DEL RIO, Texas—Border Patrol agents have arrested 353 illegal aliens with sex-related criminal convictions so far this fiscal year. A large number of the detainees had prior convictions for crimes involving a minor.

In the same period in fiscal 2020, agents apprehended 55 criminal sex offenders, and 58 total in all of fiscal 2019.

The number of criminals illegally crossing the southwest border has spiked in tandem with the border crossing surge this year. Convicted criminals are the most likely population of illegal aliens trying to avoid capture by Border Patrol.

Border Patrol has detected more than 250,000 illegal aliens who have evaded capture so far this year, according to newly appointed Acting Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz on June 24. It’s impossible to estimate how many have evaded Border Patrol without detection.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t read a paper or a report from my agents that talks about criminal aliens, sexual offenders that they’ve apprehended out there,” Ortiz said during an event in Del Rio, Texas.

“Those folks aren’t getting released in these communities. Guess what happens to them? They go to jail. When they get out of jail, they go back to their country of origin.”

According to reports by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), many of the criminals being caught have already been deported, sometimes on multiple occasions.

On June 24, agents in Rio Grande City, Texas, arrested convicted sex offender Benito Gomez-Lopez, from Mexico. Gomez-Lopez was arrested in May 2020 by the Burleigh County Sheriff’s Department in North Dakota for possession of certain prohibited materials and promoting a sexual performance by a minor, according to CBP.

He pleaded guilty to both counts and was sentenced to three years confinement, but was repatriated to Mexico in July 2020.

On June 14, a Peruvian child rapist was arrested by Border Patrol after he entered the United States illegally near Roma, Texas, according to CBP. Pedro Asuncion Ore-Quispe, 43, had been deported in 2020 after serving more than five years for felony rape of a child in Idaho.

On June 20, Mexican national Isidro Efrain Gallardo-Rangel was apprehended as part of a group of 24 illegal aliens near Laredo. Gallardo-Rangel is a registered sex offender with an extensive criminal history and a conviction for indecency with a child in 2018 in Dallas, Texas, according to CBP.

Del Rio Sector

Once a relatively quiet region for illegal border crossings, the Del Rio Sector in Texas is now the second busiest, after the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas.

“We’ve seen a tremendous increase. So far this year, this fiscal year, today, we’ve caught 144,000 people in the Del Rio sector,” said Sector Chief Austin Skero on June 24.

“We’ve gone through this before—we’ve seen these increases, these surges, for the last 30 or 40 years. It’s never been this bad. I’ll tell you that straight up—I’ve never seen it this bad.”

Skero said the sector has seen a 1,400 percent increase in the number of sex offenders arrested by Border Patrol agents.

A Del Rio resident said that prior to January, he had seen two illegal aliens pass through his backyard.

Now, he said, it’s hundreds per day.

“I have four daughters—does it concern me when you say there’s a 1,400 percent increase in sex offenders? Yes, it concerns me,” the resident said during a border update on June 24.

“I’m concerned about the single men who are running through my backyard, sneaking. And I’m about a 50 percent success rate on whether or not I get an agent to come out to my place when I call. And when they do, it’s awesome, they bring helicopters, they bring support.

“Otherwise, I’m sitting there unarmed and there’s a guy soaking wet in my backyard screaming at me in Spanish. I don’t know what to do with this guy.”

The resident asked Border Patrol if they could provide some type of training to citizens to prepare them for such encounters.

Skero suggested for residents to not engage with illegal aliens who are on their property and to call Border Patrol.

“We’re going to come just as soon as we can. Sometimes it will be immediate, sometimes it might take us an hour.”

But, he said, if an illegal immigrant is endangering a resident’s family, or is being assaultive, call 911.

State Response

At the behest of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) started surging extra law enforcement resources to the border beginning in March.

In the three months from March 4 through June 3, DPS has arrested 1,489 criminals.

In addition, state troopers have been involved in 340 vehicle pursuits along the border and have dealt with 630 vehicle bailouts. A bailout occurs when a vehicle being pulled by law enforcement stops and the illegal immigrant occupants scatter and flee to avoid capture.

Abbott issued a state of disaster declaration on June 10, highlighting 34 border counties that are struggling with cross-border crime and illegal immigration.

“We’re going to start making arrests, sending a message to anyone thinking about coming here: You’re not getting a free pass. You’re getting a straight pass to a jail cell,” Abbott said.

Last week a prison unit in Dilley, Texas, was being emptied in preparation for illegal alien criminals.

Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey also issued a call for help to other governors on June 10.

“With your help, we can apprehend more of these perpetrators of state and federal crimes, before they can cause problems in your state,” Abbott and Ducey, both Republicans, wrote in a letter.

So far, several Republican governors have pledged support by way of sending law enforcement personnel or National Guard troops.

542 Percent Increase in Convicted Sex Offenders Arrested at Border (theepochtimes.com)

The pandemic was and remains brutal for average people. But not for the rich: central bank policies created 5 million new millionaires during the pandemic. It’s the latest sign that our economy is rigged for the wealthy.

A new report from Credit Suisse has revealed that more than five million people have become millionaires over the course of the pandemic, while the number of people worth over $50 million increased by over a quarter. The main driver of this shocking increase in wealth has been rising equity and residential property prices, which increased aggregate household net worth to around $418.3 trillion. Meanwhile, more than half of the world’s population had less than $10,000 in net assets.

Most of the increase in wealth was concentrated in already wealthy countries, with the United States accounting for a third of the new millionaires. The number of millionaires in China is increasing and has now reached around one in two hundred; but in the United States, 8 percent of the population are now millionaires.

How is it that the countries worst affected by the pandemic were also those that registered some of the largest increases in wealth over the course of the last year? One reason stands out above all others: central bank asset purchases.

Over the course of the pandemic, central banks have pumped around $9 trillion worth of new money into the global financial system. This comes on top of the $10 trillion added between the financial crisis and the pandemic. The world is awash with central bank money, and it’s all flowing up rather than trickling down.

Central bankers initially argued that quantitative easing — as the policy of creating new money to purchase assets such as government bonds is known — would boost lending by providing commercial banks with more cash. Of course, the issue banks were facing in the wake of the financial crisis was not a lack of access to cash, but a lack of viable investment opportunities in the context of chronically deficient demand, exacerbated by austerity.

It ultimately became clear that QE worked, but not in the way we had initially been told. Rather than boosting lending, QE came to operate through a portfolio rebalancing effect — in essence, when governments purchased long-dated government debt, they provided private investors with cash that needed somewhere to go.

Investors responded by rebalancing their portfolios away from government bonds, which were providing negligible yields thanks to increased central bank demand, and toward other assets like equities, corporate bonds, and real estate.

In the United States, the result of this increased demand for equities was the longest bull run (a bout of optimism and rising stock prices) the world had ever seen. Cash flooding into high yield corporate bonds had also inflated a corporate debt bubble — it was so easy for even the most poorly managed companies to access cash that economists were pointing to the problem of the “zombie” corporation, which could only afford to service the interest payments on its outstanding debt.

The main impact of QE in the UK has been felt in the housing market, where prices have skyrocketed to far above where they were prior to the financial crisis of 2008 — particularly in London, the South East, and Manchester.

The pandemic has been a recession like no other — rather than falling, as they have during all previous recessions, house prices have risen. Thanks to the closure of offices and resulting emigration from cities, house prices in the countryside are now rising at a rate of around 14 percent per year next to 7 percent for urban areas.

What’s more, with interest rates at rock bottom and pensioners able to draw down their entire pensions in one go, many more older people have decided to purchase second homes to rent out to younger people. The Conservatives have created seven hundred thousand new landlords over the course of the last decade, shoring up their voter base while exacerbating the housing crisis.

Absent rent controls or a functioning social housing system, young people are being forced to pay extortionate amounts — often half to two thirds of their salaries — on rent just for the privilege of living within commuting distance of their jobs.

Meanwhile, huge international asset managers like Blackstone are taking advantage of the plentiful cash now available in the international financial system to buy up huge swathes of real estate to rent out themselves. The rise of the corporate landlord was first evident in the United States, then in Ireland, and now it is becoming increasingly visible in the UK.

In other words, the most powerful states in the capitalist world system are now in the business of creating millionaires. Undemocratic and unaccountable central banks are using the power of signories to inflate the fortunes of the wealthy; meanwhile the UK Treasury tries to prevent people from accessing sick pay.

The dramatic increases in the fortunes of the superrich during a pandemic in which millions have died and millions more have been pushed into poverty provide yet more evidence that we live in a warped economy and a sick society. But observing the irrationality of the current system is not enough; unless working people organize to hold the powerful to account, the capitalist state will continue to support the interests of the millionaires over the millions of people who work for them.

While Average People Suffered, 5 Million People Became Millionaires Under COVID-19 (jacobinmag.com)

‘Crime Is Skyrocketing In Many Big Cities,’ But Some Jurisdictions Have Cut Police Budgets In Response To ‘Defund The Police’ Demands And Many Others Are Rapidly Losing Police Officers

SENATE REPUBLICAN LEADER MITCH McCONNELL (R-KY): “From coast to coast, American families are facing an explosion of violent crime on their streets and in their neighborhoods. 2020 saw homicides skyrocket nationwide. The sharpest one-year increase in decades. And 2021 is already shaping up to be even worse…. Crime and delinquency have many causes. In some ways, the pandemic likely contributed. But it is impossible to ignore that these terrible trends are coming precisely as so-called ‘progressives’ have decided it’s time to denounce and defund local law enforcement. Seattle cut police funding by 20%. Minneapolis defunded cops by millions of dollars. The District of Columbia’s city council approved $15 million in cuts. These bone-headed decisions are the direct result of an anti-law-enforcement fad that has swept through the political left like a wildfire…. So, look, I’m not sure exactly how the rantings of far-left Twitter about crime and policing became official Democratic Party dogma in so many places across America. What I do know is that ordinary Americans cannot bear much more of this. And that goes double for the most vulnerable neighborhoods.” (Sen. McConnell, Remarks, 5/27/2021)

FLASHBACK: Far-Left Democrats: ‘No More Policing,’ ‘We Need To Disinvest From Police,’ ‘Defunding Police Means Defunding Police’

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY): “Defunding police means defunding police.” (“Ocasio-Cortez Dismisses Proposed $1B Cut: ‘Defunding Police Means Defunding Police’,” The Hill, 6/30/2020)

REP. ILHAN OMAR (D-MN): “I will never stop saying, ‘Not only do we need to disinvest from police but we need to completely dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.’” (“‘Defund The Police’ Movement Hits Semantics Roadblock,” The Hill, 6/14/2020)

REP. CORI BUSH (D-MO): “Defunding the police isn’t radical, it’s real.” (Rep. Bush, @CoriBush, Twitter, 1/27/2021)

REP. RASHIDA TLAIB (D-MI): “… Policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist. … I am done with those who condone government funded murder. No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed.” (Rep. Tlaib, @RashidaTlaib, Twitter, 4/12/2021)

REP. AYANNA PRESSLEY (D-MA): “From slave patrols to traffic stops. We can’t reform this.” (Rep. Pressley, @AyannaPressley, Twitter, 4/12/2021)

And Sure Enough, Left-Wing Activists ‘Successfully Pushed For $840 Million In Police Spending Cuts Across The U.S.’

“According to Interrupting Criminalization, an initiative at the Barnard Center for Research on Women that supports defunding the police, organizers successfully pushed for $840 million in police spending cuts across the U.S., and $160 million in shifts to other social programs. Cities cut another $35 million by canceling contracts with police departments to patrol schools, the center said.” (“Cities Reverse Defunding the Police Amid Rising Crime,” The Wall Street Journal, 5/26/2021)

• “Last summer, nearly half of 258 police agencies surveyed by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said their budgets had been cut or were likely to be cut. The cuts hit purchases of new police equipment hardest, followed by training, hiring new officers and overtime spending, the survey found.” (“Cities Reverse Defunding the Police Amid Rising Crime,” The Wall Street Journal, 5/26/2021)

In 2020, The United States Had ‘The Largest Single One-Year Increase In Homicides Since The Country Started Keeping Such Records’

“2020 has been a killer year in every way, including murder. The United States has experienced the largest single one-year increase in homicides since the country started keeping such records in the 20th century, according to crime data and criminologists.” (“2020 Saw An Unprecedented Spike In Homicides From Big Cities To Small Towns,” The Washington Post, 12/30/2020)

• “It is a trend mirrored across the country, where crime is skyrocketing in many big cities, putting liberal leaders under pressure to balance the demands of activists against the concerns of some residents about rising violence. In New York, where homicides grew by nearly 45 percent last year, crime is dominating the discussion in the race for mayor…. Even smaller cities haven’t been spared the rise in violence: Louisville last year set a record for homicides, with 173, and this year is on pace to surpass that.” (“A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime,” The New York Times, 5/23/2021)

“A group of 34 of America’s biggest cities suffered a 30 percent total increase in homicides in 2020, according to a new survey published Monday, with police in four Midwestern cities reporting increases of more than 60 percent over 2019. In Milwaukee, homicides rose from 97 to 189, a 95 percent increase. In Louisville, homicides increased from 90 to 173, a 92 percent increase. Of the 34 cities surveyed by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice, a project of the D.C.-based Council on Criminal Justice, only four — Raleigh, N.C.; Baltimore; St. Petersburg, Fla.; and Virginia Beach — saw declines in 2020.” (“Homicides Rose 30 Percent In 2020, Survey Of 34 U.S. Cities Finds,” The Washington Post, 2/03/2021)

