”

“They’re a competitor and the competition between the United States and China has a military dimension to it, but that is a far cry and that’s a long leap between that and enemy,” he added, before concluding, “there is a lot of time between now and any time the United States and China would become quote-on-quote an enemy where armed conflict were to be pursued.”

RUSI, an establishment British think-tank, summarized Milley’s speech by noting “China and the United States are competitors, not enemies” in a tweet from the event.

Gen Milley at #RUSILWC; China and the United States are competitors, not enemies. But, that competition does have a military aspect.

— RUSI (@RUSI_org) June 27, 2017

Speaking about his worldview regarding China, Milley admitted “that is a construct, though, that we use, that I use within the United States Army” at the event which he noted had Chinese Communist Party military officers in attendance.

“There’s a lot of commonality, areas of common interest.”

In addition to his rejection of the belief that the Chinese Communist Party is not an enemy of the United States, Milley also reveals he takes the regime “at their word” concerning their military ambitions:

The Chinese military is clearly and unambiguously developing a very modern, capable military. Why are they doing that? The Chinese have their own reasons, but they have clearly published it in unclassified documents. I believe them. I take them at their word. I believe the declaratory policy, that they want to assert themselves and be a co-equal partner with the United States on the global scene and they want to dominate the region in general and assert their historical rights.

The Chinese Communist Party has run influence operations across the United States and Europe for decades, culminating in the bribery of public officials, as well as outright propaganda successes.

WATCH: Gen. Milley’s Shocking Admission About ‘Commonalities’ With the Chinese Communist Party. (thenationalpulse.com)

A group of Republican senators on Thursday again demanded that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provide answers to reports that vital COVID-19 data was deleted from a key government database at the request of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official.

In a follow-up letter (pdf) to NIH Director Francis Collins, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and Roger Marshall of Kansas, called on the federal medical research agency to answer questions that they say may shed light on data relating to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and NIH’s COVID-19 data retention policies.

The lawmakers in their initial letter in June cited a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article that reported that Chinese researchers “directed” the NIH “to delete gene sequences of early COVID-19 cases from a key scientific database,” called the NIH Sequence Read Archive.

The WSJ article reported that the deleted data includes COVID-19 genomic sequences from viral samples collected in Wuhan in January and February 2020 from hospital patients. The first cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, were reported in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.

At the time, the senators asked Collins to provide a list of explanations focused on the CCP deletion requests, identifying who at NIH has authority to delete such data, the characteristics of the Wuhan samples, and numerous related issues.

On Sept. 8, Collins said, in a reply to the senators, that a review was underway to determine “whether appropriate steps were taken to assess this withdrawal request.”

“[O]n June 28, 2021, we wrote to you requesting answers to seven questions pertaining to the NIH’s role and responsibility with respect to the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) relating to COVID-19 data,” the Republican senators wrote in their letter on Thursday.

The NIH’s Sept. 8 response “failed to fully and completely answer all seven questions and failed to provide the requested records,” they wrote.

“As we have made clear to you, Congress has a constitutional responsibility to engage in oversight of the executive branch and the executive branch has an obligation to Congress and the American people to substantively respond,” the senators continued.

They said that they are reposing the unanswered questions from their June letter, adding that if the NIH is unable to respond to each question and provide the requested records, the agency must explain why that is the case.

The Republican senators are also requesting the results of an independent probe conducted within the NIH over the issue, and that the agency reveal how many researchers and other personnel linked to the CCP have requested that data be deleted from the NIH Sequence Read Archive in the past five years.

“With more than 650,000 American lives lost and trillions of taxpayer dollars spent to support the American people, businesses, and the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic, the public deserves to know what their government knows about the origins of this global illness and the research data that it possesses,” a statement from Grassley’s office said.

The Epoch Times has contacted the NIH for comment.

Mark Tapscott contributed to this report.

GOP Senators Demand NIH Provide Answers on Deletion Of COVID-19 Data (theepochtimes.com)

On Thursday morning, in the city of Shenzhen, protesters gathered outside the headquarters of China Evergrande Group. They weren’t happy, and they wanted the executives to appreciate their palpable outrage.

China’s second-largest real estate developer is facing an existential reckoning of epic proportions, a fact that is not lost on the country’s disillusioned investors and vendors. Drowning in $300 billion worth of debt, more than 1.5 million people, we’re told, “have put deposits on new homes that have yet to be built.” A collapse would surely send ripple effects across China—and quite possibly beyond.

According to the company’s website, the “ever” in Evergrande stands for everlasting, or “never ceasing existence.” Unless the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bails out the company, its existence looks likely to cease. However, any bailout from Beijing looks increasingly unlikely. Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of Global Times, a mouthpiece of the CCP, recently encouraged those at Evergrande to “use market means to save themselves.” His message was as simple as it was blunt: “Don’t bet on a government bailout. You’re not, contrary to popular belief, too big to fail.”

Whether or not Beijing steps in to save Evergrande remains to be seen. But some sort of action is desperately needed. With more than 1,300 projects in more than 280 Chinese cities, millions of proprietors and potential proprietors rely on the company. If it fails, they fail; and if they fail, the Chinese economy fails.

In addition to operating the football club, Guangzhou FC, formerly known as Guangzhou Evergrande, the company’s presence can also be felt in China’s media and leisure industries. Some commentators fear that a meltdown will affect China in the same way Lehman Brothers’ demise affected the U.S. stock market. With more than 200,000 employees, their fears appear to be warranted.

Thirteen years ago, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers triggered a 6.98 percent drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This was the largest decline since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The U.S. government’s inability to avert the crisis resulted in both a moral and financial panic. As the author Anne Sraders noted, while Lehman Brothers “was simply one of many factors contributing to the economic disaster that was 2008 and beyond,” it served as “the catalyst of the collapse of the banking and housing industries, and proved that even those that boast enormous success one year can be bankrupt the next.”

The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy was the largest in U.S. history. When the United States sneezes, the world catches a cold; and when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the “sneeze” had a global impact. The world, as we all know, experienced the financial equivalent of COVID-19.

This brings us back to China, home to the world’s second-largest economy. Will China’s “sneeze” have global consequences in case of Evergrande’s demise? As the world’s most indebted real estate developer, there is reason to think so. The Diplomat’s Nathan Handwerker warns that “a full-blown collapse,” which looks increasingly likely, will send “ripples through the Chinese economy.” With more than three-quarters of China’s household wealth tied up in real estate development, Evergrande’s demise may very well be a symptom of a deeper economic illness. “A collapse of Evergrande could be detrimental to property values,” wrote Handwerker. This, in turn, “would deal a blow to consumer wealth and in turn lead to a slowdown in consumption and investment, in addition to other consequences.”

Prior to Evergrande’s systemic rot, the CCP had identified the country’s ballooning debt as a grave threat to its economic stability. The country’s debt levels are at an all-time high. With mass unemployment and a rapidly aging workforce, China, like Evergrande, is facing an existential reckoning of its own. The CCP, it appears, is unable to help Evergrande largely because it lacks the resources. The writing has been on the wall for quite some time; Beijing knew a crisis was coming. Now, the wolf is knocking on the door, and the “wolf warriors” are afraid to answer. But answer they must, otherwise, the country will slip into an even deeper economic malaise.

Evergrande is much more than some random real estate group; the CCP views it as a symbolic representation of China’s great rise to economic prosperity. The death of this “symbol,” though, could deal a death blow to the global economy. As the Financial Times recently noted: “Evergrande counts big international companies among its investors, including Allianz, Ashmore, and BlackRock. A default is likely to have spillover effects on global markets, where many investors have historically anticipated Chinese government support at times of distress.”

Although it’s possible that the CCP will, somehow, agree to draft a debt restructuring program, there’s reason to believe that it won’t. Just like the collapse of Lehman Brothers crippled the world economy, the collapse of Evergrande has the potential to do something similar. It’s important to note the following: The effects of Lehman’s bankruptcy, even a decade after its collapse, could still be felt—not just in the United States, but around the globe. Some will argue that the Evergrande situation is not the same. Stop comparing American apples and Chinese pears, they’ll shout. Nevertheless, China is very much sneezing; whether or not we catch this particular cold remains to be seen.

Is This China’s ‘Lehman Brothers’ Moment? (theepochtimes.com)

Similar mandates for other state-regulated facilities

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Wednesday announced that state-regulated childcare centers across the state must mandate masks for children aged 2 and above, as well as staff and all visitors.

A similar measure was announced in May this year by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The pushback against the mask mandate, which also applied to those as young as 2 years old, was so vocal that New York state rescinded the order just days later.

The new mask mandate for childcare facilities across New York state is effective immediately, Hochul said.

“Starting today, we’re going to require masks in childcare and daycare centers, because if you’re watching the national news, the scariest announcements coming out every single morning are the number of children now contracting COVID,” the governor said.

She added: “We don’t have a vaccine available for 5 to 11-year-olds. I am very anxious to get this approved. And as soon as it is, we’ll be working with parents and pediatricians and schools to make sure that the children are vaccinated, but we’re not hearing that that will occur for a number of months yet.”

Similar mask mandates will apply for state-run congregate facilities, mental health facilities, and substance abuse facilities, Hochul said.

Hochul previously announced on Aug. 24—just after taking her ceremonial oath of office—that there would be universal mask mandates in schools, and that she was seeking to ultimately impose checks to ensure that all school staff are vaccinated or get weekly COVID-19 testing.

On Wednesday, Hochul urged all New Yorkers over 12 years of age to get vaccinated against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19.

She previously allocated $65 million in state funding to local governments to distribute and administer booster shots of the COVID-19 vaccine when they become available.

She said on Wednesday that local health agencies have identified over 200 vaccination sites to administer booster shots, with more to come.

She said, in anticipation of booster shots: “I just want the message to go out, be aware of when you had your last shot. Eight months later, start talking about going to see your doctor, a pharmacist, or take advantage of one of our … mass vaccination sites. We’ll make sure all the information gets out.”

New York Imposes Masks for 2-Year-Olds and Above in Childcare Facilities (theepochtimes.com)

General Milley is captured on camera lauding the brutal, oppressive, genocidal regime.

General Mark Milley – who participated in secret phone calls with Chinese military leaders while pledging to not carry out then-President Donald Trump’s orders – revealed he “hesitates” to call China an enemy, insisting he trusts the Chinese Communist Party to be forthright with its military ambitions in remarks unearthed by The National Pulse.

Milley – who used a treasonous backchannel to inform Chinese Communist Party officials that he would alert them ahead of U.S. military actions – divulged his view of the regime while speaking at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Land Warfare Conference in 2017.

“I would hesitate to call China an enemy. Some would say adversary. Others would say enemy. Some would say hostile. I think they are what the slide implies.”

– General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2017

The slide referenced by Milley reads: “The Modernisation of Land Forces to Deliver Land Power Decisively in an Era of Constant Competition.”

“They’re a competitor and the competition between the United States and China has a military dimension to it, but that is a far cry and that’s a long leap between that and enemy,” he added, before concluding, “there is a lot of time between now and any time the United States and China would become quote-on-quote an enemy where armed conflict were to be pursued.”

RUSI, an establishment British think-tank, summarized Milley’s speech by noting “China and the United States are competitors, not enemies” in a tweet from the event.

Gen Milley at #RUSILWC; China and the United States are competitors, not enemies. But, that competition does have a military aspect.

— RUSI (@RUSI_org) June 27, 2017

Speaking about his worldview regarding China, Milley admitted “that is a construct, though, that we use, that I use within the United States Army” at the event which he noted had Chinese Communist Party military officers in attendance.

MUST READ:  EXC: Biden’s National Security Council China Director Is Former Fellow At Chinese State-Funded Group Advising Communist Officials Sanctioned For Human Rights Abuses.

“There’s a lot of commonality, areas of common interest.”

In addition to his rejection of the belief that the Chinese Communist Party is not an enemy of the United States, Milley also reveals he takes the regime “at their word” concerning their military ambitions:

The Chinese military is clearly and unambiguously developing a very modern, capable military. Why are they doing that? The Chinese have their own reasons, but they have clearly published it in unclassified documents. I believe them. I take them at their word. I believe the declaratory policy, that they want to assert themselves and be a co-equal partner with the United States on the global scene and they want to dominate the region in general and assert their historical rights.

The Chinese Communist Party has run influence operations across the United States and Europe for decades, culminating in the bribery of public officials, as well as outright propaganda successes.

WATCH: Gen. Milley’s Shocking Admission About ‘Commonalities’ With the Chinese Communist Party. (thenationalpulse.com)

Over 383 million Chinese have quit the Chinese Communist Party

Three Chinese who are living in the United States quit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its affiliated organizations, joining over 383 million Chinese who have registered a public statement of withdrawal from the CCP.

From cradle to the grave, Chinese citizens are indoctrinated to be loyal to the CCP. They are also forced or asked to join CCP-affiliated organizations. As young children, they are enrolled in the Young Pioneers. In middle school, they can join the Communist Youth League. As an adult, they may choose to join the CCP.

When joining these organizations, members are required to raise their fists and swear an oath to the CCP that they will fight their whole life for the communist party, give their blood for the communist party, and never betray the communist party.

Gebi Dong, a U.S.-based economist, and an independent columnist said of the CCP, “Its evil is all-encompassing, all its manifestations are demonic, and the extent of its evil can be said to be ‘unprecedented, unparalleled in the world.’”

