A Texas hospital announced that it has suspended the privileges of a doctor who posted concerns on social media about COVID-19 vaccine mandates and suggested that ivermectin may be able to treat the virus.
Dr. Mary Bowden, an ear, nose, and throat doctor at Houston Methodist Hospital, posted what was called “dangerous misinformation” that’s “not based in science” about the virus, the hospital announced on Twitter. The firm didn’t elaborate on the so-called misinformation and didn’t explain how her social media claims aren’t scientifically factual.
“Dr. Mary Bowden, who recently joined the medical staff at Houston Methodist Hospital, is using her social media accounts to express her personal and political opinions about the COVID-19 vaccine and treatments,” Houston Methodist, which drew national headlines for becoming one of the first hospital systems in the United States to mandate vaccines for all its employees earlier in 2021, wrote on Twitter.
Patty Muck, a spokesperson for the hospital, confirmed to media outlets over the weekend that Bowden’s privileges were suspended.
“The physician’s privileges at Houston Methodist have been suspended,” Muck wrote in an email to the Washington Post.
When contacted by The Epoch Times, a separate spokesperson for the hospital sent a statement that echoed several of its Twitter posts. The spokesperson didn’t elaborate on the suspension.
Last week, Bowden wrote on her Twitter account that “vaccine mandates are wrong” and included a screenshot of a message that apparently came from an individual who told her that “what the government is doing to its citizens in the United States is incomprehensible.” She also used her account to suggest that the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin may be able to treat COVID-19 symptoms.
In recent weeks, podcaster Joe Rogan and Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers both publicly confirmed that they took ivermectin after they were each diagnosed with COVID-19. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) haven’t recommended the drug to be used for treating the virus.
“Ivermectin might not be as deadly as everyone said it was. Speak up!” Bowden said on Nov. 10.
Bowden’s attorney, Steve Mitby, told local media outlets that the doctor has treated more than 2,000 COVID-19 patients and said she isn’t against vaccines.
“Like many Americans, Dr. Bowden believes that people should have a choice and believes that all people, regardless of vaccine status, should have access to the same high-quality health care,” Mitby said.
Speaking to local media outlet Click2Houston, Bowden, who also runs her own private practice, BreatheMD, said she had a “great relationship” with Houston Methodist.
But the “issues with vaccines and ivermectin really go against patient autonomy and their right to choose their treatment,” she said.
“All of my comments are backed by clinical experience,” Bowden told the Houston Chronicle. “I have been open seven days a week since the pandemic began, performing over 80,000 COVID tests and treating over 2,000 patients with COVID.”
Mitby’s law firm didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
For most Americans, the first 10 months of the Biden administration have been a disaster. A new report suggests Vice President Kamala Harris is one of those Americans who is suffering through the administration’s incompetence.
West Wing aides are growing increasingly frustrated with “entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus” from Harris and her staff, CNN reported Sunday. The outlet interviewed almost three dozen current and former staffers for Harris, administration officials, donors, advisers and Democratic Party operatives, and they reportedly painted a discouraging picture.
“Harris is struggling with a rocky relationship with some parts of the White House, while long-time supporters feel abandoned and see no coherent public sense of what she’s done or been trying to do as vice president,” CNN reported.
At the same time, the outlet said Harris’ supporters are equally frustrated with White House officials who they feel are not putting Harris in a position to succeed.
“Kamala Harris is a leader but is not being put in positions to lead,” a top donor to President Joe Biden said. “That doesn’t make sense. We need to be thinking long term, and we need to be doing what’s best for the party.
“You should be putting her in positions to succeed, as opposed to putting weights on her,” he said, speaking indirectly to Biden. “If you did give her the ability to step up and help her lead, it would strengthen you and strengthen the party.”
However, when the president has given Harris a chance to lead, she has largely failed to do so.
He tapped Harris to lead the response to the border crisis in March, The Associated Press reported. Since then, Harris has visited the border just one time, and it was far from the areas where illegal immigration is at its highest.
Border agents are still facing huge numbers of illegal border crossings, some of which are committed by convicted criminals.
Do you think Harris will run for president in 2024?
But according to a former aide to Harris, her sinking approval rating is not due to her own failures, but rather systemic racism within the Biden administration.
“It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a white man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” the aide said.
These comments show just how dysfunctional the relationship between Biden and Harris is. Members of Biden’s own party are turning on him and accusing him of racism because of the incompetence of his administration and particularly his vice president.
Obviously, none of this is helpful optically to an administration that is already floundering. For that reason, multiple White House staffers attempted to cover for Harris after the damming report.
“For anyone who needs to hear it. @VP is not only a vital partner to @POTUS but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country — from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration to expanding broadband,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted Sunday night.
For anyone who needs to hear it. @VP is not only a vital partner to @POTUS but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country—from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration to expanding broadband.
White House chief of staff Ronald Klain also joined in on the action by retweeting a sycophantic celebration of Harris from Mayor Robert Garcia of Long Beach, California.
“Our @VP Kamala Harris just finished a highly successful trip where she strengthened diplomatic relationships,” the tweet said. “She takes on the most complex assignments because she’s capable and smart. She’s a great leader who also happens to be funny and kind. And that’s the tweet.”
Our @VP Kamala Harris just finished a highly successful trip where she strengthened diplomatic relationships. She takes on the most complex assignments because she’s capable and smart. She’s a great leader who also happens to be funny and kind. And that’s the tweet.
Scramble as they might, those within the walls of the White House cannot hide their dysfunction forever. Americans are growing increasingly tired of Biden, Harris and the entire administration just 10 months into it, and tensions are rising between its own members.
Greta Thunberg actually hit the nail on the head for once. She described the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow with remarkable accuracy.
“The #COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, blah, blah,” Thunberg tweeted.
On Nov. 13, about 200 countries agreed to a deal that is supposed to cut down on emissions worldwide.
The pact outlined that greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030. Countries represented at the conference agreed that emissions needed to be reduced quickly and that they would report annually.
However, though an agreement was reached and signed, no one is being fooled into thinking this is actually going to be all that effective.
“COP26 has closed the gap, but it has not solved the problem,” Niklas Hoehne, a climate researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, said, according to Nature.com.
Climate change talks always target fossil fuels, of course. This conference particularly seemed to be on the warpath against coal. But thanks to India and China, coal is still going to be burning.
In a last-minute change, India and China insisted that the agreement be re-worded from “phase out” of coal to “phase down” of coal, CNBC News reported.
This caused an outcry from other countries, since China and India are two of the world’s greatest coal burners.
Should Biden have stayed home from the COP26 conference?
“China and India are going to have to explain themselves to the most climate vulnerable countries in the world,” said Alok Sharma, a U.K. lawmaker who led the COP26 negotiations, according to The Guardian.
The whole conference is largely recognized as a failure and a weak agreement, rather than a great victory. The Guardian ran a headline saying, “It could have been worse, but our leaders failed us at COP26. That’s the truth of it.”
At the foundation, any agreement like this that is not legally binding is not going to be terribly effective. Add to that the fact that China and India, two of the world’s greatest carbon polluters, are going to do what they want anyway, and you begin to question what the conference accomplished at all.
As far as climate change, the conference really only accomplished “blah, blah, blah.” But it highlighted some important geopolitical stances, particularly China’s and America’s.
Though there have been warnings that climate change will end our planet and doomsday is approaching if we don’t lower carbon emissions, some countries like China have decided that they are powerful enough to just ignore it. In fact, China’s President Xi Jinping didn’t even show up to the conference.
This just goes to show that so much of the activity regarding climate change is just political posturing. And the most powerful players are making their stances known. Jinping not showing up to COP26, along with China’s representative pressuring for the change of wording in the pact, are clear signals that China sees itself as powerful enough to just do whatever it wants.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Biden is trying to take extreme climate change action. It’s more political posturing — just on the other side of the spectrum as China. While Jinping is flexing his muscles, Biden is trying to play nice and appease all the other kids on the playground.
Particularly leading up to the COP26 conference, Biden wanted to show the world that he was taking climate change very seriously, so that he wouldn’t be too heavily criticized.
“The whole world is watching. If these bills don’t come to pass, then the U.S. will be coming to Glasgow with some fine words … not much else. It won’t be enough,” Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a climate adviser for the United Nations Secretary General, told the New York Times in October.
Climate change is a significant political vehicle. Biden’s administration is trying to play nice with China on this issue, in hopes of bettering the relationship.
John Kerry, the U.S.’s climate change envoy, and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, made a good show of agreeing that the countries will work together on cutting emissions.
“Both sides will work jointly and with other parties to ensure a successful COP26 and to facilitate an outcome that is both ambitious and balanced,” Xie said.
This greased the wheels ahead of Jinping and Biden’s upcoming virtual meeting. Biden seems to be desperately trying to keep China calm and happy with the U.S. COP26 was just one more way to try to smooth things over with China.
So, while the COP26 conference and pact may be considered an environmental failure, there was plenty going on under the surface. China and the U.S. did not waste this opportunity to show the world where they stand in relation to each other and everyone else. China made sure to come out as the strong man calling the shots, while Biden kept the U.S. looking tentative and unsure of itself.
Even if the planet is in imminent danger, climate change meetings are just a political outlet at this point for the power players. This conference was just a ploy.
Remember all of the CNN and MSNBC talking heads coming up with unique and funny ways to take away former President Donald Trump’s phone when he would tweet something problematic?
The good news is that they can reprise all of those jokes again. The bad news, for them, is that they’ll have to use them against an administration they generally support — and in a high-stakes matter where that tweet could end with one of the new administration’s most divisive policies getting nixed.
In a Friday ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans that stayed President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate, Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s retweet of an MSNBC host was used as evidence that the administration used a rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as a “work around.”
The three-judge panel found “the Mandate’s true purpose is not to enhance workplace safety, but instead to ramp up vaccine uptake by any means necessary,” as per the ruling penned by Circuit Judge Kurt Engelhardt.
The ruling declared the mandate was “the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a ‘grave danger’ in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat.
“The Mandate’s stated impetus — a purported ’emergency’ that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years, and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to — is unavailing as well. And its promulgation grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority,” the court concluded.
Part of the court’s reasoning had to do with one of Klain’s retweets, this one from MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle.
“OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations,” she tweeted Sept. 9. Klain retweeted it later that day, according to the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.
OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.
This, the court said, was some proof the Biden administration knew they lacked the authority for a vaccine mandate.
“After the President voiced his displeasure with the country’s vaccination rate in September, the Administration pored over the U.S. Code in search of authority, or a ‘work-around,’ for imposing a national vaccine mandate,” the court stated.
“The vehicle it landed on was an OSHA [emergency temporary standard]. The statute empowering OSHA allows OSHA to bypass typical notice-and-comment proceedings for six months by providing ‘for an emergency temporary standard to take immediate effect upon publication in the Federal Register’ if it ‘determines (A) that employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards, and (B) that such emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger.’”
The citation for the “work around,” of course, was Klain’s retweet.
It isn’t the only reason the 5th Circuit issued a thoroughgoing destruction of the ruling, as an editorial from the board of The Wall Street Journal noted.
“The court’s opinion takes apart the OSHA mandate every which way — on constitutional, statutory and procedural grounds,” the editorial, published Sunday, stated.
“The Constitution gives states, not the federal government, the police powers to regulate individual behavior to protect public health and safety. The Administration tried to circumvent this limitation on federal power by conscripting private employers via an OSHA ’emergency temporary standard.’”
However, Klain’s retweet provides an important glimpse into what the White House was thinking when it implemented the widely hated mandate — and it could end up helping destroy it as the case continues in the courts.
As GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz noted at the time, the retweet was “Foolish” and said it meant the “Biden admin knows it’s likely illegal (like the eviction moratorium) but they don’t care.”
Important.
Foolish RT from WH chief of staff. He said the quiet part out loud.
Biden admin knows it’s likely illegal (like the eviction moratorium) but they don’t care. https://t.co/AlfmYtuvhp
But like the eviction moratorium that was struck down by the Supreme Court in August, the administration hoped it would stand up for long enough that it would scare people into getting the vaccine. The problem is that if you say that part out loud, it can induce a court to notice just how flawed the mandate is.
This isn’t the only time Klain has had Twitter issues, either. Last month, the chief of staff retweeted a Harvard economist who called inflation and supply-chain issues “high class problems,” adding a millennial-ish “This,” along with two fingers pointing down, to the tweet:
Mind you, he’s far from the only problematic member of the Biden administration. Vice President Kamala Harris has been handed several major issues as tests of her seaworthiness, and on all of them she’s ended up sinking. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin oversaw the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has made a bungle of the border crisis.
All of these things loom much bigger than a retweet by the chief of staff, but it speaks to a culture of general incompetence in the administration. Funny how, during the last administration, CNN and MSNBC would have seized upon this — just like they would joke about how the president’s phone should be taken away. They seem strangely silent on it this time.
You can trot out the Klain jokes all you want, media. After all, this is twice now he’s said the silent part out loud on social media — and one of those times, it may have affected a court ruling. Strange how the Don Lemons and Joe Scarboroughs of the world don’t want to recycle their own material.
If the Republicans had stuck together in the House of Representatives, President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill would be dead.
After all, six progressive Democrats refused to lend their votes to the $1.2 trillion plan unless the Democrats’ $1.75 trillion spending bill was also passed along with it. Perhaps they could have been induced to give in later, but without their support, the bill wouldn’t have passed this time around.
Instead, 13 House Republicans broke ranks and voted with Democrats, delivering a 228-206 victory for the president and for Democrat leadership on Nov. 5. The bill had already passed the Senate in August — with 19 GOP votes, Republicans who thought they were cutting a deal precluding the Democrats from spending more on things that weren’t really “infrastructure.” (In truth, much of that spending has just been pushed to the now $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” bill.)
Appearing on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” this weekend, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz had a message for the 13 House Republicans who broke ranks: Biden’s infrastructure bill “was failing” and “they breathed life into it.”
During the interview, host Maria Bartiromo noted that the Nov. 2 elections, which saw Democrat Terry McAuliffe defeated in Virginia’s gubernatorial race and New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy nearly ousted by his Republican challenger, might have been a signal to the nation’s politicians.
“You would have thought that the Democrats saw Virginia and New Jersey as a wake-up call to slow things down,” she said, but that they’d done “the opposite.”
And then there were the Republicans: “You had an opportunity there to stop this whole agenda, but your colleagues decided not to go that path. You had 19 of your colleagues in the Senate vote for the infrastructure package, you had 13 in the House vote for the infrastructure package,” Bartiromo said.
“What exactly did that do? Now, because they did that, the path is wide open for much higher taxes for the rest of us to pay. Isn’t that true?”
Cruz said this was “exactly true, and it’s maddening.”
Do you agree with Cruz?
At least in the Senate, Cruz said, “we spent week after week at lunch yelling at each other,” with those in support of the infrastructure plan arguing it would preclude the budgetary excesses the Democrats had been promising.
“They argued, ‘If we pass this, it’ll make the other less likely to pass.’
“That never made sense to me,” Cruz said.
“The Democrats never made any agreement to that. They didn’t say, ‘We won’t pursue the Bernie Sanders budget.’ What they said is, ‘OK, we’ll take both — we’ll take $1.2 trillion here, and then we’ll take $5.5 trillion here.’ That’s what the Democrats said.”
“And I will tell you, in the House, for the House Republicans who voted for this: Joe Biden and the Democrats, their agenda was on the rails,” Cruz said. “It was failing. It was on the way to going down.
“And what those Republicans did is they breathed life into it. They gave Joe Biden a political win,” he continued.
“He’ll now go across the country touting, ‘Look at this big bipartisan win.’ And that additional momentum, unfortunately, makes it more likely that they whip their Democrats into shape and pass some multi-trillion-dollar spending bill on top of this that will include, unfortunately, trillions in new taxes. That’s what the stakes are all about. I still hope it doesn’t happen.”
The only chance it doesn’t, at this point, is if the Democrats’ spending bill continues to be blocked in the Senate by West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin, who’s been holding up the plan up at present. That said, this kind of spending can only be financed through higher taxes — which aren’t going to be staved off forever, no matter what Manchin does.
The 13 House Republicans who voted for the bill — Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Andrew Garbarino of New York, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, John Katko of New York, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, David McKinley of West Virginia, Tom Reed of New York, Chris Smith of New Jersey, Fred Upton of Michigan, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Don Young of Alaska — gave various reasons for doing so.
Malliotakis told the New York Post that the bill would “improve the safety and prosperity of communities across America and make the necessary improvements to bring our infrastructure into the 21st century.”
“For far too long, our local, state, and federal leaders have neglected to modernize New York City’s aging infrastructure to keep pace with economic and population growth,” she said.
“The funding stream we are providing today will be used by states and cities to modernize roads, highways, bridges, sewer systems, and flood resiliency projects, including right here on Staten Island and in Southern Brooklyn.”
Katko, another New York Democrat, defended his vote by saying the plan would deliver on money to his state.
“This bill is a win,” Katko wrote in a tweeted statement, telling voters the spending would deliver a “once in a generation investment in our nation’s physical infrastructure including our roads and bridges, ports and waterways, broadband networks, electrical grid, clean water systems, and airports.”
Of the 13 Republicans who voted for the bill, it’s worth noting six were from New Jersey and New York, states that saw a windfall in spending from the bill.
Another two, Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, are noted Trump critics, both are retiring from Congress, and both of whom have broken from the party on a number of issues.
What these Republicans have done is consigned the country to higher taxes and spending that inevitably will not provide the return the administration and Democrats are promising it will.
Cruz is right — they breathed life into a bill that was dead to rights and handed the Biden administration a huge win.
Like the 19 Republicans in the Senate who voted for the infrastructure plan under the pretense it would preclude more spending by the Democrats, they may come to quickly regret the move — particularly when the bill comes due.
Many people scratched their heads when Joe Biden picked Harris as his running mate. The media claimed it was because she was an amazing politician. It had nothing to do with her race or gender. But since entering office, the woman has not had a stellar record.
She has a worse approval than Biden. That’s probably because she has done nothing with the jobs given to her. But recently she managed to drain even more water out of the shallow end. Just see what she asked NASA… about trees.
From The Right Scoop/ Twitter:
Kamala Harris interrupts a NASA presentation to ask if NASA “can measure trees” as part of “environmental justice.” pic.twitter.com/POoArDzaGc
Kamala Harris is a very special vice president don’t you think? Special. And she asked a very special question, interrupting a NASA presentation to do it, on the issue of tree justice.
That’s right, she wanted to know if NASA can use satellites to “track” how many trees there are on a neighborhood by neighborhood level, with those neighborhoods being apportioned by race, for the sake of environmental justice.
I think it’s safe to say that “social justice” has gone too far. No longer able to find real sources of racism in America, Kamala Harris is now asking about how racist a neighborhood is—based on its trees. Harris asked NASA if they could track tree density, per neighborhood, as some form of “environmental justice.”
Because, as we all know, racists love cutting down trees in majority-black neighborhoods.
What is Harris thinking? Does she really expect us to believe that a lack of trees in a neighborhood indicates its racial makeup? Or does she have a hunch and wants NASA to prove it? But we shouldn’t be all too surprised for her to think this way.
The left casts everything in the mold of race. She is assuming that, if there are lots of trees in a neighborhood, it’s because it is made of up rich people who planted them. And, as all social justice warriors know, rich equals white. So, if there are too many trees in a neighborhood… racism!
Has this woman ever gone to Brooklyn? There are lots of trees in the city—especially in the many parks managed by both the city and private communities. There are so many trees, despite the fact that the area is very racially diverse.
She should also visit cities outside the liberal bubble, where white, black, and other races get along very well. And guess what—plenty of trees!
Maybe there is a lack of trees in some areas because urban density meant they needed to be cut down. It had nothing to do with race, just the need to build more homes and buildings?
But nobody tell Harris that—she won’t understand!
Key Takeaways:
Kamala Harris asked if NASA could track trees for “environmental justice.”
The leftist seemed to think trees indicated the racial profile of a community.
Harris tried to tie the number of trees to racism, it seems.
The supposed experts shaping the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus forced their tunnel vision upon the administration, according to a former member of the White House Coronavirus Response Team.
In a new book, Dr. Scott Atlas lambastes the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx and former CDC Director Robert Redfield for refusing to look at all options.
In his book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” Atlas recounted an incident in which he wrote that he presented compelling data indicating that schools should be reopened and that children were not major factors in the spread of the virus.
Fauci and others acted as though he had never spoken, he wrote, according to excerpts published Saturday by Fox News.
“As I finished, there was silence,” Atlas wrote. “No one offered any contrary data … Zero comments from Dr. Birx. Nothing from Dr. Fauci.”
“And as always, not a single mention by Birx or Fauci about the serious harms of school closures. In my mind, this was bizarre,” he wrote.
Atlas wrote that he appeared to be the only one on the team looking at facts before forming theories.
“Why was I the only one in the room with detailed knowledge of the literature? Why was I the only one considering the data on such an important topic with a critical eye? Were the others simply accepting bottom lines and conclusions, without any analytical evaluation? Weren’t they supposed to be expert medical scientists, too? I waited,” he wrote.
When the reaction arrived, it was hostile.
Has the country lost faith in Dr. Anthony Fauci?
Birx said Atlas was “out of the mainstream” and part of a “fringe” group supporting school reopening, Atlas wrote, according to Fox.
“Meanwhile she insisted that all experts agreed with her,” Atlas wrote. “I shook my head, thinking of some of the world-class epidemiologists who agreed with me—John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—and wondered if she or Fauci had ever read a single publication by them.”
Atlas said he presented detailed data about the spread of the virus through children. Children were unlikely to spread the disease to adults, he wrote, and were themselves in little danger of catching it. In Sweden, in particular, he wrote, there were no children’s deaths from COVID-19, though schools remained open and there were no mask mandates.
“The icing on the cake was the evidence that almost all coronavirus transmission to children comes from adults, not the other way around,” Atlas wrote.
Atlas wrote that Redfield indicated that in his mind, the mountain of data was inconclusive.
“I was disgusted at Redfield’s apparent lack of knowledge, shocked at his ignoring the scientific studies that had been published from around the world,” Atlas wrote. “I looked around the room, wondering if anyone else understood the glaring incompetence on display. Clearly, [Vice President Mike] Pence needed more input.”
In excerpts published Friday by the U.K. Daily Mail, Atlas explained the root of his opposition to policies that pushed lockdowns as the magic answer to stopping the virus.
“People were dying from the virus, and the lockdown policies were not preventing the deaths,” he wrote. “The simple logic of assuming you could stop the spread of, and some said eliminate, a highly contagious virus by shutting down society after millions had been infected was worse than nonsensical.
“The idea of stopping all businesses and closing schools while quarantining healthy young people at little risk from a disease in order to protect those aged seventy and over — that is simply irrational,” he wrote.
In the book, he wrote that former President Donald Trump was being given bad advice from his top advisers.
“They had let Birx and Fauci tell governors to prolong the lockdowns and school closures and continue the severe restrictions on businesses – strategies that failed to stop the elderly from dying, failed to stop the cases, and destroyed families and sacrificed children,” he wrote, according to the Daily Mail. “The closest advisers to the president, including the VP, seemed more concerned with politics, even though the task force was putting out the wrong advice, contrary to the president’s desire to reopen schools and businesses.”
In late October, as Fox reported, Atlas accused Birx of trying to “rewrite history” during congressional testimony in which she said Trump’s advisers failed to push mask-wearing, social distancing, and other steps that could have saved lives.
Birx claimed Atlas wanted to let the virus spread to build herd immunity, regardless of the cost, a claim he denies.
“I never advised the president, the Task Force, or anyone else while in Washington to allow the virus to spread,” Atlas told Fox.
“Dozens of my writings and interviews during my Washington service explicitly called for specific mitigations, including social distancing, extra hygiene, and masks when not able to socially distance, and ‘focused protection,’ a heightened protection of those at risk, to allow a safe opening and end the public health destruction from lockdowns.”
Veterans Day was this past Thursday in the United States. In our neighbor to the north, Canada, it was Remembrance Day — a day commemorating the military fallen of the U.K. Commonwealth.
In one Canadian city, however, vandals decided there were a different set of “heroes” on this most solemn of days: namely, those who had received the COVID-19 vaccine.
According CTV News in Calgary, a wall of honor in Cranbrook, British Columbia, was defaced by vandals early Thursday morning. Their message: “The real heroes are the vaccinated!”
Wall of Honour vandalized with COVID-19 graffiti on Remembrance Day in Cranbrook https://t.co/VzyKWQ0JZ9
“Thankfully, the Cranbrook RCMP, Cranbrook Fire Services and City of Cranbrook staff worked together and were able to quickly remove the writings before any of our war heroes and veterans were able to see what had been written,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Const. Katie Forgeron said, according to the Cranbook Daily Townsman.
The city released a statement on their Facebook page, saying “we are beyond disappointed by the disrespectful actions of those responsible for defacing such an important monument on such an important day for all Canadians.”
Do you support vaccine mandates?
“This act does not speak to the character and values of our citizens and our community,” the statement continued.
“We are grateful to the member of the community that alerted us of the vandalism early this morning. We are extremely proud of our staff, RCMP and Fire Services members who were able to quickly remove the graffiti and allow for the Remembrance Day ceremonies to go on, and remain focused on honoring all our veterans, past and present for their selfless sacrifice.”
The vandalism came amid anti-vaccination protests in two other cities in British Columbia on Remembrance Day, according to the CBC — Kamloops and Kelowna.
**Correction: They brought their own microphone.**
“We are saddened that anyone would feel it necessary to distract from the sacrifice of our veterans and their families with political agendas. Especially on Remembrance Day,” said Val McGregor, president of the British Columbia/Yukon Command of the Royal Canadian Legion, in a statement.
Distasteful though this may be, protests against vaccination are unpleasant distractions. Graffiti on a memorial for veterans — calling the vaccinated the “real heroes” — is a direct insult to those who have served and died for Canada.
And yet, most of the CBC’s coverage was dedicated to the anti-vaccination protests.
The defacement was addressed in the second paragraph. The rest was mostly given over to what happened in Kelowna and Kamloops. In the final three paragraphs, the Cranbrook defacement was briefly sketched out.
While we don’t know the motives of the Cranbrook vandals, we know the message: Forget service members who have fought and died, those who’ve gotten an inoculation are the ones we ought to be celebrating. This is the kind of vaccine craziness we’re seeing now. To at least one person, heroism apparently isn’t service, it’s just getting a shot.
Assuming this isn’t a hoax, it’s rebarbative stuff — and something that merited far more condemnation than just the desultory mention it got from the national media in Canada. Any distraction from Remembrance Day is problematic. However, the inability to tell the difference between protests and vandalism which states the vaccinated are more heroic than veterans speaks to a different sickness entirely.
An eight-year-old Florida girl is making the system bend to her will as she defies the Palm Beach County School Board’s mask mandate.
So far, she has been suspended 38 times for failing to do as the adults tell her.
“I was really shocked by it,” said Bailey Lashell, Fiona’s mother, according to WTEN-TV. “I couldn’t believe it was all over not complying with the mask mandate.”
Fiona made a brief appearance at a board meeting to tell her school board exactly what she thinks of their rules.
“Just because I get suspended for not wearing a mask isn’t going to change my mind. You can keep suspending me. I still have the right not to wear a mask,” she said.
“It is not fair that I’m getting punished because you guys, the school board, are not following the law,” she said. “I’m still going to stand up for what I believe in.”
“I hope you all go to jail for doing this to me,” Fiona said.
She added one final thought: “Your rules suck.”
School board speech by Florida 2nd grader who was suspended 36 times for not wearing a mask: Legend 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/SjEAhuQuP8
Her mother is chronicling her daughter’s disobedience on a website named StandupforFiona, explaining how her child has been threatened with flunking second grade.
Is this nothing more than an abuse of power by supposedly responsible adults?
“Since August 31st and her first punishment of a referral and silent lunch in an office hallway, Fiona has been steadfast in her unwavering decision to not back down to tyranny and lunacy, vowing to do everything she can for every child going thru these lawless mandates,” she wrote.
“Fiona is a strong-minded and fearless young girl who was ready to conquer the world at 7. Unfortunately, the blows just seem to not stop as she was recently told after completing every assignment her teacher will provide that she is not only failing 2nd grade but that there is no way she could catch up per her teacher,” she continued.
Neither mom nor daughter seems the type to take these things lying down.
“Thankfully we realized this was as tyrannical a move from her teacher and after asking for nearly 3 weeks we received Fiona’s progression in an application known as success maker. Not only is Fiona at or meeting grade-level requirements in Math, but rather doing math work at a 4th-grade level with almost 100% mastery in most of the items calculated,” she wrote, noting that she put all the documents on the site for all to see.
“Fiona has changed her priorities a bit and is on a mission to take back, not only her rights but every American child’s constitutional rights from the tyrant school board,” her mom explained on the site.
Although in July, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order that made mask-wearing optional, in Palm Beach County masks have been mandated, although the mandate ends Monday.
“You wear it for a long time, and you breathe in all those germs,” Fiona said, according to WTEN. “You set it down at lunch and put it back on your face and breathed that all in all day long.”
“I’m doing it for other kids,” said Fiona. “Not just myself.”
“We have no problem with somebody wearing a mask,” Lashell said. “We just feel that the kids in this situation — or I guess the parents — should have been given that choice.”
Group wants the justices to review the case alongside a similar challenge to Harvard
An advocacy group pushing the Supreme Court to overturn Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies on Thursday filed a petition that charges the University of North Carolina with anti-Asian bias.
The advocacy group, Students for Fair Admissions, asked the justices to fast-track a case against UNC that is still being processed in lower courts. The group is petitioning the Court to review the case alongside its landmark challenge to Harvard’s admissions practices, which it asked the justices to take up in February.
“If the Supreme Court decides, as it should, to reconsider racial preferences in college admissions, it should consider that question in the context of both a private school and a public school,” Students for Fair Admissions president Edward Blum said. “And it should resolve that question under both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.”
The request is a reminder that the Supreme Court is facing a wave of affirmative action cases. Separate attacks on affirmative action are unfolding across the country and will reach the justices in due course, even if the Court refuses to hear the Harvard and UNC disputes. For example, a challenge to race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Texas is pending before the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Both matters ask the Supreme Court to overturn a foundational affirmative action decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, and forbid consideration of race in college admissions. In Grutter, the Supreme Court said colleges may consider race as one factor among many on a case-by-case basis. Grutter involved an unsuccessful attack on affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan Law School.
Although it is a private institution, Harvard is subject to federal anti-discrimination laws because it accepts federal dollars each year. UNC, on the other hand, is a public school, so the plaintiffs can attack its program on statutory and constitutional grounds.
“This case and Harvard should be heard together,” Thursday’s petition reads. “The first question presented in both cases is the same: whether this Court should overrule Grutter and hold that institutions of higher education cannot use race as a factor in admissions. This Court can resolve that momentous question in either case. But if it decides to revisit Grutter, its analysis would be more complete if it considered both a private university (Harvard) and a public university (UNC) and both the Constitution (UNC) and Title VI (Harvard and UNC).”
UNC awards racial preferences to African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, but not to Asians. The university considers the first three groups underrepresented on campus as compared with North Carolina’s population. In contrast, Asians account for about 12 percent of UNC’s student body and 3 percent of the state population.
Students for Fair Admissions on the same day in 2014 filed lawsuits that accused Harvard and UNC of unlawful race discrimination. The UNC case lagged through the court system behind the Harvard dispute. A federal trial court ruled for Harvard in 2019, and a federal appeals court did the same a year later. In contrast, it took almost seven years for the UNC case to reach trial. U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs in Winston-Salem, N.C., ruled for the university on Oct. 18.
Grutter, decided in 2003, predicted that affirmative action would end 25 years in the future. In contrast, Biggs said race-conscious admissions are a permanent “institutional obligation to be broadly and equitably administered.”
“While no student can or should be admitted to this university, or any other, based solely on race, because race is so interwoven in every aspect of the lived experience of minority students, to ignore it, reduce its importance and measure it only by statistical models as [Students for Fair Admissions] has done, misses important context,” Biggs wrote.
Hearing the Harvard and UNC cases together would be consistent with Grutter. The justices decided to hear Grutter after a federal appeals court upheld Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policies. A separate legal challenge to Michigan’s undergraduate admissions criteria was not as far along, but the Court heard that lawsuit alongside Grutter to consider affirmative action at multiple levels of higher education.
The Court often fast-tracks closely linked cases. For example, the justices in October expedited review of two separate legal challenges to Texas’s abortion law, one from clinics in the state and another from the Biden administration.
The case is Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.
Secretary spoke in front of former employer’s buses at November event
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm committed a “flagrant” violation of ethics rules by using her official position to promote products of her former employer, electric bus manufacturer Proterra, according to a watchdog complaint obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust notified the Department of Energy’s inspector general on Friday of its concerns regarding a Nov. 1 event in which Granholm appeared at an official administration event with Proterra buses prominently displayed behind her. Granholm’s participation in the event, where more than $100 million worth of government grants were announced to support electric vehicle manufacturers, was a “conscious, flagrant affront to her ethics obligations,” the watchdog wrote.
“A full investigation is warranted to understand whether and to what extent Secretary Granholm has violated her legal and ethics obligations as a Cabinet official,” Protect the Public’s Trust director Michael Chamberlain wrote in the group’s letter to agency ethics officials.
The letter argues that it was unethical for Granholm to participate in an event in which grants that “directly and predictably benefit Proterra” were announced. During the event, where Granholm was flanked by Proterra buses and joined by Vice President Kamala Harris and several senators, she praised Proterra’s battery technology.
“We are doing it, going 400, 500, 600 miles on a charge,” Granholm said, referencing the technology in the Proterra-powered vehicles behind her. Granholm announced $127 million in government grants to fund electric vehicles, gesturing to her former company’s vehicles.
As energy secretary, Granholm is bound by the Biden administration’s ethics pledge, which prevents officials from “participating in particular matters … directly and substantially related to their former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.”
The Nov. 1 event followed several months of public scrutiny into the administration’s promotion of Proterra, which has come from President Joe Biden himself. Granholm had distanced herself from public events directly involving Proterra due to her large financial stake in the company, which she sold for a $1.6 million profit in May.
Proterra has made clear to investors that it is counting on significant government investment as part of its business plan. It told shareholders in August that it planned to “ride the wave” of the Biden administration’s proposed infrastructure plan, which was approved by Congress last week. The plan includes billions of dollars’ worth of investment in electric batteries, and Proterra boasts in company reports that it positioned itself to profit from the taxpayer funds.
Protect the Public’s Trust argues that any reasonable person with knowledge of Granholm’s history with Proterra would question whether the company received “preferential treatment” from the secretary. The government watchdog says Granholm should have felt obligated to consult with government ethics officials before participating in the event involving Proterra.
The watchdog also says Granholm should recuse herself from all government business involving grants that would be made available to Proterra.
The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) was photographed officiating Ivy Getty’s lavish wedding in San Francisco last week. The photo explains everything you need to know about the Democratic Party. Nearly every important aspect of the party and its voter base is represented.
For example:
1) Millionaires and billionaires
Getty, the great-granddaughter of oil baron J. Paul Getty, is presumed to have inherited several billion dollars after her father, John Gilbert Getty, died in 2020. Her grandfather, Gordon Getty, has helped finance the careers of prominent California Democrats such as Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, and Pelosi. Billionaires and their wealthy scions tend to be loyal backers of the Democratic Party, whose most generous supporters include George Soros, Walmart heiress Christy Walton, Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs, and the Pritzker family, heirs to the Hyatt hotel fortune. J.B. Pritzker was elected governor of Illinois in 2018, and the 2020 Democratic primary featured two billionaires, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.
2) Really old career politicians
The top three Democrats in the House of Representatives are octogenarians who have worked in politics almost their entire adult lives. Pelosi, 81, is a Democratic Party scion whose political career began in the early 1960s. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) is 82 and has worked in politics since 1962. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D., S.C.) is 81 and got his start in 1969. President Joe Biden, who will celebrate his 79th birthday later this month, is relatively young and inexperienced by comparison. He didn’t launch his political career until 1970.
3) White guys
The Democratic Party is dominated by college graduates, a demographic that comprises roughly a third of the adult population, and is disproportionately white. Getty’s random white dude husband wouldn’t have to try very hard to find success in the Democratic Party or its affiliate, the media industry, where mediocre white dudes continue to excel. In most cases, they do so while simultaneously denouncing the toxic influence of white men. Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Brian Stelter, Jeffrey Toobin, Andrew Cuomo, the Pod Save America bros, the bald weirdos at the Lincoln Project—the list goes on.
4) Celebrities
Mark Ronson opened for Earth, Wind & Fire, which played at the pre-wedding bash at The Palace of Fine Arts. Hollywood actress Anya-Taylor Joy, daughter of an investment banking tycoon, served as the maid of honor. Guests included pop star Olivia Rodrigo, assorted European royalty, and TikTok celebs, along with gender-bending performance artist Kiki Xtravaganza. As former president Barack Obama has gone out of his way to demonstrate, the ability to hang out with celebrities is one of the main reasons Democratic politicians run for higher office.
5) Anti-Semites
The bride’s dress was covered in shards of broken glass, which may or may not have been an homage to the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The bridal gown and the bridesmaid dresses were designed by British fashion icon John Galliano, who also attended the wedding as a guest. In 2011, he was convicted in a Paris court for making anti-Semitic remarks, which is illegal under French law. “I love Hitler,” Galliano reportedly told a group of Italian women at a café during Paris Fashion Week. “People like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers would all be f—ing gassed and f—ing dead.” In recent years, the Democratic Party has become a space foranti-Semites.
6) Selectively enforced rules
The wedding took place at San Francisco’s City Hall, which remains closed to the public due to COVID-19. Guests were asked to wear masks during the ceremony, but photos from the multi-day affair reveal that the California Department of Public Health’s recommendation regarding the use of masks indoors was largely ignored. Democratic politicians have routinely ignored such guidance, in some cases blatantly violating state and local mandates that might impede their ability to party with rich donors and celebrities.
There. That’s everything you need to know about the Democratic Party.
Labor Dept says inflation at highest point in 30 years
President Joe Biden in July dismissed concerns over inflation, saying it’s “highly unlikely” there will be “long-term inflation.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm echoed Biden’s claim this month, telling CNN that there is a “transitory nature to the inflation problem.”
While the White House downplays the threat of rising consumer prices, the Labor Department on Wednesday said the annual inflation rate has hit its highest point in 30 years, and economic observers warn there could be no end in sight for the country’s inflation surge.
If you want someone to wear a mask, the first step is to normally just ask. But some teachers have decided to go with the option of just taping masks to their students’ faces instead.
In October, there were several reports across the country of teachers taping face masks on their students’ faces.
The most recent happened in Beloit, Wisconsin.
At McNeel Intermediate School, Fox News reported that the police are investigating after a student claimed that a teacher duct-taped a mask to his face.
The 13-year-old boy said he pulled his mask down for a moment because he was having difficulty breathing. When the teacher told him to put the mask on he responded, “I can’t breathe. Give me a moment.”
“She got clearish yellowish tape, pulled up my mask up to my nose and wrapped the tape around my head five times. I’m thinking in my head. I’m like, this is crazy. Why is she doing this?” the student told WKOW.