“[In March], the F.B.I. released preliminary statistics showing a major increase in murder last year, with a 25 percent rise in agencies that reported quarterly data. The F.B.I. did not receive data from several cities with known big increases in murder like New York, Chicago and New Orleans, but cities of all sizes reported increases of greater than 20 percent. A 25 percent increase in murder in 2020 would mean the United States surpassed 20,000 murders in a year for the first time since 1995. (The final official numbers for 2020 will not be released until late September.)” (“Murder Rate Remains Elevated as New Crime Reporting System Begins,” The New York Times, 3/16/2021)

Over The First Three Months Of 2021, The Murder Rate In 37 Cities Is Up 18 Percent Compared To The Same Period In 2020

“The big increase in the murder rate in the United States in 2020 has carried over to 2021. A sample of 37 cities with data available for the first three months of this year shows murder up 18 percent relative to the same period last year.” (“Murder Rate Remains Elevated as New Crime Reporting System Begins,” The New York Times, 3/16/2021)

As Murders Surged In 2020, Seattle Cut Its Police Department’s Budget ‘By Nearly 20%’

“Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan signed off on the 2021 budget, after months of debate and public outcry.  It includes a significant cut to the Seattle Police Department (SPD), and puts new money in new hands. … The 2021 budget sliced SPD’s budget by nearly 20% …” (“Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan Signs City’s 2021 Budget With 20% Cut To Police,” King5, 12/01/2020)

“Calling 2020 a year like no other, interim Seattle police Chief Adrian Diaz said Monday his department’s homicide detectives investigated 50 homicides last year, representing a 61% increase over the 31 people killed as a result of homicidal violence in the city in 2019. Citing data that shows homicides across the country were up 36% in 2020 compared to the previous year, Diaz said Seattle’s 50 homicides were the most investigated in the city in 26 years.” (“50 People Died From Homicidal Violence In Seattle In 2020, The Largest Number In A Quarter Century, Police Chief Says,” The Seattle Times, 1/11/2021)

The LAPD Had Its Budget Slashed By $150 Million In 2020 As Murders In Los Angeles Reached The Highest Number ‘In More Than A Decade’

“Now, a year after Mr. Floyd’s death, Los Angeles and other American cities face a surge in violent crime amid pandemic despair and a flood of new guns onto the streets. The surge is prompting cities whose leaders embraced the values of the movement last year to reassess how far they are willing to go to reimagine public safety and divert money away from the police and toward social services…. A year after streets echoed with calls to ‘defund’ law enforcement and city leaders embraced the message by agreeing to take $150 million away from the Los Angeles Police Department, or about 8 percent of the department’s budget, the city last week agreed to increase the police budget to allow the department to hire about 250 officers. The increase essentially restores the cuts that followed the protests. On the streets of South Los Angeles, where residents have historically suffered the most from aggressive policing and gang violence and where much of the current surge in shootings is happening, officers are ramping up patrols and stopping more cars to look for guns. ‘We’ve lost more than a decade of progress,’ Chief Michel Moore of the Los Angeles Police Department said in an interview, referring to the significant drops in crime in the years before the pandemic…. [T]he number of murders in Los Angeles last year — 350 — was the highest in more than a decade …” (“A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime,” The New York Times, 5/23/2021)

• “If the old crop of activists sought changes by partnering with the police, the defining view of the new movement is a focus on money, and trying to pull as many dollars as possible away from police budgets and toward other programs that address systemic racism.” (“A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime,” The New York Times, 5/23/2021)

Following A $15 Million Cut To Washington, D.C.’s Police Department Budget, 2020 Ended With The District’s Highest Number Of Homicides In 16 Years

“Homicides in the District rose for the third consecutive year in 2020, reaching nearly 200 for the first time since the previous decade and further stressing a city rattled by the pandemic and social and political unrest. The number of killings stood at 198 Thursday evening, making the past year the deadliest in the city since 2004. More than 920 people were shot in D.C. in 2020, a 64 percent increase from three years ago.” (“Homicides In D.C. Hit 16-Year High; Shootings Also Have Spiked,” The Washington Post, 12/31/2020)

• “In 2020, homicides in D.C. hit a 16-year high. If current trends continue, 2021 could be even deadlier. D.C. Police data reports a 43% increase in homicides from the same time last year, with 2021 totaling 63 as of April 28, compared to 44 on this date in 2020.” (“DC’s Homicide Rate Already Is Outpacing 2020, Which Saw A 16-Year-High,” WUSA, 4/28/2021)

“D.C. lawmakers [in June] advanced measures to cut $15 million from the police department budget, a change that defund-the-police activists dismissed as insufficient and the police chief warned could result in the loss of hundreds of officers. The D.C. Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety unanimously approved a plan to reduce the $533 million police budget proposed by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) by cutting vacant positions and rejecting an expansion of the police cadet program. The committee also voted to cut the department’s capital budget and reallocate funds to alternative violence-reduction programs.” (“D.C. Activists And Lawmakers Confront Challenges Of ‘Defund Police’ Movement,” The Washington Post, 6/25/2020)

‘Last Year, The Homicide Rate In Minneapolis Hit Highs Not Seen Since The Mid-1990s’ And Still The City Council Voted To Cut $8 Million From The City’s Police Department

“Last year, the homicide rate in Minneapolis hit highs not seen since the mid-1990s, when killings led the city to be derisively called ‘Murderapolis.’ The bleak trend has continued into this year. According to police data, nearly 200 people have been shot this year — more than double the number in the same period last year and the most recorded in more than a decade. There have been 31 homicides, compared with 15 at this point in 2020.” (“A Year After George Floyd’s Death, Minneapolis Remains Scarred, Divided,” The Washington Post, 5/23/2021)

“Months after their pledge to dismantle the Police Department fell apart, members of the Minneapolis City Council voted [December 10^th] to divert nearly $8 million from the proposed policing budget to other city services … Trimming of those items raised alarm bells among the police chief and some lawmakers, as the department has lost 166 officers this year — some permanently, others because they are on disability, and still others saying they have post-traumatic stress from the massive protests that swept the city over the summer.” (“Minneapolis City Council Votes to Remove $8 Million From Police Budget,” The New York Times, 12/10/2020)

• “Steven Belton, the president of the Twin Cities chapter of the Urban League, called the cuts to the police budget misguided and misinformed. He said council members made it an either-or proposition between funding the police and other services when he believed everything was needed…. [In 2020], the city has logged 5,164 violent crimes, up 25.7 percent from last year, according to data from the Minneapolis Police Department. The cuts to the police budget could embolden criminals to think that policing was going away, Mr. Belton said. ‘It’s the wrong optics to the communities that are most impacted detrimentally by violence and the absence of policing and poor policing,’ he said.” (“Minneapolis City Council Votes to Remove $8 Million From Police Budget,” The New York Times, 12/10/2020)

‘The Number Of Slayings In 2020 Dwarfs Anything Louisville Has Seen’

“In 2020, 173 people in Louisville were victims of criminal homicides, according to metro police — shot, bludgeoned, strangled or stabbed to death. Another 20 people were slain in homicides investigated by other Jefferson County police agencies or in cases that didn’t result in criminal charges. The number of slayings in 2020 dwarfs anything Louisville has seen — obliterating the previous record of 117 criminal homicides in 2016…. Of last year’s homicides, 160 were shootings. Another 585 people were shot and survived — another grim milestone.” (“170-Plus Killings And Few Answers: Louisville Besieged By Record Homicides And Gun Violence,” Louisville Courier Journal, 1/01/2021)

• “Louisville is on pace to have another record year for homicides in the city [in 2021]. Community activist Christopher 2X said — as of the end of April — Louisville has now seen the deadliest four-month stretch of gun violence in the city’s history. ‘In four months and three days, we’re at 59 fatals, 218 nonfatals, and we’ve never been in this space before,’ 2X told WDRB News on Monday. ‘We’ve never reached almost 60 homicides this fast.’ 2X said April was the 15th consecutive month with double-digit homicides…. In the first weekend in May, LMPD responded to at least six separate shootings, two of them ending with fatalities.” (“Several Weekend Shootings Put Louisville On Pace For Another Record Year For Homicides,” WDRB, 5/03/2021)
• “As of [April 25], there had been 84% more non-fatal shootings so far this year, with 201, compared to the 109 instances reported during the same time in 2020, LMPD statistics show. There were 56 murders reported as of Sunday — a 75% increase from the 32 reported by April 25, 2020.” (“Louisville Police Department Staffing ‘In Dire Straits’ Amid High Crime Rates, Recruitment Woes: Union,” Fox News, 4/27/2021)

“In November, Louisville social justice organizer Travis Nagdy met with another local leader, Kenneth Forbes, to discuss turning attention to the city’s seemingly intractable violence. ‘The people dying look just like you,’ Forbes, founder of the group Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters United, told the 21-year-old Nagdy. ‘We are just asking for help, for compassion, for people to open up their ears and listen. For people to talk about it.’ Days after their meeting, Nagdy was dead, fatally shot in an apparent carjacking.” (“170-Plus Killings And Few Answers: Louisville Besieged By Record Homicides And Gun Violence,” Louisville Courier Journal, 1/01/2021)

“It’s a complicated problem, said Christopher 2X, founder of the Louisville nonprofit Game Changers, which tracks gun violence and supports victims…. 2X noted, Black men haven’t been the only victims. The majority of homicides each year, he said, take place in areas covered by LMPD’s First, Second and Fourth divisions, downtown and in Louisville’s West End. In 2020, though, 51 homicides were reported in areas patrolled by LMPD’s Third, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth divisions — on the outskirts of the city and in some of Louisville’s more upscale neighborhoods. In 2019, just 22 homicides were reported in areas covered by those five divisions. Just as striking, 2X said, is 34 female homicide victims in 2020, a higher number than in previous years. ‘That’s a number that we’ve got to be concerned about,’ he said.” (“170-Plus Killings And Few Answers: Louisville Besieged By Record Homicides And Gun Violence,” Louisville Courier Journal, 1/01/2021)

In New York City, Shootings Nearly Doubled In 2020 While Murders Rose Around 45%

“Homicides and shootings in New York City rose sharply in 2020, New York Police Department officials said Thursday, as police resources were stretched thin by the Covid-19 pandemic and responses to large-scale protests over the killing of George Floyd. The number of murders in the city rose to 462 last year, up nearly 45% from 319 in 2019, according to the NYPD. The increase accompanied a steep rise in gun violence more intense than any seen in the previous 20 years, according to police statistics. The city recorded 1,531 shootings in 2020, 97% more than the 777 in 2019. Data showed the number of shooting victims in the city more than doubled to 1,868 in 2020 from 923 in 2019. The number of shooting victims exceeds the number of shootings because multiple people may be shot in a single incident.” (“New York City Homicides And Shootings Rose Dramatically In 2020,” The Wall Street Journal, 1/07/2021)

• “The major rise in gun violence in the city began in 2020, after a period in which violent crime dropped to its lowest levels in more than six decades. Now, even as New York City emerges from the pandemic, the spike that began as the virus spread last spring has shown no sign of receding: As of the second weekend in May, the city had recorded 505 shooting victims, the most through that point of any year in the last decade. … Murders in New York are at 146 this year, up from 104 over the same period in 2019 and 115 in 2020. … This year, about 96 percent of shooting victims have been Black or Latino, police data shows, similar to previous years. One percent, or seven victims, have been white.” (“The Spike in Shootings During the Pandemic May Outlast the Virus,” The New York Times, 5/14/2021)

“A shooting in Times Square, a spike in gun violence and a spate of high-profile attacks on subway riders have pushed concerns over crime and public safety to the forefront of the New York City mayor’s race, altering the trajectory of the contest as the June 22 primary approaches. A year after the rise of the ‘defund the police’ movement amid an outcry over racial injustice, the primary will offer one of the first tests of where Democratic voters stand as the country emerges from the pandemic but confronts a rise in gun violence in major cities like New York…. As of May 2, 132 people have been killed compared with 113 this same time last year, a 17 percent increase, according to Police Department statistics. There have been 416 shooting incidents compared with 227 this time last year, an 83 percent increase…. Even before the Times Square shooting, there were mounting signs that public safety was intensifying as a concern in New York: a Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos poll released late last month found that ‘crime or violence’ was a major concern for New York Democrats, second only to the coronavirus.” (“Shootings and Subway Attacks Put Crime at Center of N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race,” The New York Times, 5/11/2021)

New Yorkers: ‘Are We Back In The ‘70s And ‘80s?,’ ‘I Want Someone [For Mayor] Who Can Make Us Feel Safer’

“Jade Lundy, a child-care worker who lives in the Bronx, said she has begun taking more precautions because there seems to be an uptick in crime, which she blamed on economic hardship caused by the pandemic. ‘I don’t take out my phone anymore,’ she said Monday afternoon as she headed for the subway to the Bronx, from Times Square. Ms. Lundy, who recently turned 18, said she plans to vote in the mayoral election and has just begun learning about the candidates. ‘I want someone who can make us feel safer,’ Ms. Lundy said. ‘Especially for the women. We have it harder out here.’” (“Shootings and Subway Attacks Put Crime at Center of N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race,” The New York Times, 5/11/2021)

