Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk posted an ironic message on Twitter mocking Democrats’ efforts to give the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) an $80 billion cash injection amid swirling fears the money might be used to hire legions of tax auditors that would target middle-income Americans with audits.
“When the country that revolted over taxes hires 87,000 new IRS agents,” reads the message in Musk’s meme, which was placed above a photo of a laughing British Army officer from a movie.
“Fate 🖤 Irony,” reads Musk’s caption, with the message apparently rooted in the idea that boosting funding for tax authorities—part of which will be used for enforcement—runs afoul of principles that underpinned America’s founding, like freedom from government intrusion.
Despite repeated insistence by Biden administration officials that the Inflation Reduction Act’s funding boost for the IRS would not be used to increase audit rates among American households making under $400,000 per year, critics of the bill have warned that exactly that might happen.
Tax Crackdown on Middle America?
Republicans have speculated that the money would be used to hire tens of thousands of IRS agents while arguing that their enforcement efforts would target ordinary Americans.
“Democrats in Washington plan to hire an army of 87,000 IRS agents so they can audit more Americans like you. That’s more than the entire population of Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton,” House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an Aug. 11 statement, which comes as Democrats in the House get ready to give their final seal of approval to the big spending measure, with an estimated price tag of roughly $700 billion.
While the bill itself makes no mention of specific hiring targets, a Treasury Department report from May 2021 (pdf) estimated that an investment roughly the size of the one in the Inflation Reduction Act would enable the IRS to hire around 87,000 employees across a range of positions by 2031.
The 87,000 figure was also cited by Grover Norquist, president of the Americans for Tax Reform, in a recent interview on Fox News.
“They want to take $80 billion from taxpayers, $80 billion and hire 87,000 more bureaucrats in the IRS. They’re going after small businesses. The IRS itself says they’re going to dramatically increase how they go after independent contractors and small businesses, not General Motors, smaller businesses. That’s where they think they’re going to make their money,” he told the outlet.
No Targeting of Middle-Income Americans, Democrats Say
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen insists Republican claims that tax auditors will target middle-income Americans are false and politically motivated.
She said in an Aug. 10 letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig that the “much-needed” funding would be used to modernize outdated technological infrastructure, improve taxpayer service, and enforce tax laws against high-earners and big corporations that don’t pay what they owe in taxes.
Yellen vowed that audit rates wouldn’t increase for households making less than $400,000 per year.
“Specifically, I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” Yellen said.
“This means that, contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited,” she added. (Then why did my friend with a 30K annual salary have to file a W9 because he sold just over $600 of gifts on eBay to make ends meet? How many people making over $400K a year would even bother to sell anything on eBay? Give me a break!! [US Patriot])
The IRS chief, too, has insisted that the tax agency would “absolutely not” be increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans (Too late. See above [US Patriot]), according to a letter to members of the Senate on Aug. 4 (pdf).
Democrats have argued that the funding is needed to crack down on wealthy tax dodgers.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the funding boost to the IRS is expected to bring in $203.7 billion in revenue from 2022 to 2031.
Christina Bobb, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, dismissed a Washington Post report alleging that the FBI was looking for records including classified documents related to nuclear weapons during its raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Aug. 8.
Bobb alleged the report, which cited unnamed people familiar with the FBI investigation, was an attempt by the Democrats to cause fear.
“This is what the Democrats do. They don’t have any good reason for doing what they did. The pathetic presser that Merrick Garland held for three minutes was insufficient, so they had to create fear,” Bobb told Fox News on Aug. 11.
“Normally, they should come out with exactly what happened, and why, and explain themselves and if it was a good reason, they would have solid ground,” Bobb continued. “They are not on solid ground.”
“So they had to come up with something that would potentially terrify the American public into freely giving up their constitutional freedoms,” Bobb added.
Attorney General Merrick Garland delivers a statement at the Department of Justice in Washington on Aug. 11, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters in a brief statement how he “personally approved” the FBI raid against Trump’s resort in Florida.
“I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter,” Garland said. “The Department does not take such a decision lightly.”
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee also took notice of the close timing between Garland’s press appearance and the Washington Post’s publication of the report.
“So hours after Merrick Garland says that DOJ [Department of Justice] only speaks through its filings in court, they go out and leak this story to the Washington Post,” House GOPs on the Judiciary Committee wrote on Twitter.
Bobb said it would be a different scenario if the United States were on the brink of war.
“If we are on the verge of nuclear war, giving up the nuclear codes, maybe it’s acceptable that they violated the president’s constitutional rights,” she said. “It was not acceptable, and they’re trying to come up with reasons to make it sound appropriate and make it sound OK, because they don’t actually have a good reason for doing what they did.
Garland also told reporters on Thursday that the DOJ has asked a federal court to unseal the search warrant the FBI obtained and executed on Trump’s property. The warrant was signed off by U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, a judge at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Secret Service personnel are seen in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. on Aug. 8, 2022. The FBI raided the home reportedly to retrieve classified White House documents. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
Many Republican lawmakers have since criticized Garland for failing to tell the public more information on the FBI raid.
“AG Garland spent four minutes reading an empty and inconsequential statement, and then refused to take questions,” Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) wrote on Twitter. “We STILL don’t know the reason for the raid, the nature and extent of probable cause, and why the DOJ felt it necessary to take such extreme and intrusive measures.”
“AG Merrick Garland gave a useless statement on the Mar-a-Lago raid that included zero useful information, then refused to take questions,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) wrote on Twitter. “The House will be back in Washington tomorrow, he should come over and answer some real questions. And bring FBI Director Wray with him.”
House lawmakers are scheduled to reconvene briefly on Aug. 12 from summer recess.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee took exception to one of Garland’s comments, when he said the Justice Department applies the law “evenly without fear or favor.”
“Think Merrick Garland will apply the same standards to Hunter Biden?” the Republicans wrote. “Nope.”
Judicial Watch is suing the U.S. Department of Justice in federal court to release records ordered declassified and released by President Trump the day before he left office.
Despite Trump’s order, Justice Department officials are not releasing the records.
The ordered-declassified records relate to “Crossfire Hurricane,” a Justice Department operation against President Trump, his 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates that falsely accused the Trump campaign of “colluding” with Russian government agents to influence the results of the 2016 presidential election. (RELATED: Leading Republicans Reveal What Durham’s Up Against)
“The Obama-Biden Administration and Deep State spying on Trump and his associates is the worst government corruption scandal in American history,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And to make matters worse, the Biden DOJ simply refuses to release smoking gun documents about this corruption that the American people have an absolute right to see!”
JW notes a “Just the News report details that the documents include ‘transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.’”
The lawsuit was filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a February 17, 2022, FOIA request for:
All records regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation that were provided to the White House by the Department of Justice on or about December 30, 2020. For purposes of clarification, the records sought are those described in a January 19, 2021 Presidential Memorandum (see https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-declassification-certain-materials-related-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/ ).
All records of communication between any official or employee of the Department of Justice and any official or employee of any other branch, department, agency, or office of the federal government regarding the declassification and release of the records described in part one of this request.
Trump’s memo authorized the declassification and release of the records:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby direct the following:
Section 1. Declassification and Release. At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public. I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.
I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible. In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted its continuing objection to any further declassification of the materials in the binder and also, on the basis of a review that included Intelligence Community equities, identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure. I have determined to accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that January 17 submission.
I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.
My decision to declassify materials within the binder is subject to the limits identified above and does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law. Accordingly, at my direction, the Attorney General has conducted an appropriate review to ensure that materials provided in the binder may be disclosed by the White House in accordance with applicable law.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Law professors warned that proposal would encourage illegal race discrimination
The American Bar Association on Monday axed a proposal to require law schools to “diversify” their student bodies after more than a year of warnings from law professors that the plan would force schools to violate federal law.
The proposal, first released in May 2021, would have required law schools to submit annual progress reports on minority enrollment to the American Bar Association. Law schools that failed to boost the enrollment of “underrepresented groups” would have been at risk of losing their accreditation.
The proposal underwent three rounds of revisions before finally being withdrawn by the association’s house of delegates, which did not rule out revisiting the proposal at a later date. An early draft had warned that U.S. anti-discrimination laws were “not a justification” for “non-compliance” with the diversity standard, a line that drew criticism from many in the legal community, including from elite universities.
Ten Yale Law School professors said in a public comment filed in June 2021 that the proposal “instructs schools to risk violating state or federal law in order to retain certification.” As late as February 2022, law professors were raising “legal concerns” about the “use of racial balancing or quotas,” according to a memo from the bar association summarizing the feedback it received.
The decision to withdraw the proposal comes as the Supreme Court is gearing up for oral arguments in a landmark affirmative action case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, that could outlaw racial preferences throughout higher education. It also comes as something of a surprise given the association’s relentless focus on diversity.
The association, which accredits almost every law school in the United States, has made noise about eliminating the LSAT, a test some say disadvantages minority applicants. And in February, it voted to require law schools to educate students “on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,” over the objections from law professors who said the requirement would threaten academic freedom.
The curricular mandate was nonetheless popular among law school administrators, with 150 deans calling on the American Bar Association to implement it. There has been much less administrative agitation for rules about minority enrollment, which law schools have long struggled to boost.
There has also been little consensus on what sort of diversity the American Bar Association should prioritize. Some comments on the now-scrapped proposal said it gave “priority to racial and ethnic diversity at the expense of LGBTQ+ and disability diversity,” according to the February memo, creating a “two-tiered DEI system.” Others attacked “the phrase ‘underrepresented groups,’” which “may exclude individuals of groups that have been limited by a history of discrimination.”
The American Bar Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Less than 4 percent of Illinois public schools agreed to teach the National Sex Education Standards promoted by Democrats across the United States.
More than 500 of Illinois school districts opted out of the standards, with only 20 districts adopting them, The Center Square reported. The Illinois standards teach elementary students, including kindergartners, about consent, gender identity, hormone blockers, and healthy relationships. Middle schoolers learn about dating violence prevention, different types of sex, and sexual harassment.
The National Sex Education standards have raised parental concerns throughout the nation. Thousands of Massachusetts parents opted their children out of a federally funded sex education curriculum that teaches kindergartners about gay and transgender sex, the Washington Free Beacon reported last November. The Nebraska Department of Education shut out religious groups from the sex ed curriculum development process in October 2021, which included plans to teach elementary school students about gender identity and transgender hormone therapy.
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker (D.) signed a bill aligning the national sex ed standards with those of the state, making Illinois the first state to adopt the standards last August. Pritzker said the law “will help keep our children safe.”
State representative Adam Niemerg, R-Dietrich, however, said the standards are not age appropriate.
“This is well beyond what the conversations that should be happening with our children in schools on this particular issue, when they should be focusing on reading, studying, and enjoying sports,” Niemerg told The Center Square.
Fargo, North Dakota’s school board voted Tuesday to stop reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of meetings because it is “non-inclusionary” and “not true.”
Board vice president Seth Holden motioned to axe the pledge, saying it was inconsistent with the district’s “philosophy.” Holden said the pledge “violates board policy” because “there is text within the Pledge of Allegiance which is simply not true.” He argued during the Tuesday board meeting that because multiple religions are practiced within the United States, the country can’t be “one nation under God.” Holden also said it is an “indisputable fact” that “not all U.S. citizens have liberty and justice.” According to Holden, reciting the pledge violates district policy that “school board members should be honest.”
In recent years, school boards across the country have become increasingly critical of the United States and patriotic gestures, as well as more open to progressive conceptions of gender and sexuality. Minneapolis Public Schools, for instance, plans to pour millions into incorporating “ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity” in math curriculums designed for K-5 students. School districts in Maryland and Virginia, meanwhile, have opted to hide information from parents regarding their children’s gender identity.
Holden also argued the phrase “under God” is “non-inclusionary,” as it only applies to Christian and Jewish students. He cited the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion statement to support this argument.
Most of the board members agreed with Holden. Members called the pledge “divisive” and a “distraction,” with one suggesting it be replaced with a “shared statement of purpose.” Another said that reciting the pledge doesn’t contribute to “student achievement.”
Robin Nelson, the only board member to voice opposition to removing the pledge, pointed out that people who did not want to stand for the pledge were not being forced to.
“Please give me the opportunity to stand up at the beginning of meetings and say the Pledge of Allegiance,” she said. “I would respectfully ask that you just don’t participate but don’t deny me that right.”
Students can assume different pronouns, have access to other bathrooms, and change their name without parental involvement
Public schools nationwide are telling students they can assume different pronouns, have access to another sex’s bathroom, and change their name without letting their parents know, a violation of federal law legal experts tell the Washington Free Beacon.
Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia bar teachers from “outing” transgender students to parents, as do Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. These increasingly common policies are meant to guard students against parents who, according to Fairfax County schools, “may not yet be supportive of their child’s transition.” But according to Vernadette Broyles, they also violate parents’ right to privacy as codified in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974.
“Privacy rights are held by the parents for the child, not by the child against their parents,” Broyles, president and founder of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, told the Free Beacon. Broyles says Fairfax and Montgomery school officials are “attempting to usurp parental authority,” which is protected by the 14th Amendment. She called the schools’ policies “intentional obfuscation, driving a wedge between children and parents at a time when children need their parents most.” Three other attorneys involved in similar cases cited the same violations of the Constitution and federal law in support of parents’ rights.
The news comes as parents nationwide are filing lawsuits against school districts over the issue. Parents Defending Education, a conservative grassroots group, announced last week it was suing an Iowa school district for refusing to disclose a child’s transgender status without their permission. The district keeps “temporary” files for students’ gender support plans, allowing them to skirt official records requests from parents. Similarly, the Maryland and Virginia school districts instruct their employees to refrain from mentioning a child’s chosen gender identity on school forms or in emails where it could become public.
These policies are designed to conceal when a student begins to identify as a different gender without necessarily changing their physical appearance. To support “social transitions,” teachers are instructed to use a student’s chosen gender pronouns and treat them like their assumed gender, and in some cases giving students access to bathrooms “that correspond with their gender identity.”
Parents Defending Education president Nicole Neily told the Free Beacon the Iowa policy “intentionally evades federal law by placing students’ gender information in a temporary file—information that, if it were included in a child’s permanent file, would be accessible to parents through FERPA.”
The Montgomery County Board of Education is already embroiled in a lawsuit filed in 2019 over the policy. Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued in federal court last year that the policy is unconstitutional and violates FERPA, as well as state law. But the policy’s defenders claim that the same federal law protects a student’s right to privacy, even if the student is a minor.
LeRoy Rooker, a former director for the Education Department’s Family Policy Compliance Office, toldBethesda Magazine in 2021 that claim is false.
“There’s absolutely nothing in FERPA that would say they would violate FERPA by disclosing that to parents,” Rooker said. “The violation would be in not disclosing it if the parents request it.”
Some states have laws that ostensibly guard against such policies. A Virginia bill passed in 2013 protects parents’ rights to raise and educate their children. Fourteen other states have passed legislation along the same lines. In April, two Massachusetts parents sued their school district for violating federal and state law by hiding their children’s gender identity at school.
Parents say those laws haven’t been enough to protect children. Jeff Hoffman, a father of three Fairfax students and chairman of the Fairfax Parents First Coalition, wants the Virginia law to be written into school board policies statewide. Barring that, he called for parents to “put the entire transgender policy” on a ballot referendum for November.
“Fairfax County in Virginia is an example and proof of politically driven transgender policy that is systemically indoctrinated across our American schools,” Hoffman said.
The Free Beacon first reported in July that a Fairfax County faculty training module had directed teachers to forgo parental consent when students as young as kindergarten-age adopt a different gender at school.
Rep. Chris Pappas appears in auto repair shop with Alan Raff, chairman of Manchester Democrats
The blue-collar mechanic in a New Hampshire Democrat’s latest campaign ad is actually a lawyer and local Democratic Party chairman.
The ad, which Rep. Chris Pappas’s (D., N.H.) campaign released Tuesday, shows the Democrat talking to a mechanic at a repair shop—but the “mechanic,” according to the New Hampshire Journal, is an attorney at a Concord law office and the chairman of the Manchester Democrats. The attorney, Alan Raff, has also served as president of the Manchester Young Democrats and worked as a Democratic staffer in the state Senate and for U.S. senator Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.).
“Running a small business is hard work,” narrates Pappas, whose family founded the popular Puritan Backroom restaurant in Manchester in 1917, over a clip of Raff lifting a garage door at an auto repair shop. “There are early mornings and late nights.”
New Hampshire GOP spokesman Andrew Mahaleris said Pappas, whose net worth is $5 million, is out of touch with the working class.
“Born in the lap of luxury to wealthy parents, Chris Pappas has never worked a day in his life and doesn’t understand the struggle of working-class Granite Staters,” Mahaleris told the Washington Free Beacon. “His new ad is just another ploy by an out-of-touch Democrat elitist trying to fool voters.”
Pappas’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The congressman is just the latest Democrat to face accusations of inauthenticity while attempting to appeal to working-class voters. Sen. Michael Bennet (D., Colo.) obtained a one-day fishing license so that the multimillionaire could appear as a fly fisherman in his latest campaign ad, Axios reported last week.
Pappas says in his ad that he is “standing up to [his] own party” on the issue of stock trading for elected officials. The New Hampshire Democrat, however, has voted with Joe Biden 100 percent of the time. Only one-fifth of New Hampshire voters want Biden to run for reelection in 2024, according to a University of New Hampshire poll released last month.
Elected to Congress in 2018, Pappas won his 2020 reelection bid by 5 points. His seat is labeled a tossup this year by the Cook Political Report.
Chris Deluzio didn’t pay his property taxes. He backs a proposal that would increase IRS scrutiny on Americans.
Pennsylvania Democrat Chris Deluzio, who is running in a competitive House race, was hit with penalties for delinquent property taxes last year, according to real estate records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Deluzio, a voting rights attorney, neglected to pay $2,976 in property taxes in 2021, for the historic Georgian colonial in Pittsburgh that he purchased two years ago. He was fined a little over $100 in penalties and interest, which he paid in March 2022, according to county records.
News of Deluzio’s late tax could become a campaign issue, and comes as he and Democratic Party leaders are advocating for the Inflation Reduction Act, which would steer billions of dollars into increased tax enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service. It also comes as other Democrats, including Rep. Matthew Cartwright and Wisconsin Senate candidate Mandela Barnes, have faced scrutiny for their history of late property tax payments. Cartwright also endorsed the Inflation Reduction Act.
Deluzio, who is worth between $1.9 million and $5.5 million, according to his financial disclosure report, endorsed the Biden administration-backed Inflation Reduction Act earlier this month. The bill, which raises corporate taxes, would allocate $80 billion to the IRS, including $46.6 billion for tax enforcement and audit activities.
“There are a lot great policies for #PA17 in The Inflation Reduction Act. It’s a bill that would ramp up clean energy and lower the cost of medicine, save people $ and help tackle inflation – all paid for by the ultra-rich and corporations,” said Deluzio in an Aug. 3 post on Twitter.
Deluzio’s campaign responded to a request for comment after publication. His spokesman, Matt Koos, said the late payment was a banking error.
“Chris’s bank made a mistake and did not pay the reassessed property taxes on time from escrow,” said Koos. “When Chris realized this, he made the payment.”
Republicans and some independent economic analysts say the bill will end up raising taxes for low-income and middle-class earners. According to an analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan congressional committee, the proposal would function as a tax increase for Americans across all income brackets over the next decade.
The Senate passed the bill on a party-line vote last week, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote for Democrats. The House will vote on the package on Friday.
Deluzio is facing off against Republican and Pennsylvania businessman Jeremy Shaffer in the race, which is considered a tossup, according to the Cook Political Report. The candidates are vying to replace Democratic Rep. Conor Lamb, who ran for U.S. Senate instead of seeking reelection and lost in the primary.
Update 11:27 a.m.: This piece has been updated to include comment from the Deluzio campaign.
Former colleagues say ‘it’s not true’ that John Fetterman was an effective mayor
Senate hopeful John Fetterman (D., Pa.), a former mayor who is casting himself as the man who “worked to rebuild” the town of Braddock, Pa., missed more than a third of the borough’s monthly meetings during his time in office, according to public records.
Fetterman skipped at least 53 meetings during his tenure as mayor of the Pittsburgh suburb from 2006 to 2018, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The progressive Democrat missed just 4 meetings in his first three years in office, but peaked at 11 no-shows in 2011 and 9 in 2015. The tally may be higher, but records for the year 2016, when Fetterman first ran for Senate, are illegible.
Fetterman has been dogged for years by criticism of his spotty work history. Jesse Brown, a former Braddock borough council president, said in 2015 that Fetterman “should have been at all council meetings,” but stopped showing up after several confrontations over his duties as mayor.
“He first come in thinking he was in charge of everything,” said Brown, who also criticized Fetterman for taking credit for Braddock’s economic revitalization. “Everything that’s happened in this community, he’s gotten credit for it. The people believe that all this has come about through John Fetterman, but it’s not true.”
Chardaé Jones, who succeeded Fetterman as mayor, said Fetterman’s failure to show up to city council meetings eroded his relationships with councilmembers. “When you’re not present at council meetings, there’s not much of a relationship there,” she toldPolitico.
Fetterman has faced similar complaints as lieutenant governor. State Sen. Tony Williams, the Democratic whip, told Politico that Fetterman often failed to show up to preside over Senate sessions, hampering his ability to forge ties with policymakers.
One area where Fetterman has shown up to work as lieutenant governor could hurt him come November. As lieutenant governor, Fetterman’s only official duty is to oversee the Board of Pardons. Fetterman has embraced the role, voting to free multiple murderers from prison, a record that has drawn criticism from a group of Pennsylvania sheriffs.
Fetterman’s Republican opponent Mehmet Oz seized on Fetterman’s work ethic with the release of a campaign website this month that portrays Fetterman as a slovenly layabout who works from his basement. The Oz campaign launched the site following a report that Fetterman lived off his wealthy father until his late 40s, when he was elected lieutenant governor in 2019.
Fetterman’s truancy has drawn notice on the campaign trail, even before he suffered a near-fatal stroke that has kept him out of public view since May. Black clergy members criticized Fetterman for missing a candidate forum in February, with some speculating he skipped the event to avoid questions about a 2013 incident in which he pulled a shotgun on an unarmed black jogger.
“If there is already suspicion on the part of the community that race may be an issue and he may not be in touch with the community the way he thinks he is, then this only reinforces that by not showing up,” Rev. Mark Tyler, who leads South Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, told the Philadelphia Tribune.
Fetterman, who cast only one vote during his stint as mayor, has defended his record in Braddock, claiming borough council members were “absolute obstructionists” who were “committed to my failure.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci this week urged people to vote out members of Congress who are spreading “total lies” about COVID-19, but made a false claim himself about COVID-19 vaccines.
Fauci, speaking at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle on Aug. 9, was asked how the scientific community can deal with congressional leaders “who promulgate unscientific ideas yet control funding for public institutions.”
“Vote,” Fauci responded, drawing applause from the room.
In commencement speeches he’s given this year, Fauci urged graduates, “Don’t accept the normalization of untruths.”
“Because there’s so much preposterous lying that goes on, and including, unfortunately it’s true … that members in our own Congress, in our own Senate, who just get up and say things that are total lies,” added Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “‘Vaccines kill people, that kind of thing.’ It’s so much untruths that people who have a lot of other things in their lives that they have to worry about, they kind of start accepting it and all of a sudden, lying becomes normal.”
Vaccines do kill people, according to U.S. health authorities.
Nine deaths from a combination of blood clotting and low blood platelet levels, for instance, have been determined to be “causally associated” with Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Causally associated means the vaccine caused or was related to the deaths.
Severe allergic reactions are also triggered on occasion by the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, as are cases of heart inflammation. People who have experienced the conditions have died.
NIAID didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Dr. Larry Corey, a Fred Hutch employee who asked Fauci the question, identified Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) by name but didn’t offer any evidence for Paul promulgating unscientific ideas.
Paul and Fauci have clashed during Senate hearings over Fauci’s agency funding the Wuhan, China, laboratory located near where COVID-19 cases were first detected, and Republicans have vowed to investigate Fauci if they gain control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. Paul’s office didn’t respond to an inquiry.
Fauci wasn’t questioned on his own prior statements, including his admission that he misled the U.S. public on the effectiveness of masks in order to prevent a shortage of masks for health care workers.
The cancer center awarded Fauci with the 2022 honorary Hutch Award, which he received during a baseball game at T-Mobile Park. The discussion took place hours before the game.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, throws a pitch before the game between the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Wash., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Alika Jenner/Getty Images)
Gain of Function
At one point during the discussion, Corey started talking about how an early strain of the virus that causes COVID-19 was detected in Washington state, and Fauci joked, “I developed the ancestral modern strain.”
“I created it. I was in my kitchen,” Fauci said, drawing laughter.
“Gain of function, here we come,” Corey said, before moving on to another subject.
Gain of function is a term that describes research to make pathogens more transmissible or pathogenic.
“Families of the more than 1 million Americans who have perished from COVID-19 aren’t laughing,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), one of Fauci’s fiercest critics in Congress, wrote on Twitter in response to a clip of the new exchange.
Dozens of cases of Langya virus have been reported in China, according to new research from scientists who were previously linked to controversial bat coronavirus studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Langya henipavirus — referred to as LayV — belongs to a family of viruses that are “known to infect humans and cause fatal disease,” revealed a group of Chinese-led scientists in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Of the 35 confirmed LayV cases found in China’s Shandong and Henan provinces, however, none have proven deadly. Symptoms include fever, fatigue, cough, loss of appetite, and muscle aches.
The majority of the scientists behind the paper identifying the virus are affiliated with Chinese Communist Party-run scientific institutions, which are notorious for their ties to the regime’s military efforts and biological warfare programs. Researchers from labs including the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology and State Key Laboratory of Pathogens and Biosecurity are among the paper’s authors.
Lin-Fa Wang, a researcher at the Duke–National University of Singapore Medical School, is also an author of the peer-reviewed New England Journal of Medicine piece, whose work on the LayV virus follows his involvement with bat coronavirus research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology using funds from Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency.
Led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Bat Woman” Shi Zhengli, researchers used the samples to conduct risky “gain-of-function” research, as now-deleted webpages reveal the lab manipulating bat coronaviruses to “replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”
Wang, who is an Honorary Professor at the lab, appears as a co-author on many of these now highly controversial studies including “Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor” in 2013 and “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus” in 2017.”
Though Wang told the Chinese Communist Party-run Global Times that the reported LayV cases had “not been fatal or very serious” so far and that there was “no need for panic,” officials from Taiwan’s health authority are currently monitoring the virus’ spread.
In the paper, scientists sequenced the LayV virus genome and alleged that “the shrew may be a natural reservoir of LayV.”
In the early days of COVID-19, Chinese Communist Party scientists and their American counterparts pushed a similar narrative.
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Aug. 11 said he personally approved the FBI’s raid earlier this week of the personal Mar-a-Lago residence of former President Donald Trump.
The FBI usually seeks approval from the top before conducting a raid on a political target. Garland’s confirmation was the first public statement from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI on the unprecedented search.
Garland told reporters that his agency filed a motion on Aug. 11 to unseal the court-approved search warrant that was executed at a home “belonging to the former president,” after Trump confirmed the raid, “as is his right.”
“I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter. … The Department does not take such a decision lightly,” Garland said.
He said copies of the warrant were provided to Trump’s lawyers on Aug. 8 by FBI agents.
The attorney general claimed that FBI agents are “patriotic” and “dedicated” public servants who protect Americans against violent crime and terrorism. “I am honored to work alongside them,” he said.
So far, the Justice Department and FBI have remained mostly quiet about the purpose and probable cause behind the raid and have repeatedly declined to publicly comment to The Epoch Times and other news outlets. Only alleged anonymous sources within the FBI and Justice Department have sporadically provided details about the incident to legacy media since Aug. 8.
A day before Garland’s statement, FBI Director Christopher Wray declined to speak about the FBI search, saying that it is “not something I can talk about, and I’d refer you to the department.”
The White House, meanwhile, said it wasn’t aware of the FBI raid. On Aug. 9, when asked by reporters about what Garland told him, President Joe Biden didn’t answer.
The judge who reportedly signed off on the warrant in the case, Bruce Reinhart, ordered the Justice Department on Aug. 10 to file a response before Aug. 15 after Judicial Watch and others asked the court to unseal the warrant.
Republicans in Congress have repeatedly called on the Justice Department to release documents and other information about the raid, with some arguing that it appears to be politically motivated. Even some Democrats, including former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, asserted that the agencies need to provide answers about the raid.
Because of the extraordinary targeting of a former U.S. president, many have speculated that officials at the highest levels of the Biden administration, including Garland and Wray, would have signed off on it. Meanwhile, news of the incident has triggered a political firestorm with just 90 days to go before the 2022 midterms and a possible announcement that Trump might run for president in 2024.
What Comes Next
It was Trump on Aug. 8 who confirmed the FBI raid at his Palm Beach home. The former president reportedly wasn’t there when it happened, and his lawyers said they weren’t able to observe the agents.
“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before. They even broke into my safe!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.
Members of Trump’s family and his lawyers said in multiple media interviews that agents went into several rooms in Mar-a-Lago, including Trump’s bedroom and office. The agents, his son Eric Trump said, didn’t provide lawyers with a copy of the warrant before the search and wouldn’t answer questions.
When speaking on Fox News about the search, Eric Trump said it was done because the “National Archives wanted to … corroborate whether or not Donald Trump had any documents in his possession.” Trump was referring to the National Archives having confirmed in February that classified documents were allegedly among several boxes that Trump took to his Florida residence last year.
As for Garland, some Republican lawmakers warned that he could be investigated or even impeached over the Aug. 8 raid if the GOP takes the House in 2022. The party of the president tends to lose seats in midterm elections, and Democrats currently hold slim majorities in both chambers of Congress.
“I’ve seen enough. The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a statement. “When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned.”
In the Senate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) suggested that if it’s found that Garland engaged in anything improper, he could face impeachment.
“Now, this is really something that’s going to require an investigation,” Paul said. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if the investigation leads to abuse of power that this could even lead to an impeachment of the attorney general.”
A California teacher who bragged about using his position to radicalize students into far-left “revolutionaries” has been given three years of pay by his school district to resign, according to a report.
Gabriel Gipe, a teacher of Advanced Placement government at Inderkum High School, agreed in January to leave his post with a $190,000 payout from the Natomas Unified School District, according to The Sacramento Bee, citing district records.
Gipe, whose annual base salary is about $60,000, received a final paycheck of about $100,000 after taxes were withheld, according to the newspaper.
The teacher drew outrage from the school district community last year after he was featured in a video by undercover news organization Project Veritas.
In the video footage, Gipe says he gave students extra credit for them to attend left-wing events, including counter-protests to the “right-wing rallies.” He also allegedly kept track of his students’ political inclinations to make sure they drifted further left as time went on.
“So, they take an ideology quiz and I put [the results] on the [classroom] wall. Every year, they get further and further left,” he tells the undercover journalist, who was posing as a left-wing sympathizer.
“I’m like, ‘These ideologies are considered extreme, right? Extreme times breed extreme ideologies.’ Right? There is a reason why Generation Z, these kids, are becoming further and further left.”
Gipe says he displayed on his classroom wall an Antifa flag, which he claimed was “meant to make fascists feel uncomfortable.” The video footage also shows a poster of Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong on a wall in the teacher’s classroom.
When asked about his views on the Chinese Communist Party, Gipe says in the video footage that Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which took place after a disastrous economic campaign that triggered mass starvation and famine, provides lessons for how socialism can take root inside the United States.
“You need propaganda of the deed—your economics—and cultural propaganda as well. You need to retrain the way people think,” he says. “We have to hit both fronts. We have to convince people that this [socialism] is what we actually need.”
Later, when a Project Veritas reporter confronted Gipe on the street, the teacher was wearing a T-shirt with a hammer and sickle on the front. Gipe didn’t respond to the reporter’s questions regarding his persuading of students to adopt far-left ideologies.
Following parents’ outrage, the school district placed Gipe on unpaid leave pending an investigation, acknowledging that Gipe’s “educational approach” was “disturbing and [undermined] the public’s trust.”
An administrative judge later ordered that Gipe be put on paid leave as the district’s investigation continued.
The report of the investigation revealed more details about Gipe’s problematic conduct, including replacing typical AP government curriculum with lectures about communism and pinning photos of students who expressed conservative ideas on a wall next to a swastika.
“You used your position of authority with a captive audience of impressionable teenagers to promote your own political ideology, including advocating or teaching communism with the intent to indoctrinate or inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism,” the district report reads, according to The Sacramento Bee.
In response to a request for additional information, the Natomas Unified School District officials said in a statement that they have put the matter behind them.
“We have put this behind us and have moved forward,” the statement reads. “What’s most important right now is welcoming our students back to the start of a new school year.”
A person close to the Trump family suggested the FBI may have planted “listening devices” during a raid targeting former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence earlier this week.
Lawyers for the former president previously said that FBI agents would not allow Trump’s team to observe or supervise their search of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. One lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, told Fox News on Thursday that agents are believed to have searched Trump’s bedroom, office, and a storage room.
Because the FBI allegedly “didn’t allow anybody to supervise what they were doing, and they specifically requested to turn off the security cameras,” Kimbery Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée and an advisor to the former president’s 2020 campaign, told Newsmax. “Why? Because they didn’t want to be caught with what they were doing. How do you know there weren’t listening devices planted or evidence planted there?
“It’s something that has to be investigated and checked out, and we want to see the affidavit and what was their probable cause to be able to go in there and break into the president’s home,” she added. For her claim, Guilfoyle did not provide evidence.
Trump’s son Eric Trump told the Daily Mail on Wednesday that security cameras remained on when the agents carried out their search, accusing the agents of refusing to hand over a warrant and kicking lawyers off the premises. Agents, he said, told Trump’s team to turn off the cameras but they remained on, and those agents went to places “they shouldn’t have been.”
No Response
The FBI and Department of Justice have not responded to requests for comment. The judge who approved the FBI warrant, Bruce Reinhart, ordered the Justice Department on Wednesday to respond to requests to unseal the warrant in the case.
The White House said Joe Biden was not aware of the FBI search before it was announced earlier this week. Top Republicans have called on the Department of Justice to release documents pertaining to the raid or to have Attorney General Merrick Garland speak about the matter.
Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray have remained silent on the Mar-a-Lago search. But on Wednesday, Wray complained to reporters in a press conference about alleged violent threats levied against federal law enforcement agents in the wake of the raid.
The former president on Wednesday took to his Truth Social app and speculated on whether the FBI planted evidence. Members of Trump’s team said he wasn’t there while the raid occurred.
“The FBI and others from the Federal Government would not let anyone, including my lawyers, be anywhere near the areas that were rummaged and otherwise looked at during the raid on Mar-a-Lago,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting.’”
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind.—An Indiana congresswoman who grew up under communism said the raid on former President Donald Trump’s home was similar to “KGB-style tactics.”
Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) who grew up in Ukraine in the former Soviet Union, was one of about a dozen House Republicans who met with Trump on the evening of Aug. 9. She said the raid outraged her.
“As a US Congresswoman who grew up in the USSR, the FBI raid of President Trump’s home is alarming. It is reminiscent of KGB-style tactics,” Spartz said in an email to the Epoch Times.
Spartz called for equal treatment under the law, “not spectacles to destroy potential political opponents.”
“I don’t remember Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden’s homes being raided in this embarrassing way,” Spartz said.
Spartz joined Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and members of the House Republican Study Committee in a three-hour meeting with the former president. Banks told Fox News that Trump was “upbeat” and has made his decision about whether to run for president in 2024.
Ukrainian-American U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) speaks at a news conference on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the U.S. Capitol on March 2, 2022 in Washington. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Spartz counseled facts before feelings in the wake of the raid on Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, home.
“Regardless of people’s feelings about President Trump, this should not be acceptable in a democratic society,” Spartz said.
“If the federal government can raid the home of a former president, all Americans should ask: what can 87,000 new IRS agents do to me?” the lawmaker added, referring to a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that gives the Internal Revenue Service $45.6 billion in funding for tax enforcement activities, which is enough to hire up to 87,000 new agents. The bill was passed by the Senate and is expected to be approved by the House on Aug. 12.
Trump was in New York City while his Florida home was raided. Unconfirmed reports citing anonymous sources have said that the raid was related to a Department of Justice probe into whether Trump held on to records when he left the White House. Both the FBI and Justice Department have declined to comment on the raid.
All presidential correspondence and documentation have to be handed over to the National Archives when a president leaves office, according to a 1978 law.
The justification for the FBI search remains under seal. Trump’s legal team plans on asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to unseal the search warrant affidavit, which would outline why authorities asked for the warrant.
“It breaks my heart to see what is happening in our country and around the world, but I have full faith in the American people to defeat the rise of socialism and communism once again with the right leaders,” Spartz said.
Banks said the lawmakers’ conversation with Trump involved Republicans winning back the congressional majority, and what they might do with that majority.
“I was honored to spend time with President Trump this week with my Republican colleagues and show our support,” Spartz said. “We need to have more people like President Trump who aren’t afraid to challenge the DC machine.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is admitting it gave false information about COVID-19 vaccine surveillance, including inaccurately saying it conducted a certain type of analysis over one year before it actually did.
The false information was conveyed in responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the results of surveillance, and after the CDC claimed COVID-19 vaccines are being monitored “by the most intense safety monitoring efforts in U.S. history.”
“CDC has revisited several FOIA requests and as a result of its review CDC is issuing corrections for the following information,” a CDC spokeswoman told The Epoch Times in an email.
No CDC employees intentionally provided false information and none of the false responses were given to avoid FOIA reporting requirements, the spokeswoman said.
Heart Inflammation
The Epoch Times in July submitted a FOIA, or a request for non-public information, to the CDC for all reports from a team that was formed to study post-vaccination heart inflammation by analyzing reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a system run by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The CDC not only said that the team did not conduct any abstractions or reports through October 2021, but that “an association between myocarditis and mRNA COVID-19 vaccination was not known at that time.”
That statement was false.
Clinical trials of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines detected neither myocarditis nor pericarditis, two types of heart inflammation. But by April 2021, the U.S. military was raising the alarm about post-vaccination heart inflammation, and by June 2021, the CDC was publicly acknowledging a link.
“In reference to myocarditis abstraction from VAERS reports—this process began in May 2021 and continues to this date,” the CDC spokeswoman said in an email.
The CDC has still not released the results of analyses.
Data Mining
The CDC promised in January 2021 that it would perform a specific type of data mining analysis on VAERS reports called Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR). But when Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit, asked for the results, the CDC said that “no PRRs were conducted by the CDC” and that data mining “is outside of th[e] agency’s purview.”
Asked for clarification, Dr. John Su, who heads the CDC’s VAERS team, told The Epoch Times in an email that the CDC started performing PRRs in February 2021, “and continues to do so to date.”
The CDC is now saying that both the original response and Su’s statement were false.
The agency didn’t start performing PRRs until March 25, 2022, the CDC spokeswoman said. The agency stopped performing them on July 31, 2022.
The spokeswoman said it “misinterpreted” both Children’s Health Defense and The Epoch Times.
Children’s Health Defense had asked for the PRRs the CDC had performed from Feb. 1, 2021, through Sept. 30, 2021. The Epoch Times asked if the response to the request was correct.
The spokeswoman said the CDC thought “data mining” referred only to Empirical Bayesian (EB) data mining, a different type of analysis that the Food and Drug Administration has promised to perform on VAERS data.
“The notion that the CDC did not realize we were asking about PRRs but only data mining in general is simply not credible, since our FOIA request specifically mentioned PRRs and their response also mentioned that they did not do PRRs. They did not say ‘data mining in general,’” Josh Guetzkow, a senior lecturer at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has been working with Children’s Health Defense, told The Epoch Times via email.
“There is also no credible reason why they waited until March 31, 2022, to calculate PRRs, unless it was in response to our initial FOIA filed in December 2021, which was rejected on March 31, 2022—the same day they say they began their calculations. It means the CDC was not analyzing VAERS for early warning safety signals for well over a year after the vaccination campaign began—which still counts as a significant failure,” he added.
The CDC has also not released the results of the PRRs. “PRR results were generally consistent with EB data mining, revealing no additional unexpected safety signals. Given it is a more robust data mining technique, CDC will continue relying upon EB data mining at this time,” the agency spokeswoman said.
The FDA has told The Epoch Times it conducted EB data mining but the agency has declined to share the results.
Oversight GOP figures are requesting the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) provide information on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) raid of former president Donald Trump’s resort in Mar-a-Lago.
“NARA’s singling out of President Trump’s handling of official records stands starkly in contrast to the way NARA has treated far clearer violations committed by politicians and officials who are not Republicans,” 20 Republicans, including numerous Committee ranking members, wrote in an Aug. 10 letter addressed to U.S. Acting Archivist Debra Wall, first published by Politico.
“To better understand the circumstances and NARA’s role, if any, in the FBI raid, Oversight Republicans request an immediate briefing on this matter,” the lawmakers wrote.
The lawmakers’ move marks the first of the GOP’s promised effort in investigating the FBI’s Aug. 8 raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property for any underlying political motivation.
It follows shortly after the GOP in unison cast doubt over the nature of the raid—House Republicans first, and Senate ones followed—with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) promising to “leave no stone unturned” in an investigation of the Department of Justice that he says has “reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.”
The Republican lawmakers who wrote the letter allege that “political motivation” underlies the actions of the FBI and the National Archives, as the agencies’ treatment of Trump was “so contrary” to that of other former government officials—such as former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—whom the Republicans say also had “some Presidential Records Act violations.”
What Republicans Are Requesting
The GOP members of Congress are requesting that the NARA provide a “Member-level briefing” on the following no later than Aug. 17:
Any evidence of coordination between NARA and the FBI, or between NARA and the DOJ, on raiding the former president’s property
Any documents NARA produced and submitted to a U.S. federal court
Any documents that show NARA’s process in collecting presidential records after a presidential transition
In addition, the Republicans ask in their letter that NARA preserves records related to the warrant executed by the FBI at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort (which has, for now, yet to be unsealed), as well as any other NARA records related to Trump’s papers following Trump’s presidential term.
“The seeming weaponization of the federal government against Biden’s political rivals cannot go unchecked, and if NARA is working to further these efforts, it will be only the latest agency to lose its credibility in the eyes of the American people under the Biden Administration,” the Republican lawmakers say in their letter.
Trump’s Presidential Records
While the FBI’s search warrant for the raid remains under seal, multiple sources close to Trump have stated that the raid was conducted, at least in name, to look for presidential records that someone is alleging Trump himself has decided to keep in Mar-a-Lago after leaving office.
Trump’s lawyer, Christina Bobb, told The Epoch Times on Tuesday that FBI agents were looking for “what they deemed to be presidential records” and seized documents from Trump’s property.
“We had been very cooperative with them before. And it’s unclear to me why they went to such drastic measures to do this. But they did. And as far as the probable cause goes, they wouldn’t give that to us,” she added.
Bobb’s comments are consistent with what NARA said in statements earlier this year about how Trump’s representatives have been cooperating in transferring presidential records, including handing over 15 boxes containing presidential records. On Tuesday, the magistrate judge who reportedly approved the search warrant ordered the Department of Justice to file a response to a motion asking for the DOJ to unseal the warrant no later than Aug. 15.