“The CCP’s persecution of the Falun Gong practice group is the greatest humanitarian disaster in the world: live harvesting of human organs is an unprecedented evil in human history. Only the CCP can commit this terrible crime that has never happened before in human history, and 1.4 billion people are controlled by the CCP, which is also unprecedented in the history of mankind,” he said. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that teaches people to follow the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, and it has been persecuted by the CCP since 1999.

Since 2004, when The Epoch Times published the editorial series “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” hundreds of millions of Chinese people have quit the CCP by making a public declaration that the oaths they gave to the CCP are null and void. Quitting the CCP is called “Tuidang” in Chinese.

As of Sept. 13, the number of Chinese people who have quit the CCP has reached 383,504,922.

The Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP (Tuidang Center), writes on its website, each person who publishes a statement to quit the CCP at the Tuidang Center will receive a certificate as a testimony.

Chinese Economist: Quitting the CCP Is a Way to Save Your Life

Dong recalled that when first visited Los Angeles in 2011, he heard about the Tuidang movement from a volunteer at the Tuidang Center near the East West Bank.

After settling in the United States, he gained a deeper understanding of “quitting the CCP.” Later he not only made his declaration to quit the CCP, but he also began to persuade other Chinese people to cut their ties with the CCP.

“It is a worldwide consensus that the CCP is the most evil regime of mankind,” he said. “Quitting the CCP is actually a way to save your life. If you hesitate and wait and see because of your personal interests, once the CCP dies, it would be a big regret to accompany the regime that is bound to die, falling into the grave with the mark of the CCP.”

In ancient China, society had a deeply spiritual foundation that contained moral values from Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Chinese people believed that a person should not make bad vows at will, because it would bring disaster to oneself, Dong said. Today, if a person has dedicated his life to communism, then the mark of communism—the scythe and the ax—will remain on that person as a sign of communist membership.

“Therefore, no matter how good your reasons are and how much fear you have in your heart, I suggest that you must cut ties with CCP!” he said.

“Chinese have an old saying ‘Heaven’s way is hard to violate,’ once you ‘lose your conscience’ or ‘violate heaven’s principle,’ you will be punished by heaven. So it’s absolutely right that ‘Heaven will eliminate the CCP.’”

Chinese Student: Don’t Be Fooled by the CCP

Zhang Yuchang, a Chinese citizen, was astonished to learn of the crimes committed by the CCP while he studied abroad as an international student.

After returning to China, one day in May 2020, Zhang went to the CCP’s branch office in his local community, demanding to withdraw from the CCP organization.

He wrote a formal statement of withdrawal and signed it with his fingerprints.

The staff at the party branch were surprised and even a bit incredulous as if this had never happened before. They at first excused him, saying that the leader was not in and asked him to come back later to make an inquiry, and then said that a meeting was needed to decide how to proceed.

The staff recognized Zhang’s withdrawal from the party after his third visit but did not issue any receipt or proof to Zhang.

Now back in the United States, Zhang told The Epoch Times, “If you don’t want to be a foolish person that is fooled by the CCP,  but you want to have the right to be a real human being and live in a better environment—I urge people to quit the CCP as soon as possible.”

Chinese Christian: The CCP Regime Won’t Stand Long

On July 11, a group of Chinese people living in New York held an event in front of the New York Public Library denouncing the crimes of the CCP on the occasion of its centennial.

At the event, Yang Shisong, a Christian, told The Epoch Times, “I want everyone who knows me and doesn’t know me to be able to testify to me, and I solemnly declare that I am free from the ideology of the CCP and that I will always stay at the opposite stance to the CCP, that [the CCP] will always be my enemy.”

While in China, Yang said he discovered through his own observations and reflections that all the suffering, injustice, and inequality in modern Chinese society came from the CCP.

Yang was able to obtain the firewall-breaking software Freedom Gate, a software that allows people inside China to access websites that are blocked by China’s internet blockade.

He soon sent an email to quit the Communist Youth League, to which he had automatically been enrolled in school when he reached an age set by the CCP.

After arriving in the United States, Yang publicly posted the certificate of withdrawal issued by The Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP.

Yang said he tries to tell his friends and family, and everyone, everywhere he goes, about the CCP’s deception of the Chinese people.

“The CCP persecutes Buddhism, Christianity, and Catholicism to almost extinction, and the evilness has never stopped since the CCP established its regime. The persecution of Falun Gong has been particularly cruel,” Yang added.

Yang said he believes: “The CCP will not stand long. If you look over history, no regime that persecuted religion has lasted long.

“It is inevitable that the CCP will destroy themselves because they are against the will of heaven, just a matter of time. This is the way of heaven.”

Yang said that Chinese people should state their position clearly and quickly, and keep a distance from the CCP: “Quitting the CCP is a shortcut to avoid being dragged down with the CCP. Separate yourself from all crimes of the CCP, or else your fate will surely be tied to it.”

As a Christian, Yang believes that those who have already quit the CCP differ from those who are still with the CCP in spirit: “[Quitting the CCP] is a group of people with a spirit of fraternity and equality, and we can live in peace and love with people of all nationalities and ethnicities,” he said.

Chinese Living in the US Call on Chinese People to Quit the CCP (theepochtimes.com)

Demand has increased 20-fold in recent weeks, expert says

Some states are set to receive fewer doses of monoclonal antibody treatments after the Biden administration switched the distribution system this week.

Demand for monoclonal antibodies, used to treat non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients, has shot up in recent weeks, leading to what some officials have described as a shortage.

The Biden administration tipped off states in early September that it was limiting distribution of the treatment before abruptly switching on Sept. 13 from letting sites directly order the doses to putting the federal government in charge of allocation to states, which can then choose where to send them.

Some state officials say they weren’t notified of the change until late Sept. 13, and that pending orders with AmerisourceBergen, the primary distributor in the old model, were being closed out.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) alerted Texas health officials “that the national supply has considerably decreased and states should expect lower amounts of therapeutics available for shipment in the coming weeks,” Douglas Loveday, press officer for the Texas Department of State Health Services, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“The amount available to distribute is expected to be disproportionately small compared to the amounts needed.”

Other states have also been told they won’t get as many doses as they were getting before. Among them are southern states grappling with the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the nation.

COVID-19 Cases Coming in Through Southern Border: Stephen Miller

Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama’s top medical officer, said HHS recently called to “let us know that Alabama and some other states are going to be on an allocation.”

“We don’t think providers are going to be able to order as much as they would like,” he said during a briefing late last week. Up until the change, “there was really sort of no limit to what could be ordered.”

HHS and the federal COVID-19 response team didn’t respond to requests for comment.

HHS said in an update on Sept. 13 that the higher number of COVID-19 cases in the United States in recent weeks has “caused a substantial surge in the utilization of monoclonal antibody (mAb) drugs,” especially in parts of the country with low vaccination rates.

Federal officials informed state health officials that there’s been a 20-fold increase in demand for monoclonal antibodies in just the past few weeks, James Blumenstock, chief of health security at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, told The Epoch Times.

“Clearly that’s outstripping the current supply even with the supply increase this month; that increase is not sufficient to meet the current demand,” he said.

The timeline for when supplies will increase enough to meet the jump in demand isn’t clear. The new process will help ensure consistent availability for the drugs in all parts of the nation, according to HHS, which is basing its weekly shipments on reports of new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations and inventory data.

Monoclonal antibody treatments from two companies, Regeneron and Eli Lilly, are purchased by the federal government and distributed across the nation. Patients get them for free. The treatment received emergency use authorization from drug regulators earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinical trials show that they reduced hospitalization or death by as much as 70 percent.

It takes several weeks or months to produce a batch of Regeneron’s drug, REGEN-COV, a spokesman for the New York-based company told The Epoch Times in an email. Regeneron says demand has grown since earlier this year but that it’s ready to deliver new doses quickly because it “remained proactive” and has the drug in various stages of the manufacturing process.

An Eli Lilly spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that the Indiana-based company “continues to work with governments globally to help address the therapeutic needs of patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Another monoclonal antibody treatment, from GlaxoSmithKline, isn’t being distributed through the federal government. A spokesperson for the company, which is headquartered in the United Kingdom, told The Epoch Times in an email that there are no supply or access issues for its medicine.

The United States has purchased or committed to purchasing nearly 3 million doses of REGEN-COV, including 1.4 million doses on Sept. 14. Most of the doses cost taxpayers $2,100 each, according to the Regeneron spokesman. Eli Lilly’s treatment requires two drugs, etesevimab and bamlanivimab. The company just reached an agreement to provide 388,000 additional doses of etesevimab to the U.S. government for nearly $1,000 each, building on earlier contracts to supply nearly 1 million vials of one drug or the other.

More than 2.1 million monoclonal antibody doses were shipped to more than 8,000 sites across the nation as of early September, John Redd, chief medical officer for HHS emergency preparedness and response office, told state officials in a recent call.

Redd said that HHS hadn’t returned to the allocation model that was used between November 2020 and February. A few days later, the model was switched.

Biden’s administration said last week in a fresh COVID-19 response plan that it would increase shipments of monoclonal antibodies to states by 50 percent in September—something critics are pointing to in questioning the change.

“It is regrettable that the Biden administration would play politics with people’s lives during a pandemic, by withholding a life-saving treatment and providing mixed messages to Americans,” Christina Pushaw, press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, told The Epoch Times via email.

“Today, I pressed President Biden’s team to explain the sudden rationing of these life-saving treatments—without any warning—after the administration urged us to promote them. It is yet another example of confusing and conflicting guidance coming from the federal government,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan wrote on social media.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) office told The Epoch Times in an email that it’s looking into the matter to see how it can be of assistance.

Florida hasn’t yet seen its supply drop, and some other states said they don’t expect the distribution model change to affect them.

“We do not have any concerns about monoclonal supply at this point of time in Arkansas based on current usage patterns,” Danyelle McNeill, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Health, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Some governors, including DeSantis, have heavily promoted monoclonal antibodies, which have a high efficacy rate against cases of COVID-19 that don’t require hospital care and are sometimes used following exposure to a COVID-19 patient.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

For now, officials are encouraging people to continue seeking out the antibody treatments. Some experts say the drop in supply should prompt people who haven’t received a COVID-19 vaccine to get one.

“The public health message is, while everyone is doing their absolute best to treat and care for individuals who get sick from COVID, the best effort is to avoid that scenario in the first place, and therefore get vaccinated,” Blumenstock said.

States See Looming Monoclonal Antibody Crunch as Biden Administration Rations Doses (theepochtimes.com)

Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) is hoping to dismantle the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) influence on American academic institutions through Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes.

The congressman earlier this week submitted an amendment (pdf) to the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a massive defense bill that authorizes spending levels for defense, seeking to bar the use of funds from the legislation to provide grants to “any academic institution that receives funding from the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese Government or its affiliates, or hosts a Confucius Institute.”

In an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times, Buck described Confucius Institutes as “an avenue for the Chinese government to spread propaganda on U.S. campuses.”

“The propaganda is misleading and untruthful,” he added. “We as a government should not be funding institutions of higher education that are using and allowing Chinese propaganda to be spread.”

Billed as Chinese language and culture programs, Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes have drawn heightened criticism in the United States over their role in promoting CCP propaganda and stifling academic freedoms on American college campuses. The State Department during the Trump administration designated the Confucius Institute U.S. Center as a foreign mission in recognition of its role as a propaganda agent of the Chinese regime.

Trump administration officials and lawmakers have also piled pressure on universities to disassociate from the institutes, resulting in dozens of closures across the country. There are currently 36 Confucius Institutes in the United States, down from more than 100 in 2017, according to the National Association of Scholars.

“My hope is that the universities will shut down the propaganda machines of one of our adversaries,” Buck said.

The measure was one of four NDAA amendments submitted by Buck to the House Rules Committee due for consideration on Sept. 20, before the bill moves to the House floor.

The congressman, in another proposed amendment, is pushing for a ban on Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from being downloaded onto U.S. government devices.

“The threat is that the Chinese Communist Party … can use TikTok to gather sensitive information about Americans,” Buck said.

The Trump administration had attempted to ban TikTok last August, saying that the app could be used by the CCP to spy on Americans, but the order was never enforced due to several court orders. President Joe Biden revoked the ban in June, instead directing the Commerce Department to a review of apps with ties to the Chinese regime for national security risks. TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, has denied allegations that the app poses an espionage risk.

Buck also wants Congress to take a stronger stance against the CCP’s sweeping human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, where more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are detained in a network of internment camps.

The current version of the House’s NDAA condemns the CCP’s actions in Xinjiang, but does not label it a genocide. Buck is hoping to change this.

“The term genocide is used in a particular way in international law and is condemned in a particular way in international law,” he said.

“It’s important that the United Nations and our allies of the world understand that the United States Congress believes that the Chinese government is committing genocide.”

The U.S. government and several other Western legislatures have recognized the CCP’s campaign in Xinjiang as genocide.

The congressman called on the House to adopt these amendments, saying that Congress should send a “very strong message to China.”

“We will not tolerate their military activities around the world. We are aware of their activities, we’re concerned about those activities, and we are not going to turn a blind eye,” he added.

“It’s very important in this NDAA that we send a message that Congress is absolutely resolute in recognizing the threat from China,” he said.

Rep. Buck Calls on US Universities to Shut Down CCP ‘Propaganda Machines’ (theepochtimes.com)

Over half the grant cash came from Fauci.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has continued to funnel millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund scientific research in conjunction with Communist China since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, including to military-controlled organizations, The National Pulse can reveal.

Over half of the grants sent since early 2020 came from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) database reveals that 13 grants have been sent to the country which has stonewalled investigations into the origins of COVID-19. China has also undertaken a global propaganda campaign to blame the U.S. for the virus, while America continues to send cash.