“A spate of crimes targeting Asian-Americans have also alarmed New Yorkers across the city, some candidates say. ‘That makes them very worried about the city, and particularly for people who have lived here a long time,’ said [Kathryn] Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner. For those New Yorkers, she said, some wonder, ‘Are we back in the ‘70s and ‘80s?’” (“Shootings and Subway Attacks Put Crime at Center of N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race,” The New York Times, 5/11/2021)

“‘Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, people that lived here, including myself, you know, we witnessed some pretty nasty stuff,’ said Representative Adriano Espaillat, a New York Democrat. ‘We don’t want to slip back to that. So I think that that’s going to be a major issue with this year’s mayoral race.’ … Diana Ayala, a councilwoman representing East Harlem and the Bronx … said the response from the mayoral candidates to addressing crime will determine if she endorses anyone else for mayor. ‘Citywide, people are alarmed at the numbers of shootings but quite frankly, those numbers have been pretty consistent in my district for the last three and a half years,’ Ms. Ayala said. ‘Every summer, even as we speak, we are planning for what’s to come.’” (“Shootings and Subway Attacks Put Crime at Center of N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race,” The New York Times, 5/11/2021)

San Francisco Is Suffering From A ‘Shoplifting Epidemic’ That Has Forced Stores To Shutter And Even City Officials Now Admit Is ‘Out Of Control’

“[T]he shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco has only worsened. At a board of supervisors hearing [in early May], representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable. Brendan Dugan, the director of the retail crime division at CVS Health, called San Francisco ‘one of the epicenters of organized retail crime’ and said employees were instructed not to pursue suspected thieves because encounters had become too dangerous. ‘We’ve had incidents where our security officers are assaulted on a pretty regular basis in San Francisco,’ Dugan said. The retail executives and police officers emphasized the role of organized crime in the thefts. And they told the supervisors that Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot measure that reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors if the stolen goods are worth less than $950, had emboldened thieves. ‘The one trend we are seeing is more violence and escalating — and much more bold,’ said Commander Raj Vaswani, the head of the investigations bureau at the San Francisco Police Department. ‘We see a lot of repeat offenders.’” (“San Francisco’s Shoplifting Surge,” The New York Times, 5/21/2021)

• “The cost of business and shoplifting led Walgreens to shut 17 locations in San Francisco in the past five years — an ‘unpopular and difficult decision,’ Jason Cunningham, regional vice president for pharmacy and retail operations in California and Hawaii, said at the hearing…. Theft in Walgreens’ San Francisco stores is four times the average for stores elsewhere in the country, and the chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere, Cunningham said. At CVS, 42% of losses in the Bay Area came from 12 stores in San Francisco, which are only 8% of the market share, Brendan Dugan, director of organized retail crime and corporate investigations, said at the hearing…. CVS security guards in San Francisco have been assaulted, especially at the now-closed Seventh and Market streets location, Dugan said. Some businesses instead hire costly off-duty police officers.” (“‘Out Of Control’: Organized Crime Drives S.F. Shoplifting, Closing 17 Walgreens In Five Years,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5/25/2021)
• “A statement from Safeway read at Thursday’s hearing blamed Proposition 47, which lowered penalties for thefts under $950, for ‘dramatic increases’ in shoplifting losses…. Professional shoplifters can work the system by stealing items under the threshold from one store and hitting several retailers in the same day.” (“‘Out Of Control’: Organized Crime Drives S.F. Shoplifting, Closing 17 Walgreens In Five Years,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5/25/2021)

“Retailers attributed a majority of losses to professional thieves instead of opportunistic shoplifters who may be driven by poverty, with one CVS leader calling San Francisco a hub of organized retail crime. Losses have shuttered drugstores providing vital services, even more critical during the pandemic as some stores give out vaccines.” (“‘Out Of Control’: Organized Crime Drives S.F. Shoplifting, Closing 17 Walgreens In Five Years,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5/25/2021)

• “For years, John Susoeff walked from his home two blocks to the Walgreens at Bush and Larkin streets — to pick up prescriptions for himself and for less mobile neighbors, to get a new phone card, and to snag senior discounts the first Tuesday of the month. That changed in March when the Walgreens, ravaged by shoplifting, closed. Susoeff, 77, who sometimes uses a cane, now goes six blocks for medication and other necessities. ‘It’s terrible,’ he said. On his last visit before the store closed, even beef jerky was behind lock and key. A CVS nearby shuttered in 2019, with similar reports of rampant shoplifting. ‘I don’t blame them for closing,’ Susoeff said.” (“‘Out Of Control’: Organized Crime Drives S.F. Shoplifting, Closing 17 Walgreens In Five Years,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5/25/2021)

“‘This has been out of control,’ said Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who held a hearing [May 13^th] with retailers, police, the district attorney and probation departments. ‘People are scared to go into these stores — seniors, people with disabilities, children. It’s just happening brazenly. We can’t just as a city throw up our hands and say this is OK. We have to come up with solutions.’” (“‘Out Of Control’: Organized Crime Drives S.F. Shoplifting, Closing 17 Walgreens In Five Years,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5/25/2021)

• “On Thursday I called Ahsha Safaí, the member of the board of supervisors who organized the hearing. We talked about the thefts we had witnessed in the city and the sidewalk thieves’ markets where steaks, bicycles and other stolen goods are fenced. Safaí said he had recently stopped to inspect one of these markets at 24th and Mission. ‘Half of Walgreens was on the sidewalk. I’m not kidding,’ Safaí said. ‘I was blown away. I’ve never seen anything like it in this city.’ He talked about what he called a laissez-faire attitude in San Francisco. ‘It has become part of the landscape,’ he said of thefts. ‘People say, “Oh, well, that just happens.”‘ Thieves ‘are obviously choosing locales based on what the consequences are,’ Safaí said. ‘If there are no consequences for their actions, then you invite the behavior. Over and over.’” (“San Francisco’s Shoplifting Surge,” The New York Times, 5/21/2021)

As Violent Crime Surges In Cities, Metro Police Departments Are Hemorrhaging Officers While The Remaining Cops ‘Are Demoralized And Pulling Back On Patrolling High-Crime Areas’

“In some liberal cities like Minneapolis, where gun violence is surging and where the Police Department is depleted after so many officers quit or retired, some elected leaders and older clergy members and civil rights leaders are echoing the sentiments of conservative commentators who claim a link between the violence and the movement to defund police departments, saying officers are demoralized and pulling back on patrolling high-crime areas.” (“A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime,” The New York Times, 5/23/2021)

• “From the crucible of 1992, former gang members in South Los Angeles worked to make peace, often working alongside a new force of police officers dedicated to ‘community policing,’ in which officers worked in specific neighborhoods to establish close relationships with residents. Leon Gullette, who was drawn to activism after 1992, now works for Community Build, which was co-founded by Maxine Waters, a local congresswoman. Mr. Gullette’s specialty is working to achieve truces between rival gangs. Unlike the younger activists with Black Lives Matter, he says working with the police is essential. ‘We can’t operate without the police, so I wouldn’t say defund the police,’ Mr. Gullette said.” (“A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime,” The New York Times, 5/23/2021)

SEATTLE: “Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers are leaving the job at a ‘record pace’ — with at least 249 people leaving over the past year alone — as statistics show manpower has been declining in recent years, according to union and city officials. SPD boasted a police force of 1,276 uniformed members at the end of February 2020, but staffing levels dropped by 249 people to 1,027 by the end of February 2021, according to the most recent department statistics available to Fox News. … As of last week, 66 officers had left SPD so far this year, Solan said, confirming previous reports from local news. ” (“Seattle Police Department Losing Officers At ‘Record Pace’ Amid Budget Uncertainty, Lack Of Support: Officials,” Fox News, 5/01/2021)

• “Last June, three months into the pandemic and as the protests exploded in Seattle and around the country, officer-initiated calls plunged to a 10-year low. Mostly for that reason, the department’s overall call load dropped by almost half, to about 16,000, by June, according to a Seattle Times analysis. At the same time, the department’s monthly average response time for all remaining calls more than doubled, climbing from about 20 minutes in May to 41 minutes in June. Response times for the most serious 911 calls — known as Priority 1 and Priority 2 calls — increased 48% and 84% respectively, even though commanders repeatedly ordered the department to operate on ‘priority call status.’ That means dispatchers send officers only to Priority 1 and Priority 2 calls such as homicides, robberies and assaults, skipping other calls, such as break-ins.” (“Seattle 911 Response Times Climbed In Summer 2020. Now, Police And Activists Debate What Comes Next,” The Seattle Times, 5/11/2021)

LOS ANGELES: “Like in many major cities, homicides and other forms of violent crime in Los Angeles have risen sharply in the past year, and the LAPD is facing an unexpected staffing shortage. The LAPD was expected to have roughly 9,750 officers at the end of June 2021 — but an increase in retirements and resignations have left the department with about 9,450 officers, which [Mayor Eric] Garcetti is hoping to expand with this year’s budget.” (“Defund The Police Encounters Resistance As Violent Crime Spikes,” CNN, 5/25/2021)

WASHINGTON, D.C.: “The D.C. police force has already grown smaller, from about 3,850 officers in 2019 to around 3,650 today, because of budget cuts lawmakers imposed last year and an increasing number of resignations and retirements. About 90 percent of the department’s budget is spent on personnel.” (“Commission To Reimagine Police In District Grapples With Effort To Defund,” The Washington Post, 3/21/2021)

MINNEAPOLIS: “Nearly 200 Minneapolis police officers have left the department since Floyd’s death, including dozens who filed PTSD claims after the unrest.” (“Minneapolis To Bring In Outside Help To Deal With Surge In Violence,” Star Tribune, 5/24/2021)

• “Minneapolis police are bringing in outside help as they try to temper violence that killed four people this weekend alone, including a college senior who was out celebrating graduation. Mayor Jacob Frey said the city has asked state and federal agencies for assistance, citing the city’s shortage of officers. ‘Safety in our city has to be a priority,’ Frey said at a news conference Sunday, calling the reinforcements ‘really, really critical.’” (“Minneapolis To Bring In Outside Help To Deal With Surge In Violence,” Star Tribune, 5/24/2021)

LOUISVILLE: “Nearly 190 cops left the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) in 2020 and 43 have stepped away from the Kentucky city’s agency so far in 2021, either choosing to retire or resign altogether, as law enforcement officials struggle to recruit new members to make up for a deficit in manpower, authorities and a union spokesperson told Fox News on Tuesday.” (“Louisville Police Department Staffing ‘In Dire Straits’ Amid High Crime Rates, Recruitment Woes: Union,” Fox News, 4/27/2021)

• “Statistics provided by LMPD on Tuesday show the department has hired 26 new members so far this year, while 43 have left. The 1,069-person department falls 255 people short of its ‘authorized strength’ of 1,324 — the number of personnel it is authorized to employ, statistics show.” (“Louisville Police Department Staffing ‘In Dire Straits’ Amid High Crime Rates, Recruitment Woes: Union,” Fox News, 4/27/2021)

NEW YORK: “More than 5,300 NYPD uniformed officers retired or put in their papers to leave in 2020 — a 75 percent spike from the year before, department data show. The exodus — amid the pandemic, anti-cop hostility, riots and a skyrocketing number of NYC shootings — saw 2,600 officers say goodbye to the job and another 2,746 file for retirement, a combined 5,346. … Through April 21 of this year, 831 cops have retired or filed to leave…” (“Are NYPD Officers Rushing To Retire Amid City’s Anti-Cop Climate?,” New York Post, 4/24/2021)

Research | The Leader Board | THE NEWSROOM | Republican Leader (senate.gov)

WASHINGTON—U.S. consumer prices rose by the most in 13 years in June amid supply constraints and a continued rebound in the costs of travel-related services from pandemic-depressed levels as the economic recovery gathered momentum.

The consumer price index increased 0.9 percent last month, the largest gain since June 2008, after advancing 0.6 percent in May, the Labor Department said on Tuesday.

In the 12 months through June, the CPI jumped 5.4 percent. That was the largest gain since August 2008 and followed a 5.0 percent increase in the 12 months through May. Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the CPI accelerated 0.9 percent after increasing 0.7 percent in May.

The so-called core CPI surged 4.5 percent on a year-on-year basis, the largest increase since November 1991, after rising 3.8 percent in May. Annual inflation rates have been boosted by the dropping of last spring’s weak readings from the CPI calculation. These so-called base effects are leveling off.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the overall CPI would climb 0.5 percent and the core CPI would rise 0.4 percent.

COVID-19 vaccinations, low interest rates, and nearly $6 trillion in government relief since the pandemic started in the United States in March 2020 are fueling demand, straining the supply chain, and raising prices across the economy.

A global semiconductor shortage has undercut motor vehicle production, pushing up prices of used cars and trucks—the major driver of inflation in recent months.

With nearly 160 million Americans immunized, demand for airline travel and accommodations is picking up, also fanning price pressures.

Inflation is expected to remain elevated through part of 2022, as prices for many travel-related services are still below pre-pandemic levels.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has repeatedly stated that higher inflation will be transitory, noting that he expected supply chains to normalize and adapt. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen shares that view.

Minutes of the U.S. central bank’s June 15-16 policy meeting published last week showed “a substantial majority” of officials saw inflation risks “tilted to the upside,” and the Fed as a whole felt it needed to be prepared to act if those risks materialized.