Glasser portrays Milley as a dedicated military officer with a strong set of values who loathed his unstable and temperamental boss. But despite his commander in chief’s “fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms” and “abrupt dismissals,” Milley was determined not to resign for the good of his country. So altruistic.
There was that one time, however, when Milley was so utterly humiliated by Trump that he spent days in his Pentagon office, writing and rewriting a letter of resignation.
The occasion came during the June 2020 George Floyd riots. Members of Black Lives Matter had tried, but fortunately failed, to burn down St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square. Trump, accompanied by several advisers and Cabinet members, famously walked to the church and was photographed as he held up a Bible. Milley was among that group.
The legacy media claimed that a crowd of BLM protesters had been “violently” cleared from Lafayette Square by the U.S. Park Police for the sole purpose of this photo-op. One year later, the inspector general of the Interior Department released a report stating that the USPP had cleared the park to allow fencing to be installed “in response to destruction of property and injury to officers.”
In her new book, of course, Glasser tells readers, “Most of the demonstrations had been peaceful, but there were also eruptions of looting, street violence, and arson, including a small fire in St. John’s Church, across from the White House.”
Anyway, because members of the military are expected to remain apolitical and he had participated in a “political event,” Milley was filled with remorse.
During a pre-recorded commencement address to the graduating class of the National Defense University, Milley apologized. He said, “I should never have been there.”
“As senior leaders, everything you do will be closely watched, and I am not immune, as many of you saw the result of that photograph of me at Lafayette Square last week,” he told the graduates.
“I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned, uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.”
Upon additional reflection, Milley penned his letter of resignation, which is included in Glasser’s excerpt.
It is a boastful, four-paragraph letter written by a disgruntled subordinate with little sense of self-awareness. He tells the president he’s done some “deep soul-searching” and “can no longer faithfully support and execute your orders.”
“It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” he begins. “I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.”
Milley continues, “You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people — and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people.
“The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people.”
“I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal,” Milley writes. He expands upon his own acceptance of all people no matter their race, religion or sexual orientation, then moves on to his patriotism. The implication is, of course, that Trump is racist, bigoted and doesn’t love America.
“Lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships.
“That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order.
“You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.”
Is he calling Trump a fascist? A Nazi? Sounds like it. If Milley thinks Trump damaged America’s reputation, we have to wonder how he feels about Biden’s blunders.
Unfortunately, he never submitted the letter to Trump.
Glasser writes, “Milley had finally come to a decision. He would not quit. ‘F*** that s***,’ he told his staff. ‘I’ll just fight him.’ The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage.”
Trump would have been better off if this coward had resigned. Among other allegations, Milley reportedly told his Chinese counterpart he would alert him if Trump were to plan any surprise attacks.
“Gen. Milley needs to be called in TODAY and asked under polygraph what he said to China.”
I would remind Milley of a certain oath he took a long time ago. He solemnly swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
The BLM riots in the summer of 2020 were not peaceful. They were responsible for over $1 billion in property damage. They caused injury and even deaths. It’s one thing to oppose racism and quite another to excuse crime in our cities.
Either you’re for the rule of law and against terrorism, or you’re not.
Standing up for the rule of law and against terrorism isn’t politics, Gen. Milley. It’s your job.
George Gascón recall up in the air after campaign reveals outdated signature-verification process
Los Angeles County officials are rejecting more than one out of every five petition signatures in the campaign to recall radical prosecutor George Gascón (D.), according to a random sample of signatures provided to the anti-Gascón campaign, which says the “shockingly” high rate is because officials are using outdated signature standards.
In July, the Los Angeles County registrar notified the Recall DA George Gascón campaign that a random sampling of signatures revealed a 22 percent rejection rate, 60 times more than the rejection rate for mail-in-ballots during the 2020 presidential election. In response, the recall campaign pushed the registrar to explain what they believed was a “shockingly large rejection rate.”
The campaign obtained public records that show the registrar’s office was training staff to review votes using outdated signature standards, which allow the disqualification of any signature for minor variations compared with the one provided on a person’s voter registration form. In a letter to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, lawyers for the campaign expressed concerns that these outdated standards were leading to an improperly high rejection rate.
Registrar Dean Logan on Monday said concerns over the signature rejections were “selective outrage” and “a fictitious narrative to misinform and cast doubt.” But Marian Thompson, the attorney who wrote the letter, told the Washington Free Beacon the county clerk has not been forthcoming about the reasons for the rejection rate and refuses to share the precise number of invalid signatures.
“If they didn’t follow the law and apply the same legal standards used for signature verification for vote-by-mail ballots, then we have a legal team assembled to resolve this matter in a court of law,” Thompson said.
Gascón has been mired in controversy since taking office in November 2020. Like many progressive prosecutors backed by the left-wing billionaire George Soros, Gascón moved immediately to end cash bail, lighten sentencing guidelines, and reduce incarceration. His deputy district attorneys sued him weeks later for the drastic changes, saying his prosecutorial approach would violate their oath of office. Soros’s Justice and Public Safety PAC contributed $4.7 million to Gascón’s campaign.
The movement to recall Gascón began gathering steam as crime spiked in the city. In Los Angeles last year, auto thefts, robberies, and homicides were all up, with the city’s murder rate nearing a 15-year high. In December, former Los Angeles prosecutors began circulating a petition to recall Gascón and gathered more than 715,000 signatures by July. If around 579,000 of those signatures are from registered voters in Los Angeles County, a recall election will be held in November. The signature count is due next week.
In March, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) codified pandemic-era changes to the state’s voting regulations, which reduced mail-in rejection rates by more than 80 percent in the 2020 presidential election. The current standards presume that a signature appearing on a ballot is legitimate. Prior to that change, votes could be rejected if signatures differed even slightly from a voter’s registration.
Los Angeles County is in the process of verifying signatures after a random sampling in July determined there were not enough valid signatures to trigger a recall. The Washington Examinerreported the county has denied the Gascón recall campaign observation rights for the election’s signature count, further obfuscating the verification process. A spokesman for the county registrar said the recall campaign is entitled to review the count when it is over, and that their office’s “focus is on completing the verification within the legal timelines with integrity and appropriate quality review.”
Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told the Free Beacon the registrar’s handling of the count “fuels skepticism.”
“Public officials should embrace transparency,” Snead said. “When they don’t it fuels doubt in the integrity of our electoral system.”
A coalition of 19 Republican attorneys general says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink prioritizes left-wing political initiatives over shareholder returns and is jeopardizing the retirement of middle class workers with pensions.
Fink’s embrace of environmental, social, and governance investment policies, known as ESG, potentially runs afoul of several laws, the AGs charge in a letter sent to Fink. Instead of managing state pension funds and finding the best returns on investment, the AGs write, BlackRock uses “citizens’ assets to pressure companies to comply with international agreements” such as various climate initiatives.
Republicans are increasingly targeting asset managers such as BlackRock over their pro-ESG policies. They allege that these asset managers are transforming into backdoor channels for liberals to implement policies outside of the legislative process and leaving aside their principle, legal duty: maximizing returns for shareholders.
Critics of ESG say the policies are often arbitrary and can hurt a company’s bottom line. Moreover, ESG metrics can be gamed. Many companies, such as Tesla, receive a high ESG score under one metric while they rank poorly on another.
“Rather than being a spectator betting on the game, BlackRock appears to have put on a quarterback jersey and actively taken the field,” the AGs write. “As a firm, Blackrock has committed to implementing an ESG engagement and voting strategy across all assets under management.”
BlackRock manages an estimated $10 trillion in assets, a number larger than many first-world economies. Billions of those dollars come from U.S. pension funds. That extraordinary amount of money also gives billionaire Fink, a large donor to Democratic Party candidates and causes, tremendous influence over companies BlackRock invests in. Should Blackrock pull investments from a company over its climate or racial policies, two categories often included in ESG metrics, the company’s stock price would plummet.
The AGs assert that when BlackRock engages with companies over climate practices, it violates the states’ law about maximizing financial returns. For example, if BlackRock representatives pressure a company CEO to adopt a more expensive way to source energy in order to meet climate goals, that company may post lower profits. That drop in profits may translate to a lower stock price and harm pension funds invested in that company.
BlackRock has emerged as an explicit leader in the push “to retire fossil fuels,” the AGs allege. Part of that may be purely ideological or because of a desire to “attract investment from European or left-wing pension funds,” the AGs add. Regardless of motivation, BlackRock is obligated per law to only seek the best financial return on their investments.
Pressure from asset managers such as BlackRock appears effective. Sixty percent of respondents to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey last year said “investor pressure” was the number one reason that oil companies such as Exxon are not expanding operations.
The Biden administration recently picked BlackRock Investment Institute chairman Thomas Donilon to co-chair the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. During his time at the BlackRock Investment Institute, Donilon called on Americans to triple their investments in China, the world’s largest polluter.
West Virginia announced last month that it would no longer do business with Wall Street firms that boycott the fossil fuel industry. One of those firms included BlackRock. The ban will cost the firms $18 billion a year, according to the state’s treasury office.
Andrea Mitchell says community is ‘historic’ because homes were built by slaves
Yet another NBC journalist is fighting to prevent the unwashed masses from befouling the sanctity of their ritzy Washington, D.C., neighborhood. Longtime host Andrea Mitchell is among the wealthy homeowners on Chain Bridge Road NW—described as “one of Washington’s most exclusive and prestigious streets”—who are aggressively opposing measures to allow greater access to unsavory drivers and pedestrians.
Washington City Paperreports that the “quintessentially D.C. dispute” dates back to at least 2009, when residents of the wealthy neighborhood successfully pushed back against city plans to build sidewalks for pedestrians in the interest of public safety. Opponents complained that doing so would make the posh neighborhood feel more “urban,” a racist euphemism for “not white.”
In recent weeks the D.C. Department of Transportation has taken steps to close the road to through traffic, a move some critics view as a blatant example of government officials protecting the interests of wealthy homeowners to the detriment of the greater public.
Mitchell got involved in 2021 when the local neighborhood commissioners once again raised the issue of building sidewalks. The journalist was horrified at the thought. “These are homes that were originally built during the Civil War. Mine was built in 1865, as was my next-door neighbor’s, as farm houses by freed slaves,” she said at a meeting last September. “This is a historic community.”
Wealthy liberals across the country frequently tout the “historic” character of their neighborhoods to scuttle plans that would make them more accessible and affordable for people of color. Robert Reich, a left-wing professor at the University of California-Berkeley, used similar language while attempting to block a proposal to build low-income housing units in his fancy neighborhood.
“If historic preservation means anything, it means maintaining enough of the character of an older neighborhood to remind people of its history and provide continuity with the present,” Reich wrote in 2020. “Development for the sake of development makes no sense when it imposes social costs like this.”
Mitchell is merely the most recent NBC journalist to publicly oppose efforts to make her neighborhood more accommodating to average folks. Former wunderkind host Luke Russert, who retired at age 30, made a fuss last year after a Georgetown science professor placed two large statues of iconic Transformers characters outside his home, which neighbors Russert’s $4 million pad. Children loved them, but Russert denounced them as a safety hazard that could attract unsavory visitors who might park illegally to take photos of their kids posing with the statues.
At one point during a neighborhood commission meeting, Russert suggested that failing to remove the statues was akin to endorsing Soviet communism in America. “What’s to stop someone from putting up a statue of Joseph Stalin and saying, ‘Well, this is provocative, it’s art, it speaks to me,'” Russert said. “They are a nuisance, they are an eyesore, and they detract from the spirit of the neighborhood.”
New DCCC ad pans to menu that lists prices in euros as narrator touts support for local entrepreneurs
A new Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ad aimed at wooing Latinos says Democrats “strengthened Arizona by investing in small businesses.” The business to which the ad subsequently cuts is almost certainly not in Arizona, or even America—its prices are listed in euros.
The DCCC released the ad Monday as part of a “six-figure digital advertising campaign to reach Latino voters,” the group said in a press release. During the spot, a narrator says Democrats supported Arizona entrepreneurs by investing in local businesses. But the restaurant to which the ad cuts is by no means local—its menu lists an array of overpriced options in euros. A goat cheese platter, for example, will set customers back 11 euros, while an avocado option costs 10.50 euros. Should an Arizonan want to visit the eatery, however, the cost would be much higher. The cheapest flight from Phoenix to the European Union is $750, according to online travel agency Kayak.
The DCCC’s intercontinental Arizona ad—which the group said would appeal to Latinos as they are uniquely concerned about “protecting small businesses” and “creating good-paying jobs”—marks Democrats’ latest botched attempt to appeal to Hispanics.
Just weeks ago, in July, first lady Jill Biden compared the Latino community to breakfast tacos. Days later, the DCCC released a radio ad targeting Texas Hispanics, which argued that even though Democrats “seem so out of touch,” they aren’t as bad as “these Republican extremists.” The ad was routinely mocked by liberal Latinos in the Lone Star State—Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha called it “the worst ad I’ve ever heard,” while a Texas Young Democrats member said the spot was “so cringe.”
The DCCC did not return a request for comment. Its ad comes as Democrats hemorrhage Hispanic voters, particularly in South Texas. In June, Republicans flipped a Rio Grande Valley House seat for the first time in more than a century, a result that made Mayra Flores the first Mexican-born woman elected to Congress. Flores even defeated her Democratic opponent in deep-blue Cameron County, which is 90 percent Hispanic and less than two years ago backed Joe Biden by double digits.
Democratic lawmakers and liberal media outlets alike have responded to the Republican Party’s gains with Latino voters by attacking Hispanic Republicans. Flores’s opponent in November, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D., Texas), argued in June that he is more qualified than Flores because he “wasn’t born in Mexico.” Weeks later, Arizona representative Rubén Gallego (D.) said a female Hispanic Republican running for Congress in the state was not sufficiently Latina because she took her husband’s last name.
The New York Times, meanwhile, said Flores’s win marked the “Rise of the Far-Right Latina,” citing the Republican’s support for religiosity, strong borders, and traditional values. A Texas political blog that has received campaign funds from Gonzalez also attacked Flores last month, referring to the congresswoman as “Miss Frijoles,” “Miss Enchiladas,” and a “cotton pickin’ liar.”
“Who does this Mayra Flores think she is? Somebody said she was crowned Miss Frijoles 2022 in San Benito,” Texas political blogger Jerry McHale, who has received $1,200 from Gonzalez’s campaign, wrote on July 2. “She isn’t in congressman Vicente Gonzalez’s league. She isn’t even in the bush leagues unless she doesn’t shave her p**sy.”
The DCCC is no stranger to bungled political ads. In addition to the European menu included in its Arizona spot, the group’s latest ad in New Mexico shows a person taking pills from a bottle labeled “FOR ANIMAL USE ONLY.” It’s unclear if the person in the ad is taking an animal version of the drug Ivermectin, which CNN labeled a “livestock drug” and a “horse dewormer” after popular podcaster Joe Rogan said he took it to treat COVID-19. Rogan was prescribed a human version of the drug.
Matt Cartwright, who has a history of tax delinquency, endorses bill that more than doubles agency’s size
Congressman Matt Cartwright has a history of tax delinquency. That isn’t stopping the Pennsylvania Democrat from backing a plan that would sic an army of nearly 90,000 new IRS agents on the American people.
Cartwright last year owed $436.63 in penalties and interest that stemmed from late property tax payments on his Washington, D.C., condo, the Washington Free Beaconreported last week. The incident was not his first tax-related mishap—from 2013 to 2018, the Democrat racked up thousands of dollars in penalties and interest related to his tax delinquencies. Still, Cartwright on Monday announced his support for the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ $430 billion spending bill that does little to fight inflation and gives the IRS $80 billion to hire up to 87,000 additional employees.
Cartwright’s history of tax delinquency and subsequent support for the bill could haunt the congressman as he faces a difficult reelection bid against GOP challenger Jim Bognet. Cartwright trails the Republican by 1 point with 9 percent of voters undecided, internal polling obtained by the Free Beacon shows.
Cartwright will also have to overcome Joe Biden’s historic unpopularity, which has even extended to the president’s hometown of Scranton. In Cartwright’s eighth district, which includes Scranton, just 38 percent of voters approve of Biden, compared with 60 percent who disapprove, the Free Beaconrevealed Wednesday. Despite Biden’s hometown woes, Cartwright is standing by the president—unlike some of his House Democratic colleagues, the congressman has publicly backed Biden to run for reelection in 2024. Cartwright was also a staunch Biden supporter during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, having said in 2019 that he was “honored” to endorse his “friend, northeastern PA hometown boy, Joe Biden for president.”
Cartwright did not return a request for comment. His Monday statement voicing support for Democrats’ latest spending bill did not include a comment on its IRS-related provisions. Should that bill pass the House, the IRS will receive $80 billion to hire as many as 87,000 additional employees. The hiring spree would more than double the size of the agency’s workforce, making the IRS larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined, the Free Beaconreported. Bognet has railed against the proposal, arguing that the Inflation Reduction Act should instead be called the “Audit America Act.”
“With that many new IRS agents, every small business can expect to be audited,” Bognet said Monday. “We must stop this spending spree, and we must stop this auditing spree.”
Beyond the Cartwright-backed bill’s proposed IRS expansion, even liberal economists don’t believe the $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act will reduce inflation. Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, whom Biden himself routinely cites, said in a new report that the legislation will cause no change in inflation until the third quarter of 2023, when Americans can expect to enjoy a .01 percent decrease.
Cartwright is nevertheless touting the bill as a win for Democrats. In his Monday statement, he called the bill “landmark legislation” that “the American people have been waiting for.”
Cartwright’s race against Bognet is not his first. The Democrat narrowly defeated Bognet by roughly 3 points in 2020, a result that marked the tightest reelection bid of his career. Bognet has thus far raised $1.2 million to Cartwright’s $3.5 million.
A city van for voting visited majority-Democrat vicinities of Racine, Wisconsin, more often than it visited Republican ones, a complaint by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) said.
This violation of voting laws must not be vindicated, wrote WILL deputy counsel, Anthony LoCoco.
“Racine’s use of mobile voting sites violates clear directives in state law on the collection of absentee ballots at alternative sites.
“WEC [Wisconsin Elections Commission] must make clear that Racine is violating the law and ensure that clerks across the state understand what is and is not permitted in Wisconsin law,” he said.
As of now, the city plans to use the voting van again in November’s midterm election.
Voting Violations
The voting van violated a variety of statutes, WILL’s analysis wrote.
Under Wisconsin law, absentee voters must send votes to the office of the municipal clerk, or an alternative site near to the clerk’s office.
But Racine used a voting van to collect absentee primary votes from 21 locations across the city, WILL said.
Moreover, the areas of Racine where the voting van ventured advantaged Democrats, it said.
A study by WILL alleged that Democratic districts got more voting van locations than Republican ones.
“The city of Racine assigned more potential mobile voting locations to wards that vote at the highest percentage for Democrats,” the study stated.
Under Wisconsin law, absentee voting locations that give one party an advantage are illegal, regardless of why they occur, the complaint noted.
“Many of the 21 alternate sites advantage the Democratic Party and some advantage the Republican Party. Collectively, however, the sites used by … [Racine’s city clerk Tara] McMenamin afforded an advantage to the Democratic Party,” WILL’s complaint said.
The voting van also left votes vulnerable, the complaint alleged.
WILL said the city kept ballots in the vehicle during the night, a practice inconsistent with normal Wisconsin ballot security measures.
“That is equivalent to having someone driving completed absentee ballots around the city in the trunk of their car for 14 days prior to the election and leaving the vehicle parked in various locations throughout the days and nights.”
The complaint asked for courts to order McMenamin to obey the law by ending the use of the voting van.
The Chinese regime commits and enables trafficking in persons, primarily by subjecting religious and ethnic minorities to forced labor, according to the U.S. Department of State’s latest Trafficking in Persons Report.
Forced labor in China is so prevalent—that it amounts to a “government policy or pattern”—conducted by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials at all levels, the report stated.
Chinese citizens have further reportedly suffered forced labor at Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as “One Belt, One Road”) projects abroad due to the regime’s neglect to supervise recruitment and labor conditions, the report added.
During the reported period—from April 2021 to March 2022—China showed indicators of state-sanctioned forced labor, did not meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking in persons, and did not make serious efforts to fight it, causing the country to rank among the lowest tier of nations, the State Department said in the report.
Workers walk by the perimeter fence of what is officially known as a vocational skills education center in Dabancheng in Xinjiang, China, on Sept. 4, 2018. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)
Forced Labor in Detention Centers
State-sponsored forced labor occurs mainly under the CCP’s “mass detention and political indoctrination” campaign targeted against Uyghurs and other Muslim or Turkic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region, according to the State Department.
Victims include Tibetans, Christians, and members of other suppressed ethnic and religious minorities, such as Falun Gong adherents.
The CCP “subjugate[s] and exploit[s] minority populations in forced labor in internment camps under the pretext of combating violent extremism and other social ills,” the report stated.
“Authorities continued to amplify the magnitude of trafficking crimes in the country and abroad, including by perpetrating genocide,” it added.
An independent people’s tribunal, known as the Uyghur Tribunal, ruled in December 2021 that the Chinese regime had committed genocide against ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang—through an array of repressive acts that included mass internment, family separation, sterilizations, and forced labor.
The United Nations estimates that more than 1 million Uyghurs have been detained in internment camps in Xinjiang.
Such internment camps are “designed to erase ethnic and religious identities under the pretext of ‘deradicalization,’” according to the State Department.
Detainees may be subject to forced labor within internment camps or at near or external factories. The goods produced range from garments to consumer electronics, face masks, automotive components, and holiday decorations, among many others.
Domestic companies are incentivized to open factories near internment camps through tax cuts and subsidies, as well as to take in transferred detainees from other provinces, as stated in the report.
Local authorities are also incentivized to conduct forced labor, as they are awarded funds “for each inmate forced to work in these sites at a fraction of minimum wage or without any compensation,” the report read.
Local officials are also encouraged to meet detention quotas to keep the system functioning. They achieve this by issuing arbitrary arrests and accusing individuals of false criminal offenses or administrative violations—such as violating birth regulations. This data was extracted from the regime’s official documents, according to the State Department.
Non-interned Forced Labor
Besides being subject to forced labor under detention, victims are coerced into forced labor through threats of interment. They are also transferred to manufacturing sites in other provinces under “poverty alleviation” programs.
China “has reportedly placed 2.6 million members of minority communities in agricultural and manufacturing jobs within Xinjiang and across the country through state-sponsored ‘surplus labor’ and ‘labor transfer’ initiatives featuring overt forced labor indicators,” the report stated.
“The government has transported at least 80,000 of these individuals to other provinces for forced labor under the guise of poverty alleviation and industrial aid programs,” it added.
Workers take down a Belt and Road Forum panel outside the forum venue in Beijing on April 27, 2019. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
Trafficking in Persons Linked to China’s BRI
The Chinese regime has reportedly omitted to oversee BRI projects’ recruitment channels, labor conditions, and contracts, which resulted in Chinese citizens being deceived into moving abroad, where they were subjected to forced labor and other abuses, according to the report.
The BRI—a tool for the CCP’s global expansion—finances enormous loans to developing nations for building infrastructure. Chinese state-owned banks provide the countries with loans that experts say open the nations to the risk of being saddled with unsustainable debt levels.
The loans are then used to pay Chinese companies to build infrastructure, including the development of roads, ports, power plants, mines, telecommunications, or banking institutions. The ostentatious projects have been described as part of so-called debt-trap diplomacy since the often-unpayable loans will force the nations to repay China with goods or land.
Chinese citizens employed in BRI projects abroad have suffered forced labor at worksites funded totally or partially by Beijing, Chinese companies, or Chinese nationals, said the State Department.
Chinese and “host country nationals employed in some BRI construction projects, mining operations, and factories in African, European, Middle Eastern, Asian, Pacific, Latin American, and Caribbean countries experience deceptive recruitment into debt bondage, arbitrary wage garnishing or withholding, contract irregularities, confiscation of travel and identity documentation, forced overtime, and resignation penalties,” the report read.
Such was the case of Li Wei and Mao Chen, two Chinese citizens recruited for a rural BRI project in Indonesia, which included flights, housing, food, and wages. However, once at the smelting plant, their passports were seized, and they were subject to forced labor, working 16 hours a day without a salary, according to the report. They were accommodated in small quarters, surveilled by armed guards.
A subcontractor later took over their contracts, but their labor conditions did not change. While Li escaped the facility, Mao was still subjected to forced labor.
SO WHEN ARE REPUBLICANS GOING TO GET OFF THEIR BUTTS AND CODIFY THIS TREND?
A majority of American voters support states requiring audits “immediately after elections” to protect election integrity, according to a new poll by Rasmussen Reports sponsored by The National Pulse.
Asked, “Should every state require that ballots be available immediately after elections for bipartisan voter reviews to enhance election confidence and transparency?” 56 percent of likely voters supported the idea while just 23 percent of likely voters opposed it.
The Rasmussen data showed that 68 percent of Republicans – considerably more than just 45 percent of their Democrat-voting counterparts – supported the push for election integrity. 57 percent of Independents were also in support.
When divided into the three ideologies of “Conservative,” “Moderate,” and “Liberal,” the data showed a similar trend: 73 percent of Conservatives responded “yes,” 52 percent of Moderates responded “yes,” and just 34 percent of Liberals responded “yes.”
The news follows Democrats attempting to universalize vote-by-mail in America’s forthcoming elections while Republican officials have sought to halt these efforts with election integrity measures. It also comes as the 2020 election results continue to be subject to scrutiny due to the nefarious influence of private foundations funding ballot harvesting efforts and unmanned ballot “drop boxes.”
The Rasmussen poll also inquires with voters “How important will the issue of election integrity be in this year’s congressional elections?”.
80 percent of likely voters felt the issue would be important, with 59 percent of individuals polled believing election integrity would be “very important.”
The feelings appeared to be nonpartisan, as 87 percent of Republicans, 78 percent of Democrats, and 76 percent of Independents believed election integrity would be important in the upcoming midterms.
The poll comes amidst ongoing investigations into several late-night ballot dumps during the 2020 election, all of which supported Joe Biden, and far-left activist groups linked to George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg using hundreds of millions of dollars to boost voter turnout rates for the Democratic Party.
Mainstream media outlets, social media platforms, and Democratic officials have set out to censor individuals discussing voter fraud, despite pushing similar claims about Russian election influence throughout 2016 and the entirety of Donald Trump’s presidency. Under Biden, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has also targeted officials and activists fighting for election integrity by threatening criminal prosecution.
The Justice Department has to respond to motions to unseal a warrant that triggered the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, according to a magistrate judge who reportedly approved the search.
“On or before 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on August 15, 2022, the Government shall file a Response to the Motion to Unseal,” wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart on Wednesday afternoon, referring to the Department of Justice.
“The response may be filed ex parte and under seal as necessary to avoid disclosing matters already under seal. In that event, the Government shall file a redacted Response in the public record. If it chooses, the Government may file a consolidated Response to all Motions to Seal,” he wrote.
Neither the FBI nor Justice Department has issued public comments about the raid, which was first confirmed by Trump on Monday evening.
The FBI declined to comment when contacted by The Epoch Times, and the Justice Department has not responded to several requests for comment.
As for the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden was not aware of the raid before Trump’s announcement. Her claim was refuted by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“What I can tell you definitively and for sure, he was not aware of this,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden. “Nobody at the White House was. Nobody was given a heads up and we did not know about what happened yesterday.”
Requests
On Wednesday, the Times Union’s managing editor, Brendan J. Lyons, wrote to Reinhart to ask for the warrant to be unsealed.
“Given that the search warrant(s) have been executed, and the target of that search has full knowledge of what occurred, there is no impediment to any ongoing investigation from the disclosure of the search warrant order or the returns. As such, these records should be unsealed,” the letter to the Florida judge reads.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-A-Lago, Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
Judicial Watch asked for the warrant as part of an investigation into “the potential politicization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice and whether the FBI and the Justice Department are abusing their law enforcement powers to harass a likely future political opponent of President [Joe] Biden.”
“If the Court were to unseal the materials, Judicial Watch would obtain the materials, analyze them, and make them available to the public,” the letter said. “Unsealing the records therefore would further Judicial Watch’s mission of educating the public.”
It comes as Eric Trump, a son of the former president, told the Daily Mail that a Trump attorney at Mar-a-Lago, Christina Bobb, asked FBI agents Monday about seeing a warrant.
“They would not give her the search warrant,” he told the outlet, referring to Bobb. “So they showed it to her from about 10 feet away. They would not give her a copy of the search warrant.”
Top Republicans, meanwhile, demanded an investigation into the raid and argued that it was politically motivated to wound the GOP ahead of the 2022 midterms. Some have said the Justice Department immediately needs to release documents pertaining to the raid.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said there needs be a “thorough and immediate explanation” of how the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was approved. Legal historians have said that such a raid against a former president is unprecedented.
“Attorney General Garland and the Department of Justice should already have provided answers to the American people and must do so immediately,” McConnel added.
Trump on Monday said that federal agents entered Mar-a-Lago despite him having cooperated with federal officials for months to return documents that he allegedly took from the White House after leaving office last year.
Reinhart came under fire Tuesday amid reports from several news outlets that found he had a connection to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Reinhart left his job as an assistant United States in early 2008 before he began representing some of Epstein’s workers.
According to a 2018 Miami Herald report, two of Epstein’s accusers alleged Reinhart left his prosecutor job to give Epstein inside information. Reinhart denied those allegations.
As his connection to the Epstein case went viral on Tuesday, it appeared the U.S. Southern District of Florida removed the judge’s page from its website, according to archived versions of the website.
“Access denied,” Reinhart’s page reads. “You are not authorized to access this page.”
China and Russia are the clear winners of the the carbon-reducing provisions in the Democrats’ latest spending bill that aim to cut fossil fuel emissions by 40 percent by 2030, according to former President Donald Trump’s erstwhile economic adviser.
Stephen Moore, a Trump-era adviser and senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told NTD in a recent interview that the climate-related provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act—now en route to final House approval—would hamstring American energy production and benefit adversaries.
“The two big winners from this bill clearly are Russia and China,” Moore said, adding that he thinks the bill is not just bad for the U.S. economy but it’s “really bad for national security to give up our energy dominance.”
Moore pointed out that China—which is responsible for around five times more carbon emissions than the United States—is now building dozens of massive coal plants and “obviously, they don’t care about climate change.”
As a major exporter of fossil fuels, Russia also stands to gain from efforts to accelerate curbs on U.S. carbon emissions as that would keep crude prices elevated and bolster Russia’s revenue stream, Moore said.
The economist argued that the Biden administration has “basically declared a war on our fossil fuels,” while pointing to Germany’s “experiment” of going all-in on clean energy a decade or so ago that he said “basically led to a complete economic collapse.”
“Let’s not follow in their footsteps,” he said.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to reporters outside the Senate Chamber after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Aug. 7, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Markets or Government Subsidies?
The Inflation Reduction Act includes $369 billion in climate and energy provisions, with measures like tax credits for buying electric vehicles, making homes more energy efficient, and installing residential solar panels and battery systems.
The measure also reinstates the superfund tax on crude and imported oil, which could lead to higher energy bills for households, and it includes a fee of up to $1,500 per ton for methane emissions.
“More simply, it means that roughly 40 percent of the country’s electricity will come from wind, solar, and energy storage by 2030,” ACP said in the analysis, which projects that the Inflation Reduction Act will, overall, deliver an estimated 525 to 550 gigawatts of new non-fossil fuel power by the end of the decade, up from the current 211 gigawatts.
The bill is also expected to generate over $900 billion in economic activity via the construction of clean energy projects between now and 2030, according to the association.
Moore said that he doesn’t object to renewable sources of energy but argued that market forces rather than government subsidies should be their key driver.
“We didn’t have the government subsidize Henry Ford when he invented cars,” Moore said. “We didn’t have the the federal government subsidize Standard Oil when it started making … gas plentiful and cheap for everyone. So why do we need to have the government throw hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in this industry?”
Moore also argued that, contrary to what its name implies, the bill won’t reduce inflation.
Alliant Energy’s coal plant in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake Michigan, on July 4, 2022. (Timothy Gardner/Reuters)
Inflation Reduction?
The Inflation Reduction Act “will increase inflation,” Moore said, adding that, “the reason we have 9 percent inflation today is because of the massive Biden spending spree.”
“There’s two things you don’t want to do when you have massive inflation. You don’t want to spend more government money. And when you’re in a recession, you don’t want to raise taxes. This bill makes both those mistakes,” he said.
Some disagree with Moore about the bill’s impact on inflation.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said in an Aug. 9 interview in The Harvard Gazette that “the tendency of this bill will be to reduce inflation because over time it reduces demand by bringing down budget deficits.”
Summers also argued that it would bolster the supply of key commodities in the energy sector, helping push down prices.
Other backers of the bill, like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), say the government subsidies for clean energy will have a knock-on effect and boost private investment in the sector and so accelerate cutting carbon emissions.
“This is going to be more massive than people realize,” Khanna told Politico in a recent interview.
“If the government invests $300 billion in solar, wind, batteries, and heat pumps, that has the potential to unlock trillions of dollars in private sector investment in climate,” he added.
Moore argued that the bill is less about the environment and more about money.
“This is a massive, now trillion-dollar, industry. This is about money, folks, this doesn’t have anything to do about cleaning up the environment or keeping our environment safe,” he said.
“This is massive numbers of huge companies and huge investors. They’re going to get very, very rich off of these hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies,” Moore added.
The American Petroleum Institute (API), a fossil fuels industry group, identified six problematic provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that it argued would undermine the industry’s ability to promote energy security for American consumers.
Besides the superfund tax and methane emission fees, the API also noted additional costs imposed on energy companies with the bill’s minimum book tax provisions and increased rental fees on onshore leases.
The group also panned the bill’s omitting of comprehensive permitting reform, which API believes is key for bolstering domestic energy production, lowering costs for consumers, and helping the country meet its emission objectives.
“Glaringly absent in the bill is permitting reform, which is required for America’s infrastructure needs and to bolster critical oil, natural gas, and renewable supplies to meet our current and future energy demand,” said Mike Sommers, API president and CEO, in a statement.
Former President Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump revealed that FBI agents wouldn’t hand over the search warrant during their Aug. 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago and removed an attorney from the property.
“There’s 30 agents there,” he told the Daily Mail on Aug. 10 of the FBI raid. ‘They told our lawyer … you have to leave the property right now. Turn off all security cameras.
“They would not give her the search warrant. So they showed it to her from about 10 feet away. They would not give her a copy of the search warrant.”
Attorney Christina Bobb was confused as to why the FBI couldn’t present the search warrant, according to Eric Trump.
“It’s all a coordinated attack with the FBI,” he said. “Do you think that the FBI director is going to raid the former president’s house, especially a house as you know, kind of world-renowned as Mar-a-Lago … without getting the approval of President [Biden]?”
The younger Trump said security cameras weren’t turned off. FBI agents accessed areas of the property where they “shouldn’t have been,” he claimed.
The former president confirmed the FBI raid on his property on the evening of Aug. 8. Both the FBI and Department of Justice haven’t issued public comments about the matter; The Epoch Times has contacted both agencies for comment.
Unconfirmed reports and anonymous sources say the raid pertained to a Department of Justice probe into whether Donald Trump held onto government documents after he left the White House last year.
All presidential correspondence and documentation have to be handed over to the National Archives when a president leaves office, according to a 1978 law.
(L-R) Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner arrive for the funeral services of Ivana Trump in New York on July 20, 2022. (Yuki Iwamura/AFP via Getty Images)
“[The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)] had ongoing communications with the representatives of former President Trump throughout 2021, which resulted in the transfer of 15 boxes to NARA in January 2022,” David Ferriero, who served as NARA director from November 2009 until April 2022, wrote to House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) in February.
Ferriero said NARA requested that Trump representatives “continue to search for any additional Presidential records that have not been transferred to NARA, as required by the Presidential Records Act.”
But Bobb told Real America’s Voice that the raid over the documents is a “completely unnecessary power flex” and a “weird flex.”
“It’s quite honestly sad to see what they have done to our country,” she said.
Top Republicans demanded an investigation into the raid and argued that it was politically motivated to wound the Republican Party ahead of the 2022 midterms.
“The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an Aug. 10 statement. “When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of their department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned.”
Hiring practices driven by diversity are ‘a recipe for disaster’
Southwest Airlines Co. (AKA SouthWoke Air [US Patriot]) is basking in accolades for its “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) efforts, award-winning customer service, and record-breaking quarterly revenues.
Behind the scenes of that rosy picture, heartaches are afflicting Southwest, called “the airline with Heart” because of its heart-shaped logo and a corporate culture steeped in “The Golden Rule,” treating others the same way they’d like to be treated.
But eight current Southwest employees, including three minorities, told The Epoch Times that “woke, leftist” DEI policies, as implemented, have tarnished the cherished Golden Rule principle, fractured a once-cohesive workforce, and, ultimately, may put safety at risk.
Faced with pandemic-related staffing shortages and pressure to add minorities, the company has changed the way it hires, trains, and disciplines workers—mostly to benefit less-qualified new hires representing the diversity rainbow, the employees say.
One Southwest flight attendant, a Hispanic female, said: “They are compromising safety for the sake of race, gender identity, and sexual preference … They’re risking people’s lives because of agendas.”
Southwest, one of America’s largest air carriers, didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
Similar issues have spread industry-wide, according to 10 airline employees who agreed to be interviewed. Four are pilots and six are flight attendants; most have 20 or more years of experience. All of them, including two American Airlines pilots, spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.
While no one thinks the policies are causing an imminent threat of a plane falling out of the sky tomorrow, all of the interviewees agreed that each time a standard is lowered, or a less-qualified employee is hired, the risk that something can go horribly wrong inches forward a notch or two. In an industry that depends on a near-miracle integration of people, machinery, and computers, even a few deviations can culminate in catastrophe.
Still, some employees worry about what could happen if current trends continue to stress out and distract safety professionals. Said one flight attendant: “It’s a recipe for disaster. I just hope I’m not at work when it happens.”
Us-Versus-Them Mentality
While promoting diversity sounds like a great idea, the inclusionary policies have actually become exclusionary at Southwest, employees say. Disparate treatment has divided their ranks into two distinct camps: those with “desirable” or “approved” personal, social, or political characteristics—and those without.
Minorities or people with leftist political views, varying gender identities, and alternative sexual orientations appear to be given wide latitude. This “protected class” is allowed to bend or break rules, and new hires in these classifications may be given extra chances to pass required skills tests, the employees said.
At the same time, veteran workers—especially those who are white, heterosexual, and conservative—find themselves in the crosshairs for almost anything, including making a personal statement of religious or political beliefs, the Southwest workers said. Even minorities can be shifted into this targeted group if they espouse personal beliefs running counter to causes that the company supports.
“There are two sets of standards: One for us and one for them,” said an experienced flight attendant.
One of her colleagues said: “The company is trying to eliminate anybody who does not agree with their agenda. The last few years, anybody who speaks up against them, they want gone.” That flight attendant said she had no problems at work until she posted her Christian religious beliefs on her personal Facebook page, along with her support of President Donald Trump. A coworker reported the posts to Southwest, and the flight attendant said she has faced repercussions ever since.
She and others say the targeting of conservatives is common—and they point to the recently publicized case of fired Southwest flight attendant Charlene Carter as a prime example.
‘Targeted Assassinations’ of Conservatives
Last month, a federal jury in Texas awarded Carter more than $5 million after finding that Southwest wrongfully terminated her and that her union didn’t live up to its duty to represent her. The company fired Carter after she expressed her pro-life views to a union leader via social media and opposed the union’s pro-abortion activism.
The company supported the union’s political activism, Carter’s suit says, by accommodating work-shift changes for union members so they could participate in the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., in January 2017. Marchers were protesting Trump’s inauguration; one of the primary sponsors of the event was Planned Parenthood. Southwest also showed “solidarity” with the protesters by bathing its airplane cabins in pink lights on some D.C.-bound flights, Carter’s lawsuit says.
Charlene Carter, who was fired from her job at Southwest Airlines, has won a federal case alleging she was wrongfully terminated over expressing her personal religious views. (Courtesy of Charlene Carter)
Documents in the case revealed that some union officials and political activists were singling out dissenting Southwest employees for “targeted assassinations,” meaning that they would try to get the company to fire them, using the company’s social media policy as a bludgeon.
In an interview with The Epoch Times on Aug. 8, Carter, who lives near Denver, Colorado, said she can’t believe that some leaders of Transport Workers Union of America Local 556, who helped set her up to be fired, are still working for Southwest.
Carter also validated her coworkers’ concerns about the disparate treatment of employees who dare to oppose leftist agendas. “I think there are a ton of cases out there just like mine,” she said. Terminated employees from Southwest and other airlines have been continuously contacting Carter for help after learning about the July 14 verdict in her case.
Carter spent five years fighting in court; she thinks she was one of the first casualties of the erosion of Southwest’s unique corporate culture, which she witnessed during the latter part of her 20-plus years at the airline.
“We all loved our jobs; we all loved each other—our CoHearts, that’s what we called each other,” Carter said, pointing out that the airline’s stock ticker is LUV, a nod to its birthplace at Love Field, Texas.
Corporate Culture Shift
But corporate leadership and philosophy shifted. Carter said, her former coworkers tell her the culture is now one where people are fired on a whim, and they’re encouraged to file complaints against each other over perceived insults, such as failure to use the “preferred pronoun” of a person asserting an alternative gender identity.
Employees who face such accusations are presumed guilty, a current flight attendant said, and they risk suspension or termination. “That is how we are treated now,” she said.
“It’s gotten ridiculous,” Carter said. She was astounded to learn that lapel pins, designating preferred pronouns, are being offered to staff.
A fellow flight attendant says the company’s priorities are misplaced.
“We used to be focused on hiring ‘the best of the best,’” she said. “So why is it now that we feel at Southwest Airlines that we have to use the right pronouns and we have to acquiesce to someone’s gender-fluid mentality?”
The DEI Effect
The interviewed employees blame DEI policies for sowing the seeds of division. Ironically, before DEI was implemented, “people were never labeled,” a flight attendant said. “I find it very divisive,” she said, “because now everyone is labeled, divided by race, gender sexual orientation … whatever.”
“This is wrong—all the way wrong,” she said.
The company’s annual report, in its DEI section, says, “Southwest Airlines recognizes, respects, and values differences. … At Southwest, DEI is and always has been a part of our DNA.”
All four major airlines—and many other American companies—publicly disclose DEI-related information, such as data on minority recruitment and the racial makeup of their workforce.
“Every airline is trying to push forward with minority hiring because they want to ‘show that they care,’” aviation analyst Jay Ratliff said. “They’re being asked, ‘How many women are within your pilot ranks? … How many pilots of color?’”
If an airline’s diversity metrics seem low in comparison to their competitors’ numbers, the company’s reputation and bottom line can suffer, Ratliff said.
That’s not necessarily fair, he said, because few people have the ability, interest, and financial means to qualify as a commercial airline pilot. Amassing the FAA-required 1,500 hours of flight time with an instructor can cost $75,000 or more, pilots said.
Last year, United Airlines announced its goals: to train 5,000 new pilots by 2030 at its new flight school, with “at least half of those students to be women or people of color.” The first class of new recruits “exceeded that goal,” with 80 percent of the 30 students fitting that category, the airline said in a report.