The student’s parent said, “when he came home, he (had) a red mark on the back of his neck area. And it was a little bit red around his face.”
According to the police report that the Wisconsin State Journal reviewed, the teacher claimed it was all a joke.
“The teacher told police she did tape the front of the student’s mask to his face, but only as a joke after she said the student challenged her to do so and then he laughed about it. The teacher said she removed the tape, after which the student wore his mask properly.”
Should kids be wearing masks at school?
The student said that he did not feel like he could go back to school after the incident because he did not trust anyone.
“I’m very, very upset. I’m gonna keep pursuing this until my son gets justice and my family gets justice,” the parent said.
In response to this incident, a protest was then planned for Nov. 5 to take place in front of the School District of Beloit. The school district and the Beloit Police Department then decided to close the schools, “for the safety of the students and staff.“
This may sound like an outlandish, one-time kind of incident — some COVID-hypersensitive teacher just went off the rails. But there have been other reports of this happening in different states earlier in October and September.
Near Las Vegas, in Clark County School District, one fourth-grader forgot to put his mask back on after getting a drink of water. The substitute teacher, instead of simply instructing the student to put the mask back on, pulled him to the front of the class and taped the mask across the top of his face.
“I was furious, furious. I was scared for my son on what kind of long-term effect it is going to have on him socially, the fact that the entire class was laughing,” the student’s mother told KVVU-TV.
The student said that this was not the first time that had happened. He recalled up to five other times that this has happened to students in the class.
KKTV News in Colorado Springs reported a similar incident happening at Chinook Trail Middle School in October.
The school investigated the situation and found that, while teachers at Chinook Trail did not go to the extremes of the Clark County teacher in Nevada, teachers instructed students to tape masks to their faces.
“After examining all evidence, the district determined a policy/procedure was violated by the teaching team of 642. While we found that the teachers did NOT affix any student’s mask to their face, we did learn teachers directed students to affix their mask to their face with tape; and students believed they were required, by a teacher, to use tape to affix their mask to their face,” the school principal wrote in a letter to parents.
The fact that children are wearing masks in school is still questionable.
Children are obviously still in the developmental stage. They are not just learning information in school, but also learning how to socially interact and be with other people. Their emotions, social skills and cognitive skills all depend on having healthy interactions with peers, teachers and parents. Numerous experts and studies have shown this.
“Face-to-face interactions between a parent and child are the building blocks of the child’s emotional, social, and cognitive growth,” the Hanen Centre reported.
It’s really quite common sense.
“The right socially interactive environment will help children develop strong language skills, creativity, social intelligence, and confidence,” Tender Care Learning Center advocated.
For students to have that face-to-face interaction taken away from them in school can be detrimental. For teachers to enforce and humiliate students by taping masks to their faces could damage students even further. That kind of humiliation handed down from an authority figure, in front of peers, is going to cause problems.
As the mother of the Clark County School fourth-grader said, “It’s crazy. Corporal punishment in schools should not be happening.”
In 68.2 percent of the 500 biggest school districts in the United States, students are still required to wear masks in school, according to data from community tracker Burbio.
To those who just view U.S. media, this shouldn’t come as a shock. After all, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, has made it clear even vaccinated kids still need to mask up.
“We still have about 85 percent of our counties that are in high or substantial community transmission,” Walensky said during an appearance on “NBC Nightly News” on Thursday.
“And so, while I’m encouraged that numbers are coming down, I would say as our children are starting to get vaccinated, just a week into this program, to continue to scale up our vaccinations for these children and to not yet get complacent with our mitigation and prevention strategies that are keeping our children in school.”
“So that means kids should continue to wear masks even if they’re vaccinated?” Holt asked.
“And I would say masks are for now,” Walensky said, “but they are not forever.”
And yet, while the CDC continues to promise the masks aren’t forever but need to be worn for now, the United States is one of the few countries in the Western world that still forces its students to mask up in the classroom.
According to a Wednesday report in the U.K. Daily Mail, only seven countries in the West still recommend kids wear masks in school. Meanwhile, in at least 14 other countries, there is no masking requirement.Should mask mandates be banned?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
“Aside from the U.S., DailyMail.com could only identify six other Western countries where masking is broadly required or recommended in schools: Canada, France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain,” the paper reported.
Canada leaves it up to individual provinces, all 10 of which have some kind of masking requirement. France had lifted its masking requirement previously, but it’s being re-instituted for elementary school students as of Nov. 15.
The other four countries started the school year with a mask requirement in place on a national scale.
However, in most other countries, they’ve been — as we like to say in these parts — following the science.
The Daily Mail noted that studies have shown that while minors test positive just as frequently as adults, about half are asymptomatic (compared with roughly 10 percent of those over 18) and that only 0.1 percent of school-age children experience serious illness or die from COVID-19.
“And because of this low risk, most Western nations have opted to ditch the masks and have kids return to ‘normalcy’ in classrooms,” the Daily Mail reported.
“In the UK, for example, millions of children returned to schools in early September with face coverings not required.
“And while masks are a politically divisive issue in the U.S., members of both the Conservative and Labour Parties in the UK have stated that wearing masks prevent children from being able to communicate and socialize.”
How has that worked out for them? In the United States, children are being hospitalized at four times higher rates than in the United Kingdom.
The paper provided three potential answers for why the mask mandates aren’t in place in other Western countries.
The first postulate: higher vaccination rates. “For example, West Virginia and Idaho have yet to vaccinate 50 percent of their populations compared to more than 70 percent in all Nordic countries, according to data from the U.S. CDC and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control,” the Daily Mail reported.
However, this one doesn’t necessarily hold water; according to U.S. News and World Report, neither West Virginia nor Idaho has statewide school mask mandates.
Of the eight states that outright ban school mask mandates, only one had a fully vaccinated rate above 60 percent as of Friday, according to the Mayo Clinic — Florida. Meanwhile, of the states that require masks in school, only one had a fully vaccinated rate under 60 percent: Kentucky.
Therefore, issue number two is a bit more likely: In most Western countries, particularly in the European Union, there’s a higher degree of trust in authority figures. Paradoxically, this often leads to less regulation and freer societies. As Nick Gillespie — editor at large for libertarian publication Reason — pointed out in a Daily Beast piece back in 2016, research shows citizens in countries where authority figures are trusted want less intervention from authority figures.
Meanwhile, in the United States — where one can distinctly recall a recent gubernatorial candidate saying parents shouldn’t be deciding what the state teaches their children — one can see how this would lead to education and political officials who botched in-person learning policy and public health dictums being handed more control over it, despite having proved themselves to be unworthy of the task.
Finally, the Daily Mail noted children in other Western countries are tested more often.
“Currently the UK’s Department of Education requires all secondary school students, between ages 11 and 18, be tested at home twice a week using tests,” they reported. “Additionally, Norway is mass testing students to phase out quarantining students amid Covid outbreaks.”
All of these are valuable lessons — but then, the most valuable should be that we’re an outlier when it comes to school mask mandates and we shouldn’t be. There’s little evidence they serve a public health good, particularly among vaccinated children, and with other alternatives at hand. Psychologically, they’ve done far more harm than good.
Geez…I really think I’m going to puke. WTF is happening? [US Patriot]
Inclusion, acceptance, welcoming, understanding, equality and affirmation: These are the words we often hear in support of the LGBT community. But should all sexual preferences and orientations be accepted, welcomed and included?
What about attraction to minors?
Allyn Walker — an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in the department of sociology and criminal justice who identifies as “non-binary” — wrote the book, “A Long, Dark Shadow,” to look more deeply into “Minor-Attracted People,” address the stigma around them and discuss how they should be treated.
To be clear, though, Walker is not condoning child sexual abuse in the book.
“And I want to be extremely clear that child sexual abuse is never ever okay,” Walker said in an interview discussing the book with the Prostasia Foundation.
However, Walker did clarify that “having an attraction to minors as long as it isn’t acted on, doesn’t mean that the person who has those attractions is doing something wrong.”
“I think we have a tendency to want to categorize people with these attractions as evil or morally corrupt … From my perspective, there is no morality or immorality attached to attraction to anyone because no one can control who they’re attracted to at all.”
This immediately brings into question the meaning of morality. In the simplest terms, morality is understanding what is right and wrong. But more specifically, morality is intricately tied to natural laws and what is innate in rational human beings.
It is not natural to be attracted to a child. That is why pedophilia is treated as a disorder.
Is pedophilia a sexual orientation?
“Because it causes harm to others, it is considered a disorder,” medical information reference Merck Manuals noted.
Walker, however, wanted to distinguish between those who act on this impulse and those who simply have it but do not act on it.
“And then just as importantly, many MAPs never commit a sexual offense against a minor. And that difference is important because when we don’t understand that distinction, we make incorrect assumptions about the likelihood of offending amongst MAPs,” Walker said.
“This leads to people believing that just because someone is attracted to minors, they’re likely to commit an offense. And we start to criminalize a population just because of their attractions. Not only is this a problem in terms of criminalization, but it also serves to heighten stigma against MAPs in general, which is a huge problem.”
However, Walker is wrong in equating pedophilia with crime. Pedophilia, of course, can lead to sexual activity with children, but attraction, arousal and behavior all fall under the definitional umbrella of pedophilia.
“Doctors diagnose pedophilia when people feel greatly distressed or become less able to function well because of their attraction to children or when they have acted on their urges,” Merck Manuals explains.
Psychology Today also lines up with Merck Manuals, defining pedophilia as, “recurrent and intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children — generally age 13 years or younger — over a period of at least six months.”
Walker is attempting to make a distinction that flies in the face of medical information, trying to differentiate between attraction and action. But there is great danger in doing so.
If “MAPs” are just people who are attracted to children, but do not abuse them, why should they not be accepted in a society that is seeking to be inclusive and welcoming to all sexual orientations?
Following the same reasoning, this could happen with defining and diagnosing pedophilia. And there is a push to view pedophilia as a sexual orientation.
Toronto psychiatrist Dr. James Cantor has tweeted in the past, “Speaking as a gay men, I believe we SHOULD include the P. To do otherwise is to betray the principles that give us our rights.”
Speaking as a gay men, I believe we SHOULD include the P. To do otherwise is to betray the principles that give us our rights.
Cantor’s reasoning is correct. If our society keeps operating on the principles that give LGBT members the rights that they have, the same has to extend to pedophiles. If we follow that train of thought, attraction to children is just their sexual orientation.
There are even sites dedicated to pedophiles who are celibate, non-offenders. “Virtuous Pedophiles” is a social support group for pedophiles that promise to live celibate, non-offending lives.
The problem is that pedophilia is dangerous to children. Even if a person who is attracted to minors is determined to not act upon the impulse, having that attraction takes them one step closer to the potential of becoming an abuser.
So if pedophilia is accepted as just another sexual orientation and not treated as a disorder, that would also widen the door to “acceptable” abuse of children. If a pedophile has sexual interactions with a child, and the minor claims that they were abused, then the pedophile could hide behind their accepted, no longer termed as a disorder, sexual attraction.
As shocking as it may seem to talk about adding pedophilia to the spectrum of sexual orientations, it should be no surprise. By throwing out the conception that morality must align with what is natural, our society just opened Pandora’s box. This is just the fallout that we have to deal with now.
Is natural or vaccinated immunity better for fighting COVID? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has offered conflicting evidence on this, which is causing more questions about the efficacy of the vaccine.
Last month, the CDC published a new study that seemed to firmly indicate that immunity from the vaccine is better than natural immunity.
“Unvaccinated people who had survived a previous COVID-19 infection were more than five times more likely to be reinfected with the virus compared to those who were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines,” CBS News reported on the CDC findings.
But there is new evidence that seems to debunk this claim from the CDC.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from a lawyer, the CDC admitted that they have not had any documented cases of an unvaccinated individual with natural immunity spreading the virus.
This certainly weakens the CDC’s previous argument and study results that the vaccine is better than natural immunity.
Not only has the CDC argued strongly for the vaccines, but it has even urged those who have already been infected and recovered to still get the vaccine.
“All eligible persons should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible, including unvaccinated persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2,” their study at the end of October outlined.
These decrees from the CDC fall perfectly in line with the left’s politics around the vaccine. As many cities and President Biden are trying to push through vaccine mandates, it’s awfully convenient to have the CDC backing them.
Should you get the vaccine if you already had COVID?
But the CDC is not the only place that is collecting data and running studies on COVID.
Recently an Israeli study that has been collecting data from March 1, 2020, to August 14, 2021, published data to show that natural immunity is actually stronger than the immunity gained from the Pfizer vaccine.
“SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold … increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected,” the study concluded.
The data from this study showed the exact opposite of the CDC’s claims. While the CDC said that unvaccinated people with natural immunity were five times more likely to be reinfected, the Israeli study found that vaccinated people had “a 5.96-fold … increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold … increased risk for symptomatic disease.”
Vaccinated individuals “were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected,” the study said.
The Israeli study was several times larger than the CDC’s study that concluded that vaccine immunity was superior.
This Israeli study, coupled with the new admission from the CDC that there have been no recorded cases of those with natural immunity spreading the virus, seems to contradict the CDC’s constant messaging that everyone needs to get vaccinated.
The arguments around vaccines have been so politically charged that it’s natural to begin asking whether the CDC is really as apolitical as it claims.
So far, the CDC has been on the side of those who are calling for vaccine mandates, promoting the vaccine and even incentivizing it.
The CDC has even been campaigning for “vaccine confidence.”
“Strong confidence in COVID-19 vaccines within communities leads to more adults, adolescents, and children getting vaccinated ― which leads to fewer COVID-19 illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths,” the CDC said.
But nearly everything regarding the vaccine now is politically charged. It’s no secret that the greatest battle over the vaccine is political, not scientific. The scientific facts seem to merely be tools in the broader political roil.
Last year, when the vaccine was still being developed, Brookings predicted this politicization.
“And now, as with all aspects of COVID-19, politics has crept into the vaccine conversation in ways that threaten to derail public confidence,” Brookings noted on Oct. 30, 2020.
But it’s not just the politicization that is raising questions.
Those who are hesitant about the vaccine may have good reason after now seeing the CDC double back on itself and conflict with other studies about the vaccine immunity.
NCSBA’s separation follows the South Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri School Board Associations’ cutting ties from the NSBA after its Sept. 29 letter to the White House comparing parents to domestic terrorists.
Union County Public Schools Board Chair Melissa Merrell was on her way to an NCSBA convention when she received an alert from the NCSBA announcing its separation.
“It was a pleasant surprise,” Merrell told The Epoch Times. “I definitely did not see this coming. I’ve had a couple of board members who had been requesting and sending emails to the NCSBA asking if it were going to withdraw our membership from the NSBA, and they (the NSBA) had asked for our feedback, and then, on the way to the convention, we saw this message.”
Merrell said nothing was mentioned at the convention about the NCSBA’s departure from the national board.
According to Parents Defending Education (PDE), an organization that investigates indoctrination in schools, as of Nov. 9, 26 states have distanced themselves from the NSBA after the letter.
The NSBA, which represents more than 90,000 school board members and 14,000 public school districts in the United States, had written a letter to President Joe Biden asking that the parents who have protested COVID-19 restrictions and the teaching of critical race theory in public schools be regarded as domestic terrorists that should be investigated by agencies such as the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI.
This led to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Oct. 4 memorandum to the FBI directing the agency to work with U.S. attorneys to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
“The September 29 letter from NSBA to President Biden, in both its inflammatory language and the request for federal agencies to intervene in our communities, was just one in a series of lapses in governance,” said NCSBA President Amy Churchill in a press release. “NCSBA shares its members’ concerns about safety at school board meetings. As a proponent of local control, NCSBA believes that local law enforcement is in the best position to respond to those concerns and seek outside assistance if necessary.”
On Oct. 22, the NSBA issued an apology, stating that “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
State Response
The PDE requested statements from 47 states affiliated with the NSBA, and reported that the Alabama Association of School Boards (AASB) said it “has withheld its dues to join the NSBA for the current membership year, though AASB’s bylaws require it to be an NSBA member.”
According to the PDE, the AASB said it would be voting in December on changes to its bylaws that would give the AASB board of directors authority to determine its membership with the NSBA.
The PDE said it received no response from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees (MSCA), prompting the PDE to file a public record request for emails “to get a sense of their position.”
“It turns out that Glenn Koocher, executive director of the MSCA, was so happy about the letter that he put it in an email to NSBA CEO Chip Slaven,” the PDE said.
“We in MASC are all very happy that the NSBA has reached out to the FBI and, based on local coverage, has been identified as a key agent for generating federal support,” Koocher said in the email.
Thirty-six Republican state representatives asked that the South Carolina School Boards Association (SCSBA) end its NSBA membership.
“NSBA has labeled parents as domestic terrorists, with no evidence to justify that term,” the House Republicans wrote in a letter to the SCSBA executive director. “The reality is that parents and stakeholders are beyond frustrated being ignored and left out of decisions with their child. The NSBA is detached from reality and fails to recognize that Americans are angered by what is happening in our classrooms.”
SCSBA Executive Director Scott Price told The Epoch Times that the decision to separate from the NSBA was “aimed at protecting our membership from fallout from NSBA’s September 29 letter.”
“Any pressure that SCSBA was under stemmed primarily from our desire to keep this from impacting our members (local school boards),” Price said.
The NSBA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
GQ Pan and Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.
President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better spending plan would raise taxes on middle-class Americans, according to a study released Thursday, despite the president’s pledge that taxes would only increase for Americans earning $400,000 or more per year.
The Tax Policy Center study instead revealed a significant percentage of middle-income households would pay increased taxes in 2022 based on the current legislation.
“Taking into account all major tax provisions, roughly 20 percent to 30 percent of middle-income households would pay more in taxes in 2022,” the study found.
The estimated tax increases would be small, but would clearly exist.
“Among those with a tax increase, low- and middle-income households would pay an additional $100 or less on average. Those making $200,000-$500,000 would pay an average of about $230 more,” the research revealed.
More concerning would be tax changes for 2023.
“They would shrink the average 2023 tax cuts for low-income households, raise taxes slightly for moderate-income households, and increase taxes significantly for the highest-income households,” the study noted.
Biden has previously noted American families making under $400,000 per year would not “see a penny” in their taxes go up.
“Best of all, the cost of these bills, in terms of adding to the deficit, is zero. Zero. Zero. And I made a commitment when I wrote these when I was running: No one making under $400,000 a year will see a penny in their taxes go up,” Biden said during an Oct. 5 speech in Michigan.
The state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap has also been promoted as part of the spending plan. The Tax Policy Center’s research found that the changes would provide more help for the wealthy than for middle-income households.
“It would reduce their 2021 taxes by an average of only $20. Even those making between $175,000 and $250,000 would get a tax cut of just over $400 or about 0.2 percent of after-tax income. By contrast, the higher SALT cap would boost after-tax incomes by 1.2 percent for those making between about $370,000 and $870,000 (the 95th to 99th percentile),” the study stated.
Republicans have widely opposed the bill as “reckless” spending. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has also noted concerns with the bill’s spending.
The earlier version of Biden’s Build Back Better bill included a price tag of $3.5 trillion. Democrats were unable to move forward to pass the legislation in the Senate, needing a supermajority of 60 votes to avoid a filibuster.
Further negotiations led through concerns by Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have led to a revised version now sitting at $1.75 trillion.
Democrats hope to use a reconciliation process to move forward in the Senate and pass the bill through a simple majority. The current Senate includes a 50–50 tie, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaking vote.
Every Democratic senator will be needed to pass the legislation, making Manchin a vital part of moving forward with the new bill.
Writing for RealClearPolitics, Professor Andrew E. Busch of Claremont McKenna College finds that “one reason for Americans’ increasing political discomfort—the feeling that politics has become a blood sport in which traditional protections and safety nets are no longer present—is that the nonpartisan insulation protecting the rule of law and consent of the governed has frayed. There is a broad pattern of offices that require political neutrality being converted into offices that are genuinely partisan in their operation.”
What, I wonder, was his first clue?
Understandably, Busch concentrates on the most recent examples of this creeping partisanship in places that are supposed to be non-partisan, since the Biden administration represents a quantum leap in the politicization of everything, but especially of the law.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, he writes, “has already used the Justice Department to advance his own party’s version of the stolen-election story by suing to stop state legislative efforts to enhance ballot security, then threatening to sic the FBI on parents who complain to their local school boards about left-wing political indoctrination in the classroom.”
By contrast, Busch praises the non-partisan spirit of former Attorney General William Barr for resigning rather than supporting President Trump’s demand for a thorough investigation of election irregularities.
But then he can’t help noticing the concerted legal efforts by Democratic Attorneys General in swing states last year to change voting laws in order to create those irregularities—and, with them, the opportunities for cheating.
You can see why Busch wants to be even-handed and pretend that the partisan takeover of supposedly non-partisan institutions is coming from both sides, but he can’t quite obscure the fact that the overwhelmingly majority of these efforts have been made—and successfully made, thanks to the compliant media—on behalf of Democrats.
There is nothing like a Republican equivalent, for example, of the partisan takeover of the FBI under James Comey. “The course of the Russia investigation,” writes Busch, “complete with the obvious biases of Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, implied that the bureau had picked sides.”
Implied? Can there be any doubt about which side these and others in the bureau were on? Or which side Robert Mueller and his team were on? If there were any doubt about it, it must have been dispelled by the recent revelations, and indictments, coming out of the John Durham investigation.
Busch might also have mentioned the disparity in federal law-enforcement’s treatment of the Capitol rioters of Jan. 6 as constituting an “insurrection” and its almost complete lack of interest in the hundreds of riots, the billions of dollars in property damage and the many deaths that took place around the country last summer.
You don’t have to be particularly good at spotting “implied” biases to tell that the difference between the two was that the first was in support of Donald Trump, the others opposed to him. And, violently, opposed to the police. But why would we expect the federal police, ostensibly there to uphold the rule of law, to care about that?
Also, as I pointed out last summer in these pages, General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the nation’s armed forces, traditionally our number one non-partisan institution, along with the judiciary, testified before Congress on behalf of the Democratic talking point by asserting on the basis of zero evidence that the Capitol riot was motivated by “white rage.”
Milley is also charged with weeding out of the services those identified by the extreme left as members of the “extremist right.”
But the perspicacious could have picked up hints of the erosion of the “nonpartisan insulation” of key institutions long before 2016.
The politicization of the judiciary, I would argue, began at least as far back as 1987 when a certain Joseph R. Biden, newly appointed chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, put the kibosh on President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court for transparently political reasons.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who once said of his fellow judges that “we don’t work as Democrats or Republicans,” has gone to heroic lengths to keep up the pretense of non-partisanship in the judiciary, but then he is also the man who, apparently without irony, once called the U.S. Senate “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
The politicization of the armed services began even earlier. As the late Colin Powell cheerfully put it in 2007, presumably with reference to his own military career, which started in the Vietnam era, “Anybody who becomes a senior officer had better have some political instincts or you’re going to get ground up. We are a political nation. It is not a dirty word.”
What he meant to say, perhaps, was that it is only a dirty word when applied to constitutionally non-political institutions. Like the military.
I understand that he was talking about the internal politics that are inevitable in any large organization, but in the military, whose most senior officers are appointed by civilian (and political) authority, those politics are always bound up with the other kind.
Under President George W. Bush we learned, at least if we were paying attention, of the politicization of the CIA, which regularly briefed the media (anonymously, of course) against their ostensible commander-in-chief.
Under President Barack Obama we learned, even if we weren’t paying much attention, of the politicization of the Department of Justice and the IRS.
And, as everyone now knows, under President Donald Trump we learned of the politicization not only of the FBI and (again) the Justice Department but also of the State Department. All three, while ostensibly serving the President, were actually undermining him.
It should not be necessary to point out that all of these encroachments of the political onto officially non-political territory have been in one direction and one direction only—leftwards. It’s as if there were some law of political inertia analogous to Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”
Maybe this is what the progressives mean by saying that they are “on the right side of history,” If so, it means that the rest of us, who still treasure what we think is our right to be non-political, must be on the wrong side of history.
A public school district in Northern California announced Wednesday it will not be enforcing the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for K–12 schools.
In a 5–0 vote, the governing board of the Calaveras Unified School District (CUSD) decided at a Tuesday meeting to not “enforce, support, or comply” with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mandate, which would require students at all public, public charter, and private schools to receive COVID-19 vaccines following full federal approval of the shots for their grade span.
The school board said in a message to the school community that the decision, which came during the meeting, applies to both students and employees, adding that it will further discuss and potentially make a decision on mask mandates and testing protocols at its next meeting scheduled for Nov. 23.
In an earlier statement, the CUSD said its board was aware of the possible repercussions the district may face as a result of rejecting the state mandate, including “possible liability exposure, funding loss, and other formal actions that can be taken against the district.”
“[Board members] understand there are strong perspectives and opinions on both sides of the issue,” the statement read. “They understand the Superintendent’s recommendation for mandate compliance based on these potential consequences, but they feel strong in their individual positions on this topic.”
CUSD serves about 5,300 students and includes five elementary schools, one middle school, and Calaveras County’s only two public high schools.
California became the first state in the nation to announce COVID-19 vaccine requirements for K–12 schools in October, when the pediatric vaccines were still pending a recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Newsom said the mandate would take effect only when the vaccines receive full approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in children.
“The state already requires that students are vaccinated against viruses that cause measles, mumps, and rubella,” Newsom said when he announced the mandate. “There’s no reason why we wouldn’t do the same for COVID-19.”
“Vaccines work. It’s why California leads the country in preventing school closures and has the lowest case rates,” said the Democratic governor, who survived his recall election fueled by his pandemic response. “We encourage other states to follow our lead to keep our kids safe and prevent the spread of COVID-19.”
Despite mask mandates and other preventive measures the Newsom administration put in place, California’ COVID-19 infection rate has recently stopped dropping and started ticking up. As of Nov. 10, California remains one of the CDC’s red “high” level of virus transmission states, compared to yellow “moderate” level in Florida, where there is no state-issued mask or vaccination mandate.
Despite student outrage, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California (USC) is refusing to take down a pro-police flag from his office.
James Moore, who directs the USC’s transportation engineering program, has been displaying a “Thin Blue Line” flag outside of his office door since August when the fall semester began, but has faced a complaint only recently from students who took issue with the flag’s alleged “racist origin,” according to student newspaper Daily Trojan.
“This is an inappropriate and unnecessary symbol to have on an office door where USC is, within the last year or two, trying to have a much broader diversity initiative and to be inclusive, especially in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) area,” one USC graduate student told the newspaper. The student said that he discovered the flag in October and reported the matter to the university’s office of equity and diversity.
Moore explained that he wants to add some diversity of thought to the USC campus by exposing students to a point of view they’re not usually exposed to.
“We are in an environment where there is a lot of homogenization of ideas, and diversity should include diversity of ideas,” the professor said in an interview with education news site The College Fix. “We are charging people very good money to teach them to think. I am just trying to deliver.”
The USC said Moore’s action falls within his freedom of expression and there is no rule that prevents him from hanging such a flag on the door of his own office.
“The university does not have a policy that limits the display of materials in spaces like this, though we are looking at whether it is needed,” a statement provided to the Daily Trojan reads.
This is not the first time Moore’s unpopular viewpoints upset the progressive members of the USC community. In September 2018, Moore responded to a campus-wide invitation to an event focused on believing survivors of alleged sexual assault, saying that “accusers sometimes lie.” Moore’s comment triggered a series of angry responses, including a student-led protest calling for his resignation.
“If some of them are annoyed by ideas that are opposed to theirs, well that’s just preparation for adult life,” Moore told Daily Trojan at that time regarding criticism of his remark.
Moore also expressed disagreement with USC’s policy proposals centered on racial equity in the wake of unrest sparked by George Floyd’s death, such as that faculty members undergo training to address their “unconscious biases.” He told USC President Carol Folt in a letter that the university has no business in correcting his thoughts and decision making.
“My mental and moral development are my own ongoing responsibility. The market for good ideas and sound thinking provides me with ample incentive to deliver both if I can,” Moore wrote in the June 2020 letter. “If I elect to try and improve my decisions via an assessment and awareness of my unconscious biases, this is my own affair, my own duty. I am not inclined to surrender to anyone my own role in deciding how I will decide.”
Creating more government jobs is an expense (AKA subsidy), not a benefit. Do less with more. [US Patriot]
WASHINGTON—The U.S. infrastructure bill President Joe Biden is expected to sign soon will boost investments in the U.S. Department of Energy by the most since its founding in 1977 and create about 1,000 jobs in the agency, officials said on Wednesday.
The bipartisan bill contains more than $62 billion in incentives for emerging and traditional technologies for the department.
Biden and his fellow Democrats in Congress are also seeking to pass a bigger reconciliation bill that has even more incentives for the energy transition, but which has been delayed by disagreements within the party.
“Over the coming days, weeks, months, we are going to have to step up,” Tarak Shah, the DOE chief of staff told reporters about the programs included in the bipartisan bill.
“We anticipate somewhere around 1,000 new folks coming on board to help us spend this money efficiently and effectively for the American people.” The DOE has about 13,000 federal employees and tens of thousands more at its 17 national labs.
For the development of new technologies, the bipartisan bill includes more than $7 billion in incentives for producing, sourcing, and recycling minerals and materials for batteries to store renewable power.
It also has $21.5 billion for clean energy demonstration plants for development of hydrogen gas, sucking carbon emissions out of the air and from industrial plants, and for advanced nuclear power plants.
Hydrogen can be used in fuel cell vehicles, mixed with natural gas, or in making synthetic fuels for ships, but costs about four times as much to generate from wind and solar power as from fossil fuels.
On helping the existing U.S. energy system function better, the bill also has $11 billion in grants for states, tribes and utilities to enhance the resilience of the electric grid from extreme weather and cyber attacks.
And it creates a $6 billion nuclear power credit program at the department to save existing reactors, some of which have been struggling to compete with plants that burn plentiful natural gas and with falling costs for renewable power.
The nuclear power credit program will be one of the fastest programs to develop, with a deadline of 180 days to start running. Reactor owners will have to submit applications showing that their plants are under economic duress before receiving any subsidies.
An official said nuclear power was essential for meeting Biden’s climate goals, including decarbonizing the electric grid by 2035.
NSBA leaders even altered the letter’s text to satisfy the Biden White House
Newly released internal emails reveal that the National School Boards Association coordinated with the White House and the Department of Justice before sending President Biden the notorious letter that compared concerned parents to domestic terrorists. Emails provided to Fox News show that NSBA had coordinated with the White House for weeks beforehand.
Viola Garcia, the NSBA president whom the Department of Education later named to a federal board, sent a memo to NSBA members on Oct. 11 (but dated Oct. 12), providing a timeline of the NSBA’s interaction with the White House ahead of the letter to Biden, which the NSBA sent on Sept. 29.
Five days later, on Oct. 4, the DOJ issued a memo directing law enforcement to investigate threats to school boards. On Oct. 22, the NSBA issued an apology for the letter.
“Concern over the current climate for school board members is also a top priority as disruptions at school board meetings grow and members face growing threats,” Garcia wrote at the time, according to the memo obtained by Parents Defending Education through a Freedom of Information Act request. “NSBA has been actively engaged with the White House, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, Surgeon General, and other federal agencies on pandemic related issues.”
(Oregon School Boards Association)
“In the September 14, 2021 meeting of the [NSBA Organization of State Association Executive Directors] liaison group, they were informed there had been a meeting with White House staff that morning and that NSBA was preparing to send a letter to the President. Subsequently, on September 17, 2021, the interim Executive Director emailed notice to the state association executive directors that indicated a letter requesting federal assistance would be sent.”
“In response to the letter sent by NSBA, on October 4, 2021 the Attorney General announced in a memorandum widely shared throughout the U.S. Department of Justice that he was ordering all U.S. Attorney Offices and local FBI offices to reach out to local and state law enforcement officials to coordinate efforts on this problem within 30 days of the memorandum,” Garcia also noted.
This statement appears to contradict Attorney General Merrick Garland’s testimony to Congress on Oct. 27. When Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked Garland if he had “second thoughts” following NSBA’s apology for the letter, he said that the DOJ memorandum did not rely upon the letter.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., calls out the attorney general for his memo directing the FBI to look into reports of threats against school board members and has harsh words for teachers union leader Randi Weingarten.
“The letter that was subsequently sent does not change the association’s concern of violence or threats of violence. It alters some of the language in the letter … that we did not rely on and is not contained in my own memorandum,” Garland said.
Neither Garland nor the DOJ responded to Fox News’ request for comment by press time.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appears before the House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Oct. 21. (Michael Reynolds/Pool via REUTERS)
Another email exclusively sent to Fox News revealed that NSBA had discussed the issues with the White House “for weeks” before sending the letter. Garcia and Chip Slaven, an NSBA executive, altered the text of the letter to satisfy the curiosity of White House staff.
“In talks over the last several weeks with White House staff, they requested additional information on some of the specific threats, so the letter also details many of the incidents that have been occurring,” Slaven wrote in a September 29, 2021, email to the NSBA board of directors.
Parents have spoken up at school board meetings around the country, protesting harsh COVID-19 mitigation measures like school closures, and raising their voices against transgender policies, critical race theory, and other issues. The letter warned that these parents pose a violent threat to school boards, even going so far as comparing them to domestic terrorists.
The fallout from the letter has proven particularly severe. Ohio’s, Wisconsin‘s, and the school boards of nine other states have reportedly terminated their relationships with NSBA, and parent’s education rights organizations have grown in prominence since the letter. The letter may have also emboldened concerned parents who supported Republican Glenn Youngkin, who won the Virginia governor’s race earlier this month.
Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin gestures during a [Loudoun Parents Matter Rally] campaign event in Leesburg, Virginia, on Nov. 1, 2021. (REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz)
A Swiss billionaire is bankrolling a leading dark money group lobbying for the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan and green energy jobs initiatives, according to corporation and lobbying records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Climate Power, one of the main groups pushing for the White House’s climate agenda, has billed itself as a traditional advocacy organization, with an advisory board featuring John Podesta, Stacey Abrams, and former senator Harry Reid. But the group doesn’t actually exist independently—it is owned and operates as a front group under the Fund for a Better Future, a Democratic dark money organization that has received the majority of its funding from Swiss health care mogul Hansjorg Wyss’s foundation since 2016, according to corporation records.
Wyss has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Fund for a Better Future and other progressive dark money groups and has been the subject of controversy since his opaque web of donations was detailed by the New York Times last spring. The connection between the Wyss-funded Fund for a Better Future and Climate Power has not been reported until now.
The link raises questions about foreign influence on the climate debate and the prominence of dark money groups in the Biden administration’s public advocacy campaign for the Build Back Better legislation. While foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to federal campaigns, lawmakers and watchdogs have raised concerns about foreign donations to nonprofit political advocacy organizations—so-called dark money groups—which could be used as a legal loophole to influence elections.
Americans for Public Trust, a conservative watchdog group, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in May, calling for an investigation into whether some of Wyss’s donations amount to “campaign contributions from a foreign national, running afoul of federal law.”
The group told the Free Beacon that Wyss’s contributions to groups leading the climate legislation lobbying add to concerns about his political funding.
“Hansjörg Wyss has been indirectly funding American politics for years, so the news that his foreign money is tied up in this latest dark money campaign to pass President Biden’s legislative agenda comes as no surprise,” Americans for Public Trust executive director Caitlin Sutherland told the Free Beacon. “Americans for Public Trust has previously filed an FEC complaint against Mr. Wyss calling for an investigation into his political spending, and we look forward to the commission taking action.”
Wyss, a Swiss citizen born in Bern who has declined to clarify his citizenship status in the United States, has become one of the most prolific donors to progressive advocacy groups in recent years. His foundations, the Berger Action Fund and the Wyss Foundation, have poured over $200 million into organizations supporting Democratic policies since 2016, the New York Timesreported in May.
Since last summer, Climate Power has emerged as one of the most active lobbying arms of the Democratic Party’s climate agenda. The group rolled out a $10 million ad blitz in June, aimed at pushing lawmakers to support the Biden administration’s American Jobs Plan and Build Back Better legislation.
Climate Power also hired a lobbying firm, Pioneer Public Affairs, last February to press lawmakers in the House and Senate on “climate provisions of the American Rescue Plan (H.R.1319) and the American Jobs Plan,” according to lobbying disclosure records.
Climate Power is not an independent entity, according to records reviewed by the Free Beacon. The group operates under the ownership of the Fund for a Better Future, according to business records filed in Sacramento, where the fund is based.
The Fund for a Better Future received $44,468,000 from Wyss’s foundations between 2017 and 2020, according to the latest available financial disclosure records. Wyss’s contributions to the Fund for a Better Future make up “the majority of its funding” during this time, the Times reported in May.
Between 2017 and 2018, Wyss’s financial support accounted for 80 percent of the Fund for a Better Future’s total receipts, according to financial disclosure records.
According to Climate Power’s website, the group was founded “by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, League of Conservation Voters, and Sierra Club” and “integrates hard-hitting research, polling, state and national earned media, digital and paid media to influence the national conversation, embolden leaders to take immediate, bold climate action, and expose climate deniers and their oil and gas lobby allies.”
Climate Power launched another front group in August called the “Great American Build” to promote the Biden administration’s Build Back Better agenda. The Great American Build’s website describes it as a “public awareness campaign launched by Climate Power, League of Conservation Voters and their allies to build the momentum necessary to create millions of good clean energy jobs and give our economy the boost it needs.”
Climate Power did not respond to a request for comment. The Wyss Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this year, many California citizens moved to oust Governor Gavin Newsom via recall petition and election. This ultimately ended up falling shy, however, as Newsom easily avoided the recall.
However, now another top progressive leader is on the hot seat in the Golden State. And those seeking to get rid of him already have enough signatures on the recall petition.
If successful, his career could hit a serious roadblock.
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is a progressive prosecutor, and thousands have been trying to remove him from office for much of 2021.
In fact, this is the second recall effort against him: the first didn’t manage to round up enough signatures, but the second is moving along at a much faster pace.
Now, with enough signatures, Boudin will have to face a recall election next year. And though Newsom didn’t fall in his election, it’s very possible that Boudin will have a tougher time hanging onto his spot.
Director of Elections John Arntz announced that the petition to remove Boudin “contains a sufficient number of valid signatures.”
This means the embattled DA will be forced to defend himself come 2022.
From Fox News:
As the first petition to recall Boudin failed to garner enough signatures to trigger a special election, news of a second recall effort against Boudin came in August.
Last month, prior to the certification of the petition, NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit reported ‘more than 83,000 signatures’ had already been submitted to force Boudin into a special election during the statewide primary election on June 7, 2022.
The Department reviewed 4,174 signatures, selected at random from the total 83,484 signatures collected.
This review showed that the petition had more than the minimum of 51,325 valid signatures, so it’s officially successful. This kicks off the second phase, which is a recall election next June.
Boudin has responded with a “Friends of Chesa” group that fights back against the recall.
They’re saying petitioners spent $1.4 million and used “shady tactics” to get the recall on the ballot. Spokesperson Julie Edwards said they’re “confident San Francisco voters will reject this Republican-funded and endorsed effort.”