The Fed slashed its benchmark overnight interest rate to near zero last year and is pumping money into the economy through monthly bond purchases. It has signaled it could tolerate higher inflation for some time to offset years in which inflation was lodged below its 2 percent target, a flexible average.

The Fed’s preferred inflation measure, the core personal consumption expenditures price index, jumped 3.4 percent in May, the largest gain since April 1992.

US Consumer Prices Surge in June, Inflation Climbs to 13-year High (theepochtimes.com)

Iranian intel agents sought to kidnap American journalist

The State Department informed Congress late Tuesday that it would waive sanctions on Iran’s illicit oil trade so that the country can access frozen funds from South Korea and Japan, the same day the Department of Justice announced charges on an Iranian spy network that sought to kidnap an American.

The waiver, signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, allows the “transfer of Iranian funds in restricted accounts to exporters in Japan and the Republic of Korea,” according to a notification sent to Congress by the State Department. The waiver allows Iranian money that had been frozen as a result of American sanctions to be freed up without violating the law. “Allowing these funds to be used to repay exporters in these jurisdictions will make those entities whole with respect to the goods and services they exported to Iran, address a recurring irritant in important bilateral relationships, and decrease Iran’s foreign reserves,” the waiver states.

The waiver was announced on the same day the Justice Department announced new charges against a network of Iranian intelligence agents who sought to kidnap an American journalist and bring her to Iran. The charges include kidnapping conspiracy, sanctions violations conspiracy, bank and wire fraud conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy charges.

The sanctions relief also comes as the United States and Iran get closer to finalizing a revamped nuclear deal that will even further unwind sanctions on Tehran. Congressional Republicans are likely to oppose the move, which lessens economic pressure on Iran at a time when it is still funding regional terror groups and building out its nuclear weapons program. Sanctions of Iran’s oil trade were a hallmark policy of the Trump administration, which sought to cut Iran’s exports down to zero and deny the regime a key source of income.

Richard Goldberg, the former director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction on Trump’s White House National Security Council, said the waiver will relieve pressure on Iran’s floundering economy and give it access to much-needed cash.

“There’s a reason we talk about accessible foreign exchange reserves versus inaccessible foreign exchange reserves. If you free up money that’s trapped in foreign accounts for Iran to pay off debts, you are bailing out the regime and rescuing the mullahs from a balance of payments crisis,” said Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “This is a bailout, plain and simple. And to announce it right as DOJ tells us Iran tried to kidnap an American journalist out of New York City—that’s a national outrage.”

A State Department spokesman said Blinken signed the sanctions waiver to give Japan and Korea another 90-days to complete transactions with Iran.

“The secretary of state previously signed a waiver to allow funds held in restricted Iranian accounts in Japan and Korea to be used to pay back Japanese and Korean companies that exported non-sanctioned items to Iran,” the spokesperson said. “These repayment transactions can sometimes be time consuming, and the secretary extended the waivers for another 90 days.”

The State Department says the waiver “does not allow for the transfer of any funds to Iran,” and will make whole Japanese and Korean companies that exported non-sanctioned goods and services before U.S. sanctions were tightened by the previous administration.

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R., Tenn.) said the Biden administration is rewarding Iran with an economic bailout.

“President Biden today is giving the Iranian regime—the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism—an economic bailout by freeing up billions of dollars that U.S. sanctions had frozen in foreign banks,” said Hagerty. “I personally spent months working with the then-Japanese Prime Minster and his cabinet to put in place these crippling and biting sanctions, which had real and tangible results, only today to see them begin to be blown apart with the stroke of a pen in exchange for nothing. President Biden is doubling down on his Iran appeasement policy just as it was revealed that Iranian officials were plotting to abduct an American citizen in New York City, and as the regime is continuing to use missiles and proxy militants to attack Americans in Iraq and Syria.”

The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Biden Admin Waives Sanctions on Iranian Oil Trade As DOJ Announces Charges On Spy Network (freebeacon.com)

Border Patrol agents have continued to apprehend an increasing number of illegal aliens each month this year, and June was no exception.

Agents apprehended 188,829 people illegally crossing the border in June, up from 180,034 in May, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). That averages 6,294 apprehensions per day for the month.

The number of illegal aliens detected by Border Patrol but who evaded capture isn’t released, although Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said on June 24 that the number has exceeded 250,000 so far this fiscal year.

The number of people who pass undetected is impossible to estimate.

Along with the increase in crossings, more illegal immigrants are dying of heat-related exposure, dehydration, and drowning. Water is scarce, it’s not hard to get lost, and smugglers will leave illegal immigrants behind if they’re slow or injured.

In June, 109 bodies were recovered by Border Patrol, up from 61 in May, according to numbers obtained from CBP by Jaeson Jones, host of “Tripwires and Triggers.” That brings the total for fiscal 2021 to 321 bodies recovered by Border Patrol, with three months to go.

A major change to the current border flow is expected after July 21 if Title 42 is revoked, which is largely seen as the remaining tool holding back the floodgates. Title 42 allows for Border Patrol to turn back illegal border crossers almost immediately as a pandemic measure, rather than be placed in ICE custody for a more protracted process through deportation proceedings under Title 8.

“When we do lose Title 42, the number of people that were previously being expelled are going to have to be processed under Title 8, and we’re going to be spending more time with them,” Texas’s Del Rio Sector Chief Austin Skero told The Epoch Times on July 15.

“So that is going to be … increasing the amount of time that our agents are processing and decreasing the amount of time that our agents can be in the field.”

Currently, single Spanish-speaking adults and some families are still subject to Title 42 and are turned back to Mexico. Once the policy is lifted, border facilities are likely to be quickly overwhelmed.

In some border sectors, particularly the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, the Border Patrol facilities have been so overwhelmed that many individuals weren’t released with the common Notice to Appear document that states a date and time to appear in court. Rather, they received a Notice to Report, which is an honor system that requires the person to check in at their closest ICE facility within 60 days.

“Title 42 is absolutely critical,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Tae Johnson said during a congressional hearing on May 13.

“There’s certainly some gaps in our ability to track” illegal immigrants after they’re released, he said.

Under the agency’s narrowed criteria for priority removal, most of those who abscond won’t be a priority for ICE to track down unless they commit an aggravated felony.

ICE had around 55,000 detention beds in 2019; however, the capacity was reduced to 30,000 beds in the fiscal 2021 appropriations package.

Newly appointed Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said the main focus for the agency is to increase the ability to process illegal immigrants faster.

“It includes speeding up the process so we’re not bogged down in these communities,” Ortiz said in Del Rio on June 24.

He said a quicker electronic system to process aliens will be rolled out in about 90 days.

“[Agents] should be able to do everything on a tablet, they sign it, you move on,” he said.

Skero told The Epoch Times that a soft-sided, 500-person processing tent had been erected in Eagle Pass to help mitigate the anticipated increase.

“One of the difficulties that we have here in the sector is managing the flow of people that are coming, managing detention and the processing, and the distribution,” he said.

“And then trying to use whatever resources we have left to get after the folks who are getting away from us, the folks who don’t want to give up, who don’t want to surrender. That’s where the criminal element is really alive and well.

“But the reality is, even now, we don’t have enough people.”

Border Patrol Apprehends 188,829 Illegal Immigrants in June (theepochtimes.com)

A new BOMBSHELL report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) “must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet,” according to Secretary General Guterres.

▪️Report (the UN’s fifth) drew on over 14,000 studies by 234 experts from 66 countries
▪️Global temperatures anticipated to rise 1.5-2°C by 2030 – 10 years earlier than forecast just three years ago
▪️Global oceans have risen 20cm since 1900, with the rate TRIPLING in last 10 years – two-metre rise by 2100 not ruled out
▪️Planet at warmest levels for 125,000 years, methane levels highest in 800,000 years
▪️3mn years ago when CO2 levels and temperature last matched today’s, sea levels were 25m higher

Now, if we look at the picture of climate history above, …?

Better yet, see below.

Is There Global Cooling?

I am not a scientist and do not pretend to be. But, I have been watching the issue of climate change now for two decades and have found it is not what many say it is. Here are a collection of articles, sources, and information. Use it if you like. Hopefully it will encourage you to seek your own truth since this is one of the great issues of our time.

Geoffrey Pohanka

Is there global cooling? The answer might not be what you expected. – Home

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), who was the White House physician under former Presidents Obama and Trump, called on President Biden to resign during a Fox News interview amid the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying that Biden is “not cognitively prepared to be our president.”

“We’re looking horrible right now on the world stage, this is an absolute national embarrassment,” Jackson, who now represents Texas’s 13th Congressional District, said. “And instead of being out in front of this and talking about what’s going on, and what went wrong, and what the plan was, and what we’re gonna do next, Biden’s just been in hiding again, as he always has.

“Biden, once again, has failed us. He’s embarrassed as internationally,” Jackson continued. “And you know, honestly, it is time for him to leave. I’ve been saying this for a long time. I’ve been saying that he’s not, he’s not cognitively prepared to be our president. And this is just another example of his failure. And I think a lot of this is relevant to his cognitive ability. But he’s, he’s created a national security disaster for this country right now. And it’s time for him to move on and somebody else needs to do this job. He is not fit to be our commander in chief. It’s time for him to resign.”

During an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity in July, Jackson warned that Biden’s mental health was “only going to get worse.”

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), who was the White House physician under former Presidents Obama and Trump, called on President Biden to resign during a Fox News interview amid the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying that Biden is “not cognitively prepared to be our president.”

“We’re looking horrible right now on the world stage, this is an absolute national embarrassment,” Jackson, who now represents Texas’s 13th Congressional District, said. “And instead of being out in front of this and talking about what’s going on, and what went wrong, and what the plan was, and what we’re gonna do next, Biden’s just been in hiding again, as he always has.

“Biden, once again, has failed us. He’s embarrassed as internationally,” Jackson continued. “And you know, honestly, it is time for him to leave. I’ve been saying this for a long time. I’ve been saying that he’s not, he’s not cognitively prepared to be our president. And this is just another example of his failure. And I think a lot of this is relevant to his cognitive ability. But he’s, he’s created a national security disaster for this country right now. And it’s time for him to move on and somebody else needs to do this job. He is not fit to be our commander in chief. It’s time for him to resign.”

During an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity in July, Jackson warned that Biden’s mental health was “only going to get worse.”

“And I’ve been saying that it’s only going to get worse, and guess what? We’re watching that happen right before our eyes right now,” Jackson said. “And I’m at the point right now where, you know, I went from, you know, telling people, we should be concerned about what might potentially be going on, to now saying, hey, what is happening right now?”

“Where are the people in our academic medicine that were out there calling for President Trump to have a cognitive test? Where are these people?” Jackson added. “There’s something seriously going on with this man right now. And you know, I think that he’s either gonna, he’s either gonna resign, they’re going to convince him to resign from office at some point in the near future for medical issues, or they’re going to have to use the 25th Amendment to get rid of this man right now. There’s some serious stuff going on right now.”

Former Obama WH Doctor: Biden Is Not ‘Cognitively Prepared’ To Be President | Leo Terrell (theleoterrell.com)

The Wall Street Journal reports “An internal State Department memo last month warned top agency officials of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the U.S.’s Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the document.”

The memo was dated July 13th, a mere month after Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a Trump-era program designed at providing swift and safe evacuations for Americans out of crisis zones, such as the upcoming Afghanistan troop withdrawal.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The classified cable represents the clearest evidence yet that the administration had been warned by its own officials on the ground that the Taliban’s advance was imminent and Afghanistan’s military may be unable to stop it.

The cable, sent via the State Department’s confidential dissent channel, warned of rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces, and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up an evacuation, the two people said.

The cable, dated July 13, also called for the State Department to use tougher language in describing the atrocities being committed by the Taliban, one of the people said.

As of last weekend, some 18,000 Afghans who have applied for the U.S.’s Special Immigrant Visa program, as well as their families, remained on the ground in Afghanistan, with about half of them outside Kabul in areas already under Taliban control, and efforts to get them to the Kabul airport have grown more difficult by the day.

Internal Memo Shows State Department Was Warned ‘Collapse of Kabul’ by Taliban was Imminent | Gregg Jarrett (thegreggjarrett.com)

The National Police Association lobbying group has said that the House hearing into the Jan. 6 Capitol incident is politically motivated, urging Congress to instead investigate left-wing riots that left numerous officers injured last year.

Association spokeswoman Betsy Brantner Smith said in an interview that Congress should hear testimonials from thousands of officers who were injured during demonstrations, riots, arson, and other violence last year following the death of George Floyd.

During the first hearing for the House select committee on the Jan. 6 breach, four police officers offered testimony saying that individuals who entered the Capitol made specific threats against them.

“People need to see that police officers go through horrible things, and Jan. 6 was a horrible thing for some of those officers,” Smith told Fox News. “But, quite frankly, I find this whole Jan. 6 Commission, frankly, a dog and pony show. It doesn’t tell the whole story.”

Later, Smith questioned why the federal government hasn’t provided more information about the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt, one of several Trump supporters who died during the incident, or raised questions about video footage of Capitol Police officers’ interactions with demonstrators on Jan. 6.

“Myself, like millions of Americans, sat there watching the testimony thinking, ‘Wait, where are the police officers who appeared—appeared—to let some of the protesters in?” she asked. “Where is the police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt? In fact, why aren’t we talking about Ashli Babbitt? I mean there’s so much more here.”

On July 27, one of the testifying officers, Daniel Hodges, who works for the Metropolitan Police Department, recounted being allegedly told, “You will die on your knees.”