Considering that white males make up about one-third of the American population, a Southwest pilot said that composing a class with 80 percent minorities and women looks like “DEI special-status hiring on steroids.”
Scoring Systems Push Diversity
DEI data play a significant role in corporate ESG scores—ratings of a company’s “environmental, social, and governance” performance. It’s a complex—and controversial—way to assess which companies are considered “good corporate citizens.”
Most of the interviewed airline employees believe that the pursuit of ESG scores is driving corporate personnel practices, including ignoring well-qualified male applicants while eagerly hiring less-experienced female and minority candidates.
Increasingly, ESG scores can help determine whether a company sinks or swims. A good ESG score can attract investors, government contracts, and favorable loan-interest rates—benefits that are especially important for the airline industry, in which lucrative U.S. Department of Defense contracts are at stake and profit margins are razor-thin because of astronomical costs for equipment and personnel.
ESG ratings have existed in some form for decades, yet they barely registered a blip on internet searches until a few months ago, amid the Biden administration’s continued push for businesses to address environmental concerns and to institute “green” policies, which weigh heavily in ESG scores and DEI metrics.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently announced his intent to push back against ESG, calling it “leveraging corporate power to impose an ideological agenda on society.”
Refinitiv, a company that produces ESG scores, says its process for calculating the ratings starts with collecting more than 630 ESG measures from each company’s public disclosures. Other ESG assessors have their own rating systems, which means results can vary depending on which assessment method is being used. ESG advocates are now working on standardizing how these scores are calculated.
Several airline employees said it would benefit their company, their industry, and society in general if ESG scores and DEI programs were abolished.
One Southwest pilot with decades of experience said such measures create unnecessary complications with no positive effect on the airline’s core mission.
“Why do we need DEI programs? Why do we need ESG? A lot of the public isn’t even aware these things exist,” he said. “The passengers just want people like me to get them, and their bags, to the same place at the same time, safely … DEI and ESG do nothing to support that—zero.”
“I need these DEI programs and ESG scores to go out the back of the airplane like the jet fuel that we burn.”
Non-Pilots Hiring Pilots
Southwest’s annual report says it has been “evolving hiring and development practices to support diversity goals.”
Those changes are troubling to the interviewed employees and to the pilots’ union. In a letter to members last month, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association pointed out that, for the first time in the company’s 51-year history, a non-pilot is in charge of hiring pilots. The “system chief pilot” used to have that responsibility. “We are just a single step away” from hiring pilots based upon mere reviews of their resumes, association president Casey Murray wrote to union members. Southwest has about 9,600 pilots, the letter said.
Putting a non-pilot in charge of hiring pilots most likely will affect the quality of the pilots who are being hired, Southwest interviewees said. People who lack specific knowledge of this specialized job would have a hard time telling the difference between a good hire and a bad one, pilots said. One of the interviewed pilots said that the chief pilot told him: “The diversity department has a very strong voice in who gets hired.”
Southwest wants to hire more than 2,000 pilots in the next year, the union’s letter said, questioning whether those new hires will be required to meet Southwest’s traditionally high standards. “Across the entire commercial aviation industry, employers are fighting for an ever-shrinking pool of qualified pilots,” yet Southwest may be at a disadvantage to compete for those pilots. Contract negotiations with Southwest’s pilots are lagging, compared to progress with other airlines’ pilot unions, Murray said.
“Pilots are the fuel that powers Southwest Airlines, and right now Southwest’s supply of fuel is running low. Time is growing critical, and options are becoming limited,” Murray wrote.
Seeking the Best (Non-White) Pilots?
Current pilots also say they have learned that hiring decisions are being driven by a job candidate scoring system; they’re unsure how long it has been in place, how it works, or whether it unfairly elevates minorities. The company controls all of that information.
Still, the employees feel confident in anecdotal evidence suggesting that the scoring system, coupled with other hiring practices, could be producing a pattern of discrimination against men, especially white men who come from military backgrounds—previously highly sought-after job candidates. “We could be wrong, but I don’t think we are,” said one pilot who has military experience.
That pilot said he thinks the vast majority of his colleagues have heard accounts of possible discrimination similar to the following:
When a well-qualified former military pilot applied for a job, Southwest never contacted him for an interview. But the applicant learned that a woman was hired as a pilot, despite having half as much experience in the airline industry.
Further, the man had experience as a captain while the woman had only been a first officer, who sits next to the captain in the cockpit. “It’s a completely different world” when a person shifts into the captain’s chair, said the pilot.
“We’re leaving a lot of people behind who are better-qualified, just because they’re the wrong color, or they’re identified the wrong way. That’s concerning. We’re not putting the best up-front,” he said. “We have people’s lives in our hands. It’s just like with doctors. If you go to a doctor, you want to go to the best doctor you can.”
An American Airlines pilot with decades of experience said he was less troubled than some of the Southwest interviewees who worried about the effects of reduced standards as a result of the increased emphasis on diversity hiring. However, that pilot said he would become very concerned if standards are lowered “to the point where people aren’t flying as confidently.”
A second American Airlines pilot said he has observed that “training is not nearly as comprehensive as it used to be,” he said. “But these people who are starting out are flying with people who are supremely qualified to be flying airplanes—so mistakes can be covered.”
He thinks the reduced standards could eventually cause problems if the hyperfocus on diversity continues: “If you’re looking for a diverse workforce and not a qualified workforce, you’ve got issues. … You haven’t seen any accidents because of ‘diversity,’ but the potential is there.”
All 11 people who were interviewed for this story, including Carter, the ex-flight attendant, said personal traits such as gender and race shouldn’t be part of the equation at all.
“From the cockpit door forward, guys and gals of all ethnicities are after the same thing—and that’s a safe flight,” said one of the American Airlines pilots. “They don’t care who sits next to them as long as they can do the job.”
More Than Snack Servers
Most air passengers think of flight attendants as hospitality ambassadors who make them comfortable with beverages, snacks, blankets, and pillows. But their main purpose is to assist in the rare event of an in-flight emergency.
Six Southwest flight attendants, along with Carter, say they feel less able to perform crucial duties because of the climate in which they’re now operating—and new hires appear to be less equipped to shoulder those responsibilities.
“They have just made it such a hostile work environment. Southwest has made it that way, and flight attendants are afraid to do their jobs,” a flight attendant said. “But you’re supposed to put a smile on your face and pretend that everything is grand.”
The flight attendants describe feeling as though a backstabber is always ready to pounce, to report any action or statement that doesn’t fit the corporate ideology. They’re being held to strict conduct and uniform standards while “accommodations” are extended to people in protected classes, such as a minority woman who was allowed to wear a nose ring—which got a white female in trouble—and a male flight attendant who described himself as “nonbinary”—neither totally male nor totally female—being allowed to wear a skirt that appeared to be shorter than regulations allowed.
The nonbinary employee seemed to be using his position at the airline as a platform for LGBTQ activism and self-promotion, rather than focusing on benefiting the company or its customers, fellow flight attendants said. They shared screenshots of the nonbinary employee’s social media posts. One is a selfie of the mustached man posing in his Southwest uniform, with the comment, “My dress looks better on me than most chicks.”
That employee no longer works for Southwest, flight attendants said. Yet they said they were aware that a couple of employees faced disciplinary action for referring to the nonbinary employee as “he” in a members-only Facebook group for flight attendants.
Antics Embarrass Fellow Flight Attendants
One flight attendant perceives that the company is making skewed, unfair hiring decisions, and creating a level of absurdity that’s hard to stomach. She knows of people who are related to Southwest employees and have college degrees—which go beyond the high-school education requirement for flight attendants—“and they don’t get hired, and yet we have this guy, with a mustache, in a skirt, distracting us all because the company wants to fight over his pronouns.”
Being a flight attendant used to be considered prestigious and classy; Southwest was viewed as “Mount Rushmore,” a pinnacle for flight attendants, who felt proud just to be hired.
“Now the pride is not about the brand of Southwest Airlines,” a flight attendant said. “It’s about how different I can be as an employee of Southwest Airlines—like, ‘Y’all need me more than I need you.’”
Public perception of the role has diminished, not just at Southwest, but across the industry. Airlines grant diversity-based exceptions to people who don’t want to look or act professional, the flight attendants said.
It used to be unusual to see flight attendants behave in ways that brought embarrassment to their coworkers. Now, quite a few of the new hires who were prized for their diversity “are rather risqué,” a flight attendant said. “They become very emboldened; they feel they can get away with this because they are in a protected class.”
Still, Southwest has had to fire employees who pushed the envelope too far, including one minority flight attendant who solicited sex in a social media video and another who videoed herself twerking. In both instances, the videos, provided to the Epoch Times, show the employees in Southwest uniforms.
Such conduct disgusts the flight attendants, and their concern is more than superficial. “If we relax the appearance standards and we’re letting people lower their professional standards, then they obviously are not equipped to handle any type of safety issue that can happen on that plane,” a flight attendant said.
“Where do you draw the line and say enough is enough?”
Commitment, Skills Insufficient
One of the flight attendants who has been targeted for religious and political views said her commitment to her job boils down to this: “I will give my life for my passengers and my crew, if that’s what I need to do. My last words will be, ‘Let’s roll,’” she said, referencing the famous words spoken by a passenger on one of the U.S. airplanes that were hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001.
She doesn’t see that same level of grit from the new hires. “They don’t have the same tough mentality,” she said. Nor do they have the same work ethic, which might be attributable to differences between the younger and older generations.
The older flight attendant described being busy from the beginning to the end of each flight while many of the new hires tend to just serve one round of drink orders, “then they go back to the back (of the airplane) and sit down for the rest of the flight.”
The new employees aren’t demonstrating mastery of the skills they were supposed to have been taught, or willingness to perform them. A passenger was having a medical emergency but the flight attendant in charge of that section “wouldn’t even come out of the galley to assist,” said one flight attendant. Instead, she and a second colleague had to take care of the ailing passenger.
Such an incident stokes her worst fear: “Somebody’s gonna die. With the lack of training that we’re seeing in the new hires that are coming out … there’s going to be somebody who’s not trained, facing an emergency.”
The irony is that, because of conduct problems and lack of devotion to the job, many of the “check-the-box” new hires either quit or are discharged, the employees said. That’s why it would make more sense for Southwest to be more selective in its hiring decisions—and to make those decisions based on the applicant’s qualifications and commitment to doing a good job, both of which now seem to be lacking.
Too Many Hires, Too Fast?
A flight attendant who is familiar with hiring practices said she is concerned about the speed with which large numbers of new employees were hired in recent months. She is hearing that up to 10,000 employees have been added to the roster, so the airline is now up to pre-pandemic staffing levels.
Her concern: It’s doubtful that the company had the capacity to properly vet and train such a large number of employees, including flight attendants, in such a short timeframe. In fact, she says it’s “mathematically impossible,” (That’s OK, because mathematics is racist anyway [US Patriot]) based on past observations of failure rates among new trainees.
For each class of about 50 flight attendants, about 15 trainees would “wash out,” or not make it through the rigorous testing process, which includes mastering emergency evacuation drills. Considering that, it’s most likely that “the standards would have to be relaxed” to allow large numbers of new hires to complete the process rapidly.
“There’s a mindset that’s changed…it seems like they’re accepting almost any applicant—here’s a body and here’s a checkmark” on the diversity list, she said.
She’s puzzled as to why Southwest pushed so hard to hire so many new flight attendants. “We don’t have all the airplanes that we were expecting to get,” she said. “Then why are we hiring all of these flight attendants?”
Less-Rigorous Training
Today’s training is “a lot shorter and a lot simpler” than it used to be, she said.
Carter said it’s her understanding that flight attendants now must pass only a few tests. In years past, “there were about three tests a week for six weeks,” she said. “You were breathing through a fire hose all of this information.”
She also said that if a trainee flunked a test, that person was given one chance to retake it, “and if you failed, you were done.” Now, Carter has been told that people are being given multiple opportunities for do-overs.
As a result, “I’m hearing from flight attendants that these people don’t understand what our safety is about here.”
Employees say they feel as though core values and common sense are falling by the wayside when they are asked to give wide berth to people asserting that they are gender fluid, or identify with a gender that doesn’t match their biological sex.
“I don’t tell a pilot that I identify as a pilot, and I’m going to fly the aircraft—because there are no facts in that,” a flight attendant said.
While seeing a decline in the flight attendants who seem to be truly vested in their work, the flight attendants say the company is directing them to merely “inform” passengers about violations of safety rules, not to enforce the rules. This is in direct contrast to a few months ago, when flight attendants were required to function as the facemask police to enforce a federal pandemic restriction while it remained in effect.
Presumably in response to customer backlash over the much-despised mask mandates, Southwest has instructed flight attendants to cut passengers more slack. “We’re allowing customers to do as they please, and it’s causing safety issues,” a flight attendant said. People are refusing to remain seated during takeoffs and landings, for example. If something goes amiss, “You become a projectile; you can hurt other people,” the flight attendant added.
Airline Love Affair Ends
A longtime pilot described his passion for his job, and laments how the company killed it.
From the outset, “I was in a love affair with Southwest Airlines. They were smaller and scrappier. They were all bone and muscle. No fat. And I liked that,” he said. “We grew under the nose of American, Delta, and United, despite their tactics … We continued to grow and thrive around a very simple business model that revolved around the Golden Rule.”
That enabled the company to empower all employee groups so they could make decisions benefiting both internal and external customers. They didn’t get sucked into bureaucracies.
But the company crossed a rubicon last year when it took a stand on the COVID-19 vaccine and “woke” policies, he said. Employees were told: “You must get vaccinated and you must accept these diversity and inclusion principles even though it goes against the principles that you grew up with at this company.”
For the veteran pilot, that was a death knell, he said. “It was a complete and total divorce of the culture.”
“The company has destroyed the trust relationship. This is not the Southwest Airlines that I joined. … The love affair is over,” he said. “When you prioritize profits and special interests over people, this is what you get.”
Although the public perception is that many pilots lost their jobs because of vaccine mandates, pilots doubt that’s accurate. In the case of Southwest, many employees sought—and obtained—religious or medical exemptions.
The company still touts the Golden Rule, but that’s mostly lip service, the pilot said. “It’s the thing that allowed Southwest to rise to greatness. It’s less important now. What’s more important? I have to understand that a person’s gender can be on a sliding scale, or maybe they’re just a man who wants to dress as a woman.”
He resents the implication that “hopelessly bigoted pilots like me” need to take a new sexual harassment training module that encompasses LGBTQ considerations. He learned that if a person in that category believes they were looked at in a way that they felt was uncomfortable, “I could be written up, and I don’t even have to say anything,” the pilot said.
Southwest flight attendants were recently required to complete a DEI training or face being put on unpaid leave. That didn’t sit well. The flight attendants say they were already treating people as equally as possible—values embodied in the Golden Rule and basic human decency. “I say this as a minority: I don’t need to be told how to treat people with dignity and respect. I’ve been doing that all my life.”
Distractions Imperil Safety
These programs and the “woke” cultural shift are creating huge distractions, which by themselves pose a threat to safety in ways that most people never think about, the pilot said.
“People take it for granted that takeoffs equal landings. But I can tell you that there are close calls—regularly—where human intervention prevented things from getting really bad. … And the traveling public never knew about it,” the pilot said.
For everyone’s safety, all airline workers must be at the top of their game.
“We need the most qualified people in these safety-sensitive jobs. But it doesn’t stop at the cockpit door,” he said. If any part of the system breaks down because a person was distracted or wasn’t the most qualified person for the job, “the end result is the same if you had an unqualified pilot: the airplane is a smoking hole at the end of the runway and you have 170 people dead—and a lot of angry families.”
“If you crash one airplane, that one crash has the ability to put an airline out of business. When I go to work that weighs on me. All 170 of those lives are in my mind from the time we take off until we land,” he said. “In my mind, disaster is just around the corner.”
Ready for The Worst
Before each takeoff, pilots mentally rehearse how they would react to rare dreaded scenarios, which have actually happened: A maintenance guy doesn’t do his job and the engine falls off the airplane. Or the motor blows up. Or a fire erupts. There is an infinite number of things that can go wrong. But such incidents are exceedingly rare—and when they do happen, a miraculous interplay between humans and technology averts death and catastrophe.
“These are the things we think about,” the pilot said. “And instead, we’ve got people thinking about their special status and how they can get one of their coworkers in trouble?… When you’re cheating the laws of physics every day, DEI has no place.” (Great remark! [US Patriot])
Under these circumstances, it’s infinitesimally trivial to even give a moment’s consideration to a person’s race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or any other trait.
“I will treat that man, dressed as a woman, the same way I would treat a woman dressed as a woman, or a woman dressed as a man. I don’t care,” the pilot said. “Just do your job. Take care of those passengers. And then drag my sorry butt out of the airplane if it comes down to that, because I’m the last one to go.”
In one way, the “new” rules don’t really bother the pilot: He said he was already treating people well. That won’t change, he said. He just hates knowing that at any moment, he could be “written up because I looked at you wrong.”
As a white male, the pilot recognizes he’s “the new minority.”
He says he has to go to work every day and prove “I’m not the hopelessly bigoted, homophobic, misogynist, sexist fossil that they think I am.”
And that’s OK with him.
“I’m fine with that. I don’t care,” he said. “Because I live by the Golden Rule.”
Over two years of pandemic oversight, Johnson said he’s witnessed money being put before public health
From the early days of the pandemic, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has been trying to hold U.S. public health agencies accountable on many issues, including why the agencies censored early treatment options for COVID-19, pushed vaccine mandates, and demonstrated a lack of integrity and transparency involving the vaccine data and reporting.
After conducting two years of oversight, Johnson said that the U.S. medical system has been compromised by money from Big Pharma.
“We have a corrupt medical system in this country,” Johnson said in a recent interview for NTD’s “Capitol Report” program. “From the pharmaceutical companies down to the federal health agencies through to the research centers and medical journals. It should concern every American.”
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Agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration have not freely provided the public with accurate data about the vaccine’s origin, efficacy, and adverse effects, said Johnson, and he and others conducting oversight have had to rely heavily on other countries’ data.
“We’ve had to look to either Israel or Public Health England, Public Health Scotland. Now they’re shutting down their information streams as well,” he said. “One of my biggest concerns is our federal health agencies have not been honest. They’ve not been transparent.”
He called what the CDC is doing “willful ignorance.”
Public Health Agencies Contradicting Themselves
Johnson sent a letter to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in late July, demanding answers as to why there have been conflicting statements about the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
The Epoch Times reported that Dr. John Su, who heads the CDC’s Immunization and Safety Office, claimed that the CDC has been performing Proportional Reporting Ratio analyses on data from VAERS since February 2021. The CDC, however, told the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense that it not only did not conduct the analyses but that the method was outside of the agency’s purview.
“CDC’s assertion and Dr. Su’s statement cannot both be true,” Johnson said in the letter.
“The American people deserve the truth and you have not been providing it. That is why I, together with millions of Americans, have completely lost faith in the CDC and other federal health agencies. It is time to start regaining their confidence and your agency’s integrity by coming clean, being transparent, and telling the truth,” the letter states (pdf).
“It’s all BS,” Johnson said in the interview. “As soon as the safety signals started screaming at them through the VAER system, what do they do? They denigrated the VAER system.”
The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the NTD interview, Johnson said he believes the health agencies don’t want to provide truthful information.
“I think, among many disappointments, one of the biggest disappointments in terms of the federal health agencies is they’re just not giving us the information, and I don’t think they really want to,” he said.
From the get-go, the vaccine mandates were “pointless, completely idiotic, and totally destructive,” Johnson said, adding that the agencies’ own data has long confirmed that vaccines do not prevent transmission or reoccurring infection.
Johnson implied that Big Pharma has had a role in pushing the vaccine mandates out of its own self-interest.
“I’ve always been supportive of the pharmaceutical industry,” because the drug companies need billions of dollars to develop new drugs that are important for improving lives, said Johnson. “But now I’ve just witnessed the capture of U.S. regulatory agencies by Big Pharma.”
Former President Donald Trump released a dramatic political video, hours after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, in which he laments the “declining” state of America and says it’s “time to start talking about greatness for our country again.”
“We are a nation in decline … We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump over the ominous sounds of thunder and rain in the nearly four-minute video in which he lists the apparent failures of the Biden administration, before promising, “Soon we will have greatness again.”
Trump, who is expected to announce that he will run again for president in 2024, released the video on his Truth Social platform late Tuesday.
In the video, he says that America has the “highest inflation in over 40 years” and “highest energy cost in its history.” He adds that in the two years since Joe Biden took office, America has lost its energy independence and dominance.
“We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil,” Trump says. “We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving behind dead soldiers and American citizens and $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment in the world.”
Trump accuses the Biden administration of allowing “Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands,” and suggests that “it will only get worse.”
‘Weaponization of the Justice System’
“We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before. We’ve never seen anything like this,” Trump says in his video.
Late on Monday, Trump announced that the FBI was raiding his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, calling it evidence of “prosecutorial misconduct” and a “weaponization of the Justice System.”
A member of the Secret Service in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
The former president said the raid wasn’t announced and that it was motivated because Democrats do not want him to run again for president in 2024.
“They detest Donald Trump, not just on the Democrat side but the general establishment, because he’s not one of them. Because he doesn’t play their game,” his daughter-in-law Lara Trump told Fox News on Tuesday.
“They are terrified he’s going to announce any day that he’s running for president in 2024. And this is a very convenient way to just throw a little more mud on Donald Trump.”
America ‘No Longer Respected’
In his video, Trump also cites the legacy media as contributing to what he says is a nation in decline, saying America “no longer has a free and fair press. Fake news is about all you get.”
Traditionally, the media acts as a guardian of the public interest and a watchdog on government activities. But Trump has in the past accused legacy outlets of being partisan and colluding with “radical left Democrats … to hide the real facts.”
“We are a nation that is allowing Iran to build a massive nuclear weapon and China to use the trillions and trillions of dollars it’s taken from the United States to build a military to rival our own,” Trump says in the video.
U.S. Air Force loadmasters and pilots assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, load people being evacuated from Afghanistan onto a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 24, 2021. (Master Sgt. Donald R. Allen/U.S. Air Force via AP)
“We are a nation that over the past years is no longer respected or listened to all around the world. We are a nation that is hostile to liberty and freedom and faith.
“We are a nation whose economy is floundering, whose stores are not stocked, whose deliveries are not coming, and whose educational system is ranked at the bottom of every list,” he says.
“We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump. “But soon we will have greatness again.”
‘Soon We Will Have Greatness Again’
Trump’s political video starts in black and white with only the sounds of rain and thunder underscoring it. This sequence features video representative of the Biden administration’s apparent failures, including oil fields, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However, the last third of the video becomes colorized and the musical score uplifting as Trump shifts to speak about his promise of America having “greatness again.”
“It was hard-working patriots like you who built this country. And it is hard-working patriots like you who are going to save our country,” Trumps says in his video.
“There is no mountain we cannot climb. There is no summit we cannot reach. There is no challenge we cannot meet. There is no victory we cannot have.
“We will not bend. We will not break. We will not yield ever, ever, ever. We will never give in, we will never give up, and we will never ever back down. We will never let you down.
“As long as we are confident and united the tyrants we’re fighting do not stand even a little chance. Because we are Americans and Americans kneel to God and God alone. And it is time to start talking about greatness for our country again,” he says.
The video ends on a black screen with the words, “The best is yet to come.”
On Tuesday, only one day after the FBI’s controversial raid of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s Florida resort, federal agents seized the cellphone of Republican Congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.
Perry revealed as much via a statement Tuesday.
The congressman had been traveling with his family at the time. Then, federal agents approached him, issued a warrant and requested he turn over his phone.
“This morning, while traveling with my family, three FBI agents visited me and seized my cellphone. They made no attempt to contact my lawyer, who would have made arrangements for them to have my phone if that was their wish,” Perry said via his statement, according to Fox News.
“I’m outraged — though not surprised — that the FBI under the direction of Merrick Garland’s DOJ, would seize the phone of a sitting Member of Congress.”
“My phone contains info about my legislative and political activities, and personal/private discussions with my wife, family, constituents and friends. None of this is the government’s business.”
Perry went on to connect his encounter with the FBI to Trump’s on Monday.
“As with President Trump last night, DOJ chose this unnecessary and aggressive action instead of simply contacting my attorneys. These kinds of banana republic tactics should concern every Citizen — especially considering the decision before Congress this week to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to further persecute law-abiding Citizens,” Perry said.
Although it remains unclear if the seizure is at all connected to the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, Fox News noted that both Trump and Perry have both been targetted by the Democrat-led Jan. 6 House select committee.
The Department of Justice has yet to release a statement regarding either the seizure of Perry’s phone or the raid of Mar-a-Lago.
Regarding the raid, it is believed that FBI agents were looking for classified documents that Trump had taken with him after leaving the White House.
After news of the raid broke, conservatives and Republicans took to social media to voice their outrage.
Some supporters even went to Mar-a-Lago to support the former president.
Trump released a statement on Monday responding to the raid.
“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump wrote in a statement on Monday.
“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.”
“It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections.”
House members will be able to vote by proxy until the end of September, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) announced today, citing the COVID-19 pandemic even as cases, hospitalizations, and deaths continue to trend downward.
Proxy voting, which means that one member of the House can cast a vote on behalf on an absent member, started in May 2020, and Pelosi has extended it multiple times, citing “the public health emergency due to the novel coronavirus.” The proxy-voting period would have ended Aug. 12 had Pelosi not extended it to Sept. 26.
The pandemic did not stop Democratic users of the proxy-voting system from racking up travel expenses for their reelection campaigns. Pelosi’s fellow California Democrat, Rep. Eric Swalwell, last year voted by proxy 141 times while spending $45,000 at luxury hotels. Hawaii Democratic representative Kai Kahele voted in-person only 5 times between January and April, proxy-voting 120 times. Kansas Democratic representative Sharice Davids cited “the ongoing public health emergency” to justify skipping in-person voting as she stayed in $1,000-per-night hotels for fundraisers.
The Senate has required in-person voting throughout the pandemic. Senate Democrats last week threw out COVID safety protocols to ensure the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) has promised to end proxy voting if Republicans win control of the House in November. McCarthy said in a statement last year that proxy voting is unconstitutional.
“Although the Constitution allows Congress to write its own rules, those rules cannot violate the Constitution itself, including the requirement to actually assemble in person,” McCarthy said.
Mandela Barnes’s record to be tested as Republicans home in on anti-police rhetoric, personal issues
Mandela Barnes, a far-left Wisconsin Senate candidate bankrolled by anti-police groups, easily clinched the state’s Democratic nomination on Tuesday, after a friendly primary that effectively ended two weeks ago when his main competitor dropped out and endorsed him.
But the smooth sailing is about to end as he enters the general election against incumbent Republican senator Ron Johnson, and the Republican Party homes in on Barnes’s history as a progressive firebrand.
During the primary, Barnes’s opponents avoided attacks on his political record, including his criticism of law enforcement, far-left economic policies, and personal issues such as his tax delinquency. He also attempted to distance himself from some of the more radical policies on the left, telling the Washington Free Beacon that he doesn’t support the “defund the police” movement—even as he raked in his largest donations from Lead the Way 2022, the Working Families Party, and other anti-law-enforcement organizations.
But Johnson will almost certainly highlight Barnes’s controversial policy positions during the general election, according to Republican strategists.
“There weren’t many elbows thrown in that primary,” said Mark Graul, a Wisconsin Republican strategist. “[These issues are] going to come out over the next few months.”
Keith Gilkes, a Wisconsin Republican political consultant, predicted that Barnes will have a “very difficult time appealing statewide coming from that Democratic progressive liberal viewpoint with the voters around the state of Wisconsin outside of Dane and Milwaukee county,” the bluest areas in the state.
Barnes, who was born in Milwaukee in 1986, worked as a community organizer for Milwaukee Inner-City Congregations Allied for Hope before entering politics in 2012. He spearheaded a campaign that railed against “mass incarceration” in Wisconsin, and sought to reduce the state’s prison population by half through early release and treatment programs.
Later that year, Barnes was elected to the state assembly in a deep-blue district in Milwaukee, after ousting Democratic incumbent Jason Fields in the primary. Barnes, with backing from the state teachers’ union, argued that Fields was too conservative and campaigned against the incumbent’s support for school vouchers.
As a state legislator, Barnes backed criminal justice reform policies and sponsored a 2016 bill to abolish cash bail in the state, a position his campaign says he still supports. The bill would require Wisconsin judges to “release a defendant before trial” rather than setting monetary bail, unless the court found clear evidence that the individual would “cause serious bodily harm to a member of the community.” Prosecutors would also be prohibited from using “the nature, number, and gravity” of the charges to argue against release.
Bail reform has been a contentious issue in Wisconsin, where six people were killed and dozens injured last year at a Christmas parade in Waukesha by a repeat felon who had been released on low bail shortly before the attack.
Barnes has also taken far-left stances on economic and environmental issues. As lieutenant governor, he led a commission on climate change that proposed divesting state pension funds from fossil fuels, instituting a carbon tax, and requiring schools to teach a racially focused climate justice curriculum.
“He’s much further left than most Wisconsinites are … and I think people are going to learn that over the course of the next three months,” said Graul.
Barnes’s personal record could also be an obstacle. He has been delinquent on property taxes, and blew up at a reporter who asked about the late payments in 2019, claiming that the “check is in the mail.” He was barred from registering his car due to outstanding parking tickets in 2018, and relied on state police to chauffeur him around.
He also misrepresented his college background, claiming he received a journalism degree from Alabama A&M University in 2008. After journalists questioned this claim in 2019, he admitted that he did not graduate due to “a small technical thing” involving his failure to turn in completed coursework.
Republicans are likely to highlight Barnes’s history of controversial statements as well. He once described the U.S. founding as “awful,” citing the legacy of slavery, and was photographed holding a t-shirt reading “Abolish ICE”—a reference to the radical movement to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Barnes’s viability as a general election candidate is also largely untested. His only competitive race has been a 2016 Democratic primary bid for state senate against incumbent Democrat Lena Taylor. Barnes ran to Taylor’s left, and she ended up winning the race in a blowout.
Barnes’s election as lieutenant governor was on a joint ticket with Democratic governor Tony Evers, where statewide general election voters generally pay less attention to the running mate, according to political operatives. Evers beat incumbent Republican Scott Walker in the race by one point.
“The bottom line is [Barnes has] never stood for statewide general election,” said Gilkes. “He ran in a Democratic statewide primary [for lieutenant governor in 2018], but ultimately he was under Tony Evers, which is what everybody was voting for.”
There’s reason to suspect that the FBI search of the Florida residence of former President Donald Trump was improperly intrusive, according to several lawyers. The raid prompted a rebuke from Trump and Republicans more broadly and further escalated political tensions in the nation.
About two dozen FBI agents entered Trump’s Palm Beach resort of Mar-a-Lago at about 9 a.m. on Aug. 8 and left about 10 hours later with “a handful of boxes of documents,” one of Trump’s attorneys on the scene, Christina Bobb, told Insight.
“I didn’t actually get to oversee the search, they wouldn’t let anybody see what they were doing,” she said.
It isn’t clear what legal basis the FBI had for the raid. The agents had a search warrant signed by a judge. However, the affidavit explaining the basis—its probable cause—was filed under seal, and Trump’s lawyers weren’t allowed to examine it, Bobb said.
In general, the agents were looking for “what they deemed to be presidential records,” she said.
“I don’t think there was anything of substance.”
Trump’s legal team will take steps to obtain the affidavit, according to Bobb.
There has been a dispute between the National Archives and Trump about whether he has documents that should be stored at the archives under the U.S. Presidential Records Act.
Trump has been cooperative on that front and had previously invited the FBI to Mar-a-Lago to examine the White House records he had in storage at the time, Bobb said.
“Nothing had been hidden, and nothing had been kept secret from them, which makes this all the more ridiculous,” she said.
Potentially Illegal
“I’m stunned and dismayed,” Marc Ruskin, a 27-year FBI veteran and former federal prosecutor, told Insight. “The disregard for traditional norms and apparent lack of concern with the appearance of impropriety is indicative of an abandonment of even a veneer of independence and objectivity.”
Former federal prosecutor Mike Davis went even further, saying the raid may have been illegally invasive.
“Under the case law, you can’t do a home raid if you can secure the documents through less intrusive means,” he told “Bannon’s War Room” on Aug. 9.
The FBI had to first determine that requests for the documents or even subpoenas wouldn’t be sufficient, said Davis, who formerly advised Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on judicial nominations and now heads The Article III Project.
“There’s zero evidence” that Trump wouldn’t have cooperated, he said.
“There was no allegation or evidence that he [Trump] was destroying any of this evidence or putting it into the wrong hands. This is banana republic-level tactics from the Biden Justice Department.”
Even if Trump took classified documents, he took possession of them when he was still chief executive and had the authority to declassify them, according to Davis.
Bobb suggested that the invocation of classified documents was a disingenuous attempt of “shrouding this in a national security blanket.”
“They don’t want to disclose what they’re doing, because what they’re doing is wrong. And so they want to hide it behind the premise of ‘Oh, it’s a matter of national security and classified documents, so we can’t disclose to you what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. But just trust us. We’re not lying to you,’” she said. “Well, no, the American people aren’t going to stand for that anymore.”
Even if the DOJ tried to charge Trump with withholding documents, it wouldn’t hold up because the statute in question requires a “willful” violation, and Trump would have had to have “some malicious intent” to take specific documents, according to Bobb.
“They would have to lay the foundation that Donald Trump actually packed up his own office” or ordered somebody what specifically to take, she said.
History of Missing Documents
If Trump had documents that should go to the archives, it would add him to a lineup of former government officials.
Former FBI Director James Comey took his handwritten notes when he was fired by Trump in 2017. His home wasn’t raided. He handed the notes to FBI agents who came to interview him.
The Obama administration didn’t just fail to hand over documents, tens of thousands of its documents went missing or were destroyed. No homes were raided.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to hand over tens of thousands of emails and documents from her server, claiming that they were of a personal nature. The FBI was able to retrieve some of the documents, revealing that many were work-related. Moreover, the documents were under congressional subpoena at the time when a Clinton aide deleted them.
Immediate Skepticism
The raid prompted an immediate wave of skepticism, particularly because the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have a history of breaking protocol, misrepresentations, and even forging evidence in their case against Trump and members of his campaign.
“After six years of unfounded, absurd investigations of President Trump, the presumption is that any investigation of President Trump is politically motivated, and the burden of proof is on FBI/DOJ to prove otherwise,” Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the Internet Accountability Project, wrote in an Aug. 9 Twitter post.
In 2017, the FBI and DOJ obtained two extensions of a spying warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page even though the warrant was based on false or unsubstantiated allegations. The FBI later acknowledged that spying based on the extensions was illegal.
The FBI also has a history of harsh treatment of people associated with Trump. His aides have been arrested at gunpoint, handcuffed, and “perp-walked,” and their homes and offices have been raided in pursuit of trivial or nonviolent offenses, even when the targets were cooperating with the government.
Shoe on the Other Foot
The Trump raid increased the already polarized political playing field, as Republicans can now argue that home raids of former presidents are acceptable.
“They’re setting a very dangerous precedent where you can do a home raid of a former president of the United States,” Davis said, noting that such a thing has never happened “in our 250 years as a republic.”
Already, Republican lawmakers are promising to subject the DOJ and the FBI to intense scrutiny, with the expectation of reclaiming the majority in the House after the November midterms.
“When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an Aug. 8 statement. “Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”
Judge’s Epstein Connection
The search warrant was issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart in the Southern District of Florida. Reinhart was a senior prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida when the office reached a nonprosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein, who was later indicted for sex trafficking children and died by apparent suicide in a New York jail.
Upon leaving office, Reinhart went into private practice and represented multiple Epstein associates and employees in civil cases against Epstein by his alleged victims.
Reinhart was appointed a magistrate judge in 2018 by the district judges in the Southern District of Florida.
The warrant was issued on Aug. 5, the day after FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee and was questioned about multiple whistleblower reports alleging the politicization of the bureau. Wray cut the questioning short because he said he had to urgently travel. Flight records indicate he flew in the FBI private jet to his vacation retreat in the Adirondacks, according to New York Post columnist Miranda Devine.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the time around which the search of Donald Trump’s residence started. The raid started at about 9 a.m. Insight regrets the error.
Update: The article has been updated with a comment from Marc Ruskin.
Judge Bruce Reinhart – who is reportedly the most likely judge behind the warrant authorizing a raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar A Lago estate – is a former attorney who represented employees of convicted sex offender and notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, The National Pulse can reveal.
The National Pulse can also reveal that Judge Reinhart has donated to the campaigns of former President Barack Obama and to the establishment opponents of Donald J. Trump during the 2016 election, including Jeb Bush.
Politico – the news outlet closest linked to the establishment in Washington, D.C. – named Reinhart in their morning playbook e-mail on Tuesday, 9th August 2022:
POLITICO FINGERS REINHART
As reported by the Miami Herald, Judge Reinhart began representing Epstein’s employees on January 2nd, 2008, just one day after departing the U.S. Attorney’s Office where he served as an assistant U.S. attorney closely involved on the convicted pedophile’s case.
Accused of leveraging “inside information about Epstein’s investigation to curry favor with Epstein,” in 2011, he was named as a prosecutor who allegedly violated the rights of an underage girl whom Epstein solicited sex from in the Crime Victims’ Rights Act lawsuit.
Reinhart appears to have exploited his role in the U.S. Attorney’s Office to launch a private criminal defense practice, according to the Miami Herald:
“On Oct 23, 2007, as federal prosecutors in South Florida were in the midst of tense negotiations to finalize a plea deal with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a senior prosecutor in their office was quietly laying out plans to leave the U.S. attorney’s office after 11 years. “On that date, as emails were flying between Epstein’s lawyers and federal prosecutors, Bruce E. Reinhart, now a federal magistrate, opened a limited liability company in Florida that established what would become his new criminal defense practice.”
Reinhart insisted that he never represented Epstein himself — “only Epstein’s pilots; his scheduler, Sarah Kellen; and Nadia Marcinkova, described by some victims as Epstein’s sex slave.”
Reinhart has also participated in Newsmax interviews, appearing to defend Epstein by downplaying allegations of the financier and his associates soliciting underage prostitutes.
Reinhart donated twice to Obama’s campaign in 2008 totaling $2,000. Reinhart, who was appointed U.S. magistrate in March 2018, also donated to the campaign of Trump rival Jeb Bush in 2015.
FEC RECORDS.
The unearthed links come as Reinhart is believed to have signed off on a warrant responsible for the raid on Trump’s Palm Beach estate. A “source said FBI agents obtained a search warrant from a federal magistrate judge in West Palm Beach,” reports the Miami Herald.
Politico explained that of the three magistrate judges in that office, two recent warrant applications, both of which were assigned to Reinhart, were entered into the system on Monday. The subject of the warrants, however, remains sealed.
It would be difficult to find mainland U.S. Congressional districts much further away from each other than Washington’s 3rd District, in the far Southwest Corner of the state and Florida’s 7th District, which hugs Florida’s East Central Coast. But the swamp reaches everywhere in America, and these two districts are now inextricably linked by the shady tactics of the GOP establishment, working to defeat conservative candidates on behalf of Kevin McCarthy, alongside pro-impeachment forces and a compliant herd of RINOs they control.
McCarthy – a failed leader and an expert at talking out of both sides of his mouth – claims to be outraged about the deep state’s war against Trump and the conservative grassroots while he simultaneously works in the shadows to direct millions of dollars to anti-Trump, establishment candidates like those opposing Green Beret Joe Kent and Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini.
Grassroots favorite Kent – Gold Star husband and recipient of six bronze stars who was endorsed by Trump in Washington’s 3rd Congressional district – thrilled grassroots Republicans by narrowly toppling pro-impeachment Republican incumbent Jamie Herrera Beutler in a huge comeback, after trailing badly on election night.
Kent triumphed despite millions of dollars of establishment money being spent to defeat him. The night he took the lead for good in the GOP primary, Kent appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, renewing his call for a fundamental reining in of the deep state and intelligence agencies that had just conspired to raid Mar a Lago, the curbing of which he had made a centerpiece of his congressional campaign.
Even as the vote was still being counted, Kent sounded the alarm on Twitter about the same cast of characters that spent more than $4 million in dark money attempting to defeat him now targeting Sabatini, another grassroots conservative favorite who is currently leading the race in Florida’s open seat 7th Congressional district (August 23rd primary).
“The left uses dark money to seize the levers of power,” he tweeted in response to the news that a mysterious dark money firm, with the same financial backers and structure that had targeted him, was going after his friend and political ally. “Look at Soros Zuck etc. The right uses dark money against candidates who want to fight back against the left. Send @anthonysabatini whatever support you can. They are coming for him because he’s fighting for us.”
The left uses dark money to seize levers of power, look at Soros, Zuck etc, the right uses dark money against candidates who want to fight back against the left.
Kent’s victory was indeed remarkable. David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, widely considered the nation’s leading guru on redistricting and elections, described Herrera-Beutler early in the campaign as a lock to make it to the general election. Thanks to Trump and a grassroots push, she failed.
But the swamp plays for keeps , and nothing enrages them like a loss. They thought they had won in Washington State on election night, where Herrera Beutler had a large lead against Kent, only to watch it wither away over the following days as Pro-Trump election day votes were counted. The establishment had spent more than $4 million in late, dirty, DC money to attempt rescue Herrera Beutler, one third of which went directly to boost her, one third of which went to attack Kent and one third of which went to split the grassroots vote by boosting a fake alternative to Herrera Beutler who reneged on a pledge to exit the race.
Sabatini, the latest target of the establishment’s ire, is a strongly pro-Trump and pro-DeSantis America First candidate and military veteran who, like Kent, has crusaded against the nation-building wars that the GOP establishment and Democrats combine on to fleece American taxpayers. He’s been the strongest and most outspoken voice in the Florida legislature on everything from critical race theory (CRT) to immigration and has been described as the most pro-Trump member of the Florida legislature.
Sabatini has led in the public polling in the race, and the money (more than $600,000 so far, with doubtless more to come) has been timed, as it was with Kent, so that the donors do not need to disclose their names until after the primary election. Sabatini is hoping that the grassroots energy that has powered his campaign will provide him with sufficient funding to hold on against the onslaught.
In a brief interview, Sabatini encouraged patriotic conservatives to “raise the volume” of their protests against the establishment, claiming that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and to make sure they let their friends in Florida’s 7th district know the national importance of the race.
“The war within the Republican party now determines what the GOP will do in the future, and the establishment is hiding in the shadows and playing every dirty trick in the book. The real fight is in the primary.”
Sabatini is cautiously optimistic for a late Trump endorsement (it helps that he leads in the polls and counts Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz in his corner). Florida political operatives are confident this would put him over the top—but Trump’s attention has to this point been focused on going after explicitly pro-impeachment representatives and other major Trump critics, while Sabatini’s top opponents are ciphers with no record to stand on.
“The Republican establishment wants 22 to be a referendum against America 1st. They want controlled, weak Republicans who vote as they are told.” said Joe Kent in a tweet thread late in the primary campaign.
The Republican establishment wants 22’ to be a referendum against America 1st, they want controlled weak republicans who vote as they are told.
In the last week 2.5 million has been spent against me b/c I’m leading in the polls & Beutler might not make the top 2.