China Medical University, Fudan University, Peking University, and China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention are among the organizations, all of which are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, funded by various NIH agencies.

Of the 13 grants to China, seven are from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Southern Medical University  – which is controlled by the regime’s People’s Liberation Army and has close ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – also received two additional grants worth nearly $300,000 from Fauci.

In total over $4 million has been sent to studies counting their principal investigators as working in China for state-run scientific bodies in 2020 and 2021. Seven of the studies are still active at the time of publication.

America Has Given Millions for ‘Research’ At Chinese Communist-Run Facilities Since COVID Outbreak. (thenationalpulse.com)

A coronavirus study funded by Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health agency – which names Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists as authors – was carried out in collaboration with an “arm” of the Chinese Communist Party’s military, The National Pulse can reveal.

A coronavirus study funded by Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health agency – which names Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists as authors – was carried out in collaboration with an “arm” of the Chinese Communist Party’s military, The National Pulse can reveal.

The 2014 study entitled “Isolation and Characterization of a Bat SARS-like Coronavirus that Uses the ACE2 Receptor” was the result of a broader grant from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) that sent U.S. taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology via the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance.

The controversial, multi-million-dollar grant supported the manipulation of coronavirus into “killers,” according to Fauci acolyte Peter Daszak, who runs EcoHealth.

The study’s acknowledgments section thanks China’s Southern Medical University (SMU) for providing human serum – a type of blood that, due to a lack of plasma, doesn’t clot:

We thank X. Che from Zhujiang Hospital, Southern Medical University, for providing human SARS patient sera.

Twelve researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – including “bat woman” Shi Zhengli – are listed as authors alongside several scientists from EcoHealth Alliance. The paper explicitly states they received “financial support” from Fauci’s NIAID.

The research material provided by SMU contributed to the study’s manipulation of different strains of coronaviruses through “recombination analysis.” The study also discusses “virus infectivity” research related to humans:

To determine whether WIV1 can use ACE2 as a cellular entry receptor, we conducted virus infectivity studies using HeLa cells expressing or not expressing ACE2 from humans, civets or Chinese horseshoe bats. We found that WIV1 is able to use ACE2 of different origins as an entry receptor and replicated efficiently in the ACE2-expressing cells.

The source of these samples, however, is under the control of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China: a hostile nation’s military that is increasingly in conflict with U.S. allies like India.

Formerly known as First Military Medical University, SMU falls under the jurisdiction of the Military Committee of PLA, according to its own website. Professors as well as entire institutes have received awards from various branches of the PLA including its General Logistics Department.

The school also runs a variety of labs, including an Institute for Genetic Engineering Research, which is described as an “arm of the PLA Key Biochip Lab” and “one of the top 20 labs of the Army.”

The school’s biomechanics lab operates under the control of the PLA and counts support from China’s 863 program, which has seen Chinese scientists affiliated with the effort get convicted for stealing trade secrets from American companies.

The financial and scientific collusion between the highest paid bureaucrat in the United States – Anthony Fauci – and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army would under normal circumstances lead to at least one full investigation of the matter. Fauci, thus far, has avoided any serious level of scrutiny from the U.S. Congress.

Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, is currently the Chief of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, where she oversees her husband’s work handing cash to Chinese Communist researchers.

Read The Study:

EXC: Fauci-Funded Wuhan Research Relied On Human Blood Samples Provided by China’s Military. (thenationalpulse.com)

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed a bill (pdf) on Friday that would have prohibited teachings in the K-12 school system that the bill calls contrary to “the equality and rights of all persons”

“This legislature should be focused on supporting teachers, helping students recover lost learning, and investing in our public schools,” Cooper, a Democrat, said in a press release. “Instead, this bill pushes calculated, conspiracy-laden politics into public education.”

Proponents of the bill, mostly Republicans, call it the anti-discrimination bill, while many Democrats consider the bill an attack on critical race theory (CRT), also claiming that there is no evidence of it being taught in the North Carolina school system.

CRT is based on the Marxist philosophy that describes society as a class struggle between oppressors and the oppressed, labeling white people as the oppressors and all other races as the oppressed.

Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a Republican and an outspoken critic of CRT, said in a press release that the bill would have been the first step in combating CRT “being forced upon our children.”

Robinson called Cooper’s reasoning for vetoing the bill “lazy,” and a part of a pattern of “ignoring the issue.”

Indoctrination Report

Robinson had created the Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students task force (F.A.C.T.S.) to gather evidence of CRT in the K-12 school system, he told The Epoch Times last month, which produced the Report on Indoctrination in North Carolina Public Education on Aug. 24 (pdf).

Through an online portal, parents, teachers, and students could anonymously submit evidence from curriculums by email.

In the report, race shaming and allusions to surgical castration in children’s literature—as well as xenophobia against political figures—were among the themes found.

In his Sept. 10 statement on the veto, Robinson said that the report “irrefutably established that there is a clear problem in our state,” and that Cooper’s veto “does a disservice to the teachers, students, and parents across our state who have voiced their concerns.”

“In a letter I presented to the governor, I asked him to share which discriminatory concepts in the bill he believed he should be ‘compelled’ to believe,” Robinson said. “However, in his veto, he chose not to share those details. Governor Cooper should stop playing political games and start serving the people who elected him.”

Officials Respond

Republican House Speaker Tim Moore said in a press release that House Bill 324 “would have ensured that students of every race would be protected from discrimination in the classroom. I am disappointed that Governor Cooper would block legislation that simply protects students or teachers from being forced to accept the false idea that one race is superior or inferior to another.”

In a press release regarding the veto, Catherine Truitt, the superintendent of The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, said, “Each day, thousands of teachers lead and guide our students, challenging them with robust conversations on difficult topics without ever influencing them using their personal or political beliefs. What we’ve learned throughout this process is that we need parents to continue to play an active role in their children’s education. When and if they have concerns, they should feel empowered to share this with their children’s teacher.”

Debating on the House floor on Sept. 1, Representative James Gailliard, a Democrat, called the bill a form of censorship.

Quoting whom he said was Benjamin Franklin, Gailliard said, “It is absolutely necessary that knowledge of every kind be disseminated.”

The quote is in fact historically attributed to another founding father, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and member of the Continental Congress.

The post-Revolutionary War address was a petition to combat the danger of a reimposed monarchy by creating federal universities that would educate students in history, law, commerce, and war tactics.

“To conform to the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens to our republican forms of government, it is absolutely necessary that knowledge of every kind should be disseminated through every part of the United States,” is the full quote.

However, the question of whether CRT is “knowledge,” or propaganda, continues to be debated among lawmakers and scholars.

North Carolina Gov. Cooper Vetoes Bill Prohibiting Critical Race Theory in Classrooms (theepochtimes.com)

The future darkens as differences between the West and China’s techno-dictatorship rapidly vanish

In 1992, historian Francis Fukuyama wrote that the fall of the Soviet Union signaled “the end of history.”

Capitalism Won Over Marxism

There were nuances to Fukuyama’s theory, but essentially it held that in the battle between Marxism and Capitalism, Marxism had lost. Communist countries from Cuba to China and everywhere in between were all abject economic failures, murderous regimes and horrendous polluters that were absolute hellholes. The top-down, anti-God, oppressive communist system had failed to deliver on its promises in every way.

Conversely, free capitalist nations of every stripe performed relatively well in virtually every way that mattered—in living standards, in freedom for people in all its forms, in technological innovation, artistic and political expression, human rights and even in lowering pollution. All that remained, according to Fukuyama, was the technical management of absorbing the failed Marxist nations into the capitalist global economy.

Making China in Our Image–or Vice Versa?

But a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the “end of history.” A decade before the fall of Soviet communism, the West—led by America—decided that engaging the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would not only be a counterweight to the USSR, but would also result in China becoming more like the free, capitalist West.

The thinking was that by giving money, factories, technology and markets to the communist Chinese, we could remake the world’s most populous nation into a society that resembled our own. We thought we were succeeding, but the 1989 slaughter of 10,000 young students in Tiananmen Square ended that delusion.

After that cruel display by the CCP, the United States doubled down on China. First, the United States responded with weak sanctions and then in 2000, invited the CCP into the World Trade Organization. From 1980 to 2020, China went from a backward agrarian nation unable to feed itself, to rivaling the United States in technology, economic power and global influence. Over those years, what China didn’t get legally in terms of intellectual property and technology, it stole from the West, one way or another. That practice continues today.

Social Credit System Emerges

Not too ago, the CCP gained the technological capabilities—from facial recognition, to cameras, recording devices, GPS locators and other items—to create a digital surveillance system to monitor, track, identify, arrest, detain, and dispose of those individuals who may or could possibly pose a threat to the State. China’s social credit system was born.

Then, the CCP bundled their surveillance technology, marketed it as “smart city” technology, and sold it to other authoritarian regimes around the world. The CCP certainly didn’t invent smart tech surveillance, the UK has been among the most surveilled societies on Earth for decades. But China has perfected it.

CCP Virus Brings Totalitarianism

As for censorship and propaganda, the U.S. media and academia fought the Trump administration and its supporters to a degree we hadn’t seen before. Negative events were magnified and even invented out of whole cloth, while any positive ones were simply underreported, distorted, or not reported at all.

But all of these developments were only the precursor to what was to come with the debut of the CCP virus (commonly known as the novel coronavirus) in 2019.

As it turns out, we in America have our own homegrown strain of totalitarians who have been ready to be triggered into action. It has become evident that for America’s Big Tech moguls, great wealth isn’t enough.

They want great power, and indeed, they have it.

Medical Authoritarianism

Sadly, the tech moguls’ coordination with the federal government to censor any ideas that contradict the official narrative regarding the CCP virus in America resembles the relationship between the CCP and the state media in China. Social media companies, along with the federal government are using the CCP virus to justify infringing on our Constitutional rights under the guise of “safety.”

It’s as if the Bill of Rights—which not only guarantees our civil rights and freedoms as individuals, but also restricts the authority of the federal government—has itself succumbed to the virus and has been replaced by medically-induced authoritarianism.

That’s because it has.

The Power of Fear

Sadly, this bothers far too few people in America. Of course, who can argue that relinquishing our rights in the name of medical safety isn’t wise or legal? Very few, because if you do, you’ll be censored. Publicly excoriated. Unemployed. Cancelled.

The reality is that we’ve been spoon-fed fear day in and day out for 18 months now, we all need to accept that we’re too vulnerable, too weak, too afraid to face the world, to face a disease with a 99 percent survival rate, without living under the protection of the State.

And where is China in all of this?

Everywhere.

China Gaining Control Over America

In fact, over the past several years, China has been buying up much of American industry—from agricultural farmland and our largest meat processing plants to AMC movie theaters and major media outlets. The consequences of this are chilling: The CCP is gaining great influence on what we put into our bodies and in our minds. That’s just the kind of power the CCP likes to have.

What’s more, all of these tech giants have made billions of dollars in China and remain deeply connected to the communist regime. Another coincidence. But can anyone really hold that against them? After all, the same could be said of the Biden family.

But where does that leave the American people?

A Return to Empires of Old?

For decades, the oppression of the Chinese people by the CCP was regarded the world over as a dismal historical aberration—a dreary dystopian stepchild of the old Soviet dictatorship. The assumption that it would evolve into a more Western-style country has been proven foolhardy. Rather, current trends show that China is a growing empire with global capabilities and ambitions, disdaining the very Western nations that enabled its rise.

From today’s perspective, perhaps it is the America that is disappearing before our eyes that is the historical aberration. Is history, marked mostly by the brute force and tyranny that defined empire after empire, now returning to form?

CCP Virus Remaking the World in China’s Image (theepochtimes.com)

With the launch of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) five-year “sinicization campaign” in 2018, the regime has been working to “re-create” spiritual beliefs that are compatible with its ideologies, according to a Chinese American pastor.

Bob Fu, the founder and president of the U.S.-based Christian nonprofit China Aid, told The Epoch Times in an email that his organization has “clearly detected intensified persecution every year” since the first year of the campaign.

“The Chinese government under the guidance of President Xi Jinping has escalated the persecution of people of faith with the ‘sinicization’ campaign, or to re-create religion to better align with the CCP ideals,” said Fu, who was a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations and a house church leader in Beijing. Fu and his wife fled to the United States as religious refugees in 1997.

Fu added that the sinicization campaign has “impacted those of all faiths in China.” “Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, Falun Gong practitioners, house church Christians, and Catholics have all been targeted by the Chinese government because of their religious beliefs,” he said.

With only a few months left until the 2022 Winter Olympics, Fu says it is “egregious” that China will be hosting the Games despite its record of “gross human rights abuses.” He said the 2022 Beijing Olympics “will be a test of the world’s conscience to see how we respond.”

Sinicization of Christianity

According to Fu, the sinicization of Christianity is “directly linked” to the escalated persecution of house Christians. He said the act of sinicization is centered on gaining “control”—the key goal that the CCP “desires the most.”

“Sinicization gives the CCP a chance to re-imagine Christianity with the government at its center. That’s why we see portraits of Jesus being replaced by Mao and Xi in state-sanctioned churches,” Fu said.

However, Fu added that despite the communist regime’s “best efforts” to persecute Christians, “Christianity continues to grow rapidly.”

A week after the CCP marked its 100-year anniversary, the state-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement held a national conference on July 8 where churches were provided with “a model sermon” based on Xi’s centenary speech of July 1.