But Boudin has been under fire for a while, primarily for “his lack of commitment to prosecuting crimes.”
If he falls in the recall election, San Francisco Mayor London Breed will have to find a temporary replacement, until the city elects a new District Attorney in November.
Even if Boudin avoids the recall as Newsom did, this petition is more proof that many California residents aren’t happy with their leadership. And it’s obvious that thousands are pushing back.
This could hint at a seismic shift in the traditionally Democrat-dominated state in the future.
And if that happens, things could look very different come 2024, when the next presidential election begins.
Key Takeaways:
San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin will face a recall election in June 2022.
The recall petition is officially successful, having garnered enough valid signatures (a total of 83,484 were collected).
Boudin has been criticized for not committing to his prosecution of crimes.
For Transgender in a nutshell, see Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” and look for Eric Idle’s “Stan (AKA Loretta)” character. [US Patriot]
Legendary actor John Cleese has cancelled a talk he was scheduled to give at Cambridge University due to what he called “woke rules” that resulted in another speaker getting blacklisted for doing an impression of Adolf Hitler.
Deadline reported that Cleese’s decision came a week after Cambridge University paper Varsity reported that Union speaker Andrew Graham-Dixon used a German accent to impersonate Hitler, using racial slurs in a videotaped meeting. Graham-Dixon said the act “was meant to be satirical and was not an endorsement of Hitler or anti-Semitism, claiming he had intended to ‘underline the utterly evil nature of Hitler and his regime,’” Deadline reported.
As the outlet noted, Cleese “famously impersonated Hitler while in character as Basil Fawlty in the 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers.”
Cleese confirmed in a tweet that he had canceled his speech at Cambridge.
“I was looking forward to talking to students at the Cambridge Union this Friday, but I hear that someone there has been blacklisted for doing an impersonation of Hitler,” Cleese wrote. “I regret that I did the same on a Monty Python show, so I am blacklisting myself before someone else does.”
“I apologise to anyone at Cambridge who was hoping to talk with me, but perhaps some of you can find a venue where woke rules do not apply,” Cleese added.
Cleese had planned to give the talk with the Channel 4 crew behind his new documentary series “Cancel Me” in attendance. The new series involves Cleese interviewing victims of cancel culture.
Cleese has been an outspoken opponent of cancel culture and those who have apologized when woke mobs came for them. In April, Cleese mocked Hank Azaria for apologizing over his portrayal of Apu on the Simpsons.
“Not wishing to be left behind by Hank Azaria, I would like to apologise on behalf on (sic) Monty Python for all the many sketches we did making fun of white English people,” Cleese tweeted. “We’re sorry for any distress we may have caused.”
The tweet came after Azaria said he left the role of Apu after some people told him they were offended by the character.
“I was speaking at my son’s school, I was talking to the Indian kids there because I wanted to get their input,” Azaria said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “A 17-year-old … he’s never even seen TheSimpsons but knows what Apu means. It’s practically a slur at this point. All he knows is that is how his people are thought of and represented to many people in this country.”
“I really do apologize,” Azaria added. “It’s important. I apologize for my part in creating that and participating in that. Part of me feels like I need to go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize. And sometimes I do.”
In July of last year, Cleese took on cancel culture directly, saying it “misunderstands the main purposes of life, which is to have fun.”
Parents who never imagined running for office battled to win seats on local school boards last week; they won some, but lost many. Their fiercest opponents were the teachers unions.
The media portrayed these school board races as culture wars, but more than anything they were struggles by parents to wrest control of the boards from self-serving unions. For decades, the unions have maintained a tight grip on who gets elected. No wonder school district decisions—about budgets, masking, COVID closures, curriculum, and teacher contracts—protect teachers first. Never mind what’s best for kids.
That needs to change. Albuquerque, New Mexico, winning candidate Courtney Jackson told a local newspaper, “the board of education should be the kids’ union,” not a puppet of the teachers union. Jackson decided to run after watching the board discuss when to end lockdowns. The discussion focused entirely on what teachers wanted, never addressing the kids’ needs. “Their interests were not brought up once,” she said.
In Guilford, Connecticut, a small seacoast town, the Guilford Education Association, representing teachers, ran the show. In a questionnaire for school board candidates, the union’s No. 1 question asked candidates to pledge support for “collective bargaining rights.” Question two asked candidates to guarantee unions will be included in all discussions of the schools’ policies and funding. Question three asked candidates to promise to “oppose all proposals that would censor teachers from teaching about inclusion, diversity, and equity.” What about the kids?
All five Guilford candidates who gave the “correct” answers won the union’s backing and prevailed on election night. Their slogan was “Protect Guilford Schools,” but their true goal was “Protect the Teachers Union.” One of the winners boasted of coming from “a long line of educators,” while another promised, “I will listen to our teachers, administrators, and superintendent and respect that they act always in the best interest of our students and schools.”
Nearly everywhere, teachers unions use money and manpower to turn out voters. Challengers need to do the same. The three Albuquerque school board candidates who defeated the union slate went to the local chamber of commerce, other small business groups, and Republican party allies for alternate sources of money.
When the results were in, the president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation predicted “a new dynamic on the board,” with some members actually disagreeing with the school district’s employees. Imagine that.
In Colorado’s cities, including Denver and Steamboat Springs, union slates won handily. But in Douglas County, Aurora County, and Greeley Evans School District 6, challengers outspent the union and broke its monopoly on school board seats.
After union-backed candidates were defeated in Douglas County, Kevin DiPasquale, president of the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, predicted big changes. In the past, teachers could just assume the school board “had their backs.”
In Montclair, New Jersey, the mayor, Sean Spiller, serves as president of the state’s largest teachers union but also appointed the school board—a blatant conflict of interest. The board negotiates the teachers’ contract. Last Tuesday, the town voted 70 percent in favor of replacing mayoral control with an elected board.
That’s an improvement, but electing the board won’t guarantee students become the priority. In New Jersey, the teachers union wields enormous electoral power with the support of Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.
Although school board elections are often officially labelled nonpartisan, that’s intentionally misleading. In Tennessee and Florida, Republican state lawmakers are pushing legislation to discard the nonpartisan label so voters can see these elections for what they are.
Last week’s elections were just the beginning. Many school districts will elect board members sometime in the spring, instead of on Election Day. That’s by design to keep the public in the dark that an election is even happening, and to discourage turnout.
Parents and other concerned citizens have roughly half a year to gird for these upcoming contests. For anyone who has a child in public school, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health is refusing to share complete information about how it counted COVID-19deaths for reports ordered by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
The reports were ordered when the House unanimously approved a resolution in November 2020 requiring the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee (LBFC) to review the Department of Health’s reporting of COVID-19 testing and deaths.
State Rep. Kate Klunk sponsored the legislation, House Resolution 1087, noting that throughout the pandemic, there have been discrepancies in the information published by the Department of Health, including thousands of COVID-19 positive cases being removed from the daily totals, days where there were significant statistical anomalies in the data, the commingling of data, and COVID-19 being listed as a factor of death when the cause of death was something else.
The LBFC was tasked with providing rolling reports continuing until 90 days after Gov. Tom Wolf’s emergency declaration ends. That declaration ended in June. Five months later, the LBFC issued its first report (pdf) on Nov. 10 after being delayed due to a lack of information.
The LBFC is a bipartisan body made up of state representatives and senators. It routinely conducts studies within the Pennsylvania state government.
“Our intent was to review death certificates/records for individuals who had COVID-19 listed on their death record,” the report reads.
And although the information that the LBFC sought is generally confidential under the state’s 1953 Vital Statistics Law, the law provides exceptions to that confidentiality, allowing for the Department of Health to share the information with government agencies. The law also permits sharing the information for research.
However, LBFC’s request for death records was denied.
The Department of Health wrote in letters that the LBFC isn’t an “agency of government,” that its work isn’t “in the interest of conduct of official duty,” and that its work studying and analyzing the reporting of death records is “not research.”
“We strongly disagree with the department’s position on each of these points,” the report reads.
The LBFC finally received what it described as “highly redacted information.” With that information, it issued the report with a “scope limitation,” meaning the report attempts to answer a research question, but the limitations imposed by the lack of access to information impairs the ability to arrive at an answer.
“Unfortunately for the people of Pennsylvania, the Wolf administration attempted to shield data needed by the LBFC to do its review,” Klunk said in a Nov. 10 statement. “It’s mind boggling to me that a branch of government would try to deny a bipartisan, bicameral government entity that routinely examines data and performs research, information it needs to complete its task.”
Study findings
The LBFC noted that this is the first of what will be several studies related to COVID-19 data reporting, and it made some recommendations:
First, the Department of Health should improve its data collection and presentation on its website. While COVID-19 data is plentiful on the site, it needs better descriptions of its source and where and why it may conflict with other presented data sources. And the Department should resolve the inconsistent reporting that’s apparent in long-term care facility data, according to the report.
Second, the department should monitor the accuracy in cause of death reporting by creating a task force to address ongoing issues. Cause of death reporting was an issue before the pandemic, according to the report. Since the pandemic, the need for accurate cause of death reporting has been emphasized. The task force should include coroners, physicians, funeral directors, and medical schools. It should work to improve reporting.
Finally, the General Assembly should consider amending the Vital Statistics Law to expressly grant access to the records to legislative agencies, in order to avoid any future confusion.
The 110-page report goes into detail about the intentions of the study and the difficulties the agency faced in obtaining the necessary data. Both the LBFC and the Department of Health have used attorneys to negotiate for or block access to data.
The report provides demographic information as well. Of those who died of COVID-19 in 2020, there were 8,092 females and 7,886 males. Asian American deaths numbered 266, the category “other” accounted for 573 deaths, and there were 2,243 black deaths and 12,896 white deaths.
In 2020, no one under the age of 14 died from COVID-19 in Pennsylvania, and five died in the age range of 15 to 19, the report shows. Deaths increase with age noticeably at roughly age 60, and the majority of people who died from COVID-19 in 2020 were aged 85 to 89. In that age group, 2,792 people died.
“This data shaped policies imposed by Gov. Tom Wolf throughout this pandemic,” Klunk said. “He and all Pennsylvanians have a right to know that the data driving public health policy and individual health choices is reliable. If the governor wants a ‘government that works,’ he and his administration must be willing to not only talk the transparency talk, but walk the transparency walk by releasing this data and working with the LBFC.”
Pennsylvania acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam, speaking to the press in Lancaster, Penn., on Sept. 14, 2021 (Commonwealth Media Service)
In a Nov. 3 letter to the LBFC, Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam reiterated the position that the department isn’t legally authorized to share the requested death records with the LBFC.
“The department worked closely with LBFC to support its drafting of the report and is pleased to see the result will largely serve as a great educational tool for the General Assembly and the Public,” Beam wrote. “The department believes that Pennsylvanians have a right to accurate and concise data and information related to the COVID-19 pandemic response.”
For Democrats like John Kerry, no sacrifice is too great for the greater good — as long as it’s someone else doing the sacrificing.
The former secretary of state, U.S. senator, one-time Democratic presidential candidate and current Biden administration climate czar makes a pretense with the rest of his party of caring for the commoners in American life.
But in an interview from Glasgow, Scotland, this week, he made it clear that the policies of the White House he now serves are dead set on directly killing an industry that employs more than 40,000 of his fellow citizens.
“By 2030 in the United States, we won’t have coal,” Kerry said in an interview Tuesday, according to Bloomberg News. “We will not have coal plants.”
Kerry was speaking at COP26, one of those periodic multinational gatherings where the good and the great gather together to display their hypocrisy on the world stage while talking about ways to battle the boogeyman of “climate change,” usually on the backs of those far less fortunate.
In the Kerry case, those less fortunate include the tens of thousands of Americans whose livelihoods are directly connected to the coal industry liberals loathe (42,000 jobs in the U.S., according to the data company Statista). And that doesn’t even count their families, communities and businesses that rely on them.
That’s the Biden administration’s brand of “leadership” — part of a plan to reduce carbon emissions to zero in the next 14 years.
“We’re saying we are going to be carbon free in the power sector by 2035,” Kerry said. “I think that’s leadership. I think that’s indicative of what we can do.”
And if that means destroying jobs and the source of nearly one-fifth of the country’s current energy supply, then that’s the price Kerry & Co. are willing to pay.
Do you think the U.S. coal industry will be around longer than John Kerry?
But it’s not a plan that’s likely to sit well with lawmakers who represent major coal-producing areas — like, say, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a guy who, with Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, basically holds the Biden administration’s future in his hands.
Manchin’s state, which went for Donald Trump by overwhelming margins in both 2016 and 2020, has about a quarter of the jobs that would be lost if coal disappeared, according to Statista.
In an interview with Newsmax, another U.S. lawmaker, Rep. James Comer, an outspoken Republican whose district includes coal-rich areas of Kentucky, said the plan is self-defeating for an administration that is also hellbent on getting rid of natural gas, oil and the internal combustion engine.
Electricity, he told Newsmax in an interview on Wednesday, has to come from somewhere.
“This is another bad policy being talked about by the Biden administration,” he said.
Even in the liberal cesspool of social media, plenty of Twitter users agreed with him.
Kerry, in this one statement, proves himself completely unable to handle his position. Without coal, a lot of America loses electricity, especially with natural gas usage hindered by Biden’s policies.
John Kerry and his socialist co-conspirators do not care if the vast majority of Americans are forced into abject poverty.
The ruling class will have wealth and power beyond their wildest dreams. That is all they care about. Kerry is a Clown!#DemsAreEvil#SocialismSucks#FJB — Scott Cook (@ScottCookOCMD) November 10, 2021
No energy source will ever come without costs and environmental tradeoffs. That’s part of life on earth.
But coal provides stable power, is in American hands and employees tens of thousands of jobs for the kind of workers liberals used to pretend to care about.
Democrats, on the other hand, provide little to the country besides duplicitous politics, social unrest and an ever more-grasping-hand of an ever-more-powerful state. Certainly, real jobs — the kind that don’t involve working for the government, for instance — aren’t high on the agenda. (President Joe Biden opened his administration by killing the Keystone XL pipeline, remember, at the cost of about 11,000 jobs. Democrats didn’t give much of a damn.)
The United States could cheerfully do without the likes of John Kerry and his hypocritical “climate change” hype by the year 2035, along with the rest of his socialist power-hungry party — much more so than it could do without coal and the electricity and jobs it provides.
Some people spreading information about COVID-19 contrary to what is deemed “acceptable” by Big Pharma are criminals, according to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
They’re professionals, he says, that “circulate, on purpose, misinformation” regarding mRNA vaccine shots.
“They’re not [just] bad people, they’re criminals. Because they literally have costed millions of lives,” Bourla said Tuesday in a telecast with Frederick Kempe, CEO of the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank.
.@pfizer CEO Albert Bourla: People who share “misinformation” on vaccines’ efficacy are “criminals.”
“They’re not bad people. They’re criminals because they have literally cost millions of lives.” pic.twitter.com/VjIXs5rQCg
So who are these professionals? Dissenting researchers? Doctors treating patients with the Drugs Which Must Not Be Named? Nurses losing their jobs because of the vaccine mandate?
What about the president of the United States, Joe Biden? He’s a professional. Is he a criminal? If we follow Bourla’s reasoning, he would be.
Is Pfizer’s CEO out of line calling professionals who are critics of COVID vaccines “criminals”?
Several times throughout the course of the pandemic, Biden has said things to large audiences which contradict White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“You’re not gonna get COVID if you get these vaccinations,” Biden said.
However, Fauci has told the American people, “It is important to remember…that infections after vaccination are expected.”
BIDEN: “You’re not gonna get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
FAUCI: “Infections after vaccination are expected.”
— Young Americans for Liberty (@YALiberty) July 22, 2021
Now, in all likelihood, Bourla would not say Joe Biden is a criminal. He would say Uncle Joe’s just wrong. And Bourla said a lot of people are refusing to take the COVID vaccine for reasons which are largely not nefarious.
“There are two groups of people, alright, there are the people that — they are vaccinated [and] there are the people that are skeptical about the vaccination, and both of them are afraid,” he said.
“Those that are getting the vaccine, they are afraid of the disease and they believe, because people are not getting vaccinated, [the unvaccinated] are increasing the risk to them, they are increasing the exposure, so they are mad with them because they don’t get the vaccine.”
“Those that don’t get the vaccine, they’re afraid of the vaccine and they are mad with the people that are oppressing them to get it,” Bourla continued.
“Those I understand — they are very good people, they are decent people, but they have a fear and I understand it and they don’t want to take chances.”
“But there is a very small part of professionals, which they circulate, on purpose, misinformation so that they will mislead those that they have concerned. Those who are criminals. They’re not [just] bad people, they’re criminals. Because they literally have costed millions of lives.”
Millions of lives. Right.
There are plenty of top-notch medical researchers and professionals with legitimate questions about the catastrophic events of what is now going on two years, including the lockdowns, the mask mandates and, of course, the quickly developed vaccine.
But Bourla says professional dissenting “criminals” are profiting by pushing “conspiracy theory.”
“People want [to] make money — some of them — by playing with the emotions of these people [and] are creating a whole conspiracy theory and they are trying to basically to benefit and profit from this fear of the people. And this is who are the criminals.”
These are not criminals. They are individuals following the time-honored practices of science which, to sum it up as a sort of meme, is: “Here’s my hypothesis — change my mind.”
That’s the scientific practice of what’s called falsification.
That seems to have been missing in this entire COVID scenario. And it’s been evident in the unmitigated propaganda: the constant public service announcements, the droning announcements in stores, even the proclamations of electric highway signs.
And the censorship. Where there’s censorship, there is no science.
Besides being censored, people are losing their jobs, being subjected to unhealthy physical and mental health situations and suffering from divided friendships and families because of poor decision-making on the part of makers of public policy.
It’s due to a sickness that can be truly dangerous mainly to people who are aged and who have other physical problems, such as obesity, diabetes and more.
Maybe those at most risk can receive some reduction in the chance of getting COVID-19 from an experimental vaccine presented without legal liability on the part of companies like Bourla’s.
But confidence in a company like Pfizer is not increased when its CEO describes professionals who disagree as criminals.
For the second time in less than a week, parents are demanding answers after their children were given the incorrect of COVID vaccine.
The first incident, however, merely involved two children under 10 in Texas who were given adult doses of the vaccine on Oct. 31. This time, it involves over 100 children ages 5-to-11 in Loudoun County, Virginia, who were given diluted versions of the vaccine meant for those 12 and older, according to WRC-TV in Washington, D.C.
Despite the larger number of children who were affected this time, this still isn’t national news — in part because it doesn’t fit the narrative that the Biden administration is effectively rolling out a vaccine for children, and possibly because Google is trying to starve publications that don’t parrot the approved line when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines. (We’re trying to fight this at The Western Journal — and you can help us in our fight by subscribing here.)
On Wednesday, the Virginia Department of Health confirmed that Ted Pharmacy in Aldie, Virginia administered a diluted version of the inoculation formulated for 12- to 17-year-olds to 112 children younger than 11 on Nov. 3 and 4, according to Washington’s WTTG-TV.
On Nov. 5, state and federal authorities stepped in and ordered the pharmacy to stop administering the shots. The Virginia Department of Health later collected the remainder of the vaccines at the pharmacy.
Dasha Hermosilla’s daughter, 7-year-old Gryffin Fahle, is one of those affected. She told WRC that Gryffin was given a diluted dose of the vaccine for older kids, which comes with a purple cap. The dose for 5-11 comes with an orange cap to differentiate it.
The pharmacist said this was allowed. All it took was a Google search for Hermosilla to confirm that it wasn’t.
“Nothing says that you can change a purple to an orange,” Hermosilla told the station. “I had this pit in my stomach that, like, ‘what did they just do to my daughter?’”
She also criticized how the pharmacy treated parents after it happened.
Would you vaccinate your children against COVID-19?
“The way they have dealt with individuals is really, like, ‘Oh, it’s no big deal,’” Hermosilla said. “There are dozens and dozens of families out there that don’t even know that this is an issue.”
She wasn’t alone.
“Another mom sent News4 a screengrab of a Facebook conversation in which the pharmacy admitted to the mistake and apologized for the ‘inconvenience,’” WRC reported.
BREAKING NEWS: 112 children were administered the WRONG DOSE of COVID-19 vaccine at Ted Pharmacy in Loudoun County https://t.co/V1iq68N1yh
According to WRRC, the Loudoun County Health Department released an alert after the station reported Hermosilla’s case, acknowledging the incident.
The letter stated that the formulation used resulted in the affected children receiving “a dose of COVID19 vaccine that is potentially lower than recommended.”
“The pharmacy who administered the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination to your child last week has been removed from both state and federal COVID-19 vaccination programs,” said Loudoun County Department of Health Director David Goodfriend said in the letter.
Virginia’s Board of Pharmacy, meanwhile, said it is “not at liberty to confirm nor deny whether an investigation into a possible violation of a law or regulation is or is not underway.”
“Should an investigation reveal there is probable cause to believe a law or regulation was broken an Informal Conference or a Formal Hearing before the board may be held for consideration of possible disciplinary action,” the board said in a statement.
“The Board’s findings of fact and resulting actions are contained in a Board Order that becomes a matter of public record available online on the Board of Pharmacy’s website under License Lookup and Recent Case Decisions.”
It’s unclear what this means for the children. As the county health department’s letter stated, the pharmacy’s action meant the children likely received a lower dose than they ordinarily would have.
Even still, Goodfriend’s letter said parents should first contact their pediatrician “for clinical judgment and decision making to determine the best course of action for each patient.”
The letter also urged parents to watch for the traditional COVID-19 vaccine side effects, such as fever, chills, fatigue or pain or swelling at the site of the injection.
“If any additional or more serious side effects occur or are prolonged, contact your primary care provider or pediatrician,” the letter warned.
Parents were then told to log the event in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance says parents can either restart the vaccine series in 21 days or wait for a second dose with the orange cap as scheduled.
In this case, the danger seems less pronounced than it was during a similar incident on Oct. 31 in Garland, Texas, where a 6- and a 7-year-old were both given adult doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine before a child formulation had even been approved.
“They asked us our kids’ ages, and so we told them 4 and 6, and they said ‘the 6-year-old can obviously get it if you’d like to go ahead and do that,’” Julian Gonzalez, father of the 6-year-old, told KTVT-TV in Fort Worth.
“Going off their confidence and what we read [on the form], we were all for it,” he said.
The next day, however, they were contacted by the Garland Health Department, alerting them that the vaccine hadn’t been approved for their son but that they’d received adult doses.
A dose for ages 5-to-11 is 10 micrograms while an adult version contains 30 micrograms. Gonzalez’s son experienced some side effects, while the mother of the 7-year-old said he was fine.
The case in Virginia is worrying for a different reason: It involved 112 children getting faulty vaccinations over a two-day period. And people wonder why some parents are skeptical about vaccinations?
As of Nov. 10, CDC data show only 595 individuals under the age of 17 have officially died of COVID-19 in the U.S. — and this says nothing about whether or not they had pre-existing risk factors. While every death is tragic, of course, 595 is a minuscule fraction of the more than 780,000 deaths attributed to the coronavirus in the country.
When looking at the cost-benefit analysis of vaccinating a child, that’s something that has to be taken into consideration.
Incidents like the one in Virginia may be rare. However, when it’s questionable whether the vaccination is necessary for this age group at all, it’s enough to give a mother or father pause.
A group of Virginia parents say they have secured enough signatures on petitions to remove the school board chair they say has endangered their children and placed woke politics ahead of education.
Fight for Schools filed the recall documents in Loudoun County Circuit Court on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.
The filing said board President Brenda Sheridan broke open meetings laws by using closed Facebook groups as a way to discuss school business without the public being aware. Sheridan is also accused of violating the First Amendment rights of parents by limiting public comment at meetings.
The board chair is also accused of mishandling a sexual assault case in the schools in which a student who was accused of a sexual assault was shunted from one school to another, where he has been accused of another sexual assault.
“Today, we just filed 1200 signatures to remove the chairwoman of Loudoun County School Board, Brenda Sheridan,” Fight for Schools Executive Director Ian Prior told Fox News. “We decided that for the chairwoman and the vice-chairwoman, the buck stops with them, that we were going to draft new petitions … We were able to finish those off in 13 days.”
The group says it also has petitions to remove Board Vice-Chair Atoosa Reaser and board members Ian Serotkin and Denise Corbo, all with more than enough signatures to meet the legal requirement to trigger a recall. In Virginia, elected officials can be recalled if a petition to remove them receives a number of signatures equal to 10 percent of the votes cast in the previous election, Fox reported.
Have school boards become rubber stamps for liberals?
The intent to recall all of the board members was expressed during a public comment period at Tuesday’s board meeting.
“By the way, Denise, Brenda, Ian, Atoosa, we are well over 100% of required signatures for the petitions,” Megan Jenkins said, according to Fox News. “So I’m not going to encourage any of you to resign because when you are recalled and removed from office, it will be much more satisfying. See you in court.”
“I have the privilege of telling you that we are finished collecting signatures for your removal,” parent Jessica Mendez said during the meeting.
“I used to think that there was no point in speaking at these meetings,” Mendez said. “There was no point in trying to have a voice because you never seem to listen, anyway. But I had it all wrong. It wasn’t you who needed to hear our voices. It was all those parents, grandparents and neighbors listening at home, horrified at your actions or inactions. They were the ones who needed to hear us, and they were the ones who sign petitions, see you in court.”
“For six months, Fight for Schools has been out collecting signatures in the heat, the cold, the rain and even hail,” Prior said on Monday. “To get 20,000 signatures during that time is a testament to the dedication of our volunteers and an engaged community that wants to see a change on its school board.”
“We are looking forward to the next steps and replacing school board members that are political servants with non-partisan public servants who will put the focus back on excellence in education,” he said.
Sheridan issued a statement in reply.
“My election was a mandate from those who came to the polls — three times — to choose me as their representative. Tuesday’s filing is the result of a fraction of those citizens signing a petition, whether they voted or not,” she said, according to the Post.
But Prior said change is necessary.
“From violating open meetings law to ignoring the school board’s code of conduct to neglecting to keep our children safe, all for her activist causes, Sheridan has been nothing short of a disaster,” Prior said, the Post reported.
“Let this serve as a message to the rest of the board and Superintendent Ziegler,” he said. “We’re still here, and we’re not going anywhere.”
Procedurally, if recall cases go to trial, a judge or a jury rules on the removal of a board member. The board then gets 45 days to appoint an interim replacement and 15 days to schedule a special election, according to Fox.
In addition to issues over student safety, parents have objected to the district embracing Critical Race Theory, as explained Tuesday night by parent Erin Dunbar, who accused the board of using tax dollars to teach “critical theory of the Marxist philosophy,” Fox reported.
“You have activist teachers using to indoctrinate their kids who are at the mercy of their authority,” she said. “That is child abuse. And you have no right to brainwash children into believing that their skin color determines their purpose.”
COLORADO SPRINGS — They admitted it. Now they think they can get away with it.
Three weeks ago, I reported to you on the appalling case of sixth grade student Rylee M., who was pressured by teachers at Chinook Trail Middle School to seal her mask to her face with thick blue painter’s tape. Another schoolmate came forward to describe how those teachers would patrol their classrooms for violators while twirling the tape rolls around their wrists.
Skeptics accused the children of manufacturing the story and of voluntarily putting the tape on themselves. Others, including the Colorado Springs Police Department school resource officer stationed at Chinook Trail, baselessly dismissed the incident as a prank committed by a teacher in “jest.” Gaslighters in the school district and their supporters misleadingly denied that teachers applied the tape directly to victims’ faces — something Rylee and her mom never alleged. By mischaracterizing the actual allegations, public school propagandists deflected attention from the brazen abuse of authority exercised by educators who issued de facto ultimatums that children comply with their directive to use the tape handed to them. Or else.
On Monday, after the district’s three-week-long internal investigation, Chinook Trail Middle School principal Tom Andrew confirmed in a meeting with Rylee’s mom, Stephanie M., that teachers had indeed “directed students to affix a mask to their face with tape” — a cruel measure that only sadists, not sane public health advocates, could embrace. Moreover, the unfazed principal blandly acknowledged, “Yes,” the “students thought they were compelled to follow through” on the teachers’ “requests” (to choke themselves off).
“In short,” the principal told Rylee’s mom in his sing-song scripted voice, “district policy and procedures were broken,” “trust and respect” were “broken,” and “poor decisions” were made. Now, the principal told Stephanie M., it’s time “to move this forward” after “admitting our mistake” and “trust” the administration. The abusers will remain in the classroom with vulnerable 11- and 12-year-olds; any disciplinary measures will be kept “confidential”; and brave Rylee, who has been harassed over the incident, will now be enrolled in online school to keep her safe from the mask bondage bullies.
“It was never our intent,” the anonymous group of “Team 642” tape torturers wrote in a crappy little note to parents handed out Monday night at a meeting closed to the public, “to cause anxiety, fear, confusion, or physical or emotional harm.” Never mind that these petty tyrants wrought all of the above and will be shielded from any transparent punishment. “We look forward to returning to normal and continuing along this learning journey with your family,” the teachers (none of whom have reached out to Rylee or her mom directly) cheerily chirped.
Elitist privilege means always pretending to say you’re sorry without ever suffering consequences for wrongdoing.
Darcy Schoening, parent advocate and town of Monument Board of Trustees member, agrees. She believes “the teachers responsible for this behavior should be fired. Their names should be released. Parents have the right to know WHO is abusing their kids. Protecting the teachers’ identities and disciplinary actions is a slap in the face to parents.”
“It’s sickening to me,” Stephanie lamented as the principal echoed the educrats’ desire to get back out of the public spotlight and “resume normalcy.” She’s not going to let it drop. “I am not going to be quiet,” the work-at-home mom of three young daughters told KVOR-AM 740 radio talk show host Richard Randall this week. “Plenty of parents are willing to step up for their kids.” No doubt about it. The Election Day revolt against K-12 control freaks just demonstrated that parents across the country from Loudoun County, Virginia, to El Paso County, Colorado, to Los Angeles County, California, will not let COVID-era abnormalities hijack their children’s health and freedom.
With Justice Department goons and local cops treating parents protesting at school board meetings like criminals, we know we can’t rely on law enforcement to side with sovereignty-defenders over the State. Remember: Stephanie M. immediately contacted the Colorado Springs Police Department to report the abuse as soon as her daughter told her what happened. They blew her off. Instead, according to creepy public record files I obtained last week, at least three members of the CSPD’s Metropolitan Vice, Narcotics and Intelligence Division/Strategic Information Center passed around my Twitter and Gab posts about Rylee’s case to several CSPD command staff and other individuals whose names were redacted. A CSPD “Intelligence Unit” detective made note of my “2 million (yes, million) Twitter followers” (so what?), and a sergeant falsely claimed I was aware of protest plans at the school (I heard no such information until after administrators shut down the school on Oct. 25 amid an international maelstrom of public scrutiny and press coverage).
It’s getting impossible to “back the blue” when they stand down as antifa and Black Lives Matter attack you for defending law and order, kneel before the altar of George Floyd, enforce junk-science-based COVID-19 tyranny lining the pockets of Big Pharma and Big Government, and spy on you for standing up for parents fighting educational malpractice. Teach your children well.
If you have any doubt that the radical left is alive and well in the Biden administration, this should wipe it out once and for all.
Saule Omarova, the administration’s dubious pick for comptroller of the currency, is a radical by pretty much anyone’s definition. Up for a job that would put her in charge of regulating the country’s largest banks, she published a paper earlier this year with a proposal to “end banking as we know it,” as the New York Post reported.
And, as a video now circulating online shows, she’s on record desiring the destruction of the nation’s fossil fuel industries.
Scared yet?
Documents show Saule Omarova was a committed communist & planned a career as a Prof. of Scientific Communism. She hid her Karl Marx thesis and conveniently omits that she was planning to be a Professor of Marxism.
Whatever you think about climate change, it’s clear that political forces on the left are leveraging the idea in their bid for globalization. The COVID-19 pandemic is real, and the left politicized it in a sweeping power grab. They have no shame.
Speaking in March at a “Social Wealth Seminar” sponsored by the Jain Family Institute, according to The Daily Wire, Omarova made her feelings about the fossil fuel industries clear.
“We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change,” Omarova said.
Biden nominee Saule Omarova saying the quiet part out loud. On the oil, coal and gas industries:
Born and raised in the former Soviet Union, Omarova graduated from Moscow State University in 1989, as noted in an October column by Forbes magazine editor in chief Steve Forbes.
“Amazingly, she still has nice things to say about the defunct U.S.S.R., where Western-style liberties were non-existent and countless millions died from man-made famines, arbitrary executions and, of course, in the notorious Gulag Archipelago,” Forbes wrote
Forbes also noted that Omarova, “advocates that consumer banking be taken over by the Federal Reserve and wants the government to direct where loans are made.”
Is Biden trying to ruin America?
In fact, her appearance at the Jain Family Institute seminar was to advocate the idea of a “National Investment Authority” — a top-down control of the economy that would basically implement the communist ideal of the state having the ultimate power over what, in a capitalist system, are free-market decisions.
For the record, as the Washington Examiner noted, Omarova denies having communist or Marxist sympathies (she told the Financial Times she’s an easy target for critics because she’s “an immigrant, a woman, minority”). But the names that are used aren’t nearly as important as the ideas.
And when it comes to the kind of government Omarova’s ideas conjure up, you get the picture: It’s leftist. It’s radical. And it’s a horror show.
If you have any doubt Biden is on board with Omarova’s thinking about fossil fuels, the White House has confirmed the administration is now studying the impact of shutting down the Embridge Line 5 pipeline. The pipeline brings 540,000 barrels of oil a day — about 23 million gallons — into the United States through Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac, according to Breitbart.
If you haven’t noticed, gas prices are already sky-high. After his opening-day decision to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, why on earth would Biden consider shutting down another pipeline under the current conditions? To make fuel prices go even higher?
Is he trying to destroy what the radical left sees as deplorable middle America?
Put the coal, gas, and oil, industries out of business, nationalize the banks, and what comes next? Hand over the rest of our hard-won American freedoms to would-be globalist overlords?
Jack Gist is an award-winning writer who has published essays, poetry and fiction in Catholic World Report, First Things, The Imaginative Conservative, New Oxford Review and others.
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Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), a former White House physician who served under former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, said last week that President Joe Biden, who turns 79 this month, has “age-related cognitive decline” and is not “mentally fit” to serve as president.
Jackson, speaking on a podcast with Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), also said that he received a “scathing” email from Obama accusing him of “betrayal” for talking about Biden’s mental state in the past.
“All I know is that he’s got age-related cognitive decline, right. He is not mentally fit right now,” Jackson said on the podcast, the Washington Examiner reported. “He’s 78 years old and you can see it. You don’t need to be a physician to look at him and to look at his behavior and some of the other stuff, just the way he shuffles away, stares off into space.”
“I know what that job entails, both physically and mentally, and how demanding it is. And I can tell you right now, I’m 100% sure that Joe Biden is incapable of doing that job,” the doctor added.
Following a fumbling speech from Biden back in August, Jackson posted critical commentary of the president. “That was embarrassing,” he tweeted. “There is something so obviously wrong with Biden’s cognitive fitness it was hard to watch. He should NOT remain President for another SECOND. We deserve better – MUCH better.”
Jackson said Obama then wrote him a “scathing” email about his Biden commentary. “He just tore me up,” the representative recalled. “It was unbelievable.”
“An entire page about how disappointed he was in me and how it’s beneath me as a physician and beneath me as an officer in the military to be attacking Joe Biden like this,” the doctor explained. “And it was a betrayal of the trust that he and his administration put in me and he was so disappointed in me and yada, yada.”
Jackson also ridiculed the media’s double standard in treatment toward Trump compared to how they treat Biden, the Examiner outlined:
The first-term lawmaker said the event showed how the media and Democrats have a double standard when judging presidents. He viewed Trump as strong-minded but convinced him to take a cognitive test to quiet critics. He said Trump answered all questions correctly.
But when he called for the same thing for Biden, he was assailed.
As highlighted by The Daily Wire last month, GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician, called for annual senility tests for aging politicians, such as President Biden, Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY):
Cassidy, a gastroenterologist, said that people generally begin a “rapid decline” when they hit 80 years old.
“It’s usually noticeable,” the senator said. “So anybody in a position of responsibility who may potentially be on that slope, that is of concern. And I’m saying this as a doctor.”
“I’m told that there have been senators in the past who, at the end of their Senate terms were senile,” Cassidy added. “I’m told that was true of senators of both parties.”
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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has vetoed a legislative package that would have granted tax credits for contributions to scholarship programs that could help low-income students to have a private school education they may not have otherwise been able to afford.
Collectively, the Senate Bills 687 and 688 and House Bills 5404 and 5405 would create Michigan Opportunity Scholarship Accounts that could be used by families to cover education expenses, including those related to non-public schools, courses, and programs. Michigan residents and businesses who donate to the scholarship accounts would receive a state tax credit equal to the value of their contribution.
Once established, the scholarships would prioritize students most in need, including those receiving free and reduced lunch, those living in foster care, and those with disabilities.
Whitmer, a Democrat, promised last month to veto the Republican-sponsored school choice bills, which the Democratic minority in the state legislature argue would have steered public money into private education.
“Simply put, our schools cannot provide the high-quality education our kids deserve if we turn private schools into tax shelters for the wealthy,” Whitmer said in her Nov. 5 veto message. “The movement to privatize education in this state has been a catastrophic failure, causing Michigan students to fall behind the rest of the nation.”
The Republicans decried the veto, saying that their plan was meant to help students get better educational outcomes after more than a year of school closures and the resulting stress, anxiety, and learning loss.
“Instead of empowering parents to give students—especially students with special needs or from underserved communities—better opportunities to learn and succeed, the governor has again rejected progress for the same old, tired, and failing approach to education, because she is beholden to the teachers’ unions and their generous donations,” said Republican state Sen. Lana Theis, who chairs the Michigan Senate Education Committee, said in a statement following the veto.
The Michigan Education Association (MEA), the state’s largest public sector union representing about 120,000 public school employees, applauded Whitmer’s decision. MEA President Paula Herbart criticized the Republican scholarship plan, characterizing it as an “unconstitutional school voucher.”
Herbart claimed that the plan would only benefit wealthy donors like Betsy DeVos, a Michigan-born billionaire whose tenure as the U.S. Secretary of Education was marked by increased federal support for charter and private schools.
“Michigan voters have resoundingly opposed attempts by mega-donors like Betsy DeVos to enact voucher schemes in our state,” Herbart said. “We value our neighborhood public schools and know that funneling money to private schools does nothing to provide equal opportunity for Michigan students.”
If a new study coming out of Japan is to be believed, many countries across the world may need to change their strategies for combatting COVID-19.
A team of researchers from Harvard University in Massachusetts, Gakushuin University in Tokyo and Shizuoka University in Shizuoka compared Japanese municipalities that closed down their school systems in spring of 2020 to those that did not, according to study published in Nature Medicine.
The team of researchers conducted the study by examining 847 municipalities in Tokyo and Osaka.
As it turns out, the shutdown of schools did not prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus during the first wave of the pandemic, their study found.