Russ Vought, President Donald Trump’s former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director, had a plan, but too little time left in 2020 to restore the bureaucracy as a neutral tool for ensuring that federal officials do what American voters want done by their government.
But Vought will be ready from the get-go when, he hopes, the next Republican Chief Executive enters the Oval Office in January 2025. If he succeeds, Vought will accomplish something that has eluded presidents of both parties since before World War I, when Woodrow Wilson turned federal civil servants from neutral implementers into unaccountable policy-making “experts.”
Wilson upended the neutral federal workforce concept established by the Templeton Act of 1888, which replaced the former “to-the-winner-goes-the-spoils” system that had been in force for a century.
Wilson wanted policy experts in the bureaucracy in whom would be vested immense independent powers to regulate American society as they thought proper. That led to an explosion of regulations, including many intended to protect the newly muscular bureaucracy from electoral accountability.
Two of Wilson’s Democratic successors—Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society—expanded the federal bureaucracy into such an unwieldy, cumbersome, and costly regulatory monster that another Democrat, President Jimmy Carter, made it one of his administration’s chief goals to gain passage of the landmark Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978.
It fell to Carter’s successor, Republican Ronald Reagan, however, to implement the CSRA, which included multiple provisions designed to make bureaucrats more accountable for their individual performance and easier to replace poor performers.
“It worked for a few years but was fought throughout by OMB, which moderated CSRA during its legislative journey through Congress and then, afterwards, helped agency experts and allies in Congress to modify CSRA’s reforms,” Donald Devine, the former Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), who managed the CSRA implementation for Reagan, wrote recently.
“Today, we are basically back to the system Carter was elected to change—but worse, as aspects of his reforms are now forbidden by both law and regulation,” Devine continued.
That was the situation when Vought became Acting OMB Director under Trump in 2019. Having served on Capitol Hill in various Republican policy positions for two decades, Vought was already familiar with entrenched bureaucrats repeatedly undermining common sense, conservative policy directives. When the Senate confirmed him in the position the next year, Vought began taking concrete steps to address the problem.
What became known as “Schedule F” was a presidential Executive Order (EO) designed to extend application of CSRA’s basic principle of policy and performance accountability deeper into the bureaucracy by giving the president’s appointees throughout the departments and agencies more flexibility to replace recalcitrant bureaucrats in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating” positions.
But there were so many fires to put out during the Trump era, that Vought was only able to implement his plan starting 13 days before the 2020 election, and then only within OMB where he reclassified an estimated 90 percent of the agency’s employees.
“We had been working on it for about two years and we were really trying to think through when we do it,” Vought told The Epoch Times in an interview. James Sherk, a Trump domestic policy adviser and former Heritage Foundation analyst, is credited with the original concept for Schedule F.
“A lot of my effort was to help get it across the finish line and then to show that an agency head was willing to use it, and then set down a marker that we would indeed do it in a second [Trump] term,” Vought said.
One of Joe Biden’s first acts in office after defeating Trump in the still-contested 2020 presidential election was to repeal the Schedule F EO. Since then, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt think tank discretely devoted to researching the case for and laying out policy frameworks for the continuation of the “America First” reforms first advanced by Trump.
That continuation could be carried out either by a resurgent Trump or by another of the GOP’s potential alternative presidential candidates such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
But a July 22 Axios story—”A Radical Plan for Trump’s Second Term” by Jonathan Swan—renewed worries throughout the Washington establishment that Schedule F will be among the top items on the policy agenda of any GOP president seeking to make significant headway toward reforming the Washington swamp.
One detail that gained particular notice was Swan quoting an unnamed source who estimated that full-scale implementation of Schedule F could affect as many as 50,000 civil service positions.
There are approximately 2.1 million civilian federal employees, but only about 9,000—or 0.43 percent of the total—of those positions are at-will, political appointees of a president. Assuming Swan’s 50,000 figure is accurate, it would still mean only 2.4 percent of the total workforce would be subject to Schedule F.
“I think any time you are setting policy within an agency, think about your entire regulatory departments, think of all those general counsels, and it’s not just the general counsels but those massive legal departments,” Vought said when asked to describe the kinds of positions that would be subject to Schedule F.
“I think it would be pretty sizable, given how many people you have working on policy these days in the agencies,” Vought added.
Under the Trump EO, the ultimate decision on whether to reclassify a career position to Schedule F status would be made by the OPM Director, a fact that would substantially elevate the importance of that presently obscure agency.
Vought has no illusions about the difficulties a future president will face if he or she attempts another run at Schedule F implementation.
Democrats in Congress who receive the overwhelming majority federal employee union political donations are already rallying against the possibility of a Schedule F renewal. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest such labor group, gave more than 94 percent of its contributions to Democrats in 2020, continuing a trend that has held for decades.
In the House of Representatives, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) whose district is made up almost exclusively of government employees and contractors, authored a provision adopted by the lower chamber to prevent implementation of Schedule F.
In the upper chamber of Congress, Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner of Virginia, and Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, plus Senators Diane Feinstein and Alex Padilla of California, are co-sponsoring the Connolly provision.
The mainstream news media inaccurately portrayed Trump’s Schedule F effort as an attempt to return to the old “Spoils System” that was abolished in 1888. Typical was an Oct. 23, 2020, Washington Post story headlined “Trump’s Historic Assault on the Civil Service Was Four Years in the Making.” In fact, Schedule F is based on the CSRA that was conceived and signed into law by a Democratic president, then implemented by a Republican chief executive.
Vought is confident as long as a GOP presidential aspirant makes reforming the federal bureaucracy a national issue, the Schedule F plan will go forward.
“How would they not? The only reason it wouldn’t be used is because no one would have wanted to take on the [opposition] forces, but in some respects that balloon has already been punctured,” he said.
“When you nationalize the issue heading into a presidential election, it makes it so this is part of the base of policy expectations in a way that it is not when someone just has a good policy idea and you’re trying to figure is this a good idea and will it sustain itself,” he added.
“They’re looking for presidential records, what they deemed to be presidential records, and anything that could potentially be classified,” Christina Bobb, the lawyer, told The Epoch Times on Aug. 9.
“We had been very cooperative with them before. And it’s unclear to me why they went to such drastic measures to do this. But they did. And as far as the probable cause goes, they wouldn’t give that to us,” she added.
In mid-January, the National Archives and Records Administration arranged for the transport from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives 15 boxes that the archives said contained presidential records. Under the Presidential Records Act, the records should have been transferred in January 2021 as Trump left office, and some of the boxes contained classified information, the institution said in a statement at the time. The administration did not return an inquiry on Tuesday.
Approximately two dozen FBI agents arrived around 9 a.m. on Monday morning and remained at Mar-a-Lago, which is in West Palm Beach, for about 10 hours.
Agents initially resisted showing Bobb the warrant but ultimately did. But the agents would not allow any representatives of the former president to oversee the search, Bobb said. The justification for the search also remains under seal. Trump’s legal team plans on asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to unseal the search warrant affidavit, which would outline why authorities asked for the warrant.
“We don’t know what the probable cause is. I don’t think there is a good cause to do such a drastic thing. But they did,” Bobb said.
The FBI has declined to comment. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have not returned requests for comment. The White House has said the DOJ is independent and that Joe Biden and others in the White House were not notified of the raid ahead of time.
‘Peaceful’
Agents kept Mar-a-Lago neat while they were searching for documents, with one even picking up trash, according to Bobb. The agents “took a handful of boxes of documents,” she said.
“I don’t think that there was anything incriminating. I don’t think there was anything of substance. So I’m sure that they will say otherwise. But we’ll have to wait and see what they come up with, but it was all paper. I hear the conspiracy theories and the rumors that there were other artifacts or something taken—it was all paper,” she said.
Agents previously visited the resort in June, and were given access to a storage facility there, according to Bobb. “Nothing had been hidden and nothing had been kept secret from them, which makes this all more all the more ridiculous,” she said.
“Donald Trump didn’t commit a crime,” Bobb said, adding that prosecutors would not be able to show that Donald Trump knew about the boxes the FBI took.
“They would have to lay the foundation that Donald Trump actually packed up his own office, and Donald Trump was actually the custodian of these records, and that he actually moved them,” she said.
If the DOJ decides to press charges against Trump, then the effort would not get very far, she predicted.
“I just don’t see it making a bit of difference. I think President Trump is going to most likely run for reelection,” she said. “I can’t wait until he does. And he will be the next President of the United States.”
Heather Lang steps down after allegations that Morningstar subsidiary blacklists companies that do business in Israel
A senior executive at the ratings giant Sustainalytics—who spent years working at an anti-Israel advocacy group—announced last week that she is stepping down amid scrutiny of the company’s reliance on sources that critics say lead to bias and discrimination against Israeli companies.
Heather Lang, a onetime official at the anti-Israel activist organization B’Tselem, announced last week her departure as a senior vice president at Sustainalytics, a subsidiary of the corporate-ratings giant Morningstar, after 18 years at the company.
“Tomorrow is my last day at Sustainalytics after an incredible 18-year journey!” wrote Lang in a social media post last week. “It’s been an absolute privilege to work with such wonderful colleagues and friends.”
The news comes as Sustainalytics—one of the major ratings agencies that score companies based on their environmental, social, and governance practices—has facedallegations that its scoring system is biased against Israel and that it downgrades companies that help the Jewish state’s national security operations. Prior to joining Sustainalytics, Lang worked at B’Tselem, a self-described human rights group that asserts that “Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations,” according to its website. NGO Monitor, a watchdog group that monitors Middle East organizations, describes B’Tselem as “part of a network of NGOs that promote artificial and manufactured definitions of apartheid to extend the ongoing campaigns that seek to delegitimize and demonize Israel.”
Morningstar enlisted law firm White & Case to conduct an internal investigation into potential anti-Israel bias at Sustainalytics. This came after the Illinois Investment Policy Board, a state commission, launched a probe into whether the company was in violation of Illinois laws against anti-Israel boycotts.
Lang’s presence at Sustainalytics raises questions about the neutrality of its executives, a week after the Missouri attorney general launched an investigation into allegations of anti-Israel bias at the ratings giant.
Lang did not indicate that her departure is related to the investigation or allegations of bias. But Israel advocates said the company should be cautious about anti-Israel activism among its leadership.
“If Morningstar is serious about rooting out anti-Israel bias in their ranks, it would behoove them to ensure no more of their officers have a history of demonizing the Jewish state,” a former Israeli government official told the Washington Free Beacon.
Sustainalytics referred a request for comment to Morningstar. Morningstar declined to comment on Lang’s departure, telling the Free Beacon that the company “does not support the anti-Israel BDS movement. Matters related to an individual’s employment are confidential.”
According to an online biography of Lang, posted by a conference at which she spoke, she previously worked as a “corporate social responsibility consultant and spent several years living in Israel, working for leading human rights watchdog organization B’Tselem.”
While at B’Tselem, Lang was the editor of the group’s 1999 Human Rights Report, which accused Israel of various humanitarian abuses, including blocking water from Palestinians and discriminatory deportations.
Lang’s prior work for B’Tselem was not mentioned in the White & Case probe.
According to the White & Case investigation, Sustainalytics has relied on research from Who Profits, a group that supports boycott campaigns against Israel.
Still looking for hand-outs despite the fact that African people have been immigrating here for over a hundred years. White workers in factories, mines, etc. could be considered slaves as well. Get over yourself and start working on improving yourselves instead of trying to further weaken what is (by far) the most free nation on the planet [US Patriot]
The ACLU and Human Rights Watch want the United Nations to demand that Joe Biden “take immediate, tangible measures,” including reparations, to “dismantle structural racism” in the United States.
The groups are recommending that the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which will meet later this month, order the United States to “provide effective remedies, including reparations for racial discrimination, including ongoing structural discrimination that flows from the legacies of slavery.”
The ACLU, which ostensibly advocates for Americans’ civil liberties regardless of politics, has a long history of defending left-wing policies. The group in April said it would use “the full force of the law” to allow children to undergo transgender hormone treatment. The ACLU is also a top advocate for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, the Washington Free Beacon has reported. Human Rights Watch also routinely criticizes the Jewish state, with Ben and Jerry’s basing its anti-Israel boycott on advice from a high-ranking Human Rights Watch employee. Ben and Jerry’s parent company overruled the anti-Semitic boycott following widespread criticism.
While the groups note that Joe Biden has criticized “systemic racism,” they say the president has not gone far enough.
“The Biden administration has shown it can name the problem, but the time has come to take bolder action to radically transform these abusive systems and fully implement U.S. human rights obligations,” ACLU human rights director Jamil Dakwar said in a statement.
One such “bolder action,” the groups say, is creating “a commission to study the need for reparations and develop specific remedies for the enslavement of people in the United States and its myriad legacies.” The ACLU and Human Rights Watch want the government to work against anything that has “a racist effect or impact,” such as “mass incarceration” and concentration of wealth.
Barrington Martin II, a national director of the patriotic group Our America, called the groups’ actions “preposterous” and “oxymoronic.”
“There is not one law on the books or any institution within the United States that seeks to oppress or subjugate any individual or group on the basis of race,” Martin told the Free Beacon. “People from all across the world have come to the United States for decades because of the freedom and equal opportunity America offers for all.”
A Democratic senator was overcome with emotion on Sunday as the Senate prepared to pass legislation that would dramatically expand the IRS and permanently solve so-called climate change, the Washington Postreports:
Even before the vote was final, Democratic lawmakers on the chamber floor rejoiced and cheered, shaking hands and hugging, as their Republican counterparts cast their votes and headed for the exits for a month-long summer break. Manchin made a beeline for Schumer’s desk, as the two men leaned their heads together and clasped their hands. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), a proponent of climate change provisions, broke into tears.
Schatz praised the passage of what some are calling the “IRS Expansion” bill as a “historic victory for the United States and the planet.” The legislation, which is expected to pass the House later this week, solves climate change by giving Americans earning $300,000 a year tax credits to buy an $80,000 electric SUV for just $72,500. It also allocates $10 million to combat “racial equity issues” within the Department of Agriculture.
Cryin’ Brian is best known for supporting colonialism and exploiting indigenous land; he claims to “represent” Hawaii despite being a white man born in Michigan to a Canadian doctor.
Dem donor Lauri Strauss is behind debate that will allow Dem candidate to debate empty podium
A Joe Biden donor is the organizer behind a U.S. Senate debate in Georgia that will allow Democratic senator Raphael Warnock to symbolically debate an empty podium after Republican challenger Herschel Walker turned down the invitation.
Atlanta Press Club director Lauri Strauss, who is organizing the debate, and at least three other members of the group’s board have donated thousands to Democrats, including Biden, Georgia Democratic senator Jon Ossoff—and Warnock himself.
Strauss in 2020 donated $173 to Biden and $35 to Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), according to campaign finance records. Strauss is the organizer of the press club debate and personally extended the group’s invitation to Walker, according to an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
“Mr. Walker’s opponent has confirmed his participation in our debate, and we hope to have your confirmation as well,” wrote Strauss in a June 21 email to Walker’s campaign. “I look forward to hearing back from you.”
News of the donations comes after Walker declined to attend the debate, citing political bias at the Atlanta Press Club. The contributions could fuel criticism of the organization, which has said it will allow Warnock at the Oct. 16 event to debate with an empty podium symbolizing Walker’s absence. If one candidate does not show up, having the other candidate debate an empty podium is a long-standing policy for the APC.
Walker’s campaign has agreed to participate in a different debate hosted by Nexstar Media Group on Oct. 14, which Warnock declined.
“We’re not going to be bullied by their thinly veiled threat of an empty podium—because it’s not a podium, it’s a campaign prop. So we’re leaving the elite media behind and rejecting the partisan Press Club debate,” said Scott Paradise, Walker’s campaign manager, in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.
Other members of the Atlanta Press Club’s board also appear to be Democratic donors, according to campaign finance records. Keith Pepper in 2020 donated over $2,500 to Warnock and over $500 to Ossoff. Rene Alegria donated $500 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, $250 to Biden, and $60 to Ossoff. Deisha Barnett donated $500 to Warnock.
The Atlanta Press Club did not respond to a request for comment.
Strauss told the Free Beacon that she “made donations to Joe Biden and Mark Kelly in 2020, both of whom are longtime family friends.” But she said she has not contributed to any Georgia candidates and added that the other board members “do not have anything to do with our debates.”
She also said the Atlanta Press Club is “proud of our reputation [for] holding balanced and fair debates for all candidates” for the past 30 years and said the debate series was funded by an endowment from the late Charlie Loudermilk, a Republican philanthropist who passed away last week.
Former Georgia congressman and House speaker Newt Gingrich, a surrogate for Walker, told the Free Beacon the donations are an indication of the group’s political slant.
“Herschel Walker is exactly right to reject the Atlanta Press Club debate proposal as many of its leadership donated to Democrats, including radical-left Senator Warnock,” said Gingrich. “They are a one-sided, biased organization. Walker should continue to insist on open fair debates in front of Georgians. Let Warnock hide behind his liberal media supporters.”
Florida Democrat Charlie Crist hired Jack Cocchiarella after college Dems chapter ousted young activist over troubling allegations
Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s (R.) top Democratic opponent paid thousands of dollars to a young liberal activist who is facing “campus-wide allegations of sexual assault” at his former Ivy League school.
On July 8, Democrat Charlie Crist’s gubernatorial campaign paid $2,250 to Politically Correct Strategies—a consulting company registered to Gen Z liberal activist and former Dartmouth student Jack Cocchiarella—for “digital consulting.” Just weeks later, on July 28, the prestigious school’s College Democrats chapter revealed it ousted Cocchiarella from the club “in late October 2021, following campus-wide allegations of sexual assault.” Those allegations emerged publicly in a string of December 2021 Redditposts, which accused Cocchiarella of using “his Twitter notoriety and left-wing credentials to position himself as an ally. Then, once people let their guards down, he rapes them.”
Crist, who did not return repeated requests for comment, has remained silent on the accusations facing his campaign aide. By his own logic, that silence means he endorses Cocchiarella’s alleged behavior—in a June 29 tweet, Crist pressed DeSantis to condemn the January 6 riots, writing, “Is it just me, or do you agree that his silence = endorsement?”
Crist is not the only prominent Democrat to hire Cocchiarella following the troubling allegations. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R., Ga.) Democratic opponent, Marcus Flowers, has paid Cocchiarella’s firm more than $40,000 since October 2021, when the activist announced his “new role” as Flowers’s digital director.
Flowers has his own alleged issues with women. In July 2016, the Democrat attempted to dump his ex-wife—Russian national Svetlana Chudinova—at a local homeless shelter, court documents reported by the New Republic show. Flowers did not dispute the incident and instead defended his attempt to offload Chudinova, saying he “felt she had a personality disorder that was not previously disclosed.” In turn, Chudinova accused Flowers of threatening to strike her.
Flowers’s campaign did not return multiple requests for comment.
Cocchiarella, whose Twitter account boasts more than 250,000 followers and includes a photo of the activist smiling alongside Joe Biden, enrolled as a Dartmouth freshman during the 2021-22 school year. While it’s unclear what specific “digital consulting” services he provided Crist, Cocchiarella publicly endorsed the former governor over fellow DeSantis challenger Nikki Fried (D.) just days after Crist’s campaign paid him.
Flowers, meanwhile, routinely replies to Cocchiarella’s tweets to solicit campaign contributions. In October 2021, he called the young activist “an outstanding young man.” In addition to his work with Crist and Flowers, Cocchiarella has collaborated with the Lincoln Project, an anti-Republican super PAC founded by disgraced sexual predator John Weaver.
Cocchiarella reduced his public presence as allegations against him swirled. A notoriously avid Twitter user, Cocchiarella did not send an original tweet for more than a week after Dartmouth College Democrats confirmed the “campus-wide allegations,” instead opting to populate his feed by sharing posts from liberal politicians and journalists. The activist has also blocked users who raised the allegations in his replies.
Cocchiarella during an Aug. 1 podcast appearance did, however, confirm his decision to transfer from Dartmouth to fellow Ivy League school Columbia. The activist did not discuss why he opted to leave Dartmouth after just one year at the college and is yet to publicly address the allegations leveled against him.
Cocchiarella, Dartmouth College Democrats, and Dartmouth’s Title IX office did not return requests for comment.
‘I don’t want to answer that question because we have not—that’s not—yeah, I don’t want to answer that question,’ Rep. Cori Bush (D.) told reporters
Joe Biden, whose average approval rating sits at just 39.6 percent, insists Democratic voters want him to seek reelection in 2024. Several members of Biden’s own party, however, are refusing to back the 79-year-old president.
“I don’t want to answer that question because we have not—that’s not—yeah, I don’t want to answer that question,” Rep. Cori Bush (D., Mo.) told reporters last month when asked whether she would back Biden in the next presidential election.
Multimillionaire Michael Bennet is working to cast himself as an outdoorsman. It may be a hard sell.
Sen. Michael Bennet’s (D., Colo.) latest reelection ad depicts him clad in outdoor gear, casting a fly fishing line into the Arkansas River. But the multimillionaire businessman isn’t exactly a regular fisherman, local records suggest. The campaign obtained a one-day fishing license in order to shoot the ad, according to Axios.
The new ad is the second in the last month featuring Bennet enjoying Colorado’s outdoors and a clear attempt to shake the image that the two-term lawmaker is a wealthy, D.C. insider.
“The worst sin any candidate can do is come across as insincere and phony and I think Bennet comes close to doing that,” said Colorado Republican strategist Dick Wadhams. “He’s going to have to answer for that on the campaign.”
Bennet’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Bennet, who has seen his net worth increase by the millions during his time in the Senate, is running for reelection against former carpenter and construction CEO Joe O’Dea. Republicans are optimistic that Biden’s historically low approval rating has made Bennet’s seat competitive. According to FiveThirtyEight, Bennet votes with Biden 98 percent of the time.
O’Dea’s campaign is working to characterize Bennet as a lawmaker who left his home state to profit off his position as a senator. As average Coloradans struggle to pay for groceries, O’Dea’s campaign said in a recent Tweet, Bennet is checking “his stock portfolio.”
Bennet’s net worth is valued up to $31 million, his financial disclosure forms show. A considerable amount of that money is located in Cayman Islands hedge funds, those same forms state, making a detailed accounting difficult. Bennet has also set aside hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment funds for his children.
The fly fishing guide featured with Bennet in the ad is not exactly a regular small businessman. Rather, he is Chaffee County commissioner Greg Felt, whom Colorado governor Jared Polis (D.) appointed in 2020 to the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Felt’s claim in the ad that he is “not a Democrat” is not entirely true, given that he voted as a Democrat in several election cycles starting in 2002, according to a review of Colorado’s voting records.
Bennet’s ad will air for two weeks across Colorado as part of a $1.2 million ad campaign launched in mid-July. None of his ads contain any references to Joe Biden or some of the landmark bills Bennet voted for, such as the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, which many economists say contributed to skyrocketing inflation.
The Free Beaconreported earlier this month that Bennet’s first ad misled voters on who funds his campaign. Bennet claims he does not accept campaign contributions from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists, despite his campaign finance records showing otherwise.
Bennet was appointed to his seat in 2009 after his predecessor, Ken Salazar, became secretary of the interior. He dropped out of the 2020 presidential race after receiving just 164 votes in the Iowa caucuses and fewer than 1,000 in the New Hampshire primary.
In June, Toyota warned buyers of its bZ4X electric SUV not to drive their vehicles for fear the wheels could fall off. Toyota said at the time the cause was a mystery, but it would look into the glitch.
Toyota has not yet found a solution to the problem and is offering to buy back the SUV from its owners, according to CNN.
“We know that our customers have many choices when it comes to purchasing a vehicle. We appreciate their loyalty and are supporting them through this recall,” Toyota said in a statement, according to The Verge. “However, if a customer does not want to proceed with the provided options, we will offer to repurchase their bZ4X.”
Plan B for owners who want to keep a vehicle they may never be able to drive is to have free use of another Toyota vehicle until such time as Toyota figures out what went wrong and how to fix it.
Toyota offers to buy back recalled bZ4X fully electric SUV from customers | A headline writer’s dream. Toyota’s first full #EV recalled and a buyback offer literally because the wheels keep falling off! How can a car maker get something so basic, so wrong? https://t.co/lDJo4u43Zrpic.twitter.com/n9lcYPTgIo
As part of that deal, Toyota will pay $5,000 toward an owner’s car payments or as a partial refund. Toyota also said that it will extend the factory warranty on the bZ4X by whatever length of time it becomes before an owner gets her or his vehicle back, according to CNN.
The offer for those who do not sell their vehicle back also includes free EV charging once the owners get the vehicle back and the cost of gasoline for their loaner, according to Autoweek.
It was unclear in the announcement how owners of the vehicle, whose price starts at $43,215, would handle dealer markups, according to Car and Driver.
In June, the company announced that all 2,700 of its new electric bZ4X SUVs were a danger to their drivers, with only 260 to date having been delivered in the United States.
“After low-mileage use, all of the hub bolts on the wheel can loosen to the point where the wheel can detach from the vehicle,” Toyota said in a June 23 statement on its website.
“If a wheel detaches from the vehicle while driving, it could result in a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash,” the company said. “The cause of the issue and the driving patterns under which this issue could occur are still under investigation. No one should drive these vehicles until the remedy is performed,” Toyota said.
“No remedy is available at this time,” Toyota said in its June release.
Toyota’s somehow gone from “The best built cars in the world” to “The hub bolts loosen which may cause a wheel to fall off, & almost two months later we don’t know how to fix it”https://t.co/wOJjNc44pW
In a column for Bloomberg, Anjani Trivedi, who covers industrial companies in Asia, wrote, “If that’s the level of quality and safety traditional auto giants are willing to commit to, then investors and regulators should increase their scrutiny.”
The bZ4X debuted in Japan in June, according to CNBC.
The company’s president, Akio Toyoda, said in December that Toyota planned “to roll out 30 BEV models by 2030.”
“Toyota has been under pressure to up its game in EVs, so will be very disappointed that a recall has been necessary on its first mass-market electric cars,” David Leggett, automotive editor at GlobalData, told CNBC.
House GOP leaders have pledged to take action on the “weaponized politicization” of the Department of Justice (DOJ) “when Republicans take back the House” in the midterm elections, after federal agents raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Monday.
“I’ve seen enough,” House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in a statement late Monday. “The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.”
“When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned,” McCarthy added.
“Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy’s comment came after the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Monday. Trump has characterized the raid as “prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical left Democrats who desperately don’t want [him] to run for President in 2024.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Ranking Member on the House Judiciary Committee, which provides oversight over the DOJ, called on House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) to bring FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland onto the House floor for questioning on Friday.
“What was on the warrant? What were you really doing? What were you looking for? Why not talk to President Trump and have him give the information you’re after?” Jordan asked in an interview with Fox on Monday night. “We deserve answers now, and this Friday would be a good time.”
“Jerry Nadler: call up Christopher Wray, call up Merrick Garland, bring them in front of the House Judiciary Committee, so we ask them the questions that the American people deserve the answers to.”
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Minority Whip, called the raid the “weaponization of the FBI by Biden’s DOJ against his political opponent.”
“Let’s be clear: This is a brazen weaponization of the FBI by Biden’s DOJ against his political opponent—while giving their political allies free passes,” Scalise said in a statement published late Monday. “It’s exactly why the IRS shouldn’t get an army of 87,000 more agents.”
“House Republicans will hold them accountable next year,” the lawmaker added.
Rep. Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, called Monday “a dark day in American history” and said that the “political weaponization of the FBI and Department of Justice is an actual threat to democracy.”
“There is a reason that Americans no longer trust these agencies,” Stefanik said in a Monday statement. “This is the same corrupt agency that illegally fabricated FISA warrants, knowingly deceived Americans about Russian ‘collusion’ for years, and weaponized itself to perpetuate this hoax with their all-too-eager mainstream media accomplices.”
“There must be an immediate investigation and accountability into Joe Biden and his Administration’s weaponizing this department against their political opponents—the likely 2024 Republican candidate for President of the United States,” the congresswoman added.
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), vice chair of the House Republican Conference and a part of Trump’s legal defense team during the Democrats’ 2019 attempted impeachment of Trump, said Biden and Garland “completely weaponized the DOJ” and “eroded the people’s faith in our system of justice.”
“Today’s raid on the former President’s home in the middle of an election season looks like another egregious & unprecedented abuse of power,” Johnson said in a statement on Monday.
“We will restore order & accountability as soon as we regain the gavels for a Republican majority in November. It can’t happen soon enough!” he added.
With a looming recall election swirling around the culture wars in a small Colorado town, authorities confirmed their arrest of a recall leader on false complaint charges.
The Woodland Park Police Department confirmed in a press release late last week their arrest of Samantha Peck, one of the leaders of a recall campaign aimed at the Woodland Park School Board.
Peck is charged with a misdemeanor charge of false reporting of an emergency to police and a felony charge of attempting to influence a public servant.
Police say that on July 24, the police department received an emergency call from a person identifying herself as Ms Peck.
David Lane, a Denver lawyer representing Samantha Peck, says he’s investigating if her civil rights were violated when she was charged by Woodland Park police. (Courtesy of David Lane)
The caller said that someone she knew to be the wife of the school board’s vice president appeared to be drunk and getting into a car in a Safeway supermarket parking lot, preparing to drive away with a small child.
Officers responding six minutes later found the driver sober and without a child in the car, police said in the press release.
Peck, who was arrested on Aug. 2, is free on a $3000 bond.
Having retained Denver civil rights lawyer David Lane, Peck appears to stand by her story.
Lane, a Berkeley Law graduate who worked with the ACLU and Amnesty International in the past said, “we are investigating whether this is or is not a civil rights violation.”
“There are two conflicting versions of what happened,” Lane said. The police department’s version is one, but the other is that Peck “was seriously reporting someone who appeared to be impaired.”
“Ultimately, what we want to do is talk to witnesses and consult body cameras and go from there,” Lane said.
Peck reinforced civil rights analogies in a Facebook post, comparing herself to Martin Luther King and including photos of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela behind bars, and Rosa Parks being fingerprinted.
Lane abruptly excused himself from a telephone call, citing a meeting with a judge, before he could be asked how civil rights relate to the Peck case, who in her Facebook photos appears to be white.
Peck is the administrator for the Concerned Parents of Teller County Facebook page, one of the recall’s main online outlets.
Woodland Park police had declined earlier in the week to confirm Peck’s arrest or discuss the matter with The Epoch Times.
David Illingworth is vice president of the Woodland Park RE-2 School District. The police department did not name his wife.
Illingworth was elected to the school board of the small town outside Colorado Springs in November, part of a conservative wave winning four of five school board seats in an election amplifying local schools’ rapidly declining enrolment, and parental dissatisfaction over educational practices.
The new board began rapidly addressing the issues.
They started certification of a charter school the old board had blocked, raised teacher pay, forced out the school superintendent, and ensured notification of parents in advance if their children were to be taught sensitive or age-inappropriate material.
A recall campaign began almost immediately, formally launching a petition drive in early June with 60 days to gather enough signatures to justify a recall election against three board members, including Illingworth, David Rusterholtz, and Suzanne Patterson.
By the deadline, the opponents narrowly met the required threshold of signatures for Illingworth and Patterson but failed for Rusterholtz.
The signatures still need to be certified by the state.
The fourth conservative board member elected last year had already resigned after coming under severe personal attack at board meetings.
A Colorado columnist decried the recall campaign’s apparent use of a tactic called “swatting” coming out of the video game world.
To take out a rival, a player falsely reports him to the police for something severe enough to justify sending a SWAT team.
“The innocent victim finds himself surrounded by police officers with guns drawn. It wastes officers’ time and resources and puts the victim, and the officers, in danger,” wrote Krista Kafer of The Denver Post.
“When an irresponsible teen whose prefrontal cortex is still developing engages in this kind of delinquent behavior, some consideration should be made for his lack of maturity.
“When middle-aged women do it to harass political opponents, no such consideration should be made. Throw the book at them. They aren’t just harming their victims, but democracy itself.”
Kafer cited another case of it in the Denver suburbs, where the partner of a former police chief anonymously reported a city councilwoman for child abuse.
The councilwoman, who was exonerated, had been critical of the police chief, who later resigned. The partner was charged with making a false complaint.
Efforts to reach Erin O’Connell, another leader of the recall movement, were unsuccessful, as were attempts to contact the Colorado Education Association, parent of the Woodland Park Education Association.
Opponents of the recall maintain the parents’ group supporting it is fronting for union activists
Former President Donald Trump said his Florida Mar-a-Lago home is “under siege” and “occupied by a group of FBI agents” in a statement late Aug. 8.
“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
“After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” Trump said.
The FBI declined to comment on a press inquiry from The Epoch Times. Its parent agency, the Department of Justice (DOJ), did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb confirmed with CNN on Monday night that the FBI seized documents from Mar-a-Lago.
“President Trump and his legal team have been cooperative with FBI and DOJ officials every step of the way. The FBI did conduct an unannounced raid and seized paper,” Bobb said.
The alleged raid by the FBI came two days after Trump’s latest hint at a 2024 run, in which he stopped short of giving an official announcement.
“Well, it’s not a long period, regardless, whether you go before or after, certainly not a very long period of time,” the former president said when responding to questions from the press before he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, on Saturday.
“It’s coming,” Trump said, “and I think people are going to be very happy.”
“Our country has never been in a position like this. We lost everything. We’ve lost energy independence. We’ve lost our prestige. We’ve lost every single thing you can lose,” Trump said during the event, noting the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he previously called “the greatest tactical mistake in history,” and the border crisis.
A police car outside former President Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 8, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
Lawmakers React
‘Weaponized’ Justice System
The 45th president said during his speech that he may be the “most persecuted” person in the history of America.
“A friend of mine recently said that I was the most persecuted person in the history of our country,” Trump said during his speech at CPAC. “And then I thought about it, because I didn’t have time to think much because I’m always being persecuted, and I felt he may very well be right.”
Trump called the raid “prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want [him] to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls,” adding that Democrats “will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections.”
“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before,” Trump said.
During an America First Policy Institute event in July, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), who was part of Trump’s legal defense team during the Democrats’ 2019 attempted impeachment of Trump, told The Epoch Times in an interview that the Biden administration has completely “weaponized” the Department of Justice (DOJ).
By design, the American justice system “is a bulwark against tyranny,” Johnson said. “But if the Department of Justice, for example, is weaponized for political purposes—which is what we’re seeing right now in the Biden ministration—that jeopardizes that foundational pillar itself.”
“Today’s raid on the former President’s home in the middle of an election season looks like another egregious & unprecedented abuse of power,” Johnson said in a statement on Monday.
“We will restore order & accountability as soon as we regain the gavels for a Republican majority in November. It can’t happen soon enough!” Johnson added.
‘Third-World Marxist Dictatorship’
“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries,” Trump said in his Monday statement. “Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) echoed Trump’s comment.
“Using government power to persecute political opponents is something we have seen many times from 3rd world Marxist dictatorships,” Rubio said in a statement on Twitter late Monday. “But never before in America.
“After today[‘]s raid on Mar A Lago what do you think the left plans to use those 87,000 new IRS agents for?
“The FBI isn’t doing anything about the groups vandalizing Catholic Churches, firebombing Pro-Life groups or threatening Supreme Court justices. But they find time to raid Mar A Lago,” Rubio said.
Outcry from Republicans
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said in a statement on Monday: “The FBI raid on President Trump’s home is an unprecedented political weaponization of the Justice Department. They’ve been after President Trump as a candidate, as President, and now as a former President. Using the criminal justice system in this manner is un-American.”
“The DOJ & FBI are being weaponized like never before to target political opponents. This Admin has thrown the rule of law and faith in our democratic institutions out the door,” said Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) in a Monday Twitter post. “Joe Biden and Merrick Garland must answer immediately for today’s raid against an American president.”
“The inconsistent and partisan application of the law by the FBI has gone too far,” Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) said on Monday. “The Democrats, for too long, have used our government agencies from the FBI to the IRS to target their political opponents. This inconceivable raid is an attack on our Republic.”
“This action, a raid on a former President and political rival, is something we would expect from Putin on his rivals… not here, not in the USA,” Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.) said.
“The weaponization and politicalization of federal agencies is egregious and scary. These are Gestapo-like tactics. If the FBI can do this to President Trump, what do you think 87,000 new IRS agents will do to the American people?” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said. “Did Biden sign off on this raid? The American people deserve answers.”
“I stood up to America’s bureaucratic corruption, I restored power to the people, and truly delivered for our Country, like we have never seen before. The establishment hated it,” Trump said in his Monday statement.
“Now, as they watch my endorsed candidates win big victories, and see my dominance in all polls, they are trying to stop me, and the Republican Party, once more. The lawlessness, political persecution, and Witch Hunt must be exposed and stopped,” Trump said.
“I will continue to fight for the Great American People!”
Dark Brandon’ is the Biden White House’s cringetastic effort to win back the “Let’s Go Brandon” meme that haunted the perennially COVID-hit President through late 2021 and early 2022. The efforts, shared by taxpayer-funded White House staff, combines an almost year-late rebuttal to the Brandon memes with the Byronic aethestic of the well established “Dark MAGA” movement.
One more problem: it’s extremely ‘Third Reich‘ in nature.
But there’s more to this story than the White House using the Reichsadler or Parteiadler in its memes.
THE REICH EAGLE SUPERIMPOSED BEHIND BIDEN IN HIS WHITE HOUSE STAFFER’S MEME.
The first thing to note is that this “Dark Brandon” stuff is actually being promoted by corporate media outlets. Check out Slate’s take, which concludes: “If he can muster a smidge of momentum from the al-Zawahiri assassination by pulling up the cowl of Dark Brandon, then that is surely better than whatever he’s got going right now. After all, Joe Biden’s approval rating is already cresting back toward 40 percent. Dark Brandon strikes again!”
Sycophantic though Slate may be, the author isn’t wrong. Rasmussen polling has consistently noted that when Biden is away in his basement, hiding from COVID-19, his approval numbers go up. No wonder the White House would rather use cartoon images of him on social media. The left’s pro-Nazi memes are literally more popular than the real Joe Biden.
Mel Magazine – which appears to be some kind of soy-sponsored blog site for, uh, funboys – offers, “Okay, I pledge my soul to Dark Brandon. What’s the worst that could happen? Not like Regular Brandon was doing such a bang-up job. Trust the process. We’re finally winning.”
But there’s one more part of the Dark Brandon saga. The cherry on the cake. And that is the aesthetic origin of the entire thing.
“You have this very exaggerated image of a very ‘evil Biden,’ but also, his ability to mobilize these public intellectual zombies in an image is also kind of funny because it has long been China’s accusation of the U.S. government, that the U.S. is using folks like public intellectuals and scholars within China to carry out ‘peaceful evolution,’” Victor Shih, associate professor at UC San Diego, told POLITICO.
That’s right – it comes from China. Specifically, by an artist named Yang Quan, who sought to portray Biden in a negative light in early 2022.
Yes, the pro-Biden memes being disseminated from the hallowed halls of the White House are both Third Reich in nature, and hail from the Chinese Communist Party’s fellow travelers.
THE CANDIDATE’S OWN BALLOT BEING RETURNED WILL SET ALARM BELLS RINGING.
Joe Kent, candidate for Washington’s 3rd Congressional district, has had his own ballot rejected by the state, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.
Kent, who is endorsed by President Trump, submitted his ballot to the county auditor’s office himself, on August 2nd 2022. It was originally sent to him on July 17th.
The National Pulse has obtained an image of the notification of Kent’s rejected ballot:
KENT’S REJECTED BALLOT.
Kent told The National Pulse that he had to go into the offices of the election administrators on Monday, August 8th, in order to verify his own signature – a process that many older voters may be unable to attend to so easily – so that his vote would count.
“It’s a mess of a system,” Kent told The National Pulse.
The primary election in WA-3 is curious enough by itself, using a non-partisan, top-two system, “in which all candidates appear on the same ballot, for congressional and state-level elections. The top two vote-getters move on to the general election, regardless of their party affiliation.”
But Kent’s primary appears to have had especially strange problems, with the count still not concluded almost a week since election day. At the time of writing, around 81 percent of ballots (183,000) have been counted. Another twenty-odd thousand remain.
VOTE TOTALS AS ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, EST.
Kent is currently running 0.1 percent behind establishment Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach President Trump. Critics wrote off Kent’s chances on election day, but the former Green Beret who served 11 combat tours and won six bronze stars has clawed his way back as the votes have trickled in.
Now, critics suspect there could be foul play in certain counties, where votes for Kent are being rejected, including his own.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has criticized Democrats for pushing their so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which he warns is a “terrible bill.”
The bill will double the size of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). But IRS agents are not designed to go after “billionaires and big corporations,” Cruz said in an interview with Fox News. “They’re designed to come after small businesses and working families across this country … The Democrats are making the IRS bigger than the Pentagon, plus the Department of State, plus the FBI, plus the Border Patrol combined … This is a massive power grab.”
Senate Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act on Aug. 7 with a 51 to 50 vote, with Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris casting her tie-breaking vote in favor of her party. The estimated $740 billion package now heads to the House for vote.
Over $300 billion will go to climate change and energy, which is the largest clean energy investment made by a federal government in American history. It also includes tax credits for electric vehicles. The bill institutes a 15 percent minimum tax for corporations making over $1 billion a year.
Cruz warned that the Inflation Reduction Act will “drive up gas prices” and “kill manufacturing jobs.” The bill has “billions in new taxes” charged against U.S. gas and oil production, a decision that will raise gas prices at the pump, he said.
According to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the bill will “reduce” the U.S. budget deficit.
But a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CRO) shows that even though the budget deficit will be lowered by $101.5 billion over a 10-year period, the deficit will actually increase by $24.6 billion in the first six years between 2022 and 2027.
Widespread Criticism
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday, former president Donald Trump warned that the Inflation Reduction Act will worsen inflation, which is already at a four-decade high.
Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) will pay a political price for backing the spending bill, he predicted.
In an Aug. 8 Twitter post, Sen. Masha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) called the $80 billion set aside to double the number of IRS agents as practically giving “every American a personalized tax auditor.”
Instead of increasing taxes, the government should be focusing on reducing them, she insisted. The Democrats’ “socialist agenda” will make the life of Tennesseans “more difficult and expensive.”
“It’s a special kind of stupid to raise taxes during both a recession and inflation—that’s called stagflation, which is what we have right now as a result of Biden’s policies,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said on Twitter.
There are also worries about the 15 percent book minimum tax affecting small and mid-sized businesses that make below $1 billion a year.
An analysis of the tax rules by Americans for Tax Reform states that the minimum tax will be applicable to any company that has private equity in its capital structure, since the firm will be considered a subsidiary of the private equity firm for tax purposes.
The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors this week voted to add a November 2022 ballot measure that would allow the county to secede from California.
The measure, which was voted on 4–0 by the supervisors Wednesday, would ask San Bernardino residents: “Do the citizens of San Bernardino County want the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors to study all options to obtain its fair share of state and federal resources, up to and including secession?”
“Now, that last line is the most controversial,” said Supervisor Curt Hagman during Wednesday’s meeting about the proposal. “It’s a question we’re going to put to our residents. Do they want to include all options to go after [the] fight for their fair share of taxpayer dollars?” he asked.
Over the years, some California counties have evaluated the possibility of seceding from the Golden State due to monetary, cultural, and other differences. In 2016, a failed ballot measure would have split California into six states, while a 2018 proposition that also failed would have created three new states.