The pastors were instructed to hail “Long live the great, glorious and correct Chinese Communist Party,” and Christians were required to “trust the CCP,” reported Bitter Winter, an online magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China. A few days later in another conference on July 13 in Shanghai, the participants discussed speeding up the “sinicization of Christianity,” according to the magazine.

The communist regime has reached this key phase of distorting the Christian faith over the long years of persecution. Just in the year 2020, over 900 crosses were removed from churches and Bibles were confiscated. Apart from demolishing the crosses, the CCP also raided and closed down many house churches, including state-run churches.

“In 2020, we saw a rise in cases involving authorities threatening or detaining Christians, outlawing house churches, as well as increases in demolishing church buildings and crosses,” Fu said. “2020 is the worst year in persecution since the end of the Cultural Revolution.”

In the same year, it was reported that a state-owned university in China distorted a biblical story from John 8 about how Jesus forgave a woman who had committed adultery. The altered version, published by the University of Electronic Science and Technology Press, states that Jesus stoned the woman, saying “I too am a sinner. But if the law could only be executed by men without blemish, the law would be dead,” reported Bitter Winter.

According to UCA News, Catholics in China are “upset” over the incident. An anonymous priest said in the report that such distortion of the original text “is against morality and the law.” Another Catholic in China said that events distorting Christian faith and history have been “repeated every year,” but the Church has never received the “respect and apology it deserves.”

Fu doesn’t find it surprising, either. “It is sadly unsurprising to me that the CCP would go through such lengths to alter the Gospel,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that the true teachings call for “sacrificial change” and for one’s life to be centered on the Divine, “not the CCP.”

Some of the other instances of Christianity being sinicized include the following: the replacement of a painting of Mother Mary and the Christ child with a portrait of the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, religious believers being forced to attend compulsory training to memorize Xi’s quotes, and the portraying of Jesus and Mary in ancient Chinese attire, reported Bitter Winter.

“My eyes widened when I saw Mary with her hair tied in a bun like an ancient Chinese woman. It’s so bizarre,” a Three-Self churchgoer told Bitter Winter after seeing the illustrations of Jesus and Mary published in Tian Feng, a monthly Christian magazine.

Another 70-year-old Christian said: “The CCP has always talked about de-Westernization; it doesn’t allow Chinese people to believe in the God of foreigners, but I never expected that the Lord Jesus and saints through the ages would be transformed into Chinese people. The CCP has gone totally crazy.”

According to a 2019 report by Bitter Winter, a Three-Self church in Jiangxi province was “completely altered.” One house church leader said in the report that sinicization aims at “eliminating pure religious beliefs.”

“The ultimate goal is to eliminate Christianity, and also to eliminate Taoism, Buddhism, and Islam, with only communism remaining in the end,” the anonymous leader said.

Sinicization of Other Religions

The CCP’s sinicization campaign is multi-targeted; Tibetan Buddhists and Muslims aren’t spared either.

For instance, the China Islamic Association in Puyang County, Henan province, issued a notice in 2019 that the mosques’ Arabic-style domes and structures must be changed to ancient Chinese-style architecture to fit in well with the rest of the buildings located on the South Ring Road, reported Bitter Winter. The dismantling of the domes and minarets began thereafter.

“This is nationwide. Anything with these symbols must be altered. If you obstruct [the dismantling work], the mosque will be torn down,” an officer from the Religious Affairs Bureau told local Muslims, according to the report.

To force religious leaders to conform to the CCP’s ideologies of Marxism and atheism, they are required to undergo training at the Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences in Yinchuan City, an imam told the magazine in another report.

“The regime doesn’t allow us to preach in accordance with the teachings of the Quran and requires us to talk about state policies before expounding scriptures,” the imam said, adding that their preaching has to be recorded and sent to the authorities.

The sinicization campaign has equally impacted Tibetan Buddhism since the campaign’s beginning. According to Bitter Winter, the CCP has since intensified the demolition of temples and the removal of symbols related to Tibetan Buddhism.

In June 2020, the authorities in Qingdao City, Shandong province, issued an order to hide a white Tibetan Buddhist stupa on the Xiaolong Mountain because the stupa distracted the drivers and “affected the traffic on the nearby highway.”

According to the same report, other elements or words related to religion were also removed. The “wisdom eyes” that were painted on a signboard, which hangs at the entrance of a temple in Shandong province, were painted over in red color.

In the same year, authorities in Hebei province instructed Tibetan words to be removed from the Xingguo Temple, which was built in the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234), according to the report.

Arshdeep Sarao contributed to this report.

CCP Is Sinicizing Christianity, Other Faiths to ‘Align’ Them to Its Ideology: Chinese American Pastor (theepochtimes.com)

A new report from the Chicago Federal Reserve on business conditions in the central bank’s seventh district paints a picture of slowing growth and historically high price pressures, with labor cost inflation at a record high.

The Chicago Fed Survey of Business Conditions, released on Sept. 13, shows that the headline business activity index fell to a reading of -2 in August from +14 in July, suggesting August growth fell below trend.

At the same time, labor costs rose to a series high of +42 in August, up two points from July and the highest reading in the eight-year history of the series. Nonlabor cost pressures—led by materials, shipping, and energy—held steady over the month at +23, a level not seen since mid-2018.

The report is based on a survey of over 800 business contacts in the Seventh Federal Reserve District and provides input into the Fed’s recently released so-called “Beige Book,” which provides an economic snapshot of the United States from early July through August, based on reporting from the central bank’s 12 districts.

While the Chicago Fed survey is limited in scope to the seventh district, it provides insight into the state of the broader economy. According to Thomas Walstrum, senior business economist at the Chicago Fed, the survey’s headline business activity index has tracked real GDP growth from 2013 to the present “quite well.”

“The index is less volatile than real GDP growth, so while it usually is right about whether growth sped up or slowed down from quarter to quarter, it often understates the degree of the pickups and slowdowns,” Walstrum wrote in an explainer note.

Despite the slowdown in the current business activity measure, respondents’ outlooks for the economy over the next 12 months remained optimistic, with 60 percent saying they expect an increase in economic activity in the coming year, the Chicago Fed report said. Still, the 12-month forward outlook deteriorated significantly in August compared to July, dropping over the month from a reading of +44 to +14.

The pace of hiring fell, as did respondents’ expectations for the pace of hiring over the next 12 months, although both indexes remained in positive territory.

Meanwhile, the Fed’s Beige Book, which was partly informed by the Chicago Fed’s data, showed that U.S. businesses were facing supply-crunch-driven inflation in input costs, with many saying they expect to pass those higher prices to consumers.

Resource shortages were “pervasive” and input price pressures “widespread,” with many businesses reporting difficulty sourcing key inputs, even at greatly increased prices, the Beige Book report indicated.

“Firms have continued to report exceptionally widespread increases in input prices—particularly in the construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, and transportation and warehousing industries,” the report’s authors wrote, adding that contacts in all sectors expect widespread input price increases for the rest of the year.

Half of the districts described input price inflation as “strong,” while the other half characterized it as “moderate.” In many cases, higher input costs are likely to translate into higher prices for consumers.

“A sizable share of contacts in all sectors plan to increase prices over the next six months,” the Beige Book authors wrote, adding that several of the 12 districts indicated that businesses expect “significant hikes” in their selling prices in the months ahead.

Adding fuel to the inflationary dynamic were upward price pressures on wages, with most businesses characterizing wage growth as “strong” as demand for workers continued to climb.

“All districts noted extensive labor shortages that were constraining employment and, in many cases, impending business activity,” the authors of the report wrote.

Increased worker turnover, a rise in early retirements, child care needs, and enhanced unemployment benefits were all noted as factors driving the hiring crunch, according to the report, with businesses resorting to more frequent raises, bonuses, training, and flexible work arrangements to attract and keep staff.

Echoing the findings in the Chicago Fed’s business activity index, the Beige Book showed overall economic activity “downshifted slightly to a moderate pace” in the reporting period, with the softening mostly down to a pullback in dining out, travel, and tourism, mostly reflecting concern around the spread of the Delta variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Business Activity Growth Slows While Labor Cost Inflation Hits Record High: Chicago Fed (theepochtimes.com)

An international group of vaccine experts, including officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and World Health Organization (WHO), said that there is no evidence to suggest that the general population needs COVID-19 vaccine booster shots.

The authors warned that if booster shots are introduced too soon, they may cause more side effects in the general population, including myocarditis or Guillain-Barre syndrome. Should that occur, the researchers said, it would create even more problems with vaccine acceptance in the general population.

The paper was published Monday in The Lancet medical journal and was co-authored by Marion Gruber and Phil Krause, two top FDA officials in charge of regulating and approving vaccines. Both Gruber and Krause are slated to depart the FDA in the coming weeks, the agency confirmed about two weeks ago.

The Lancet paper’s authors said that available COVID-19 vaccines are able to offer strong protection against severe COVID-19 cases and symptoms. They noted that protection against symptomatic infection from the Delta variant has dropped.

But, they added that “current evidence does not … appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high.”

“Even if boosting were eventually shown to decrease the medium-term risk of serious disease, current vaccine supplies could save more lives if used in previously unvaccinated populations,” the authors added.

Booster shots could lead to more harmful side effects in the general population, which is a poorly understood phenomenon, they cautioned.

“There could be risks if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines ),” the study said.

If “unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions,” such as the aforementioned side-effects, the authors said, “there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines.”

In recent days, the WHO has urged wealthier nations not to embark on producing, distributing, or mandating booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week urged these countries, including the United States, to halt developing booster shots until the end of 2021.

“I will not stay silent when companies and countries that control the global supply of vaccines think the world’s poor should be satisfied with leftovers,” he told a news conference on Sept. 8. “Because manufacturers have prioritized or been legally obliged to fulfill bilateral deals with rich countries willing to pay top dollar, low-income countries have been deprived of the tools to protect their people.”

Meanwhile, both Gruber, the head of the Office of Vaccines Research and Review, and Krause have not issued statements why they are departing the FDA.

According to a memo that was sent by FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research head Peter Marks in August, Gruber is leaving on Oct. 31. Krause is leaving sometime in November, the memo said. In the meantime, Marks will serve as the head of the Office of Vaccines Research and Review.

COVID-19 is the illness caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

FDA Leaders, Other Scientists Say Most People Don’t Need Vaccine Boosters (theepochtimes.com)

Most people in the West believe that China, the Chinese people, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are all the same. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s time the world wakes up to the fact that the CCP is not China, nor does it represent the Chinese people.

The first politician to point out this fact was former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In a speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California in July 2020, Pompeo said: “The Chinese people are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party. The biggest lie that they tell is to think that they speak for 1.4 billion people. The CCP fears the Chinese people’s honest opinions more than any foe.”

On Sept. 1, Professor Miles Yu, former adviser to Pompeo on strategies related to China, took time off his busy schedule and granted me an exclusive interview at his Maryland retreat. He explained why the CCP and the Chinese people are not the same.

Yu, who was born in China and left the country in the mid-1980s, understood what life was like under CCP rule.

“Anyone who has life experience in China would immediately conclude that the interests of the Party and the people are not the same. For example, people want freedom but are denied on the pretext of national security.”

According to Yu, it’s ironic that while the CCP’s interests are at odds with the people’s, it shamelessly claims that the Party represents the Chinese population of about 1.4 billion. Whenever Beijing quarrels with the Western powers, it would accuse them of “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.” In other words, the CCP tries to intimidate the West by the sheer size of the population under its control.

In Yu’s view, this is like kidnapping the Chinese people for a ransom. “While the CCP silenced the people and tied their hands, they claimed to represent the people they kept hostage—these are exact characteristics of a rogue regime.”

The Chinese regime was infuriated by Pompeo’s statement. State-run media Xinhua published a long article that accused Pompeo of “trying to drive a wedge between the CCP and the Chinese people.”

Furthermore, the Yu family clan in Anhui Province de-listed Miles from the family tree registrar at the behest of local authorities. In the Chinese tradition, this is regarded as a major insult to the Yu family and a heavy “moral” penalty for Miles.

From the fierce reaction of the CCP, Yu deduced that he and Pompeo had directly touched on the CCP’s sore point.

The CCP understands that this distinction between the Party and the people could cost its legitimacy. Before the CCP came to power 100 years ago, it applied the same tactic to undermine the then-ruling Kuomintang, which led to the latter’s eventual downfall.

“Therefore, they are hypersensitive when we point out that they in fact do not represent the Chinese people,” Yu explained.

Indeed, the “wedge” concept is bothering the CCP. On Sept. 3, 2020, Chinese leader Xi Jinping gave a speech during the 75th anniversary of the Anti-Japanese War (1937–1945) and said, “The Chinese people will never allow anyone or any forces trying to drive a wedge between the CCP and the Chinese people.”

The same theme also came up in the Sino-U.S. meeting in Alaska early this year, when Yang Jiechi, the top official for China’s foreign affairs, drew a so-called red line for the United States, warning the latter not to question its legitimacy.

In the past, whenever Beijing complained that a certain U.S. policy “hurts the feeling or the interests of 1.4 billion people,” Washington would soften its stance a bit, Yu said. Starting from Pompeo, this rhetoric no longer worked because “we knew that the CCP does not represent the Chinese people.”

At the policy level, the Trump administration made a clear distinction between the Chinese people and the CCP. While the administration welcomed Chinese nationals to study in the United States, it imposed restrictions on certain CCP members from entering the country.

“We penalize the CCP for hurting Hong Kong, for genocide in Xinjiang, for intimating Taiwan and for violating international law in the South China Sea. All these measures are truly in the interest of the Chinese people but at odds with those of the CCP, Yu said.