In fact, the number of COVID cases per 100,000 people between the two groups of municipalities remained exactly the same, regardless of whether or not schools were shut down.
“We do not find any evidence that school closures in Japan reduced the spread of COVID-19,” one of the study’s authors wrote.
“Our null results suggest that policies on school closures should be re-examined given the potential negative consequences for children and parents.”
“School closures reduce children’s learning opportunities, negatively affect their physical and mental development and make it difficult for their parents to leave for work in the daytime,” co-researcher Dr Kentaro Fukumoto said, according to the Daily Mail UK.
“The central government should carefully consider whether to ask schools to close in the future.”
Should school shutdowns still be used to combat COVID?
This news may come as a shock to many public health experts around the world.
This includes those in the U.S., many of whom have repeatedly called for school shutdowns since the COVID pandemic began.
The Center for Disease Control even went as far as to create a guide for “considerations for school closures” as a method for stemming the spread of COVID.
While the plan did advise against closing schools “early in the spread of a disease,” it did maintain that “waiting to enact school closures until at the correct time in the epidemic” would prove helpful in slowing COVID-19’s spread.
NIAID Director Anthony Fauci has also supported the closure of schools in the past.
In July of 2020, Fauci said that “It’s been shown that children from 10 to 19 can transmit the virus to adults as well as adults can,” according to CNBC.
While acknowledging that keeping students at home can create “negative consequences,” Fauci further said that schools should nevertheless close down at certain times.
“When you get to the real hot zones, I think you’re going to have to take a really good look and examine the advisability or not,” Fauci said.
“What likely would happen is that you would have parents that don’t want to send their children to school or you’re going to have teachers that not going to want to be there.”
Internal documents show Meredith Whittaker was reprimanded for insubordination
The Biden administration’s choice to advise the Federal Trade Commission on artificial intelligence was pushed out of her position at Google for being too political and insubordinate, according to internal documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Meredith Whittaker announced Friday that she is joining the FTC as a “Senior Advisor on AI,” a position that reports directly to chairwoman Lina Khan. The former Google employee made headlines in 2019 for organizing walkouts in opposition to the company’s partnership with the U.S. military. Internal reviews obtained by the Free Beacon show that Whittaker was repeatedly warned to focus on her job responsibilities and left Google in July 2019 after she was asked to take a more limited role following several critical performance reviews in the first quarter of that year.
Under President Joe Biden, the FTC has embraced the far-left positions Whittaker espouses. Khan has argued that Amazon, Google, and others may be monopolies even if they don’t raise prices for consumers. FTC commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter has said that antitrust enforcement “can’t be value-neutral” and that the FTC has a mandate to tackle “structural and systemic racism.” Carl Szabo, vice president of tech industry group NetChoice, told the Free Beacon that Khan, Whittaker, and Slaughter share “an obsession with using antitrust to shape progressive policy.”
Although Whittaker has presented herself as an expert in artificial intelligence ethics, some former colleagues have accused her of inflating her credentials, noting that she has no formal training in the field and has done no peer-reviewed research. One manager described her impact inside Google as “nonexistent in the AI bias space, if not negative” and said that “there is not a lot of value” in the work she touted.
Under Whittaker, Google’s AI Now Institute received funding from liberal donors, including the Ford and Omidyar Foundations. In her performance review, Whittaker highlighted her work on the institute as her major contribution at Google, prompting a manager to comment, “This isn’t her job at Google.” Whittaker made her priorities clear in a 2019 blog post that announced her departure from Google, in which she noted her commitment to “organizing for an accountable tech industry.”
Whittaker has a history of controversial statements. In 2019, she called Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James an “outspoken bigot” after Google named James to its artificial intelligence advisory board. Whittaker in her attacks on James said the idea of viewpoint diversity is a rhetorical tool of the alt-right. She has called the gender gap in the artificial intelligence industry “an emergency” and called on Google to fire an employee who suggested that innate sex differences might contribute to the gap. Whittaker has also attacked white women who voted for former president Donald Trump and called out women in “positions of patriarchal power.”
Whittaker’s appointment will likely open another front in the battle over the FTC’s role. Republicans in Congress who think tech companies are a threat are divided over whether to trust the FTC with more power. Republican senators Josh Hawley (Mo.), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), and Tom Cotton (Ark.) have all cosponsored bills that would give the FTC more power to go after tech companies. Other lawmakers, including Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), have slammed the Biden FTC for political “abuses.”
Whittaker did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Some Pennsylvania students just got a lesson in how discrimination really operates in American public schools.
A middle school used a video broadcast during school announcements to invite kids interested in flying drones to attend a weekend camp.
There was just one catch — and parents of white students probably weren’t happy to hear about it.
As National Review reported Monday, the Upper Merion Area Middle School’s announcement for the camp, which took place on Saturday, opened with a woman brimming with enthusiasm, followed by video of drone activities pretty much guaranteed to pique the interest of any adolescent.
Besides it being limited in size — there were only 24 slots available — the program was extremely limited in who its target audience was:
“Here’s the thing,” the woman said. “It is a Black Student Union-sponsored event, so, in order to participate, 1: You must have a signed permission slip to claim your seat.
“Secondly, you must be black, African-American, a person of color in order to participate.”
Check out the video here. The drone stuff is undeniably cool. The uncool, undeniably ugly part comes at the end:
S
There it is — an actual example of literal “systemic racism” that progressives claim, ludicrously, is everywhere. Except in this case, it’s openly biased against white people.
But Upper Merion Area School District Superintendent John Toleno evidently doesn’t see a problem.
In an email to The Western Journal on Tuesday (a collection of bubbly boilerplate that was apparently being sent for PR purposes to any news organization that raised questions), Toleno noted that the program was simply part of the district’s “ongoing efforts over the past 8 years to give opportunities to groups who are underrepresented in STEM fields with a primary focus on students of Color and students who identify as female. This has been a national focus in the STEM community.”
The modern education mindset is on full display in those few words: jargon like “groups” who are underrepresented”; the obsequious capitalization of the “c” in “Color”; being careful not to say “girls,” just “students who identify as female.”
Walking on eggshells at the same time must be a tough way to live.
A couple of comments on Facebook communicated the reactions of what were doubtless many, many more people who heard about the video:
One commenter wrote: “This is wrong on so many levels and not at all what I want for my children, and that’s why I’m homeschooling now and by the grace of God, my children will never step foot in another public school — they undo and undermine everything my husband and I teach them.
“Maybe white people should take to the streets and start burning communities down. 😏 I jest, obviously. But this is blatant racism on its face.”
Do you think this is racism against white people?
There aren’t too many other ways to see it. (Liberals love to claim racism over differences of opinion. Don’t expect them to see it where it actually is.)
In his email, Superintendent Toleno stressed that the school district has drone programs open to all students throughout the year. He even noted that this particular program would have accepted white students if not enough black students were interested.
“Please be further advised that if we didn’t get to our 24 student limit with African American students as stipulated in the grant we wrote and were awarded, we would have absolutely opened this up to our entire middle school student population to fill the 24 student seats,” he wrote.
How very gracious. (The email didn’t come out and say whether all of the slots were filled at the event, but it sounds like they were.)
It’s worth noting here that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Upper Merion area, in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, is about 72 percent white, about 19 percent Asian, and 6 percent black.
Assuming the school district’s demographics are similar, the overwhelming majority of students who watched that really cool video about drones were told right to their faces that there was a party going on and they weren’t invited.
As ugly as it sounds, there’s no other way to put it: They’re not of the favored race these days.
That isn’t the United States as most Americans of any race understand the country. It’s not the United States the civil rights movement of the 1960s fought for, with Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams about content of character being more important than skin color.
And it’s not what parents want for their children, as evidenced by the critical role of public education in last week’s election results in Virginia.
Sometimes you have to wonder whose team President Joe Biden is playing on.
Nearly every decision he has made since taking office in January has been to weaken the United States.
What’s shaping up to be the latest example is the Biden administration considering shutting down a vital pipeline that transports 540,000 barrels of oil per day into the U.S. from western Canada.
White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed the reports are true, saying the Army Corps of Engineers is doing an environmental impact study on the Line 5 pipeline that runs through Michigan.
Biden spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre acknowledges the Biden administration is “studying” shutting down the Line 5 Pipeline.
If Biden shuts down Line 5, Millions of Americans could face higher energy bills this winter. pic.twitter.com/7ZJoDIBd0S
Of course, this brilliant move comes after Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, which was slated to transport over 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada to refineries in Texas.
Oh, and he halted oil exploration on federal lands just as the U.S. had reached energy independence during the Trump years, and he closed down drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska too.
The United States is producing nearly 2 million barrels of oil a day less under Biden than it was at its peak under former President Donald Trump, during whose administration the nation became a net energy exporter for the first time in nearly 70 years.
Predictably, with less supply and rising demand, gas prices have risen by an average of over $1.30 per gallon nationwide.
A year ago we were energy independent, a net exporter, and a gallon of gas was 2 bucks and change. After less than a year of a war on fuel producers here and giveaways to Russia, all those gains are reversed. The surprise is how quickly everything changed. https://t.co/JD3dF4mBjg
Perhaps, one could argue that Biden and his team have calculated if they make it painful enough at the pump, they will speed along the day when the U.S. transitions completely away from fossil fuels to wind and solar and, who knows, unicorn travel.
Well, that sounds nice, but it’s contradicted by the fact that imports of Russian and Saudi Arabian oil are up. So we’re burning oil, just less of our own.
The EIA reported that the U.S. imported 24.6 million barrels in August from Russia on top of over 26 million in May. That’s nearly 5 million more barrels per month than the highest number ever recorded under Trump.
During the previous administration, the amount imported consistently ranged between 11 million and 16 million barrels per month.
Under Biden, the total has been over 20 million barrels every month, with the exception of February.
In August, Bloomberg reported that Russia had become America’s No. 2 foreign oil supplier, edging out Mexico.
Because the Biden admin would rather import more Russian and Saudi oil than Canadian…brilliant. https://t.co/Rzbfr9cR6A
Meanwhile, oil imports from Canada have stayed roughly the same between Biden’s and Trump’s presidencies.
So why are we favoring Russia over Canada?
That wasn’t the only pro-Russia move Biden has made.
In May, the president announced no sanctions would be imposed to block the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, as Trump had threatened to do. The pipeline will transport natural gas from Russia into Western Europe.
To summarize, Biden — citing climate change concerns — shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, killing American jobs, and greenlit Nord Stream 2, which benefits Russia economically and gives Russian President Vladimir Putin a leverage point over NATO allies like Germany.
And now the administration is considering shutting down another U.S.-Canada pipeline, which is almost certain to drive up prices even more.
Again, whose team is Biden on?
For all the hooting and hollering by the Democrats about Trump and “Russia, Russia, Russia,” it sure feels like Biden’s the one Putin has in his back pocket.
State Farm on Monday said it supports Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ “personal point of view,” shortly after the footballer said he is unvaccinated and that he thinks the NFL rules regarding COVID-19 and vaccines “are not based in science at all.”
The insurance giant said in a statement to several media outlets on Monday morning that Rodgers had “been a great ambassador for our company for much of the past decade.”
“We don’t support some of the statements that he has made, but we respect his right to have his own personal point of view,” the company, which has been aligned with Rodgers since 2007, said.
“We recognize our customers, employees, agents and brand ambassadors come from all walks of life, with differing viewpoints on many issues. Our mission at State Farm is to support safer, stronger communities. To that end, we encourage vaccinations, but respect everyone’s right to make a choice based on their personal circumstances.”
However, Michigan-based ad tracking and consulting company Apex Marketing Group found that Rodgers featured in just 1.5 percent of 400 State Farm television advertisements aired on Sunday through 8 p.m. ET, down from more than 20 percent two Sundays prior.
It comes after the NFL star, 37, sparked controversy after he tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus last week, after claiming in August that he was “immunized” against the virus.
Rodgers, three-time Most Valuable NFL Player, claimed in an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show on Nov. 5 that he was told by a league doctor that people who take a vaccine for COVID-19 will not catch or spread the disease.
“One of the main docs said it’s impossible for a vaccinated person to get COVID or spread COVID,” he said. “We know now that information is totally false.”
He confirmed during his television appearance that he is not vaccinated against COVID-19, explaining that he is allergic to an ingredient in the mRNA Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and is wary of taking the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, citing documented past cases of blood clots that prompted federal regulatory agencies to temporarily pause administration of the shots earlier this year.
State Farm’s statement also follows the news that Rodgers was dropped by Prevea Health over the weekend. He had been aligned with the company for nine years.
“Prevea Health remains deeply committed to protecting its patients, staff, providers and communities amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” the company said in a statement. “This includes encouraging and helping all eligible populations to become vaccinated against COVID-19 to prevent the virus from further significantly impacting lives and livelihoods.”
The Epoch Times has contacted State Farm for additional comment.
“How do you think these schoolchildren have felt for the last year?”
Speaking in Zephyrhills on Monday, Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis took aim at both Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers labor union in America, as well as Dr. Anthony Fauci. He pointed out that Weingarten, who had favored keeping schools closed through much of the pandemic, had been found maskless recently, but protested she did so because it was too hard to communicate while wearing a mask. DeSantis fired, “Well, how do you think these schoolchildren have felt for the last year?”
Regarding Fauci, DeSantis asserted, “I do think just the lack of just leveling with the public, I think it’s been very detrimental … I think you’re gonna see people have really, really serious misgivings the next time St. Fauci comes down the pike and says something.”
Speaking of mask mandates for schoolchildren, DeSantis said, “I think the smiles matter, and particularly the young kids. You will actually have school districts that will say, ‘We are relieving mask mandate for high schoolers but we’re keeping them on those elementary.” First of all, I don’t think you should have a mask mandate, period, but the elementary are the ones that need to be able to see the interaction more than anything, cause they’re learning to speak and read and do all that stuff.”
“And it’s absolutely critical. And don’t tell me it doesn’t make a difference,” he continued. DeSantis referenced Weingarten, who had said, “We took them off as people were having a hard time hearing us,” snapping, “Heck, this head of the teachers union who tried to keep the schools closed all last year; she was found maskless, and she said, I took it off because it was too hard to understand each other wearing the mask.”
He fired, “Well, how do you think these schoolchildren have felt for the last year?”
The Trump admin nearly broke Tehran. Biden’s soft stance on sanctions helped the regime get back on track.
Iran’s stockpile of hard currency has skyrocketed during the Biden administration, rising from just $4 billion at the end of 2020 when sanctions were at their height, to more than $31 billion by the end of 2021, according to projections by the International Monetary Fund.
The Biden administration’s decision to pursue diplomacy with Iran and unwind the Trump administration’s sanctions has helped the country recover from its cash shortage, according to the IMF’s projections. The group says Iran’s cash reserves will top $31 billion by the end of the year and increase up to $42.9 billion by the end of 2022. This number could be even higher if the United States reenters the 2015 nuclear deal and removes all sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. Iran had $122 billion in cash reserves in 2018, when the Trump administration began to tighten the economic noose on Iran. That number dropped to $4 billion by the end of 2020, during the height of the former administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign.
Iran’s access to cash has been bolstered by the Biden administration’s lax enforcement of sanctions on the country’s illicit oil trade, which has increased to record levels amid a buying spree from China, the number-one importer of illegal Iranian crude oil. While Tehran’s oil sector is still sanctioned by the United States, experts told the Washington Free Beacon last week that the Biden administration has turned a blind eye to Tehran’s exports, enabling countries such as China, Russia, and Syria to provide the hardline regime a financial lifeline.
The IMF’s projections are the clearest sign to date that the Biden administration is serious about helping Iran’s hardline regime claw back from the brink of economic collapse. Republican leaders in Congress, who are widely critical of the Biden administration’s approach to diplomacy with Iran, maintain that the further removal of sanctions will embolden the ruling regime and help it fund terrorist groups across the Middle East, including those responsible for conducting a drone strike late last month on a U.S. military outpost in Syria.
Gabriel Noronha, a former State Department special adviser for Iran under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the Biden administration gave up U.S. leverage on Iran by unwinding sanctions before it extracted assurances from Tehran that Iran will stop its nuclear buildup and end its support for terrorism.
“At the end of the Maximum Pressure Campaign in January 2021, Iran was facing a simultaneous debt, inflation, unemployment, and balance of payments crisis caused by massive U.S. economic pressure,” Noronha, the executive director of the Forum for American Leadership, a national security think tank, told the Free Beacon. “Now the regime is making tens of billions in unsanctioned oil sales with China while Biden’s Treasury Department looks the other way and even supported the IMF giving Iran a $5 billion currency bailout.”
“Instead of getting a better deal or depriving the regime of funds for its nuclear program and terrorism,” Noronha said, “the Biden administration has obtained zero concessions from the regime in its 10 months of appeasement.
Data from Iran’s budget and planning offices showed the country’s debt would increase more than 2,000 percent by 2027, from $68 billion to $1.39 trillion, if U.S. sanctions remained in place. If sanctions are unwound, however, Iran will only be around $561 billion in debt by 2027. It was also projected that the Iranian rial—which is already almost worth nothing—would devalue by 10 times the current amount by 2027 if sanctions are not removed.
This is primarily why Iran is pressuring the Biden administration to unwind sanctions before it agrees to a revamped version of the nuclear deal. It remains unclear, however, how long any sanctions relief will remain in place. Republicans in Congress have vowed to immediately trash any deal that is reached between the United States and Iran once Democrats are out of office.
Iran appears to be aware of this possible outcome. Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, a ruling body that holds power over the country’s policies, said last week that “the U.S. president has no authority [and] is not willing to provide any guarantees [the United States will not leave the nuclear deal again],” according to comments cited in the country’s state-controlled press.
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!
Workers place barriers outside the closed Huanan Seafood wholesale market during a visit by members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team, investigating the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China’s central Hubei Province on Jan. 31, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
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:
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.”
The virus contains a CGG-CGG sequence not found in nature, ergo it was genetically engineered.
Evidence of Chinese virus “retro-engineering” has been suppressed for well over a year.
There were no bats or pangolins sold in the Wuhan wet markets between May 2017 and November 2019.
Conclusion: The zoonotic theory is a farce and complete misdirection.
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.
Police officers wearing masks walk as the CCTV Building (left, back), the headquarters for the Chinese regime’s mouthpiece broadcaster, is seen in Beijing on May 19, 2020. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)
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.
In the aftermath of reports that the conservative media company Newsmax would comply with President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate, the company itself said that’s not quite true.
On Friday, Mediaite reported that it had obtained an internal email sent to Newsmax employees that indicated the company would not fight the Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule requiring every employer with more than 100 employees to have its workers vaccinated.
“To ensure that we are in compliance, we require that all vaccinated employees submit a copy of their vaccination card,” the email told Newsmax employees, Mediaite reported.
News of the corporate policy came as Newsmax host Steve Cortes was issuing blistering comments against a vaccine mandate.
I will not comply w/ any organization’s attempt to enforce Biden’s capricious & unscientific Medical Apartheid mandate.
I will not be forced into the injection, nor will I disclose my vaccination status.
No one should be pressured to choose between medical privacy & their job.
“Newsmax has no vaccine mandate nor do we require it for employment,” Newsmax wrote in an editorial on its website in which it called the rule “a dangerous overreach of federal power and opposed by Newsmax.”
The Newsmax editorial said that the company “informed our staff of the upcoming federal rule. At the same time, we have notified staff we will create an easy opt-out for any employee who does not want to be vaccinated.”
“Under the rule, any employee who is not vaccinated will be tested for COVID on a weekly basis,” the editorial continued, adding, “Newsmax is going beyond the OSHA rule to provide free weekly testing on its company premises.”
As noted by USA Today, the rule does not force employers to bear the cost of weekly testing, meaning that if they should wish, employers with more than 100 people could force unvaccinated workers to pay those costs themselves.
@KenPaxtonTX The testing option of the OSHA mandate stipulates that the employee is responsible for paying for the weekly COVD test. In many area COVD tests are $50+, which would be $200+ month. *Also, not free with insurance at doctors as person has to pay copay to get the test
“No Newsmax employee will be forced to receive the vaccine or be fired for not doing so,” the editorial said.
The balance of the editorial discusses the merits — or lack of same — concerning the mandate and the vaccine. It calls the OSHA rule “not good and probably illegal.”
“The Biden administration’s decision to implement an OSHA requirement is a dangerous overreach of federal power,” the editorial read, noting that states have been shepherding their populations through the pandemic, and there seems to be no need for federal intervention.
“Now the Biden administration is using authority intended for workplace safety to bypass the traditional governmental approach to health safety,” the editorial continued, adding that “by engaging in an unprecedented power grab, the Biden administration is taking its eye off the ball.”
The editorial states that the vaccine “which has been demonstrated to be safe and effective, is clearly playing a role” in the decline of COVID-19 deaths; however, it did point out that the vaccine is not the only contributing factor.
“While the vaccine works, so does natural immunity,” it read.
A LOT of fake news out there about @newsmax and the Vaccine. Well–here’s the TRUTH: no one at NEWSMAX will ever be forced get “the jab”—it’s a CHOICE!!! You can work at “The Max” if you’re unvaccinated!!!! (PS: @JoeBiden you SCREWED this up in EVERY) https://t.co/oAA4T5jqTj
“At Newsmax, we do not ignore the science nor the facts,” it said.
“President Donald Trump provided the funding for the vaccine and cut through the red tape to see it implemented. And Trump himself has been vaccinated. Publicly, he has encouraged others to receive the vaccine,” the editorial stated, while noting that Trump recommended it, but did not force it on anyone.
“His approach is the right way. Government provides an opportunity, but an informed citizenry in a free nation should make its own health decisions,” the editorial concluded.
“Sesame Street” has become a propaganda arm of the Biden regime, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas charged Saturday.
On Saturday, the Twitter account of the “Sesame Street” character Big Bird tweeted a message telling children to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
“I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy. Ms. @EricaRHill even said I’ve been getting vaccines since I was a little bird. I had no idea!” the tweet read, referring to CNN journalist Erica Hill, who on Saturday hosted an event with Big Bird called “The ABCs of COVID Vaccines.”
I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.
Ms. @EricaRHill even said I’ve been getting vaccines since I was a little bird. I had no idea!
“Government propaganda … for your 5 year old!” he tweeted.
Has everything become political these days?
The Food and Drug Administration late last month gave Emergency Use Authorization for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to be given to children between the ages of 5 and 11.
Newsmax host Steve Cortes joined in with his criticism of the “Sesame Street” edorsement.
“This kind of propaganda is actually evil. Your children are not statistically at risk, and should not be pressured into a brand new treatment. Do Not Comply!” he tweeted.
This kind of propaganda is actually evil.
Your children are not statistically at risk, and should not be pressured into a brand new treatment.
Erin Gauch, of Middletown, Rhode Island, said concerns over side effects make her pause, according to The New York Times.
“I’m looking at a 9-year-old, and if I make a bad decision and he ends up with some debilitating side effects or lifelong adverse reaction, I don’t think I could live with that,” she said.
“If we ultimately decide not to get my youngest vaccinated right now, I guess I’ll be subjected to mommy shaming, but I’ll just have to deal with it,” Gauch said.
Requirements as common in STEM as in social science
Nearly a fifth of university jobs require diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements that press applicants to express and expound upon their commitment to diversity, according to a new study from the American Enterprise Institute.
The study, from the Educational Freedom Institute’s James D. Paul and the American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Maranto, is the first to empirically estimate the prevalence of diversity statements in higher education, which they say may narrow the research questions that academics feel comfortable addressing.
Using a representative sample of 999 job postings, the study found that 19 percent require a diversity statement; that the statements are significantly more common at elite schools than non-elite ones; and that jobs in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—are just as likely as jobs in the social sciences to require a diversity statement from applicants.
DEI statements have grown more routine in recent years, especially on the West Coast. Between 2018 and 2019, most schools in the University of California system mandated DEI statements for all faculty applicants, with a system-wide task force recommending that the requirements be standardized across UC schools. Such requirements soon made their way east: In 2020, a job posting at the University of Denver asked applicants “how you plan to integrate DEI into your role as a faculty member, including new or existing initiatives you would like to be involved with.”
The last finding surprised Paul, the director of research at the Educational Freedom Institute, who told the Washington Free Beacon it was a testament to the sway of DEI ideology in academia. He and Maranto had hypothesized that the more empirical a field, the less likely it would be to use “soft” criteria when evaluating applicants. But when they actually ran the data, that hypothesis collapsed.
“The most surprising finding of the paper is that these requirements are not just limited to the softer humanities,” Paul said. “I would have expected these statements to be less common in math and engineering, but they’re not.”
This swift march has not gone unopposed. City Journal‘s Heather Mac Donald has blasted DEI requirements as an assault on meritocracy, quipping that Einstein’s groundbreaking research had nothing to do with diversity, equity, or inclusion. Paul agreed, saying it was “concerning” that DEI has begun to “take precedence over merit.” The study notes that at the University of California, Berkeley, more than 76 percent of applicants to a life sciences post were eliminated on the basis of their DEI statements.
Others, like Maranto’s American Enterprise Institute colleague Max Eden, see the requirements as ideological litmus tests, loyalty oaths to a “woke” worldview in which equity matters more than education and free thought.
“Universities are conditioning employment on fealty to an ideology that is inherently hostile to the university’s traditional mission,” Eden said. “If colleges started asking prospective faculty about their patriotism or commitment to American ideals, you can bet there would be a mass outcry about academic freedom.”
Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), echoed Eden’s concern.
“The idea that someone looked at the current crop of professors and said, ‘There’s just not enough political homogeneity’ is remarkable to me,” Lukianoff told the Free Beacon. “I fear that higher education has become a conformity engine.”
That conformity, Paul and Maranto note, “may also result in a narrowing of research questions, with negative consequences for intellectual pursuits.”
The study, which reviewed postings on three popular online job boards, suggests that DEI litmus tests are not aberrational. They are now common at both public and private universities—especially the elite ones, which the study found were 18 percent more likely than non-elite schools to require diversity statements. The authors defined an “elite school” as any college or university in the top 100 of the 2020 U.S. News & World Report rankings.
Paul speculated that the market power of such schools lets them be extra ideological. If elite universities get more job applicants, he reasoned, they may “be able to prioritize this ideology without sacrificing anything in quality. They’re in a position to pick and choose, so why not choose someone who toes the line?”
The study emphasizes that the 19 percent statistic is likely a low-ball estimate. For one thing, Paul and Maranto only used the terms “diverse” or “diversity” to identify jobs that require DEI statements; postings that eschewed that language in favor of “equity” or “antiracism” weren’t counted under their coding scheme.
For another, the study only looked at job postings, not job applications. If some applications required diversity statements that weren’t advertised in public postings, Paul and Maranto’s results could be a significant undercount.
“I strongly suspect that if we went through the steps of applying for positions there’d be more jobs with DEI statements,” Paul said. “Our estimate is conservative.”
Komi German, a research fellow at FIRE, argued that the proliferation of DEI statements could ultimately backfire, constraining not just ideological but racial diversity.
“Hiring committees may actually emphasize the political and ideological components of DEI statements to make them more palatable to politically progressive white scholars,” German said. “After all, being white won’t count against them if they can pledge strongly enough their allegiance to DEI.”
CBP cites law that prohibits foreign imports produced through labor abuses
U.S. Customs and Border Protection last week seized imports from a Chinese company backed by an investment group in which climate czar John Kerry holds a $1 million stake.
Kerry and his wife are invested in Hillhouse China Value Fund L.P., part of the Hillhouse investment group that is a top shareholder in a Chinese solar panel company that works with companies known to be using forced labor. It was on that account that CBP seized the imports from LONGi Green Energy, citing a law that prohibits foreign imports produced through labor abuses.
The news could raise additional concerns about the Kerry family’s investment in Hillhouse China Value Fund L.P., which the climate envoy disclosed at the beginning of the year. Although Kerry divested from many of his energy-related holdings in March, the list of divestments did not include Hillhouse, according to a disclosure Kerry filed in March with the Office of Government Ethics. The investment has drawn scrutiny from Republican lawmakers and China experts, who accuse Kerry of downplaying and enabling China’s human rights abuses while trying to win concessions from Beijing on climate change.
The Hillhouse investment group, which is run by Zhang Lei, an adviser to the Chinese government, owns a 6 percent stake in LONGi. Hillhouse is also a top shareholder of YITU Technology, a company that was blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce for allegedly aiding the Chinese government’s surveillance of Uyghurs.
Kerry’s Hillhouse stake is through a trust in which his wife is the beneficiary. He stated in his disclosure that they are not involved in managing the investments.
LONGi, the White House, and CBP did not respond to request for comment.
LONGi Green Energy said its products were temporarily detained by CBP from Oct. 28 to Nov. 3, under a “Withhold Release Order,” according to an announcement filed by its board of directors with the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Nov. 4.
Withhold Release Orders are intended to “prevent merchandise produced in whole or in part in a foreign country using forced labor from being imported into the United States,” according to the CBP website.
LONGi’s board of directors sought to allay concerns over the seizure order, saying it impacted “a total of 40.31 MW of components exported to the United States” which “accounted for approximately 1.59 percent of export sales” to the United States last year.
“The U.S. Customs’ Temporary Detention Order (WRO) has not yet caused the company’s operations significant adverse effects,” the board said. “The company will continue to monitor and evaluate the impact of the WRO on the company’s U.S. shipments.”
Human rights investigators identified LONGi as “a customer of many of the polysilicon companies that are engaged in labor transfers in the Uyghur Region,” in a report published earlier this year by the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University.
Industry analysts recently warned that LONGi is likely to face trade obstacles, after the Biden administration ordered a ban in June on imports connected to forced labor of minority groups in China’s Xinjiang region.
Roth Capital Partners, a financial analyst firm, said on Tuesday that it believed a detention order for LONGi products was “imminent,” according to a client report obtained by PV Magazine, a solar trade publication.
“Look for this to impact LONGi in a broad-based way,” the analysis said.
A group called American Solar Manufacturers Against Chinese Circumvention (A-SMACC) has also been lobbying the Biden administration to investigate the supply chain of LONGi specifically, and other Chinese solar panel companies linked to forced labor, and to impose additional tariffs on those goods. The administration is expected to make a decision on the tariffs next month.
Kerry criticized moves by lawmakers to penalize Chinese solar panel companies in September.
“On the one hand, we’re saying to [China], ‘You have to do more to help deal with the climate,’” Kerry said. “And on the other hand, their solar panels are being sanctioned, which makes it harder for them to sell them.”
Although six House Democrats from the progressive wing of the party voted against passage of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed the bill late Friday night with the help of 13 Republicans. Hidden inside the 2,300 pages of this complete boondoggle of a bill are numerous dangerous provisions that would have our founders rolling in their graves.
Shortly before the vote, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana warned colleagues about several of the most egregious initiatives contained in this legislation.
Scalise, holding up a copy of the unwieldy bill that lawmakers had only received the night before, reminded his colleagues of Biden’s promise that passage of his agenda would not cost Americans earning under $400,000 one dime.
“He breaks the promise right here,” Scalise said. “In the bill, a tax, according to the American Gas Association, will increase household electricity rates by 30 percent. And by the way, that’s low-income families that pay that tax the hardest.”
Democrats had originally put amnesty for illegal immigrants into their larger Build Back Better bill. Because there is no Republican support in the Senate for this legislation, they hoped to pass it through the process of reconciliation.
However, in September, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough ruled that amnesty could not be included in a reconciliation bill because it has nothing to do with either spending or revenue. So they added it to the infrastructure bill instead.
Scalise told colleagues: “Millions of additional people will get amnesty in this bill. And it comes at a time where President Biden is negotiating — initially he said he wasn’t — and then the White House had to go back up and say the Justice Department is negotiating half a million dollar checks to people who came across our border illegally and then they’re going to give amnesty to millions more people. Estimates are seven million more people.”
“Can you imagine the flood that will come over when they hear that you can get a half a million dollars a person if President Biden gets his way?” he adds.
Scalise was referring to reports that the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are in talks to give $450,000 per person to immigrants who were separated from family members at the border during the Trump Administration. Questioned about these payments by Fox News’ Peter Doocy last week, Biden said the story wasn’t true. He was later “corrected” by White House officials who confirmed that negotiations are ongoing.
Do you believe inflation will rise next year from current levels?
Next, he addressed the addition of 87,000 IRS agents. “They call this infrastructure. They call this equity. Whatever they want to call it, it’s an army of IRS agents that are going to comb through your bank account. … Why? Because they’ve got to generate hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on more inflation-inducing spending. …”
“According to this Penn-Wharton account [a budget model], you’re going to have over $4 trillion of spending with $1.5 trillion of new taxes. By the way, that’s $2.5 trillion of additional debt. The President says there’s no cost – no cost, just … $2.5 trillion of debt.”
“These IRS agents are going to have to account for over $200 billion to find money from your checking accounts,” he said. “That’s what they’re trying to do at dark of night.”
“No wonder they don’t want a CBO score [on this bill], no wonder they want to do this by dark of night. This is going to induce more inflation that’s hurting families all across America,” Scalise said.
In this bill Dems are trying to ram through: – Mass amnesty – 87,000 new IRS agents – Insane leftist mandates – Giveaways to union bosses – Natural gas tax that’ll raise energy costs
Scalise listed two additional items in his Twitter post that time would not allow him to cover in his floor speech. The first was giveaways to union bosses.
According to the Labor Department, “Davis-Bacon Act and Related Act contractors and subcontractors must pay their laborers and mechanics employed under the contract no less than the locally prevailing wages and fringe benefits for corresponding work on similar projects in the area.” Locally prevailing wages are set by the Labor Department.
A White House fact sheet states that “the overwhelming majority of the funds in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will be subject to Davis-Bacon requirements. … These requirements will protect wages for millions of workers, grow the economy, and support good-paying, union jobs.” (Emphasis mine.)
Stand for America has warned that tying federally funded infrastructure projects to the Davis-Bacon Act will make these projects substantially more expensive and will put unions at a distinct advantage to win these coveted government construction projects. They explain that “it’s mainly unionized companies that pay prevailing wage salaries, so they’re more likely to be chosen for federally-funded construction projects.”
According to their report, “Under Davis-Bacon, the government jacks up required wages. Studies show that prevailing wages can drive the costs of projects 20% higher than market cost. As of just a few years ago, carpenters’ prevailing wages in Nassau-Suffolk, New York, were 30% above market. Electricians and plumbers’ prevailing wages were 45.5% and 58.7% above market, respectively.”
The organization also discusses the union giveaways included in the Build Back Better bill, which they said are even worse.
The final grievance on Scalise’s list was “insane left mandates.” The bill contains an abundance of insane left mandates, so I’m not exactly sure which ones he had in mind.
I imagine he was referring to the legislation’s aggressive climate-change measures. Yahoo’s senior climate editor — yes, they have a climate editor — calls the spending in this bill alone “the largest climate change investment in U.S. history.”
For example, it includes $150 billion for clean energy advancement. This is a mere drop in the bucket when one considers Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s mind-boggling estimate of $100 to $150 trillion over the next 30 years to reach “net-zero” emissions. She delivered this stunning figure in her remarks to COP26 attendees last week. ZeroHedge had the story.
No need to worry, though. Yellen has assured us that this represents the “greatest economic opportunity” of our lives.
Scalise is right. None of these items are good for America. All are intended to move the country closer to becoming a socialist state.
The passage of the reconciliation bill would bring us to the brink. Let’s hope Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia who has thus far withheld his tie-breaking support, either blocks it, which may be too much to hope for, or at least takes the most dangerous provisions out of the final bill.
This administration represents the greatest national security threat America faces today.
A $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill the Republican Study Committee criticized as “a Green New Deal Lite” just passed the House of Representatives and is headed to President Joe Biden for signature.
Considering the bill has already passed the Senate, that’s pretty big news by itself, but an even bigger issue is that the radical Green New Dealers in the Democratic House caucus didn’t think it went far enough.
And the biggest issue of all might be that it wouldn’t have passed if 13 Republicans didn’t vote for a massive spending bill that could save President Joe Biden’s Democratic agenda.
According to the New York Post, the 13 GOP members/traitors were Reps.:
Don Bacon of Nebraska
Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania
Andrew Garbarino of New York
Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio
John Katko of New York
Adam Kinzinger of Illinois
Nicole Malliotakis of New York
David McKinley of West Virginia
Tom Reed of New York
Chris Smith of New Jersey
Fred Upton of Michigan
Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey
Don Young of Alaska
Malliotakis, a Republican whose district encompasses one of the few conservative areas of New York City — Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn — said the bill would “improve the safety and prosperity of communities across America and make the necessary improvements to bring our infrastructure into the 21st century.”
“For far too long, our local, state, and federal leaders have neglected to modernize New York City’s aging infrastructure to keep pace with economic and population growth,” she said.
“The funding stream we are providing today will be used by states and cities to modernize roads, highways, bridges, sewer systems, and flood resiliency projects, including right here on Staten Island and in Southern Brooklyn.”
Other Republicans who voted for it held up the bill as a necessity. New York’s Katko posted a message to Twitter in which he said the infrastructure bill was a “win” but that he didn’t vote for the larger Democratic spending bill — the so-called “Build Back Better” plan pegged for the moment at $1.75 million.
“This bill is a win,” Katko wrote, promising the spending would deliver a “once in a generation investment in our nation’s physical infrastructure including our roads and bridges, ports and waterways, broadband networks, electrical grid, clean water systems, and airports.”
“Make no mistake: This bill is a win for Central New York. I urge the president to move swiftly in signing it into law.”
Of the 13 who voted for the bill, six were from New Jersey and New York. Another two — Ohio’s Gonzalez of Ohio and Kinzinger of Illinois — are noted anti-Trump Republicans, both retiring.
Kinzinger “defended” his vote by quote-tweeting Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene criticism of Republicans who supported the bill, then likening the new measure to President Dwight Eisenhower’s construction of the nation’s highway system.
Infrastructure=communism is a new one. Eisenhower’s interstate system should be torn up or else the commies will be able to conveniently drive! Red Dawn in real life pic.twitter.com/WTPtBYDSHx
“Infrastructure=communism is a new one,” Kinzinger quipped.
“Eisenhower’s interstate system should be torn up or else the commies will be able to conveniently drive! Red Dawn in real life.”
Kinzinger’s analysis may have tried to strike the right notes for his audience. (The original 1984 film “Red Dawn” featured American teenagers battling a Soviet takeover of the U.S. A 2012 remake featured a considerably less credible North Korean invasion.) But this bill isn’t just investing massive amounts of money for something as essential as Eisenhower’s interstate system.
If only.
As a Republican Study Group tweet noted, there was plenty of wokeness to go around in this one:
The bipartisan infrastructure proposal floating around the Senate is essentially a Green New Deal Lite.
New York’s Garbarino took lessons from the Biden media team and clamed the “infrastructure bill will not raise taxes or increase costs to American families.”
However, it would provide lots of funds to the New York City area’s infrastructure, so he’s in:
“What it will do is allocate $24.9 billion for New York Highways, bridges and transit, provide $15 billion to replace lead service lines for New York drinking water, grant $470 million to New York’s MacArthur, Republic, LaGuardia and JFK airports, and fund many other vital infrastructure projects that Long Island residents desperately need,” he said in a statement.