But San Bernardino County is the largest county in California and United States, spanning more than 20,000 square miles and home to well over 2 million people. Cities like Fontana, San Bernardino, Victorville, Hesperia, and other municipalities are within its borders, which stretch from Los Angeles County to the California-Nevada and California-Arizona state lines.
Reasons
Supervisor Joe Baca Jr. said he doesn’t want the county to split from California but is interesting in studying whether its residents should receive more state and federal funds.
“I do think we have to look at anything we can do to enhance services for our residents,” Baca said, reported The Herald Sun newspaper. “I’m not in favor of seceding. I’m proud to be from California. I love California.”
Hagman concurred with Baca’s assertion and noted that it would be acceptable “if the worst thing that comes out of this is a study that will be ammunition for our state representatives to fight for more money for us.”
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“San Bernardino is a large county in both terms of size and population, with many pieces of critical infrastructure,” Barbara Rodriguez, an accountant who assists in state and local fund tax breakdowns, told the California Globe Thursday. “And the people there are feeling like they are being gipped. Like most counties, they are looking for more money coming in, and seeing their county be so low on the list has really incensed them.”
Supervisor Janie Rutherford, meanwhile, said she doesn’t “believe it’s feasible politically or financially to secede from California,” adding, “I absolutely joined with my constituents who have a growing palpable anger about everything.”
Many Californias are dealing with daily problems, including heavy taxes, the nation’s highest gas prices, and widespread homelessness, added Rutherford.
California, she said, has an “ineffective justice system, broken schools, [and] the state’s overreaching counterproductive regulatory schemes, housing and affordability to the ineptness of the state’s preparation for this drought.”
“People pay high taxes, and they do not believe those taxes are coming back to their neighborhoods to address the problems they’re most concerned about,” Rutherford said. “That’s what we heard from our public last week, and there is nothing crazy at all about being angry about those things.”
Posts shared on Facebook that claim the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) classified monkeypox as an airborne virus, it can cause paralysis, and can last months are false, officials said.
Facebook posts containing the claims reviewed by The Epoch Times show they both have a BBC News logo and credit the World Health Organization and CDC. One of the posts says, “CDC has now classified this disease as airborne and anyone within 15 feet can catch it,” while it adds that it is now being classified as a form of herpes, the illness can last up to four months, and it can lead to paralyzation.
Under the Facebook post, some said the information is fake and one said that it’s “trying to scare us to take more vaccine shots.” The person added, “Only way it can spread is through contact from someone who has it, kissing, sex, cuddling.”
A spokesperson for the BBC told Reuters and The Associated Press the news outlet did not make the images. A spokesperson for the CDC told the Associated Press that the post’s claims “are not correct.”
The CDC, WHO, and other health organizations have not classified monkeypox as “airborne,” and they have said it spreads via close, prolonged contact from one person to another person. Homosexual males are the primary spreaders of the virus, officials say.
CDC spokesperson Kate Fowlie told AP that the virus “is not known to linger in the air and is not transmitted during short periods of shared airspace.” She added, “In the current monkeypox outbreak, we know that those with the disease generally describe close, sustained physical contact with other people who are infected with the virus.”
Transmission is primarily through skin-to-skin contact, and “direct contact with monkeypox rash, scabs, or body fluids from a person with monkeypox,” according to the CDC website.
“Touching objects, fabrics (clothing, bedding, or towels), and surfaces that have been used by someone” infected with monkeypox can also transmit the virus, the agency says.
Paralysis is not generally associated with monkeypox, according to health agencies, and the virus doesn’t last for four months, but rather between two and four weeks, officials say.
Symptoms of the virus include fever, swollen lymph nodes, malaise, and a rash or lesions that may initially be mistaken for chickenpox or a sexually transmitted disease.
As for the claim about it being a form of herpes, monkeypox is classified as a pox virus in the poxviridae family related to smallpox, cowpox, and others. Herpes, meanwhile, is within the herpesviridae family.
Republicans say a Democrat-backed bill worth $740 billion includes funding to hire 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents, which they say will target Americans.
The bill, known as the “Inflation Reduction Act,” was approved in a 51–50 vote as Vice President Kamala Harris served as a tie-breaker for Democrats. A provision includes the hiring of 87,000 agents, a move that was defended by Democrats, who said that the funding would target people who cheat on their taxes.
“Millions of Americans aren’t going to be impacted by that other than getting better service from the IRS having their telephone answer getting the questions they need in order to comply with our tax laws,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) told Fox News on Sunday. “The auditing is going to be focused on those of high income, the large corporations, etc.”
Meanwhile, Democrats have pointed to a May report from the Government Accountability Office showing that IRS audits have dropped over the past decade, including audits for the wealthy.
In a recent letter to Congress, IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said that if an additional $80 billion is given to the agency via the legislation, it would not increase audits for households that earn less than $400,000 per year.
“These resources are absolutely not about increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans,” Retting wrote in the letter. “As we have been planning, our investment of these enforcement resources is designed around Treasury’s directive that audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000.”
Warning
But Republicans warned that the IRS will target middle-class Americans with the tens of thousands of extra agents.
“Seriously, how out of touch do you have to be to brag about forcing a purely partisan bill through the Senate that raises taxes on the middle class, makes inflation worse, lowers after-tax income for Americans at every income level, decreases economic growth during a recession, and sends an army of IRS enforcers after grandma?” Republican National Committee spokesman Tommy Pigott asked, according to the Washington Examiner.
And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that those agents will “target Americans with 1.2 million new audits, more than half of which would be for people making less than $75,000 a year.”
“This bill is a give-away to the Democrats’ radical leftist base at the expense of middle-class Americans. It’s a betrayal of Biden’s promise to not raise taxes on the middle class. Make no mistake—this bill will hurt America and hardworking Americans at a time when we can least afford it,” Cruz wrote.
Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, disputed Democrat claims that the new funding will be used to target tax cheats and millionaires.
“My colleagues claim this massive funding boost will allow the IRS to go after millionaires, billionaires and so-called rich ‘tax cheats,’ but the reality is a significant portion raised from their IRS funding bloat would come from taxpayers with income below $400,000,” he said in a statement Sunday.
On Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that GOP claims about more IRS audits or changes to the U.S. tax code are false.
“This is just the latest example, again, of those who do nothing to protect tax welfare for the rich at the expense of everything else,” Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday on Air Force One. “They’re blatant lies.”
A doctor who was banned from Twitter for posting about COVID-19 vaccines is willing to serve as the lead plaintiff in a potential class-action lawsuit against the social media company, his lawyer has informed the tech giant.
Dr. Andrew Bostom “stands with a growing number of similarly situated people who have had their Twitter accounts suspended for sharing their views and opinions on COVID-19,” James Lawrence III, Bostom’s lawyer, told Twitter in a letter dated Aug. 6.
“Dr. Bostom is ready, willing, and able to serve as a lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Twitter for breach of contract if that becomes necessary,” Lawrence added.
Bostom, with the Brown University Center For Primary Care and Prevention, was permanently suspended in June after sharing the results of a study that linked Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine with lower sperm and semen concentration in men.
After Lawrence contacted Twitter on Bostom’s behalf, the company reversed the suspension, admitting he did not appear to violate any rules with the post.
Just two weeks later, Bostom was banned for asserting that the only randomized controlled trial data on children shows zero hospitalizations prevented by COVID-19 vaccination, while trial data from adults showed the vaccines caused more severe adverse events than the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations it prevented.
Twitter told Bostom in the suspension notice that he violated the company’s policy on spreading misleading information related to COVID-19.
New Letter
But the post does not violate the policy, Lawrence told Vijaya Gadde, head of legal, policy, and trust at Twitter.
The first portion of the comment is backed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s briefing document (pdf) analyzing Pfizer trial data in children aged 6 months to 23 months, the lawyer said, noting that there were zero hospitalizations in the placebo arm but one in the vaccinated arm.
The second portion is supported by a recent paper that analyzed serious adverse events from the original Pfizer and Moderna vaccine trials and concluded that people who were vaccinated were at higher risk of an event than those who did not get a shot.
“His comments can be substantiated by actual pediatric and adult data. This is not ‘misinformation’ by any means, but rather a restating of actual scientific analysis of the data from clinical trials of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines,” Lawrence wrote.
Both the vaccines are built on messenger RNA, or mRNA, technology.
Even if the comment did violate Twitter’s policy, the company failed to follow its own five-strikes rule, which gives users five violations before a ban, the lawyer said.
He recently represented journalist Alex Berenson in a case against Twitter in which a judge said Twitter violated its own rule in its ban of Berenson. The suit was settled, and Berenson was reinstated.
Twitter is being urged to restore Bostom’s account by 8 p.m. on Aug. 12.
Former President Donald Trump has warned Americans to brace for something “a lot worse than a recession” while blaming the Biden administration’s poor stewardship of the economy for soaring inflation and denouncing the tax hikes in the latest Democrat spending bill.
Trump made the remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday, where the former president raised the alarm on the state of the union.
“Our country is being shot. It’s being destroyed,” Trump told attendees, while touting his administration’s record on the economy and national security.
Trump spoke of “creating the most secure border in American history, record tax and regulation cuts, $1.87 gasoline, no inflation, low interest rates, record growth in real wages, record growth in our economy.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on August 6, 2022. (Bobby Sanchez for The Epoch Times)
Soaring Inflation, Recession
During Trump’s tenure, the highest the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation gauge came in at was 2.9 percent in July 2018, while in his final month in office, January 2021, inflation clocked in at 1.4 percent.
Under Biden, inflation has climbed steadily, soaring 9.1 percent year-over-year in June 2022, a figure not seen in more than 40 years.
In his speech, Trump drew a contrast with the economy under Joe Biden, blaming the president for the highest inflation in decades that Trump estimates is costing American families as much as $7,000 a year.
“After the pandemic, we handed the radical Democrats the fastest economic recovery ever recorded, the history of our country, ever recorded,” Trump continued. “They’ve turned that into two straight quarters of negative economic growth, also known, despite their protestation to the contrary, as a recession.”
Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth are a common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession, although recessions in the United States are officially declared by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using a broader definition than the two-quarter rule.
Despite a number of economists arguing that the United States is in a recession based on the two-consecutive-quarters rule, the Biden administration insists that the economy isn’t in a recession, citing NBER’s consideration of a broader range of indicators.
A key argument against recession made by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others in the Biden administration is that the U.S. labor market remains tight, with unemployment at 3.5 percent and, at 10.7 million, the number of job openings remaining well above the 6 million or so people classified as unemployed.
Joe Biden gives remarks during a meeting on the economy with CEOs and members of his Cabinet in the South Court Auditorium of the White House on July 28, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Worse Than Recession
In his CPAC speech, Trump then issued an ominous warning that, absent a course correction, the recession could spiral into something even worse.
“Just hope that the recession doesn’t turn into a depression, because the way they’re doing things, it could be a lot worse than a recession,” Trump said, echoing similar remarks he made at a rally in Arizona at the end of July, where he warned that “we’re going to have a serious problem” unless political change takes place.
“We got to get this act in order, we have to get this country going, or we’re going to have a serious problem,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona, warning that “we’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession. We’ll have a depression.”
During his appearance at CPAC, Trump issued a call for urgent action at the polls in the upcoming midterms.
“The future of our country is at stake. We don’t have time to wait years and years. We won’t have a country left. What I used to say about Venezuela is true. We have to save the economy, defeat the Biden, Pelosi, Schumer tax hike, which is happening right now tonight,” Trump continued, referring to the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” that cleared the Senate not long after his speech.
Senators passed the sweeping bill, estimated at $740 billion, in a 51–50 vote on Aug. 7, with the package next going to the House for consideration.
During the deliberations, Senate Democrats rejected an amendment offered by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) that sought to ban any of the $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from being used to target Americans making less than $400,000 per year.
“My colleagues claim this massive funding boost will allow the IRS to go after millionaires, billionaires and so-called rich ‘tax cheats,’ but the reality is a significant portion raised from their IRS funding bloat would come from taxpayers with income below $400,000,” Crapo said in a statement.
Crapo’s amendment was rejected on a party-line vote, with the Democrat bill including softer language that features a non-binding statement of intention not to squeeze more revenue from America’s middle class.
Tax Hikes
According to an analysis by Americans for Tax Reform, a U.S. advocacy group, the spending bill includes a number of tax hikes on American households and businesses.
This includes a $6.5 billion natural gas tax that ATR says will increase household energy bills, a $12 billion crude oil tax that will end up being passed on to drivers in the form of higher gas prices, and a $52 billion income tax hike on mid-sized and family businesses.
In a separate analysis, ATR said that the Democrat bill’s changes to the book tax threaten small businesses.
Elaborating on that theme, economist and author Antonio Graceffo wrote in an op-ed for The Epoch Times that the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” would drive up prices for American households.
“Nearly half of these new taxes will be paid by manufacturers, creating disincentives to produce. Diminished industrial output will drive up the cost of goods and reduce the variety and quantity of goods available on store shelves,” Graceffo wrote.
“Beyond the manufacturing sector, the act increases taxes on businesses in general, which, combined with higher interest rates will decrease new investment and hamper job creation. Ultimately, these increased costs will be passed on to customers,” he added.
‘We Have to Win’
During his CPAC speech, Trump revealed what he sees as the key to bringing the country and its economy back on track.
“We have to win an earth-shattering victory in 2022. We have to do it, coming up in November,” Trump said.
“This election needs to be a national referendum on the horrendous catastrophes the radical Democrats have inflicted on our country,” he continued.
“The Republican party needs to campaign on a clear pledge that, if they are given power, they’re going to fight with everything they have to shut down the border, stop the crime wave, beat inflation, and hold the Biden administration accountable. They have to hold it accountable. Job number one for the next Congress,” Trump said.
The national midterm election takes place on Nov. 8, with 34 Senate seats and all 435 House seats up for grabs.
Jennette McCurdy was a mainstay for years as character Sam Puckett on Nickelodeon’s “iCarly.” But in a new memoir, she alleged her time at the network was far from the happy, free-spirited character she portrayed on the screen.
Vanity Fair published an excerpt Friday of McCurdy’s new memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died.” In it, McCurdy detailed the treatment she was allegedly subject to while working on the show.
At the beginning of the excerpt, McCurdy described a dinner she had with “The Creator,” an anonymous character in the memoir.
McCurdy wrote that “The Creator” pressured her to consume alcohol, which she initially refused.
“I’ve never had alcohol before,” McCurdy said in the excerpt. “And I’m only eighteen. Couldn’t I get in trouble?”
“The Creator” told her the stars of “Victorious,” another popular show on Nickelodeon, got “drunk together all the time,” McCurdy wrote.
“The iCarly kids are so wholesome,” he said, according to the excerpt. “We need to give you guys a little edge.”
McCurdy wrote that she eventually took a sip of alcohol, and she told “The Creator” she enjoyed it. After he pressured her further, she admitted she did not like the taste of the drink.
“The Creator laughs,” McCurdy wrote. “I’ve done well. I’ve pleased him. Mission accomplished. It’s the same mission I have every time I get dinner with him, which has gotten more and more frequent lately as my new contract for the spin-off he promised me is being worked out.
“The Creator is doing the thing that I’ve heard from my co-stars he does with every new star of a show that he’s making — he takes you under his wing. You’re his favorite. For now. I like being his favorite for now. I feel like I’m doing something right.”
McCurdy said this uncomfortable dinner was just one of many questionable interactions she had with “The Creator,” interactions that crossed from ugly into creepy, into abusive.
In another scene she described, “The Creator” put his hand on her knee at dinner, then said he thought she was cold.
He draped his jacket around her, then patted her shoulders, then began to massage her.
“My shoulders do have a lot of knots in them, but I don’t want The Creator to be the one rubbing them out,” McCurdy wrote. “I want to say something, to tell him to stop, but I’m so scared of offending him.”
Eventually, she wrote, Nickelodeon offered her $300,000 when it canceled “Sam & Cat,” if she would promise not to talk about her experiences at Nickelodeon.
“What the f***?” McCurdy wrote, describing her thoughts at the time. (She didn’t use asterisks.) “Nickelodeon is offering me three hundred thousand dollars in hush money to not talk publicly about my experience on the show?
“My personal experience of The Creator’s abuse? This is a network with shows made for children. Shouldn’t they have some sort of moral compass? Shouldn’t they at least try to report to some sort of ethical standard?”
McCurdy wrote that she ultimately decided not to take the money, but that did not erase her experiences.
While “The Creator” is never named in the book, Yahoo! Entertainment reported that producer Dan Schneider was the creator of “iCarly.” ViacomCBS launched an investigation into his behavior before he left the network in 2018, according to a July report in Deadline.
She also described an incident from the show “Sam & Cat,” the “iCarly” spinoff show featuring her “iCarly” character and actress/singer Ariana Grande as the Cat Valentine character from “Victorious,” Yahoo! Entertainment reported.
McCurdy alleged Grande was allowed to pursue other career opportunities during the show, but she was not.
“What finally undid me was when Ariana came whistle-toning in with excitement because she had spent the previous evening playing charades at Tom Hanks’s house,” McCurdy wrote. “That was the moment I broke.”
On top of her issues at the network, McCurdy wrote that her home life was incredibly challenging.
According to Yahoo! Entertainment, she described to her mother that she was embarrassed of being pictured in a bikini during a wardrobe fitting.
Her mother reportedly told her to ignore her issues at the network because “everyone wants what you have.”
Amid Senate run, Val Demings whitewashes past support for Minneapolis’s far-left city council
Florida Democratic Senate hopeful Val Demings wants voters to know she would never support abolishing the police. Two years ago, she praised a group of radical activists working to do just that as “thoughtful.”
In a June 2020 interview with CBS, Demings voiced support for Minneapolis City Council members who pledged to “abolish the Minneapolis Police system as we know it” following the police killing of George Floyd. Demings had no doubt the council members and their activist allies would “come out with a plan” for a new policing system that would “keep Minneapolis safe but also bring the community and the police together in a much needed and long overdue way.”
But days after Demings’s interview, the council voted unanimously to eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department without establishing any kind of replacement. In December, the council voted to pull $8 million in police funding as part of its pledge to “transform our system of public safety.” All the while, the far-left groups that demanded those changes made it clear they would not be satisfied until lawmakers abolished “jails, prisons, detention centers, [and] immigration enforcement.”
Now, as Demings fights to unseat Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), the Democrat is running away from her praise for the council. The position earned her praise amid the riots that followed Floyd’s death, when two-thirds of Americans supported the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then, support has plummeted to 31 percent, prompting Demings to use her status as a former cop to argue that she’d never “call abolishing the police ‘thoughtful.'”
Still, many Florida law enforcement officials aren’t buying Demings’s turnaround. 55 state sheriffs have endorsed Rubio, and some say Demings “turned her back on law enforcement” in the wake of Floyd’s death. Demings did not return a request for comment.
On June 7, 2020, days after violent riots subsided in Minneapolis, the anti-police groups Reclaim the Block and the Black Visions Collective hosted a rally in Minneapolis’s Powderhorn Park. During the event, nine Minneapolis City Council members, including then-president Lisa Bender, stood behind a giant “DEFUND POLICE” sign on stage, and announced their “commitment” to “end policing as we know it.”
The next day, Demings defended the council to CBS, expressing confidence in the group’s ability to reimagine public safety in a “safe” and “thoughtful” way. During a CNN appearance that morning, Bender shared her hope for a “future without police.” Pressed on the prospect of having no cops to call during a break-in should Minneapolis actualize that future, Bender said the concern “comes from a place of privilege,” as “calling the police may mean more harm is done.”
Bender’s rhetoric closely resembles language in the Black Visions Collective’s “Minneapolis Without Policing” resource guide, which instructs crime victims to resist “the urge to dial 911,” as the police’s presence “will put people at risk of being jailed, abused, or killed.” The similarity is likely no coincidence—in August 2020, two months after the interview, Bender acknowledged her “long relationship” with the anti-cop group, which began its work to defund and disband police in 2017.
While the Black Visions Collective long had the ear of Bender and other council members, its radical vision for Minneapolis didn’t catch fire until after Floyd’s death. That event prompted the collective’s members to seize on growing anti-police rhetoric, harassing city mayor Jacob Frey (D.) and his liberal counterparts on the council to answer the call to defund police. Days before the nine city council members publicly caved to the collective’s demands in Powderhorn Park, the group planted gravestones with Floyd’s name outside council members’ homes.
It’s unclear if Demings was familiar with the Black Visions Collective when she praised the “community leaders” working with the council to reimagine law enforcement. But the group undoubtedly led the charge to abolish police in Minneapolis, giving politicians like Bender a guide to “eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance” and building “a police-free future.”
“As [prison industrial complex] abolitionists, we organize to dismantle and defund these systems,” the guide reads. “This looks like organizing to abolish police and all law enforcement, including ICE and the military; to stop jail/prison construction and close existing facilities; and to end racist, predictive policing practices that use zip codes to target Black and Brown neighborhoods. It also looks like not calling the police on people, ever.”
Bender and the rest of the City Council advanced many of these policies after the June rally. On June 26, the council unanimously approved a proposal that would have done away with the Minneapolis Police Department in favor of a “department of community safety and violence prevention.” The proposal gave the council overwhelming control over the new department. It also removed the city’s mandatory officer requirement, which meant the council did not have to hire a single cop.
Unfortunately for the Black Visions Collective, the community safety department never came to be. Minneapolis voters had a chance to approve the proposal through a November 2021 ballot measure, which came as the city experienced a surge in violent crime, including the highest number of homicides in two decades. Voters rejected the measure by a double-digit margin.
Following the vote, Bender retreated into privacy. After declining to run for reelection in November 2020, the former president announced she was “logging off for a while” and locked her Twitter account.
But for Demings, distancing herself from the summer of 2020 has proven more difficult. Rubio’s campaign has flooded airwaves with ads saying the Democrat “refused to condemn radicals.” In response, Demings released her own ad, which called the idea of defunding police “just crazy.”
That rhetoric is a far cry from Demings’s earlier comments. She claims her “very thoughtful” comments were directed toward the City Council, not their movement to dismantle police. For former Minneapolis-area police captain David Zimmer, that defense is not a convincing one, as the council in 2020 was well known as “an activist council that had it out for its own police department and was looking for ways to take more control.”
“They were pretty clear with what their intent was,” said Zimmer, now a criminal justice policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment. “They wanted to do away with the police department. And when the Floyd case came about, they felt like they had the power to do it.”
The Senate approved the Democrats’ sweeping health care and climate bill on Aug. 7 in a 51–50 vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote.
The estimated $740 billion package next goes to the House for consideration.
“It’s been a long, tough and winding road, but at last, at last we have arrived,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. “The Senate is making history. I am confident the Inflation Reduction Act will endure as one of the defining legislative measures of the 21st century.”
Senators engaged in a round-the-clock marathon of voting that began on Aug. 6 and stretched into the afternoon of Aug. 7. Democrats voted against some three dozen Republican amendments to the legislation.
The bill ran into trouble midday over objections to a 15 percent corporate minimum tax that was disliked by private equity firms and other industries, forcing last-minute changes.
“It will close tax loopholes and it will reduce and reduce the deficit,” Schumer said. “It will help every citizen in this country and make America a much better place.”
Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a U.S. advocacy group, stated that the measure will increase taxes on thousands of mid-sized small businesses across the United States.
“Any business that has [private equity] in its capital structure is now considered a subsidiary of that firm and thus subject to 15 percent book tax,” John Kartch, a spokesman for ATR, wrote on Twitter.
“As written, the provision now appears restructured to define any company with private equity in its capital structure to be considered a subsidiary of that private equity firm for purposes of the tax,” the group said in a statement. “This means that these companies would now be swept up in the new 15 percent tax on book income. This provision would greatly expand the reach of the book minimum tax to apply to small and midsize companies that require capital investment to grow their business.”
Concerns over objections to the corporate minimum tax on private equity firms and other industries threatened to slow the progress.
Republicans said the measure would undermine an economy that policymakers are struggling to keep from plummeting into recession. They said the bill’s business taxes would hurt job creation and force prices skyward, making it harder for people to cope with the nation’s worst inflation since the 1980s.
“Democrats have already robbed American families once through inflation, and now their solution is to rob American families a second time,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the floor.
Spending and tax increases in the legislation would eliminate jobs while having an insignificant impact on inflation and climate change, the Kentucky Republican said.
Starting late on Aug. 6, the Senate began its so-called “vote-a-rama” that comes before the final passage in the Senate’s budget reconciliation process. Democrats used the process to pass the bill along party lines so as to avoid the 60-vote filibuster, and Harris served as a tiebreaker on several amendments in the 50–50 Senate.
More Details
The bill came to the floor about a week after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced he came to an agreement with Schumer in what is believed to be an attempt to boost Democrats’ and Biden’s chances during the 2022 midterms amid months of negative polling. Biden’s original climate and social measure collapsed after it was opposed by Manchin, who said it was too costly and would fuel inflation.
“The Inflation Reduction Act is the product of years of bipartisan conversations about the most impactful ways to produce more energy domestically, bring down energy and healthcare costs and pay down our debt. The IRA achieves this without raising taxes,” Manchin wrote on Twitter.
Around the same time, the West Virginia Democrat said he would vote down GOP amendments.
“Despite this, my [Republican] friends have made clear they’re completely unwilling to support this bill under any condition. None of their amendments would change that,” Manchin said.
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) offered amendments to further expand the legislation’s health benefits, and those efforts were defeated. Most votes were forced by Republicans and many were designed to make Democrats look soft on issues such as U.S.–Mexico border security, gasoline and energy costs, and like bullies for wanting to strengthen IRS tax law enforcement.
Late on Aug. 6, Sanders said the measure won’t reduce inflation and said it also doesn’t go far enough with its climate-related measures.
“I want to take a moment to say a few words about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act’ that we are debating this evening,” he said from the Senate floor. “And I say so-called, by the way, because according to the [Congressional Budget Office], and other economic organizations that study this bill, it will, in fact, have a minimal impact on inflation.
“At a time when the drug companies are enjoying huge profits, the pharmaceutical industry will still be allowed to charge the American people by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
UPDATE: This article has been updated to include Sen. Joe Manchin’s full title.
he Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose research into coronaviruses is believed by many to be the source of COVID-19, is engaging in similarly risky studies tracking bats and their ability to infect humans in caves across China.
The unearthed paper follows the controversial lab using funds from Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance to gather bat samples. Beginning in 2014, led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Bat Woman” Shi Zhengli, researchers used the samples to conduct risky “gain-of-function” research, as now-deleted webpages reveal the lab manipulating bat coronaviruses to “replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”
The new study, published in May of 2020, appears to be engaging in similar research methods.
Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including “Bat Lady” Shi Zhengli, tracked and sampled the Cave Nectar Bat since it is “known to carry both filoviruses and coronaviruses,” according to the paper.
“In this study, we tracked 16 bats in Mengla County, Yunnan Province, China, using miniaturized GPS devices to investigate their movements and potential contact with humans. Furthermore, to determine the prevalence of coronavirus and filovirus infections, we screened for the nucleic acids of the Měnglà virus (MLAV) and two coronaviruses (GCCDC1-CoV and HKU9-CoV) in anal swab samples taken from bats and for antibodies against these viruses in human serum samples,” explains an overview of the researcher’s work.
The study also shows that researchers worked with “recombinant proteins,” a term that commonly appears in “gain-of-function” research.
The research was published in the journal Zoological Research and was funded by several Chinese Communist Party-run scientific organizations including the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The National Pulse has previously exposed the NSFC’s deep ties to China’s military.
The group’s 2020 funding guidelines identify “innovative research in defense and military and civilian integration” as receiving “preferential” funding. The foundation also inked a 2016 “strategic cooperative agreement” with the Science and Technology Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission – the regime’s paramount military policy-making body.
Annual reports from NSFC reveal several researchers from PLA-run institutions received millions in funding.
The paper also follows lies from EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak about the lab’s work with live bats, which were proved false through recovered footage from the lab. Deleted webpages and patents filed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology also show that researchers worked closely with bats despite the lab acknowledging that “the risk of being bitten by a bat still exists” even when protective gear is worn.
WASHINGTON—Lawmakers and experts highlighted the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) history of violence and bloodshed, while recognizing a new milestone reached by a global movement calling for people to relinquish their ties to the world’s largest communist regime.
The number of Chinese who have severed their ties to Chinese communist organizations reached over 400 million on Aug. 3, according to the Global Center for Quitting the CCP, an organization dedicated to processing and tracking online declarations denouncing CCP memberships. The global movement is known as “tuidang,” which means “quit the Party” in English.
“The Chinese Communist Party has the blood of tens of millions of Chinese on its hands, so it is no wonder that over 400 million Chinese civilians have left the CCP over the past two decades,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) in an emailed statement.
“Mao’s Great Famine, Tiananmen Square, the persecution of the Falun Gong, and the genocide of Uyghur Muslims are all proof that the CCP only cares about its grip on power,” continued Burchett, who sits on the Asia subcommittee of the House Committee of Foreign Affairs.
“Chinese people would be better served by an open and truly representative government, so I hope the tuidang movement picks up steam.”
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) (L) shakes hands with Defence Under Secretary for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie, after a hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 17, 2022. (Jose Luis Magana/AFP via Getty Images)
A ‘Self-Healing’ Movement
In the past decades, more and more Chinese have been questioning the CCP’s representation of the people, according to Ryan, one of the authors of “Nine Commentaries of Communist Party,” a 2004 book first published by the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times that inspired the global movement. Ryan is an alias used to protect his identity and family in China.
Ryan described the tuidang as a “self-healing” and “self-redemption” movement. According to him, Nine Commentaries helped the Chinese people unwind decades of CCP propaganda that instilled the idea that the Party equates to China, and the Chinese civilization. People were finally able to separate the CCP from the people, and the nation.
Before the book systematically illustrated the Party’s history of deceit and use of mass struggle to solidify its power over society, the CCP had controlled the Chinese people and dictated their mentality without the people’s knowledge, said Ryan. While he himself grew up in this environment, Ryan credited his belief in Falun Gong for helping him to transcend the communist regime’s indoctrination.
Falun Gong is a spiritual practice involving meditative exercises and a set of moral teachings underpinned by the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
Putting these principles into practice helped Ryan to extricate himself from the CCP’s hold on people’s psyche. This is because the Party has been able to manipulate and control the populace by appealing to the ignoble parts of human nature: greed, fear, and jealousy, he said. Such a tactic is most clearly shown in the CCP’s continual efforts in its 100-year history to pitch one group of society against another for no other reason than to consolidate its own grip on power, and eliminate threats to its control.
Falun Gong, itself, became singled as a target of the CCP’s wrath in 1999, after the Party deemed the spiritual disciplines’ huge popularity—with up to 100 million people practicing—a threat to its hold on power. The CCP has sought to wipe out the spiritual discipline with an all-society-wide campaign of arrest, torture, and vilification for the past 23 years and counting.
“Whether Chinese people have read the ‘Nine Commentaries’ or not, they have begun to discuss social issues with the verbiage and logic presented in the book,” Ryan said about the book’s impact. “Their mentality change is as important as the action of quitting the Party.”
Chinese people have quit the Party or its affiliate organizations by submitting online statements to the Global Center for Quitting the CCP. Most use an alias to do so.
“Chinese as a group are rediscovering their identity, one that is separate from the CCP,” Ryan added.
Andrew Bremberg, president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, in Washington on Feb. 3, 2022. (Bao Qiu/The Epoch Times)
‘An Exemplar’
Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a Washington-based advocacy group, highlighted the tuidang movement as a model for peaceful resistance against communist oppression.
“Congratulations to the Tuidang movement for reaching a new milestone. Tuidang is an exemplar of a peaceful, civil society movement where activists reach the conscience of their fellow citizens and persuade them to renounce communist ideology and control,” he said in an emailed statement.
“The efforts of the movement to end communist domination are admirable, and the free world must stand with the people of China in such brave acts of resistance against the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party,” Bremberg continued.
Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) on the House Energy and Commerce Committee welcomed the latest progress of the tuidang movement in an emailed statement: “This week’s milestone is a clear signal to the CCP that their oppressive ways will not stand forever, and personal freedom will eventually carry the day, even in their own country. This is progress for those who stand against communism and the harm its policies have across the globe.”
Ryan said he has also seen the knock-on effects of the movement in the United States. It’s now the norm for U.S. officials to clarify that they don’t target the Chinese people or China the nation when they criticize the CCP.
Communist Insider Decouples from the CCP
Cai Xia, a former professor at the CCP’s elite Central Party School in Beijing, was a Party insider.
Now based in Washington, Cai, in a January interview with The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet NTD, described her journey of how she walked away from the CCP.
The first time Cai thought of quitting the Party was in 2016. She had retired from teaching then and was living in Beijing. The impetus for her change in thinking was statements made by Ren Zhiqiang, an outspoken real estate tycoon in China, who questioned whether the government was the same as the Party and criticized the CCP for “taking the taxpayers’ money but not working for them.” That was his response to the CCP general secretary Xi Jinping’s statement that “the media’s last name is ‘dang’”—a term referring to the CCP.
Chinese real estate mogul Ren Zhiqiang poses for photos in his office in Beijing on Dec. 3, 2012. (Color China Photo via AP)
Known as “Ren the canon” for being vocal in criticizing the Party, the real estate mogul is a “red princeling”, a term for descendants of former CCP senior officials. Thus many thought Ren would get into trouble but wouldn’t have to pay a hefty price. However, Ren was sentenced to 18 years in September 2020 for alleged graft after criticizing the CCP for its mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, which led to the global pandemic.
Cai told NTD that the Party school reprimanded her in 2016 for publishing an article supporting Ren. “I didn’t have a voice because the Party discipline bound me, and I was considered a CCP member first and foremost,” said Cai. “I would rather have abandoned my CCP member identity to keep my right to speak up.”
Cai had written a formal application to quit the CCP then. But her friends persuaded her not to submit it because of the expected financial retaliation, including losing her pension. When Ren was sentenced to 18 years in 2020, Cai again wanted to quit the Party. At that time, she was in the United States. Once again, her friends in the United States persuaded her not to leave the Party so that she could keep her pension income.
But the decision was ultimately made for her. The Party expelled her on Aug. 17, 2020.
Cai said she felt “completely relieved” upon receiving the news.
“I completely decoupled with the Party. From then on, I would have no relationship, economic or interest involvement, with the Party anymore,” she said.
Cai’s transition from a CCP insider to a member of ordinary Chinese citizens brought her sense of happiness mixed with relief. She acknowledged that she had to deal with some financial difficulties due to the loss of her pension, but it was something that she could overcome.
“Once you have joined the Party, you don’t have the freedom to quit it. They strictly forbid members from quitting the Party,” Cai told NTD, adding that this was equivalent to making people accomplices to the CCP’s criminal activities.
She urged people to have the courage to break this bind. Such an act doesn’t only amount to the liberation of a person’s mind and spirit, Cai said.
It will also “offer a person an added layer of protection when China goes through a transition in the future,” she said.
“The Party is evil; it doesn’t mean the 90 million members are all like that.”
Hundred of people march in a parade in downtown Toronto on Aug. 6, 2022, to celebrate 400 million Chinese people quitting the Chinese Communist Party and its affiliated organizations. (Evan Ning/The Epoch Times)
Renouncing Their Pledge
Many Chinese who quit the communist organizations state their reason as wanting to rid themselves of the CCP’s control and avoid being considered an affiliate if or when the CCP is held accountable in or outside China.
These people also include those who were once members of the CCP’s junior organizations: the Young Pioneers for elementary- and middle-school-aged children, and the Communist Youth League for those who are middle- and high-school-aged.
Although memberships in these organizations are not mandatory on paper, they are in practice. Students who haven’t joined these two groups by a certain age face increasing pressure and even discrimination in being eligible to receive education benefits.
With each progressive level from the Young Pioneers up until fully-fledged Party member, the initiates’ pledge evolves from “contributing to” to “fighting for,” and eventually, “ready to sacrifice everything for” the CCP.
Even though the membership in the Young Pioneers supposedly ends at 14 and the Youth League at 28, members don’t go through a formal process to rescind their pledge to the CCP. Therefore anyone who has ever been a member of these youth organizations is encouraged to submit a statement withdrawing their affiliation at the Global Center for Quitting the CCP platform.
This explains why the 400 million figure who have quit the CCP organizations vastly outstrips the official number of CCP members, which is 90 million.
The movement was also welcomed by Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.), a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology: “We spent decades fighting the Cold War to stop the spread of communism because we knew back then that it is evil and capable of great atrocities.
“The Chinese Communist Party is not only a great threat to democracy and freedom but also our national security. We must stop its growing influence around the world and here at home.”
Australia’s shadow defence minister has called on the West to “see China with clear eyes” as he warned Australia’s “greatest vulnerability” is its failure to recognise the communist regime’s “fundamentally different vision for the world.”
Andrew Hastie on Sunday said that Australia is in an “immensely difficult” position where it can neither forsake its closest allies, the United States, nor turn away from its largest trading partner, China.
Hastie added that Australia has “failed to recognise how mobile our authoritarian neighbour has become” and ignored the role that ideology plays into China’s actions across the Indo-Pacific region. For example, Australia keeps using its own categories to understand China’s actions, such as its motivations for building ports and roads, rather than those used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he said.
“The West has made this mistake before. Commentators once believed Stalin’s decisions were the rational actions of a realist power,” Hastie said.
“Right now, our greatest vulnerability lies not in our infrastructure, but in our thinking. That intellectual failure makes us institutionally weak.”
The shadow defence minister warned that the West and the Chinese communist regime has “a fundamentally different vision for the world” and urged Australia to be “intellectually honest and take the Chinese leadership at its word.”
“Xi’s view of the future is one where capitalism will be eclipsed and ‘the consolidation of and development of the socialist system will require its own long period of history … it will require the tireless struggle of generations, up to 10 generations.’”
“If we don’t understand the challenge ahead for our civil society, in our parliaments, in our universities, in our private enterprises, in our charities—our little platoons—then choices will be made for us. Our sovereignty, our freedom, will be diminished.”
Meanwhile, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong on Aug. 5 called out China for its “destabilizing” live-fire drills near Taiwan, noting that Australia will monitor the situation closely.
On Aug. 4, China launched live-fire military drills in the seas surrounding Taiwan, which was seen as a campaign of military coercion against the island in apparent retaliation for U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) visit.
The CCP declared six exclusion zones encircling the island for its war games. Warplanes and vessels crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait that separates Taiwan from mainland China.
Calling the military drills “highly provocative,” Taiwan’s defense ministry said that Chinese military jets and warships had been seen in waters near Taiwan on Aug. 4, with some crossing the median line. Also known as the Davis Line, the median serves as an unofficial air and maritime buffer between China and Taiwan.
Twitter has permanently banned author James Lindsay for calling a transgender attorney a “child sexualization specialist” on the social media platform.
Lindsay said he made the comment after Alejandro Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic who previously worked as staff attorney for the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, accused him of being racist and sexist.
Caraballo celebrated and took credit for Lindsay’s suspension, saying, “Tell James, I want him to know it was me” in a post on Twitter.
Over the last two weeks, Lindsay said, trans activists have banded together, targeted him, and claimed responsibility for a “mass reporting” campaign—which is against Twitter rules.
“They not only launched a massive reporting [campaign], but they bragged that they did it,” he told The Epoch Times on Aug. 5, the day he was banned. “Twitter has a terms of service agreement that you can’t mass report or induce mass reporting. It’s considered targeted harassment, and it’s against the terms of service to do it, but nobody ever enforces it—ever.”
The Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on April 26, 2022. (Amy Osborne/AFP via Getty Images)
He was previously twice locked out of his @conceptualjames Twitter account, once on July 21 for responding “ok groomer” to Ari Drennen, an LGBTQ program director at Media Matters, and again on July 26 for using the word “groomer” in old Twitter posts that trans activists publicized.
Drennen, who took credit for getting Lindsay locked out of his account on July 21, wrote an article published online July 22 suggesting Twitter suspend users “slandering LGBTQ people as ‘groomers’” and calling Lindsay a “right-wing CRT alarmist.”
To get back into his Twitter account in that case, Lindsay said he was “forced to confess” the “ok groomer” comment violated Twitter rules because “it’s the only way to get your account back unless you want to get locked into appeal limbo.”
Lindsay has since appealed the permanent ban. When prompted to “describe the problem” to Twitter, he wrote: “The problem is that you arbitrarily changed the rules and suspended my account after repeatedly forcing me to lie to admissions of guilt for ‘violations’ that aren’t real. You should un-suspend my account and correct your biased and arbitrary policy enforcement.”
Ironically, Lindsay said that he felt like he was “let out of prison” after the ban.
“I don’t know why I want to go back. It’s so strange how immediate it is that I just feel relief that I’m not on there anymore,” Lindsay said. “The only reason I want it back as a matter of practicality, because it drives something like 80-something percent of my traffic to my website.”
He accused Twitter of using tactics similar to those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to coerce people into confessing to fake crimes.
A small group of Beijing residents walk in February 1967 in downtown Beijing, past a huge poster showing Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” (Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images)
“That is a tactic of Maoism—a communist tactic to force people to confess to crimes to be able to get leniency. That’s literally how Mao ran his prisons in CCP-controlled China in the ’50s,” he said.
The term “groomer” has several meanings, and although it can refer to pedophilia, it can also mean a recruiter who “grooms” someone into a cult, club, or organization, or a person who “grooms” another for a job or position, he said.
Lindsay contends he used the term “groomer” to describe someone involved in what he views the “cult indoctrination” of others into the trans activism or and gender ideology movement and was not accusing anyone of pedophilia.
“I would not accuse anybody of that without substantive evidence. It’s a horrific accusation,” he said.
He has admitted publicly that he openly criticizes those involved “defending and engaging in cult grooming into a gender ideology rooted in queer Marxist theory.”
People protest a school board’s pro-transgender policy outside of a middle school in Falls Church, Va., on June 16, 2022. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
“It’s weird because the cult indoctrination is sex, gender, and sexuality, and so they’re indoctrinating people with concepts of sexuality which sexualizes children, but that’s not the same thing specifically as pedophilia, which is also the sexualization of children. There is this weird double meaning, or two meanings to the word,” he said.
Lindsay has produced a series of podcasts called “Groomer Schools” for his website, New Discourses, which has been very popular, he said.
“So, I’ve been calling these people ‘groomers’ for months. I started doing it back in October,” he said. “[It wasn’t] ambiguous in terms of what it means until 10 minutes ago.”
Twitter did not respond to an inquiry about Lindsay’s allegations that activists had launched a mass reporting campaign against him, but told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement on Aug. 5 that his account was “permanently suspended” for “hateful conduct” according to Twitter policies.
While Lindsay opposes “cancel culture” on social media, especially for expressing an opinion on an issue, he said people who abuse their positions or power to impose an ideology on school children “should be fired.”
Students walk outside Hewes Middle School in Tustin, Calif., on Aug. 12, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
As the author of several books, including “Race Marxism” and “Social (In)Justice,” that delve deep into today’s culture wars, Lindsay is no stranger to controversy, but he has never been banned from Twitter for his opinions on critical race theory, for example.
“It’s not the broader constellation of things I’m calling out; it is specifically that they want to protect the transsexual ideological grooming of children, and it is huge and it is coordinated,” he said. “There is a vested interest in protecting this specific thing, and I don’t know why that is.”