Yu believes that by pointing out the obvious fact that the CCP is not the same as China or the Chinese people, this would go a long way toward ending the pro-Beijing appeasement sentiment.

He explained that deep in the American culture, there had been strong sympathy for the Chinese people—thanks to the early Christian missionaries who witnessed the plight and backwardness of the ordinary people. This compassion for the suffering Chinese was best reflected in Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth.”

Unfortunately, this benevolence for the ordinary Chinese citizens was skillfully transformed by the CCP, through propaganda and united front tactics, to serve its own interests. This resulted in a strong appeasement sentiment toward the CCP.

“This appeasement policy had survived eight presidents, until Donald Trump,” Yu said. He believes that appeasement would naturally die down once people realize that the CCP and the Chinese people share diametrically opposite interests.

Yu concluded: “For over half a century, we had been fooled by the Chinese propaganda into believing that the CCP and China meant the same. For the first time, we broke this myth and this is going to have a significant impact in the days to come.”

The CCP Is Not China, Nor Does It Represent the Chinese People (theepochtimes.com)

A Norwegian pension fund that recently announced it planned to blacklist Israeli companies in the West Bank has poured hundreds of millions into Chinese companies linked to slave labor and Russian entities on the U.S. sanctions list.

Norges Bank’s Government Pension Fund Global, Norway’s largest pension fund, placed several Israeli companies in the West Bank on its “excluded companies” list earlier this month, citing “serious infringements of the rights of the individual in situations of war or conflict in connection with the construction of roads linked to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.”

At the same time, Norges held over $150 million in investments in at least seven companies that operated in or are suspected of using forced labor from the Xinjiang province of China, where Uyghur Muslims face human rights abuses, according to the fund’s most recent financial disclosures from last December. And the fund also held $1.8 billion in shares in at least six Russian energy companies and banks that are under U.S. financial restrictions or sanctions.

The fund’s investments raise questions about its decision-making process for divestments. While Norges Bank cut ties with Israeli companies, it has yet to bar controversial Russian and Chinese companies from future investments. Anti-Israel boycotts are growing more common in progressive circles. Earlier this year, Ben & Jerry’s announced it was ending its operations in the West Bank, prompting a wave of public backlash and the threat of financial penalties against the ice cream company from several U.S. states.

“The decisions made by the Executive Board of Norges Bank, announced last week, were made based on recommendations from the Council on Ethics,” said Line Aaltvedt, a spokesman for Norges Bank. “The Ministry of Finance has established the independent Council on Ethics to evaluate whether or not the fund’s investments in specified companies is consistent with its Ethical Guidelines.”

Norges Bank did not indicate whether it still holds shares in Chinese companies linked to slave labor or Russian firms under U.S. sanctions. The fund said last year that it would be reviewing its investments in companies that are linked to forced labor in Xinjiang, but the entities are not included on the fund’s list of “excluded companies,” which was updated earlier this month.

The list is overseen and approved by the fund’s executive board, which acts based on formal recommendations from the Council on Ethics. Such recommendations are kept private until the bank unloads its shares.

According to Norges Bank’s most recent investment disclosure from last December, the pension fund held $28 million in investments in Daqo New Energy Corp., whose Xinjiang subsidiary was blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce this summer for “accepting or utilizing forced labor in the implementation of the People’s Republic of China’s campaign of repression against Muslim minority groups.” The fund also held a $35 million stake in JinkoSolar Holding Co. Ltd., a solar panel company that is supplied by Daqo—over 1 percent of JinkoSolar’s shares.

The Government Pension Fund Global listed a $30 million investment in GCL-Poly Energy Holdings Ltd., a company that was also designated by the Commerce Department.

In addition, it held stakes in several Xinjiang-based manufacturers, including Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology, which has been accused of supporting forced Uyghur labor and has come under scrutiny for its work with Apple.

Other Government Pension Fund Global investments have been subject to U.S. sanctions. This includes a subsidiary of China’s state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China, which produces military aircraft and was placed on an investment blacklist by the U.S. Department of Defense.

The fund also disclosed stakes in subsidiaries of Russia’s Lukoil, Novatek, Surgutneftegas, Sberbank, and Gazprom, which have been sanctioned by the Treasury Department related to their work in the Russian energy sector and oil production.

Johan H. Andresen, chair of the fund’s Council on Ethics, told Reuters in March that he was “concerned that some of our companies in the fund may make use of this [forced] labour” in Xinjiang.

“If we were to make a recommendation [to exclude these companies from investments] it would be in the first half of this year,” Andresen told Reuters.

The Chinese foreign ministry denied that it persecutes Uyghurs and urged Norway to “respect the facts” and avoid “politicizing economic trade and cooperation,” according to Reuters.

Norwegian Pension Fund Boycotts Israel While Investing in Companies Linked to Chinese Slave Labor (freebeacon.com)

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is taking his fight against what he calls the “patently unconstitutional practice” of proxy voting in the U.S. House of Representatives to the Supreme Court.

In the early days of the pandemic in May 2020, the House approved a resolution allowing members to cast votes on the House floor by proxy on the theory that it was advisable to limit attendance in Congress to combat the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said at the time the new absentee voting protocol was needed because the virus posed a “mortal danger.” House Democratic leadership said when the policy began that it would be temporary but it is still in effect today.

This “unprecedented” proxy voting resolution permits a single member to vote on behalf of up to 10 absent members, according to the petition for certiorari, or review, from McCarthy.

“Today, we are asking the Supreme Court to uphold the Constitution by overturning Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s perpetual proxy voting power grab. 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 in a statement.

“Since its adoption 14 months ago, proxy voting has shattered 231 years of legislative precedent and shielded the majority from substantive policy debates and questions, effectively silencing the voices of millions of Americans,” he said. “It was a raw abuse of power … [and its] continuation is an insult to hard-working taxpayers who are back at work safely while members of Congress get a pass to skip work but still get paid.”

“The Founders wisely rejected proxy voting because they knew Congress cannot adequately ‘do the business’ of our chambers without deliberating, and we cannot adequately deliberate without assembling in person. The Senate has managed through the whole pandemic without proxy voting because they know, as we do, that it is unconstitutional.”

The petition in the case of McCarthy v. Pelosi, an appeal from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was reportedly filed with the Supreme Court on Sept. 9 but had not yet appeared in its online docket as of press time.

The appeals court held that the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause states that “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they [members] shall not be questioned in any other Place,” has the effect of preventing courts from reviewing the constitutionality of proxy voting.

“That decision takes a radically broad view of the Speech or Debate Clause,” McCarthy’s petition states. “The court concluded that any acts related to voting were privileged—including here, the Clerk’s collection of proxy letters from absent Members or declarations by the Speaker and Sergeant-at-Arms that proxy voting should continue. By that logic, there would be no stopping any voting rule adopted by the House.”

House GOP Leader Asks Supreme Court to End Proxy Voting (theepochtimes.com)

A delayed start in required reporting caused as many as 16,623 deaths from the CCP virus in nursing homes to be omitted from the official count, according to a Harvard University researcher-led study.

The federal government did require nursing comes to report COVID-19 cases and deaths until May 24, 2020, more than three months after the first nursing home outbreak at the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington. During the first reporting period, facilities were also given the option of whether to report retrospective data.

The Life Care Center of Kirkland, for example, did not report any COVID-19 cases or deaths in its first submission to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), even though a CDC investigation a month earlier had 81 cases of and 23 deaths from the CCP virus.

The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, is the pathogen that causes COVID-19.

While it is still unknown how many nursing home facilities chose to not report retrospective CCP virus cases and deaths in the early months of the pandemic, the Harvard study arrived at an estimate by collecting case and death data from states which collected them prior to the federal government. The researchers then compared the state and federal data to estimate the likelihood of cases and deaths going unreported. The estimates were then used to come up with a cumulative number of cases and deaths across all nursing homes.

“To our knowledge, no previous study has used the available data sources in combination with the federal data to estimate national nursing home COVID-19 cases and deaths. This study aims to fill that gap,” said the study, which was led by Karen Shen at the Department of Economics at Harvard University.

The study estimates that nearly 40 percent of nursing home COVID-19 cases and deaths were omitted nationally prior to May 24, 2020. The percentage of unreported deaths was particularly high in New York, Maryland, and Florida, according to the study, which looked at death reporting samples from 19 states.

The study did not find any specific characteristics—like their region, ownership, or rating—among the facilities that did not retrospectively report CCP virus cases and deaths.

“This implies that facilities of all types omitted previous cases and deaths in the first NHSN [National Healthcare Safety Network] submission,” the study states. “This may demonstrate a widespread inability of nursing homes to reliably collect data early in the pandemic or that pressures to report fewer cases and deaths were common to all facilities.”

More Than 16,000 Early Nursing Home COVID-19 Deaths Likely Uncounted: Study (theepochtimes.com)

Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) said during a recent budget reconciliation markup meeting that he opposed an amendment proposed by Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) that would require parental consent for schools to administer vaccines to children, with the Democrat lawmaker challenging the idea that parents always know what’s best for their kids’ health.

During the virtual meeting of the Select Committee on Education and Labor on Sept. 10, Miller argued in favor of her amendment, saying that, “parents need to have the power to make decisions on vaccines because they know what’s best for the health of their families.”

State laws establish vaccination requirements as a condition of admitting children to public daycares and schools—and in some cases also to private ones—with all states providing medical exemptions and some providing exemptions on religious or philosophical grounds. Some states, however, allow minors to decide on their own about getting vaccines, even over parental objections.

“When it comes to any medical treatment, making an informed decision is of the utmost importance. Parents know what’s best for their children, not any government body. We must protect our future generations. That’s why my amendment would restrict local education agencies from administering vaccines to children on school grounds without the consent of a parent or guardian.”

Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), a member of the select committee, came out in opposition to Miller’s amendment, saying that all states have laws that provide parents with a process to exempt children from getting vaccines, arguing further that there’s currently no legal framework that would force a vaccination without parental consent.

“This is a nonsense amendment that is in search of a problem that does not exist and I would urge my colleagues to reject it based on … it’s intended to score political points, it’s not a sincere amendment,” Takano said.

Takano’s remarks appear to overlook the fact that some states give minors the power to consent to health care decisions on their own, even over the objection of parents. According to Stateline, a publication from The Pew Charitable Trusts, indicated that around 10 states have given teenagers some rights in this regard, including around vaccines.

Following Takano’s remarks, Yarmuth also urged his colleagues to oppose the amendment, making the argument that parents don’t always know best.

“I know I’ll get in a lot of trouble for this, but I want to refer to the sponsor’s premise for the amendment, and the first words out of her mouth were, ‘parents know what’s best for their children.’ I think the evidence is compelling and overwhelming and widespread that they don’t,” Yarmuth said.

“Unfortunately, a lot of parents are misinformed and that’s why we have, literally, tens of thousands of kids now in hospitals, and suffering from this virus,” he added, referring to COVID-19.

According to a recent report by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), COVID-19 infections in children have “increased exponentially” after declining in early summer, with over 750,000 cases added between Aug. 5 and Sept. 2. Still, the report found that severe illness among children infected with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, were uncommon.

Between 0.1 percent and 1.9 percent of all child COVID-19 cases in 24 reporting states resulted in hospitalization, according to the AAP report. At the same time, among 45 states reporting data on child mortality from COVID-19, children accounted for between 0.00 percent and 0.27 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, with 7 states reported zero child deaths. Between 0.00 percent and 0.03 percent of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death, the report said.

Yarmuth argued that Miller’s amendment and similar measures should be rejected, saying, “We need to protect kids from their parents. That is the unfortunate state of the country right now.”

Later, Miller took to Twitter to criticize Yarmuth’s remarks, insisting that, “children across our nation are being administered the vaccine without parental consent” and that, “Not surprisingly, Democrats are rejecting parental rights in favor of an all-powerful government.”

Miller’s amendment ultimately failed to win committee approval.

It comes as the Biden administration has ramped up efforts to overcome vaccine hesitancy in the face of waning vaccination rates. The White House launched a summer campaign that included offers of cash, door-to-door outreach, and recruitment of social media influencers to help spread the word and persuade more Americans to get the shot.

But those efforts have had a limited impact, with President Joe Biden turning to more aggressive measures—requiring federal employees and contractors, as well as healthcare workers at facilities that get federal funding to show proof of vaccination with no testing option.

House Democrats Oppose GOP Proposal for Schools to Require Parental Consent to Vaccinate Kids (theepochtimes.com)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top U.S. public health official, said that a new study regarding so-called natural immunity following COVID-19 infection is provoking discussion among government experts.

The real-world study, conducted by Israeli researchers, found that previous COVID-19 infection confers better protection against infection and hospitalization than COVID-19 vaccines.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was asked Friday about the research in the context of convincing people who have natural immunity, or recovered from COVID-19, to get vaccinated.

“I get calls all the time people say, ‘I’ve already had COVID, I’m protected.’ And now the study says maybe even more protected than the vaccine alone. Should they also get the vaccine? How do you make the case to them?” Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked Fauci during an appearance on CNN.

“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that,” Fauci responded.

“That’s something that we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response. The one thing that paper from Israel didn’t tell you is whether or not—as high as the protection is with natural infection—what’s the durability compared to the durability of a vaccine? So it is conceivable that you got infected, you’re protected, but you may not be protected for an indefinite period of time,” he continued.

“So I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously because you very appropriately pointed out, it is an issue, and there could be an argument for saying what you said.”