But it won’t raise taxes. Gotcha.
And there were others scrambling to defend themselves:
…expand broadband to underserved communities, strengthen our energy grid against Russian & Chinese cyberattacks & create jobs across SW MI…
I regret that this good, bipartisan bill became a political football in recent weeks. Our country can’t afford this partisan dysfunction any longer. #MI06#Infrastructure
Our country is an economic powerhouse in no small part due to our historical support for infrastructure projects. Perhaps more than anyone else, Alaskans know just how vital reliable infrastructure is to stay connected with one another and secure upward economic mobility.
Keep in mind that, according to the New York Post, the Democratic progressives in New York who voted against the bill — Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance — are being roundly criticized because the sweet federal government money isn’t coming home to their districts.
“I don’t know why she voted against it,” retired college professor Michael Goodman told the Post. “For decades New York has given more money than they’ve gotten back. Politics is the art of compromise. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
According to the Post, AOC was willing to vote no because she said the infrastructure bill would increase greenhouse gas emissions.
“My main concern is … we just locked in the United States to increase its climate emissions,” Ocasio-Cortez told her followers on Instagram Live. “I did not feel that I had the assurances in that moment to vote to increase U.S. climate emissions for an IOU.”
That’s fine. Probably stupid, from a party point of view, given this ordinarily would have meant the Democrats didn’t have the votes, but fine.
Should these Republicans be punished by conservative voters?
However, what’s not fine is the decision these 13 Republicans made.
This was an opportunity for these representatives to hold up Biden’s spend-a-palooza. As the Washington Examiner noted, without the six Democrats who voted against it, the Democrats shouldn’t have had enough votes. It should have been the job of Nancy Pelosi & Co. to make AOC and Bowman vote with the rest of their party or make their party blow up the bill.
Considering last week’s defeats in Virginia elections and elsewhere, as well as the closer-than-expected governor’s race in New Jersey, the Biden-Democratic agenda has not been seeing good days lately. A defeat on the infrastructure bill could have been a devastating blow to a president already on the ropes.
Instead, these Republicans saved the day for the Democrats because they either loathe where the party is going — a la Kinzinger and Gonzalez — or want that sweet, sweet federal cash to buy off their constituents.
Vermont, the state with the highest COVID-19 vaccination rate in the United States, matched a record for daily COVID-19 deaths set during a winter 2020 surge and reported a record 527 CCP virus cases on Nov. 4, according to state data tracked by Worldometers.
Six people in the state died of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, on Nov. 4, a death toll not seen since Dec. 27, 2020.
Between Aug. 25 and Nov. 3, deaths among the fully vaccinated population accounted for more than 60 percent of the state’s total COVID-19 deaths. In all, 62 of the 103 people who died during that 10-week period were fully vaccinated, according to Vermont’s vaccine breakthrough data.
The seven-day moving average of new COVID-19 cases in Vermont reached a record level in mid-September and has been trending upward since.
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott said 70 to 85 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations and intensive care unit stays have been among people who haven’t taken a CCP virus vaccine.
“Enough is enough, it’s time to step up and get vaccinated, something over 90 percent of your fellow Vermont adults have done,” Scott said, according to New England Cable News.
Vermont had less than 60 total CCP virus deaths prior to the 2020 winter surge and prior to the approval of the three CCP virus vaccines. Since then, the death toll has risen to 384 as of Nov. 6. The state has reported that 72 of the total deaths have been among people who are vaccinated against the virus.
Infections, hospitalizations, and deaths linked to COVID-19 have risen in recent months among people who have had a COVID-19 vaccine, according to newly released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But the bulk of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have occurred among unvaccinated Americans, the data show.
The rate of infections and deaths among the fully vaccinated rose by roughly tenfold from late June to mid-August, according to the CDC. The rate of CCP-virus-associated hospitalizations among the vaccinated rose by more than eightfold during the same time.
Vermont boasts the highest vaccination rate among the 50 states, with 71.6 percent of the population having been fully vaccinated.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has remained out of public sight since getting a CCP virus vaccine booster shot on Oct. 27.
The governor’s office released a surprising announcement on Oct. 29 canceling Newsom’s plans to attend the United Nations climate summit in Scotland to deal with unspecific family obligations.
The governor’s spokesperson said on Oct. 29 that Newsom planned to participate in the climate conference virtually, but a delegation schedule released later did not feature any virtual events with Newsom.
Newsom spokesperson Erin Mellon said on Thursday the governor will participate virtually in “a couple” of the climate summit events next week. The office did not respond to questions on Friday about what the governor has been doing this week.
“The governor will participate in a couple events next week focused on global efforts to advance zero emission vehicles and to move beyond oil,” Mellon said Thursday.
The governor was last seen receiving a Moderna CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus booster shot on Oct. 27. The governor’s booster was a mix-and-match with the original regimen, which was a Johnson & Johnson (J&J) shot.
“I am choosing not to do J&J today not because I had any problems with J&J, in fact it went beautifully, but to make the point about the opportunity to mix and match,” Newsom said at the time.
The California governor should have appeared before TV cameras to announce the state’s CCP virus vaccination program for children aged 5 to 11. Atypically, the announcement was made via an emailed news release instead.
Newsom submitted some prerecorded remarks to a transit conference earlier this week and his office announced some appointments to state agencies and boards. He also posted a photo on his Instagram account with his wife and four children, aged 5 to 12, dressed as pirates on Halloween.
“Hope everyone had a safe, happy Halloween!!” the governor wrote in the post.
Newsom’s Twitter account was quiet from Oct. 28 until Tuesday, when he sent posts backing fellow Democratic Govs. Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Terry McAuliffe of Virginia on Election Day. As the week went on, Newsom’s Twitter account became more active.
It’s rare, but not unprecedented, for Newsom to go a whole week without some type of appearance. Such absences are usually explained, including when Newsom leaves the state for vacation.
It’s a relatively slow time in Sacramento as the state Legislature is not in session and won’t meet again until January. Recent storms mean no major wildfires are burning out of control, as has been the case in recent years.
Thirteen Republicans jumped across the aisle late Friday night to deliver President Joe Biden a massive victory by voting with Democrats to pass his $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill while many Americans were asleep.
The New York Post reported that the final vote was 228-206, ushering in a new era of spending on infrastructure and other aspects of Biden’s agenda.
The Republican traitors who voted for the bill were Reps:
Don Young of Alaska
Adam Kinzinger of Illinois
Fred Upton of Michigan
Don Bacon of Nebraska
Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey
Andrew Garbarino, John Katko, Nicole Malliotakis and Tom Reed of New York
Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
Those Democratic votes would have been enough to block the bill if the 13 Republicans hadn’t bucked party leadership and bailed out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Deseret News reported that it includes a controversial “anti-discrimination” measure that some fear could put religious freedom at risk.
The bill passed the Senate in August but had stalled out in the House, where Pelosi did not have the votes to advance it until the GOP members joined her ranks.
A vote on Biden’s slimmed-down Build Back Better Act is scheduled to take place before Nov. 15 as part of an agreement to inch the infrastructure bill across the finish line.
That vote will take place following assurances from the Congressional Budget Office that the bill will not contribute to the national debt.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki celebrated the bill’s passage on Twitter.
Proof that delivering for the American people is worth all the painful sausage making. Clean drinking water for kids, broadband access, electric vehicles, biggest investment in public transit. It’s happening. And more to come.
“Proof that delivering for the American people is worth all the painful sausage making. Clean drinking water for kids, broadband access, electric vehicles, biggest investment in public transit. It’s happening. And more to come,” Psaki tweeted.
“Tonight, we took a monumental step forward as a nation,” Biden said in a statement on Saturday. “Generations from now, people will look back and know this is when America won the economic competition for the 21st Century.”
According to a report from Fox News on Thursday, the University of North Carolina Wilmington paid “The 1619 Project” writer and impresario Nikole Hannah-Jones over $16,500 to speak at a 55-minute event at the school this week.
“Nikole Hannah-Jones in Conversation,” which took place Tuesday, was part of the school’s “Writers Week.” On the university’s events page, it’s described as the “Department of Creative Writing’s annual celebration of the written word” where “authors, editors, students, faculty and the community join in discussions of literary craft and current issues of the profession.”
Hannah-Jones was the keynote speaker for the week. It shouldn’t be surprising that the rest of the speakers also seemed to skew left; of the other participants I knew, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino and “The House on Mango Street” author Sandra Cisneros were both identifiably liberal. Not that I expected for there to be a panel discussion of Ayn Rand’s work, but it gives one a general idea of what “Writers Week” is about.
It’s Hannah-Jones’ contract for the event that’s drawing some attention, however — particularly the reported $16,570 price tag.
The university also reportedly paid for her airfare, meals, transportation, and accommodations for two nights.
Just got to Wilmington, NC, for @UNCWilmington Writers Week, checked into my room, and I have to say, y’all know how to treat a gal. 😍 🥃 pic.twitter.com/rqDfwn4uWT
“The event consisted of a 40-minute speech from Hannah-Jones and a 15-minute Q&A period,” Fox News reported.
Is critical race theory an issue in America’s schools?
“The contract lists a 15-minute meet and greet with students, but is crossed out in the signed version of the contract.”
This, in other words, puts the event at 55 minutes — over a whopping $300 a minute for someone to peddle the bible of critical race theory, a left-wing school of thought that states America and Western societies are founded on systemic racism.
Because, make no mistake, that’s what Jones’ “1619 Project” is. In the introduction to the project, published in The New York Times, 1619 should be considered “the country’s very origin” because that’s when the first slaves arrived in America.
“Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day,” the introduction said.
“The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.”
Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize in 2o2o for her introductory essay to the project, although historians noted it was riddled with errors. Beyond the obvious lie of “reframing” our founding to 1619 for narrative reasons, several prominent historians publicly called out the Times and Jones for claims like the American Revolution was actually fought so Americans could keep their slaves.
“These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing,’” read the December 2019 letter, signed by five prominent historians — including two Pulitzer Prize winners.
“They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections of only ‘white historians’ — has affirmed that displacement.”
But never mind that. This is all about the narrative. For Hannah-Jones, that narrative could be summed up best with this delightfully race-baiting quote she gave in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in 2019.
When asked if America could change its racial trajectory, Hannah-Jones said: “Whiteness cannot exist without blackness, so until white people are willing to give up whiteness, you will never see an end, really, to racism that is built on antiblackness, and I don’t have hope for that. It is really the oldest American value, and it continues to be so.”
Last November, Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” was reportedly paid $20,000 by the University of Michigan for an hour-long virtual discussion via Zoom, according to Campus Reform.
That event, the University of Michigan said, was paid for out of the university’s general fund, which “comes from a variety of sources, including student tuition and fees, state appropriations and costs recovered from sponsored research activities.”
In the case of Hannah-Jones, UNC Wilmington told Fox News the money was covered by a “donor-supported fund managed by the department.”
Either way, it’s a nice hustle to have, being so oppressed. Of course, one is left to wonder how many economically oppressed students at these woke institutions might have benefited from that money being used on lowering tuition instead.
An Indianapolis-based public school educator and education journalist has gone viral on social media after he pushed back on the narrative that critical race theory (CRT) isn’t being taught in schools, warning concerned parents to not be deceived and to “keep looking” for its presence.
“When we tell you that our schools aren’t teaching critical race theory, that it’s nowhere in our standards, that’s misdirection,” Tony Kinnett said Tuesday in a video he shared to Twitter. He explained that he works as a science coach and administrator at Indianapolis Public Schools, Indiana’s largest school district that serves about 23,000 students.
“I’m in dozens of classrooms a week, so I see exactly what we’re teaching our students,” Kinnett said, noting that while the schools “don’t have the quotes and theories as state standards,” the teachers are incorporating the concepts of CRT into their teaching of a variety of subjects.
“We tell our teachers to treat students differently based on color; we tell our students that every problem is a result of ‘white men’ and that ‘Everything Western Civilization built is racist,’ ‘Capitalism is a tool of white supremacy,’” he continued. “Those are straight out of Kimberle Crenshaw’s main points verbatim in ‘Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement.’ This is in math, history, science, English, the arts, and it’s not slowing down.”
In June 2020, amid the nationwide unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd, the IPS adopted a racial equity resolution (pdf) to identify and correct practices and policies that may perpetuate racism, which is defined as “a white supremacy system” in which those considered white “oppress” those who are not. It also partly attributed the student achievement gaps to the district’s history of “privileging the prejudice of white parents over the interests of black and brown students.”
“If students of color have lower reading scores, it’s because of inequity,” Kinnett asserted. “Therefore, we take from the white students and give to the colored students. That’s Richard Delgado, straight out of ‘CRT: An Introduction.’”
“Parents, when we tell you critical race theory isn’t taught in our schools, we’re lying, keep looking,” he said at the end of the video.
Kinnett posted along the video screenshots of an email, which appears to show the IPS instructing school principals to tell parents and community members that CRT is not taught in their schools. He also posted slides that are allegedly used in the ISP, including one that explains some of the tenets of CRT.
Kinnett’s call to action comes as controversies around K–12 education, including the teaching of CRT and COVID-19 restrictions on campus, took center stage in many of the state- and local-level elections across the country. In Virginia’s gubernatorial race, Republican Glenn Youngkin, running on a “Parents Matter” platform, defeated former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe who said parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach. In Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and other blue states, school board seats are claimed by candidates who oppose the Marxist ideological indoctrination and support parents’ right to make medical decisions for their kids.
The Indianapolis Public Schools didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thomas Moore used to drive his truck into California to pick up cargo loads for years. He refuses to do that now.
He could tick off a mile-long list about why: overregulation, long wait times at the ports, too much traffic, and a lack of facilities for drivers.
“We just refuse to go into California,” Moore told The Epoch Times. “At 63 years old, I just can’t do it anymore.”
He’s not alone, he said.
“I would say that the numbers on that probably 10,000 per day who refuse to drive in California or New York. Just refuse to go there. They just won’t have anything to do with it,” Moore said from his home in Tuscon, Ariz., Nov. 2.
“You’re going to find a lot of anti-Biden people in truck driving but I’m not one of them. I wear a mask and I’m vaccinated.”
The ports Los Angeles and Long Beach continued to sort through a container logjam at the terminals this week as cargo ships waited for their turn to offload.
Trucker shortages were one of the many reasons blamed on the supply chain crisis that has placed the Southern California ports at center stage recently.
Vessels line the horizon waiting to offload containers into the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., on Oct. 27, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
This week, the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach implemented new fines to attempt to spur faster clearing of the backlog of containers from its terminals.
The ports will charge $100 a day for each container left for more than nine days if the container will be moved by truck. Rail carriers will be charged after six days.
Operators appeared to answer the call. According to statistics provided by the Port of Long Beach, truckers and rail carriers are making progress taking cargo out of the terminals.
“Loaded import containers dwelling 9 days or longer in port terminals numbered 25,000 one week ago, and have declined 19 percent since then, showing these containers are being taken out of terminals,” port spokesman Lee Peterson told The Epoch Times in an email.
Total imports to be loaded from the port by Sunday were expected to be nearly 115,000 and exports were expected to total 30,000. Total empties to be processed were expected to total 87,000.
Meeting Regulations
Truckers coming into the ports face some of the country’s strictest regulations at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. In California, they are restricted to moving one container at a time.
They are also restricted to driving newer trucks with engines that meet California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations.
California decided in 2008 to put a deadline on implementing emission standards for vehicles to meet the new standards, which started in January 2020.
By Dec. 31, 2022, no vehicles will be allowed on the roads that are not 2010 or newer without emission components that comply with the CARB regulations.
This has caused many truckers to steer clear of the state, Moore said.
A driver backs into a parking spot at the One9 truck stop in Wildwood, Georgia on Oct. 18, 2021. (Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times)
Another regulatory issue that makes California unappealing for Moore is the fact that he can no longer run his truck engine during the night to heat or cool his cab. The state tickets drivers who run their engines and purchasing special air conditioning and heating equipment is expensive, he said.
The auxiliary power units can cost anywhere from $8,500 to $13,000 per unit installed, according to the North American Council for Freight Efficiency. They can cost about $3,000 each year to maintain.
The small units can keep the air conditioning and heaters running inside the truck cabs without the need to run the truck engines.
In California, a driver of a diesel-fueled vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 10,000 pounds may not idle its engine for more than five minutes at any location and is not allowed to operate a diesel-fueled auxiliary power system for more than five minutes when located within 100 feet of a restricted area.
Operators of trucks equipped with sleeper berths must shut down the engine manually when idling for more than five minutes at any location and can be fined. The California Department of Motor Vehicles will not register, renew or transfer registration for any vehicle operator with a ticket until it is cleared.
A truck shortage has also caused some problems for companies and may be adding to the crisis, according to Paula Ventura of Monarch Truck Center.
“The issue is that there is a shortage of vehicles in California and across the United States at this time. The market expects that to be for the next two years,” Ventura said in a June 22 company video.
National Shortages
A change in rules for obtaining commercial driver’s licenses (CDL) has added to the national shortage of drivers, even though many opportunities exist for drivers, according to the operators of Elite Trade Academy in Dallas, Texas.
“There’s really a lot of opportunity in the truck driving industry. Drivers are so needed right now. Starting in February when the regulations changed and you have to attend an approved school, it’s really cutting down on the amount of schools available to the people who are interested in getting a CDL. Most CDL schools have a waitlist,” said co-founder Sierra Mosby, during an interview this month.
The school’s program takes about four weeks and about 200 hours of additional training to receive a commercial driving license.
American Trucking Associations’ (ATA) Chief Economist Bob Costello said Oct. 25 the current driver shortage has risen to an all-time high of 80,000.
“Since we last released an estimate of the shortage, there has been tremendous pressure on the driver pool,” Costello said. “Increased demand for freight, pandemic-related challenges from early retirements, closed driving schools and DMVs, and other pressures are really pushing up demand for drives and subsequently the shortage.”
Shipping containers wait to be transferred from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on Oct. 14, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
The ATA pointed to the high average age of drivers, the inability of drivers to pass a drug test and the increasing number of states legalizing marijuana, and the lack of truck parking spots where drivers can stop to rest.
Moore said the lack of driver accommodations was one reason he no longer took jobs in the Southern California area, especially at the ports.
The lack of parking, no facilities at the ports for drivers to use the bathrooms, the traffic, and the driving laws requiring truck drivers to stay in the right lanes that cause truckers to constantly adjust their speeds.
“I could give you a list a mile-long,” Moore told The Epoch Times. “First five years of driving, I used to do all this stuff. Now, I refuse to go to California.”
Newest Regulations
The Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners unanimously approved on Nov. 4 a program that will charge cargo owners for using trucks that don’t meet rigorous clean air standards.
The port will begin collecting fines on April 1, 2022, at $10 per container hauled by a nonexempt truck. The Port of Long Beach is also implementing the fine.
The board initiated the program to the transition of zero-emission trucks at the Port of Los Angeles.
Zero-emission trucks are exempt from the rate, along with trucks that meet or exceed California’s low nitrogen oxide standard through Dec. 31, 2027.
Loaded containers entering or leaving marine terminals by on-dock rail will also be exempt.
The rate is set to expire on Dec. 31, 2034, according to the port.
America has had it and the cracks in the veneer are showing. The expression of our outrage is heard in the chants of “Let’s Go Brandon!” at public events, seen among parents pushing back on radical educational agendas which insert trans ideology into curriculum in places like the Loudoun County school district where a trans identified male student sexually assaulted two young girls, and most recently, is explicit in the defense of Dave Chappelle by comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan of Chappelle’s latest Netflix special, “The Closer” after transactivists joined Netflix employees demanding Netflix pull his comedy special.
What do, “Let’s go Brandon!” and Dave Chappelle have in common? The catchphrase and the comedian have become targets by radical activists who seek to silence opposition, demonize detractors, and sideline anyone who threatens their radical agendas. People are done being pushed around and bullied into sitting down and shutting up.
As Gary Powell says in my latest film, “Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender?”, “One thing that is particularly striking is that as soon as anybody expresses any kind of mild criticism of extreme gender ideology or any type of considered criticism or raises any doubts, they are denigrated as transphobes and as haters.”
That is what is happening today. Parents are being labeled as domestic terrorists and Dave Chappelle is being labeled as a transphobe and charged with hate speech. Fortunately, freedom of speech is a two-way street, and main street has had enough.
Signs of hope? I see plenty. Joe Rogan immediately threw his support to Chappelle, saying, “He’s not a homophobic or transphobic person. He makes fun of himself. Look, it’s fun. It’s just making jokes. That doesn’t mean hate.”
Other high-profile celebrities have voiced their support too. Piers Morgan expressed how refreshing it was that Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos didn’t cave to the activists request to cancel “The Closer” and even trans-female identified Caitlyn Jenner, said on twitter, “Dave Chappelle is 100 percent right.”
“This isn’t about the LGBTQ movement,” Jenner said. “It’s about woke cancel culture run amok, trying to silence free speech. We must never yield or bow to those who wish to stop us from speaking our minds.”
Not only are people with influence coming to the defense of free speech, biological reality, and even comedy, but the public is also weighing in with their support and their wallets. Most recently, Chappelle, joined by his pal Joe Rogan, played to a sold-out audience in New Orleans, telling the audience, “In the middle of me being canceled, we broke the attendance record.”
Jennifer Bilek said it best, writing, “Chappelle has given everyone permission to say the unsayable, and they are saying it, and they are laughing. They are laughing because this agenda is comedy gold, and no one has been tapping it, for fear of the very ridicule some are slinging at Chappelle. This time it isn’t sticking, and Chappelle has doubled down. He is not only too big to cancel, he understands the subtext and has called it out.”
As Chappelle says in “The Closer,” “All this talk about how people feel inside. Since when has America given [expletive deleted] about how any of us feel inside? And I cannot shake the suspicion that the only reason everybody is talking about transgenders is because white men want to do it. . . .No one asked you how you felt. Come on everybody, we have strawberries to pick. It reeks of white privilege. You never asked yourself why it is easier for Bruce Jenner to change his gender than it was for Cassius Clay to change his [expletive deleted] name?”
President Biden campaigned and promised in his first 100 days in office, he’d pass the “Equality Act,” but signed an Executive Order on “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation” on day one of his presidency. The Equality Act seeks to obliterate biological realities, allowing anyone to self-identify into whatever sex they wish to be, and force the rest of us to just go along and be polite lest we be called haters and transphobes. But people aren’t having it. Let’s Go Brandon! Let’s Go Joe! And Let’s Go Dave!
Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly announced Friday she is opposed to President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for companies with 100 or more employees, saying it is not the “correct” solution.
The statement makes Kelly the first Democratic governor to officially oppose the mandate.
“Yesterday, I reviewed the new vaccine mandate from the Biden Administration. While I appreciate the intention to keep people safe, a goal I share, I don’t believe this directive is the correct, or the most effective, solution for Kansas,” Kelly said.
Kelly also expressed that the timing of the mandate is too late, as Kansas already has systems in place that work for residents.
“It is too late to impose a federal standard now that we have already developed systems and strategies that are tailored for our specific needs,” she said.
The governor said she will look for a solution that is better suited to the needs of the people of Kansas.
“I will seek a resolution that continues to recognize the uniqueness of our state and builds on our on-going efforts to combat a once-in-a-century crisis,” she said.
Should more governors oppose vaccine mandates?
Kelly is not the only leader to come out against the president’s employer vaccine mandate.
Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel released a statement on Thursday announcing the organization is suing the Biden administration over the mandate, calling it “authoritarian overreach.”
The Republican National Committee is suing the Biden admin for its forced vaccine mandate. pic.twitter.com/fm0iv5d5Zc
“Joe Biden failed to shut down the virus as he promised — he couldn’t do his job, so now he wants you to lose yours,” McDaniel said. “This mandate is yet another attack on frontline workers, first responders, small businesses, and the rights of the American people.”
“While I am pro-vaccine, the Biden administration does not have the authority to force hardworking Americans to choose between being vaccinated and providing for their families. That’s why the RNC is suing the Biden administration over this unlawful vaccine mandate and will maintain every legal option to fight this authoritarian overreach.”
South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem also posted a video on Twitter Thursday telling Biden she would be taking legal action.
“This morning, the Biden Administration released their guidance through OSHA that affects over 100 million Americans,” Noem tweeted.
This morning, the Biden Administration released their guidance through OSHA that affects over 100 million Americans.
I am announcing that today, we are joining a lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s unconstitutional vaccine mandates.@JoeBiden, see you in court. pic.twitter.com/sA3xnEIYuQ
“I am announcing that today, we are joining a lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s unconstitutional vaccine mandates. [Biden], see you in court.”
Trust, we’re told, takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair. Right now, Americans’ trust in government is low—and for good reason.
Despite months of denial, documents recently obtained by The Intercept clearly show that both the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the neighboring Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, “along with their collaborator, the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance,” knowingly engaged in “gain-of-function research.” In other words, viruses were intentionally made “more pathogenic or transmissible”—all in the name of science, of course.
As The Intercept noted, this type of research took place “despite stipulations from a U.S. funding agency that the money not be used for that purpose.”
In an interview with Newsweek, American molecular biologist Richard Ebright argued that the documents clearly show “that NIH [National Institutes of Health] grants were used to fund controversial gain-of-function (GOF) research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.” However, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a man who has been lauded by many left-leaning outlets, has vehemently denied this claim.
If Ebright is correct—and there’s plenty of reasons to think so—then Fauci lied before Congress, a felony that comes with a prison sentence of up to five years.
More worryingly, Fauci’s lie (or lies) is symptomatic of a much deeper malaise gripping the country. For the best part of two years, the American people have been gaslit by the mainstream media. Questions of the virus emerging from a lab in China’s Wuhan city have been called racist and misinformed.
In reality, ever since former President Donald Trump discussed the likelihood of the virus originating in China, left-leaning publications have gone to great lengths to say the very opposite. A deadly virus has been politicized. Because of this, no one benefited—except, of course, members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Although we can debate the exact numbers of cases and deaths, millions of people have died from COVID-19, including hundreds of thousands of Americans. Still, China is no closer to admitting fault. In fact, it’s busy pushing lies about the virus originating in Maine—yes, Maine, the easternmost state in the United States.
(Left to right) Thea Fischer, Marion Koopmans, Peter Daszak, and other members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, leave the Hilton Wuhan Optics Valley Hotel in Wuhan, China, on Jan. 29, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
The U.S. government appears to have played a major role in the creation of a deadly virus, and the mainstream media appears to have played a major role in covering up this very fact. Which begs the following question: Is this the biggest lie in U.S. history?
Lies, Inglorious Lies
According to a recent survey by academics at Chapman University in California, the thing Americans fear most are corrupt government officials. It’s easy to see why.
Eighteen years ago, the United States invaded Iraq. Why? Because, according to then President George W. Bush, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq’s neighbors and against Iraq’s people.”
This lie was an extremely costly one. As the journalist Matt Taibi noted, it “cost over a hundred-thousand lives just in Iraq and drained north of $2 trillion from the budget.” Unsurprisingly, the “most lethal weapons ever devised” or weapons of mass destruction (WMD), were not discovered, largely because they didn’t exist. Although a number of media outlets initially supported the president, and far too many were reluctant to question the invasion, by October 2004, roughly 18 months after U.S. troops arrived in Iraq, the WMD-narrative was being questioned by commentators on both sides of the political aisle.
Since the ill-advised invasion, the American people have also been sold other lies, including Russiagate, a conspiracy involving Russian “meddling” in the 2016 U.S. election. The scandal, which appears to have been created by the Clinton campaign, was devoid of any evidence whatsoever. Yet, unsurprisingly, this didn’t stop the likes of CNN and MSNBC from devoting hundreds of hours of airtime to the promotion of a fictional narrative. However, when Robert Mueller’s report arrived in the spring of 2019, it was clear, even to the blindest and most biased of individuals, that the allegations of collusion being leveled against Donald Trump were detached from actual reality.
Which brings us back to the dishonesty surrounding COVID-19, which was first detected in Wuhan almost two years ago. As the CCP rejects further inquiries into the origin of the virus, and prominent American voices continue to refuse the reality of the situation, we are no closer to holding the Chinese regime responsible. The lie continues to be given life by dishonest actors, some of whom occupy positions of significant power within the branches of government, and by others who occupy positions of significant power within branches of the mainstream media.
This lie, like the WMD lie, has been a costly one. Is it the biggest lie in U.S. history? I believe so. Sadly, unlike Iraq and Russiagate, we may never get the closure that we deserve.
A group of GOP senators criticized the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate while seeking a ban on dishonorable discharge directives for unvaccinated service members.
Sens. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), and First Liberty Institute’s general counsel, Mike Berry, held a press conference Thursday morning here they slammed President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for the military.
The senators also discussed the COVID-19 Vaccine Dishonorable Discharge Prevention Act—a bill Marshall introduced in September to prohibit dishonorable charges for service members not receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. The bill was introduced as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act FY 2022.
“I joined the Navy at 18 years old. I served as a rifleman,” Scott said during the press conference.
“I never imagined that our federal government that I took the oath to defend the freedoms of this country, will come back and say, ‘if you don’t put something in your body that you don’t feel comfortable with, right or wrong,’—and I took the vaccine, I’ve had COVID—that we’re going kick you out of the military, … and we’re going to give you a dishonorable discharge.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, on May 26, 2021. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Scott said with the dishonorable discharge, the Biden administration is trying to ruin the lives of those who choose not to get vaccinated.
A dishonorable discharge would mean that the individual would have to surrender a slew of rights and benefits, including ownership of any firearms and ammunition, access to the G.I. Bill for further education, Veterans Affairs home loans and medical benefits, military funeral honors, and reenlistment in another military branch.
“This is disgusting. It’s wrong. It needs to stop,” Scott continued.
“Joe Biden needs to start standing up for the men and women of our military instead of trashing them and tell them he’s going to ruin their lives—that’s exactly what his goal is—he is going to ruin their lives by kicking them out of the military and give him a dishonorable discharge. This needs to change.”
Wicker, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Biden has misjudged how Americans view the issue.
“Our commander in chief is grossly miscalculating the will of the American people,” Wicker said. “Not only is he going to create a crisis in the United States military, but writ large these mandates across our economy—mandates to small businesses, mandates to businesses that would contract with the federal government—they are not going to be well received,” Wicker said.
“He is going to create a shortage in the military, he is going to create morale problems, and in the economy as a whole, he is going to create a recession.”
Cramer said the vaccine mandate violates common sense and ethics.
“Scripture tells us there’s no greater love has a man than this, that he lay down his life for a friend,” Cramer said at the press conference.
“These are the kinds of people who make these decisions to sign up to serve. They have a servant’s heart. And then to disrespect that servant’s heart with this kind of a rule just violates all kinds of common sense and ethics and great traditions of our great country.”
Dishonorable discharge is “bullying” service members, Marshall told FoxNews.
“I would use the term bullying, you know, the military has its ways,” said Marshal, who spent seven years in the Army Reserve. “So I get it. They’re able to bully people if they want you to do something,” he said adding that they’re able to apply peer pressure. “And you know, it works.”
Marshall explained why he wanted to get support for his bill, a legislature trying to prohibit dishonorable discharge for unvaccinated service members.
“What really lit my fire was when I heard the White House say, we want them [to] have a dishonorable discharge,” Marshall said. “So next week is Veterans Day. We’re honoring them this week [as] the president of the United States is dishonoring our military members.”
Marshall has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
The White House stated that it “strongly opposes” the senators’ bill, saying that it would “detract from readiness and limit a commander’s options for enforcing good order and discipline when a service member fails to obey a lawful order to receive a vaccination.”
During a Sept. 28 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asked if he supports dishonorable discharges for unvaccinated service members.
“Taking a vaccine is a requirement. I’ll just leave it at that,” Austin replied at the time.
On Wednesday, Marshall and nine senators sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), pledging to oppose any legislation that would fund Biden’s vaccine mandate.
“President Biden is waging a cruel campaign to punish unvaccinated Americans—depriving them of their ability to provide for their families. This is nothing short of immoral,” the letter reads.
Schumer hasn’t provided a floor time for the National Defense Authorization Act. The delay has brought bipartisan anger against him.
Mark Tapscott and Mimi Nguyen Ly contributed to this report.
Several large business groups on Thursday said President Joe Biden’s latest COVID-19 vaccine requirement was poorly planned and would burden employers during the holiday season.
It requires employers with 100 or more employees—and, perhaps, smaller businesses—to secure proof of COVID-19 vaccination from workers or force them to get tested for the disease on a regular basis, at least once a week.
David French, a senior vice president at the National Retail Foundation, said retailers have taken “extraordinary measures” during the pandemic to protect employees and customers, including encouraging and mandating vaccination.
“Since the president’s announcement of the vaccine mandate for private industry, the seven-day average number of cases in the United States has plummeted by more than half. Nevertheless, the Biden administration has chosen to declare an ‘emergency’ and impose burdensome new requirements on retailers during the crucial holiday shopping season,” he said in a statement.
Michael Hanson, a senior executive vice president at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, said the deadline of Jan. 4, 2022, was disappointing because planning and implementation would fall “during the busiest part of the shopping season.”
Hanson also said that retailers want to serve as partners in the push to increase vaccination rates but decried the fines threatened by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which promulgated the mandate in an emergency standard.
“It pits government against private employers instead of working with them to create a safe working environment,” Hanson said.
Large groups, including the association, had urged the Biden administration to allow at least 90 days for implementation.
The National Federation of Independent Business is opposed to the standard, Karen Harned, executive director of its Small Business Legal Center, said in a statement. She said it “restricts the freedom of small business owners to decide how best to operate their own businesses and imposes unwarranted burdens on small businesses that further threaten the small business recovery.”
Some other groups backed the standard, with several claiming it should have been stricter.
“Today’s action from the Biden administration, while not going far enough, is a critical first step to keep workers safe on the job as COVID-19 dangers continue,” Marc Perrone, international president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, said in a statement.
“While we are still digesting the details of the rule, initially we are encouraged by the compliance flexibility given to employers in the standard. We especially appreciate that the administration provided a longer compliance window and made the compliance dates consistent between the OSHA ETS and the federal contractor vaccine mandates,” added Timothy Bartl, president and CEO of the JR Policy Association.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a statement saying that OSHA “made some significant adjustments” in the standard “that reflect concerns raised by the business community.”
The deadline was pushed back to align with the deadline for federal contractors that were already in place, deputy White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre told reporters during a briefing.
“We wanted to avoid confusion,” she said, later adding that the administration doesn’t think the vaccination requirements will affect the already fragile supply chain.
The standard drew multiple lawsuits just hours after it was unveiled but the White House maintains it will survive legal challenges.
Biden said in a statement that vaccine mandates are working to increase vaccination rates and claimed that they have not led to “mass firings” or “worker shortages,” even though thousands of Americans have been confirmed by various companies as quitting or getting fired over mandates. Businesses and government agencies in multiple states have likewise had to curb services due to a shortage of workers as the mandate deadlines have kicked in.
“Despite what some predicted and falsely assert, vaccination requirements have broad public support,” he said. “I’m calling on employers to act. Businesses have more power than ever before to accelerate our path out of this pandemic, save lives, and protect our economic recovery.”
Children’s natural defenses against the SARS-CoV-2 virus have largely spared them and I ask, why would we seek to bypass these defenses and threaten them?
Why vaccinate our children for this mild and typically non-consequential virus when they bring protective innate immunity towards SARS-VoV-2, other coronaviruses, and other respiratory viruses? Why push to vaccinate our children who may well be immune due to prior exposure (asymptomatic or mild illness) and cross-reactivity/cross-protection from other coronavirus (common colds)?
Many children are likely COVID-recovered and as such are immune, so why not consider assessing their immune status? Between their young age and robust innate immunity and this possibility of being COVID-recovered, it should be hands-off regarding the vaccine.
Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche writes that children’s innate immunity “normally/ naturally largely protects them and provides a kind of herd immunity in that it dilutes infectious CoV [coronavirus] pressure at the level of the population, whereas mass vaccination turns them into shedders of more infectious variants. Children/ youngsters who get the disease mostly develop mild to moderate disease and as a result continue to contribute to herd immunity by developing broad and long-lived immunity.”
This is a potentially very serious issue, for the vaccine offers children no opportunity for benefit and only potential for harms. We could end up harming thousands of our children with these vaccines, for which there’s no proper medium or long-term safety data. Below are several studies that help make the case that children must be considered “already vaccinated” and must not be touched by these vaccines.
Different Immune Response
A Yale and Albert Einstein College of Medicine report on Sept. 18, 2020, in the journal Science Translational Medicine indicates that children and adults display different immune system responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection, which helps in understating why they have far less illness or mortality from COVID-19.
“Since the earliest days of the COVID-19 outbreak, scientists have observed that children infected with the virus tend to fare much better than adults,” stated a Yale news article about the study.
Researchers reported that “levels of two immune system molecules—interleukin 17A (IL-17A), which helps mobilize immune system response during early infection, and interferon gamma (INF-g), which combats viral replication—were strongly linked to the age of the patients. The younger the patient, the higher the levels of IL-17A and INF-g, the analysis showed. These two molecules are part of the innate immune system, a more primitive, non-specific type of response activated early after infection.”
Different Physiology
The virus uses the ACE2 receptor to gain entry to the host cell, and the ACE2 receptor has less presence in the lining of the nose in young children (potentially also in upper respiratory airways); this partly explains why children are less likely to be infected in the first place, or spread it to other children or adults, or even get severely ill—the biological molecular apparatus is simply not there in the nasal cavity of children as reported eloquently by researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.
By bypassing this natural protection and entering the shoulder deltoid muscle, the vaccine, its mRNA and lipid nanoparticle content, and generated spike protein could be released into the blood circulation and could then damage the lining of the blood vessels and cause severe allergic reactions (e.g. Varga et al. 2020 in The Lancet, Nuovo et al. 2021 in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology, Ogata et al. 2021 in Clinical Infectious Diseases, and Lei et al. 2021 in Circulation Research).
Fewer Deaths from COVID-19 Compared to Other Common Causes
Statistician William Briggs looked at the rationale for vaccinating children based on their risk of death from COVID-19. He notes 542 children aged 0–17 have died (crude rate of 0.00007 per 100; 132 under 1 years old) since January 2020 with a diagnosis of COVID-19 linked to their death, according to CDC data up to Oct. 22. This doesn’t indicate whether, as Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Marty Makary has been clamoring, the death was “causal or incidental.” That said, from January 2020, 1,043 children aged 0–17 have died of pneumonia.
Briggs writes: “There is no good vaccine for pneumonia. But it could be avoided by keeping kids socially distanced from each other—permanently. If one death is ‘too many,’ then you must not allow kids to be within contact of any human being who has a disease that may be passed to them, from which they may acquire pneumonia. They must also not be allowed in any car. In one year, just about 3,091 kids 0-17 died in car crashes (435 from 0-4, 847 from 5-14, and 30% of 6,031 from 15-24). Multiply these 3,000 deaths in cars by about 1.75, since the Covid deaths are over a 21-month period. That makes about 5,250 kids dying in car crashes in the same period—10 times as many as Covid.”
Yearly, around 500 children in the United States die of seasonal influenza and there has never been a mandated vaccine.