Tiffany Justice, co-founder of national parental rights organization Moms for Liberty, was recently locked out of the group’s Twitter account for a week over a post condemning controversial proposed legislation that would make California a transgender sanctuary state, and for also challenging gender ideology.
She wrote on Twitter July 25, “Gender dysphoria is a mental health disorder that is being normalized by predators across the USA. California kids are at extreme risk from predatory adults. Now they want to ‘liberate’ children all over the country. Does a double mastectomy on a preteen sound like progress?”
After Justice deleted the post, the Moms for Liberty Twitter account was unlocked.
Media Matters has also accused Twitter account Libs of Tik Tok, Gays Against Groomers founder Jaimee Michell, and others of slandering people with the term groomer.
Last week, Twitter also locked the Gays Against Groomers account. The group had posted: “Damaged people damage people. The internet is a dangerous place for kids, especially when you have radical alphabet activists openly grooming them. Protect your children from these people at all costs.”
President Donald Trump said on Aug. 7 that if he returns to the White House in 2025 he’ll rehire the service members who lost their jobs by refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
“I think it’s a disgrace what happened to them,” Trump said, answering a reporter’s question.
Trump was responding to questions from the press before he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday.
“I’d let them back. I’d give back pay,” Trump said. “So I would give them their back pay and I would let them back, and they understand that. They know it.”
Back pay is “a common remedy for wage violations” where “the employer makes up the difference between what the employee was paid and the amount he or she should have been paid,” according to the Department of Labor.
Trump’s comments came weeks after the U.S. army announced plans to cut more than 60,000 guards and reserve soldiers for refusing COVID-19 vaccines.
“Soldiers who refuse the vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to service, and official reprimands,” a July 1 statement on the U.S. Army’s website reads.
More than 19,000 U.S. Army personnel have refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine, as of July 14, 2022, according to U.S. Army data. The Army approved a total of 24 medical and 19 religious exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine.
Jan. 6 Pardons
In response to another question, Trump said he’ll “very strongly” consider pardoning nonviolent political prisoners who have been indicted as a result of participating in the January 6 Capitol breach.
“We’ll certainly be looking at it, and very strongly,” Trump said, adding that he has made previous statements about potentially pardoning January 6 political prisoners.
“I think many people are being treated very unfair … having to do with that. And we will be looking at that very strongly,” Trump said. “I think you know the answer.”
The president hinted strongly at but stopped short of announcing a 2024 run.
“Well, it’s not a long period, regardless, whether you go before or after, certainly not a very long period of time,” the former president said. He raised the same point in an interview with the New Yorker earlier this year, when he said he’s undecided on whether to announce his decision on a 2024 run before or after the midterms.
“It’s coming,” Trump said, “and I think people are going to be very happy.”
“Our country has never been in a position like this. We lost everything. We’ve lost energy independence. We’ve lost our prestige. We’ve lost every single thing you can lose,” Trump said, noting the withdrawal from Afghanistan—which he previously called “the greatest tactical mistake in history“—and the border crisis.
“So we’ll be making an announcement in the not-too-distance future.”
Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, is scheduled to meet on Aug. 9 with the House’s Jan. 6 committee. While it was to be a voluntary interview, the committee is now demanding a compelled deposition.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, following his win in the Pennsylvania Republican primary, gives a victory speech at his election night party at The Orchards in Chambersburg, Pa., on May 17, 2022. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“Your committee is not legally able to conduct compelled depositions, which is why all of my clients have all offered to participate in voluntary interviews,” Mastriano’s attorney, Timothy C. Parlatore, wrote in an Aug. 5 letter to the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol breach.
“Although Senator Mastriano is happy to cooperate with your committee, as he has nothing to hide, I do have concerns that are particular to him, given the conduct of the committee up to this point.”
Parlatore believes the Jan. 6 committee may try to influence Pennsylvania’s election.
“Given the committee’s demonstrated propensity for releasing edited clips of interviews without the requisite context to support a false partisan narrative,” Parlatore wrote, “I am concerned that there is a risk that your committee will do the same to Senator Mastriano.
“Members of your party like Sean Patrick Maloney, Democratic Campaign Chair, have openly admitted that the goal of the hearings you are conducting is intended to paint the Republican party as irresponsible and power hungry ahead of the midterms.
“For this reason, my client has legitimate concerns that your committee may attempt to influence the outcome of the Pennsylvania state elections through the dissemination of disinformation.”
A spokesperson for the Jan. 6 committee didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
Parlatore’s letter indicates that he’s willing to allow the meeting if he can make his own recording of the interview, which could be released if the committee releases edited recordings of Mastriano that need more context.
“I was informed by your staffer that you rejected this proposal and refused to make any counterproposals because you wish to retain sole dominion over the public narrative,” the letter says.
“Obviously, your refusal to even discuss this is concerning, as there is no downside to me holding a second recording of the interview, unless the committee does, in fact, intend to engage in disinformation with Senator Mastriano’s interview and is afraid of any accountability for that disinformation.”
The lack of a truly bipartisan committee infringes on the rights of the witnesses and serves no legitimate investigative purpose, Parlatore said.
“My client has significant concerns that he is being set up for sanctions due to the Committee’s refusal to respect the bounds of privilege and lack of any opposing viewpoints to act as a counterbalance,” the letter states.
Parlatore said Mastriano would appear for a deposition if the committee gets a ranking minority member designation from the Republican steering committee.
But before Mastriano would testify in that scenario, Parlatore said he would review the Regulations for Use of Deposition Authority to determine if all provisions had been met. If not, he and Mastriano would leave the session and return only in the event that all provisions in the rules are met the by committee, a judge rules that the committee doesn’t need to comply with the rules, or they agree to a voluntary interview.
Mastriano attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally in Washington with numerous other people. He has cooperated with the committee so far, providing documents that have been requested.
The Senate’s rules expert has approved provisions in a major bill Senate Democrats want to pass soon called the Inflation Reduction Act, according to top Democrats in the body.
Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that tax incentives for renewable energy and other related provisions can stand, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said.
“I’m especially pleased that our prevailing wage provisions were approved,” Wyden said in a statement. “These provisions guarantee wage rates for clean energy projects. Clean energy jobs will be good-paying jobs.”
Another piece that would enable Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs with pharmaceutical companies was also cleared, according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
“This is a major victory for the American people,” Schumer said.
Medicare is a health insurance program run by the federal government that primarily covers people aged 65 and older. About 64 million people are covered by the program.
Private insurers are already allowed to negotiate prices with drug companies.
MacDonough did strike down another portion of the bill, which would have essentially forced companies not to raise prices higher than inflation.
“While there was one unfortunate ruling … in that the inflation rebate is more limited in scope, the overall program remains intact and we are one step closer to finally taking on Big Pharma and lowering Rx drug prices for millions of Americans,” Schumer said.
Additional portions have not yet been fully vetted.
All Democrats Support Bill
The mammoth $433 billion bill has the backing of all 50 Democrats in Congress after swing Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) threw their support behind the legislation.
“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” Sinema, the last Democrat to announce her support, said in a statement this week. “Subject to the Parliamentarian’s review, I’ll move forward.”
Joe Biden and other Democrats have said the bill will help Americans save money, but experts are divided on the potential impact.
The bill is aimed at reducing energy costs, transitioning to “cleaner production” by incentivizing solar and other alternative forms of production, lowering health care premiums, increasing taxes on the rich, and reducing the deficit to “fight inflation,” according to Democrats.
Most Republicans appear opposed to the bill.
“Congressional Democrats are pushing a massive tax-and-spend proposal that will crush Americans already struggling under record-high inflation. Cutting wasteful spending would ease inflation. Spending more money will only make it worse,” Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) said in a statement.
“If a truth-in-advertising law were applied to the ‘Inflation Reduction Act,’ Democrats would be guilty. Their proposal would do nothing to tame inflation,” added Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).
Democrats hold a majority in the upper chamber because the party controls the White House. That means, in the event of a 50–50 tie, Vice President Kamala Harris can cast a tiebreaking vote.
Schumer has said the Senate will vote on Aug. 6 to advance the bill, triggering hours of debate. A final vote can happen as soon as Sunday.
Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are trying to reinstate the federal assault weapon ban that was in effect for 10 years because—they claim—it reduced gun crime. The bill, which just passed the House, will soon get a vote in the Senate.
In the effort to get it passed, Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made some grand claims, which they called “facts,” about the previous ban on rifles leading to decreasing crime. But those facts don’t appear to be backed up by evidence.
“Supporters of the bans are calling their assertions ‘facts,’ in an effort to mislead the public,” Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) told The Epoch Times. “Many of the Democratic Members of Congress were purposefully misleading in their assertions that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban reduced crime. This level of willful ignorance would be comical if the effects of what they are trying to do wasn’t so blatantly unconstitutional.”
The ban was in effect from 1994 to 2004.
Pelosi
During that time, “we witnessed gun crime with assault weapons drop by up to 40 percent,” Pelosi said on the House floor during the recent debate.
“The number of murders with rifles actually increased slightly when the ban went into effect,” John R Lott Jr., the president of Crime Research, told The Epoch Times, referring to data from the FBI’s annual release of reports from law enforcement agencies on homicides by weapon type. Lott also pointed out that no one collects data on all crimes committed with so-called assault weapons.
The term “assault weapon” is a political phrase referring to semi-automatic rifles with various cosmetic features. The House bill calls an “assault weapon” a rifle that has one feature such as a pistol grip, folding stock, or grenade launcher.
While Pelosi makes it sound like there’s a grave risk of being killed by a rifle, it’s actually a rare crime. Lott has reported that the percentage of firearm murders with any type of rifles was 4.8 percent prior to the ban starting in September 1994. During the 10-year ban, homicide by rifle was 4.9 percent of all murders. Then rifle homicides dropped to 3.6 percent after the ban expired in 2004.
The speaker did not cite the source of her statistics. She could be referring to how all violent crime went down since the spike in the 1980s, which would include the small number of murders by rifles.
You can see this in this graphic of the FBI data. The decrease was dramatic.
There were 15,463 homicides by gun in 1994 when the ban went into effect and 724 were by rifles. When the ban expired in 2004, there were 9,385 homicides and 403 of them were by rifle.
“The falling crime rates are more likely due to many other factors than firearm ownership, including a concerted effort and focus on prosecuting criminals,” explained Keane.
Pelosi’s press office did not respond to a request for information on the source of her data.
Studies
Furthermore, there is no study that has proven that the gun control law had a direct effect on crime reduction. Quite the opposite, Rand’s “Study of Gun Policy” in 2018 (pdf) looked at various studies on the impact of the law on violent crime and concluded that “available evidence is inconclusive for the effect of assault weapon bans on total homicides and firearm homicides.”
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) also published a report in 2003 on evaluating the effectiveness of firearms laws and studied the assault weapon ban. It said that studies were “inconsistent” and thus concluded that, “evidence was insufficient to determine the effectiveness” of the law.
Ownership of these so-called assault weapons increased during the ban. Keane, the powerful gun lobbyist, pointed out that during the ban, what his organization calls Modern Sporting Rifles continued to be legally manufactured and sold if they did not have two of the cosmetic features necessary for the rifle to be banned.
Biden has been pushing incessantly for it to be reinstated since he took office on the basis that it decreased mass shootings. He said in July: “Assault weapons need to be banned. They were banned. I led the fight in 1994. And then, under pressure from the NRA and the gun manufacturers and others, that ban was lifted in 2004.”
NRA stands for National Rifle Association.
Biden also said on June 2, “In the 10 years it was law, mass shootings went down. But after Republicans let the law expire in 2004 and those weapons were allowed to be sold again, mass shootings tripled. Those are the facts.”
But an Epoch Times investigation into mass shootings showed that they are extremely rare and went up and down during the time period in question. As you can see in this graphic, there was no pattern of mass shootings in that 10-year period.
The White House press office did not respond to a request for the source of the president’s data.
Pelosi echoed Biden with her own statistic, saying in a speech that “since the ban expired, the number of mass shooting deaths has grown by nearly 500 percent.”
That’s not true.
“Mass public shootings with assault weapons in the ten years after the ban sunset increased to six compared to the four that occurred in the ten years during the ban,” Lott reported in his analysis. He also reports that total mass public shootings increased between those two ten-year periods, almost doubling, but the increase occurred with non-assault weapons.
“If Pelosi’s claim is correct, we should see a drop in the percent of attacks with assault weapons during the federal ban period and then an increase in the post-ban period, but the exact opposite is true,” said Lott, the author of the new book Gun Control Myths.
Furthermore, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service studied the impact of the 1994 assault weapon ban and concluded: “Significantly while tragic and shocking, public mass shootings account for few of the murders or non-negligent homicides related to firearms that occur annually in the United States.”
Motivation?
Why are top Democrats focusing public attention on legislation from so long ago that had no impact on violence?
“They are living in a 1994 mindset because we have an anti-gun political class that is still using the same old talking points when it comes to assault weapons,” said an insider at a group that aims to protect Second Amendment rights. “They are highlighting the most emotionally compelling crimes [mass shootings] that are extremely rare—less than 1 percent of all gun deaths—to confuse and scare the public, but it’s not working anymore.”
Keane echoed this, saying, “These are the same politicians that manufacture terms to scare the American public with the term ‘assault weapon’ to purposefully mislead the American public and confuse Modern Sporting Rifles with the military’s automatic rifles.”
While these kinds of scare tactics on “assault weapons” worked back in the days of the first ban, modern-style rifles have become much more popular and are in common use. The NSSF, reported this month that there are now 24.4 million Modern Sporting Rifles in circulation in America. The trade association for gun manufacturers noted that means there are more of the AR-15 and AK-style rifles “in circulation today than there are Ford F-Series trucks on the road.”
This is a large part of the reason that the polls now work against the old talking points that Pelosi and Biden are using. Quinnipiac reported in June (pdf) that support for a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons—50 percent—was the lowest level of support among registered voters since the poll question was first asked in February 2013.
Now that so many Americans own or know friends and family who own AR-style rifles, they don’t seem as scary. So when this bill gets voted on in the Senate, the public should be aware that banning these commonly owned rifles will not do anything about the serious crime problem in America.
Critics say the bill will slash economic growth and spur further inflation
I’m with the critics. Just because you have checks in your checkbook…and who in the hell thinks you can spend your way out of inflation? Oh yeah. I forgot. Mathematics is racist, so we can’t use it anymore. [US Patriot]
Despite Democrats’ claims that the Inflation Reduction Act (Destroy America Act) will ultimately serve to reduce consumer prices and spur economic growth, experts remain divided, with some predicting that the bill will worsen inflation and lead to stagnation in growth.
The bill, hammered out as a compromise agreement between moderate Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), serves to fulfill a series of broad Democrat aspirations: increasing federal revenue by closing so-called tax “loopholes,” climate change policies, expansion of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as “Obamacare,” and reducing prescription drug prices.
The act, according to its supporters, will also help to slow the growth of the ballooning U.S. national debt by decreasing the deficit.
Though it authorizes around $433 billion in new spending, Democrats’ internal estimates suggest that the bill will bring in around $725 billion in new revenue to the federal government, thus reducing the federal deficit and slowing the growth of national debt. Specifically, Democrats estimate that the bill will reduce the deficit by around $292 billion annually.
Joe Biden issued a statement on July 27 expressing support for the new proposal, which he called “the action the American people have been waiting for.”
“This addresses the problems of today—high health-care costs and overall inflation—as well as investments in our energy security for the future,” Biden said.
IRS to Receive $80 Billion for Stricter Tax Code Enforcement
Proponents of the measure hope to offset the cost of new spending in the bill by altering the tax code, which would then be enforced by a substantially bulked-up Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which is set to gain around $80 billion through the package.
Among other provisions, the bill would impose a new 15 percent minimum tax rate on all corporations that bring in more than $1 billion per year. Though the current corporate tax rate is technically 21 percent, Democrats say that the new minimum tax rate will target large corporations who pay substantially less than 21 percent by using loopholes.
This change, Democrats estimated in a one-page summary of the bill, will bring in an additional $313 billion annually for the federal government.
Proponents of the bill suggest that, in addition to the new tax code changes, a bulkier IRS will bring in an additional $124 billion annually through the enforcement of the package’s tax code reforms.
Broken down, the roughly $80 billion appropriation to the IRS will go toward “necessary expenses for tax enforcement activities … to determine and collect owed taxes, to provide legal and litigation support, to conduct criminal investigations (including investigative technology), to provide digital asset monitoring and compliance activities, to enforce criminal statutes related to violations of internal revenue laws and other financial crimes … and to provide other services.”
In addition, the funds would go to hire tens of thousands of new IRS agents to further aid enforcement of the new tax rules—which likely will mean far more audits across the board.
Unsurprisingly, the effort to expand the IRS is not popular with Republicans, who have generally opposed such efforts in the past.
“Democrats are scheming to double the size of the IRS by hiring an army of 87,000 new agents to spy on Americans,” wrote House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in an Aug. 4 tweet.
In their one-page summary of the bill, Democrats insisted that the tax code changes would have no effect on families making less than $400,000 annually, a position carried over from the original effort to pass the Build Back Better Act (BBB).
“There are no new taxes on families making $400,000 or less and no new taxes on small businesses—we are closing tax loopholes and enforcing the tax code,” the summary says.
Some critics have expressed doubt about this claim, however, noting that the increased scope and funding of the IRS will affect people across income levels, including some individuals and small businesses making less than $400,000.
Prescription Drug Pricing Changes
Further helping to cushion the cost of the bill, Democrats say, are new provisions designed to lower the amount that the federal government pays for Medicare recipients’ drugs.
Currently, Medicare is not allowed to negotiate the price of prescription drugs with pharmaceutical companies, in contrast to private insurers who do have such power. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, Medicare will be authorized to begin such negotiations on the cost of 10 “high-spend” drugs, beginning in 2026.
In addition, the bill would cap out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries, who are largely senior citizens, to $2,000 per year, or around $150 per month.
These changes, Democrats claim in their summary of the bill, will bring in an additional $288 billion in revenue to the federal government.
However, critics have questioned the focus on prescription drug pricing, noting that spending on pharmaceuticals only comprises around 15 percent of Medicare spending. Topping the list of Medicare expenditures are things like hospital inpatient care.
Further, the bill contains provisions designed to lower Americans’ premiums under the Affordable Care Act.
New Climate Policies, Spending
Since the failure of the BBB in December, Democrats have remained as desperate as ever to make wide-reaching changes to climate policy, and the Inflation Reduction Act would create a series of new programs and appropriations to that end.
The top line price of the climate policies in the bill comes out to around $369 billion.
Among other elements, the Inflation Reduction Act emphasizes tax incentives for companies and individuals who switch to renewable energy sources.
For instance, the bill would dole out as much as $28,500 in tax incentives to American households who buy more energy-efficient electric home appliances, install solar panels on their homes, and buy new electric vehicles. Though households would need to do all of these to come close to that $28,500 figure, it represents one of the largest government climate incentives ever put forward for individual households.
Proponents of the bill have also pointed to an Energy Innovation study that suggests that by 2030, the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate incentives could create as many as 1.5 million new jobs.
Also, front-and-center for Democrats in the bill is its potential effect on reducing U.S. carbon emissions.
During negotiations on the bill, Manchin insisted on including several provisions designed to help the energy sector in West Virginia—which is dominated by coal mining.
In addition, the bill would require the reinstatement of three oil and natural gas leases that were halted by the White House near the beginning of Biden’s term. Solar and wind project permits on federal lands would also only be permitted if these oil and natural gas leases are retained.
Nevertheless, a key focus for Democrats was to de-incentivize fossil fuels as much as practicable.
Just as the bill would incentivize individual households to switch to renewable and efficient energy sources, corporations also stand to gain tax incentives, loans, and grants to do the same on a larger scale.
Proponents of the bill have cited various analyses suggesting that these policies would cause a net reduction in U.S. emissions of somewhere around 40 percent over their 2005 levels.
Democrats supporting the bill have said that the effects of pro-fossil fuel provisions in the bill—which angered environmentalists—would ultimately have a negligible effect on emissions. Proponents say that for every additional ton of greenhouse gas emissions in the bill, 24 tons of emissions would be cut.
This section comprises by far the largest chunk of spending in the new bill, and critics have pointed to it with concerns that it will reduce U.S. energy competitiveness and have suggested that the new spending may serve to worsen inflation.
Some Experts Applaud Bill as Much Needed, Anti-Inflationary
Marc Goldwein, senior director of policy at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, applauded the bill during an appearance on Yahoo news.
At the beginning of the segment, Goldwein was asked what effect the bill will have on inflation.
“Look, this bill is not gonna get us from nine percent inflation down to the two or three percent it should be,” Goldwein said. “What this bill does is it’s gonna make the Federal Reserve’s job just a little bit easier, so they can fight inflation with fiscal policy moving in the same direction, not the opposite direction.”
Later in the interview, Goldwein reaffirmed this position: “No matter how you look at this bill, it’s gonna be good for inflation.”
“Macro-economically, it’s gonna take some excess money out of the economy, which we need when demand is so overheated, [and] it’s also gonna lower drug prices.
“Micro-economically, it’s gonna reduce the sticker prices that people and businesses see for energy, updates to their homes, for health care, for drugs—and all of that is gonna hopefully feed the inflation expectations.
“I don’t expect the effect to be large, but the direction is pretty clear and it’s gonna help to make the Fed’s job easier.”
However, Goldwein emphasized that, despite Democrats’ hopes that the bill will aid their dismal outlook for the midterms later this year, Americans won’t see any real effect on inflation in calendar year 2022.
“Really this is a 2023, 2024, 2025 game,” Goldwein said. “What this is supposed to do is stop inflation from persisting over the long term—again, make the Fed’s job a little bit easier. It’s not gonna provide relief next month, and we shouldn’t expect that.”
Asked about the implications of the bill on the federal deficit, Goldwein affirmed Democrats’ claims that through the new 15 percent minimum tax and expansion of the IRS, the bill would greatly increase revenue and reduce the deficit by about $300 billion, which, Goldwein noted, is “the largest deficit reduction since 2011.”
Over two decades or so, Goldwein added, that comes out to around $1.5 trillion spared from being added to the national debt.
“That’s not gonna fix our debt just like this isn’t gonna fix inflation,” Goldwein admitted, “but it’s gonna help with our debt, just like this is gonna help with inflation.”
Republican and conservative critics of the bill have argued that through the new corporate taxes, capital investment will diminish, slowing the growth of the economy.
This, Goldwein acknowledged, is true. But, he said, limiting growth is exactly what the economy needs right now.
“The reality right now is that the economy is overheated,” Goldwein said. “We have too much money chasing too few goods. … There’s a lot more we can do. But this is a piece of the puzzle. This is gonna help make it a little bit easier for the Fed to get inflation under control.”
Larry Summers, an inflation expert and former Treasury Secretary often quoted by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), shared Goldwein’s sanguine assessment of the bill.
“This bill is fighting inflation and it’s got a whole set of collateral benefits as well,” Summers said during an appearance on CNN. “It’s fair to call it the ‘Inflation Reduction Act.’”
Bill Will Shrink GDP, Cause Thousands of Lost Jobs: Tax Foundation
These sanguine assessments are far from universal, however. Several conservative and Republican-leaning experts and organizations have been critical in their analysis of the bill, which they have said would at best have a negligible effect on inflation while stagnating economic growth.
In its analysis of the bill the Tax Foundation, a tax information nonprofit, estimated that the bill “would reduce long-run economic output by about 0.1 percent and eliminate about 30,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the United States.”
Further, they estimated, “it would also reduce average after-tax incomes for taxpayers across every income quintile over the long run.”
“By reducing long-run economic growth, this bill may actually worsen inflation by constraining the productive capacity of the economy,” the group argued.
Later down their report, the Tax Foundation explained the claim, noting that while the bill would avoid some of the direct tax increases contained in the original iteration of the BBB, it would nevertheless have a pronounced effect on capital investment.
“While the latest proposal steers clear of some of the major tax rate increases contained in the House-passed Build Back Better Act, this proposal would raise taxes on work and investment, disincentivizing productive activity,” the organization wrote.
“The bill would increase long-run American incomes (as measured by gross national product, or GNP) by less than 0.05 percent, which is entirely driven by the bill’s reduction in the budget deficit over the long run. The bill would reduce the capital stock by about 0.3 percent and wages by about 0.1 percent, while eliminating about 30,000 full-time equivalent jobs.
“The proposed 15 percent minimum tax on corporate book income is the most economically damaging provision in the bill, reducing GDP by 0.1 percent and costing about 23,000 jobs. The tax increase on carried interest also eliminates about 5,000 jobs.”
Bill Will Disincentivize Capital Investment, Causing Long-Term Stagnation: Heritage Foundation Tax Expert
Preston Brashers, a senior tax policy analyst for the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, shared the Tax Foundation’s pessimistic appraisal in an interview with The Epoch Times.
Specifically, Brashers emphasized the negative effects that the new tax laws, including the new corporate minimum tax, will have on capital investment.
The problem, Brashers said, is the way that the bill would change the rules about determining whether a corporation meets the standard for the minimum tax.
Under the Inflation Reduction Act, corporations with an annual income of $1 billion or more will be subject to a 15 percent minimum tax. Though current tax law sets the corporate tax rate at 21 percent, many corporations ultimately pay less once write-offs, exemptions, and workarounds in the tax law are taken into account. Through the corporate minimum tax, Democrats hope to end these practices.
However, rather than using tax income—which takes into account exemptions and write-offs—to determine whether the minimum tax applies, the Democrats’ bill would use the “book income” to determine applicability.
The “book income,” reported under standards developed by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission, is the figure handed to investors to show a company’s annual income before any taxes paid or written off are taken into account.
Under current rules, when corporations reinvest their income into the business—by purchasing things like new equipment, machinery, factories, and other types of capital—they are permitted to write the cost of such investments off as a matter of tax income.
Book income, on the other hand, does not take such expenses into account—it is simply a report of the net revenue a corporation brings in over an annual period.
“If I’m a business, and I buy some new machinery—put some new machinery in my factory—that expense, under the book income system, I wouldn’t be able to deduct that [from book income] right away,” Brashers explained.
“The whole point of book income is totally different from taxable income,” Brashers argued.
Because of this, the new corporate minimum tax is “a major disincentive for companies to invest. So what’s gonna happen then is they’re gonna invest less—there’s gonna be fewer factories.”
Brashers said that those hardest hit by these new rules will be manufacturers and other capital-intensive industries like mining, which, by the nature of their enterprises, necessarily have far more capital expenses if they hope to continue growing.
However, new and growing firms will also be hit hard, to the benefit of older and more established firms. Older firms often see dwindling opportunities for reinvestment, and instead opt to pay investors dividends while they run “on autopilot,” Brashers said. Newer and growing companies, on the other hand, often have many capital investment needs.
Thus, this bill will also serve to make it harder for new competitors to enter established markets.
Brashers said that the new rules will also muddy the waters around FASB-compliant financial statements in a way that may drive investors away from investing in U.S. companies. Because companies will have tax incentives to reduce their book income, Brashers explained, the figures investors see may be somewhat bleaker financially than the actual facts on the ground at the firm.
“What companies are gonna be doing for their financial statements is gonna be driven more by tax incentives—which is not a good thing,” Brashers said. “It’s gonna lead to investors having worse information about what’s going on with companies, because now [companies] have an incentive to reduce their financial statement income if it’s just gonna cause them to have this book minimum tax.”
In addition, Brashers predicted, basing these new tax rules on FASB financial statements could lead to a new genre of lobbyists who, instead of lobbying Washington lawmakers, lobby the FASB to encourage it to change its financial statement rules.
On an international scale, these changes could drive investors out of U.S. markets, Brashers suggested, to countries like China, where these rules are not in place.
Taking these things together, Brashers contended: “there’s gonna be fewer jobs, and the people who are working in those jobs are gonna have less capital around them—less tools, less equipment—which means that each worker [will be] less productive.” Workers producing less, in turn, will lead to lower wages and slowing wage growth—meaning that individual Americans will also be hit by the unintended consequences of the bill.
In summary, Brashers said: “This bill is exactly the wrong approach. We’re heading into a recession—and they wanna raise taxes; we’re dealing with inflation—and they want to add to the cost of doing things in this country. This approach is exactly wrong because rather than unfettering the economy and allowing businesses to produce and workers to work more and do more, we’re just making it harder.”
Bill on Track to Pass the Senate in Coming Days
Whatever the truth of the varied expert assessments of the bill, it now appears to have a straight shot through the Senate.
Because the Inflation Reduction Act uses the reconciliation process, it is exempt from the normal 60-vote filibuster threshold that kills most partisan bills in the Senate. Instead, only 51 votes are needed for the passage of a reconciliation bill.
Currently, Democrats hold just enough seats to pass the bill, including 50 Democrat senators and the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the past, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Manchin, the two swing-voting members of the Democrats in the upper chamber, have been the largest threat to the passage of any overly ambitious reconciliation bill from their party. As soon as the agreement was unveiled by Manchin and Schumer, Manchin vowed his support for the legislation, leaving a question mark only on Sinema.
Despite some hopes among critics that Sinema would hold out against the bill, denying it of the 50 votes needed to activate Harris’ tie-breaking vote, her office announced late in the evening on Aug. 4 that Sinema had decided to back the bill.
The original draft of the bill would have closed the “carried interest loophole,” a tax code workaround that allows money managers to pay a lower tax rate than normal on profitable investments. This proposal, which was part of the original BBB plan, would have brought in another $14 billion in revenue, Democrats said.
As part of committing her support for the bill, Sinema demanded that this provision be removed, despite Manchin’s expressed demands that the provision remain in the bill. Democrat negotiators acceded to Sinema’s request, paving a way forward for the bill.
“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” Sinema said.
Only the approval of the Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan referee in the upper chamber whose go-ahead is necessary for reconciliation bills, remains left for the quick passage of the bill through the Senate.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has expressed support for the bill, and it is likely that the House will take up and pass the bill following its passage in the Senate.
Biden, likewise, is likely to sign it upon its approval by both chambers of Congress.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday updated its monkeypox advice to suggest people most at risk, namely men who have sex with men, “take a temporary break” from those behaviors to help “contain … the outbreak.”
Among the updates are suggestions that people “take a temporary break” from sexual activity until considered vaccinated; limit their number of sexual partners; avoid “spaces” for anonymous sex with multiple partners; use condoms; and wear gloves during particular sexual activities.
These five suggestions to reduce the chance of spread were added to the seven that appeared on the webpage when it was updated on July 12. In that previous update, the CDC offered suggestions for sexual activities for people who have (or think they have) “monkeypox and … decide to have sex.”
Friday’s update contains stronger messaging, with the CDC now saying “the best way to protect yourself and others is to avoid sex of any kind … while you are sick.” People should especially “avoid touching any rash.”
Public Health Emergency
The updates come a day after the Biden administration declared a public health emergency for monkeypox in a bid to unlock funding and more powers to deal with the virus. Some states, including New York, California, and Indiana, have declared their own public health emergencies for similar reasons.
The stages of Monkeypox. (UK Health Security Agency)
The updated advice appears on the CDC’s “Safer Sex, Social Gatherings, and Monkeypox” webpage which contains detailed and specific information tailored to lowering the risk of transmission during particular sexual activities.
“While CDC works to contain the current monkeypox outbreak and learn more about the virus, this information can help you make informed choices when you are in situations or places where monkeypox could be spread,” reads a statement on the webpage which wasn’t there in July.
“Monkeypox is not considered a sexually transmitted disease, but it is often transmitted through close, sustained physical contact, which can include sexual contact.”
The CDC has also advised people to consider the chances of skin-to-skin contact when attending festivals or raves.
“Festivals, events, and concerts where attendees are fully clothed and unlikely to share skin-to-skin contact are safer. However, attendees should be mindful of activities (like kissing) that might spread monkeypox,” the CDC webpage reads.
“A rave, party, or club where there is minimal clothing and where there is direct, personal, often skin-to-skin contact has some risk. Avoid any rash you see on others and consider minimizing skin-to-skin contact.”
The CDC especially noted the increased risk of spread at these events in “enclosed spaces” where people go for “intimate, often anonymous sexual contact with multiple partners.”
The White House has identified a vital need for education about monkeypox and outreach to the LGBT community, which is most affected by the outbreak, in order to combat the virus.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that there is a need to make sure the LGBT community and public health officials “know exactly what to look for and what the treatment is.”
The CDC’s updated suggestions come three days after President Joe Biden picked Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who runs the CDC’s HIV prevention division, as one of two officials to lead the nation’s response to the monkeypox outbreak.
Daskalakis, who will be deputy to FEMA’s Robert Fenton, has expertise with issues that impact the LGBT community, making him an appropriate pick, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis speaks at the press conference for New York City Pride on June 27, 2021. (John Lamparski/Getty Images)
The 2022 monkeypox outbreak has so far primarily spread via the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men, a major study has found. The virus can also spread through contaminated bedding, clothing, towels, according to the CDC and World Health Organization.
After the United States’ fifth pediatric monkeypox case was reported in Long Beach on Thursday, a Californian health department has also said transmission can occur via household items such as cups and utensils.
The CDC’s updated webpage for safer sex amid the monkeypox outbreak noted that vaccines will be “an important tool in preventing the spread of monkeypox.”
“But given the current limited supply of vaccine, consider temporarily changing some behaviors that may increase your risk of being exposed,” the webpage reads. “These temporary changes will help slow the spread of monkeypox until vaccine supply is adequate.”
Joe Biden, 79, remains on Death Watch™ with COVID-19
Democratic lawmakers spent the better part of two years assailing their Republican colleagues for not taking the COVID-19 pandemic seriously enough for their liking. Nevertheless, these same Democrats are flagrantly disregarding COVID safety protocols to ensure the timely passage of a massive tax-hike and spending bill before Congress adjourns for the summer recess.
“Senate Democrats, some of whom have decried their G.O.P. colleagues’ lenient attitude toward masking, have adopted an unofficial ‘Don’t Test, Don’t Tell,’ protocol of late, particularly as they endeavor to pass the historic Inflation Reduction Act this weekend,” Tara Palmeri of Puckreports.
(Note: It is not clear what the word “historic” means in this context. There is no evidence to support this claim.)
A senior Senate aide told Puck the upper chamber would not delay a vote on the Inflation Reduction Act in the event that a senator tests positive for COVID. Some members have even said they plan to stop testing themselves for the virus. “It’s not an official mandate but we all know we’re not letting COVID get in the way,” the aide said. “The deal is happening. Less testing, just wear masks and get it done.”
(Note: We are literally shaking right now.)
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has said there is no “plan B” when it comes to passing the controversial spending package, insisting that Democrats are “going to stay healthy.” Another source told Puck that senators who contract COVID, which has killed more than 620,000 Americans on Joe Biden’s watch, could “bring [their] ventilator and still vote.”
(Note: This is reckless behavior and should not be condoned. People are going to die.)
Speaking of Biden, the 79-year-old president remains on Washington Free Beacon Death Watch™ as he continues to test positive for COVID-19, a virus that is most likely to be fatal for individuals over the age of 65. Biden, who will turn 80 in November, has already outlived the average life expectancy for American men (75.1 years).
New York Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney draws scrutiny for personal relationship with “bodyman”
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Sean Patrick Maloney (D., N.Y.) could face scrutiny from the Office of Congressional Ethics after another New York Democrat filed an ethics complaint over his personal relationship with a former staffer who was on the campaign and congressional payroll.
New York Democratic county chairwoman Elisa Sumner on Wednesday filed a complaint with the congressional ethics office alleging Maloney paid staffer Harold Leath to provide personal services for himself and his family, which would constitute a misuse of campaign and federal funds. The complaint, filed in the wake of a New York Postreport on the congressman’s relationship with the staffer, asserts that Leath “outright admitted that [he] performed nongovernmental, noncampaign work for Maloney, and also provided services for Maloney’s family—which by definition was not related to his government responsibilities.”
“When I first started, my main responsibility was to make sure the congressman and his family never needed anything,” Leath, who served as Maloney’s “body man” until 2018, told the New York Post. “I was to be there.”
Social media posts flagged by the New York Post corroborate the claim that Leath spent extensive time with Maloney and his family, showing the staffer attended sports events that Maloney’s children participated in, was a guest at Maloney’s wedding, and swam in his pool. Leath also registered to vote at Maloney’s house when he moved to New York, though he denied that he ever lived there.
Leath had no experience in politics before being hired by Maloney. Leath told the Post that he got the job through the congressman’s husband, which Maloney’s office denied.
Ann Ravel, a former Democratic chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, told the Post she was “stunned” by Maloney’s arrangement with Leath and called Leath’s description of his responsibilities under Maloney “unseemly” and “unusual.”
While Leath initially appeared to admit to providing personal services to Maloney and his family, he walked back his comments in a second interview with the Post, denying that he did any nongovernmental work for the congressman.
Sumner charged in her complaint that Leath likely changed his tone because Maloney or someone close to the congressman coerced him “in an attempt to cover up his behavior.”
Maloney, who faces a competitive primary and general election, has overseen the DCCC’s controversial strategy this election cycle of boosting controversial candidates in Republican primaries, in what some have called a “cynical” ploy for Democrats to pick up congressional seats.
The Washington Free Beaconreported last year on Maloney and his husband’s maskless vacation at a billionaire’s estate in France that defied State Department COVID-19 guidance warning against travel to France.
Sen. Maggie Hassan plays up her appeal to independents. NH voters say she’s a reliable vote for the Biden admin.
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Sen. Maggie Hassan’s reelection campaign ads tout that the Granite State Democrat is the “most bipartisan” lawmaker in the Senate. But state residents across the political spectrum say they consider Hassan a reliable vote for the Biden administration.
Sean Chambers, a 43-year-old construction worker and registered independent, said Hassan’s time in the Senate has been “nothing but broken promises.” He said he has yet to decide on whether he will vote Republican in November but refuses to back Hassan.
“She says she’s for the worker but hasn’t done anything,” Chambers told the Washington Free Beacon. “I don’t buy the bipartisan talk. There’s a big divide and nothing is getting done.”
Hassan won her seat in 2016 by just about 1,000 votes in a $120 million campaign battle largely focused on her appeal to independents, who make up roughly 40 percent of the state’s registered voters. Her reelection campaign is set to be equally competitive as residents grow frustrated with the Biden administration’s handling of the economy—only one-fifth of state residents want Joe Biden to seek reelection in 2024, according to a University of New Hampshire poll released last month.
Hassan has attempted to distance herself from the Democratic Party establishment, but New Hampshire voters who spoke to the Free Beacon, including Republicans, Democrats, and independents,share the view that the Democratic senator is a reliable supporter of the White House’s agenda.
Al Macaloan, a retired project manager and an independent who voted for Biden in 2020, said he will vote for the New Hampshire Democrat, who has voted with the president 96 percent of the time, for just this reason.
“In the present environment I don’t think you can be bipartisan,” Macaloan told the Free Beacon. “I would like to see it, but it’s not possible.”
Democrats and their allies are prepared to make the race a top spending target: Hassan has raised $26 million, including $3.2 million in individual contributions between April and June alone—88 percent of which came from out of state. These funds helped her launch a series of campaign ads in recent weeks that tout her “bipartisan” record on issues such as small businesses and federal budgets. Hassan declared in one campaign ad that “fiscal responsibility is the New Hampshire way.”
The ad comes after the senator voted to pass Biden’s American Rescue Plan and infrastructure bill, which total more than $3 trillion in spending. She also backed the $739 billion climate spending bill that gained traction with Democrats in recent weeks. Many economists point to these price tags as sources of the four-decade-high inflation rate—an issue that led two-thirds of voters in the state to disapprove of Biden’s economic policies.
Hassan said in another ad that she is “taking on members of my own party to push a gas tax holiday” and “pushing Joe Biden to release more of our oil reserves.”
But as governor, Hassan signed a gas tax increase in 2014 and proposed a budget in 2015 to increase taxes and fees by $100 million, the New Hampshire Journalreported. As a senator, she voted against former president Donald Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, which saved an average of $1,400 for New Hampshire residents.
The Hassan campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
T.J. Duffy, a 26-year-old U.S. Postal Service driver, plans to vote for Republicans up and down the ballot in November. Hassan’s campaign message, he said, is a desperate reversal to appeal to blue-collar workers in the state.
“If you’re going to vote one way for the majority, it’s pretty unfair to say you’re bipartisan,” Duffy told the Free Beacon. “The people who don’t see gas prices as an issue don’t drive to work every single day.”
Hassan’s campaign message relies in part on her award from the Lugar Center, which in May crowned her the “most bipartisan” senator in 2021. The organization noted that Hassan rallied a Republican cosponsor on all 48 bills she introduced last year. Only two of these bills passed, though, both of them directing the Department of Health and Human Services to bolster public health programs.
Danielle Ovellette, a 32-year-old waitress, wore a “fuck Trump” bracelet as she served several Trump supporters last week at Ryan’s Place, a veteran-themed diner in Epping, N.H. Ovellette supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) in the 2020 presidential primary and refused to vote for Biden in the general election. She said she plans to vote for Hassan because of her support for a progressive agenda.
“You vote for what’s best for you,” Ovellette told the Free Beacon.
Polling data show Hassan has a narrow lead against her potential Republican challengers. Hassan ran a series of campaign ads that criticize the Republican candidates’ pro-life records after the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June. The New Hampshire primary is not until Sept. 13—a little more than a month before the election.
Paul Lessard, a 58-year-old former New Hampshire Department of Transportation employee born and raised in Manchester, N.H., said Hassan’s bipartisan message will fall flat come Election Day.
“She’s full of shit,” Lessard, a registered Republican, told the Free Beacon. “She only sides with Democrats.”
Manchin-backed Inflation Reduction Act would more than double agency’s size
If Democrats have their way, one of the most detested federal agencies—the Internal Revenue Service—will employ more bureaucrats than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.
Under the Inflation Reduction Act negotiated by Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), the agency would receive $80 billion in funding to hire as many as 87,000 additional employees. The increase would more than double the size of the IRS workforce, which currently has 78,661 full-time staffers, according to federal data.
The additional IRS funding is integral to the Democrats’ reconciliation package. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found the hiring of new IRS agents would result in more than $200 billion in additional revenue for the federal government over the next decade. More than half of that funding is specifically earmarked for “enforcement,” meaning tax audits and other responsibilities such as “digital asset monitoring.”
That would make the IRS one of the largest federal agencies. The Pentagon houses roughly 27,000 employees, according to the Defense Department, while a human resources fact sheet says the State Department employs just over 77,243 staff. The FBI employs approximately 35,000 people, according to the agency’s website, and Customs and Border Protection says it employs 19,536 Border Patrol agents.
The money allocated to the IRS would increase the agency’s budget by more than 600 percent. In 2021, the IRS received $12.6 billion.
Although Democrats say the hiring of additional IRS agents will help root out tax cheats and other criminals, federal tax revenues have steadily risen over the past several decades. Federal tax receipts are projected to hit $5.7 trillion in 2027, up from just over $4 trillion last year without additional IRS agents.
But the roughly $450 billion in new spending proposed by Democrats requires new funding mechanisms. Some of the new spending includes $161 billion for clean electricity tax credits and $64 billion in new Affordable Care Act subsidies.
The majority of new revenue from IRS audits and scrutiny will come from those making less than $200,000 a year, according to a study from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. The committee found that just 4 to 9 percent of money raised will come from those making more than $500,000, contrary to Democrats’ claims that new IRS agents are necessary to target millionaires and billionaires who hide income.