Some experts who have studied the matter have expressed confusion as to why vaccination efforts are not focused on those who have not gotten a shot and have not recovered from COVID-19.

“We’re trying to update policy such that people who have recovered have the same privileges and access as people who are vaccinated,” Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, clinical professor of preventive medicine and medicine at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, told The Epoch Times previously.

The Israel findings, because they’re based on real-world data, even led Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, to call for natural immunity to be part of policy discussions.

“The balance of the evidence demonstrates that natural immunity confers a durable protection,” Gottlieb said during a recent television appearance.

Official guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledges people have some level of immunity after COVID-19 recovery. But the agency still recommends the vast majority of Americans get a COVID-19 vaccine, asserting the protection is even better when combining natural immunity and a jab.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, last month pointed to a study conducted by CDC and Kentucky researchers that suggested vaccines actually provide better protection than previous infection.

“These data further indicate that COVID-19 vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone and that vaccines, even after prior infection, help prevent reinfections,” the agency said in a statement.

Fauci: No ‘Firm Answer’ on Why Americans Who Recovered From COVID-19 Should Get Vaccinated (theepochtimes.com)

President Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has ruined, perhaps for decades, America’s most important bilateral relationship of this era.

If Washington is going to deter a militant China, it needs the support of democratic India. Unfortunately, India looks like the country most immediately—and perhaps most adversely—affected by the Biden-created debacle. As a result, New Delhi could decide to side not with America but with a Chinese ally, Moscow.

New Delhi was one of the staunchest supporters of the American-backed Afghan government and was working alongside Washington in the war against the Taliban and other insurgents. For instance, Indian intelligence was instrumental in breaking up an Afghan ring of Chinese spies working with the Haqqani Network. The Trump administration believed that the Chinese members of that ring, taken into custody last December, were, among other things, offering cash to kill American troops in-country.

India saw the Afghan government as a friend in blunting extremism in neighboring Pakistan, which has always defined itself as India’s enemy. Islamabad continually foments trouble in India-controlled Kashmir and has continually backed insurgents targeting India. The Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists who attacked targets in Mumbai in November 2008, for instance, came from Pakistan and relied heavily on Pakistani government resources.

The fall of the Afghan government was, therefore, a blow to New Delhi. Worse, the inability of the Biden administration to orchestrate an orderly withdrawal resulted in compounding the damage to Indian interests.

“The U.S. left behind reinvigorated jihadist networks, tens of billions of dollars in weapons and communications systems, critical strategic infrastructure, and even, reportedly, intel not only on who was working with the U.S. but some who were working with India,” Cleo Paskal of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Gatestone. “Physically, the closest target for this massively armed and confident jihadist resurgence is India. As a result of decisions taken in Washington, India is dramatically less secure today than it was a few months ago.”

To obtain security, New Delhi had been looking toward the United States. Consequently, Russia’s and China’s friends in Indian policy circles were losing influence, a trend especially evident after the Chinese incursions in Ladakh beginning in May of last year. Russia’s friends were delegitimized by that event because Moscow had assured New Delhi that the movement of Chinese forces in Tibet, which occurred immediately before the invasion, was only a drill.

As a result of Ladakh and other incidents, the government of Narendra Modi had been working fast to build military ties with the United States. In the wake of the fall of Kabul, however, relationships with Washington have been put on ice. “Indian strategists who have been saying that the way forward is working more closely with the U.S. are being openly taunted by those who have a more pro-Moscow bent,” Paskal, also associated with Chatham House, reports.

“There is a reassessment going on,” she added. “One possible outcome is that Delhi works more closely with Tokyo, and possibly Canberra and Taipei.” Japan, Australia, India, and the United States form what is known as the Quad, which up until the fall of Kabul was coming together as an effective grouping. Now, all bets are off.

Another scenario is that New Delhi decides to work more closely with Russia, reviving decades-old ties. Russia, of course, is increasingly aligned with China.

In the wake of the fall of Afghanistan, Taiwan has become the critical test of American resolve, especially as President Biden has justified the withdrawal as a strategic move to counter Russia and China. “The world is changing,” he said to the American people on Aug. 31. “We’re engaged in a serious competition with China. We’re dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia.”

It is significant, therefore, that on Aug. 27 USS Kidd, an American guided-missile destroyer, and USCG Munro, a Coast Guard cutter, transited the Taiwan Strait. The transits come on the heels of Vice President Kamala Harris’s welcome comments in both Singapore and Hanoi on China’s “bullying” in the South China Sea.

The Biden administration may in fact be willing to defend Taiwan, but that is not all that counts at this crucial time. What also counts are perceptions, and the perceptions that especially count are those in Beijing. Chinese propagandists promoted two narratives as Kabul fell: The United States will not defend Taiwan and an America unable to deal with the Taliban cannot hope to stand up to China.

Those two narratives appear to in fact reflect Chinese thinking, especially because the withdrawal from Afghanistan signaled to Beijing a complete failure of the U.S. intelligence community, the Pentagon, and the White House national security apparatus. Chinese exercises in areas adjacent to Taiwan in August and an Aug. 13 simulated attack on Taiwan with a short-range missile are, in this context, ominous.

The other perceptions that count are those in New Delhi, which had been inching toward closer cooperation with Taiwan. Indian thinkers realized that they needed to challenge China in its peripheral seas as China was challenging India in its nearby waters. India’s close ties with Vietnam are an indication that India perceives its security as dependent on an open South China Sea and even East China Sea. Taiwan, which sits at the intersection of those bodies of water, is essential in keeping sea lanes there open.

America more than ever needs India’s help in ensuring peace in the ring of countries surrounding China and its surrounding waters. Now, however, India could desert America as America has just deserted India. Said Paskal, “To say there is a crisis in trust in current U.S. policymaking in New Delhi is an understatement.”

From the Gatestone Institute.

Chaotic Afghanistan Pullout Puts Important Relationship With India in Peril (theepochtimes.com)

Critical race theory (CRT) aims to indoctrinate students and turn them into “Red Guards,” akin to those during the Cultural Revolution in China, warned Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese-American living in northern Virginia’s Loudoun County, at a “Rally to Save Our Schools” event on Sept. 8.

She called CRT “communist race tactics” with the goal of “indoctrinating our kids, dividing Americans, and controlling Americans.”

She added that she would talk to Chinese-language media to tell Chinese-Americans not to stay silent.

“If you still want to enjoy the prosperity and the freedom of this country, now it’s your turn—join the fight,” she said.

She said that upon taking over China in 1949, the first thing the CCP did was to indoctrinate teachers with Marxist ideology so they could teach it to students. Red Guards were the “full display” of what indoctrinated children could do, she said.

The Red Guards were communist youth led by then-CCP leader Mao Zedong to persecute those identified as the CCP’s “class enemies” during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. They beat up their teachers in public and tore down temples and statues.

“They became Mao’s bulldogs,” said Van Fleet, adding that she saw a similar phenomenon in America during the “so-called summer of unrest,” referring to the riots during Black Lives Matter protests.

CRT adherents believe America is systemically racist, that racial oppression exists in every institution, and that an individual is either an oppressor or oppressed based on the color of their skin.

Monica Gill, a Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) teacher who teaches Advanced Placement government, said that the LCPS was indoctrinating teachers with CRT tenets to trickle down the effect onto students. Though LCPS is not explicitly telling teachers to teach CRT to students, it is “imposing this very distorted lens of race on kids,” Gill said.

“Our kids are in this cultural battle with us … And we have been asleep at the wheel, just thinking that everything in public schools is okay with the majority of teachers—they are teaching our kids the right things—and that’s not the case,” Gill added.

LCPS Public Information Officer Wayde Byard stated in an email to The Epoch Times, “As LCPS has stated, repeatedly, Critical Race Theory is not part of its student curriculum.” He didn’t comment on Gill’s assertion of the LCPS indoctrinating teachers and students.

Political Action

Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin also attended the event. He accused his opponent, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, of introducing CRT in Virginia’s schools during his administration in 2015 and that McAuliffe called concerns of CRT a “right-wing conspiracy.” The Epoch Times contacted McAuliffe’s campaign for comments and didn’t receive them by press time.

On June 30, in front of the LCPS school administration building in Ashburn, Virginia, Youngkin promised to ban CRT if elected on day one of his administration. “He will end the use of divisive critical race theory in professional development and as an approach to education,” a Youngkin campaign spokesperson wrote in an email to The Epoch Times on Sept. 9.

“I will preside over the largest education budget in the history of Virginia … to reestablish expectations of excellence in the school systems across Virginia that used to be known nationally for the best place to send your kids,” said Youngkin.

McAuliffe’s campaign announced that Youngkin’s tax cut plan would result in Virginia’s schools losing funds, based on a new study by Virginia Excels, an education advocacy organization.

“Between the available surplus, remaining one-time federal funds, and expected future revenue growth, Glenn’s plan can provide significant tax relief to address the cost of living while making a significant investment in education,” a Youngkin campaign spokesperson told The Epoch Times.

Polls have shown a close race for the next Virginia governor. A new one by WPA Intelligence conducted for the Youngkin campaign shows him leading McAuliffe for the first time at 48 percent versus 46 percent. The poll, released on Sept. 8, surveyed 734 likely Virginia voters between Aug. 30 and Sept. 2. Its margin of error is 3.6 percent.

Early voting in Virginia starts next week.

Critical Race Theory Aims to Turn Students Into ‘Red Guards,’ Chinese American Warns (theepochtimes.com)

More than a dozen governors and two attorneys general late Thursday issued statements defying the Biden administration’s impending vaccine mandates for federal workers and private-sector workers.

President Joe Biden earlier in the day signed an executive order to require all federal workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. There would be no option to opt out via COVID-19 testing. The mandate also applies to government contractors and their employees.

The president later announced he would direct the Department of Labor to create a rule to have companies with over 100 employees mandate vaccinations or weekly testing, a move that impacts more than 80 million workers in the private sector.

At least 19 governors and two attorneys general immediately issued statements disagreeing with the administration’s move, with several vowing to defy it.

They include the governors of Arizona, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming.

They were joined by at least two state attorneys general as of Thursday night—Sean D. Reyes from Utah and Todd Rokita from Indiana.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, the chair of the National Governors Association, said in a statement, “I fully support continued efforts to increase vaccination rates across our nation, but the federal government mandates on private businesses are not the right answer.

“I have been consistent in freedom of businesses to require their employees to be vaccinated, and I have opposed the government from saying businesses cannot exercise that freedom,” he added. “The same principle should protect the private sector from government overreach that requires them to vaccinate all employees.”

Multiple Republican governors, including for Arizona, Georgia, and South Dakota, hinted or announced that they would seek legal avenues to resist the mandates.

“The COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective tools to prevent the disease, but getting the vaccine is and should be a choice,” Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said in a statement. “These mandates are outrageous. They will never stand up in court. We must and will push back.”

“I will pursue every legal option available to the state of Georgia to stop this blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden administration,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said on Twitter.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem issued a statement on Twitter, saying, “South Dakota will stand up to defend freedom. @JoeBiden see you in court.” She later shared another Twitter post saying that her legal team is prepared to stand up to the Biden administration’s mandates.

The Biden administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Biden earlier in the day commented on the issue of vaccine mandates in schools, saying, “if these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as President to get them out of the way.”

Biden said the matter of getting more shots into arms is “is not about freedom or personal choice. It’s about protecting yourself and those around you—the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love.”

Statements from the remaining governors and attorneys general as of late Thursday are as below:

• Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (in part): “I support the science and encourage folks taking the vaccine. However, I am absolutely against a government mandate on the vaccine, which is why I signed the vaccine passport ban into law here in Alabama. This is not the role of the government.”
• Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy: “This is ridiculous and unenforceable. If there was ever a case for the 25th Amendment…”
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (at a press conference): “I do not believe that people should lose their jobs over this issue, and we will fight that. If they try to do that through a rule like the Department of Labor, I don’t think they have the legal authority to do that, but we obviously would want to support protections for people who are just trying to earn a living.”
• Idaho Gov. Brad Little: “Today’s actions from President Biden amount to government overreach. Government should stay out of decisions involving employers and their employees as much as possible. I’ve advocated for and championed fewer government regulations and mandates on business.”
• Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds: “President Biden is taking dangerous and unprecedented steps to insert the federal government even further into our lives while dismissing the ability of Iowans and Americans to make healthcare decisions for themselves. Biden’s plan will only worsen our workforce shortage and further limit our economic recovery. As I’ve said all along, I believe and trust in Iowans to make the best health decisions for themselves and their families. It’s time for President Biden to do the same. Enough is enough.”
• Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (in part): “Vaccination protects us from serious illness, but the decision to get vaccinated is a private health care decision that should remain as such. My administration will always fight back against federal power grabs and government overreach that threatens to limit our freedoms.”
• Mississippi Gov. Mike Reeves: “The President has no authority to require that Americans inject themselves because of their employment at a private business. The vaccine itself is life-saving, but this unconstitutional move is terrifying. This is still America, and we still believe in freedom from tyrants.”
• Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte: “President Biden’s vaccination mandate is unlawful and un-American. We are committed to protecting Montanans’ freedoms and liberties against this gross federal overreach.”
• Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts: “President Biden’s announcement is a stunning violation of personal freedom and abuse of the federal government’s power. This plan isn’t about public health—this is about government control and taking away personal liberties.”
• North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum: “President Biden’s misguided plan steers our country down a dangerous path away from states’ rights and the freedom of private businesses to make their own decisions on vaccinations. We stand opposed to this blatant federal overreach.”
• Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt: “It is not the government’s role to dictate to private businesses what to do. Once again President Biden is demonstrating his complete disregard for individual freedoms and states’ rights. As long as I am governor, there will be no government vaccine mandates in Oklahoma. My administration will continue to defend Oklahoma values and fight back against the Biden administration’s federal overreach.”
• South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster: “The American Dream has turned into a nightmare under President Biden and the radical Democrats. They have declared war against capitalism, thumbed their noses at the Constitution, and empowered our enemies abroad. Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian.”
• Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee: “‘This is not about freedom’ is a phrase that should never come out of a U.S. President’s mouth. For a fight that requires working together, a lot of cynical and divisive edicts came out of the White House today pitting the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, businesses against employees, and the federal government against states.”
• Texas Gov. Greg Abbott: “Biden’s vaccine mandate is an assault on private businesses. I issued an Executive Order protecting Texans’ right to choose whether they get the COVID vaccine & added it to the special session agenda. Texas is already working to halt this power grab.”
• Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (in part): “I have asked the Attorney General to stand prepared to take all actions to oppose this administration’s unconstitutional overreach of executive power. It has no place in America. Not now, and not ever.”