Hodges said he was kicked in the chest and struck with something heavy in the head as other officers and he clashed with a crowd near the Capitol.

But Smith suggested that the injuries those officers suffered likely paled in comparison to the numerous officers who were injured during riots last year.

“We have a Las Vegas police officer who is still paralyzed from the Black Lives Matter riots,” she told Fox. “We have thousands of police officers around the country who are retiring because of post-traumatic stress because of the riots.

“The 2020 riots, we can’t just say the whole George Floyd thing was bad and that’s what cops have to deal with, and then watch these four weeping men talk about their experiences, ignoring thousands and thousands of police officers, ignoring their feelings and their experiences and their injuries.”

A recent analysis from The Epoch Times in late June showed that major metropolitan police departments are struggling with hiring new recruits and dealing with an increase in retirements or officers quitting amid anti-police rhetoric and activism. Violent crime such as murders, rapes, and robberies has also spiked in most major cities.

Last month, the Portland Police Bureau’s riot squad quit en masse after one of its officers was indicted on an assault charge. The arrest stemmed from violent demonstrations that roiled the Oregon city last year.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Smith said. “I have some cops who would rather go back to Iraq than continue to work on the street, just because of the massive amounts of blood and bodies and everything they deal with that people don’t see.”

The office of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), head of the select committee, didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

National Police Association: Congress Should Investigate 2020 Riots, Not Jan. 6 Capitol Breach (theepochtimes.com)

Vera Institute of Justice has received $89 million in contracts and grants this year

The federal government provides tens of millions of dollars each year to a nonprofit group that supports the movement to defund police departments and dismantle the criminal justice system.

Officials with the Brooklyn-based Vera Institute of Justice have urged the government to “radically dismantle” police departments in order to fix a system they say dehumanizes people of color. The institute is heavily funded by the federal government. So far this fiscal year, the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and other agencies have awarded the Vera Institute more than $89 million in contracts and grants. The organization has received $811 million in federal funding since 2008, according to USA Spending, a federal budget database.

Vera’s support for the “defund the police” movement comes amid a contentious political debate over policing in America. Democrats see the issue as a political third rail and have tried to distance the party from anti-police rhetoric popular on the left. While members of the Democratic Party have embraced the defund movement, President Joe Biden claimed this month that Republicans are “lying” when they say Democrats support the concept.

The Vera Institute, which calls itself a “justice reform change agent,” also received stipends from traditional progressive donors, such as George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The billionaire’s philanthropy gave more than $10 million to Vera from 2016 to 2019.

Two top executives at Vera rallied to the defund cause following the death of George Floyd, a black man who was killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020.

“Vera is committed to dismantling the current culture of policing and working toward solutions that defund police and shift power to communities,” Vera president Nicholas Turner wrote on June 8, 2020.

Turner, who received $420,000 in salary and benefits at Vera in 2019, urged support for “the outrage we’re seeing—in the streets, in our communities, and in the media.”

“Now is the time to stop tinkering with police reform and to enact wholesale change,” Turner said. “We’re building on this unique moment of public awareness, outrage, and calls to defund the police.”

Another Vera officer, Jamila Hodge, said it was “time for us to radically dismantle” the criminal justice system. Writing in June 2020, she said the criminal justice system “dehumanizes and devalues Black people” and is rooted in “our nation’s legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”

Vera, which took in $174 million in revenue for the year ended June 30, 2020, receives the bulk of its federal funding to represent illegal aliens and refugees seeking entry to the United States. The Justice Department has awarded Vera grants and contracts through various subagencies, including the Office for Victims of Crime and the Office for Violence Against Women, which provide assistance to crime victims. Other grants have been for research, including $750,000 to conduct a randomized trial on the effect of “innovative” youth housing on crime.

In addition to harboring radical views on policing, Vera has thrown its weight behind a pack of left-wing prosecutors, many of them backed by Soros, that swept into office across the United States on the promise to reform the criminal justice system. Their policies have come under intense scrutiny as crime rates surge across the country.

One such prosecutor is Kimberly Foxx, the district attorney in Chicago. The Vera Institute is hosting an event this week with Foxx and Angela Davis, the Communist Party USA member who supports the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Foxx was reprimanded last year over her handling of the investigation into actor Jussie Smollett’s false claim that he was the victim of a hate crime. An independent prosecutor said Foxx displayed “substantial abuses of discretion” during the investigation, in which she dropped charges against Smollett for filing a false police report.

Vera has also partnered with two other left-wing prosecutors, Boston district attorney Rachael Rollins and St. Louis circuit attorney Kim Gardner. The Washington Free Beacon reported that Rollins, who Biden nominated for U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, helped form a commission last year with the Grassroots Law Project, a group that supports the defund cause.

Gardner has come under fire in St. Louis after judges tossed out three murder cases in one week earlier this month after Gardner’s team of prosecutors failed to show up for trial. In another case, the mother of a murder victim blasted Gardner for striking a plea deal that involved no jail time for her son’s killer.

The Vera Institute has also prematurely entered the fray in hot-button cases, including the April shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old black girl in Columbus, Ohio.

“When Ma’Khia Bryant dialed 9-1-1, she needed help,” Vera said in a statement after the shooting. “Instead of assistance, she was shot and killed by Columbus police. Her death underscores that our emergency system does not keep Black and brown children and communities safe.”

Video released soon after the shooting showed a Columbus police officer shooting Bryant as she was attempting to stab another girl with a knife.

The Vera Institute did not respond to a request for comment.

Federal Government Gives Millions to Group That Supports Defunding the Police (freebeacon.com)

Patrick Moore talks about why he left Greenpeace and why the the push for net-zero emissions is an unattainable goal

Patrick Moore was only 24 when he co-founded Greenpeace in the early 1970s. He soon became the driving force behind the environmental activist group’s many influential campaigns, such as to stop nuclear testing, protect endangered whales, and prevent toxic dumping.

“It began in 1971 with the first voyage to stop U.S. hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska, which we did,” Moore told The Epoch Times. “And then we went after France’s atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific.”

Greenpeace would go on to launch its “Save the Whales” campaign in 1975, followed in 1976 by a campaign to end the killing of baby seals for their fur, and later that decade a campaign to end toxic dumping in rivers by factories in Europe.

But as Greenpeace gained influence, Moore says he started to see it getting hijacked by what he characterizes as people with political ideology from the left.

“None of us in the original group was there to make money. We were all volunteers,” he said.  “But the ultra-leftists took over my organization when they realized there was a lot of money and power to be had there.”

He said it was during the “Save The Whales” campaign that people started donating money to Greenpeace in larger numbers, and that was when the group started getting a bank account and renting an office.

“So as time went on into the late 1970s, Greenpeace turned into a kind of business,” he said. “Pretty soon it actually became a business where fundraising started to become more and more important.”

By the time Moore left in 1986 after being with the organization for 15 years, “fundraising had now become the most important priority, and they would go ahead with a campaign for which there was no scientific basis,” he said.

He left Greenpeace due to “philosophical and political” reasons, he said, after having served as director, president, and international director.

“Greenpeace had started out with a strong humanitarian orientation, as well as a belief in saving the environment,” he said. “‘Green’ is for the environment, ‘peace’ is for the people not to be killed by nuclear war, among other things, or pollution.”

Over time, “peace” was gradually dropped, and Greenpeace, along with the rest of the environmental movement, drifted into a belief that sees the “human species as the enemy of nature, the enemy of the Earth,” Moore said.

The Epoch Times asked Greenpeace for an interview but didn’t hear back.

Emphasis on Fundraising Over Science

In the mid 1980s, Moore, who has a PhD in ecology, says he found himself the only director with a formal science education on Greenpeace’s international board, and the only director disagreeing with what the rest would propose next.

“They all agreed that the next campaign for Greenpeace should be to ‘ban chlorine worldwide.’ … They named chlorine ‘the devil’s element,’” he said.

Moore says he pointed out to the board that chlorine is one of the building blocks of the Earth, and of utmost importance for public health, as chlorine added to “drinking water, swimming pools, and spas has ended waterborne communicable diseases like cholera.” 

He also said chlorine is critical for medicine because 25 percent of medicines contain chlorine, and chlorine chemistry is essential in the making of some 85 percent of medicines.

Greenpeace International proceeded to launch the campaign nonetheless, the reason being “largely based on fundraising,” according to Moore, and so he decided it was time to go. 

Moore believes this is where scare stories of impending catastrophes and doom started. “It begins with the politicians and their bureaucrats funding the scientists who can be trusted to give them a good scare story.”

The Importance of Carbon Dioxide

When it comes to climate change, the continued narrative of carbon dioxide being a “bad thing” and “destroying the world” is contrary to what the scientific community has found, Moore says. 

Moore currently serves as a director of the CO2 Coalition, established in 2015 to create educational material on the importance of carbon dioxide. The organization has published papers presenting scientific data to dispute that CO2 emissions are causing global warming. 

Contrary to what climate alarmists claim, Moore says, “carbon dioxide is the basis of all life on Earth.”

“It makes the oceans less alkaline, thus making it suitable for life,” and “on land, CO2 makes the greening of the Earth plus it makes plants more efficient with water.” 

In April 2016, an article published in Nature funded in part by NASA found that CO2 fertilization has had significant impact on the greening of the planet.

“From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide,” reads a post on NASA’s site on the study.

“Studies have shown that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide increase photosynthesis, spurring plant growth,” the article added.

Net-Zero a ‘Political Goal’

Moore said the push for net-zero carbon emissions by governments around the world is “purely a political slogan.”

“I’m not sure how they could reduce CO2 emissions if they didn’t stop using fossil fuels virtually altogether,” he said, questioning how the transportation, agriculture, mining, and forestry sectors could function without them. 

“I believe this is an unattainable political goal for society. And I also believe it is a goal that will bring greater hardship than people have endured since the great wars, since the great disease epidemics of the past.”

Moore said there is a powerful convergence of interests among key elites in Western society pushing environmental scare stories.

“It puts [politicians] in the media, and the media makes much money from the sensationalism, and the activists then raise money,” he said. 

Hollywood plays a big part as celebrities join to endorse the climate change narrative, he added, as well as many scientists.  

“Nearly all the money going to the scientists who are writing these things is public money, so it all has to be approved by politicians, and bureaucrats working for the politicians,” he said, adding that scientists who utter anything to the contrary get cancelled.

In his latest book, “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom,” Moore talks about how the hyped up environmental catastrophes and threats create fear.

“There’s so much propaganda and so many lies, but the unified theory of scare stories is what I call these, because they have something in common—they are all based on things that are invisible or so remote that the average citizen cannot observe what these people are seeing, and cannot verify what these people are saying.”

Climate ‘Scare Story’ Began With Far-Left Ideology: Greenpeace Co-Founder (theepochtimes.com)

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Border Patrol’s apprehension numbers of illegal migrants broke records in July for the sixth consecutive month following Joe Biden’s taking office as president, with the numbers reaching an “historic crisis level.”

While the “sweltering” heat of June and July usually slows down illegal immigration at the southern US border, according to Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), in June and July of 2021 border traffic actually increased. Bensman said:

“For the sixth consecutive month since President Joe Biden took office and followed through on campaign promises to dismantle his predecessor’s deterrence-based policies, the number of illegal immigrants encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection broke records, reaching 210,000 in July, the Associated Press reported Monday. The outlet cited a court filing by David Shahoulian, assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security. Based on past trends, the vast majority of those encountered were likely illegal immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol.”

Authorities encountered on average 6,770 individuals every single day of July, and many of these people were families and “unaccompanied alien minors.” Single adult “runners” were also driving the wave of immigration. Border Patrol is struggling to push these people back into Mexico over and over again, its resources “strained.” The CBP encountered 210,000 illegal aliens in July, and it is estimated that 37,000 migrants evaded Border Patrol altogether, a number which Bensman calls a “likely… significant undercount.”

While June’s apprehension number of 188,829 illegal migrants was the largest for one month in 21 years, July’s number of 210,000 exceeded that record. Overall, in this fiscal year, which ends September 30, CBP encounters reached the staggering number of 1.3 million. The last time border apprehension numbers hit the mark of a million was back in 2006.

In the border crisis “epicenter” of the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, the numbers of illegal migrants stopped by Border Patrol were 51,149 in May, 59,380 in June, and 78,000 in July.

“The July numbers, once finalized and released in the next couple of weeks, will show that the border crisis is going from record high to record high in an upward climb into a red-zone crisis that will defy any control, short of a radical about-face by the Biden administration. Few signs point to any such policy reversal, although the White House has tentatively begun long-haul deportations to Central America aboard ICE jets.

Border Patrol and CBP facilities, meanwhile, are overrun in the crisis’s Texas epicenter, as are hundreds of border communities that have rarely experienced anything like the steadily worsening chaos of wandering immigrants; high-speed car chases; crime; fear of Covid; and widespread insecurity.”

Bensman explained that promises by Democrat candidates for president in 2019 and 2020 to welcome illegal immigrants and institute policies highly favorable to those migrants caused migrants to begin massing in southern Mexico and even increase CBP apprehension numbers, despite then-President Trump’s “tough turn-back policies.” Individuals who had previously been “unable to advance through Trump’s border restrictions” saw a chance to be successful migrants. As polls pointed to a Biden win, migrants continued to cross in increasing numbers. Some of the migrants in Mexico told Bensman they were planning to “wait out” what they expected to be the last few months of Trump’s presidency.