Briggs concludes, “There exists no justification based on any available evidence for mandatory vaccines for kids.”
Different Immune Systems
Dr. Stuart Weisberg, of Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and colleagues (building on 2018 research work by Brahma Kumar and colleagues at Columbia) suggest that the reason children can more easily neutralize the virus is that their T cells are relatively naïve. They argue that since children’s T cells are mostly untrained, they can thus immunologically respond more rapidly and nimbly to novel viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 for an effective robust response.
Research published in the journal Nature Biotechnology in August 2021 deepens our understanding of this natural type biological/molecular protection even further by showing that pre-activated (primed) antiviral innate immunity in the upper airways of children works to control early SARS-CoV-2 infection.
“The airway immune cells of children are primed for virus sensing, resulting in a stronger early innate antiviral response to SARS-CoV-2 infection than in adults,” states a report on the study by Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
When one is vaccinated or gets infected naturally, this drives the formation, tissue distribution, and clonal evolution of B cells, which is key to encoding humoral immune memory. There is research evidence published in May 2021 in the journal Science that blood from children retrieved prior to the COVID-19 pandemic has memory B cells that can bind to SARS-CoV-2, suggestive of the potent role of early childhood exposure to common cold coronaviruses. This is supported by Mateus and colleagues’ October 2020 report in Science on T cell memory to prior coronaviruses that cause the common cold (known as cross-reactivity/cross-protection).
In closing, there’s very little risk and no data or evidence or science to justify any of the COVID-19 vaccinations in children. Can the content of these vaccines cross the blood-brain barrier in children? We don’t know for it wasn’t studied. Recklessly so. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Food and Drug Administration are all going along with this push when there’s no sound medical justification for this. In my opinion, based on the science and all the data collected across 19 months, under no circumstances should we expose children to the risk of the COVID-19 vaccinations. To consider putting healthy children at risk so as to protect adults is illogical, irrational, perverse, and reckless. There’s no proper safety data.
The focus rather has to be on early treatment and testing (sero-antibody or T-cell testing) to establish who is a credible candidate for these injections if properly ethically informed and consented to, for it’s also harmful to layer inoculation on top of existing COVID-recovered, naturally acquired immunity (as studies are showing).
What does all of this mean? We could end up harming our children. Liability protection should be taken off the table. Government officials and vaccine companies must stand to be at risk too, not only our children. Don’t touch our children unless you’re 100 percent sure that any drug or vaccine is safe. These vaccines have not been shown to be. They aren’t needed based on the risk to children from COVID-19—near zero! Consider them already vaccinated. Leave them alone.
As the Gateway Pundit points out in a new report, children are actually at a higher risk for dying from drowning, the flu, or from car accidents than they do from contracting the coronavirus. Kids aren’t even forced to take the flu shot, but here we have Pfizer and the FDA, along with other government agencies trying their best to force this vaccine on kids. In fact, when you look at the data, more kids have been shot this year in Chicago than have died from COVID across the United States.
However, Pfizer sees an opportunity to put more green in their pockets by targeting this massive demographic of potential test subjects (that’s what they are, make no mistake about it) so they are going all in with this new ad campaign.
The Republican House Doctors Caucus is calling on Dr. Eric Rubin, a professor at Harvard Medical School, to retract statements he made during the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) panel discussion on whether to endorse Pfizer and BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines for children aged 5 to 11.
During the October panel discussion, Rubin said, “And yet, we’re worried about a side effect that we can’t measure yet, but it’s probably real.” Adding, “But we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to Dr. Rubin at the Harvard Medical School for a clarification on his comment.
Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) led the group of House Republican Doctors in sending a letter to Dr. Rubin on Thursday calling on him to correct the comments he made during the panel discussion.
Rubin was part of a panel of independent advisers to the FDA who on Oct. 29 granted emergency-use authorization of Pfizer’s jab for children 5–11 after its advisory panel, except for one abstention, recommended doing so. The panel was in agreement with Pfizer’s own data that the vaccine is 90.7 percent safe for children.
Dr. Rubin said there is much more to learn about the vaccine as it relates to children.
“I agree with Dr. Cohn we want to save the kids … and I do think that it will be useful to have a lot more information though, to determine how best to deploy the vaccine. So, … we ended up sort of in between, we decided to vote for it with a lot of heavy consciences, but I’m hoping that is the start of learning more about it.”
In response to Rubin, the GOP doctors wrote, “Yet your comments suggest we subject a vulnerable population to vaccination to gain a greater understanding of the vaccines’ efficacy. This highly immoral and unbelievably reckless statement will cause lasting harm to [Americans’] trust in our medical community, science and the sanctity of individual medical decisions.”
Meanwhile, top Democratic leader Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised the FDA for authorizing the vaccine for children.
“Congress and the country are grateful to our scientists and health officials, who worked quickly and carefully to ensure that the Pfizer vaccine is safe and effective for our youngest Americans,” said Pelosi in a press statement and added that this will allow full community engagement.
On Nov. 2 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended practically every child in the United States between 5 and 11 get Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky made the recommendation following advice from the agency’s vaccine advisory panel.
“Together, with science leading the charge, we have taken another important step forward in our nation’s fight against the virus that causes COVID-19,” Walensky said in a statement.
The GOP lawmakers are calling on Rubin to correct his comments and publicly retract his statements or resign from the FDA.
A group of Republican lawmakers are planning to introduce a resolution to strike down President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate after the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) released its emergency temporary standard requiring businesses with 100 or more workers to have their workers get vaccinated or submit to regular testing for COVID-19.
In a statement issued on Thursday, House Education and Labor Committee Republican Leader Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) confirmed that GOP lawmakers on her committee will “introduce immediately a Congressional Review Act resolution to nullify OSHA’s ’emergency’ rule when it is received by Congress.”
Biden’s rule (pdf) will go into effect on Jan. 4 in a bid to raise vaccination rates and get more people back to work. However, a significant number of trade groups have issued warnings about the mandate, saying that it would exacerbate supply chain bottlenecks and staffing shortages nationwide—leading some association presidents to ask the White House to delay the rule until after the holiday season.
Employers are not required to provide or pay for tests, and the rule offers medical and religious exemptions. Unvaccinated people have to wear masks while on the job, the rule stipulates.
Those who do not comply with the mandate will result in an approximately $14,000 fine per violation with a scale that increases with several violations, according to the rule. It’s not clear what penalty will be handed down for workers who don’t wear face masks and who are not vaccinated.
A senior Biden administration official said Thursday that the White House believes the mandate will spur vaccinations across the United States.
“Thousands of employers have answered the president’s call and stepped up to implement vaccination requirements covering tens of millions of Americans,” the official said.
After Biden announced the mandate on Sept. 9, a number of Republican governors and attorneys general promised to file lawsuits against the rule. So far, more than a dozen GOP-led states have sued the administration over a related but separate mandate that federal contractors and workers get the vaccine.
And on Wednesday, a group of Republican senators sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) signaling their intention to block funding for the vaccine mandate.
“We will oppose all efforts to implement and enforce it with every tool at our disposal, including our votes on spending measures considered by the Senate,” the letter led by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) read. “To be sure, we agree that countless Americans have benefitted from the protection offered by the COVID-19 vaccines. Nevertheless, the decision whether to be vaccinated against COVID-19 is a highly personal one that should never be forced upon individuals by the federal government.”
A seasoned boxer senses weakness in an opponent and quickly seeks advantage. China senses weakness in the U.S., because it’s plain to see, and has already begun taking advantage.
Hours after Biden cowered in front of the world at the UN Climate Change Conference — stating he wants competition, not conflict, with China — the Pentagon warned that China could have “at least” 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030. China will also expand their number of silos capable of launching rockets, as reported by the Daily Mail.
“I’ve made it clear, this is competition. It does not have to be conflict,” Biden said at a news conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Does Biden want to seek a nuclear arms race with China? If so, it looks like China is game.
The international stage would have been an ideal place for Biden to shame China about human rights violations concerning the Uyghurs, aggression against Taiwan or unleashing COVID on the world. Instead, he complained about China’s lack of attendance and repeated, “There is no reason there needs to be conflict,” and that he expects Xi to play by the rules.
Or else what? China looks like they are playing smash-mouth football and are willing to do what is necessary to dominate the globe.
Competition is a type of conflict — unless you give blue ribbons to everybody that participates in the game, that is. China does not appear to be interested in a game that encourages mediocrity. They are looking to win.
According to the 2021 DOD Military and Security Report on China, the “PRC’s strategy aims to achieve ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ by 2049 to match or surpass U.S. global influence and power, displace U.S. alliances and security partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region and revise the international order to be more advantageous to Beijing’s authoritarian system and national interests.”
While the Biden administration focuses on COVID mandates, transgender admirals, trillion-dollar socialist tax-and-spend packages and threatening angry parents who call out the wickedness in Critical Race Theory with domestic terrorism, China’s National Radio and Television Administration recently instituted new measures to keep “effeminate” men off Chinese screens, according to The Daily Wire.
Is China poised to dominate America?
Chinese regulators push programming to “vigorously promote excellent Chinese traditional culture, revolutionary culture, and advanced socialist culture” on television and the internet to realize President Xi Jinping’s plans for “national rejuvenation” by creating a more “patriotic atmosphere” for viewers.
Back in the U.S.A? Domestic terrorism is a top concern. The January 6 riot is amped up into an “insurrection,” though the only person who was shot was unarmed Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt. CRT’s sole purpose seems to be to engender hatred and suspicion among American citizens based on the color of someone’s skin.
And the list goes on: Down with the patriarchy. Systemic racism. Down with the police. Blah, blah, blah. Are leftists competing with China on who can be the better Marxist by undermining Western traditional culture? To make way for what? An authoritarian political scheme?
Instead of patriotism and unity, leftists promote confusion, intolerance, division and hatred.
Our Founders realized that disunity at home would allow hostile foreign governments to further sow the seeds of discontent and pluck American sovereignty from the withering tree of democracy.
Make no mistake, China senses the Biden administration’s weakness. They’ll do their best to take advantage of it.
China’s intentions to build a massive nuclear arsenal meshes with the fact they successfully tested an orbital, hypersonic delivery system in the last several weeks. This means that China has one of the most sophisticated delivery systems on Earth, if not the most advanced. Now, they’re going to make the nukes to arm it.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill Thursday to prohibit the federal government from requiring COVID-19 vaccines for children.
Cruz introduced the bill as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.
“Parents should have the right to decide what is best for their children in consultation with their family doctor,” Cruz said in a news release.
“My view on the COVID-19 vaccine has remained clear: no mandates of any kind.”
NEW: Sen. Cruz Introduces Bill To Block The Federal Government And Public Schools From Mandating Covid-19 Vaccines For Kidshttps://t.co/nt9bd14m3D
Cruz noted President Joe Biden has repeatedly ignored the medical privacy rights and personal liberties of Americans when it comes to vaccine mandates.
The senator said his goal is to keep the government out of decisions related to a child’s health.
“President Biden and his administration have repeatedly ignored medical privacy rights and personal liberty by pushing unlawful and burdensome vaccine mandates on American businesses, and now they are preparing to push a mandate on kids by pressuring parents — all without taking into account relative risk or the benefits of natural immunity,” Cruz said.
Should kids be protected from COVID-19 vaccine mandates?
“I am proud to introduce this legislation today to ensure President Biden and his administration stay out of decisions related to a child’s health — decisions best left to parents.”
Cruz’s bill will prohibit “the federal government and any recipient of federal funding from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and/or the CDC at the state, local, Tribal, or territorial level from requiring any individual aged 18 or younger from requiring a COVID-19 vaccine.”
As a result, school districts would not be able to impose a vaccine mandate for students under 18 without losing Title IV, Part A and Title II, Part A funding.
Under the bill, parental consent would be required for the vaccination of a minor using any COVID vaccine that is fully approved or authorized for emergency use.
On Tuesday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky endorsed the recommendation from the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for children 5 to 11 years old to be vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech pediatric vaccine.
“CDC now expands vaccine recommendations to about 28 million children in the United States in this age group and allows providers to begin vaccinating them as soon as possible,” the CDC’s statement said.
The statement also noted the effectiveness of the vaccine in clinical trials.
“Vaccination, along with other preventative measures, can protect children from COVID-19 using the safe and effective vaccines already recommended for use in adolescents and adults in the United States. Similar to what was seen in adult vaccine trials, vaccination was nearly 91 percent effective in preventing COVID-19 among children aged 5-11 years,” the statement said.
“In clinical trials, vaccine side effects were mild, self-limiting, and similar to those seen in adults and with other vaccines recommended for children. The most common side effect was a sore arm.”
“Together, with science leading the charge, we have taken another important step forward in our nation’s fight against the virus that causes COVID-19,” Walensky said. “We know millions of parents are eager to get their children vaccinated and with this decision, we now have recommended that about 28 million children receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
“As a mom, I encourage parents with questions to talk to their pediatrician, school nurse or local pharmacist to learn more about the vaccine and the importance of getting their children vaccinated.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has issued a federal rule mandating COVID-19 vaccinations or weekly testing for companies with 100 or more employees while also seeking comments about potential parts of the rule that could force massive government overreach into American lives.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro highlighted the Request for Comment section of OSHA’s document announcing the emergency temporary standard, which featured seven authoritarian aspects of the ETS that could become part of a permanent rule.
OSHA standards are required to be replaced by a permanent regulation after six months, according to Bloomberg.
So, OSHA is promulgating this insanely authoritarian regulation on an emergency temporary basis. They’re seeking to make a rule permanent. Here are the questions they are asking about when formulating a permanent rule:
The seven areas OSHA sought comments about included sweeping, invasive suggestions like the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for companies with under 100 employees.
Questions in the document included, “How much time would it take, what types of costs would you incur, and how much would it cost for you to implement [vaccination and/or testing requirements]?”
7. Social distancing, physical barriers, and further ventilation requirements. In other words, this is only the beginning of the authoritarianism. If made permanent, the OSHA rule would be far more onerous. They could push a national vaccination AND mask mandate.
Another section asked whether fully vaccinated people should be required to wear masks in the workplace.
“Should portions of the rule, such as face coverings, apply to fully vaccinated persons?” OSHA’s document asked.
The third area of consideration involved no exceptions for natural immunity.
“Given scientific uncertainty and limitations in testing for infection and immunity, OSHA is concerned that it would be infeasible for employers to operationalize a standard that would permit or require an exception from vaccination or testing and face covering based on prior infection with COVID-19,” the document said.
The fourth area discussed the potential to remove testing as an alternative to vaccination.
“Should OSHA impose a strict vaccination mandate (i.e., all employers required to implement mandatory vaccination policies as defined in this ETS) with no alternative compliance option?” OSHA asked.
The fifth area asked questions about testing employees more than once per week.
“Should OSHA require testing more often than on a weekly basis?” it asked.
The sixth area addressed quality standards for masks.
“Are there particular workplace settings in which face coverings meeting one standard should be favored over another?” OSHA asked, suggesting only masks meeting a certain quality standard would be acceptable in the workplace.
The seventh area included other “controls against SARS-CoV-2 transmission recommended by OSHA and the CDC.”
The open-ended list included ongoing social distancing, physical barriers and specifics such as ventilation requirements for businesses, suggesting a potential addition of requirements for American businesses.
The Republicans MUST push Democrats in the Senate for a Congressional Review Act vote. Today. Force the Democrats to sign onto this authoritarian nonsense.
After posting about OSHA’s detailed requests for recommendations in its 490-page document, Shapiro concluded, “The Republicans MUST push Democrats in the Senate for a Congressional Review Act vote. Today. Force the Democrats to sign onto this authoritarian nonsense.”
Despite there being only one vaccine in the country approved for children between the ages of 5 and 11, San Francisco is already looking at the day in the not-too-distant future when a vaccine mandate will apply to those children.
On Tuesday, federal officials gave final approval for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to be given to children aged 5 to 11.
Moderna has developed a shot for children between 6 and 11, but it has not even asked the Food and Drug Administration for approval yet because its vaccine for adolescents aged 12-17 is being held up over concerns that it is linked to a higher-than-normal number of cases of heart inflammation.
Johnson and Johnson is in the process of studying the impact of a vaccine on adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17.
San Francisco currently forces anyone 12 and older to prove they are vaccinated against COVID to enter indoor establishments including bars, restaurants, clubs, and gyms. A vaccine mandate would require children to also show proof of vaccination to enter many businesses and public places.
City Health Officer Dr. Susan Philip said during a Tuesday town hall that a proof-of-vaccination mandate for children is an idea on the horizon and could be implemented early next year, according to SFGate.
“We definitely want to wait and make sure that children have an opportunity to get vaccinated,” Philip said.
“That will happen no sooner than about eight weeks after the vaccine is available to kids. So there will be a limited time in which there will not be those requirements, but then at some point, 5- to 11-year-olds will also have to show proof of vaccination to access some of those same settings.”
During the debate over authorizing the vaccine for children, some voiced concern that mandates would follow.
Do you trust these vaccines for children?
“I am just worried that if we say yes, then the states are going to mandate administration of this vaccine for children to go to school. And I do not agree with that,” Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine, said during the FDA vaccine committee meeting last week, according to U.S. News and World Report.
“I think that would be an error at this time.”
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has indicated that the Biden administration will push to have children vaccinated.
“We know that vaccination eligibility for our elementary-aged students would be a game changer,” Cardona told the outlet in September. “Not only would it help us keep our schools open and have less quarantining and closures, but it would also help parents breathe a lot easier and increase confidence in communities that their schools are safe.”
Erin Gauch, of Middletown, Rhode Island, said concerns over side effects give her pause, according to The New York Times.
“I’m looking at a 9-year-old and if I make a bad decision and he ends up with some debilitating side effects or lifelong adverse reaction, I don’t think I could live with that,” she said.
“If we ultimately decide not to get my youngest vaccinated right now, I guess I’ll be subjected to mommy shaming but I’ll just have to deal with it.”
Pro-vaccine parent Abby Cooper of Bergen County, New Jersey, said the issue defines who is and is not in her circle of friends, and those who do not get their children vaccinated are no longer welcome.
“Their kids are going to school with my kids and putting them at risk for no reason. It’s very upsetting. So, sadly, I’ve lost friends over this,” she said.
A dozen violent male prisoners in Scotland who identify as transgender have been relocated to women’s prisons over the past 18 months, according to a review by corrections officials in the United Kingdom.
The Times of London reported that, through an official request from the Scottish Prison Service for transparency, the agency admitted that it had indeed moved men convicted of violent crimes — including sex crimes — into close quarters facilities with women. If that news isn’t shocking enough, 11 out of 12 of the men who were moved in with women had not even undergone procedures to “transition.”
They had simply identified as the opposite sex and were cleared to bunk with physiologically smaller and less physically imposing women.
Thankfully, the revelation brought on by opponents of having the state force women to share living spaces with convicted and dangerous men might lead to some reforms. That’s what Dr. Kate Coleman, the director of a group called Keep Prisons Single Sex, hopes.
“The evidence clearly indicates that where prisoners of the male sex, no matter how they identify, are held in women’s prisons, women in prison are negatively impacted,” Coleman told the Times. “I trust that the SPS will pay heed to that fact.”
The SPS’ experiment with housing men who identify as transgender in women’s prisons began in 2014.
One former governor of the Cornton Vale prison for women in Sterling told the Times that prison officials understand the stakes for women who are confined to facilities, such as the one she oversaw.
“My experience is that it is always an issue to have trans women in with female prisoners and you have to think beyond the obvious which is physical or sexual threat, which is sometimes an issue, to the very fact of the presence of male-bodied prisoners among vulnerable women causes them distress and consternation,” Rhona Hotchkiss said.
The SPS was less than transparent with regard to speaking about the specifics of just how many men are currently an added stressor for women serving time after having been convicted of crimes in Scotland.
Do you think Western culture will eventually grow tired of the transgender movement?
A spokesperson for the prison system offered a vague statement that risks are taken into account before men are sent to share spaces with women.
“All cases are treated on an individual basis and are risk-assessed through a multi-disciplinary case conference, transgender case conference supported by transgender policy,” the spokesperson said. “Any decisions about the location of transgender prisoners are only made after an individual risk assessment has taken place. This process considers the risks potentially presented both to and by the individuals.”
“We take very seriously our duty of care towards all in our custody. We also undertake regular prison surveys, which includes a focus on the experience and needs of the people in our care — this is an important part of the SPS’ evidence base for policy,” the SPS official concluded.
The official did not disclose if any incidents have occurred since men were given the option of serving time with women.
Women tend to be the victims any time the “transgender” movement acquires more “rights.” Despite being convicted of crimes, women, even in prison, deserve safety from violence or sexual assault at the hands of men who are either confused or taking advantage of the loopholes being offered by a culture that has lost its way.
Women, just like men, must navigate hazards to both physical and mental health once sent to prison if they are to ever re-enter society. They don’t deserve to have the added stress of being surrounded by potentially predatory men.
When they serve their sentences, they deserve the dignity to walk out free, and they’re owed as much protection as possible by prison officials. Perhaps the light shed on this issue by advocates for common sense will force the SPS and the Scottish government to bend to common sense.
Men, especially those convicted of sex crimes, have no place in women’s prisons. Rather than empower them to potentially behave as big fish in small ponds, prison officials need to ensure these people remain in men’s prisons, which is where they belong.
Minnesota has seen in the latest school board elections a number of wins by candidates opposing critical race theory and COVID-19 restrictions, including in areas that traditionally vote Democrats.
In Anoka-Hennepin, Minnesota’s largest school district serving some 38,000 students and 248,000 residents, Matt Audette won by a margin of over 30 percent. The only key issue on Audette’s campaign website is preventing the infiltration of CRT, which he said divides students based on their skin color and teaches that the most important aspect of their humanity is not their character, morality, or actions, but their race.
While CRT is not incorporated as part of the curriculum in Anoka-Hennepin schools, the district has partnered with the Midwest and Plains Equity Assistance Center, an organization that promotes “anti-racism education” to analyze and address supposed “systemic racism” and inequity. “The school district did take a side, and they are siding with CRT,” Audette warned. “The use of this equity analysis in our schools will affect staff development, and it will eventually get into the classrooms.”
Instead of teaching “concepts of division and guilt” derived from CRT, Audette said he supports teaching about not only racism, but also achievements and successes in racial equality in the history of the United States. He also supports giving parents “complete access” to curriculum on demand.
A special one-year seat on the Alexandria School Board went to Maureen Eigen, who said in October that she opposes CRT because it “does not empower students of color” and “furthers segregation.”
“I don’t oppose CRT because of any political agenda. I oppose it because it’s not right,” she added.
In Lakeville, Cinta Schmitz narrowly won a special election for an open school board seat. A co-founder of local parental group “Informed Fully-Awake Parents,” Schmitz ran on a platform of allowing parents to make decisions for their kids when it comes to wearing masks and receiving COVID-19 vaccines.
“Keep divisive policies that teach racism and intolerance of people with different ethnic backgrounds or skin colors—whether it’s called CRT or any other equity-related term—out of our schools,” her campaign website reads.
The Minnesota wins could be suggesting a nationwide trend, too, according to the 1776 Project PAC, a political action group with the aim to combat CRT in K–12 education and help elect conservatives to school boards in the United States. The PAC reports that as of Wednesday, 44 of the 58 candidates it endorsed have either won or are leading in their school board races.
The 44 candidates backed by the PAC include 13 in Pennsylvania, with four of them sweeping seats in Perkiomen Valley School District, which serves the powerful Democratic bastion of Montgomery County. Also among them are 11 in Colorado, nine in Kansas, four in New Jersey, three in Virginia, and two each in Minnesota and Ohio.
The Biden administration’s emergency COVID-19 vaccination requirement released today could be expanded in the future to employers who have fewer than 100 workers.
The emergency temporary standard, issued by the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and scheduled to go into effect on Friday, is presented as only applying to firms that have 100 or more employees.
But OSHA is seeking public comments on that aspect of the standard, and it may be ultimately expanded to include smaller businesses, the agency said in the 490-page document.
OSHA said it is “soliciting stakeholder comment and additional information to determine whether to adjust the scope of the ETS,” or emergency standard, “to address smaller employers in the future.”
The agency is seeking perspectives from employers, it indicated (pdf).
“OSHA seeks information about the ability of employers with fewer than 100 employees to implement COVID-19 vaccination and/or testing programs,” it said.
“Have you instituted vaccination mandates (with or without alternatives), or requirements for regular COVID-19 testing or face covering use? What have been the benefits of your approach? What challenges have you had or could you foresee in implementing such programs? Is there anything specific to your industry, or the size of your business, that poses particular obstacles in implementing the requirements in this standard? How much time would it take, what types of costs would you incur, and how much would it cost for you to implement such requirements?”
The standard takes effect on Friday but also serves as a proposal under the Occupational Safety and Health Act. That means OSHA is seeking feedback and may adjust the finalized version based on the comments.
The standard forces many private employers to require proof of COVID-19 vaccination from workers or submit to COVID-19 testing on a regular basis, at least once a week.
Workers who refuse to provide proof must be compelled to wear masks.
The deadline to comply is Jan. 4, 2022.
Administration officials assert OSHA has the authority to promulgate such a rule because the COVID-19 pandemic presents an emergency and the agency is bestowed powers through the OSH Act.
Critics say the regulation is government overreach and outside the authority of OSHA. Dozens of attorneys general have vowed to sue over the standard and Republican members of Congress are gearing up to try to strike it down.
Penalties for noncompliance include a $14,000 fine for a single violation, an administration official told reporters in a call late Wednesday.
Firefighters, nurses, and other so-called frontline workers are being fired or facing termination across the country for not complying with COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
“It’s a great disservice to fire people—nurses, doctors, firemen, policemen—who put their life at risk when there was no vaccine at all,” he told NTD’s “The Beau Show.”
Officials in New York City and other locales that have imposed vaccine requirements say they will help decrease community spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, though the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines against infection has dropped sharply in recent months.
“In terms of COVID, we are one of the safest places in America, because we have one of the highest levels of vaccination,” Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, told reporters on Wednesday.
Paul disagrees, particularly because many mandates lack opt-outs for those who have had COVID-19 and recovered. That means they have some level of protection against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, many studies have shown.
“Many of them got COVID while taking care of people. The doctors and nurses caught COVID from their patients. Most of them survived, fortunately. They now have immunity and all the science—102 studies—show that you have immunity if you’ve had the disease naturally,” he told NTD.
NTD is part of the Epoch Media Group.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledges natural immunity, or protection bestowed by having COVID-19, but asserts even those with it should get a vaccine for an extra boost.
“We do know that after nearly all infectious diseases, you have some protection from getting that infection again, but we don’t really know how long that lasts or how robust it is,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s head, told reporters on Wednesday.
Critics argue those points are largely the same for vaccines and note that many of the studies suggest the level of protection is similar to or even superior to vaccination.
“What kind of discriminatory policies do we have in place that are excluding someone like me from the workplace when I’m 99.8 percent protected against reinfection, whereas someone who got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, by the company’s own data that they submitted to the FDA, is 67 percent protective against COVID infection?” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who was suspended by the University of California, Irvine for not getting a vaccine, told The Epoch Times last month.
Paul, a doctor, said that “nothing’s perfect, but your immunity is as good as the vaccine.”
“And there’s no reason for the government to be mandating a vaccine, particularly on people who’ve already had the disease,” he added.
Obviously, some books are better than others. This is something everyone should understand. A well-written book that tackles profound themes is far more likely to stand the test of time than a poorly written book that deals with superficial topics.
For example, Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” is a literary classic. That’s because it portrays the reality of slavery in the Antebellum South in a way that few other books have done. One cannot read that book without being deeply moved by the injustice of slavery.
However, “Huckleberry Finn” also contains inappropriate language, including a deeply offensive racial slur. As a result, some educators think that this book should not be held in school libraries or used in classrooms. That would be a mistake.
The problem with judging authors of the past by today’s cultural standards is that virtually no one measures up. This is why there is such a push among progressive educators to replace classical literature with contemporary books written by authors who espouse the “correct” ideology using the “correct” words—at least by today’s standards.
One can only wonder whether any authors from this century will measure up to whatever the prevailing ideology is several centuries from now.
At a recent meeting of the Waterloo Region District School Board, for example, the superintendent of human resources and equity announced that the board was in the process of reviewing every single book in school libraries. According to this superintendent, libraries haven’t been removing “inappropriate” books quickly enough.
“We recognize as our consciousness around equity, on oppression work and anti-racist work has grown, we recognize some of the texts in the collections that we have are not appropriate at this point,” stated the superintendent.
Not only is this verbiage typical of the gobbledygook often spouted at school board meetings, but it also reveals a profound lack of understanding of what education is all about. The notion that some books must be censored because they no longer conform to modern cultural standards is the antithesis of helping students become critical readers and thinkers.
It is only by exposing students to a wide variety of perspectives that we can help them become well-educated. The reality is that students are going to encounter ideas that challenge their core beliefs, whether we want them to or not. The only question is whether we want them to grapple with challenging concepts while in a classroom, or whether we think it’s better for them to just try to figure things out on their own after they complete school.
In addition, there is a world of a difference between culling library books due to space considerations and removing books because they might contain offensive material. Obviously, libraries have only a limited amount of space and it makes sense to remove books that no one is reading. On the other hand, it would be a travesty to remove excellent books such as “Huckleberry Finn” solely because they contain offensive language or reflect outdated cultural norms.
This does not mean that school libraries should be places where anything goes. Younger students should not have easy access to books with graphic sexual content, nor should school libraries be expected to stock books that promote blatantly false information (such as the works of prominent Holocaust deniers).
Unfortunately, censorship is becoming increasingly common in schools. For example, there has long been a concerted campaign to remove Dr. Seuss’s books from school libraries and classrooms because these books contain images and statements that are clearly inappropriate by modern-day standards.
However, a better approach would be to use these books as an opportunity for a teachable moment. Students should not only have access to classic literature but they should also be expected to study it and critique it. If students are going to grapple with challenging concepts, it’s best they do so by reading literature that has stood the test of time, and with the guidance of an effective teacher.
Hopefully, school trustees start pushing back against the woke ideology that undermines our kids’ education. There is a whole world of good literature for students to explore. Let’s not shelter our kids from reality.
Censorship is a poor way to promote literacy. If we want students to become good readers and thinkers, they need to read quality literature—including books that challenge their way of thinking.
Lawmakers say Virginia election results show parents want government out of schools
After education issues proved crucial to Republicans’ upset victories in Virginia, GOP lawmakers are turning their attention to Democratic plans to put the federal government in charge of education.
Buried in the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act is a plan to nationalize preschool programs and place them under the direction of the Education Department. The bill would require governors to submit learning standards for preschoolers for the secretary of education’s approval, which detractors say would further the Biden administration’s reach into public schools across the country.
According to Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), the plan to increase federal oversight of preschools is a natural extension of Democrats’ “far-left socialist tax and spending spree.”
“It gives the Biden administration complete control to approve the early education standards being taught to three to four years olds,” Stefanik said at a roundtable Wednesday hosted by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.). She pointed to Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s (R.) successful appeal to parents to show that the Biden administration is “out of touch” with what Americans want in schools.
The Biden administration has repeatedly tried to extend federal control over public education. The Education Department in April proposed a rule to prioritize federal funding for education groups that help schools create lessons for elementary students based on “antiracism” and the New York Times‘s controversial 1619 Project. The Washington Free Beacon reported last month that the White House communicated with the National School Boards Association before the group petitioned the Justice Department to investigate concerned parents, whom it likened to “domestic terrorists.”
Stefanik also noted that Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in September refused to say whether parents were a “primary stakeholder” in their children’s education. The round table discussion was focused on the Biden administration’s attempts to keep parents out of children’s education. Also present were Republican representatives Virginia Foxx (N.C.), Julia Letlow (La.), and Burgess Owens (Utah).
Foxx slammed Democrats for focusing on radical social issues rather than falling test scores.
“If you have a federal takeover of education, what you’re going to have is drag queen story hour instead of a math one,” she said.
Some speakers at Wednesday’s event seemed buoyed by Youngkin’s win over Democratic nominee and former governor Terry McAuliffe, who drew ire for saying parents shouldn’t have a say in what their children learn.
“It’s just the clear optics that McAuliffe had Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation for Teachers union, at his final rally. And then he lost,” Ginny Gentiles, a school choice advocate said. “That is very clear evidence that that power was surpassed by the power of parents who want something different.”
Still, Parents Defending Education founder Nicki Neily warned that Youngkin’s victory will not stop Democrats from attempting to radicalize education.
“As we saw in the House and Senate Judiciary oversight hearings, I do not think they will be walking this back. We are seeing them double down,” Neily said.
None of Virginia’s Democratic representatives responded to a Free Beacon inquiry regarding their stance on the education items in the legislation.
The Build Back Better Act has hit repeated snags on the way to the House floor. Whether or not it comes to a vote, however, Stefanik says the reconciliation bill misses the mark.
“Today’s Democratic Party believes that the government knows better than parents when it comes to what is right for their kids,” Stefanik said. “We know that is not a message that resonates with America.”
New scientific findings in the prestigious Lancet Infectious Diseases journal blow a hole in the argument that workers need to get vaccinated to protect those around them. The findings prove the foolishness of forcing police and other public employees to get jabbed or lose their pay. And President Joe Biden should retract his order to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to compel large employers to mandate vaccines.
The journal reported Thursday that COVID-19 vaccines have “minimal” impact on preventing transmission of the delta strain. Delta is the COVID strain currently causing over 99 percent of U.S. cases.
Vaccines protect the people getting the shots from serious illness, but they don’t stop the delta variant from spreading to others.
Don’t get me wrong. Americans should choose to get vaccinated. The key word is “choose.” Though shots are no guarantee against getting infected and spreading it to others, they provide significant protection (90 percent or more) against hospitalization and death. I’m triple jabbed.
Choosing not to get vaccinated is choosing to risk your own life. The health risk to others is minimal.
Most vaccines—against polio, smallpox, measles, and other diseases—prevent infection and spread. But not COVID-19 vaccines. Now that the battle is against the delta variant, they’ve become disease-tamers rather than infection preventers.
Tell that to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who gave New York City employees until Monday to get at least one shot or be sent home without pay. As of Monday, 9,000 are on unpaid leave because they have refused the shots. Twenty FDNY companies were shuttered because many of New York’s bravest refuse the vaccine. Police Commissioner Dermot Shea claims the mandate will not further diminish the number of New York’s finest on the street. That remains to be seen.
Governors and mayors from Maine to Los Angeles are demanding that public employees, and even nurses and doctors, hailed just months ago as heroes, get vaxxed or go without a job.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills says, “just as vaccination defeated smallpox and vaccination defeated polio, vaccination is the way to defeat COVID-19.” Sorry, Governor, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Just as politicians don’t read the bills before voting on them, they don’t keep up with science but still want to tell the rest of us what to do.
The groundbreaking findings in Lancet show that fully vaccinated people who came down with COVID infected others in their household at the same rate (about 25 percent) as unvaccinated people did (about 23 percent). The vaccinated had just as much viral load in their upper respiratory tract, making them just as contagious. “Our findings show that vaccination alone is not enough to prevent people from being infected with the delta variant and spreading it,” study co-author Ajit Lalvani said.
The British researchers also found that vaccinated people were only somewhat less likely to contract the virus (25 percent) compared with the unvaccinated (38 percent). That conflicts with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data showing the vaccinated are far less likely to contract COVID.
One thing is for sure: The science is uncertain on this. So, government should not be using a heavy hand to impose mandates claiming to make workplaces safer.
Meanwhile, the White House is pressing large companies to mandate vaccinations and calling on OSHA to enforce that policy with hefty penalties. The Build Back Better bill increases the penalties tenfold to as much as $700,000 per incident for hazardous conditions, threatening bankruptcy for all but the largest enterprises. The Biden administration expects to publish the rules in the Federal Register in the coming days, affecting about two-thirds of the private sector workforce.
Yet the new science undercuts OSHA’s claim that unvaccinated people are a workplace hazard. So far, workplace mandates have been challenged at least 39 times in federal courts with little success, but the new scientific evidence may change that.
Lancet Infectious Diseases stressed the urgency of improving current vaccines or developing new ones to actually “protect against asymptomatic infections and onward transmission.”
Foolishly, the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress vilify the vaccine developer Moderna for making a profit and threaten to seize its patents. It’s possible COVID will continue morphing into new variants, requiring new vaccines from companies like Moderna.
When you’re fighting a war—in this case, against a killer disease—attacking your own ammunitions maker is no way to win it.
Overturning the Trump ERISA rules is proving a lot harder than the White House supposed.
Pity the Department of Labor. Tasked with undoing two Trump-era rules on the conduct of pension fiduciaries under the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and promoting the administration’s climate policies, the DOL finds itself between the rock of the letter of the law and a hard place in the form of two White House executive orders. The first, signed hours after President Joe Biden was inaugurated, directs all departments to review and take action on Trump-era regulations that impede the fight against climate change. In May, there followed an executive order on climate financial risk that specifies two DOL regulations, “Financial Factors in Selecting Plan Investments” and “Fiduciary Duties Regarding Proxy Voting and Shareholder Rights,” and orders the Secretary of Labor to consider publishing a proposed rule by September 2021 to “suspend, revise or rescind” both of them.
Missing the White House deadline by two weeks, the DOL published its proposed rulemaking earlier this month. The outcome is a model of everything a rule should not be: ambiguous, at times contradictory, and, most deleterious of all, dissembling in its claim to uphold the letter of the law when the intent and effect of the rule—if finalized—is to weaken it. When Congress wrote the ERISA legislation in 1974, it was determined that pension plan fiduciaries, who manage retirement income plans on behalf of plan beneficiaries, act solely in the financial interests of those beneficiaries. Section 404 of the act is tightly drafted to require plan fiduciaries to discharge their duties for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to plan participants and plan beneficiaries and defraying reasonable expenses of so doing.
“The fundamental principle is that an ERISA fiduciary’s evaluation of plan investments must be focused solely on economic considerations that have a material effect on the risk and return of an investment based on appropriate investment horizons,” the November 2020 financial factors rule stated. “The corollary principle is that ERISA fiduciaries must never sacrifice investment returns, take on additional investment risk, or pay higher fees to promote non-pecuniary benefits or goals.” In operationalizing these two principles, the financial factors rule was designed to show how plan managers can be assured they are acting as they are legally required to. There was little novel in the Trump DOL’s articulation of these principles. A 2015 DOL interpretative bulletin issued during the Obama presidency advised plan fiduciaries that they “may not use plan assets to promote social, environmental, or other public policy causes at the expense of the financial interests of the plan’s participants and beneficiaries. Fiduciaries may not accept lower expected returns or take greater risks in order to secure collateral benefits.”
For an administration that has made environmental, social and governance (ESG) and climate change a lodestar for investing and wants Wall Street and institutional investors to do what it has—so far—failed to persuade Congress to enact and force decarbonization on the American economy, this constraint is unwelcome, as it is to Wall Street, which can charge higher fees for ESG investment products and strongly objected to the rule. Rescinding the rule is technically difficult, as it hews like a limpet to the letter and intent of the law. If it can’t be rescinded, the rule must be weakened.