19 Governors, 2 AGs Resist Biden’s Vaccine Mandates (theepochtimes.com)

The White House signaled Thursday its continued support of the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, following the release of documents detailing U.S.-funded coronavirus research in China.

Statements Fauci made to Congress have come under review following the release of more than 900 pages of documents, obtained by The Intercept, detailing the use of federal money by the U.S.-based health organization, EcoHealth Alliance, to fund bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

Critics say the documents show Fauci misled Congress when he repeatedly asserted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has never funded the controversial gain-of-function (GOF) research at the Chinese lab.

When asked at Thursday’s White House Press Briefing if she would retract a previous statement that under “no circumstances” President Joe Biden would consider firing Fauci, White House press secretary Jen Psaki doubled down in support of the doctor.

“NIH has never approved any research that would make the coronavirus more dangerous to humans,” said Psaki.

“A reminder that there are previous and different coronaviruses than the existing one we’re battling, and the body of science produced by this research demonstrates that the bat coronavirus sequences published from that work the NIH supported were not the strain, the COV-2 strain. So, what [Fauci] said was correct.”

The newly released documents include two grant proposals funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

One of which, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” totaled $666,422. It outlines a plan, led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, to “investigate the ecology, evolutionary biology, and transmission dynamics of bat coronaviruses at the human-wildlife interface.”

It is unclear if the second grant awarded by the NIH to EcoHealth Alliance, “Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in Emergent Infectious Disease Hotpots of Southeast Asia,” was withdrawn or suspended by the government after being awarded in August 2020 to extend through 2025.

The bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans, according to The Intercept.

In an email to The Epoch Times, an NIH spokesperson reiterated Psaki’s comment writing: “The research we supported in China, where coronaviruses are prevalent, sought to understand the behavior of coronaviruses circulating in bats that have the potential to cause widespread disease. The body of science produced by this research demonstrates that the bat coronavirus sequences published from that work NIH supported were not SARS-CoV-2. More importantly, because of similar research to understand coronaviruses, we were able to move swiftly to develop vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 and save lives.”

Fauci has sparred repeatedly with Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R) on the issue of GOF research during congressional hearings, including one instance in July where Paul suggested Fauci lied to Congress about whether the NIH funded GOF.

Fauci responded by saying he “never lied before the Congress” and that the NIH did not fund GOF research at the Wuhan lab. Fauci told Paul, “you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly.”

Paul seemed to see the release of documents by The Intercept as a victory when he tweeted out Tuesday: “I was right about his agency funding novel Coronavirus research at Wuhan.”

Paul’s tweet was a re-tweet of Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, who wrote: “The materials confirm the grants supported the construction—in Wuhan—of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells.

“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.”

The documents also shine a light on the theory that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic originated from a lab leak in Wuhan. The regime has faced criticism from the international research community and has been accused of engaging in a cover-up.

White House Stands by Fauci Over Gain-of-Function Research Controversy (theepochtimes.com)

Interview with the Antichrist is a must-see film, especially for Christians. In the movie, the Antichrist interviewee made a warning that soon he would take all lukewarm Christians to Hell, instead of being saved by God. Who is this guy? And who are the lukewarm? Could this happen in the real world, and how to prevent it? You will get an answer to these questions after watching this feature.

Director Timothy A. Chey shared he was an atheist until in his 30s. Since then, he has become very spiritual and committed to making faith-based films. Chey does not think the movies he made are merely fictional or for entertainment. “My one and only goal is to bring people true salvation in Christ in these very last days,” Chey said, “the Lord is coming sooner than we think.” And what he is most interested to illustrate is the battle of Armageddon described in the book of Revelations—the destruction of humanity by the Antichrist before God returns and how mankind would go through this great tribulation.

“I believe the Antichrist is alive right now,” Chey stated, “so it intrigued me to show a live broadcast with the Antichrist to ask him every question under the sun.” That is why, in the film, the Antichrist is peppered with stark questions including media domination, the battle between pastor John MacArthur and the California governor, the ACLU, Netflix and couch potatoes, the 9/11 terrorist attack, mass shootings, radical left movements, communist China, the evils of political correctness, pandemic lockdowns, and other mandates.

In the movie, the Antichrist mocks Pope Francis’ Interfaith Unity movement and lukewarm Christians spending more hours watching food channels than reading the Bible. Is even the Pope lukewarm? Some churchgoers may be shocked.

Lukewarm is neither hot nor cold. Lukewarm Christians are people who claim they have faith in Lord, but in the real world, are on and off. Are you lukewarm? Maybe you’re thinking, “No, I’m a devout believer of God.” That is remarkable. But wait for a minute. Is this your resolution or actual daily practice?

When the apostles worried about their clothes and bread, and when frightened by the storm, they were called “ones of little faith.” Peter denied his identity three times, even though he was the first disciple to acknowledge the Messiah.

Like water being cooked, every molecule of water in the pot is lukewarm until it boils. So lukewarm might not be name-calling, but a description of certain status or phase in the spiritual journey. And a person’s spiritual level is not static throughout one’s life; shifts in both directions are possible.

Viewer Joan Enderman agrees this movie is a wake-up call because she has found herself “slipping,” “being a Christian and sealed by the Holy Spirit does not give us immunity from sin and slipping backward.” Another viewer Christine Kenyon notes, “it now becomes harder and more of a spiritual battle because our eyes and hearts have been opened.” The movie talked about people being deceived or attached to worldly desires. For example, the lure of pornography is everywhere, from movies to TV shows, from advertisements on the street to the internet.

The Antichrist in the film is an anthropomorphized character. Through the dialogue between host Alex Carter and the Antichrist, the film conveys that the Antichrist is alive and is everywhere, as many politicians and influential figures believe more in the power of man than in God. This is exactly the spirit of the Antichrist.

Undoubtedly, communism or Marxism has been a collective representation of the Antichrist for the last hundred years. Opposing capitalism and preaching common prosperity through violence are just the political slogans of communists. But anti-God and anti-humanity are their hidden intentions.

The communist regimes have killed hundreds of millions of innocent people simply because of their spiritual beliefs. Affirmed by the China Tribunal, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has committed forced organ harvesting for years on a significant scale, “an unprecedented evil on this planet.” The reason the communists denigrate and eliminate all traditional beliefs and values is that they want humans to worship them as god or savior.

If you were thinking the Antichrist would only appear in the Western world, that might be a mistake. Revelation 14:9 reads that the worshippers of the beast will receive “the mark on his forehead or on his hand.” Think about the communist posture of raising their hands to take the oath, and then you may understand the verses better.

Likewise, Revelation 17:1-2 says, “The great whore… With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.” Who better to be called the great whore than the CCP that has lured the leaders on earth with money and coaxed the inhabitants of the earth with poor quality and low-priced goods?

Stressed in the movie, the Antichrist and his secular agents are most adept at creating and exploiting various forms of crisis to panic people into ceding their rights to the government and totalitarians. Hence, many people fear that America might become like a communist country.

If you are someone who wants to take your faith seriously, or is concerned about the future of America, or cares about the health and well-being of yourself and your family, I suggest you watch this film. It is available on EpochTV, a streaming platform for exclusive programming that includes investigative news analysis, in-depth interviews, and award-winning documentaries and films.

Lukewarm Christians, Watch This Before It’s Too Late (theepochtimes.com)

Karl Eikenberry – a former Ambassador to Afghanistan under President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden – now collaborates with several Chinese Communist Party-funded influence groups seeking to “co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition” to the regime and works for a state-run university in China, The National Pulse can reveal.

The sole political appointee to fill the role in the Obama-Biden years, Eikenberry served as Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011. His appointment followed his service as a Lieutenant General in the U.S. Army focusing on Afghanistan, overseeing the training of the now-defunct government’s army and police forces.

Since his departure from the role, Eikenberry has affiliated with several Chinese Communist Party-run institutes and initiatives.

In addition to serving as a senior advisor to the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Defense, he doubles as a Visiting Professor at Schwartzman College housed at Tsinghua University. The alma mater of Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, Tsinghua University has a history of launching cyberattacks against the U.S. government.

Tsinghua also has a “clear connection between them and the state administration for technology and industry in discussions on what [they] can do to help the national security,” according to former Senior Intelligence Officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency and State Department Official Nicholas Eftimiades.

Similarly, Eikenberry is an International Security fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). The National Pulse has previously highlighted the center’s deep collaboration with several Chinese military and government-linked entities, including those flagged by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for espionage and blacklisted by the U.S. government.

Eikenberry is also part of a working group based at the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) 21st Century China Center, which is predominantly funded by the co-founder of the e-commerce giant Alibaba. The China-based firm has close financial and personnel ties to the Chinese Communist Party and its military. It has been flagged as a “tool” of the Chinese Communist Party by the U.S. State Department.

Beyond academia, Eikenberry has also participated in dialogues at the East-West Institute sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF). The organization was founded by the Vice-Chairman Chinese Communist Party’s “United Front,” an effort that seeks 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.”

Another event sponsor – the China Association for International Friendly Contact (CAIFC) – has been flagged by the U.S. government as a United Front group operating under the auspices of China’s military.

“CAIFC has additional ties to the Ministries of State Security, Civil Affairs, and Foreign Affairs, and it is a platform for deploying undercover intelligence gatherers,” the federal commission’s report adds.

Despite these ties, Eikenberry participated in a 2018 military-to-military dialogue – the Sanya Initiative – alongside Chinese Communist Party counterparts sponsored by CUSEF and CAIFC.

“Retired American and Chinese senior flag officers and executives of the hosting organizations met in Beijing to discuss critical issues of mutual concern and interest impacting the U.S.-China military-to-military relationship, including North Korea, Taiwan, the South China Sea, emerging technologies, as well as other regional security challenges,” an event summary notes.

Foreign Policy magazine noted how the Chinese regime effort aims to subvert former American military leaders into advocating on behalf of Beijing and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA):

• One of those PLA projects is the Sanya Initiative, an exchange program that brings together U.S. and Chinese former high-ranking military leaders. On the Chinese side, the Sanya Initiative is led by a bureau of the PLA that engages in political warfare and influence operations, according to Mark Stokes, executive director of the Project 2049 Institute.

• Sometimes the results of such high-level exchanges aren’t subtle. In February 2008, PLA participants in the Sanya Initiative asked their U.S. counterparts to persuade the Pentagon to delay publishing a forthcoming report about China’s military buildup, according to a segment excised from the 2011 annual report of the congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

• The U.S. members complied, though their request was not successful.

Obama-Biden Afghan Ambassador Is Now A China-Funded Academic Tied To Influence Groups ‘Neutralizing’ Beijing’s Enemies. (thenationalpulse.com)

A report highlighting Chinese government-backed influence campaigns on social media platforms found that the effort sought to mobilize protests against “racial injustice,” CNN has finally admitted.

The network’s summary of the recently released Mandiant Threat Intelligence and Google report notes how bot accounts linked to a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) disinformation network attempted to incite Asian Americans to protest against racism and those claiming COVID-19 originated in China.

“US officials believe the operation is linked to the Chinese government,” the article adds.

As the CNN article admits:

In April for example, experts saw thousands of fake accounts calling on Asian Americans to protest racial injustice in the US and “disinformation about the virus’ origins.” While experts found no evidence these posts were successful in mobilizing protesters, the report says “it does provide early warning that the actors behind the activity may be starting to explore, in however limited a fashion, more direct means of influencing the domestic affairs of the US.”

The report identifies how the bot network attempted to catalyze a protest on April 24th in New York City:

In April 2021, thousands of posts in languages including English, Japanese, and Korean, images, and videos were posted across multiple platforms by accounts we assess to be part of this broader activity set that called on Asian Americans to protest racial injustices in the U.S. The accounts specifically called on Asian Americans to protest on April 24 in New York City and “fight back” against the purported “rumors” caused by Dr. Li-Meng Yan, Guo Wengui, and Steve Bannon, and in some instances provided an address that they claimed Guo lived at.

Posts shared by the fake accounts included messages such as “the racism is the virus.”

MUST READ:

High School Teacher With Antifa Flag in Classroom Praises Chinese Communist Party.

“This direct call for physical mobilization is a significant development compared to prior activity, potentially indicative of an emerging intent to motivate real-world activity outside of China’s territories,” the report says.’