Senate Republicans argue that the roughly $45 billion the bill puts towards hiring IRS agents could be better spent on other priorities, such as helping students rebound from the learning loss suffered during COVID school closures. A proposal by Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) would amend the spending bill to put the IRS money towards education tax credits.
“When faced with the decision to spend $45 billion on America’s largest revenue collection agency, or give it back to parents to help them get their kids the help they need, the Senate needs to choose the latter option every single time,” Scott told the Free Beacon.
The Washington Free Beacon previously reported that, despite White House claims to the contrary, the Inflation Reduction Act does little to combat inflation. A report from Moody’s Analytics found the Democratic bill will shave just .33 percent from the Consumer Price Index over the next decade.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used COVID-19 for biological warfare, according to a new report by nine experts with the Center for Security Policy (CSP).
Generals, medical experts, and foreign policy experts including former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra and former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin contributed to the report, which is available in book form on Amazon.
The report, titled “The CCP is at War with America,” stated that there is no evidence COVID-19 was a natural virus, arguing that there is significant evidence it came from a CCP lab. It also stated that the CCP deliberately allowed the virus to spread worldwide by allowing international flights while locking down movement within China.
The CSP describes the report as an “exercise in competitive analysis that strongly challenges the Director of National Intelligence’s September 2021 conclusion.”
The Plague War
U.S. intelligence experts in 2021 concluded that they might never know for certain where COVID-19 came from. But the CSP put the blame squarely on the Chinese communist regime.
“The preponderance of evidence indicates that SARS-CoV-2 was lab-manufactured,” the report stated. “In any event, Beijing acted with murderous intent in spreading the disease beyond China’s borders.”
As proof of these claims, the report pointed to genetic features of COVID-19 not found in natural viruses. It noted that China’s military has a biological warfare program.
Finally, it highlighted that the Chinese regime restricted internal travel to stop the spread of COVID-19 but kept its international borders open. At the same time, it bought up global supplies of personal protective gear.
Even if the original release of the virus was an accident, its worldwide spread was intentional, the report stated. The likely motive was to ensure that the rest of the world would be set back economically by the virus to the same degree China would be.
The cover of The CCP is at War with America report on Amazon. Screenshot taken Aug. 5, 2022. (Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times)
“Xi’s regime clearly saw the imperative need to ensure that it would not suffer economic privation alone, to the advantage of its enemies, especially the United States,” the report read. “Actively spreading the virus was, thus, a means of waging economic warfare, and the Chinese Communists applied themselves to doing so with a vengeance.”
According to the report, the CCP worked to spread its COVID-19 quarantine policies around the world so it could weather the pandemic at an advantage. The damage COVID-19 measures did to America’s economy put the CCP ahead.
“A principal beneficiary of such economic trauma would be the Chinese Communist Party,” the report read.
Weapons of Choice
The report also stated that the Chinese regime has a history of biological warfare. In the early 1990s, Chinese general Chi Haotian told China’s biological weapons program that it should depopulate America so China could take it over, according to the report. But China kept these plans secret.
“Right now, it is not the time to openly break with [America],” the general said. “Our reform and opening to the outside world still rely on their capital and technology.”
Biological weapons could be China’s road to world domination, the report stated. Chinese military journals have openly published articles about genetically-targeted biological warfare. China has collected genetic profiles of foreigners while keeping a close guard on the genetic profiles of Chinese people, it added.
“If Chinese scientists succeed in designing pathogens targeting only foreigners, the next germ, virus, or microbe from China could end non-Chinese societies,” the report stated.
“Xi will be the first supremo to possess a weapon making worldwide Chinese rule possible,” it read.
The report suggested that COVID-19 fatalities outside China should be considered “murder victims.”
The paper offered several conclusions. These include that the CCP and any who colluded with it must be held accountable for the pandemic’s results; the government shouldn’t impose vaccine mandates on the vulnerable; the United States should develop deterrents against Chinese bioweapons; and future medical health measures shouldn’t follow Chinese totalitarian lockdown advice.
“We must never again allow our constitutional freedoms to be denied on the pretext of a public health emergency, especially at the insistence of foreign powers, let alone our mortal enemy,” the report stated.
China’s ruling communist regime announced Friday that it would cancel or suspend dialogue on several issues with the United States ranging from military communications to climate change initiatives.
A statement from the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign ministry said that the regime would cancel all direct communications between military theater leaders, working meetings between defense departments, and maritime security dialogues with the United States.
Additionally, the CCP would suspend all cooperation with the United States related to illegal immigrant repatriation, criminal justice assistance, climate talks, transnational crime, and anti-drug programs.
The announcement is part of a suite of retaliatory measures by China against the United States and its partners following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier in the week.
Moreover, the canceling of communications between military commanders in the Indo-Pacific is likely to be seen as a major escalation by the international community, as such contact is often a key tool in helping militaries avoid miscommunication or harmful accidents.
The CCP statement follows a barrage of explosive rhetoric and hostile actions from Beijing this week.
On Thursday, the CCP launched 11 ballistic missiles into the waters around Taiwan, some of which passed over the island and into the exclusive economic zone of Japan. The regime has also seemingly launched a sustained series of cyberattacks on Taiwanese infrastructure, and has implemented import bans on more than 2,000 items from Taiwan. The Chinese military’s encirclement of Taiwan has also formed a sort of blockade, forcing international air and sea traffic to back up as it attempts to wrap around the most dangerous areas.
International forums including the G7 and ASEAN have called on the CCP to end its provocations and pursue a peaceful solution to ongoing tensions.
The White House, meanwhile, summoned the Chinese ambassador for a reprimand over the unprecedented escalations.
The U.S. leadership said that it would not give in to China’s erratic and dangerous behavior and that, in spite of CCP threats to regional stability, it would pursue deescalatory measures including postponing one of its own missile tests.
“As China engages in destabilizing military exercises around Taiwan, the United States is demonstrating instead the behavior of a responsible nuclear power by reducing the risks of miscalculation and misperception,” said White House National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby during an Aug. 4 press conference.
“This is how we’re going to defend America’s national security interests and our values.”
The CCP maintains a so-called One China principle, which states that Taiwan is a breakaway province that must be reunited with the mainland. The regime has not ruled out the use of force to achieve this goal. Taiwan has been self-governing since 1949 and has never been controlled by the CCP, however. And Taiwan maintains a democratic government and thriving market economy.
U.S. relations with Taiwan and China are governed by a series of treaties and diplomatic cables stretching back to the 1970s. Notably, the United States adheres to a One China policy, which provides an acknowledgment, but not endorsement, of the CCP’s One China principle. The policy also mandates extensive unofficial ties with Taiwan. The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 further mandates that the United States will provide the arms to Taiwan necessary for its self-defense.
At the heart of the ongoing tensions between the CCP and the United States is their long-standing agreement that neither side will attempt to unilaterally change this status quo through force or coercion.
CCP authorities maintain that Pelosi’s visit was intended to unilaterally change that status quo. U.S. officials say the same of China’s increased military and economic aggression in the region, and have accused the CCP of manufacturing a crisis to justify military expansion around Taiwan.
“Beijing’s provocative actions are a significant escalation in its long-standing attempt to change the status quo,” Kirby said.
“We’re not going to accept a new status quo. And it’s not just the United States, but the world as well.”
Sen. Josh Hawley grilled FBI Director Christopher Wray on the allegations at a Senate hearing
Two GOP senators have urged the Department of Defense (DoD) to immediately investigate whistleblower allegations that hundreds of Afghan evacuees who appeared on official watchlists were not properly vetted before they were released into the United States.
According to the DoD whistleblower, the Biden administration failed to properly vet 324 Afghan evacuees who appeared on the DoD’s Biometrically Enabled Watchlist (BEWL), which includes known suspected terrorists, said U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Thursday.
The BEWL identifies individuals whose biometrics have been collected and determined by analysts to be threats or potential threats to national security, including known suspected terrorists.
A full flight of 265 people supported by members of the UK Armed Forces on board an evacuation flight out of Kabul airport (MoD)
Hawley and Johnson said the whistleblower also alleges that White House and DoD officials instructed agency personnel to “cut corners” and not conduct full fingerprint tests on the evacuees at staging bases in Europe, “in order to promote the rushed evacuation from Afghanistan.”
Further, the whistleblower alleges that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff were authorized to delete old biometric data at their discretion, said the senators, who went on to say that this is a “troubling development that could threaten national security and public safety.”
Whistleblower Allegations Raised in Letter
Hawley and Johnson raised the DoD whistleblower’s allegations with DoD Acting Inspector General Sean O’Donnell in a letter on Thursday (pdf).
“We write to you with concern over new allegations raised by a Department of Defense (DoD) whistleblower. This information may show the Biden Administration’s failure to vet those evacuated from Afghanistan was even worse than the public was led to believe. The following allegations demand an immediate investigation by your office,” the senators wrote.
The DoD has previously admitted in a report that the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) did not vet all Afghan evacuees “using all DoD data prior to arriving in” the United States.
NEW whistleblower allegations – hundreds of Afghan evacuees who appeared on DOD terror watch list allowed to enter the U.S. @SenRonJohnson and I lay out what we’ve learned pic.twitter.com/zBHlVB0ujE
The DoD earlier this year said that it identified 50 Afghan individuals in the United States whose records indicate they might pose a significant security concern.
Hawley and Johnson said they “understand that number has risen to at least 65,” and declared that the individuals “need to be immediately located, fully vetted, and, if appropriate, deported.”
The senators noted that the 324 Afghan individuals allegedly on the watchlist are in addition to the 50 or 65 already identified.
Answers Sought From DOD
Hawley and Johnson asked O’Donnell to confirm how many BEWL matches were generated by biometric submissions from Afghan evacuees.
Of these matches, if any, the senators asked the DoD acting inspector general to clarify if any were denied entry, admitted entry, or currently in the United States.
The senators also sought information about the allegations that NSC or DoD staff instructed personnel to cut corners in processing the evacuees’ fingerprints, and asked for clarification on the circumstances under which agency personnel may delete biometric data.
Hawley and Johnson also asked O’Donnell to clarify the number of BEWL matches generated by Afghan evacuees after they arrived; what steps have been taken toward identification, vetting, or deportation; and how many were known suspected terrorists.
Additionally, the senators asked if the FBI or other law enforcement were investigating the individuals.
Hawley Grills FBI Director
At a Senate Judiciary Committee Oversight Hearing on Thursday, Hawley confronted FBI Director Christopher Wray about the whistleblower’s allegations.
Wray wasn’t able to give a clear answer about the FBI’s efforts to track down and interview the 324 Afghan evacuees, but noted that “there are a number of individuals, through our joint terrorism task forces, that we are actively trying to investigate.”
The FBI director noted that the agency had disrupted a number of actions related to the evacuees, but did not specify what they were.
Evacuees wait in front of a Royal Air Force C-17 at Kabul airport (LPhot Ben Shread/MoD/PA)
Regarding the allegations of cutting corners, Wray said: “I will say that this was a massive number of people to be vetting in an extraordinarily short period of time and that in my view inevitably raises concerns.”
“Oh, I think you’re absolutely right about that,” Hawley responded. “‘Inevitably raises concerns’ I think is the is the nicest thing that could be said about it.
“We know that the basic procedures were not followed. We know that the screening process was not followed. And now we know that potentially hundreds of people connected to terrorism are loose in this country as a result,” the Missouri senator said before conceding his time.
The Biden administration brought around 77,000 Afghans to the United States during its chaotic military withdrawal last year. The airlifts were for Afghans and their family members who risk Taliban retaliation for helping the United States during its 20-year war. The execution of the withdrawal has been widely panned.
The Afghans were being granted Special Immigrant Visas entitling them to bring their families.
The Epoch Times reached out to the DoD for comment.
Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, told hundreds of conservatives in Texas on Thursday that his country defeated communism—and now America must do the same.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Orban told the crowd that America is fighting for its life against progressives and globalists, which are communists.
“Don’t be afraid to call your enemies by their name,” he said. “They hate me and slander me and my country, as they hate you and slander you and the America you stand for.”
Orban said the Democrats in the United States were not fond of him and wanted Hungary to move away from being a Christian nationalist state.
“They did not want me to be here, and they made every effort to drive a wedge between us,” he said.
Orban has been criticized as a right-wing Christian nationalist. His anti-immigration stance drew condemnation from the United States and the international community recently after he said Hungarians did not want to become “peoples of mixed race.”
Orban later clarified that the issue isn’t as much about race as it is about culture. While not mentioning the controversy directly, he noted that a Christian politician “cannot be racist.”
‘Lone Star State of Europe’
Orban’s anti-immigration policy earned him a warm welcome in Texas, which is overwhelmed with illegal immigrants under Joe Biden’s border policies.
Orban praised CPAC’s host state of Texas for its independence and freedom, calling Hungary the “Lone Star State of Europe,” much to the delight of the crowd.
The prime minister said that massive immigration is a globalist goal. George Soros, a Hungarian by birth, has an army of followers in institutions across the globe who want to create a post-Western world.
In 2015, Orban said 400,000 illegal immigrants came to Hungary’s borders, but Hungary built a wall and reduced illegal immigration to zero.
Orban’s speech outlined how America and Hungary, which he sees as fighting a common enemy on two fronts, can win against the Marxist movement trying to destroy western civilization. For better or worse, the world looks to America as a great power that will lead the world into the future, he said.
“The West is at war with itself,” he said. “The globalists can all go to hell. I have gone to Texas,” he said, prompting wild clapping and cheers.
Orban said the fight against the far-left starts with understanding that they want to drive a wedge between people and their faith and destroy families. Nazi Germany was able to succeed in a godless environment, he said.
“You must play to win. Play by your own rules,” he said. “This war is a culture war.”
Progressives change language to disguise their Marxist agenda, he said. The ideology wants to destroy the family because Marxism sees it as an oppressive patriarchal system.
Gender ideology and the sexualization of children is an idea of the left meant to harm families. In Hungary, a mother is a woman, and a father is a man. Order is necessary for any free country, meaning law enforcement is respected, he said.
In Hungary, large families are encouraged through tax breaks for having more than two children. With those policies in place, Hungary has seen marriages double and abortions cut in half over the past decade, he said.
“We need a strong America with a strong leader,” he said, adding America must lead the world to defeat the globalists.
The path to victory starts with taking back institutions and turning to faith in God. Orban said America has two years to get ready, alluding to the next presidential election.
Enemies in the media would not view his speech in a favorable light, said Orban, who met with former President Donald Trump before his appearance at CPAC.
“I can already see tomorrow’s headlines: Far-right European racist, anti-Semite strongman, the Trojan horse of Putin, holds a speech at the conservative conference,” he said.
Democrat Logic: Spend hundreds of billions of dollars to reduce inflation. Are you F-ing kidding me?! [US Patriot]
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) has reached a deal with Democrats over a multi-pronged spending package that lawmakers say would reform the tax code, lower the federal deficit, lower health care costs, and invest in energy and climate change programs.
The spending package appeared to be a revised, alternate version to the Build Back Better (BBB) bill, which would fulfill a major agenda of Joe Biden.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) previously announced on July 27 that he had reached a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on energy, taxes, and health care to advance the bill, which is dubbed the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”
Sinema, who previously held out on the deal, said in an announcement on Thursday she would support moving forward with the measure and begin debate on the bill.
“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” Sinema said. “Subject to the Parliamentarian’s review, I’ll move forward.”
Sinema was referring to a provision that would have closed the so-called carried interest loophole and generate an estimated $14 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years. The loophole is said to help wealthy private equity and hedge fund managers pay less taxes.
She was also separately referring to an agreement to protect manufacturing from the impact of a proposed 15 percent corporate minimum tax, which opponents say would jeopardize economic growth.
“Following this effort, I look forward to working with [Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.)] to enact carried interest tax reforms, protecting investments in America’s economy and encouraging continued growth while closing the most egregious loopholes that some abuse to avoid paying taxes,” the Arizona senator said, referring to tax concerns that affect hedge funds.
Schumer said in a statement on Thursday that the agreement “preserves the major components” of the original bill, which includes “reducing prescription drug costs, fighting climate change, closing tax loopholes exploited by big corporations and the wealthy, and reducing the deficit by $300 billion.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks during a news conference about the Inflation Reduction Act outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Aug. 4, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
“I am pleased to report that we have reached an agreement on the Inflation Reduction Act that I believe will receive the support of the entire Senate Democratic conference,” he also said. “I have had many productive discussions with members of our conference over the past three days and we have addressed a number of important issues they have raised.”
Schumer said the final version of the bill will be introduced on Saturday.
The Democratic leader seeks to pass the measure through a procedural tool called “reconciliation” that allows a bill related to taxes, spending, and debt to be passed in the chamber by a simple majority rather than having to pass the 60 vote filibuster threshold. The reconciliation process also limits debate on the bill to 20 hours. That could allow the bill to be passed with only Democratic votes, if necessary, if every Democrat is on board.
The bill is expected to include about $370 billion on energy and climate programs and $64 billion to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums for three years through 2025.
It also seeks generate about $700 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years, which would leave roughly $300 billion in deficit reduction.
A large portion of the $700 billion—an estimated $313 billion—is expected to be generated by increasing the corporate minimum tax to 15 percent, while the remaining amounts include $288 billion in prescription drug pricing reform and $124 billion in Internal Revenue Service tax enforcement.
Support of All 50 Democrats in Senate
Sinema’s announcement means all 50 Democrats in the 50–50 split Senate will support the measure. Democrats hold a majority due to Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote.
Biden said in a statement from the White House released late Thursday that “we’ve taken another critical step toward reducing inflation and the cost of living for America’s families,” adding, “I look forward to the Senate taking up this legislation and passing it as soon as possible.”
In a Twitter post on Thursday afternoon, Schumer said the legislation “will be the largest package to fight the climate crisis ever passed by Congress.”
“Republicans want to take away people’s health care, cut taxes for the rich, put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block, raise taxes on working families,” he said in a separate Twitter post. “Democrats are working to lower inflation, lower Rx drug costs, close tax loopholes exploited by big businesses.”
Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) signaled opposition to the spending package.
“Even the Democrats’ favorite estimate says their so-called inflation bill will take nine years to cut the same amount of inflation that our country added every week in June,” he wrote on Twitter on Aug. 3. “Nine years of huge tax hikes and big spending to remove literally one week’s worth of inflation. A joke.”
“Democrats want to raise families’ electricity, gas, and heating bills so they can send rich people rebates for buying $80,000 electric cars. New taxes on American oil and gas,” he said in another Twitter post. “Costly virtue signaling with no meaningful emissions impact as China keeps emitting more and more.”
A report from Joe Biden’s Department of Justice released in June includes a fact that the Biden administration likely regrets publishing.
As it turns out, according to the report, domestic violence is more common in LGBT relationships.
Titled “Violent Victimization by Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, 2017-2020,” the report sought to prove the pervasiveness of anti-LGBT violence.
After listing off a number of stats meant to show this supposed pervasiveness, the report dropped a domestic violence truth bomb: When compared to straight couples, domestic violence is eight times higher among bisexual couples and more than twice as high among lesbian and gay couples.
A 2018 review of studies analyzing “intimate partner violence” published in the National Library of Medicine reached the same conclusion. According to the review, IPV among LGBT couples is “comparable to or higher than heterosexual cases.”
If true, these inconvenient facts would be devastating to the left’s narrative that all family structures are equivalent (because men and women are the same, fathers and mothers are the same, so it doesn’t matter if a kid has a mom and a dad, two dads or two moms).
That being said, it could be the case that the DOJ’s report is completely fallacious. Chad Felix Greene of The Federalist has researched LGBT violence extensively and seems to believe as much.
“I’ve been following [anti-LGBT violence statistics] for years and it is always the same manipulation techniques. The data has never been improved or accurate. It’s maddening,” Greene told The Western Journal.
According to Greene, the biggest problem with these numbers is missing context. In his opinion, there is no reason to assume that “all people have equal opportunity to experience violence.”
The proponents of the LGBT movement seem to be constantly changing the goal posts, underlying assumptions and definitions key to many such statistics in order to further their ideological narrative.
For example, Greene pointed out that in recent years, murders in Puerto Rico have been categorized as U.S. murders, “disregarding the significant cultural differences that cause them.”
Additionally, terms like “simple assault” can be used to inflate “violence” statistics. Physical violence is not necessary for something to qualify as a “simple assault.” If someone were to merely make a gay or trans person “feel or believe they will be harmed,” that could be categorized as simple assault.
Lastly (although many other forms of statistical manipulation are likely used), Greene pointed out that much of the LGBT violence data is “self-reported,” making the numbers more difficult to verify.
“In my experience, these numbers are inflated, not based on objective, measurable data and lack sufficient context to make any determination. The term ‘violence’ is too broad to understand what is being presented,” Greene told The Western Journal.
So either the Biden administration is right and LGBT couples tend to produce more dangerous family environments, or it is wrong and completely fudging the numbers in order to fuel an ideological agenda.
Either way, know that when officials in the Biden administration talk about “LGBT rights,” you can’t trust a single word they say.
Revisionist powers, nations whose leaders seek to undermine American leadership in the world, seem to be on the march.
Russia persists with its heavy bombardments in Ukraine. Its army holds on, at least for now, not only in eastern Ukraine but also on the Black Sea coast, shutting off Ukraine from supplies and trade with the rest of the world.
China is threatening retaliation for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. The regime of President Xi Jinping may be mollified for the moment by the Biden White House’s hints that it wasn’t their idea, or deterred by the staging of U.S. naval forces nearby. But there’s no doubt that China has much more military capacity to attack Taiwan and inflict damage on U.S. forces than when Speaker Newt Gingrich visited Taiwan in 1997.
Iran, meanwhile, is showing little interest in Biden administration efforts to reinstate the JCPOA, the nuclear pact signed by the Obama administration in 2015 and from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018. The mullah regime seems unblushingly intent on achieving nuclear weapons capability.
In reflecting on these threats, I am struck by how much longer the leaders of each of these revisionist polities have been in power, how secure their hold on it has been, how short the tenure has been and how weak the hold of elected leaders here in the United States and among our allies.
Consider Vladimir Putin. When he took power in the last hours of 1999, he was unknown beyond Moscow and not expected to be around a generation later. Yet he’s still there 22 years and eight months later, longer than the reign of Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917) and not that many years less than the 29 years of Joseph Stalin (1924-1953). There’s speculation that the 69-year-old Putin’s hold on power has been endangered by the failure of his apparent plan to absorb Ukraine, but last year, he signed a law that would allow him to serve until 2036.
Speaking of changing term limits, China abolished its limit of two five-year terms in 2018. Xi is expected to be granted another 10 years in power this fall. Those term limits were established by Deng Xiaoping, a close observer and sometime victim of the violent lurches in the nearly 27-year rule of Mao Zedong (1949-1976).
Now Xi, at age 69, is positioned to challenge that record, though not that of the 18th-century Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796). But Xi may want to stick around for the 100th anniversary of the Communist takeover in 2049, at which point the regime hopes to become the world’s dominant power, according to Michael Pillsbury’s “The Hundred-Year Marathon.”
The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, is already a record-setter. He has held that position since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989, 33 years ago. That’s nearly as long as the 37-year reign of the Shah Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979).
There’s an obvious contrast here with Western leaders. The two most recent American presidents won a majority of electoral votes by margins of 77,000 and 42,000 popular votes in three states. Though there’s some continuity in their administrations’ policies, they’re not on speaking terms. Oh, and they’re also currently 76 and 79 years old.
Other Western countries are in similar flux. Britain awaits a vote of some 160,000 Conservative Party members that will determine who becomes prime minister next month. France’s Emmanuel Macron lost his parliamentary majority last month. Germany’s Olaf Scholz, in office since December, leads an unwieldy coalition. Japan’s prime minister lacks the counsel of his long-lasting predecessor Shinzo Abe, assassinated July 8.
Successive Western leaders have supposed that they can change the behavior of revisionist leaders. American China policy since Henry Kissinger assumed that China could be prodded to be more open, more democratic, less aggressive. It didn’t work much before Xi, and under Xi, China has been moving in the opposite direction.
The first three presidents this century sought some kind of reset with Russia, and Donald Trump had some positive words for Putin (but the charge he colluded with Russia was always a hoax). But these approaches never worked out better than Hillary Clinton’s mislabeled reset button. As for Iran, presidents including Reagan, Obama and now Biden have reached out for better relations — and have gotten nothing for their concessions.
Putin and Xi are both 69, and Khamenei, the only one older than Biden and Trump, is 83. None will last forever. But deaths are hard to forecast and regime change even harder. There are underlying geopolitical forces behind Russia’s and China’s challenge to American leadership, and a religious motivation behind Iran’s.
The downside risk is that revisionist leaders, or Western mistakes, may plunge much of the world into destructive war. That has happened in Ukraine, although the violence is minuscule next to the carnage of the 20th century’s two world wars. The negative potential in Taiwan could be worse, and the reverberations of communist conquest more profound, as defense analyst Elbridge Colby argues. But those are subjects for another column.
In the meantime, let’s hope recent events have made the West’s wobbly buttressed leaders skeptical of the possibilities of enticing the revisionist leaders to see things our way. They’ve played this game before.
Rep. Matthew Cartwright has a history of tax delinquency
Rep. Matthew Cartwright (D., Pa.) was hit with tax penalties for late condo payments in 2021, just three years after facing media scrutiny for repeated tax delinquency.
Cartwright last year owed $436.63 in penalties and interest, stemming from the late property tax payments on his Washington, D.C., condo he shares with his wife, according to D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
The news could be a problem for the congressman, who is locked in a competitive race against Republican challenger Jim Bognet. Cartwright on Tuesday declined to say if he supports a Democratic-backed inflation bill that is expected to raise taxes on middle-income earners, according to Fox News.
Cartwright did not respond to a request for comment from the Free Beacon.
Cartwright’s late taxes have been fodder for political attacks in his past campaigns. In 2018, Cartwright’s opponent ran an ad that slammed the congressman for supporting tax hikes “while refusing to pay taxes on his luxury Washington condo.”
At the time, Cartwright defended his years of late payments as an “oversight.” He had racked up $3,700 in penalties and interest related to delinquencies between 2013 and 2018, according to the Associated Press.
Cartwright in 2015 received a notice from the city threatening to put the condo up for sale if the delinquency wasn’t resolved, the AP reported.
“This is a very busy job that I have and I’m working really hard at it,” Cartwright told the news outlet, noting that he eventually paid the taxes and penalties in each of these cases.
Cartwright’s race is one of two tossup House elections in Pennsylvania this year, which could determine party control in the lower chamber.
Iran and al Qaeda have quietly forged a strategic terror alliance
The man likely to become al Qaeda’s next leader has spent decades using Iran as a base of operations and maintains deep ties to the hardline regime, signaling that two of the globe’s leading terrorist forces could exponentially expand relations in the near future.
Saif al-Adel, al Qaeda’s number two leader and longtime head of its security arm, fled to Iran in the early 2000s, along with other senior leaders, following the September 11 attacks. From there, he helped relay orders from the just-killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and orchestrate terrorist operations that killed dozens of people, including Americans, according to former U.S. officials and information on the Iran-al Qaeda axis published by a watchdog group.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) protected al-Adel during his time in the country, and the regime permitted him to plan deadly terror attacks, including a May 2003 operation in Saudi Arabia that killed eight Americans. “Adel’s suspected presence in Iran has raised further questions regarding Iranian influence on al Qaeda if Adel were to be named leader,” according to United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), an advocacy group that closely tracks Iran’s regional terror operations.
These ties have only deepened since Joe Biden’s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan that left the Taliban in power and the country in shambles. Senior leaders in Iran’s Quds Force, an elite IRGC branch, remain in close contact with al Qaeda leaders, “and since the fall of Afghanistan, have provided some al Qaeda leaders with travel documents and safe haven,” according to a European intelligence analysis. The Iran-al Qaeda alliance, former U.S. officials told the Free Beacon, has quietly grown for many years, making the prospect of a new nuclear deal with Iran—which will provide Tehran with billions in cash—beneficial for its allies in al Qaeda.
“When the U.S. government enriches Iranian terrorists through sanctions relief or a lack of enforcement, that money ultimately goes back to support al Qaeda,” Gabriel Noronha, a senior Iran adviser for the State Department during the Trump administration, told the Free Beacon. “We know that Saif al-Adel has not just been living in Iran for most of the past 20 years—he’s been hosted there by the regime along with other al Qaeda operatives. Since 2015, the Iranian regime has allowed al Qaeda to establish an operational headquarters in the country, providing them with documents, passports, funding, and logistical support like safe houses.”
Al-Adel and his network of al Qaeda confidants used their time in Iran to build close “operational coordination” with Tehran’s security forces, including the IRGC. While Iran was once at odds with al Qaeda due to religious differences, that has not been the case for many years now, according to Noronha and other former U.S. officials familiar with these ties.
“These are not totally separate and distinct terrorist groups or even rivals anymore—they are part of an anti-American and anti-Western alliance,” Noronha said.
From his perch in Iran during the mid-2000s, al-Adel “was allowed by Iran to travel to Pakistan and open more contacts with other al Qaeda leaders,” according to UANI’s research, which is based on intelligence and open-source reporting. Iran’s decision to permit al-Adel and other al Qaeda operatives to freely move in the region “opens up speculation that al-Adel could establish a ‘satellite office’ for the group in Iran,” according to a 2011 AP report.
Nathan Sales, former U.S. ambassador-at-large and coordinator for counterterrorism, told the Free Beacon that “contrary to expectations and contrary to conventional wisdom, the Iranian regime and al Qaeda have maintained a mutually beneficial relationship for many years.”
Iran, Sales noted, recently hosted senior al Qaeda leaders and operatives, “which is exactly what we should expect from the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.”
The depth of these ties was first unveiled by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo in January 2021, when he disclosed publicly that a U.S. operation killed one of al Qaeda’s top leaders on the streets of Tehran in 2020.
“Al Qaeda has a new home base: the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Pompeo said in a speech at the time, marking one of the first public disclosures about Iran’s deepening relationship with the terror group.
Hans-Jakob Schindler, a senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, which tracks jihadi groups, noted that al-Adel “has become very high value” since al-Zawahiri was killed, “and the Iranians usually take advantage of such situations.”
Al-Adel’s “existence in Iran and his freedom to act while in Iran will solely depend on what the Iranian regime think his value and usefulness for their aims is,” Schindler said.
Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke, who has taken thousands from teachers’ unions, says parents shouldn’t question teachers
Texas Democratic gubernatorial nominee Beto O’Rourke said this week that “we don’t need to tell” teachers “what version of history” they are “allowed to teach,” a statement similar to a remark that in part cost Democrat Terry McAuliffe the governorship of Virginia.
O’Rourke, who is best known for losing a Senate campaign and a presidential primary, went on to dismiss parental concerns about critical race theory, which he said he had “never heard of before last year.” Instead of asking questions, he said, Texans need to treat a teacher with “the respect that she has earned, that she is owed.”
O’Rourke has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from teachers’ unions.
McAuliffe, who lost the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election to Republican Glenn Youngkin, made a similar statement that likely cost him votes. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” McAuliffe said during a televised debate. At least one poll found before the election that parents of school-aged children opposed McAuliffe by nearly 20 points, The Hillreported in October.
O’Rourke has flip-flopped on critical race theory, which teaches that the United States is systemically racist, several times during his gubernatorial bid. He opposed a Republican bill to ban the theory from classrooms, saying in February that students should learn that “so much of the wealth and opportunity in this state was actually created by people who had no choice in the deal whatsoever.” He said just one month later, however, that he does not think critical race theory “should be taught in our schools.”
Education has become a hot-button issue in the Texas gubernatorial race. Republican incumbent Greg Abbott and O’Rourke have clashed extensively over school choice, with O’Rourke saying the idea of letting parents decide what schools their children should attend is “radical.” A plurality of Texans, including an overwhelming majority of Hispanic Texans, support Abbott’s school voucher program, polls have found.
A group of Republican lawmakers put forth a proposal on Thursday that it says would relieve student debt crisis without using taxpayer dollars to fund a massive debt forgiveness program.
The Responsible Education Assistance Act would limit the amount of interest borrowers could accumulate on federal student loans to help them more effectively pay back their loans. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), who co-sponsored the bill with Reps. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) and Jim Banks (R., Ind.), said the bill will help in-need Americans without shifting debt onto taxpayers.
The plan serves as an alternative to plans championed by prominent Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) to forgive all outstanding student debt. The Biden administration has already mobilized so that it is prepared to implement forgiveness to millions of Americans in debt once the White House announces its plan, according to Politico. The mass forgiveness proposals would cost the federal government at least $197 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Foxx told the Free Beacon it’s “grossly unfair” to force Americans to bear the burden of other people’s loans, especially those who already paid back loans of their own.
“Under the Biden administration’s blanket student loan forgiveness agenda, taxpayers bear the burden of paying back other people’s loans,” Foxx told the Washington Free Beacon. “This is grossly unfair to the two-thirds of Americans who never went to college or those who already paid back their loans.”
Experts say the Democratic proposals to forgive student loan debt fail to address the underlying issues that led to the current situation. If Joe Biden instituted his loan forgiveness plans, Americans would hold the same amount in three years as today, the Free Beacon reported in July.
The Republican bill takes a different route: the proposal would cap interest on federal student loans after 10 years, in order to help borrowers pay down their principal. It would also cap the amount of money students could borrow from the federal government and block the secretary of education from imposing costly student loan forgiveness plans without congressional approval.
It is highly unlikely the bill will advance to the House floor as long as Democrats remain in control of the House of Representatives. The legislation, however, serves as an example of the type of legislation Republicans would put forward should they win the majority back in November.
The Biden administration is poised to deny free school lunch funding from a Florida Christian school that refuses to comply with the administration’s LGBT mandates, despite the school’s qualification for a religious exemption.
Grant Park Christian Academy in Tampa, Fla., represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, is suing Joe Biden and Florida agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried for enforcing the Biden administration requirement that schools comply with its LGBT mandates or lose federal school lunch funding.
In May, the Biden administration redefined the meaning of “sex” in Title IX to include sexual orientation and gender identity, forcing schools to permit transgender students to use male or female bathrooms and play sports with either sex in order to receive National School Lunch Program funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More than half of state attorneys general rejected the memorandum, with Florida attorney general Ashley Moody saying the Biden administration was “using hungry children to advance a political agenda,” the Washington Free Beaconreported.
The Florida school refused to substitute gender identity for biological sex, costing them their ability to feed two meals and snacks daily to their 56 students when the fall semester starts. If Grant Park’s application is not approved by Aug. 10, the school will not be reimbursed for the meals it serves students. ADF legal counsel Erica Steinmiller-Perdomo said Fried should not block Grant Park’s school lunch funding, as Title IX provides a religious exemption.
“For five years, this Christian school has received funding to provide nutritious meals to dozens of low-income children in the community,” Steinmiller-Perdomo said. “Commissioner Fried and the Biden administration are trying to rewrite the law and ignore the exemption in an attempt to force this school to choose between violating its religious beliefs or providing lunches to children.”
Unqualified diversity hire Xavier Becerra is really bad at his job
Glad to see someone else use the “Affirmative Inaction” phrase [US Patriot]
Joe Biden still hasn’t fired Xavier Becerra, the unqualified health and human services secretary whose failed leadership has exacerbated the administration’s botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the ongoing monkeypox outbreak.
Alas, Becerra probably won’t be fired for the same reason he was hired. Because of his race and the so-called diversity he brings to the administration.
The White House has been fed up with Becerra’s job performance for months and has “openly mused” about replacing him, according to a Washington Post report published in January. Health experts inside and outside the administration complained about his “low profile” and “passive” approach to complex problems. “He hasn’t shown up,” one COVID-19 analyst told the Post. “[He’s been] like a ghost.”
Nevertheless, administration officials were “loath” to give Becerra the axe because doing so “would likely draw the ire of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other grass-roots groups that pressed Biden to appoint more Latinos to his Cabinet.”
New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns recounted this racially charged pressure campaign in their recently published book, This Will Not Pass. Biden’s search for a health secretary, they wrote, was a “fraught” process characterized by “hurt feelings and [racial] grievance.”
While attempting to assemble “the most diverse cabinet in history,” Biden’s team “panicked” in response to criticism from Hispanic lawmakers who wanted more Hispanics nominated for cabinet-level positions. They “scrambled” to offer Becerra the job—a “hasty choice” explicitly intended to “calm the situation.”
So much for Biden’s campaign pledge to “follow the science” and “shut down” COVID-19 by putting the experts back in charge of the government’s pandemic response. Becerra, a former congressman, was woefully unqualified for the position of health secretary. His most relevant experience involved a lawsuit he filed as California attorney general to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide birth control to employees. More than 620,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 on his watch.
Some Democrats complained about the “harried selection process” and viewed Becerra as a “baffling” nominee. They were ignored. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) was especially annoyed because she “had worked closely with Becerra in the House and viewed him as untrustworthy.” Meanwhile, Biden chief of staff Ron Klain grew “weary” of the Democratic coalition’s insistence on “treating the cabinet as an identity-politics Rubik’s Cube.”
Becerra’s inability to helm the nation’s health department was glaringly obvious in January, when the Post reported on White House “frustrations” with his leadership. In recent months, the federal government’s response to monkeypox has further vindicated Becerra’s critics who contend the health secretary has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.
The New York Times on Wednesday published a damning report on Becerra’s botched handling of the monkeypox outbreak, which has been hobbled by a vaccine shortage “caused in part” by his department’s failure “to ask that bulk stocks of the vaccine it already owned be bottled for distribution.” The release of the vaccine doses was also delayed because the Food and Drug Administration, under Becerra’s purview, took months to inspect and approve the Danish factory producing the vaccine.
Lawrence Gostin, a renowned public health expert from Georgetown Law who has consulted with the White House on monkeypox, said the government’s response to the outbreak has been “deeply frustrating.” Federal health agencies have been “kind of asleep at the wheel on this,” and continue to struggle with “the same kinds of bureaucratic delays and forgetfulness and dropping the ball that we did during the COVID pandemic,” he told the Times.
The article includes a familiar critique of Becerra’s leadership. Detractors fault his “hands-off approach to an increasingly serious situation,” but weren’t willing to speak on the record. Biden is reportedly “upset” by the vaccine shortage and “stung by criticism that a lack of foresight and management has left gay men—the prime risk group for monkeypox—unprotected.”
Josh Barro, a pro-Biden journalist, observed that the Times article “really makes Xavier Becerra sound incompetent and out to lunch. How did he get the HHS Secretary job anyway? He doesn’t have relevant qualifications.”
Michael Bennet claims he doesn’t accept corporate PAC contributions. He’s taken thousands from groups that accept corporate PAC money.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D., Colo.) claims he doesn’t accept contributions from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists. A Washington Free Beacon review of his campaign finance records tells another story.
“I’m not taking a dime in corporate PAC money,” Bennet says in his first reelection campaign ad. “Washington could learn a lot from Colorado. That’s why I approve this message.” But the Colorado senator accepted more than $60,000 from PACs that accept corporate PAC contributions last quarter alone. Bennet also accepted $3,500 from the Blackstone Group’s corporate PAC in 2021. The same quarter he accepted that donation he claimed on Twitter that his campaign was “setting records without taking a cent from corporate PACs.”
On multiple occasions Bennet has also claimed that he has never taken any donations from lobbyists. Yet lobbyists have given him more than one million dollars since he entered the Senate in 2009, according to his campaign finance records.
Bennet taking money from corporations and lobbyists highlights how Democrats struggle to meet purity pledges demanded by left-wing activists. Such pledges help give the impression to voters that the candidates are free from outside influence. Other Democrats who say they swear off corporate PAC money, including Sens. Mark Kelly (Ariz.) and Raphael Warnock (Ga.), have exploited corporate donation loopholes.
At least 16 PACs that accept donations from corporations donated money to Bennet last quarter, according to his campaign finance records. Those PACs include the Real Estate Roundtable PAC and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.
Similar to Democrats such as Kelly, Bennet also accepted tens of thousands of dollars from PACs funded by trade associations. Some of those PACs include the National Structured Settlements PAC and the American Council of Life Insurers PAC.
Much of Bennet’s other donations come from those connected to financial firms. From 2009 to the second quarter of 2022, Bennet accepted more than $5 million dollars from the securities and investment industry. Employees from the investment management firms Blackstone Group and Oaktree Capital Management have given Bennet over a half million dollars.
Bennet will face Republican challenger Joe O’Dea in November.
The need for medical patients to have their own advocates has become critical in light of increasing reports from family members who believe their loved ones died in the hospital because of the COVID-19 treatment protocols prescribed by doctors.
To assist in breaking up what Priscilla Romans called “an unhealthy co-dependency” between patients and the health care system, Romans launched Graith Care, a patient advocacy business that takes the ultimate authority out of the hands of the “white coats” and returns it back to the patient.
“People have believed the hospitals are going to take care of them, only to find that this isn’t always the case,” Romans told The Epoch Times.
Many hospitals mechanically adhere to treatment protocols outlined in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), but with the help of patient advocates, patients and their families can override these one-size-fits-all treatment plans.
It’s a solution to a problem long overdue, Romans said.
Romans is launching Graith Care at a time when many health care professionals are leaving a medical system that they say was broken long before COVID-19 brought its corruption to the surface.
The tipping point has caused some doctors and nurses, including Romans, to find alternatives outside of the system.
‘It Was Worse Than I Thought’
As a nurse who later worked in the health insurance industry, Romans said she’s seen the many faces of the medical industrial complex, only to find that “it was worse than I thought.”
Among the issues is the fact that hospitals are paid large incentives by health insurance companies to follow a pre-set treatment plan, she said, which has led to hospitals exchanging patient care for lucrative payoffs.
For example, hospitals that receive federal funding from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act receive a 20 percent increase in reimbursement for inpatient stays resulting from COVID-19, she said.
There there are also incentives for treating COVID-19 patients with sedatives and the antiviral drug remdesivir, and then putting them on a ventilator, which often ends in death.
Even before the pandemic began, Romans said, she had been feeling a spiritual calling to step out of the comfort zone of a steady paycheck after years of observing the mechanics of a machine fueled by money, not by compassion.
“I launched Graith Care from my own home not knowing what was around the corner with all the vaccine mandates, protocols, and the use of drugs like remdesivir that, in many cases, have been deadly,” Romans said.
Since then, she’s expanded her business through word-of-mouth to help people throughout the United States and internationally, she said.
“I just felt like this was the right thing to do for people at the worst time in their lives,” she said.
Rescue Operations
Patient advocacy requires quick, critical thinking skills and a good understanding of the health care system to properly advocate for the average person, who may not understand that starving patients while keeping them on drugs like remdesivir, fentanyl, and precedex only makes them sicker, Romans said.
“These hospitals will make it seem like they are giving an individual plan of care while the patient and the family have no clue what is happening, and they just go along with what the white coats tell them,” Romans said.
Patient advocacy is about helping families understand their rights, she said, and how to navigate through the bureaucracy of the system that tells them they only have one option, like remaining trapped in the hospital.
Anne and Scott Quiner at Gooseberry Falls State Park in 2018. (Courtesy of Anne Quiner)
In the case of the Anne and Scott Quiner in January 2022, Graith Care had Anne’s husband Scott flown out of a hospital in Minnesota to another hospital in Texas that allowed patients to choose a COVID-19 protocol recommended by America’s Frontline Doctors, which involved hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and vitamin C.