The replacement rule, the DOL claims, is needed because the current one “has created a perception that fiduciaries are at risk if they include any ESG factors in the financial evaluation of plan investments.” Many stakeholders, it says, “misperceive” that consideration of ESG factors is banned except in cases of a tiebreaker. Not really: the financial-factors rule explicitly acknowledges that “ESG factors can be pecuniary factors, but only if they present economic risks or opportunities that qualified investment professionals would treat as material economic considerations under generally accepted investment theories.” In the proposed replacement, the DOL says that ESG is the one category of investment singled out for special documentation. In fact, the text of the final rule does not mention ESG at all; as is stated in its explanatory preamble, “the final rule does not single out ESG investing or any other particular investment theory for particularized treatment.” Then why is a new rule needed? In its discussion of alternatives to the proposed rule, the DOL omits the most obvious: if the problem is misperception, the straightforward remedy is to republish the current rule with an updated explanatory preamble. This, of course, would conflict with what the White House wants, which goes to the real motivation behind the new rule.
The special documentary requirement of the current rule arises in rare cases when a plan manager can’t distinguish between two alternatives based on pecuniary factors alone. In these circumstances, a non-pecuniary factor can be used as a tiebreaker provided that the manager fully documents the factors leading to the selection. This documentary requirement, the DOL claims, could have a “chilling effect.” The DOL reports that stakeholder uncertainty as to whether ESG factors may be treated as pecuniary factors—the current rule is explicit in saying they can be—has already had a “chilling effect” in integrating ESG and climate change into investment decision-making. There is a reason for the chilling effect, but it isn’t caused by Wall Street’s misperception. In effect, the current rule calls Wall Street’s bluff: if you want to sell ESG products to ERISA plans, you must demonstrate the financial benefit.
The replacement rule proposes to gut the documenting requirement, which it claims is unnecessary as fiduciaries remain subject to a general prudence rule in a move that is tantamount to non-enforcement. How can plan managers demonstrate that they have acted prudently and with undivided loyalty to beneficiaries when there’s no paper trail? Instead, the proposed rule will require, in the case of designated investment-alternative default options, that the collateral benefit be “prominently displayed” in disclosure materials provided to participants and beneficiaries. Is this meant to be a subtle warning that beneficiaries can expect lower investment returns? If so, it is a straight violation of ERISA’s cast-iron duty of exclusivity. Or might it be to advertise the greater good that the fund aims to achieve? There is nothing in ERISA to support such a requirement. It would be the legal equivalent of the DOL giving the middle finger to ERISA Section 404 and to court rulings that plan investment decisions must be made “with an eye single” to the interests of participants and beneficiaries.
Ambiguity is at the heart of the proposed rule. On the one hand, it leads plan managers to treat climate and ESG as material to a risk-return analysis, a list that includes the physical and transitional risks of climate change, workforce diversity, and inclusion, and creates a presumption that they should all be treated as pecuniary factors. As the preamble says, “the proposal makes clear that climate change and other ESG factors are often material and that in many instances fiduciaries should consider climate change and other ESG factors in the assessment of investment risks and returns.” On the other, the rule also states that whether any particular factor is material “depends on the individual facts and circumstances” and that it’s the responsibility of fiduciaries to make their own assessment of the weight given to any particular factor. The DOL’s argument that its proposal does not “tip the scale” against ESG-style investment approaches is in danger of tipping the scale against the letter of the law.
The DOL makes similar arguments on the current rule on proxy voting and shareholder rights, which set out to prevent fiduciaries subordinating the economic interests of plan participants and beneficiaries to non-pecuniary benefits. The current rule put in place safeguards against fiduciaries outsourcing their proxies to proxy advisers and their like without proper scrutiny. The DOL argues these also create a misperception that might chill fiduciaries from exercising their proxies—safeguards that the replacement rule will remove on the grounds that ERISA’s general prudence and loyalty duties impose, implicitly, a monitoring requirement. The rule also proposes to remove two “safe harbor” examples which, it says, provide “illusory” protection. It’s perverse of the DOL to delete the safe harbors, leaving fiduciaries and beneficiaries reliant on their interpretation of general ERISA duties, when the rational course of action would be to craft safe harbors that meet the standard the DOL had in mind when it declared the current ones illusory.
The preamble contains much rhetoric. It hails language in the proposed rule on the prohibition against subordinating the interests of participants and beneficiaries to other objectives as clarifying “in no uncertain terms” the legal standards required of fiduciaries and claiming it as one of the benefits of the new rule, when the provision is carried forward, word for word, from the existing financial-factors rule. By reproducing the wording in the current rule, the DOL asserts that its proposed rule will, apparently, “increase fiduciaries’ clarity about their obligations;” more defensively, the DOL claims that its proposal “does not undermine serious reliance interests on the part of fiduciaries,” when its effect is to do precisely that. A purportedly “simple and clear” directive muddies the waters to promote ESG and climate risk as factors that fiduciaries are being instructed to consider as material, then leaves them dangling in the air by saying it’s their responsibility to obey the law.
For a rule the DOL claims is needed to correct perceptions, the new rule does a fine job in creating the perception that it drives a coach and horses through ERISA’s requirement that plan managers act exclusively in the financial interests of plan participants and beneficiaries. A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal argues that the rule will “coerce” workers and businesses into supporting progressive policies. “Retirement plan sponsors won’t merely be allowed to prioritize climate and social factors in how they invest,” the Journal editorial board claims. “They could be sued if they don’t.” Should this become the general perception and the DOL fail to correct it, ERISA’s exclusivity requirement becomes a dead letter. The new rule is thus a test case of whether the executive branch can nullify the express intent of Congress enshrined in statute law through regulatory rulemaking.
A group of House Republicans are demanding answers from all 93 U.S. attorneys about what steps they have taken since the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo directing them to potentially crack down on parental protests.
“We are continuing to investigate the troubling attempts by the Department of Justice and the White House to use the heavy hand of federal law enforcement to target concerned parents at local school board meetings and chill their protected First Amendment activity,” the Republicans said in a letter (pdf) sent on Monday to every U.S. attorney in all 50 states and territories.
The DOJ memo, which sparked much controversy since its Oct. 4 release, directs the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to “convene meetings” with state and local governments to address an alleged “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against teachers and school leaders.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garlandlater revealed at a congressional hearing that his department issued the memo after communicating with the White House about a letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA). The NSBA letter characterized disruptions at school board meetings as “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crime,” and urged the Biden administration to invoke counter-terrorism laws to handle “angry mobs” of parents seeking to hold school officials accountable for teaching the Marxist-inspired critical race theory and for imposing COVID-19 restrictions on their children.
“Concerned parents voicing their strong opposition to controversial curricula at local schools are not domestic terrorists,” the Republicans said, adding that state and local authorities are already equipped with legal tools in case any parent actually crosses the line to commit a violent act.
Although the NSBA has apologized for the letter which the DOJ memo was based on, Garland has yet to rescind the order, meaning that his directives to U.S. Attorneys are still in effect, the Republicans said.
They further noted that during Garland’s testimony before the House, “he appeared to have no idea whether the U.S. Attorney meetings he ordered were actually taking place.”
Specifically, the Republicans demand that the U.S. attorneys provide a trove of information, including all documents and communications related to convening meetings in their respective judicial districts in response to Garland’s memo, and the names of all individual employees involved and organizations that were invited to or attended such meetings.
The U.S. attorneys will have until Nov. 15 to hand in those materials.
The letter was co-signed by 19 Republican members of Congress, including Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.
Amid debates over the ability of COVID-19 vaccines to prevent transmission of the virus comes a report from Germany that a vaccinated man died aboard a plane and was later found to be infected with COVID-19.
The virus has not been confirmed as the cause of death, according to the National.
The 51-year-old man, whose name was not disclosed, was flying from Istanbul to Hamburg, Germany, on Oct. 25 aboard Pegasus Airlines.
He was found motionless in his seat after the other passengers had disembarked the plane.
The German-language publication der Spiegel speculated that other passengers may have believed the man was sleeping.
A police spokesman said he was traveling alone and had a window seat on the plane.
In order to enter Germany from Turkey, the traveler had to provide either proof of vaccination or a negative test.
“In full compliance with the Covid-19 regulations between Germany and Turkey, the passenger was allowed to take the flight from Istanbul to Hamburg after providing evidence of his or her complete vaccination status,” Pegasus Airlines said in a statement.
“We extend our condolences to the family and neighbours of the passenger,” the airline added, according to the National.
A doctor found that the deceased man had COVID-19 during a preliminary examination of his body.
According to der Spiegel, another German newspaper reported that the man had previously suffered from severe illnesses, but no details were provided.
A study published last month in the medical journal The Lancet indicated that individuals who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 are just as likely to spread the delta variant of the virus as those who have not been vaccinated.
“The proportion of infected contacts was similar regardless of the index cases’ vaccination status. We observed transmission of the delta variant between fully vaccinated index cases and their fully vaccinated contacts in several households,” the researchers said.
“Although vaccines remain highly effective at preventing severe disease and deaths from COVID-19, our findings suggest that vaccination is not sufficient to prevent transmission of the delta variant in household settings with prolonged exposures,” the study concluded.
“Our findings show that vaccination alone is not enough to prevent people from being infected with the delta variant and spreading it in household settings,” said Ajit Lalvani, a professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College London who helped lead the study, according to Bloomberg.
The Western Journal has published this article in the interest of shedding light on stories about the COVID-19 vaccine that go largely unreported by the establishment media. In the same spirit, according to the most recent statistics from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, 7,439 deaths have been reported among those who received a vaccine, or 20 out of every 1,000,000. By contrast, 652,480 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported by the CDC, or 16,101 out of every 1,000,000. In addition, it must be noted that VAERS reports can be filed by anyone and are unverified by the CDC. Thus, as the agency notes, “reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.” The decision to receive a COVID-19 vaccine is a personal one, and it is important to consider context when making that decision. — Ed. note (edited)
Growing up in the crunchy, green, hippie epicenter of San Francisco, I was indoctrinated from a young age in the early days of concerns over “global warming,” as we called it back then, that we all must do our part to reduce our carbon footprint.
Walk or take the bus, bring your own grocery bag to the store, recycle, turn lights off when you’re not using them, reduce your time in the shower, do your laundry at midnight, and so on — it was all part of the lofty collective effort to save Mother Gaia, which would only work if each and every one of us pulled his or her weight.
Of course, while my perspective on what it means to steward this amazing planet God has given us and the veracity of claims surrounding anthropogenic “climate change” have certainly shifted since my youth, my scorn for the sheer hypocrisy from those who claim to want to save the planet and don’t, in turn, do their part to reduce carbon emissions certainly hasn’t.
While there might be plenty of hardcore environmentalists out there who practice what they preach — again, I’m from California, so I’ve seen some of these extreme lifestyles — wealthy politicians and celebrities who push for radical worldwide economic reform in the name of “saving the planet” are often as hypocritical as it gets.
President Joe Biden can now most certainly be numbered among those who seem to think that when it comes to saving the planet, only the plebs need to change their lifestyle.
Ahead of his trip to the United Nations’ 2021 Climate Change Conference, or COP26, in Scotland on Monday, the American president was spotted cruising through Rome with a massive, gas-guzzling motorcade that was 85-cars strong, according to Fox News.
Yes.
85.
First of all, why on earth did the president need literally dozens of vehicles just to visit Pope Francis? I know he’s probably a lot to handle these days what with all the highly coordinated efforts it takes to prevent him from speaking to reporters, but does his entourage seriously require enough people to fill 85 cars?! So much for social distancing, essential travel and reducing carbon emissions, apparently.
Is Biden a hypocrite on the climate?
Second, could anything possibly make his visit to the U.N. climate conference appear more frivolous than wantonly disregarding even the appearance of caring about the planet exactly one day prior?
Opinionated critics sure thought so.
When The Washington Post’s Chico Harlan first tweeted about the lengthy motorcade Harlan was accompanying while covering the president’s visit to the Vatican, commenters noted the irony that not only was Biden on his way to the U.N. climate conference the following day but that he was likely going to discuss climate change with Francis.
That Biden did — the pontiff is well known for his climate concerns, and it was reportedly among the topics the two discussed when they met.
Another noted that this was Biden arriving to “discuss emissions, fossil fuels, pollution,” etc.
Someone astutely pointed out that the Vatican has a train station, and since we know that Biden is perfectly comfortable traveling by railand that green warriors love going on about converting more American travel to trains, this just further underscores the insanity that he took dozens of vehicles to travel there.
Yet another commenter shared a gif of angry child climate activist Greta Thunberg (who, in reality, does not appear to have commented on the length of Biden’s motorcade thus far).
Panelists on Fox News’ “The Big Saturday Show” also slammed Biden, whom commentator Lisa Boothe derided as the ultimate “limousine liberal” — quite literally.
“The issue of climate change is a limousine liberal issue,” she said. “The Republican Party has turned into the party for the American worker, and Democrats are the party for coastal elites. This issue alone underscores that point.”
Boothe also pointed to Biden’s fellow Democrats, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who reportedly parked her Tesla illegally outside of a Whole Foods, and U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, who she said “exclusively” travels on a private jet while promoting policies that ultimately hurt the American worker.
“If Democrats actually cared about emissions, they would look toward things like natural gas, nuclear power as well,” she continued. “But they don’t care about these issues. They don’t care about emissions. All they care about is virtue-signaling to their other limousine liberal friends.”
Fox News contributor and former Republican congressman Sean Duffy agreed, declaring the size of the motorcade to be hypocrisy “to the teeth” and noting how common it is for Democrats to essentially declare there is a “climate crisis for ye but not for me.”
“What gets me,” he continued, pointing to a House hearing last week in which several Democratic politicians slammed energy executives for supposedly contributing to climate change, “every single one of them fly in airplanes, they drive cars, they heat their homes, they turn on their lives, all of them use energy” that is provided by energy companies and helps improve the lives of millions of Americans.
“And they’re bashing every single one of the energy executives who actually produce the energies that make their lives work,” Duffy said.
What’s more, as panelist Jackie DeAngelis astutely noted, Democratic officials are perfectly happy to bash their own country while remaining virtually silent about India and China, the “two biggest polluters in the world” whose emissions drastically outweigh our own.
“Why is it that we have to pay more to pay for the perils that are happening across the globe when it comes to climate change, and everybody else can just shrug their shoulders and look the other way?” DeAngelis asked.
This is a very good point — made all the more infuriating by the fact that Biden showed up in Scotland on Monday to apologize for his own country and his predecessor’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord.
Yes, something tells me that Biden’s rhetoric about the climate has little to do with the actual planet, and everything to do with his political agenda.
Each one of these jets emits extremely high levels of carbon dioxide, but as we’ve already established, the elites don’t need to follow their own rules on climate change.
Apparently, this is the case even when they attend conferences about climate change itself.
The parade of planes was led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who arrived in his $65 million Gulfstream private jet.
He also just attended a party celebrating the 66th birthday of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, which took place on an expensive superyacht located off the coast of Turkey.
In order to attend, Bezos flew to the yacht via helicopter, the Daily Mail reported.
The American billionaire and his rich friends aren’t the only climate change hypocrites, however.
President Joe Biden’s trip to the summit “will generate an estimated 2.2 million pounds of carbon,” thanks to his use of four planes, the Marine One helicopter and “an enormous motorcade,” according to the Daily Mail.
These people want to lecture the rest of the world on how they’re supposed to live, but they continually fail to follow their own rules.
Either Biden, Bezos and other climate alarmists don’t actually believe climate change is as much of a pressing threat as they claim it is, or they simply believe they are better than the rest of the world.
In reality, both points likely carry some truth to them.
Regardless of the reasons, it is clear that Democrats and the rich elites of the world have fallen out of touch with the common man.
To them, the common man or woman is nothing but an obstacle that must be overcome, a problem that must be solved.
And their solution to that problem? Overly burdensome government regulations that force us all to follow their pseudoscientific climate-change agenda.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
— Declaration of Independence, 1776
The promise of the United States has always been about more than itself. In recognizing that all human beings are created equal, and in defending individual liberty, the United States has demonstrated that self-government is possible.
It has done so while making steady progress toward realizing its ideals so that anyone—regardless of what race they are, whether they are male or female, or where they come from—may pursue his or her idea of happiness.
This has unleashed energy and creativity. America has achieved unheard of levels of abundance and has been a fount of invention, enriching all of humanity.
America’s first settlers traveled here to gain the freedom to worship as they chose, and the United States has all along recognized the importance of “in God we trust.” It has protected spiritual life in order to give its citizens the conditions needed to flourish.
But forces inside and outside the United States now threaten to undo America’s promise.
With the American Promise initiative, The Epoch Times seeks to revitalize America’s principles and traditions while contributing to our nation’s quest to perfect itself.
Main Challenges To The American Promise
Marxist Ideology Challenges America
When KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov spoke of America’s decline, he spoke of a gradual “demoralization” of the nation driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology. While faced with this domestic ideological crisis, America is also facing the threat of China’s ruling Communist Party, which for decades has infiltrated nearly every aspect of our society, in the fields of education, entertainment, politics, and business, among others. Exposing these threats and educating people about them is now, we believe, a critical element of allowing America to realize its promise.
Traditions Under Assault
Our founders believed that our form of self-government was created for a moral people. Traditions have allowed nations to flourish for thousands of years. How do we return ourselves to a path of tradition and righteous principles?
Ideological Education
Our education system is a cornerstone of society. Over the years, however, the idea of striving for excellence has been challenged by post-modernist ideology. If we want our nation to flourish, our children should be well-educated, moral beings.
Constitutional Rights Challenged
Our education system is a cornerstone of society. Over the years, however, the idea of striving for excellence has been challenged by post-modernist ideology. If we want our nation to flourish, our children should be well-educated, moral beings.
It has long been policy among Marxist progressives, socialists, and communists to undermine and destroy the family. The reason is obvious: When your goal is to vest all power in the government, any independent organization, such as the family, that retains the loyalty of citizens withholds power from the government. The commitments of families are to its members, not to the government, and Marxists think that this should be forbidden.
The self-proclaimed Marxist Black Lives Matter declared on its website, until it saw fit to scrub it off, that one of its objectives, along with disbanding the police, was destroying the two-parent family. Two-parent families are rare among African Americans, but in spite of poor academic performances, a high level of gang membership, a high level of incarceration, and a horrific rate of violent murder among African American youth, Black Lives Matter’s view is that one-parent families are a good plan. Black Lives Matter thinks that all will be fine (for them) once they take over.
Totalitarian societies such as National Socialist Germany, the Soviet Union, Soviet Eastern Europe, and communist China strived to undermine family loyalties, encouraging family members to inform on one another. Any anti-government sentiment, or even insufficiently strong pro-government sentiment, are grounds for re-education and punishment. Children are taught in government schools to vet their parents, and report them to the authorities if they’re not enthusiastically patriotic.
Kibbutzim in Israel were founded on the communist model. Everything was handled at the community level; nothing was left to the family unit: Cooking was communal, as was eating in the community cafeteria. Children resided and were reared in the community children’s house. But over the next decades, Kibbutzniks slowly had a change of heart, and mothers wanted more time with their children, first weekends, then full-time family apartments. Children, too, when they hit adolescence, were unwilling to reside and dress and undress in front of children of the opposite sex. Eventually unisex overalls were exchanged for clothes suitable for binary gender roles.
The logic of feminism, having incorporated Marxist class conflict for its identity politics, disparages men, marriage, motherhood, and families. What holds the greatest value for feminism is being able to kill unborn children. The feminist goal is not to support the government, but to take over the government, so that females can rule. The family stands in the way, so it has to go.
The two-parent family was the dominant form of the family, in all racial and ethnic groups, during the first half of the 20th century. But by the 21st century, the two-parent family was prominent only among Asian Americans and white Americans, with single-parent families a major percentage among Hispanics, Native Americans, and African Americans.
The two-parent family was also stripped down in both structure and function. In traditional societies in the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific, and elsewhere, families were either multigenerational, compound, or extended, with a large number of relatives providing a wider family within which the two-parent family was nested. In the 21st century, two-parent families, not to mention single-parent families, were in many cases on their own. This is largely the result of the spatial and social mobility facilitated and even required by an advanced industrial and post-industrial economy.
The traditional family was the basic productive unit of society, usually engaged in agricultural production. Children provided the necessary manpower to get the labor-intensive, multiple tasks done. Think of an American or Canadian family farm at the turn of the 20th century. Male children also provided the strong arms of the family militia that would defend, if necessary, the members and property of the family. In the 21st century, child labor and military defense are no longer functions of the family.
What remains of the functions of family in the North American 21st century is the establishment of a domestic household and the rearing and socializing of children, usually a small number of children, as they’re financial liabilities rather than assets. Many people under the influence of feminism choose not to marry or to establish a household with others, but instead reside as individuals, which indicates a loss of family households. Many single women decide to have children on their own, forming single-parent households. But children are increasingly under the authority, not of their parents, but of civic and governmental authorities, stripping parents of the child-rearing function.
Educational bureaucrats, school boards, and teacher’s unions engage in collusion to take control of children’s lives, sidelining parents who are purposely kept in the dark regarding what students are taught and how students’ lives are managed. These bureaucrats and officials share the radical ideologies of the extremist faculties of education in which they were trained. Thus, we see bureaucrats, unions, and school boards pushing political ideologies on K-12 students. These include racist “critical race theory” that condemns little white children as privileged oppressors and little black children as victims who have no control over their lives. Schools also push children into “transitioning” from their birth sex to an imagined alternative sex, smoothing the way for puberty blocking hormone treatments and disfiguring plastic surgery, all hidden from children’s parents. Schools now specialize in systemic programs of child abuse.
These educational officials also collude with friendly state and federal administrations, such as the Biden administration, which concur with the radical ideologies and wish to advance them. The point of this collusion among officials and governments is to wrench all children away from their parents, making them dependent on the government, in which the school officials are low-level members. This is a major step in destroying the family and making the government all powerful, smoothing the way to despotic socialism and communism.
Despite the establishment media’s attempts to push the COVID-19 vaccine on every American, there are legitimate risks of side effects that need to be reported. In particular, a new study found the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine increases the risk of blood clots.
The study was conducted by Mayo Clinic researchers in Rochester, Minnesota. They were specifically looking for cases of a type of blood cot called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis in Olmstead County, Minnesota, and they published their findings in JAMA Internal Medicine.
First, the researchers studied cases of CVST from 2001 to 2015 in Olmstead County. According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, the county has a population of about 158,000.
Over that 14-year span, the researchers found 39 patients who had developed acute incident CVST. Adjusted for population, that translated to about 2.34 cases per 100,000 person-years.
Of those 39 patients, 29 of them had a pre-existing risk factor within 92 days before developing the blood clot, according to the study. The Daily Mail said those risk factors include things like cancer or infection.
Next, the researchers studied CVST cases from the J&J vaccine’s approval in late February to May 7, 2021. The Daily Mail reported about 8.7 million doses of the vaccine had been given around the country during that time period.
In Olmstead County, the researchers found 46 CVST cases were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System within 92 days of receiving the vaccine. Eight of those were disregarded for various reasons, bringing the total to 38 “objectively diagnosed cases” of CVST.
At 15 days after vaccination, the researchers found 8.65 cases per 100,000 person-years. That rate is 3.7 times higher than the rate researchers found during their 14-year analysis of the general population.
In female patients, in particular, the rate was 13.01 cases per 100,000 person-years. The study said the CVST case rate was 5.1 times higher after vaccination among just female individuals compared to the pre-pandemic rate.
Does this study change your opinion of the J&J vaccine?
Overall, the researchers said their study found the CVST incidence rate within 15 days of receiving the J&J vaccine was “significantly higher than the prepandemic rate.”
To the average American, that should be concerning. While correlation does not necessarily equal causation, it certainly appears that the J&J vaccine may increase the risk of blood clots.
“[T]he higher rate of this rare adverse effect must be considered in the context of the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing COVID-19,” the researchers said in the discussion portion of the study.
That may very well be true, but it does not change the fact that a higher risk of CVST does appear to be present post-vaccination. Americans have a right to choose for themselves which risk they want to take, and deserve to have the full information presented to them.
If a person is not vaccinated, they run the risk of getting COVID-19 and possibly more severe symptoms. If they are vaccinated, they face the risk of adverse effects like blood clots.
Even if the risk of side effects from the vaccine is relatively low, it still exists. That is yet another reason vaccine mandates are so blatantly unconstitutional.
President Joe Biden may feel the risk of severe COVID-19 in an unvaccinated person is much higher than the risk of vaccine side effects, and he may be correct in that assumption. But that does not give him the right to make that decision for every American.
A cornerstone of a free country is that citizens ought to be able to make choices for themselves, especially when it comes to risk factors. As the Biden administration attempts to enforce medical tyranny, that right is more important than ever.
The Western Journal has published this article in the interest of shedding light on stories about the COVID-19 vaccine that go largely unreported by the establishment media. In the same spirit, according to the most recent statistics from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, 9,143 deaths have been reported among those who received a vaccine, or 22 out of every 1,000,000. By contrast, 740,348 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported by the CDC, or 19,483 out of every 1,000,000. In addition, it must be noted that VAERS reports can be filed by anyone and are unverified by the CDC. Thus, as the agency notes, “reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.” The decision to receive a COVID-19 vaccine is a personal one, and it is important to consider context when making that decision. — Ed. note
My three boys were in Virginia public schools from the beginning of their education. But no more. At the end of last year, after seeing exactly what was being taught and how little my schools prioritized education, I pulled them out. It is a sacrifice: I now have to pay tuition for my two younger children and am homeschooling my oldest child. It’s worth it.
More and more, parents are waking up to the reality that the public school system is broken. They aren’t just failing to teach kids basic skills; the public schools are misusing the trust that is placed in them. What’s worse, school boards and administrators are pushing political agendas and harming children in the process.
Many citizens still don’t know what’s going on. There is a reason why: Schools lock the public out, and the media supports it. They’ve even colluded with social media mobs to torment parents who try to speak up. Informing the public is an uphill battle.
Consider this: It recently came to light that numerous Virginia high school libraries stock a graphic novel (a genre geared to preteens) that includes extreme and violent sexual content. Parents understandably objected.
But this isn’t a case of parents trying to prevent their child from learning the facts of life or griping about the depiction of routine romantic or sexual situations. This is pornography.
A parent brought the existence of this book to the attention of the Fairfax County school board and read sections of the book out loud, revealing the obviously inappropriate content. The school board pulled the book from the libraries and is reviewing whether it should continue to be carried.
It’s nice that they have temporarily removed these books, but parents deserve more answers. Who included this book in the library in the first place? Are they reviewing what else is being featured in libraries? Is anyone being held accountable for exercising such poor judgment?
Independent Women’s Voice created an advertisement to raise awareness about this issue, which included images from the book. The ad was rejected as too explicit to run during the 11 p.m. hour on television in Virginia. Think about everything you see on TV and imagine what it takes for a television station to decline to run an ad that late at night.
Parents and citizens should be asking one question: Why are our schools so much less protective about what high school students as young as 14 are exposed to than TV stations catering to adults?
Will more parents start pulling their children from public schools?
This isn’t the only problem with Virginia schools. Students routinely endure race-obsessed classes, are given surveys that ask intimate questions about their sex lives, are treated to absurd lessons that tell them a British accent is a microaggression and form of racism, and are forced to watch misleading videos about Christopher Columbus in anticipation of “Indigenous People’s Day.”
Many parents woke up to the fact that something is very wrong with our schools last year when classes went virtual. Parents logged their kids into class and were surprised by what was being taught. As private schools quickly and safely resumed in-person learning, the public schools remained closed for most of the year.
We now know that our kids suffered tremendous learning losses during virtual learning, as well as from mental health issues due to the isolation and long hours spent staring at screens.
Since in-person classes resumed, safety has arisen as a major concern. For example, Loudoun County parents just found that school officials failed to report a violent sexual assault that occurred in a school bathroom, and that the student assailant was placed in another Virginia public school and went on to attack another girl.
Why was this student back in school just a few months after this first attack? Why weren’t parents alerted of the first attack? How many other incidents have Loudoun County school officials failed to report? Disturbing footage of violence in other schools has also been posted on social media. Are Virginia schools committed to actually providing students with a safe environment, even if it is at odds with their political narratives?
Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAulliffe recently said he doesn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” and as governor, he actually vetoed a bill that would have required schools to give parents more information about sexually explicit content covered in schools. Now administration officials in Washington are seeking to label concerned parents domestic terrorists.
What’s going on here? Why is the left demonizing parents and suggesting that we somehow aren’t supposed to be our children’s chief advocate responsible for ensuring that they grow to be healthy and responsible adults?
Public school officials need to remember that they work for parents and that their top priority should be to provide kids a safe environment in which to learn. That’s not happening in Virginia schools. Until that happens, parents will continue to do as I did — pull their children out of the public schools. And it will be worth it.
A federal judge temporarily blocked an Illinois hospital system from allegedly putting workers with religious exemptions on unpaid leave.
In late October, several employees at the Chicago-area NorthShore filed a legal complaint against the company, arguing that the firm’s vaccine mandate discriminated against them by forcing them to decide between a vaccine and their jobs.
Liberty Counsel, which is representing the 14 health care workers, said in an emailed statement last week that the “plaintiffs have shared these religious beliefs, and others, with NorthShore, and have asked NorthShore for exemption and reasonable accommodation for these beliefs, but NorthShore has unlawfully and callously refused.”
U.S. District Judge John Kness on Friday issued a temporary restraining order against the hospital system.
“They can’t be fired and they can’t be placed on what is effectively, in my mind, unpaid leave,” Kness said during a hearing on the lawsuit, reported the Chicago Tribune.
NorthShore is “going to have to keep paying them. If you wish to require them to show up to work and use [personal protective equipment] and go through testing because you need the help and you don’t want to pay them to be off site, that’s up to the hospital,” he added.
Liberty Counsel said that more than a week ago, “NorthShore had already started purging those employees with sincere religious objections to its ‘Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccination Policy’” and removed many employees with religious exemptions from its November work schedule. That included staff members with appeals that were pending, Liberty Counsel said.
Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines say that employees may ask to be exempted from vaccine requirements due to religious or medical reasons. However, workplaces do not necessarily have to grant the exemptions under certain circumstances, the agency’s guidance adds.
Horatio Mihet, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told the Chicago Tribune that unvaccinated workers can still work there while wearing personal protective equipment and getting weekly testing.
NorthShore previously told The Epoch Times that it understands “that getting vaccinated may be a difficult decision for some of our team members” and values “their committed service and respect their beliefs.” On Monday, NorthShore didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We must prioritize the safety of our patients and team members in support of our broader mission,” the hospital system said.
NorthShore, in a statement to local media last week, disputed several claims in the lawsuit and had “considered each request based on multiple criteria” on exemptions.
The vaccine mandate recently implemented by the Biden administration is costing jobs and affecting the U.S. economy, said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) in an interview with NTD.
President Joe Biden on Sept. 9 announced sweeping COVID-19 vaccine mandates for federal workers and contractors, and set a Dec. 8 deadline. Federal workers and contractors under the mandate won’t have the option to submit weekly COVID-19 tests and instead have to get vaccinated or seek a religious or medical exemption.
Norman said the mandate is creating a “huge issue” in South Carolina where essential workers such as engineers have walked off jobs and military families have come under pressure.
“It affects their livelihood, food on the table, not to mention their retirement,” said Norman. “This is a man-made crisis.”
Norman also cited “millions” of illegal immigrants entering the United States without needing proof of COVID-19 vaccination or having received a negative test.
“If it’s so important that Americans get vaccinated and to cause people to lose jobs again, how is it not important for the millions coming into this country?” said Norman.
President Joe Biden has presided over what is on track to be the worst border crisis in U.S. history in terms of the number of illegal immigrants that U.S. agents and officers have encountered. The number topped 200,000 in both July and August.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki in September had defended the Biden administration’s decision not to require negative COVID-19 test results or proof of vaccination from people illegally crossing the U.S.–Mexico border.
Psaki, responding to a question from a reporter on whether border patrol officials ask to see proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or negative test results “if somebody walks into the country, right across the river,” said illegal immigration is not comparable to foreign nationals who arrive by airplane to the United States.
In August, 40 percent of illegal immigrants released in Texas city had tested positive for COVID-19.
Regarding the Biden administration’s enforcement of the vaccine mandate for employers with 100 or more employees, Norman said private companies are “being held hostage” while postal unions were exempt from the mandate.
“It’s been a pick and choose, it’s been a sham show that this administration continues to do,” stated Norman. “They say one thing and do opposite.”
A U.S. Postal Service (USPS) spokesman told The Epoch Times in September that the USPS is not one of the agencies compelled to require COVID-19 vaccination.
The USPS, with more than 630,000 employees, is an independent agency of the Executive Branch.
Did you know that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spends public money to warn of attacks by hordes of zombies? Really. The program is designed to make some demographic groups more receptive to CDC propaganda—or rather, “messaging.”
But spending our tax dollars on zombie posters, a zombie novel, and zombie history are among the lesser problems at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Both of these federal agencies are overgrown, unnecessary, arrogant, infused with leftist politics, and unconstitutional. And both should be abolished.
Recent Revelations: Fauci and Walensky
This past week, Americans were stunned to learn that a long-standing charge was actually true: The NIH funded coronavirus “gain of function” research at the Wuhan lab in communist China. This revelation directly contradicted repeated reassurances by NIH official Anthony Fauci that such funding didn’t happen.
Apart from the issue of misinforming the public (although that’s serious enough), why would a federal agency spend nearly $600,000 in taxpayer money to make a virus more dangerous? Why would it fund anything in communist China—except, perhaps, resistance to that country’s tyrannical government?
Earlier this year, CDC Director Rochelle Paula Walensky issued a decree rewriting every residential landlord-tenant lease in the country. This was outside her statutory authority and in defiance of both the Constitution and the Supreme Court (pdf).
Legal issues aside, consider the sheer hubris: There’s nothing in Walensky’s background to suggest she has any expertise on landlord-tenant law or management. What made her think she knows anything about the subject? What drove her to impose her will on millions of other people?
Fortunately, the Supreme Court promptly voided her order (pdf).
The Constitutional Issue
Every federal elected office holder promises to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. Outside of the capital district and the federal territories, that Constitution assigns no powers to the central government over civilian health care. Further, the Constitution limits the permissible size of the capital district to 10 miles square, so as to prevent federal institutions from metastasizing into state territory and unduly influencing state policy.
The great Chief Justice John Marshall—an advocate of a strong federal government—summarized the Constitution’s position on health care in his famous decision in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824): Reserved exclusively for the states, he wrote, are “health laws of every description”.
Nevertheless, enabled by rogue Supreme Court rulings issued in panic circumstances during the Great Depression, Congress continues to fund both the CDC and the NIH.
Bureaucracy Run Wild
Over the years, these two agencies have grown into massive bureaucracies. The CDC has nearly 11,000 employees and recently enjoyed a budget of $11.1 billion. That budget is now almost certainly higher. Rather than being located in the capital district, the CDC occupies a campus in Atlanta, Georgia. Except for a museum on the grounds, that campus is closed to the public.
The NIH is not located in the capital district, either. It occupies a lavish main campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The campus is a federal enclave, which means that although it’s within a state, it’s under direct federal control. It’s large enough to house several fitness centers and its own fire department. According to its official directory, the NIH contains 27 separate institutes and centers and a National Library of Medicine. It has 20,000 employees, and in 2020 enjoyed a budget of $42 billion.
The publicity and—for lack of a better word—conceit surrounding these two entities might make you think they’re the only health agencies in the country. Wikipedia, for example, describes the CDC as “the national public health agency of the United States.” This makes it sound as if the United States didn’t have 50 state public health departments and thousands of local public health departments.
Similarly, the NIH Clinical Center identifies itself as “America’s research hospital”—as if America didn’t contain hundreds of other research hospitals funded by state and local governments and by private philanthropy. In addition, the United States has 4,000 degree-granting institutions of higher learning, many of which are involved in health care research, and the pharmaceutical companies also operate a huge health care research sector.
Constitutional issues aside, therefore, an objective observer must ask why, at a time when the federal government is essentially bankrupt, are the feds duplicating state, local, and private efforts? After all, with modern telecommunications, research can be coordinated among different entities nationwide. Moreover, to the extent the CDC and NIH are not duplicating other efforts, why is Congress allowing federal agencies to crowd out programs that might otherwise flourish?
Politicization: Critical Race Theory and Other Leftist Notions
But duplication and waste are not the biggest dangers posed by federal involvement in health care. The biggest danger is politicization. When politics infiltrate science, science becomes corrupted and its application inefficient. Corrupted and inefficient medical science can lead to the death of millions who might have been saved and prolong the misery of millions who might have been cured.
One long-standing example of politicization is the CDC’s efforts to become involved in the issue of gun violence. Traditionally, this is an issue for law enforcement and criminologists rather than for public health agencies. The CDC’s intrusion into the area is a classic example of “mission creep.”
The reason for this mission creep is politics. The CDC started meddling with the “gun violence” issue during the administration of President Bill Clinton. A major agenda item for Clinton was more regulation of owners and users of firearms. The CDC apparently was to supply the supposedly neutral “science” to promote that agenda. Congress had to enact legislation to stop it.
Now Joe Biden is president and he also wants draconian control of firearms. So CDC Director Walensky has announced that she wants to renew CDC gun-violence research.
Another example of politicized mission creep is how the NIH and the CDC have become invested in the left’s poisonous racial politics—including “structural racism” (translation: “You’re a racist even if you’re not”) and the misnamed critical race “theory.”
Like gun control, race relations are outside the traditional scope of public health agencies. Walensky, however, claims that “racism is a serious threat to the public’s health.” So the CDC now spends your tax dollars on both a “Health Equity Matters newsletter” and an “Office of Minority Health and Health Equity (OMHHE).”
The latter office recently named a certain Chandra Ford as “the Health Equity Champion for Spring 2021.” The reason was that Ford and another person “originated … the Public Health Critical Race Praxis, which is a framework for applying Critical Race Theory empirically.”
Just as the CDC is on the lookout for zombies, the NIH is deeply into racial witch hunting. The agency has assigned nearly 100 highly paid witch-hunters to its UNITE program with the assignment of exorcizing “structural racism.” The NIH website virtue-signals by affirming that “ending structural racism in biomedical research starts now.”
The CDC and NIH are also attuned to the wider “woke” cause. The CDC’s celebration of Ford, for example, was a “two-fer” because she also works on LGBTQ issues. The NIH (like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services generally), grants federal funding—that’s our money—to writers committed to the leftist agenda. Recent “funding opportunities” include “New investigators to promote workforce diversity in genomics, bioinformatics, or bioengineering and biomedical imaging research” and “Understanding and addressing the impact of structural racism and discrimination on minority health and health disparities.”
All of these are easily accessible examples of CDC and NIH politicization. My long experience in government taught me that for every easily accessible example, there are many hidden ones. Only whistleblowers can reveal the full extent of the rot within.
A Message to Republicans: Abolish Both Agencies
How can we clean up this mess?
It’s not by writing a letter to the president. It’s by insisting that the next time Republicans control Congress they permanently defund the CDC and NIH, thereby eradicating them root and branch.