Bensman calls this steadily growing surge of illegal immigration the “Biden effect,” and said that the border crisis was predicted by an October 2020 national threat assessment from the Department of Homeland Security. Biden’s exemption of “unaccompanied alien minors from pandemic-related ‘Title 42’ instant expulsions to Mexico” and effective ending of interior removals for all those migrants who had successfully evaded Border Patrol as soon as he took office made the crisis rapidly worse.

“The exempted family groups and unaccompanied alien minors have driven the crisis, because they have forced Border Patrol agents ‘off the line’ to deal with their care and processing. Agents processed a whopping 80,000 illegal family unit immigrants in July, Shahoulian said, a leap from June’s 55,805. Reports coming from the border in recent days indicate they have been showing up in individual groups of 500, and even 1,000.

U.S. officials probably picked up more than 19,000 unaccompanied children in July, exceeding the previous record of 18,877 in March.”

If the Biden administration continues its failed border policies, apprehension numbers are likely to continue in an upward trend.

Border Patrol Apprehension Numbers Point To Historic, Crisis Levels At American Border. – The National Pulse

Border officers are releasing illegal immigrants who test positive for COVID-19 to a nonprofit organization, Texas authorities said this week.

The immigrants were handed over to the Catholic Charities of The Rio Grande Valley, which arranged for their stay in a La Joya, Texas, hotel that it had rented out entirely, La Joya police officials said.

“We did not know this. No one told the city of La Joya. No one told the police department that these people were here. And no one told us that these people were possibly ill,” La Joya Sgt. Manuel Casas told reporters at a July 27 press conference.

The situation came to light on July 26, after a concerned citizen reported to a police officer that she saw members of a family who were coughing and sneezing without covering their mouths at a Whataburger location, and they weren’t wearing masks. Management at the restaurant where the incident was reported said they wanted the family to leave because they were disregarding other people’s health.

The officer went to the family, who told the officer they had been apprehended by Border Patrol agents just days before, but were released because they had COVID-19. The family was being housed at the Texas Inn Hotel, which authorities later learned had been completely booked to house such immigrants.

“The information we have is that everybody that is staying in that hotel is COVID-19 positive,” Casas said.

Officers later witnessed a group of 20 to 30 people staying at the hotel outside. Most of them weren’t wearing masks.

Officers also later learned that the illegal immigrants being detained by Border Patrol were given over to the nonprofit to be placed in hotels in the La Joya and McAllen, Texas, areas.

“We have been doing well as a community in slowing the spread of this deadly virus. But ill-conceived policies by both the federal and state governments are beginning to have serious consequences on Hildago County. I call on federal immigration officials to stop releasing infected migrants into our community,” Richard Cortez, the county judge, said in a statement.

A Catholic Charities of The Rio Grande Valley representative didn’t return a request for comment by press time.

The charity’s executive director, Sister Norma Pimentel, told Border Report that the group has been helping house COVID-positive immigrants in hotels. Pimentel said that a security guard is now at the La Joya hotel to keep the immigrants inside.

A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection told The Epoch Times via email that the agency in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) Sector “continues to encounter significant numbers of undocumented migrants crossing the border.”

Undocumented migrants is a term for illegal aliens.

“RGV continues to expel individuals under Title 42 authorities as part of COVID mitigation efforts and utilizes pathways under Title 8 proceedings to remove those amenable to their home countries,” the spokesperson wrote. “During these challenging times, our federal, state, and local partnerships are indispensable as we work to secure our borders and to quickly move individuals out of USBP custody and through the appropriate immigration pathway.”

Border agents in the Rio Grande Valley apprehended more than 20,000 illegal immigrants in a single week this month, part of a dramatic rise in apprehensions seen during President Joe Biden’s first term.

Texas authorities have begun taking matters into their own hands, arresting immigrants on trespassing charges. The city of Laredo, Texas, sued the Biden administration last week in a bid to stop the transfer of thousands of illegal immigrants from among those apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley and Del Rio to the city.

US Releasing Illegal Immigrants Who Test Positive for COVID-19: Texas Police (theepochtimes.com)

Data from Public Health England (PHE) shows that, while the overall chances of getting reinfected are very low, the Delta variant, first identified in India and which accounts for around 99% of cases in the UK, poses a higher risk.
It came as new figures showed the breakdown of how many people in hospital with the Delta variant have had one or both doses of a Covid-19 vaccine.

While it is “possible” to identify that someone may have the DELTA variant, THERE IS NO DIRECT TEST.
So, I repeat my question–how the hell do we know that most of the new cases are “DELTA” when there is no DIRECT test?

How is the Delta Variant Spreading If There is No Direct Delta Variant Test? | Dude Pac | dudepac.com

A fourth police officer who was present at the grounds of the Capitol building when it was breached on Jan. 6 has died by suicide, according to the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPD).

Metropolitan Police Officer Kyle DeFreytag, 26, was found dead on July 10 from suicide, an MPD spokeswoman told The Epoch Times via email.

DeFreytag was assigned to the Fifth District and had been with the police department since November 2016.

MPD Chief Robert J. Contee III had sent a message to the police force last month to notify them of DeFreytag’s death.

“I am writing to share tragic news that Officer Kyle DeFreytag of the 5th District was found deceased last evening,” Contee told the department in July, according to WUSA. “This is incredibly hard news for us all, and for those that knew him best.”

DeFreytag lived in Alexandria, Virginia, and was originally from Pennsylvania, according to an obituary posted by the Bensing-Thomas Funeral Home. A memorial service was held in his memory on July 31.

“He liked hiking, camping, riding his motorcycle, he liked traveling and playing the drums, he enjoyed trying different ethnic foods and always knew the best places to eat. Kyle was kind, he had a quick wit and a great sense of humor and kept us laughing for 26 years,” according to the obituary.

DeFreytag is survived by his parents, his brother, and his sister.

The confirmation from the MPD of DeFreytag’s suicide came just hours after 43-year-old Gunther Hashida was confirmed to have died by suicide.

According to a GoFundMe fundraising page, Hashida is survived by his wife and three children. The page didn’t specify the cause of his death or what may have driven him to end his life.

DeFreytag’s death brings the number of police officers who were present at the Capitol on Jan. 6 who reportedly died by suicide to four.

The other two cases said to be due to suicide are that of MPD Officer Jeffrey Smith and Capitol Police Officer Howard Liebengood.

Read MoreTimeline of Events in DC on Jan. 6

Lawmakers gathered at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 for a joint session of Congress to count and certify electoral votes for the 2020 presidential election. Proceedings in the chambers were temporarily interrupted when a sizable group of protesters entered the Capitol building. Thousands of protesters, mostly peaceful, remained outside.

It remains unclear who or what groups may have instigated the breach of the Capitol building.

A total of five deaths were recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 incident.

Of the deaths, Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt was determined to have died from homicide on Jan. 6, having been shot and killed by an unnamed officer.

Another three people died on Jan. 6 outside the Capitol building but on Capitol grounds. Two of the deaths were found to be from natural causes—both were men in their 50s who died of hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The remaining death, involving a woman in her 30s, was ruled as an accident from a drug overdose.

Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was determined to have died of natural causes on Jan. 7.

More than 100 police officers were reportedly injured in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 incident.

The events of the day culminated in a second impeachment trial for then-President Donald Trump, who was ultimately acquitted of an insurrection incitement charge in February.

More than 500 people have been arrested and charged in cases related to the events on Jan. 6 at the Capitol. Among them, more than 50 are being held pretrial in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, in conditions that are “unconstitutional” and violate “every single basic human right,” lawyers representing several of the defendants told EpochTV last month.

Four police officers on July 27 recounted to a House of Representatives special committee that they were beaten and threatened amid clashes with the protesters on Jan. 6.

4th Police Officer Who Was at Jan. 6 Capitol Breach Dies by Suicide (theepochtimes.com)

She unveiled the black ops military force on the Capitol steps today as she gave an impassioned speech about defunding the police.

“If you don’t want to defund the police, my private army has been ordered to take care of you,” she said, standing in front of dozens of hardened, trained private special forces. “Butch, Spike, Zero, Aces, Skull—go get ’em!” 

The private military she’d hired with her healthy congressional salary then went out to find anyone who didn’t like Bush’s idea of defunding the police to apprehend them. Many tried to call the police to protect themselves, but their cities had already defunded the police, and nobody responded, or else a social worker showed up to ask about their feelings.

Bush has arrested thousands of Americans so far. Prisons are filling up quickly, but no worries: Bush says she is holding a protest to make sure violent criminals are released as soon as possible to make room for pro-police Americans.

Cori Bush Hires Mercenary Army To Arrest Anyone Who Doesn’t Want To Defund The Police | The Babylon Bee

Americans have been beaten in Afghanistan, a U.S. military official said Saturday.

A day after he said the military was aware of reports that Americans were beaten by Taliban terrorists, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said that “we know of a small number of cases where some Americans … have been harassed, and in some cases, beaten.”

“We don’t believe it’s a very large number, and most Americans who have their credentials with them are being allowed through the Taliban checkpoints,” he added.

The stunning admission came as the U.S. Embassy warned Americans against traveling to the U.S.-held airport in Kabul, where thousands of people are trying to enter to escape the country before American troops leave.

The United States is openly working with the Taliban to facilitate the evacuation, and Taliban militants control all of the ground around the exterior of the airport.

President Joe Biden said Friday that the United States was in “constant communication” with the Taliban, which is designated as a terrorist group by a number of countries.

The U.S. military has largely chosen not to conduct operations outside the airport, leaving Americans and Afghans to fend for themselves until they reach the facility.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told members of Congress in a call Friday that violence against Americans “is unacceptable,” Kirby said Saturday.

And U.S. commanders have conveyed the same message to Taliban commanders, he said.

“We’ve been in touch with the Taliban for quite some time, I think, over the course of the last week. And we’ve certainly made our concerns known,” Kirby said.

According to the military spokesman, word had not filtered down from Taliban leadership to every individual militant.

“What appears to be happening is that not every Taliban fighter either got the word or decided to obey the word,” he said.

The revelation came as a growing number of Republicans called for more decisive action from the Biden administration, which both parties have said has botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“Instead of going out there and making the Taliban our hostages, right now America is on day seven, day eight of the Afghanistan hostage crisis for us,” Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), a military veteran, said on Fox News on Friday. “And until we flip that scenario back to where it was prior to this, we can’t safely get our people out.”

“Biden’s failed Afghanistan withdrawal has put thousands of American lives in danger behind enemy lines,” added Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who is trying to impeach Biden, on Twitter on Saturday. “The Taliban is beating Americans but Biden is still relying on & trusting them. He is incompetent, unhinged, incoherent & unfit.”

Military officials said the focus remains on keeping the airport secure and evacuating people who can make it there.

“The military mission that we are executing now is a noncombatant evacuation operation,” Kirby said. “We’re fighting against both time and space. That’s the race that we’re in right now,” he added later.

Pentagon Confirms Americans Have Been Beaten in Afghanistan (theepochtimes.com)

As the storming of the Capitol building on January 6th was still unfolding a despicable gremlin of a woman at The New York Times, Sheera Frenkel, was already crafting a totally baseless lie along with her demonic friends at the ADL and Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg about the event being “planned” on both Gab and Parler.

“We need to ascertain right here, right now, whether this specific platform was knowingly facilitating an attack on our nation’s capital, literally a terror act against the seat of our government,” said the ADL’s Greenblatt, who noted that other platforms should also be investigated over the insurrection attempt but he says special attention needs to be trained on Gab.

Source

The ADL also went as far as demanding the DOJ investigate both myself individually and Gab as a whole for “intentionally aided or abetted individuals who carried out the January 6 attack on the nation’s Capitol.”

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of the largest social network on the internet that happens to have a specific feature for organizing and planning events, also deflected the blame on Gab and Parler. “Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has sought to deflect blame, noting the role of smaller, right-leaning services such as Parler and Gab.”

It has been widely reported, even by mainstream media outlets, that if the event was planned and organized anywhere it was most certainly done on her platform, Facebook.

Today the FBI is exposing the mountain of lies built up by Frenkel, Greenblatt, and Sandberg (I can’t help noticing a trend here!)

The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.

“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”

Source

The defamatory lies of the New York Times, the ADL, and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had dire consequences for Parler, which was immediately removed from App Stores and hosting providers and has never fully recovered despite caving to Apple’s demands for censorship.

These defamatory lies also impacted Gab’s public image. The lie is still featured prominently on Gab’s Wikipedia page and is falsely cited by other reporters in stories about Gab to this day.

We demand a full and immediate retraction of this story by the New York Times and thank God for shining the light of truth on this fake news story.

Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
Jesus is King

NYT Editorial Team,

Gab AI Inc. hereby demands retraction of the false and defamatory reporting published by the New York Times’ Sheera Frenkel on January 6th, 2021 claiming without providing any evidence whatsoever that the storming of the Capitol was organized on our platform.

Today it has been reported that the FBI found scant evidence that the event was organized at all, let alone on Gab.

Gab is not a lawless platform and proactively cultivates good working relationships with U.S. and international law enforcement. If we were made aware of an illegal plot taking place on our hardware, we would have removed it. This stands in sharp contrast to platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which for years have harbored international terrorist organizations like the Taliban – something your paper has never reported on or taken to task to the extent you took us to task for content which appeared on our platform in the aftermath of Jan. 6th and other offensive but legal content that has appeared on our platform from time to time.