“While experts at Mandiant and Google say they have not seen these specific pro-Chinese accounts wade into election specific content to date, they did warn that the actors responsible could be gearing up for a more expansive disinformation push,” CNN adds. Platforms such as TikTok, however, have been used to sabotage Trump rallies during the 2020 election cycle.

The National Pulse first reported on the existence of a Beijing-backed, online bot army in early 2020, which, at the time, was used to criticize former President Donald Trump and his COVID-19 response.

More recently, over 20 advocacy groups comprising the “Stop AAPI Hate” coalition sent a letter demanding the Biden White House terminate the Department of Justice’s Trump-era “China Initiative” – which identifies and prosecutes Chinese Communist Party espionage operations – and publicly discredit the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory.

No evidence of a quid pro quo over the CCP’s attempts to bolster these campaigns digitally and the campaigns’ attempts to shift U.S. government policy on China has yet emerged.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declined emergency use authorization for a lenzilumab monoclonal antibody drug to treat COVID-19, according to Humanigen.

Humanigen, the developer of the drug, sought the FDA’s emergency use authorization for the medication to treat newly hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The firm filed its petition with the drug regulator in May 2021.

“In its letter, FDA stated that it was unable to conclude that the known and potential benefits of lenzilumab outweigh the known and potential risks of its use as a treatment for COVID-19,” the Burlingame, California-based company said in a statement.

The head of Humanigen, Cameron Durrant, said that the company will attempt to keep trying to develop the drug.

“We believe the ongoing ACTIV-5/BET-B trial, which has been advanced to enroll up to 500 patients, may provide additional safety and efficacy data sufficient to support our efforts to obtain an [emergency use authorization] to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients,” he said.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Monoclonal antibody treatments for COVID-19 drew headlines last week after podcaster Joe Rogan wrote on social media that he contracted the virus and was taking monoclonal antibodies and a cocktail of other medication to treat it, although it’s not clear what exact medications Rogan took. Former President Donald Trump also took monoclonal antibodies from Regeneron when he contracted COVID-19 last year.

Rogan later confirmed on social media that he tested negative for the virus. “Tested negative today! Thanks for all the kind wishes!” he wrote on Sept. 3

“We immediately threw the kitchen sink at it. All kinds of meds,” Rogan said two days prior to that, adding that he underwent the treatment for three days. “Monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin, Z-pak, prednisone, everything. And I also got an NAD-drip and a vitamin drip.”

The FDA is currently investigating the use of monoclonal antibodies to prevent CCP virus sufferers from being hospitalized. Monoclonal antibodies, which are commonly used to treat cancer patients, are proteins created in a laboratory that bind to specific substances in the body.

In May, the agency issued an emergency use authorization to GlaxoSmithKline for “monoclonal antibody therapy sotrovimab for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults and pediatric patients,” according to a news release. In November, the FDA provided emergency authorization for casirivimab and imdevimab, also monoclonal antibodies, for the virus, according to a release.

The Epoch Times has contacted the FDA for comment.

FDA Denies Emergency Use Authorization for New COVID-19 Drug (theepochtimes.com)

A Maryland-based biotechnology company on Wednesday announced the launch of a clinical trial that will examine the efficacy and safety of a combined flu/COVID-19 vaccine.

The early stage phase 1/2 study will examine a combination of a seasonal influenza vaccine candidate from Novavax and a COVID-19 vaccine candidate the company makes, neither of which have been authorized or approved for use in the United States.

Approximately 640 healthy adults between the ages of 50 and 70 will participate in the trial, which will take place in Australia. Only people who have been previously infected with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, or have been vaccinated with an authorized COVID-19 vaccine at least eight weeks prior to enrollment will be considered.

Results are expected during the first half of 2022.

“This study is the first-of-its-kind to evaluate the vaccine’s potential to induce a robust immune response, augmented by our Matrix-M adjuvant, against two life-threatening diseases simultaneously,” Dr. Gregory M. Glenn, president of research and development at Novavax, said in a statement. “The combination of these two vaccines, which have individually delivered outstanding results with favorable safety and tolerability profiles, may lead to greater efficiencies for the healthcare system and achieve high levels of protection against COVID-19 and influenza with a single regimen.”

Earlier findings suggested the combination of the shots could be a “viable immunization strategy,” the company said over the summer. Preclinical trials of the combo vaccine showed good results, Novavax scientists said in a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed.

NanoFlu, the company’s flu vaccine, has been studied for years but has never been authorized or approved. Work on the COVID-19 vaccine began last year but the company has still not applied for emergency use authorization in the United States, though it did in India and the Philippines last month.

Novavax received $1.6 billion from the Trump administration to develop the COVID-19 vaccine.

A phase 3 trial for the COVID-19 vaccine showed 100 percent protection against moderate and severe disease and 90.4 percent efficacy overall, according to a June release from the company.

The vaccine is in the subunit class, meaning it does not contain live components of the CCP virus. Subunits instead contain components, or antigens, of the pathogen that are believed to best trigger the immune system.

The two most widely used COVID-19 vaccines in the United States are based on messenger RNA technology. The new type of vaccine also does not contain the virus. Instead, the messenger RNA is utilized to teach teach cells how to make a protein that triggers an immune response.

The third, from Johnson & Johnson, is an adenovirus-based vaccine that uses a common virus combined with a gene from the CCP virus’s spike protein to stimulate the immune system.

If the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine ultimately gains authorization, it would offer an option to people “that are uncomfortable with the genetic vaccine strategy,” Dr. Robert Malone, a vaccine inventor, told The Epoch Times in a recent interview.

Novavax Launches Trial for Combined Flu/COVID-19 Vaccine (theepochtimes.com)

Two GOP representatives are calling on Congress to pass legislation that would require schools that receive federal funding to make the curriculum they use to teach students available to parents and the public.

Education and Labor Committee Ranking Member Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) and Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Wis.) introduced the Curriculum Review of Teachings Transparency Act (pdf). The bill stipulates that federal funding can be denied if K-12 schools do not comply with the rule.

Making the K-12 curriculum openly available to parents is an effort by Foxx and Fitzgerald to counter what they call controversial and factually inaccurate ideas being taught in schools under the name of critical race theory (CRT).

“Decisions about what to teach students in school are being made by bureaucrats and teachers unions, often without the input from parents. As a result, parents across the country are flocking to their local school board to demand transparency and to oppose dangerous ideologies, like critical race theory,” said Fitzgerald said in a press statement.

CRT is rooted in the Marxist theory of class struggle, but with a particular focus on race. Proponents of CRT see racism in every aspect of the American public and private life and seek to dismantle American institutions—such as the Constitution and legal system—which they claim to be inherently and irredeemably racist.

While schools have for years been quietly infusing CRT into their curriculums, it wasn’t until last year, during lockdowns enacted in response to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, that parents were able to see what their children were being taught. Since then, parents have been increasingly stepping forward to oppose CRT due to its racially divisive and anti-American concepts.

There has been fierce debate over whether CRT or similar initiatives—including The New York Times’ “1619 Project” or diversity, equity, and inclusion training—should be taught to schoolchildren. Parents across the United States have held protests against school boards that have increasingly started to promote CRT or CRT-aligned viewpoints in class.

Meanwhile, some media outlets have claimed that CRT is only taught in higher education settings, such as in colleges and universities, and isn’t being widely adopted by teachers. However, critics of CRT have said there are plenty of examples of young children in school being taught to believe that white people are inherently racist—a key CRT tenet—and that “systemic racism” permeates every U.S. institution.

Foxx wrote in a recent op-ed that education’s goal was originally to produce virtuous citizens who would make the country stronger, adding, “The future of our country depends upon a high-quality education system dedicated to equipping the next generation with the knowledge needed for an active civic life. Critical race theory is incompatible with this mission.”

Jack Phillips contributed to this report.

US Reps. Introduce Bill to Mandate Public Access to Schools’ Curriculum (theepochtimes.com)

An appearance by Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Victory Boyd to perform the National Anthem at the NFL’s Sept. 9 season-opening game in Tampa Bay was canceled by the league because she declined for religious reasons to be vaccinated against the CCP Virus.

“As I understand that Victory will not be fully vaccinated by the time of the Kickoff game, she would not have been able to comply with the terms of the Game Day Field Access Policy,” NFL Senior Director for Media and Entertainment Events Seth Dudowsky told Boyd’s father and manager, John Boyd, in an Aug. 31 email made available to The Epoch Times.

“And as a result, we unfortunately will not be able to invite Victoria to perform the national anthem at this year’s Kickoff game,” Dudowsky said.

The defending Super Bowl-champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ home field is Raymond James Stadium, an open-air venue. The 2021 season-opening game is to be played against the Dallas Cowboys.

“The NFL’s Game Day Field Access Policy requires that all individuals accessing the playing field and surrounding sideline areas within the stadium bowl (including individuals involved in game presentation elements such as the singer of the national anthem) be fully vaccinated.

“Under the Policy, ‘fully vaccinated’ means 14 days have passed since the individual received the final dose required in the vaccine sequence, in accordance with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This requirement is mandatory and fully complies with the laws applicable to the type of business relationship contemplated here, and we are not in a position to make an exception,” Budowsky told Boyd in the email.

Dudowsky thus ended weeks of negotiations that initially excited both Boyds because, in addition to a $20,000 performance fee, the occasion provided invaluable national television exposure on one of the NFL’s most-watched games other than the Super Bowl.

The NFL also agreed to cover the travel costs of Boyd and her entourage, “as well as all costs, expenses and fees related to the services of all of Artist’s support personnel in connection with the Performance and all related obligations,” according to a copy of the contract reviewed by The Epoch Times. The contract was the result of the negotiations but had not yet been officially signed by the parties to it.

The 27-year-old singer/songwriter blends soul and folk music and has twice before sung the National Anthem at NFL games. She was a member of the team that produced Kanye West’s Grammy Award-winning “Jesus Is King,” 2020’s top contemporary Christian album.

Boyd was the primary lyricist for the album’s “Closed on Sunday” and “God Is” songs and she made additional contributions to “Water.” Her music is available on the Roc Nation label of Jay-Z.

Her grounds for declining to be vaccinated are rooted in her Christian faith, she told The Epoch Times:

“The Bible admonishes Christians to appreciate their bodies as being sacred and a temple of the Holy Spirit and to not participate in things that can defile the body or render the body dysfunctional.

“I am in prayer to make sure that the Lord guides me into the right decision concerning receiving an unproven injection with artificial properties that can potentially have a longterm effect on my reproductive health.

“If I want to take the vaccine, the decision will be between myself, my doctor and my God. At this point, the Spirit of God is leading me to take a stand for freedom of choice.”

She also told The Epoch Times that she worries the NFL decision to cancel her for not being vaccinated may herald more disheartening restrictions throughout the music and entertainment industries.

“Throughout my life I have overcome many obstacles, but now I was faced with a new glass ceiling that I couldn’t break through. It feels like we’re going backwards to a familiar place that I thought we had overcome as a country,” Boyd told The Epoch Times.

“To be disqualified because of a discriminatory policy that had nothing to do with my talent made me feel alarmed because of what it implies for not only myself but millions of others,” she said.

Dudowsky declined to respond to The Epoch Times’ email request for comment, referring it instead to Brian McCarthy, a league spokesman. McCarthy declined to say if the NFL places a higher value on ratings and entertainment than on First Amendment rights, including freedom of religion.

John Boyd told The Epoch Times he was mystified by the NFL’s adamant refusal to make any accommodation of his daughter’s religious and medical rights.

“My response to the final position of the NFL was one of utter disbelief because I didn’t understand why a single person that was willing to comply with all other NFL COVID protocols and submit verification of a current COVID-19 negative test was not allowed to sing the National Anthem in an open-air stadium. It made no common sense to me that the NFL was not willing to make any accommodation,” John Boyd said.

John Boyd added in a separate email that he believed “if accommodations were made for tens of thousands of mask-less, unvaccinated fans screaming over the field and many unvaccinated players running back and forth on the field, surely an accommodation could have been made for a single singer (standing alone distanced from all other people) to sing the National Anthem on the sidelines for only a minute and 45 seconds.”

The immovable NFL policy was first announced to franchise owners and officials, coaches and players, in a July 1, 2021, memo that detailed processes to be followed by everybody involved with a game, including NFL staff, members of the news media, game coaches and officials on the field and the sidelines, and entertainers.

Significantly, NFL players are not required to be vaccinated, but those who decline to do so are required to submit to a daily test. A positive result means the player cannot play in a game or participate in practice sessions until he has five consecutive negative daily tests.

In a tense telephone conversation prompted by Dudowsky’s Aug. 31 email, the NFL official told John Boyd that while he understood the manager’s concerns, “unfortunately, that is the NFL’s policy that the NFL has stated both privately and publicly, this is not something we’re running from or hiding.”

Dudowsky told Boyd that “there are players pushing back on this policy,” but “the league does feel it has control over its venues, the fields and the protocols.”

Dudowsky said the NFL’s decision to not accommodate Boyd’s request to be allowed to perform in an alternative setting on the sidelines or elsewhere in the stadium was not a legal issue.

“That is a decision by the NFL, by our events team and our entertainment team,” Dudowsky told Boyd. He also acknowledged that the NFL made extensive accommodations to entertainers and others during the 2020 season due to the virus that causes COVID-19.

“This is our first big one for a national broadcast and it is important that we are showcasing a singer on the field for the first time, other than the Super Bowl, in the last year,” Dudowsky told Boyd.

Recording Artist Victory Boyd Refuses Vaccine for Religious Reasons, NFL Cancels Her National Anthem Opening Day Performance (theepochtimes.com)