Radical? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. History tells us why:
Conservatives and “progressives” have one thing in common: Conservatives use their own money to fund their political activities, and “progressives” use the same source—conservatives’ money—to fund theirs. Without constant forced subsidies from hardworking taxpayers (overwhelmingly conservative and moderate), the far left would be an insignificant force in this country.
When Democrats obtain majorities in Congress and the state legislatures, they use public money to create and fund social programs that become (1) mechanisms for social control and (2) bases for leftist political activity. When Republicans regain legislative control, they may trim the programs and reform them. But those changes don’t last long, because when Democrats recover their majority, they expand funding, lift restrictions, and render the programs even larger and more powerful than they were before.
If the Republican Party wants to continue as a viable force, it must fully defund these programs and the agencies that administer them. This will eliminate their lobbying power and make it harder for subsequent Democratic majorities to re-create them.
Permanent defunding is, I recognize, a difficult task. Once accomplished, however, the agency and its lobbyists have vanished, its abuses are over, and a reliable Democrat base has vanished. This is because for all their talk about “public service,” once the money has dried up, bureaucrats don’t hang around. As the late California state senator and humorist H.L. (“Bill”) Richardson often remarked, “I never knew a bureaucrat who worked for nothing.”
What will happen to the CDC and NIH staff once the funding has stopped? Some will retire on their government pensions. Some will get jobs in state and local health agencies, where their potential to inflict damage is more limited and they may actually do some good.
But most will switch to the private sector where they no longer have incentives to be nuisances, and will become productive and useful members of society.
Robert G. Natelson, a former constitutional law professor and historian, is senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at Colorado’s Independence Institute. He is the author of “The Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant” (3rd ed., 2015). He comes from a medical family and, unlike CDC director Walensky, has an extensive background in landlord tenant issues.
A remark made by a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) adviser is “the most dangerous statement I’ve ever heard in medicine,” the only active practicing physician in Congress said in a new interview.
Dr. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and an associate physician specializing in infectious disease at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, sits on the administration’s vaccine advisory panel.
Before the panel voted this week to advise the FDA to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 jab for kids 5 to 11, Rubin said, in part: “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes. That’s how we found out about rare complications of other vaccines, like the rotavirus vaccine.”You May Also Like
“That is literally the most dangerous statement I’ve ever heard in medicine,” Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), a doctor, said on NTD’s “Capitol Report.”
“How’s that going to sit with the average mom, the average parent that cares about their child? That they want their child experimented on?” he added.
Rubin’s remarks were clipped by various people and widely circulated on social media, with some users saying it showed that the vaccine should not be given to children.
Asked about the criticism, Rubin told The Epoch Times in an email: “The clinical trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in children showed no adverse events. All data to date indicate that it is safe. It will prevent the hospitalization of children with severe disease, as it does with adults. The vaccine works, and saves lives.”
The claim the trial showed no adverse events is false, as the FDA did discover 13 cases of lymph node swelling. However, none of the trial participants experienced heart inflammation (myocarditis or pericarditis)—a serious side effect that has been seen at higher than expected rates among youth, particularly males.
The panel pondered the potential benefits and risks of giving young children the vaccine but ultimately decided the benefits outweighed the risks. The FDA accepted the recommendation on Friday.
Rubin said after the vote that surveillance systems would be crucial in learning “how safe” the Pfizer jab is for children.
“We decided to go for it with a lot of heavy conscience. But I’m hoping that this is the start of learning more about it,” he said.
Murphy and Rubin did agree on one point, that COVID-19 vaccines should not be mandated for young children at this point due to the lack of safety data. Several other FDA advisers also said this week they are opposed to mandating the vaccine for young kids at this time.
Murphy, speaking to NTD, noted a key difference between COVID-19 and diseases that children routinely receive vaccines for early in their life.
“The vaccines that we have for children are measles, mumps, rubella, those things that we give kids, we have to have them before they go to school. And I agree with that, that’s fine. But the problem is, those are childhood diseases. COVID is not a childhood disease. It can affect children, but its lethality rate is infinitesimal compared to what it is in adults,” said Murphy, who practices at the Vidant Medical Center, a 1,000-bed level 1 trauma center.
“I just don’t understand why it’s being pushed on kids so much,” he added, predicting a federal mandate for kids soon just to go to school. “We don’t mandate that kids get the flu vaccine to go to school. We don’t mandate that kids have the HPV vaccine. So I just don’t understand the biology and the virology for this.”
Just because a Food and Drug Administration panel recommended the COVID-19 vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds, does not mean that it is risk-free. If it was, it wouldn’t have taken eight hours for the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee to deliberate the matter on Tuesday.
The whole meeting revolved around answering two questions: Do the benefits of Pfizer’s vaccine for children outweigh the risks? And what are the risks?
Pfizer announced in September that the vaccine is safe and efficacious for children, but there was a general consensus during the committee meeting that the data was limited. Ultimately, the panel’s decision to recommend the vaccines for children communicates that its members are fine with letting the general public be the next round of test cases to find out more about the possible risks and side effects of the vaccine.
“We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes,” microbiologist and infectious disease expert Dr. Eric Rubin said in the meeting.
Here is what is known about the COVID vaccine from the clinical trials so far.
First, it is important to note that the clinical trials for children were not huge. There were 2,268 participants between the ages of 5 and 11 in the trial, according to Pfizer.
This is technically in accordance with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s regulations for trial size, which require thousands of volunteers for the third phase. However, due to risks of significant health complications from the vaccine, federal regulators pushed both Pfizer and Moderna to expand their trial sizes over the summer.
A few thousand is not terrible for a clinical study, but with such a push to make the vaccine universal for the population, only 2,000 participants is a pretty small data pool.
Pfizer itself acknowledged that its data was limited. In fact, it did not even include data in its news release to show if the chances of children getting sick were lower.
Should young children be getting the vaccine?
“Gruber said that there were not enough cases of illness to tell,” Stat reported. “That means a decision has to be made on more limited data than regulators might like.”
The number of participants in this trial especially pales in comparison to the previous COVID-19 vaccine trials for adults. WCNC-TV reported in February that Pfizer’s Phase 3 of trials had 40,000 participants, while Moderna’s had 30,000.
With a relatively small clinical study, this means that if the vaccine is given emergency use authorization for children, 5- to 11-year-olds will more or less be joining a trial.
Besides concerns over fairly limited data, there are other risks from the vaccine that must be considered. One of the more serious risks, that still has lots of unresolved questions around it, is myocarditis.
Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle often caused by infection. It can cause a heart to beat irregularly, or even reduce its ability to pump. Sometimes the infection can leave the heart muscle weakened. In very rare cases, it can lead to death.
This problem can often resolve itself, but since it does affect the heart, it has the potential to become more serious, depending on the individual. Both the COVID-19 infection and vaccines have been linked to the heart complication.
This side effect of the vaccine has been rare, but it has shown up in Pfizer’s clinical trials. It is an especially concerning risk since Sweden, Finland and Denmark thought it problematic enough to pause Moderna, the other mRNA vaccine, due to an increase in myocarditis among youths.
“In the preliminary data … there is a suspicion of an increased risk of heart inflammation, when vaccinated with Moderna,” the Danish Health Authority said in a statement, according to Reuters.
Pfizer did look at the risk of myocarditis in its clinical studies, but determined it will take more time to really see how that potential risk could play out.
“The number of participants in the current clinical development program is too small to detect any potential risks of myocarditis associated with vaccination. Long-term safety of COVID-19 vaccine in participants 5 to <12 years of age will be studied in 5 post-authorization safety studies, including a 5-year follow-up study to evaluate long term sequelae of post-vaccination myocarditis/pericarditis,” Pfizer outlined in its briefing for the FDA committee meeting.
An outside Israeli study did provide more insight on this risk, however. The study, which looked at over 5 million people 16 years old and above that had been at least partially vaccinated, showed that the risk is small. But the demographic most at risk are adolescent males.
“During that time, 283 people had probable or definitive myocarditis, with 142 cases (50.2%) linked to the Pfizer vaccine,” the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy reported, regarding the study.
So going into the FDA meeting, there were plenty of questions about the risk of heart problems being an adverse side effect of the vaccine.
“There’s not a lot of controversy that the vaccine is causing some myocarditis. The question for the panelists is going to be how to weigh this against preventing Covid-19, which may cause more of the condition, and how severe these cases are,” Matthew Herper wrote for Stat ahead of the meeting.
Sure enough, committee members quickly brought up the heart risks that were linked to Pfizer’s vaccine.
Dr. James Hildreth, the CEO of Meharry Medical College, asked about some scenarios that Pfizer ran in its trials that showed an increase in myocarditis.
“When you did your risk-benefit assessment in your briefing document, there were six scenarios that you considered. It strikes me that scenario three, where you have the incidents from — I think it’s June of 2021, where the cases are low, the hospitalizations from myocarditis actually exceeded hospitalizations from COVID-19,” Hildreth said. “So could you comment on that, because to me, the single most important question is whether the benefits outweigh the risks, and in that scenario, they clearly don’t.”
Dr. William Gruber, Pfizer’s senior vice president for vaccine clinical research and development, answered that the benefits outweigh the risks. So while heart problems might be a risk, the benefits that the vaccine can offer in getting everyone back to normal life are greater.
“[T]he other benefits, and particularly those societal benefits — obviously protecting vulnerable populations, including populations of color, the ability to get the children back into the schoolroom setting … all of those things, I think have to enter into the equation, regardless of the rate,” Gruber said.
In its FDA committee meeting document, Pfizer reiterated that it considers myocarditis a small risk. But it’s important to note the wording and to keep remembering that since the clinical trials have been sped up, the full effects of the vaccine will have to be further discovered once it’s in the general population of 5- to 11-year-olds. There are still many side effects and responses that Pfizer can only “expect” at this point.
Despite this, the FDA committee did decide in favor of the vaccine, 17 to 0. But it is important to look at the one member who abstained from voting.
Dr. Michael Kurilla, from the National Institutes of Health, was the single abstention. He noted there was a lack of data, but particularly he questioned if vaccinating 5- to 11-year-olds was worthy of an application for emergency use.
“I don’t see the need for ‘emergency use’ of this vaccine across the entire age group and would have preferred a more nuanced approach,” Kurilla said.
There is no question that overall children are at much less risk of contracting and getting seriously ill from COVID than adults.
According to data accumulated by the American Academy of Pediatrics, states reported that only between 5.3 percent and 13.6 percent of children tested positive for COVID. Furthermore, children only accounted for 0 to 0.26 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, and 7 states reported no child deaths.
During the FDA committee’s discussion, there seemed to be some consensus that the vaccine should be available to high-risk children, but to make it universal was a bit more controversial.
“This is a really tough one. I do believe children at highest risk do need to be vaccinated, but vaccinating all the children to achieve that seems a bit much to me,” Hildreth said, according to Stat.
With such a low risk of contracting or dying from COVID in children, pushing for emergency use authorization is concerning. There does not seem to be an emergent need for the vaccine in the broad population of 5- to 11-year-olds.
No vaccine is going to be perfect and it’s natural that there will be side effects and that some may even have quite adverse responses (like myocarditis). Trying to push through a vaccine for such young children in the name of emergency should raise questions.
The speed and small data pool of the clinical trials seem to leave more questions than answers about the risks of the vaccine. At best, the data half-answers a lot of questions. Instead of convincing the FDA on grounds of strong, extensive data, Pfizer is essentially saying, “We are pretty sure that the risks aren’t too serious, but we’ll have to really just find out by giving it to the general population.”
Many decisions are going to boil down to choosing the lesser of two evils, but it should not be too much to ask for more extensive data in order to make the soundest decision possible. Most parents don’t want their child to be a guinea pig.
A new study stops short of saying that vaccine mandates are as useful in stopping the spread of COVID-19 as a screen door on a submarine, but it admits that the delta variant hops from person to person with no regard for vaccination status.
The way that the experts whose study was published in the British medical journal The Lancet put it was that “fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts.”
When Bloomberg reported on the study, it cut to the core: “People inoculated against Covid-19 are just as likely to spread the delta variant of the virus to contacts in their household as those who haven’t had shots.”
The study only tracked a tiny sliver of those impacted in the global pandemic but followed 621 people for a year.
The study’s goal was to look at whether vaccination impacted the spread of the disease, not just whether the vaccine could prevent severe illness or death.
It also sought to look at COVID-19 in the context of households, where exposure is repeated over time — not hospitals, workplaces or schools.
“We found that the secondary attack rate in fully vaccinated household contacts was high at 25%, but this value was lower than that of unvaccinated contacts (38%),” the study’s authors wrote.
They noted that the vaccine did offer greater protection against severe illness among those infected.
The authors added, however, that protection offered by a vaccine dipped quickly.
Are vaccine mandate not actually following the science?
“Risk of infection increased with time in the 2–3 months since the second dose of vaccine,” they wrote.
“The proportion of infected contacts was similar regardless of the index cases’ vaccination status. We observed transmission of the delta variant between fully vaccinated index cases and their fully vaccinated contacts in several households, confirmed by whole-genome sequencing,” they went on.
“Increasing population immunity via booster programmes and vaccination of teenagers will help to increase the currently limited effect of vaccination on transmission, but our analysis suggests that direct protection of individuals at risk of severe outcomes, via vaccination and non-pharmacological interventions, will remain central to containing the burden of disease caused by the delta variant.”
One of the study’s co-leaders noted that the report does not disparage vaccine use but that vaccination status is no bar to the spread of the delta variant.
“Our findings show that vaccination alone is not enough to prevent people from being infected with the delta variant and spreading it in household settings,” Ajit Lalvani of Imperial College London told Bloomberg.
The study said vaccinations alone will not stop the delta variant.
“Although vaccines remain highly effective at preventing severe disease and deaths from COVID-19, our findings suggest that vaccination is not sufficient to prevent transmission of the delta variant in household settings with prolonged exposures,” the researchers concluded.
“Our findings help to explain how and why the delta variant is being transmitted so effectively in populations with high vaccine coverage.”
The Western Journal has published this article in the interest of shedding light on stories about the COVID-19 vaccine that are largely unreported by the establishment media. In that same spirit, according to the most recent statistics from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, 7,439 deaths have been reported among those who received a vaccine, or 20 out of every 1,000,000. By contrast, 652,480 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported by the CDC, or 16,101 out of every 1,000,000. In addition, it must be noted that VAERS reports can be filed by anyone and are unverified by the CDC. Thus, as the agency notes, “Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.” The decision of whether to receive a COVID vaccine is a personal one, but it is important to consider context when making that decision. — Ed. note
The New Hampshire School Boards Association (NHSBA) announced Thursday that it has withdrawn from the national organization following the group’s efforts to target parents.
The National School Board Association (NSBA) recently sent a letter to the Biden administration’s Department of Justice that described the actions of parents protesting policies such as critical race theory or COVID-19 rules as the equivalence of “domestic terrorism.”
“This email is to inform you that NHSBA [the New Hampshire School Board Association] has decided to withdraw its membership from the National School Boards Association, effective immediately,” NHSBA Executive Director Barrett Christina wrote. “NSBA’s recent actions have made our continued membership untenable.
The NSBA wrote Sept. 29 (pdf), “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat.”
The letter added, “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Following the NSBA’s letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memorandum to the Federal Bureau of Investigations to direct investigators to address the “disturbing spike” in harassment involving school board members by parents.
The controversy led lawmakers in Washington to discuss the matter with Garland this week. Republicans on the Judiciary Committee blasted the attorney general after he failed to rescind the letter or apologize regarding the matter.
“Thank God you’re not on the Supreme Court,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told Garland. “You should resign in disgrace.”
The NSBA has since apologized for its letter.
“On behalf of the NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter. To be clear, the safety of school board members, other public school officials and educators, and students is our top priority, and there remains important work to be done on this issue,” the NSBA wrote last Friday.
“However, there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter. We should have had a better process in place to allow for some consultation on a communication of this significance,” the letter added.
Despite the apology, the damage has already had negative consequences nationwide.
In addition to New Hampshire, state school board associations in Ohio, Missouri, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania have already withdrawn from the NSBA.
Three additional states, Alabama, Florida, and Kentucky, have also announced they are considering a departure from the national organization.
A majority of American parents are unaware that China, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are among the top financiers of U.S. universities and are worried that foreign cash is influencing what their children are taught in the classroom, according to a recent poll.
Nearly 60 percent of those interviewed in the September poll said they were not aware that the countries are major donors to U.S. universities. The poll was commissioned by the Lawfare Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that tracks campus issues.
Qatar’s presence in the U.S. academic system was concerning to parents when they learned about the small Gulf nation’s deep ties to Iran and terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the Taliban. Eighty-four percent of those surveyed said American schools should publicly disclose their ties to Qatar and explain how the money could be coloring the in-class agenda, according to the poll, which surveyed 2,009 adults last month and was provided exclusively to the Washington Free Beacon.
While extensive foreign funding of American universities has raised alarms in Congress and among advocacy groups such as the Lawfare Project, ordinary American parents are not aware of the issue. This is partly because American schools do not publicly disclose their funding and in many cases try to hide their ties to adversarial nations like China. Foreign countries see the U.S. academic system as central to their propaganda efforts, including anti-Israel initiatives. In the case of countries such as China, they seek to steal cutting-edge research. More than 80 percent of those surveyed said Congress should enact legislation requiring schools to publicly account for every foreign donation.
Around 70 percent of those surveyed said they were concerned that foreign donations influence teaching and research priorities. In Qatar’s case, the country has spent billions running propaganda efforts in at least 28 American universities, generating concerns these donations run afoul of U.S. law. With anti-Semitism and anti-Israel attitudes increasing on many American campuses, foreign money has helped foment these movements, including at the University of North Carolina and Duke University—both of which have been embroiled in a long-running controversy over Qatar’s funding of programs critics see as anti-Semitic.
“The public wants full transparency on what Qatar is funding in American schools, and Congress must demand it,” Brooke Goldstein, the Lawfare Project’s executive director, told the Free Beacon. “Parents have a right to know what foreign governments are teaching our children.”
China’s funding for American universities remains the top concern for parents, with 70 percent expressing worry about Beijing’s presence at U.S. schools. Around 65 percent expressed similar concerns about Saudi Arabia, followed closely by Qatar with 57 percent of those surveyed.
More broadly, there was a 50-50 split between those who support foreign funding of schools and those who oppose it altogether.
The immunity conferred by COVID-19 infection and recovery has by now been shown to be superior to the protection given by COVID-19 vaccines, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) says.
“For people who’ve had the disease and who have naturally acquired immunity, there is no reason to get a vaccine,” Harris, the co-chair of the House Doctors Caucus, said on NTD’s “Capitol Report” this week.Play Video
Dozens of studies have shown strong immunity to reinfection among people who got COVID-19 and recovered.
“Our conclusion is that if you were previously infected, you are protected because of the previous infection and you don’t need the vaccine,” Dr. Nabin Shrestha, of the Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Infectious Disease, told The Epoch Times earlier this year.
Shrestha led a team that found employees at the clinic who had natural immunity were unlikely to benefit from vaccination.
“The science is becoming very clear that naturally acquired immunity actually is better than vaccine-acquired immunity,” Harris said.
Many experts agree with the school of thought, though the view is far from universal.
Top public health officials and agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, still urge practically everybody to get a COVID-19 vaccine, even those who recovered from the disease.
“Getting the vaccine is the best way to protect yourself and others around you, especially as the more contagious Delta variant spreads around the country,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the centers, said in August after a study suggested those with natural immunity benefited from vaccination.
The debate was on full display during a recent Food and Drug Administration panel hearing considering whether to advise the agency to give shots to children as young as 5 years old.
Multiple members said data indicates children with prior infection don’t need a vaccine. Another proposal bandied about is giving such children a single shot, as opposed to the two-dose regimen often used for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
Harris says the COVID-19 vaccine mandates that don’t incorporate testing or natural immunity opt-outs have widespread resistance and the consequences of the mandates are severe.
“There are always going to be 15 or 20 percent of Americans who will just resist the government mandate. They just won’t get the vaccine, whether or not they’ve had naturally acquired immunity, and the consequences of taking those people out of the workplace, for instance, is going to be very broad, very widespread, and I think very bad for our economy,” he told NTD.
“If someone doesn’t want to get the vaccine, then just ask them to be tested every few days, make sure that if they’re tested, they quarantine themselves. But vaccine mandate that doesn’t take into account naturally acquired immunity and doesn’t allow an exception, either for religious, medical reasons, or with a test out option, I think in the long run is going to be shown to be more harmful than helpful.”
Democrats in Virginia will receive daily updates on election mail processing and delivery, according to an agreement released Thursday.
The Democratic Party of Virginia sued the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) last week, claiming that thousands of absentee ballots were sitting at postal facilities throughout the commonwealth, unprocessed, “for weeks on end.”
“USPS to give daily election mail reports to Virginia Democrats after lawsuit alleging delays,” they alleged, citing data from the Virginia Department of Elections (VDOE).
The party asked a judge to enter a temporary restraining order that would force USPS to deliver all election-related mail within Virginia no later than three days after its entry and nearly immediately process all such mail in Albemarle County and the city of Portsmouth.
USPS officials said the allegations lacked factual and legal merit and said a check of its facilities uncovered no misplaced ballots. Further, they spoke to officials from Albemarle County and Portsmouth and were told there were no issues.
The parties ultimately reached an agreement laid out in a consent order.
USPS agreed to process all election mail within Virginia according to its established procedures, including making sure all mail processing facilities and post offices certify daily they are clear of all election mail scheduled for action on that day.
Beginning Friday, the USPS must also provide a daily report by noon each day confirming a process known as “all clear” was carried out at each facility in Virginia the previous day.
If any facility does not report being “all clear,” USPS must provide details on why and follow up as warranted.
The reports shall continue through Nov. 5, the day of Virginia’s gubernatorial election.
The parties also said they’ll work with the VDOE to try to figure out why the agency’s reports “appear to identify a substantial number of ‘unscanned’ outbound ballots for Portsmouth City and Albemarle County.”
“As stated in the consent order, there is a common interest to ensure that if Virginia voters choose to use the mail to vote, they are able to do so effectively,” a USPS spokeswoman told The Epoch Times via email.
“The United States Postal Service is fully committed to fulfilling our important role in the electoral process as a secure, efficient, and effective way for citizens to participate when policymakers decide to use mail as part of their election system. We are also actively working with election officials and look forward to a successful election in Virginia,” she added.
VDOE and the Democratic Party of Virginia did not respond to requests for comment.
Government assistance programs and policies are contributing to the decline in employment activity among able-bodied Americans, according to a new study by the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) Republicans.
The study, titled, “Reconnecting Americans to the Benefits of Work,” published on Wednesday, seeks to understand why fewer prime-age Americans are part of the nation’s workforce.
While noting that declining wages, technological change, and international trade all play a part in the decline in employment activity among able-bodied Americans, JEC Republicans said that “government programs and policies have likely made work less attractive for these Americans.”
The study found that the United States has experienced an unprecedented rise in disconnected prime-age workers over time.
For men, this trend dates back half a century, with their labor force participation rate falling from over 97 percent in 1955 to 89 percent before the pandemic. For women, receding workforce participation began in the last two decades.
The decline in prime-age labor force participation has been mostly voluntary, the study notes, with just 12 percent of inactive, prime-age, able-bodied men stating that they wanted a job or were open to work. Among men who said they are not working due to reasons other than disability, retirement, education, or homemaking, 41 percent personally receive government assistance.
“If more men are genuinely choosing to stay home with the kids, go to school, or retire early, policymakers should not be concerned. However, government policies may be tipping the scales toward inactivity and away from work,” the study notes.
“Policymakers should take note if would-be workers’ inactivity is indeed enabled or encouraged by poorly structured government benefits or made more likely by unnecessary barriers to work,” it adds. “This is likely the case for the 41 percent of primeage men who personally receive government assistance and are inactive for reasons other than disability, retirement, education, or homemaking.”
JEC Republicans also noted that a growing number of Americans were receiving government assistance “despite improving pre-pandemic economic conditions.”
“The share of working-age Americans living in households between the 20th and 50th income percentiles who receive safety net benefits increased from 20 percent to about 30 percent between 1998 and 2014. This growth in safety net benefits likely makes non-work more attractive and has contributed to declining labor force participation,” they wrote.
The study noted a decline in labor force participation and earnings after government assistance programs such as housing assurance, Medicaid, and the introduction of the food stamp program in the 1960s and 1970s.
“More recent evidence following the Great Recession shows how the expansion of safety net benefits undermined the rewards to work, creating employment losses and delayed economic recovery,” the study adds.
The study focuses on multiple government assistance programs in the time period before Congress passed three massive stimulus packages in an effort to support the economy and help Americans through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additional government spending is currently being pushed by the Biden administration, which has said it has secured a new $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act framework for economic and climate change spending that has yet to pass the Senate.
The bill is a revised and reduced version of the $3.5 trillion social spending bill unveiled at the beginning of the year that was blocked by key moderate Democrats who refused to allow such an increase to the national debt.
The new stimulus package has been praised by Democrats such as Sen. Tammy Baldwin, (D-Wis.) for helping working Americans get back on their feet.
But further stimulus support has also been criticized by Republicans including Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the ranking member of the JEC Republicans.
“As the number of Americans who receive government assistance has grown, more Americans have voluntarily left their jobs,” Lee said in a statement to Fox News. “Congress’ plan to spend an additional $3.5 trillion to provide households with new subsidies and fewer incentives to work would only make things worse.”
JEC Republicans suggest approaching the current declining employment situation with a three-pronged approach: removing barriers to work such as burdensome regulations, removing financial disincentives to work such as those in social-safety net programs, and bolstering incentives and increasing the attractiveness to work, such as a government-funded wage subsidy to increase workers’ take-home pay.
“Reconnecting inactive workers to the labor force will require careful consideration of poorly-designed federal benefits, wide-ranging regulations that exclude would-be workers from the labor market, and labor laws that restrict employee freedoms to work on their own terms,” the study says.
“Ultimately, work is a means of promoting wellbeing, not an end in itself. Improving connections to work and increasing the attractiveness of work, particularly among those most at risk for idleness or isolation, can significantly improve the economic, social, and mental well-being of disconnected Americans.”
A district court judge in Washington, D.C. issued a temporary injunction Thursday that bars both civilian and military plaintiffs from being fired after they filed a lawsuit against the White House’s vaccine mandate.
District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, issued a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction preventing the plaintiffs from being fired while their religious exemption requests to the COVID-19 vaccine are pending.
“None of the civilian employee plaintiffs will be subject to discipline while his or her request for a religious exception is pending,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote in an order, dated Thursday.You May Also Like
The judge also ruled that “active duty military plaintiffs, whose religious exception requests have been denied, will not be disciplined or separated during the pendency of their appeals,” noting that the federal government has provided “no guarantee of what will happen … if their exemption requests are denied.”
Defendants named in the lawsuit, including all Biden administration executive branch secretaries, have to issue supplemental memos by Friday that say they will not terminate or penalize staff while religious exemptions are being heard, Kollar-Kotelly also ruled.
President Joe Biden and members of his administration were sued by 20 plaintiffs last month over his Sept. 9 executive order requiring vaccines for all federal employees and contractors, reported Fox News.
In their complaint, the plaintiffs wrote that “plaintiffs along with hundreds of thousands of other federal employees and active-duty service members will be terminated, discharged or separated on or before November 22, 2021.”
“The Biden administration has shown an unprecedented, cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and an utter ineptitude at basic constitutional contours,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Yoder told the network after Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling.
Describing this mandate as “dangerous to American liberty,” Yoder said that “our Constitution protects and secures the right to remain free from religious persecution and coercion.”
Similarly, he praised Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling and said that “we are one step closer to putting the Biden administration back in its place by limiting government to its enumerated powers. It’s time citizens and courts said no to tyranny. The Constitution does not need to be rewritten, it needs to be reread.”
Biden’s announcement on vaccine mandates across different sectors of society drew significant criticism, leading to lawsuits from several states over the requirements.
Ahead of the mandate’s deadline, several trade associations—including cargo carriers and truckers groups—issued warnings to the Biden administration that vaccine mandates would snarl supply chain bottlenecks and trigger chaos nationwide.
The Washington court order came as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, announced that his state filed a lawsuit against the White House over its vaccine mandate for federal contractors.
The Epoch Times has contacted the White House press office for comment.
Mason became the second city in Ohio to criminalize abortion within city limits after a tense city council vote on Monday evening.
Located 25 miles northeast of Cincinnati, Mason, with a population of about 30,000 people, voted to ban abortions after four out of seven members of the city council supported the ordinance, which goes into effect in 30 days.
Mason now becomes the 41st city in the country and the second one in Ohio to offer “sanctuary for the unborn,” an initiative started by a Texas nonprofit. There are currently no abortion clinics in the city, but supporters of the ordinance say that this will ensure no facilities are set up in Mason.You May Also Like
There was a split between Republicans who believe in banning abortions and those who don’t, which was unexpected, according to Council member T. J. Honerlaw. Honerlaw, along with Tony Bradburn, Mike Gilb and Mayor Kathy Grossmann voted in favor of the ordinance, while council members Ashley Chance, Diana Nelson, and Josh Styrcula voted for abortion rights.
“I’m here to protect life. For me it’s a fundamental issue. If the foundations be destroyed, what do we have left,” said Vice Mayor Gilb at the meeting. “I’m not just here to decide how bright the street lights should be or where the next roundabout goes. Those things are certainly important issues, but they’re not as fundamental as protecting life.”
“America has a legal system in place to create order in our country. We must follow and abide by that system,” Nelson, who has served on the council for five years, said. “The supreme court has made a ruling on abortion, regardless of one’s opinion on abortion, creating local laws that contradict with federal laws is illegal and unconstitutional.”
There were demonstrators from both ends of the aisle displaying fierce support with banners that read, “Protect the Unborn,” and “Bans Off Our Bodies.” Speakers were allowed to voice their opinions while some constituents shouted to vote out the members who supported the ordinance.
The ordinance makes it illegal for anyone in Mason to “aid or abet” an abortion, including the possession and distribution of abortion-inducing drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol. Violators can be punished with up to 180 days in jail or $1,000 in fines. There are no penalties for someone seeking an abortion.
Exceptions include dangerous, disabling, and life-threatening situations for the mother, and accidental miscarriages.
While Kersha Deibel, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio, said to AP that the Mason ordinance opened up the city to “public ridicule, promised boycotts, and costly litigation,” Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, said that this decision by the city council was a “a stand against the violence of abortion and for the protection of women and babies.”
Other smaller Ohio cities like London in Madison County and Celina in Mercer County are also considering implementing similar measures, and banning abortions within their city limits.
The only Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory panel member to abstain from a major vote this week that essentially authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children as young as 5 said he did so because of limited safety and efficacy data.
All 17 others voted to advise the administration, or the FDA, to authorize the jab for children between the ages of 5 and 11. The agency already supported doing so and is expected to formalize the authorization soon. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would then decide which children should get the shot.
The vote was preceded by nearly eight hours of discussions and presentations, with multiple members expressing concern about the scant data on how the vaccine will affect the age group.You May Also Like
But Dr. Michael Kurilla, an expert on infectious diseases and pathology who directs a division inside the National Institutes of Health, was the only one who didn’t support the recommendation.
Kurilla told The Epoch Times in an email that he opposed the specific, binary wording of the question, which opens up the possibility that any child between 5 and 11 will be able to get the Pfizer vaccine. He was also concerned about the longest follow-up for the clinical trial involving the age group being only three months, data that shows children experience severe cases of COVID-19 much less often than adults, and how a large chunk of them have already had the disease, giving them some level of immunity.
If the authorization goes through as expected, at least some of the age group will be able to get two doses of 10 micrograms each, spaced three weeks apart.
The same dosage interval, with a dosage level three times as high, is currently in place for adults. But adults have seen waning effectiveness, especially against infection, prompting the recent authorization of booster doses.
Because the interval is the same, it can be predicted that the effectiveness will also wane in children, Kurilla said. The lower dosage level, meanwhile, brings into question whether the protection against severe disease and hospitalization will be as strong as in adults.
“Real-world evidence involving adults suggest the 3-week dosing interval is suboptimal in terms of durability and is likely to be similar in children, leading to waning immunity within 4–6 months,” Kurilla said. “Because the Pfizer vaccine offers protection against serious disease even after antibody titers have waned, there is some other basis for immunity, but at the lower dose in children, there is no expectation that those same immune processes will behave similarly to the higher adult dose.”
Pfizer/BioNTech’s new pediatric COVID-19 vaccine vials are seen in this undated handout photo. (Pfizer via Reuters)
Low Hospitalization Rate
During the meeting, members heard that among children 5 to 11 in the United States, there have been over 1.9 million infections since the start of the pandemic, but just 0.4 percent, or 8,400 of those cases, have required hospital care. And just 94 of them ended up dying.
They also heard that an estimated 20 percent of the hospitalized children were admitted for a reason besides COVID-19 and that nearly seven out of 10 of the children had existing serious health conditions like heart disease, illustrating just how little risk COVID-19 poses to healthy children.
Further, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 40 percent of children in the age group have already had COVID-19. Recovery from COVID-19 bestows some level of immunity, studies show, with multiple studies indicating the level is actually higher than vaccines provide.
“The benefit here is assumed to be prevention of severe disease, which is what we’re all hoping for,” Kurilla said during the meeting. But among the recovered, he added later, “The question really becomes, does this vaccine offer any benefits to them at all?”
Kurilla signaled he would have voted “yes” if the FDA had proposed opening up access to the vaccine to a subset of the 5–11 group. He also explained why he abstained.
“My abstention was based on the specific question the FDA asked. A ‘no’ vote would have been misconstrued as my opinion about the vaccine,” he told The Epoch Times. “There are high-risk groups within the 5–11 age group that would benefit from the vaccine, suggesting a more tailored approach.”
In this image from video, Dr. Michael Kurilla (C) questions the CDC’s Dr. Fiona Havers (R) during an FDA advisory panel meeting on Oct. 26, 2021. (The Epoch Times via FDA)
Others Question Widespread Use
Additional panel members openly questioned whether all young children should get the vaccine.
“I’m torn. On one hand, we know that many mothers and fathers and parents are eager to administer this vaccine to children because they’re so frightened, perhaps overly so, … that they really are anticipating having access to this vaccine in children,” said Dr. Cody Meissner, the director of pediatric infectious disease at Tufts Medical Center.
“On the other hand, I think we saw that approximately 68 percent of the children who are hospitalized with COVID-19 have underlying comorbidities. That means about 32 percent do not. And then if we were to take 40 percent of that group that may have immunity already, we’re getting down to a very small percent of otherwise healthy 6- to 11-year-old children who might derive some benefit,” he added.
But others said they saw the need for the vaccination. The protection it gives would prevent more hospitalizations and ensure schools remain open, some argued.
“We don’t want children to be dying of COVID, even if it is far fewer children than adults, and we don’t want them in the ICU,” said Dr. Amanda Cohn, a CDC official.
Jeannette Lee, a biostatistics professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said she was impressed by the data presented by Pfizer, which relied on an approach called immunobridging. In this case, Pfizer’s trial showed the vaccine triggered antibodies in children. The antibodies were compared to those elicited in older groups, and that was used as proof the vaccine will protect the kids against COVID-19.
Kurilla, though, voiced disapproval with the approach, telling colleagues “it’s being based on an immunogenicity marker that we know wanes.”
He said he hoped for more flexibility in the authorization, including a single dose for some children and no doses for others, based on factors like prior infection.
“There are high-risk individuals and I think they do need to be attended to, that we do need to provide a vaccine for them. But for many others, one dose—or no dose, even, if they’ve had prior COVID infection. I think they may not need anything more,” he said.
A 14-year-old girl gets a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in Hartford, Conn., on May 13, 2021. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)
Side Effects
Cases of heart inflammation after receipt of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are highest in youth, especially boys in their teens. Based on reports submitted to the federally run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the cases are higher than expected in males aged 12 to 49 after the second Pfizer dose and females 12 to 24 after the second Pfizer dose.
Over half of the children with confirmed myocarditis or pericarditis studied in the Vaccine Safety Datalink surveillance system required hospital care, though no post-vaccination deaths due to the conditions have been confirmed, according to federal authorities.
Pfizer said none of the 5- to 11-year-olds in its trials experienced post-vaccination heart inflammation. Using a third of the amount of that given to older people is, in part, an attempt to curb side effects, though how that will ultimately turn out is unknown.
FDA scientists said they determined the vaccine would prevent more COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among the age group than vaccine-linked heart inflammation cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. They assumed a vaccine efficacy of 70 percent against COVID-19 cases and an efficacy of 80 percent against hospitalizations linked to the disease. Among young males, “the benefits appear to outweigh the risks,” Hong Yang, an FDA scientist, told members. Among young females, “the benefits clearly outweigh the risks,” she added.
“What will the actual myocarditis rate be in these younger kids?” Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, wondered. That group “may be less susceptible to myocarditis, but right now that’s a speculation,” he added. “We don’t know that for sure.”
Members of the public also expressed concern, arguing the safety data wasn’t sufficient to authorize the vaccine for children so young.
But other members pointed to the trial data, the fact fewer reports have come in for 12- to 15-year-olds than 16- and 17-year-olds, and how, generally, fewer younger children experience heart inflammation versus older ones.
“I am not as concerned about myocarditis in this age group as I am in the older kids,” Dr. Melinda Wharton, another CDC official, said.
Surveillance systems like VAERS will help detect if inflammation becomes an issue in the younger children, members said.
“If the surveillance systems do start seeing severe outcomes and deaths from vaccination, I’m quite confident that those surveillance systems will tell us that we need to pause like we did with the J&J vaccine to really have a good idea of what the effects are vaccinating this age group,” said Dr. Patrick Moore, professor at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
In this image from video, Dr. Eric Rubin (L) explains why he will vote to advise the FDA to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for young children during an FDA advisory panel meeting on Oct. 26, 2021. (The Epoch Times via FDA)
The ‘Yes’ Votes
Ultimately, most members said the benefits and predicted benefits of the vaccine in the 5- to 11-year-olds outweighed the risks and potential risks.
“I think this vaccine will likely be effective in reducing pediatric COVID in this age group and may also help reduce transmission. On the safety end, I’m encouraged by the lower dose, … finding a dose that’s immunogenic and had not too much in terms of reactogenicity,” said Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Eric Rubin, an adjunct professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, said he wanted to give parents the choice to vaccinate their kids, imagining he had a child who was a transplant recipient, though he joined others in saying there are probably some younger children who shouldn’t get the vaccine.
“The question of how broadly to use it, though, I think is a substantial one. And I know it’s not our question, but I—and I know we’re kind of punting that to [the CDC’s advisory panel]—but I do think that it’s a relatively close call,” he said.
Soon after, in a comment that was widely distributed online, he added: “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes. That’s how we found out about rare complications of other vaccines, like the rotavirus vaccine.”
Rubin told The Epoch Times in an email, responding to critics: “The clinical trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in children showed no adverse events. All data to date indicate that it is safe. It will prevent the hospitalization of children with severe disease, as it does with adults. The vaccine works, and saves lives.”
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