We quote from Reuters: “The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.”

In light of this reporting vindicating Gab’s innocence in this matter, we are demanding a full retraction of the defamatory reporting published by The New York Times. Ms. Frenkel’s piece, which alleged that “[t]he storming of Capitol Hill was organized on social media” and made extensive reference to posts on Gab that discussed the event (as indeed most of the Internet did on that day) without providing any evidence that the event was in fact organized by those same commenters, was presented as fact, not opinion.

This statement of fact was not only false, it was recklessly and maliciously false. FBI officials’ own statements on the matter, reported today, prove it was false.

Our rights in this matter are fully and expressly reserved. Please be guided accordingly.

Gab Legal

The New York Times and ADL Lies Exposed By The FBI – Gab News

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is partnered with a self-described “socialist” internet foundation run by the branch of the Chinese Communist Party spearheading its digital campaign to censor factual narratives and push fraudulent information about COVID-19.

The two foundations inked a memorandum of understanding in 2015, pledging cooperation in areas including “public health”:

According to the cooperation memorandum of understanding, the two parties will rely on new technologies such as the Internet to promote pragmatic cooperation in the fields of charity, public health, and international development, and work together to improve the quality of life of the poor and promote poverty reduction in developing countries.The China Internet Development Foundation (CIDF) operates under the Chinese Communist Party’s Ministry of Civil Affairs and is managed by the Cyberspace Administration of China.Given its close relationship to the Chinese Communist Party, CIDF’s charter pledges to “adhere to the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.”

“Consciously maintain a high degree of consistency with the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core in ideological and political actions, and earnestly fulfill the historical mission of building a network power to promote the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” are among the foundation’s other objectives.

“The Foundation adheres to the overall leadership of the Communist Party of China and, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution of the Communist Party of China, establishes an organization of the Communist Party of China, carries out party activities, and provides necessary conditions for the activities of the party organization,” the group’s charter adds.

The CIDF also openly admits to “practicing the core values of socialism.”

CIDF’s oversight body, the Cyberspace Administration of China, also played a critical role in deploying Chinese bot armies on social media platforms to spread propaganda about the origins and severity of COVID-19.

In addition to controlling thousand-person legions online, the body was also responsible for dictating pro-government editorial lines of Chinese state-run media outlets regarding COVID-19 stories.

“All Cyberspace Administration bureaus must pay heightened attention to online opinion, and resolutely control anything that seriously damages party and government credibility and attacks the political system,” reveals a government memo obtained by ProPublica.

Gates Foundation Partnered With ‘Socialist’ Internet Group Running China’s COVID-19 Propaganda Operation. – The National Pulse

State health departments are using the Chinese Communist Party-linked social media platform TikTok to encourage children as young as 12 to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

In West Michigan, Kalamazoo County’s Health and Community Services Department is specifically using the app to “better reach people ages 12 to 29 years old.”

Lyndi Warner, public information officer for the department, reveals the platform is being used to target the young demographic: “When we look at who’s being vaccinated and where are we wanting to make those strides… the 12- to 29-year-old age group is where we really wanted to try and focus in on.”

“We are seeing these videos do really well so far. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well that they’re doing,” she added.

The Alabama Department of Health (ADH) also sponsored a contest on TikTok for individuals aged 13 to 29 to “encourage vaccination against COVID-19 before the beginning of the school year.”

“To participate, contestants are to submit a TikTok video showing themselves getting vaccinated or include a creative message explaining, “This is why I got vaccinated.” All videos must tag @alcovidvaccine, #getvaccinatedAL and #ADPH. […] A panel of judges composed of advertising professionals and ADPH personnel will select four winners who will each be awarded a $250 Visa gift card,” a contest summary continues.

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance employs former Chinese Communist Party officials, including individuals with military ties, to executive roles and grants party members preferential treatment in hiring processes. Its founder has also pledged to use ByteDance to “promote socialist core values” and devotion to the Chinese.

The app’s threat to national security and data privacy prompted the Trump administration to attempt to ban the platform from operating in the U.S. – an effort recently quashed by the Biden White House.

Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick – who played a critical role in shaping the Vatican’s controversial relationship with the Chinese Communist Party – has repeatedly headlined events sponsored by CEFC China Energy, a Chinese government-led influence group that has counted Hunter Biden as its Managing Director, The National Pulse can reveal.

The former Cardinal, who was defrocked due to sexual abuse, spoke at several events hosted by the group, with excerpts of his remarks earning publication in CEFC China Energy’s journal, “China Eye.” McCarrick has asserted commonalities exist between Communist and Catholic doctrine along with drawing positive parallels between Xi Jinping and the Pope.

McCarrick also served as an envoy for negotiations between the Chinese Communist Party and the Vatican over establishing formal ties, with many criticizing the final deal as a “slap in the face” to China’s Catholics. The establishment of formal relations between the two entities follow McCarrick’s robust involvement with CEFC China Energy.

CEFC’s Deputy Chairman and Secretary-General is Dr. Patrick Ho, dubbed “the f**king spy chief of China” in exclusive audio released by The National Pulse from Hunter Biden’s “Hard Drive from Hell.”

Ho appears multiple times in the e-mails as the pair inked million-dollar contracts, earning Hunter Biden the position of “Managing Director” at CEFC by 2018. The Chinese Communist Party operative was later indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for “schemes to bribe top officials for business advantages,” and used the committee “to conceal his criminal schemes, according to the Department of Justice.

McCarrick spoke at several CEFC events including the New York Forum on World Civilizations in 2012 and Sino-US Colloquium on Core Values and World Order in 2013.

A 2014 edition of CEFC’s “China Eye” Journal contains an excerpt from McCarrick’s speech from 2013. “It is a special pleasure to be back with the China Energy Fund,” he began his speech before praising the “brilliant” Patrick Ho. “I do not have the brilliance or the learning to match Patrick, but I’m just going to take out a couple of things that I think would be important and perhaps stimulating as we begin our discussion today,” he added.

EXC: Ex-Cardinal Negotiating Vatican-China Deals Attended Hunter Biden-Led Communist Party Influence Events, Deleted Webpages Reveal. (thenationalpulse.com)

Americans in Afghanistan were told Saturday not to go to the airport in Kabul to evacuate unless they receive a specific message to do so.

“Because of potential security threats outside the gates at the Kabul airport, we are advising U.S. citizens to avoid traveling to the airport and to avoid airport gates at this time unless you receive individual instructions from a U.S. government representative to do so,” the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan said in an alert.

The Pentagon declined to comment, referring The Epoch Times to the State Department. That agency did not respond to a request for comment.

Video footage from the exterior of the airport on Saturday showed crowds remaining outside the concrete, razor wire-topped walls being guarded by U.S. troops.

President Joe Biden told Americans in Washington on Friday that his administration had “no indication” that Americans weren’t able to get to the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.

“We’ve made an agreement with the Taliban. Thus far, they’ve allowed them to go through,” he said.

He later said he misunderstood the question and that Americans may be getting into trouble after being let through Taliban checkpoints.

But the Department of Defense, about an hour later, acknowledged being aware of reports that Taliban terrorists had been beating Americans in Afghanistan.

Thousands of Americans are estimated to remain in the country after the United States withdrew most troops and the Taliban pummeled Afghan forces.

The Taliban took over Kabul on Aug. 15.

Members of Congress from both parties have been critical of how the United States conducted the withdrawal, with many wondering why civilians weren’t evacuated before the military largely pulled out.

Now, Americans, Afghans, and others seeking to flee the country must brave the Taliban-held streets to reach the airport, with little to no help from troops from the United States or other nations, though some special forces have reportedly conducted targeted rescue missions by helicopter and U.S. troops went outside the airport to rescue 169 people.

Americans were encouraged to leave Afghanistan earlier this year and urged to do so as the Taliban rapidly gained ground this month.

Those who chose to stay have been receiving changing advice from U.S. officials regarding travel to the airport.

The U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan told Americans on Aug. 15 to shelter in place because of the unstable security situation there.

That directive remained active until Aug. 18, when Americans were told that U.S. government flights were departing from the airport but also informed that the government could not “ensure safe passage” to the facility.

A similar message was promoted on Thursday, with another warning.

“We are processing people at multiple gates. Due to large crowds and security concerns, gates may open or close without notice. Please use your best judgment and attempt to enter the airport at any gate that is open,” U.S. citizens were told.

US Tells Americans to Avoid Traveling to Kabul Airport Because of ‘Potential Security Threats’ (theepochtimes.com)

Illegal immigrants are crossing into the United States from Mexico in record-shattering numbers, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is ignoring a congressional request for information regarding where the government is relocating them, lawmakers say.

“On April 15, 2021, 34 Members of the House of Representatives sent a letter requesting important information regarding the destinations within the interior of our nation of the heavy illegal migration over our nation’s border,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) told DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in an Aug. 5 letter.

The letter was also addressed to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. The two departments are responsible for implementing President Joe Biden’s open border policies on immigration.

“As of the date of this letter, the response from [HHS] deferred to [DHS], and regrettably, DHS has not responded to the Congress’ letter,” Braun and Gohmert told Mayorkas and Becerra.

The lawmakers said the repeated requests for relocation information were made because “border crossings remain unsustainably high. In July, it was reported that attempted crossings at the U.S.–Mexico border remain at a historically high level not experienced in at least 21 years.

“In June, more than 188,829 individuals were taken into custody by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), including 15,018 unaccompanied children. This former figure represents an alarming 141 percent increase from January 2021. Like so many in our nation, we remain deeply concerned about this unlawful, manmade humanitarian and national crisis that is being facilitated on our southern border.”

In addition to Braun and Gohmert, the April and August letters were signed by Sens. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.).

Members of the House of Representatives who signed the letters include Reps. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.), Matthew Rosendale (R-Mont.), Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), Greg Steube (R-Fla.), Randy Weber (R-Texas), Ben Cline (R-Va.), Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), Bob Good (R-Va.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Chip Roy (R-Texas), Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Ted Budd (R-N.C.), Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Vicki Hartzler (R-Mo.), and Pete Sessions (R-Texas).

Representatives from DHS didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

The information sought by the lawmakers includes the following:

“The locations where illegal immigrants have been sent, transported, or provided ability or funding to travel to, or allowed to travel to by other funding including their own or private funding for all individuals who entered the U.S. without visas.

“For each named location, the total number of immigrants who have been sent, transported, or provided ability or funding to travel to, or allowed to travel to by other funding, including their own or private funding to such city.

“The number of immigrants tested for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the number of immigrants that tested positive for COVID-19, and [DHS’s] course of action to respond to immigrants that test positive for COVID-19.”

The signers noted that “this requested information is critical to understanding how the unabetted flow of illegal aliens over the Southern border affects all Americans in each of the 50 states.”

“It must be reiterated that members of the executive branch have a duty, and many have sworn an oath that would include the requirement to carry out the lawfully enacted legislation under the Constitution,” the letter reads.

“With an open border facilitating illegal entry into our nation and the manifold resulting criminalities, the executive branch is failing miserably in its duty.

“Your failure to provide this requested information over the past three months, an eminently reasonable amount of time, raises further concerns about the lack of transparency and your unwillingness to provide this important information to elected representatives of the people of this nation.”

Homeland Security Ignoring Congressional Requests for Info on Where Illegal Immigrants Are Being Sent (theepochtimes.com)

‘Highly unlikely’ Taliban will overrun Afghanistan, Biden said in July

When President Joe Biden defended his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by a September 11 deadline, the president told reporters in July that it remained “highly unlikely” the Taliban would take control of the country. 

“The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” Biden said. “The Afghan government and leadership has to come together. They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place … there’s not a conclusion that, in fact, they cannot defeat the Taliban.”

Biden’s forecast for the future of Afghanistan, however, has proven completely false. The Taliban has captured several of Afghanistan’s largest cities, and experts now believe the terrorist group will target the Afghan capital of Kabul in the coming weeks. The Biden administration scrambled to call in another 8,000 troops to the region in an effort to rescue both U.S. troops and civilians remaining in the country.

Biden’s Afghanistan Predictions Were All Wrong (freebeacon.com)

Fellow American:

Did you see the news? 

Joe Biden released 50,000 illegal immigrants into the United States without even giving them a court date. 

We don’t know how many are violent criminals, how many work for the drug cartels, or how many are infected with Covid-19. All we know is that the Left’s plan is working.

They don’t see the lawless humanitarian crisis on the border as the problem. To Democrats, the crisis is the solution. 

ONLY A CONSERVATIVE HOUSE CAN SEAL THE BORDER. CLICK HERE TO GIVE TO HOUSE FREEDOM FUND TODAY!

Democrats want chaos at the border so that they can sneak in as many illegals as possible, right under your nose. So far, more than 1 MILLION illegals have crossed the border since Joe Biden took office! 

Biden isn’t turning them back to Mexico. He’s letting them into our towns, without Covid tests or court dates, while telling American citizens we have to start wearing masks again!

What happened to our country? America belongs to the people who love her, and it’s time to take her back.

Support the House Freedom Fund today, and join the fight to win America back.

HFF is the only organization in the country exclusively committed to electing TRUE CONSERVATIVES to the U.S. House.
      
HFF only supports fighters – men and women like Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, and Lauren Boebert. These are leaders ready to take on the socialist Left, the establishment GOP, the Big Tech billionaires, and the mainstream media.