Anne Quiner had to seek legal counsel to file a restraining order to prevent the Minnesota hospital from taking Scott off a ventilator. The hospital responded by objecting on the basis that Anne’s position wasn’t “supported by medical science” before requesting that the court issue an order authorizing the hospital to take Scott off the ventilator, which would have killed him.
The judge sided with the Quiners’ lawyer, and on Jan. 15, it was Graith Care that helped organize a team to transfer Scott.
When Scott arrived in Texas, it was reported that he was malnourished, dehydrated, and 30 pounds underweight, and that his doctors there were “horrified” at his condition, but on Jan. 20, he reportedly became responsive and was “making tremendous progress.”
“He had already been put through too much and had so much thrown at him without the proper nutrition,” Romans said. “After a period of time, all of his organs were just suffering.”
Graith Care had another patient flown out of a top-tier hospital in South Dakota where the doctor was refusing a patient alternative treatment, Romans said.
The physician there said that a ventilator was the only option, so Graith Care worked to have the patient transferred, she said.
“The doctor told me, ‘Nobody ever flies out of this hospital—they fly to us,’” she said. “I told him we were going to try because it’s what the family wants.”
Within about 24 hours of his stay at the new hospital, the patient was healthy enough to return home, she said.
“He probably would have died at the other hospital because the only option they gave him was to be put on a [ventilator],” Romans said.
But there are many people who didn’t have the option to transfer their loved ones out of hospitals where they were receiving poor care.
Katrin Crum, Aletha Chavez, and Ashley Wines said their husbands were each isolated and given a combination of sedatives and the antiviral drug remdesivir, a drug reported to cause acute kidney failure. The doctors said the kidney failure was a symptom of COVID-19.
Though individual treatment had previously been left up to the physician and was an open discussion between the physician and the patient, Crum told The Epoch Times that all of that was “thrown out the window” when it came to her husband’s care.
“My 58-year-old husband in Washington received the exact same treatment as a 40-year-old woman in Florida who had none of the same health issues that my husband had,” Crum said.
For Romans, the pandemic has exposed the frayed wires of a medical system that can’t be fixed. The behavior of some physicians and nurses in the face of families who have had their lives turned upside down has revealed a disconnect in health care, she said.
“I think the system is going to implode on itself,” she said. “As a result, people are going to start shifting where they get their advice and medical care.”
As with all change, she said, it won’t be comfortable.
“It’s been painful, but it’s opened our eyes so that we can start looking for better solutions,” she said.
An illegal alien has been charged with first-degree kidnapping, three counts of capital murder, and two counts of abuse of a corpse, after a gruesome discovery in rural Alabama on Aug. 1.
José Paulino Pasceul-Reyes, 37, who had previously been deported, is accused of murdering Sandra Vasquez Ceja, and her son, who was under the age of 14, as well as kidnapping Ceja’s 12-year-old daughter in Tallapoosa County, Alabama.
The complaint alleges that Reyes killed Ceja by smothering her with a pillow and her son “by bludgeoning him with his hands or feet” on or about July 24. Reyes is also accused of cutting both bodies into “small pieces at the joints in order to hide evidence.”
Reyes then allegedly tied Ceja’s 12-year-old daughter to the bedposts for about a week, plying her with alcohol to keep her in a drugged state, and abusing her. The girl eventually chewed through her restraints and escaped from the house.
A passerby called 911 after seeing the girl wandering down a road early on Aug.1.
“The information she provided us was that she had been bound and held at the residence that’s located near where she was at,” Tallapoosa Sheriff Jimmy Abbett told The Epoch Times.
“As we proceeded through it, a warrant was issued for [Reyes] on that offense—the kidnapping in the first degree—and then as our investigation continued, we determined that there were two decomposed bodies in the residence.”
Abbett said the bodies are still with forensics for formal identification and cause of death.
He said Reyes and Ceja were a couple and had moved into the residence in February.
Abbett said the young girl is now in state custody and “she’s protected and, and she is being provided all the needs.”
He’s calling her a hero. “What she had to endure and also provide us enough information where we could actually arrest this individual,” he said.
She’s doing as well as can be expected, he said. “No life-threatening injuries but you know, you got the anguish and the mental part she’s got to deal with.”
The sheriff said he hasn’t had border-related issues in his county prior to this. Tallapoosa has a population of about 41,000.
“This is really our first one. We’ve had some minor stuff, traffic stuff and things of this nature, but not to the magnitude of this,” he said.
Reyes is being held in custody without bond and had his first court appearance on Aug. 3, when he was provided attorneys.
He ended up with three capital murder charges due to Alabama laws adding an extra charge for killing two or more persons.
ICE didn’t respond by publishing time to a request for more information on Reyes.
GOLIAD, Texas—Three stash house operators, a raft guide, two walking guides, a bush hiking guide, a taxi driver, and at least three other drivers were coordinated to smuggle Martin Lazaro Bieya from Reynosa, Mexico, to Houston—his first major city after running the gauntlet through U.S. Border Patrol and law enforcement.
His final goal was Detroit, where he said an uncle had a job lined up for him.
Bieya’s trip was cut short in Goliad County, some 200 miles north of the border and 150 miles shy of Houston, after the vehicle in which he was being smuggled crashed into a culvert as the driver attempted to flee local law enforcement.
He initially fled the scene, but was picked up by the sheriff that evening after walking to a road to look for water and food.
The Epoch Times spoke with 17-year-old Bieya through a translator on June 23 as he sat in the Goliad jail.
Bieya said he’s from Veracruz in eastern Mexico, where his family owns a small ranch, but he “can’t make enough money there.”
He says that in late May, he made the decision to come to the United States and called his uncle in Detroit.
“He told me he would get me to the United States,” Bieya said.
A couple of weeks later, Bieya and his father took a bus to Reynosa, a major city separated from McAllen, Texas, by the Rio Grande, which marks the international border.
In central Reynosa, the duo waited at a restaurant. They provided to the uncle their GPS location and what they were wearing, and a taxi soon arrived to take them to a stash house.
At the house, Bieya’s father bid him goodbye and got back in the taxi to return to Veracruz.
Inside the house, which Bieya said was good-looking, “not a trashy house,” four other Mexicans waited to be smuggled across the border. These weren’t the illegal crossers who turn themselves into Border Patrol for asylum, but rather, the “gotaways”—the tens of thousands who evade capture every month because they’re unlikely to qualify for any type of legal entry.
A Mexican man in his mid-20s was running the house, Bieya said. He said that he didn’t have to pay anything for food, accommodation, or transport at any stage, but suspects that his uncle paid about $7,000 to have him smuggled to Detroit.
“He said he paid a lot of money, but he never told me how much he paid,” he said.
Bieya said he spent the night in the house, and around noon the next day, the five migrants were transported by car to “the end of a long road,” after which he estimates they walked about three miles to the bank of the Rio Grande.
There, they crossed the river in an inflatable raft and disembarked into the United States.
A smuggler paddles his raft back to Mexico after dropping two illegal aliens on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande near McAllen, Texas, on April 18, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Two Mexican Americans appeared and escorted them further from the river.
“They knew what they were doing. They were just there to pick us up,” Bieya said. The group walked until nightfall, then stopped for a while before resuming at about 1 a.m. They arrived at a stash house in McAllen, Texas, in the early morning, he said.
Three other illegal immigrants were already at the stash house, bringing their group to eight.
Several hours later, the group was transported to a second stash house in McAllen, where they waited until evening before squeezing into a Ford pickup truck. By now, there were 14 people to transport, including two Honduran nationals and one female.
“There were seven of us” jammed into the truck bed under a sheet of plywood to hide them, he said. “It was tight.”
“After about an hour on the road, the truck stopped and they told us to get out.”
Bieya said he didn’t know where they were, but the timing fits with where smugglers drop off illegal immigrants so they can walk through the brush to skirt the Border Patrol highway checkpoint near Falfurrias, Texas.
It’s one of the deadliest paths for illegal immigrants, where many die from heat-related issues. Guides, or “coyotes,” leave sick or injured people to fend for themselves.
The original two coyotes were still with Bieya’s group, and at this point, a third was present to lead them in their ensuing seven-night trek.
“We walked from 4 in the afternoon until 5 in the morning,” Bieya said. At the time, the temperature in South Texas was hitting the high-90s to 100s during the day, while the night cooled to the mid-70s.
The group carried 1-gallon jugs for water, and when they ran dry, they’d find a livestock trough to refill. They ate only once a day.
“We all talked about what we would do if we made it safe into the United States,” he said. “I wanted to work for a couple of years and hopefully get citizenship.”
Helicopters with spotlights passed over several times, and they had to scurry into the brush to hide. He said he also saw drones three times during the trek. Two rattlesnakes met their demise during the trip.
A map shows Goliad County in relation to the U.S.–Mexico border and Houston. (The Epoch Times)
After seven nights, Bieya said the group arrived at a paved road and waited for the pickup vehicle to arrive. Within an hour, a Chevy Tahoe SUV stopped, and they all crammed in. The next stop was supposed to be Houston, but in Goliad County, Sheriff Roy Boyd spotted them and attempted to pull the vehicle over.
The driver tried to escape, but lost control and crashed into a culvert. All of the occupants, including Bieya, fled into the brush. But he was the last one to exit the vehicle and never saw the main group again. He said members of the group had told him they planned to go to New York, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Houston.
“I didn’t know what to do because I was so hungry, so thirsty,” he said. Later that evening, he said he decided to turn himself in.
Bieya found some workers near a road and asked them for water.
“They gave me two bottles of water and a beef taco,” he said. Not long afterward, the sheriff was passing by, saw him on the side of the road, and apprehended him.
Eight other members of the group were later apprehended in a nearby county. They were turned over to Border Patrol and taken back to Mexico, but Boyd has issued warrants for their arrests, should they reappear. The warrants include felony charges for engaging in organized crime, as well as several misdemeanors, including evading arrest, Boyd said.
Goliad County Sheriff Roy Boyd in his office in Goliad, Texas, on Nov. 23, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
The Cartel
The Gulf Cartel coordinates all the logistics of the human smuggling from the eastern part of Mexico right through the Texas corridor and deep into the United States, said Boyd.
“Just think of the logistics that go into it,” Boyd said. Bieya was just one person in a system that handles thousands of illegal aliens per day.
Officials in El Paso, Texas, recently estimated there were 60,000 people across the border in Ciudad Juárez waiting to enter the United States illegally. Boyd said he’s heard estimates of a half-million waiting to cross along the 1,254-mile Mexico–Texas border.
“As you move those people, where you’re moving them to has to be vacated by the people who are already there,” he said.
“It’s almost like warfare, the logistics of feeding and transporting and housing and having water and the toiletries and all of the things that are required. It’s a phenomenal task just on the logistics side.”
He said working factories and warehouses in Mexico are common locations that cartels use to stash people until they’re ready to take them across the border.
Boyd said the cartels pay the Mexican government each month for the use of the “plazas,” which are the staging and border crossing areas. The government will allow a certain volume of drugs or amount of people to flow through per month, and if it exceeds that, the cartel is taxed, or the government will raid a warehouse and sit on the commodity until the cartel pays.
“It’s how they work with the drugs, so I suspect they work the exact same way with humans,” Boyd said.
If too many people get stacked up waiting to cross, it causes a cash flow issue for the cartels, he said, “because now, the cartels have got to pay extra manpower, they’ve got to pay for water, they’ve got to pay for food, they’ve got to pay for toilet paper, they’ve got to pay for medicine—they’ve got to pay for all the things because it’s in the cartel’s interest to keep these people alive.”
“What these people don’t know at this point is that that payment to get across to Texas is not the final payment. The final payment gets told to them when they get to Houston,” he said.
Goliad County Sheriff Roy Boyd checks a site used by cartels to smuggle illegal immigrants through Goliad County, Texas, on Nov. 23, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Inside Texas, and beyond, the Gulf Cartel has an extensive network, with Atlanta being the next major hub beyond Houston.
“The cartel owns car dealerships, restaurants, various businesses, and it helps them launder their money, move their slaves, and maintain a foothold within the communities,” Boyd said. “That’s how it functions, and it’s very complex, but it ensures the cartel’s total control of their operational area within the United States.”
The smuggler drivers are now often recruited via social media such as TikTok, WhatsApp, and Facebook, Boyd said.
“They were targeting Hispanic teenagers from the metropolitan areas like Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas,” he said.
“They show wads of money. And so you have a teenager who sees somebody with $10,000, and they’re told, ‘You can drive down to Falfurrias, pick up eight people, drive up here, and you get this amount of money.’ It’s quick, easy money.”
Boyd said there’s a large Hispanic community in Houston, of which a portion “sympathizes with Mexico and works for the cartel—and so they’re the operatives that get hired to go back and forth.”
Boyd’s goal is to deter the cartel from entering Goliad County. Within the 852 square miles of the county, he monitors 16 cartel sites that are currently dormant, but tactics change quickly.
“We can’t stop it. The federal government wants it. The federal government encourages it through their policies and procedures,” he said.
“All I can do is try to make it as uninviting as possible for them to come into Goliad. And that’s what we’ve been trying to do.”
A warning sign to cartels at the Goliad County boundary line, written in Spanish. (Goliad Sheriffs Office)
Boyd started putting up large billboards on the county line last year.
“Warning! Drug and human traffickers: Turn around, do not enter Goliad County,” the signs read. “Go around. Or we will hunt you down and put you in Goliad County jail.”
He said they worked—when the signs were up, cartel activity decreased, and when the Texas Department of Transportation (DOT) removed the signs, cartel activity picked up again.
Boyd had to stop putting up the signs after an attorney general opinion came back saying a county isn’t authorized to place signs without approval from the DOT.
“We have a whole list of rules, we have a Constitution, we have laws,” Boyd said.
“The cartel only has one: to make money. So it makes them very quickly adaptable to whatever situation they find themselves in. They’re constantly morphing.”
Boyd arranged a deal with Bieya that if he gave him as many details about his journey as possible, he’d recommend that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allow him to stay in the United States. Boyd said Bieya will likely be released—with the 3,000 pesos (about $150) he brought—within the next two weeks, to his uncle in Detroit.
“Hopefully, it’ll save him from winding up in indentured servitude [to the cartel],” Boyd said.
From the heights of the New York Times, a watchman named Tim Gruber has espied out upon the fringes of the liberal-democratic wastes a rowdy band of “Far Right Christians” in a “Quest For Power”. Grubbs intends it as a warning, but this sounds like the beginning of a really rad story. Tim is afraid that the Global American Empire (GAE) is under attack by radical right-wing “christo-fascist” extremists. He’s probably upset that they’re having fun, too.
I was going to write an article about the contradictions in Grubbers’ piece, but I instead thought it more enjoyable to lean into his fears and mock his alarmism, for the fact that the great Tower of The New York Times even notices our mannerbund of ruddy warriors betrays their weakness. Tim calls us conspiracy theorists – a worn phrase that induces yawns. Such has always been the complaint of critics and skeptics.
Yet, Christ’s resurrection was the first Christian “conspiracy theory”, in the eyes of the antiChrist Jews and pagan Romans. It was a lie that Jesus was the Christ. It was domestic terrorism that this God-Man was King. And it was an insidious conspiracy that this King had risen from the dead. But it was all true, and Jesus also ascended into heaven and sat down at his Father’s right hand until all enemies will be made as a footstool under his feet. Enemies, like, say Grubbs here. Jesus now bids all men, and especially rulers and kings to bow and kiss the Son, lest he be angry with them and them perish in the way.
So, do not fear, brothers and sisters, when the world slanders you; for it first did so to your Lord and Savior and his immediate followers long ago. They mean it for evil, but God will use it for good. Very often the thing which brings judgment upon the wicked brings salvation for the righteous. The flood of Noah was salvation to God’s covenant people but judgment on the wicked and their entire world order. The fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity happened simultaneously. Tim Grubbler and the New York Times are just scrawling scribes in a dying empire soon to be replaced by the eternal City Of God. They fear the inevitable collapse of what they call “our American democracy” at the hands of the “Christo-fascists” and “far-right” wackos. The Romans, too, accused the Christians of famine, military defeats, orgies, atheism, and for the fall of their political power. But Augustine of old wrote in his City of God that it was the Romans’ own cosmic wickedness that caused their empire to collapse.
Sure, all unbelievers incur the wrath of God. But, said Augustine, there is a special evil that rejects even natural order, natural law, moral norms known and honored among all mankind which, when forsaken, bring about cosmic curses. The Canaanites filled up the measure of their sins and the land literally “spewed them out”. Nature itself expelled them. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah likewise were destroyed with fire for their unnatural desires. Spengler wrote about the moral decline preceding the fall of civilizations: decadence, unnatural desires, and finally a gluttonous lust that devours itself. Yes, there are some sins which Nature itself rectifies. Horace said that if you drive out Nature with a pitchfork, she comes right back in – good and hard. St. Paul said that when people reject God they themselves become rejected by the natural order of things.
Don’t worry, friends. The meek shall inherit the earth. The wicked will perish from the land. And what shall we do with it once we come into our inheritance? What, indeed, would we do now if the gospel actually won in our land and in our time, and our nation bowed its knee to Christ? Such thoughts scare liberal journalists, not because we would do anything nasty to them, but because they and their world are small and cannot comprehend the greatness of Christian civilization, much less heavenly life. In C.S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce”, the people in hell couldn’t withstand even the laughter of the people in heaven. Heavenly joy is too heavy and oppressive for devils. The mere political success or domestic flourishing of Christians looks to the pagans like tyranny, fascism, conspiracism. This is why they want to stamp out families raising children. There’s truth to the meme that a man and wife with children in a home minding their business is, to the left, “right wing extremism.” Our laughter is their nightmare. The mere existence of the godly is “terrorism” to the wicked.
So, the Grubman is more right than he knows or fears: Christianity itself is a grand conspiracy, as C.S. Lewis said, “Christianity is the story of how the rightful King has landed, you might say in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in His great campaign of sabotage.” The enemies of Christ call it “fascism” or whatever but we know it as a holy campaign of sabotage. Christianity is indeed engaged in a quest for power – holy, eternal, and joyful power of the righteous sings over the entire earth. It’s the greatest, most enthralling effort imaginable. Liberals are worried that Christians are plotting to take over the United States. They should be more concerned that Jesus is plotting to take over the United States.
The correct response to the liberal establishment’s wailing and weeping is that we Christians are going to convert their future kids & teach them to overthrow their own parents’ idols and worship the true God in holiness and righteousness and sing songs of the glory and victory of Christ.
Thomas Achord is the headmaster of a Christian Classical academy, the co-host of Ars Politica Podcast, and the co-author of “Who Is My Neighbor”.
A Co-Chair of Joe Biden’s forthcoming White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health has appeared in documentaries produced by Chinese Communist Party-run outlets; lauding the regime’s agriculture and food policy as an approach that should be “learned by the whole world.”
Ertharin Cousin, one of five individuals selected by Biden to lead the conference, has also repeatedly praised the Chinese Communist Party’s agricultural policies, with her quotes frequently appearing on regime-run media.
Set to take place in September, the White House’s conference is slated to address nutrition and health in addition to food security and agriculture. It comes as inflation and food shortages plague the economy, dovetailing with efforts by left-wing activists and billionaires to eliminate meat from Western diets to supposedly combat climate change.
Cousin, who was a former executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, appeared on an episode of China Global Television Network’s (CGTN) show Full Frame titled “The Hunger Paradox.”
Cousin is the sole interviewee in the 20-minute program aired by CGTN, which is entirely owned and operated by the Chinese Communist Party. It has been described by the Freedom House think tank as “a long-standing weapon in Beijing’s arsenal of repression” whose “mission is to attack designated enemies of the Communist Party.”
DURING HER UN TENURE, COUSIN VISITED CHINA’S U.S. EMBASSY.
The episode peddles Chinese Communist Party talking points surrounding the success of its agriculture methods despite the regime’s notoriety for famine and food rationing during the Cultural Revolution.
“In China, agricultural reforms ensured most rural farmers had land to grow on, allowing them to be food self-sufficient. China’s poverty reduction efforts have contributed to 70 percent of the world-wide poverty reduction since the 1980’s,” asserts the host, who makes no mention of China’s history of famine.
“One of the things I’ve heard you say, which I think is fascinating and true, is that policies do make a difference and you point to China. So many people lifted out of poverty, so many people hungry that now have meals, so policies do make a difference don’t they,” he continues.
“Yes they do,” responds Cousin, adding “You would often hear me use China as an example of a country that the world said would never feed itself. That it would always depend upon assistance from the global community because 50 years ago, China was WFP’s largest recipient, and that all evolved to the point where President Xi now says that he will eradicate poverty by the end of 2020.”
“I’m looking forward to that,” Cousin exclaims.
Cousin proceeds to explicitly praise the actions of the Chinese Communist Party, praising the regime for its “commitment”:
“It did take commitment from government to developing the programs, investing in the activities that were necessary to ensure the agricultural system was one that could provide access to food, but also ensuring that people who could not afford food had access to food. And that made a difference in the evolution of China, and there are many other factors involved there but the reality of it is is it began with a commitment by leadership to ensure that they were self-sustained in food access.”
Cousin, who served in the Obama administration as the Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, has made similar comments throughout her public service tenure.
“China has made enormous progress in dealing with hunger and its experience can be learned by the whole world,” Cousin said during a visit to China in 2013, which was hyped in an article by state-run media outlet China Daily.
In 2016, speaking with another state-run media outlet Xinhua, she claimed that “China has created significant lessons for the world and established a true benchmark for what the world can achieve.”
As recently as July 2021, while delivering a keynote address at a conference, Cousin again praised the Chinese Communist Party for “despite the fact that some 60 years ago, the world said China would never be able to feed itself, not only does it feed itself today, but it is also a donor country, supporting food access across the globe for developing countries.”
In addition to Cousin’s praise for China potentially complicating her leadership role for the upcoming White Conference, she has also served on the Advisory board of pharmaceutical giant Bayer since 2019.
Five ballistic missiles launched by China landed in the waters of Japan’s exclusive economic zone on Aug. 4, prompting an international outcry against the communist regime.
The missiles were launched as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) retaliatory military exercises against Taiwan, which have cut off several international air and sea paths to the island in a sort of blockade.
“To have five Chinese missiles fall within Japan’s EEZ like this is a first,” Japanese defense minister Nobuo Kishi said.
“We have protested strongly through diplomatic channels.”
Shortly before the launches, CCP authorities canceled a previously planned meeting between China and Japan’s foreign ministers, citing displeasure with Japan’s signing of a joint statement by the G-7 that called on China to resolve its tensions with Taiwan peacefully.
“We call on the PRC not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the region, and to resolve cross-Strait differences by peaceful means,” the document said.
Taiwan Warns CCP Could ‘Invade’ Local Waters
The military exercises are the largest ever conducted by the CCP across the Taiwan Strait. They include joint naval, air, and missile forces, operating in six areas surrounding Taiwan.
Notably, some of the exercise areas, which the CCP has declared “prohibited” to international travel, occur within 10 miles of Taiwan’s coastline. A nation’s sovereign waters end 12 miles from the coastline, according to international law.
Such maneuvers would constitute an invasion of Taiwan’s territorial waters if Chinese forces were to travel the full breadth of the exercise areas, Taiwan lawmaker Wang Ting-yu told Axios.
“If they send in their fighters or their warships to enter our territorial sea, that means China invaded our territory and we will have our standard operation procedure to respond to that,” Wang said.
“We don’t want to provoke any conflict here, but whoever dares to invade our country, our home, we have our obligation to defend our home.”
CCP authorities claim that Taiwan is a rogue province of China that must be united with the mainland at any cost. As such, China’s state-owned propaganda organs have issued articles claiming that Taiwan’s territorial waters are actually China’s territorial waters.
Despite China’s claims, Taiwan has been self-governed since 1949, has never been controlled by the CCP, and boasts a democratic government and thriving market economy.
The White House said that China was positioning itself to take further aggressive actions against Taiwan following the announcement of the exercises, which have effectively blockaded many important international trade routes to the island.
“China has positioned itself to take further steps, and we expect that they will continue to react over a longer-term horizon,” said White House National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby during an Aug. 2 press briefing. “The United States will not seek and does not want a crisis. [But] we are prepared to manage what Beijing chooses to do.”
“What we’ve seen thus far is consistent with the playbook that we expected them to run.”
US, China at Loggerheads Over Status Quo
The CCP’s escalations in the region follow a highly publicized visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which the CCP leadership loudly protested. Both China and the United States have used the ensuing tensions to accuse one another of unilaterally attempting to change the status quo regarding Taiwan.
The United States maintains a “One China” policy, which acknowledges but doesn’t endorse the CCP’s principle that there is one inalienable China of which Taiwan is a part. It’s also bound by treaty to supply Taiwan with the arms necessary for Taiwan to defend its de facto independence. Further, the documents that form the basis of China and the United States’ agreement on the Taiwan issue demand that neither side seek to unilaterally change the current status quo through force or coercion.
To that end, the CCP has said it would “start a war no matter the cost” in order to prevent Taiwan’s independence from being recognized on the international stage.
Likewise, however, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said that the language of the United States’ agreements with China indicated that the nation would be willing to go to war to defend Taiwan from a CCP invasion.
“Going back 50 years, our views on this issue [have] been clear in that regard, that this would be a matter of ‘grave concern,’ which is often diplomatic language that we would be willing to go to war over this,” Esper said during a speech last month.
“It’s China that is undermining the “One China” policy as all sides have understood it now for 50 years, and it’s China changing the status quo through force. Those are just the facts of the matter.”
Despite the CCP’s claims that Pelosi’s visit constituted a “secessionist” push away from the status quo, the White House was quick to note that congressional delegations visit Taiwan with some frequency, including multiple times this year which received relatively little or no attention from the CCP.
Taiwan’s political and military leadership have also defended the visit, and have vowed to defend Taiwan’s territory and democratic way of life from CCP aggression.
“We are not eager for a fight, nor will we shy away from one,” Taiwan’s defense ministry stated in a video released on social media. “We have the capacity and the will to uphold our valued liberty and democracy, and maintain our region’s stability.”
Florida’s governor on Aug. 4 suspended a state prosecutor who has vowed not to enforce laws related to abortion.
Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren of the 13th Judicial Circuit due to “neglect of duty.”
In the order (pdf) outlining the move, DeSantis cites Warren recently declaring he wouldn’t enforce laws that largely prohibit late-term abortions.
Warren and other prosecutors signed a document in June that said “enforcing abortion bans runs counter to the obligations and interests we are sworn to uphold.”
“We decline to use our offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions and commit to exercise our well-settled discretion and refrain from prosecuting those who … provide, or support abortions,” the prosecutors stated.
No other state attorneys in Florida signed the document.
One Florida law bars doctors from performing abortions during the third trimester, or after a fetus achieves viability. Another law bans abortions, with exceptions, after a fetus reaches 15 weeks of age.
Warren “has put himself publicly above the law,” DeSantis, a Republican, told reporters during a press conference.
Warren’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
Policies and Other Statements
The governor’s order also cites how Warren’s office has avoided prosecuting people who commit misdemeanors such as resisting arrest without violence, stating that the policies aren’t “a proper exercise of prosecutorial discretion” and also usurp the authority of the Florida Legislature by not enforcing the law.
The order also notes that Warren in 2021 signed a separate statement with other prosecutors regarding biological males using female bathrooms and vice versa.
The prosecutors pledged to “not promote the criminalization of gender-affirming healthcare or transgender people.” Gender-affirming is a term used to describe sex change operations and other procedures meant to facilitate a person’s change from male to female or female to male.
The joint statement said that bills that criminalize such treatments “do not promote public safety, community trust, or fiscal responsibility,” and suggested that they wouldn’t be enforced.
DeSantis appointed Susan Lopez to replace Warren while the suspension is in place. Lopez was appointed by DeSantis in 2021 to be a judge on the Hillsborough County Court, and she previously served as an assistant prosecutor in the 13th Judicial Circuit.
“I have the utmost respect for our state laws and I understand the important role that the state attorney plays in ensuring the safety of our community and the enforcement of our laws,” Lopez said in a statement. “I want to thank the Governor for placing his trust in me, and I promise that I will faithfully execute the duties of this office.”
The Biden administration declared a public health emergency for monkeypox on Aug. 4 in a bid to unlock funding and more powers to deal with the virus, which officials say is primarily spreading among homosexual males.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra issued the declaration, saying in an Aug. 4 conference call with reporters that the move will allow for quicker distribution of the monkeypox vaccine. Becerra was joined by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf on the call.
“I will be declaring a public health emergency on monkeypox. … We’re [taking] our response to the next level,” Becerra said, stating that Americans should take “monkeypox seriously.”
Walensky said the public health declaration will provide more “access to resources” and will “enable personnel to be deployed to the outbreak” in some localities. The emergency will also “further raise awareness” and encourage testing for it.
In the United States, there are “1.6 to 1.7 million” people who are at the “highest risk” of contracting monkeypox, according to the CDC director. She reiterated that homosexual men, namely those who are HIV-positive, appear to have the highest chance.
The declaration comes after officials in New York, Illinois, California, some cities, and the World Health Organization declared respective health emergencies for monkeypox, which is part of the same family of viruses as the one that causes smallpox. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, reportedly overruled an expert advisory committee to make the declaration on July 24, while the U.N. agency confirmed that the virus is in about 70 countries outside of Africa.
Along with Ghebreyesus, the heads of various federal, state, and local health agencies have stated that the large majority of cases are found among homosexual males. However, they’ve also stated that the virus is spreading among other groups, including children.
Earlier this week, the White House named Robert J. Fenton Jr., a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) official, to serve as the U.S. monkeypox response coordinator. That move echoes one made in early 2020 to name a response coordinator for COVID-19, with the first being former Vice President Mike Pence.
What It Means
Becerra said the Aug. 4 declaration was done because there has been an increase of about 1,500 new monkeypox cases across the United States in the past week or so.
More than 6,600 monkeypox infections have been reported across the United States, according to the CDC’s data, although the data show that no deaths have been reported so far. Only a handful of deathsfrom the virus have been reported outside the United States.
Earlier this week, Los Angeles and San Diego counties, as well as New York City, became the latest municipalities to declare local health emergencies over the virus.
Health care workers with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene help people register for the monkeypox vaccine at one of the city’s vaccination sites on July 26, 2022. (Mary Altaffer/AP Photo)
But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he’ll resist declaring an emergency for monkeypox, saying that such policies—such as the mandates and lockdowns around COVID-19—are designed to create a climate of fear. It’s not clear if any other Republican governors will follow his lead.
“I’m so sick of politicians—and we saw this with COVID—trying to sow fear into the population,” DeSantis said during an Aug. 3 press conference. “We are not doing fear.
“You see some of these states declaring states of emergency. They’re gonna abuse those powers to restrict your freedom. I guarantee to you that’s what will happen.”
The virus may cause fever, body aches, chills, fatigue, and pimple-like bumps on many parts of the body. The United States saw its first case of the monkeypox virus confirmed on May 18 and now has more than 5,800 confirmed infections.
Scientists say that mass vaccinations against monkeypox won’t be needed and that targeted use of the available doses, along with other measures, could be enough to shut down the expanding epidemic that was recently designated by the WHO as a global health emergency.
DeSantis’s office has expressed ‘serious concerns’
With less than a week to go before the official kickoff of Florida’s 2022 primary election cycle, documents obtained exclusively by The Epoch Times expose how one supervisor of elections has repeatedly overstepped his authority to implement COVID-19 mandates and voting procedures that appear to challenge numerous Florida laws.
Early voting in Florida runs between Aug. 13 to 20, and “Each county Supervisor of Elections may offer more days of early voting from one or more of the following days: August 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 21.” Florida’s Primary Election day is Aug. 23.
In a letter dated Nov. 4, 2021, Paul Stamoulis, Supervisor of Elections for Florida’s Charlotte County informed “all applicants interested in serving as a Poll Worker” that they were “required to complete an enclosed Certification form,” verifying that they had “been inoculated for the COVID-19 virus.”
Applicants were told they had to identify the type of vaccine they received and the dates the vaccine was administered. By signing the form, applicants were also acknowledging that they understood they would be required to wear a mask or a face shield, covering their nose and mouth, “at all times.” Applicants who could not “comply with this new policy” for “whatever reason,” were told they were “ineligible to work the 2022 Elections.”
Paul Stamoulis, Supervisor of Elections for Charlotte County, Florida. (Charlotte County Supervisor of elections website)
On April 2, 2021, seven months before Stamoulis mailed his letters, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Executive Order 21-81 (pdf), banning vaccine mandates and “so-called COVID-19 vaccine passports,” saying it “would create two classes of citizens based on vaccination.”
On May 3, 2021, six months before Stamoulis mailed his letters, DeSantis issued Executive Order 21-101 (pdf), which suspended all local COVID-19 restrictions and mandates on individuals and businesses, and further stated that “no county or municipality may renew or enact an emergency order or ordinance, using a local state of emergency … that imposes restrictions or mandates upon businesses or individuals due to the COVID-19 emergency.”
The order was effective immediately. The same day, DeSantis signed Executive Order 21-102 (pdf) suspending all remaining states of emergency effective July 1, 2021, four months before Stamoulis mailed his letters.
Due to immediate backlash, Stamoulis rescinded this vaccine mandate policy.
Pandemic Procedures
But after his failure to force a vaccine mandate on local poll workers, Stamoulis has released a new set of polling room procedures that would prohibit voters from entering any one of their three early voting locations.
According to Page 8 of Stamoulis’s “Polling Location Pandemic Procedures 2022” manual, Stamoulis wants poll deputies to take the temperature of every voter—including accompanying children or any assistors they bring to help mark and cast their ballots—who wants to cast a ballot during Charlotte County’s 15-day early voting period.
Deputies duties from “Polling Location Pandemic Procedures 2022” issued by the Supervisor of Elections for Charlotte County, Fla., Paul Stamoulis as seen in July 2022. (Screenshot)
Under the heading, “CHANGES DURING COVID,” the new manual says “each location would be provided with a thermometer,” and “Deputies stationed at the entry to the polling location” will be responsible for that thermometer throughout the day.” Deputies will also “instruct that “EVERYONE WISHING TO ENTER A POLLING LOCATION IS TO HAVE HIS OR HER TEMP CHECKED (kids, assistors, poll watchers, etc.).”
If anyone registers a temperature of 100 degrees or more, “claims to be uncomfortable entering the location” or “claims to feel ill and does not want to enter the polling location” or “refuses to have their temp taken,” a costly, resource and time-consuming procedure ensues.
‘Alternate Voting’ Procedures
When any of the aforementioned situations take place, the “Alternate Voting” procedures are to be implemented.
The deputy must stop attending to their other outside duties—which include ensuring that only voters and qualified individuals are admitted into the polling room, maintaining the peace outside, and ensuring enforcement of the 150 feet “No Solicitation Zone”—in order to find the clerk, at which time the clerk must also stop performing their many inside duties, such as assisting voters casting a provisional ballot, providing assistance to the EViD Operator/Inspector who operates the electronic poll book when they are unable to locate a voter in the registry, ensuring the maintenance of adequate supplies, filling in for poll workers who are on breaks, and managing the overall voting process within the polling location.
Screenshot of mandatory procedures to be followed for deputy and clerk responsibilities if a voter registers a temperature of 100 degrees or more that are being imposed by the Supervisor of Elections for Charlotte County, Fla., for the 2022 Primary Election Cycle. (Screenshot)
Under the heading, “DEPUTY AND CLERK RESPONSIBILITIES,” it describes how the clerk must next go outside and approach the voter, “wearing a mask and single use gloves.” Then, the Clerk is to “explain the new Alternate Voting process” and “request the voter’s photo/signature identification and inform the voter they will be right back.” The clerk must then go back inside and interrupt the check-in procedure of a voter—who already went through the temperature screening process—in order to have the EViD Operator/Inspector force the machine to issue a voting pass, as the voter has not yet provided a signature for verification purposes.
One Voter, Three Poll Workers
Now the clerk goes back outside, with the voter’s ID, Voting Pass, Signature Slip, ballot, and secrecy sleeve. After having the voter sign the Signature Slip, the clerk then compares the signature with the signature on the voter’s ID. If all is well, the voter is directed to a voting booth that has been set up outside, in the Florida summer heat, to mark their ballot.
The deputy must now juggle their normal duties with monitoring the voter to make sure they don’t leave with the ballot and/or that they aren’t approached by a third person. Once the voter has completed their ballot, they are told they must take their ballot to the deputy, who is not permitted to touch the ballot, so the deputy can go inside to get the clerk, who must again stop what they were doing inside in order to go back outside to get the voter’s ballot.
A clerks additional responsibilities listed in the “Alternate Voting” procedures created by Paul Stamoulis in the “Polling Location Pandemic Procedures 2022” for Charlotte County, Fla. (Screenshot)
Now the clerk must explain to the voter that they are going to take their ballot away from them and go inside the polling room where they will cast the voter’s ballot into the tabulator. In the meantime, a third poll worker, the assistant clerk, must also stop their inside duties, which consisted of covering for the clerk in their absence, in order to document the procedure for the voter with a “recording device,” leaving no one left to assist voters and other poll workers with ballot casting and check in issues. “The Assistant Clerk records the ballot going from the voter to insertion into the DS200,” the manual describes. Then the clerk “returns to show the voter the video that their ballot was tabulated.”
“Once the voter sees the video it is deleted (in front of the voter).”
Florida Election Laws
According to Fla. Stat. § 102.031, “No photography is permitted in the polling room or early voting area.” Florida’s Voter’s Bill of Rights states that an elector has the right to “Vote free from coercion or intimidation by elections officers or any other person.”
According to Fla. Stat. § 104.20, “Any elector who, except as provided by law, allows his or her ballot to be seen by any person; takes or removes, or attempts to take or remove, any ballot from the polling place before the close of the polls; places any mark on his or her ballot by which it may be identified; endeavors to induce any elector to show how he or she voted; aids or attempts to aid any elector unlawfully; or prints or procures to be printed, or has in his or her possession, any copies of any ballot prepared to be voted is guilty of a misdemeanor of the first degree.”
Forcing a voter to have possession of their ballot outside of the polling location, where anyone could walk up and see it, subjects the voter to committing a third-degree felony.
Stamoulis Responds
When asked by The Epoch Times about his policies and procedures that appear to violate at least three executive orders and several statutes in Florida’s election laws, Stamoulis said in an email: “Regarding the sanitizing and social distancing issues, please see Governor Ron DeSantis’ Executive Order cited, in part, below.” He then pasted the following:
STATE OF FLORIDA OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR EXECUTIVE ORDER NUMBER 20-149 Section 3. Election Administration Coordination A. Each Supervisor of Elections shall ensure proper social distancing and cleaning procedures are implemented for Early Voting and Election Day, insofar as is practicable. This may include, but is not limited to, spacing out voting stations, the use of physical barriers for poll workers interacting with voters, providing personal protective equipment to poll workers and making hand sanitizer and other cleaning products readily available.
DeSantis signed Executive Order 20-149 (pdf) on June 17, 2020. The three aforementioned Executive Orders superseded that one.
“Masks are optional but not required of voters or poll workers in Florida,” Stamoulis said further.
However, his manual clearly states on Page 6, under the heading, “WHAT WE EXPECT OUR VOTERS TO DO FOR OUR COMMUNITY,” that voters are expected to “Arrive with sanitized hands and a face mask.” Under the heading “WHAT WE WILL DO FOR YOU,” it says poll workers will “Provide masks for those without.”
“We are awaiting a ruling on the temperature issue,” Stamoulis added.
However, on the last page of his manual, Stamoulis insists “THE SUPERVISOR OF ELECTIONS IS THE FINAL AUTHORITY WHEN IT COMES TO DECISIONS SURROUNDING COVID IN OUR OFFICES AND POLLING LOCATIONS.”
“In response to me being the final authority on COVID issues, please be advised that I follow the law in all matters, including Executive Orders, no exceptions,” Stamoulis insisted.
Rebuttal from DeSantis Office
The office of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis disagrees.
“Florida law is the final authority when it comes to elections in the state,” DeSantis’s Executive Press Secretary Christina Pushaw told The Epoch Times. “Supervisors of Elections must follow state law. If a supervisor is found to be in violation of the law, the governor has the authority to suspend that person from office.”
Under state law, Pushaw asserted that Floridians cannot be required to wear a mask by any government official or entity, which means that a mask mandate for voting would not be permissible.
“Beyond the mask issue, this document as a whole is concerning because it could scare citizens into thinking they must comply or simply not show up,” Pushaw explained. “In other words, this could be seen as voter suppression. It needs to be rectified to be clear to voters about their rights. We do not accept ‘COVID protocols’ that could suppress legal votes or prevent anyone from voting in person.”
Florida Department of State Weighs In
The Epoch Times also reached out to the Florida Department of State for comment.
“We were made aware of the document and reached out to Charlotte County Supervisor of Elections (SOE) Stamoulis to discuss,” FLDOS Director of External Affairs, Mark R. Ard, told The Epoch Times. “After our conversation, Supervisor Stamoulis understands the concerns presented within the document in question and is revising his policy so that all voters in Charlotte County will [have] equal access to ballots and there are no restrictions on voting. We appreciate Supervisor Stamoulis for being very collaborative throughout the process as we continue to work together to ensure safe, transparent elections in Florida.”
The Epoch Times has asked for an update on how the policy has been revised, but has not heard back from either Stamoulis or Ard as of press time.
Questionable Equipment Security
During the course of the investigation, The Epoch Times also received another manual, which raises serious questions regarding election equipment security at “polling locations that do not have a secured/locked room to store equipment.” According to the “2022 Election Cycle” training manual for “Clerks and Assistant Clerks,” the Charlotte County SOE’s security procedure for storing EViDs and ballot tabulators at unsecured locations consists of laying a large tarp “flat on the floor,” placing the equipment on the tarp, pulling the tarp over the equipment and fitting the U-bar of a combination lock through grommeted holes.
Equipment security procedures from the 2022 Election Cycle training manual for clerks and assistant clerks for the Supervisor of Elections in Charlotte County, Fla. (Screenshot)
While the manual indicates “there should be no holes to allow access” to the equipment inside the tarp, there is nothing to prevent anyone with a pair of scissors from cutting through the tarp to access the equipment. Should any of the seals be found broken, the equipment would have to be replaced. This is not a simple matter as there is a complicated procedure involved in staging an EViD for an election.
A meticulous and time-consuming Logic and Accuracy Testing procedure must also be performed with ballot tabulators, including the DS200 (pdf), used by Charlotte County, and the ritual must be witnessed and verified by a canvassing board. Considering the high cost of election equipment, odds are that there are limited spare ready-to-go ballot tabulators and EViDs sitting around in some other secure location ready for use when security measures at a polling location have failed.
‘Serious Concerns’
Pushaw said that given the Pandemic Procedures manual is already in the hands of poll workers, some of them are still going to believe that they must enforce the outlined rules.
“Our position is that these policies need to be revised to make clear that voters cannot be required to participate in COVID protocols in order to exercise their right to vote,” Pushaw asserted. “More broadly, no official anywhere in the state is permitted to enact policies that violate Florida law. To summarize, we have serious concerns about this document and this Supervisor’s approach to elections administration.”
Correction: The headline of this article has been updated to more accurately describe the election concerns.