I know because HFF supports me, and that’s no small thing. I’ve learned that when conservatives truly fight the liberals, even many of the leaders in our own party will abandon them.

Electing more Republicans won’t change anything. Only electing conservatives can make the House great again. HFF is the Right’s secret weapon against the woke socialist Left.

As you know, under our Constitution, the House holds the power of the purse over the federal budget. If we nominate and elect enough conservatives next year, we can cut off Biden’s allowance:

❌ No more money to relocate illegal immigrants into our hometowns;
❌ No more money to poison our children with Critical Race Theory;
❌ No more money to get Big Tech to spy on American citizens;
❌ No more money for new mask mandates or school closures; and
❌ No more money to finance coronavirus experiments by Communist scientists in Chinese labs.

If Democrats won’t turn away illegal immigrants, then the American people have to turn away the Democrats.

Please join me in supporting HFF today!

Thank you for considering this urgent request and doing so much to help fight for America’s future.

Sincerely,

Marjorie Taylor Greene
U.S. Congresswoman (R-GA)

‘It was pretty obvious to me what was going to happen’ if Biden bucked military advice, Senate minority leader says

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said President Biden directly ignored the advice of military leaders during briefings on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

“I was in a number of these briefings over the last couple months, it was pretty obvious to me what was going to happen,” McConnell said Monday. “I know for a fact that the president’s military leaders argued against this decision. I think the president himself felt strongly about this and overruled his own military leaders to do it, and he owns it.”

McConnell slammed the Biden administration for its incompetent withdrawal of thousands of Americans and Afghans. Footage emerged Monday of havoc at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, that caused civilian casualties.

“Honestly, this administration looks to me like it couldn’t organize a two-car funeral,” McConnell said. “It is a sad day for the United States of America.”

President Biden responded Monday to critics of his withdrawal, saying he stands by his decision.

“We will continue to support the Afghan people,” Biden said. “The way to do it is not through endless military deployments, but diplomacy.”

McConnell: Biden Ignored Military’s Advice on Afghanistan (freebeacon.com)

The restraint crowd delivers America’s humiliation in Afghanistan

When the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft was founded in 2019, the mainstream media celebrated its emergence as a beacon of hope for a more restrained American foreign policy. Two years later, the humiliating failure wrought by the toxic mix of isolationism and anti-Americanism at the heart of the Quincy Institute is on full display.

Charles Koch, once pilloried for his conservative politics, was celebrated for a collaboration with George Soros that aimed to “bring an end to America’s age of endless wars and to reduce the nation’s military footprint around the world.”

While the left and right alike remain allergic to bipartisanship, the so-called transpartisanship of the Quincy Institute’s retrenchment remains very much in fashion in Washington. It can now claim full credit for the foreign policy debacle in Afghanistan.

The institution itself—and the White House—agrees. The Quincy Institute trumpeted its “success” in a Monday night email. “We knew that if we could bring the forces against endless war on the Left and the Right together, we could achieve the impossible,” the Quincy Institute wrote to supporters. White House chief of staff Ron Klain, for his part, retweeted the top Koch aide William Ruger’s wet kiss to Biden: In Ruger’s view, the president is “showing the requisite realist spine America needs at the moment.” Congratulations!

Quincy cheered President Joe Biden’s announcement in April that the United States would leave Afghanistan, sneering that that “the military high command’s never-ending urge to stick with a failed war was complemented by the inside-the-Beltway Blob’s doomsday scenarios and tired nostrums.”

The Soros network may have been pushing on an open door with Democrats, but Charles Koch gets the credit for doing the heavy lifting to provide intellectual cover for isolationists on the right.

That’s in part why President Donald Trump nominated Ruger, to serve as ambassador to Afghanistan in the last days of that administration. We opposed that nomination, but we now regret he wasn’t there this week to see the fruits of his labor.

This precipitous and calamitous withdrawal had “transpartisan” advocates. But the slogans, the white papers, the research and reports, and the veneer of professionalism and academic rigor used to justify the reckless policy came largely from Koch, Soros, and their army of “restrainers.”

A recent article from the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft blog posed a question that gets to the core of its naïve worldview:

What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?

Now they know the answer. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft has brought us the single most irresponsible bit of American statecraft in 50 years. This travesty—and all the death and destruction that will flow from it—is their first great achievement. Let’s hope it is also their last.

Responsible Statecraft Gets Its Moment (freebeacon.com)

The Forrest Gump of American decline?

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan is at the center of yet another U.S. foreign policy disaster. During the Obama administration, in his role as a top aide to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and then-vice president Joe Biden, the highly credentialed wunderkind presided over some of the most humiliating failures in the history of American foreign policy.

Sullivan’s extensive experience as an architect of American failure in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Iran, and Myanmar, plus the fact that White House press secretary Jen Psaki is mysteriously out of the office, made him a natural choice to defend the Biden administration’s handling of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.

“It is certainly the case [that] the speed with which cities fell was much greater than anyone anticipated,” Sullivan said Monday during an interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, who also asked about President Joe Biden’s assessment that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “highly unlikely” and “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States,” as there was in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.

Fact check: False. Kimberley Motley, an international human-rights attorney who has worked in Afghanistan for more than a decade, described the situation in the country as a “nightmare” that was “like Saigon on steroids.”

Sullivan was unable to muster a compelling response. “To be fair, the helicopter has been the mode of transport from our embassy to the airport for the last 20 years,” he said as the network rolled footage of Taliban militants streaming into Kabul.

Perhaps the 44-year-old Sullivan has grown weary of presiding over epic failures. Despite being considered one of the most brilliant foreign policy experts of his generation, Sullivan’s résumé is littered with embarrassing debacles, including both of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaigns. Afghanistan is merely the most recent example.

In 2011, as a top adviser to then-secretary Clinton, Sullivan helped orchestrate the “kinetic military action” in Libya. Even though the intervention resulted in the death of dictator Muammar Qaddafi, it is widely viewed as a failure. The U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was assassinated during the Benghazi terrorist attacks in 2012, and the country would eventually become a haven for Islamic State militants.

Less than a month before Stevens was killed, Sullivan was among the team of experts advising then-president Barack Obama on the escalating civil war in Syria. Obama warned Bashar al-Assad, the Russian-backed dictator, that the use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that would “change my calculus” regarding U.S. military action against the regime.

Assad crossed the red line on multiple occasions, and the United States responded by taking negligible action to deter the slaughter of civilians. Assad remained in power, Russia flexed its military muscle, and the Islamic State established a caliphate in northeast Syria, wreaking havoc in Iraq as well.

During an interview with the New Yorker in 2019, Sullivan said he considered it “a great regret of mine” that “we were not able to more effectively play a role in stopping hundreds of thousands of people from dying in Syria and millions and millions more losing their homes.”

By 2014, Obama’s failure to enforce his “red line” on chemical weapons in Syria had changed Vladimir Putin’s calculus regarding Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Once again, the United States took no significant action to deter Russian forces from destabilizing the country and annexing Crimea. The conflict would claim thousands of lives, including the 298 people aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down with a Russian-made missile over eastern Ukraine.

Less than a month after Biden was sworn in as president, the government of Myanmar was ousted in a military coup conducted by individuals responsible for the genocidal atrocities perpetrated against the country’s Rohingya population. Foreign Policy magazine called it “a failure of U.S. diplomacy orchestrated by some of [the Biden administration’s] own players nearly a decade ago.”

In other words, people like Jake Sullivan. In 2011, he was advising Clinton when she described meeting Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as an “inspiration” and touted the Obama administration’s efforts in the country as a diplomatic victory. The celebration was short-lived. Aung San Suu Kyi would go on to assume a senior role in the country’s government but would be widely condemned for her refusal to denounce the military’s campaign of violence against the Rohingya.

Sullivan, who played a key role in negotiating the failed Iran nuclear deal in 2015, is currently leading the Biden administration’s efforts to revive the controversial agreement. He will almost certainly have a major role in crafting the pathetic U.S. response to China’s inevitable invasion of Taiwan. He is the Forrest Gump of American decline, and one of the best rebuttals to the American system of meritocracy.

None of these policy failures will hurt Sullivan’s glowing reputation among members of the Liberal Élite. After all, his credentials are impeccable: Yale University (Phi Beta Kappa), Rhodes scholar, Yale Law School, Brookings Institution. He was a debate team champion and president of the student council in high school, where he was voted “most likely to succeed.” He clerked for Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer and worked as chief counsel for Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), where he was presumably traumatized by the abuse he suffered.

In any event, these colossal blunders will likely pale in comparison to what he will be able to accomplish as U.S. secretary of state in the Kamala Harris administration.

Jake Sullivan Presides Over Yet Another Foreign Policy Disaster (freebeacon.com)

Another widely peddled media hoax has been shot to pieces as Reuters reveals that the FBI has “scant evidence” of any plot or forward planning to overthrow the U.S. government on January 6th.

The news confirms The National Pulse’s reporting from January 11th, and raises questions about the government’s power grab and abuse of authority using January 6th as pretext.

Reuters reported Friday morning:

The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.

Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.

“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”

The report also vindicates President Trump and his team, and clarifies that there is “no evidence that the groups had serious plans,” to overthrow the U.S. government or commit anything like an actual “insurrection.”

The news blows apart the media’s narrative over the past eight months, and should refocus attention on the fact that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser refused support in advance of the peaceful Trump rally at the White House earlier that day.

President Trump is known to have cleared the way for 10,000 National Guard troops, in advance of the event, in order to keep the peace.

The FBI, meanwhile, has been targeting peaceful U.S. protesters who did not breach the Capitol on January 6th, including Alaska spa owners Paul and Marilyn Hueper. Many of those arrested in the wake of the riot are being held in D.C. prison without access to edible food, and sometime in solitary confinement.

The National Pulse declared the January 6th hoax dead in March of this year, after exhaustive investigations.

FBI “Finds Scant Evidence” of Jan 6 Insurrection Plot, Killing Off Another Anti-Trump Media Hoax. – The National Pulse

Obama’s super-spreader birthday bash may have ruined the fall party scene in our nation’s capital

Regular Americans love to complain about how the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected their lives. The plebs throw temper tantrums when members of the political élite flaunt their privilege by throwing massive parties and ignoring the rules they put in place for everyone else.

Regular Americans, who as we all know are to blame for ruining democracy and botching the Afghanistan withdrawal, should try to take a deep breath and put their so-called suffering in perspective. They shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the political élite are also suffering, and élite suffering is, for obvious reasons, even more tragic than regular suffering.

Politico reports that members of the Washington, D.C., élite are the victims of a grave injustice perpetrated by one of their own. Former president Barack Obama’s 60th birthday party in Martha’s Vineyard earlier this month was a confirmed super-spreader event. The “Obama variant” has wreaked havoc on the island’s only hospital system.

Thanks, Obama. His insatiable narcissism may have ruined the fall party scene in our nation’s capital. Democratic power players, shocked at the (relatively) critical tone of the media coverage surrounding the Martha’s Vineyard affair, are worried they might have to wait a few months before it’s socially acceptable to hang out with celebrities again:

The bashing of the bash is having a chilling effect on the D.C. party scene as (especially Democratic) pols and their staffers scramble to figure out when and where — or even if — they can party again.

“Who wants to throw a party right now when Obama hired a doctor to make sure everyone’s vaccinated and passes a Covid test and he still gets shamed for it?” said JOHN ARUNDEL, former associate publisher of Washington Life magazine and managing director of Perdicus Communications.

“I just think there’s a stigma to throwing any kind of event,” he added. “The optics of throwing the party or being at the party, it can be chilling.”

The results have been almost as tragic as the chaos unfolding at the Kabul airport. Democratic lobbyist Heather Podesta, for example, was planning to host a lavish gala in September at the French ambassador’s residence. She was forced to reschedule the event for November.

“What we could do six weeks ago, we can’t do now,” lamented Adrienne Elrod, a former Hillary Clinton adviser. “We have to be so cognizant because Republicans are looking for any reason to call us hypocrites or to call us liars.”

All is not lost, however, as a number of swanky gatherings are still on track. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.) will be honored at the March on Washington Film Festival on Sept. 30; hundreds are expected to attend. The Halycon Awards, a fundraising gala for a prominent liberal nonprofit organization, is scheduled for the following day.

A number of Democrats are refusing to let Obama’s bad vibes prevent them from raising money from left-wing billionaires. Kathy Hochul, who is (at least in theory) set to replace disgraced governor Andrew Cuomo (D., N.Y.), attended a series of high-dollar fundraisers in the Hamptons this weekend.

Journalists and lobbyists, meanwhile, are suffering an almost unfathomable hardship:

Some lobbyists are panicked about shrinking guest lists at fundraisers, especially with the infrastructure and reconciliation bills on the table. Fundraisers are prime opportunities to corner a member and press their interests.

Journalists might suffer too, with the Washington book party circuit in limbo. Lobbyist and D.C. hostess JULEANNA GLOVER was slated to have a book party at her Kalorama home in September for GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON’s new tome, but she’s going to make the call the week before on whether to have the party based on the CDC’s guidance.

Perspective: Stop Whining, Plebs, the DC Élite Are Also Suffering (freebeacon.com)

Gov exploits loophole to raise millions from outside Michigan for non-existent recall election

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (D.) condemned “out-of-state interests” for “pouring millions of dollars” into her state. That apparently doesn’t apply to her own campaign coffers, which prominent national Democrats have flooded with cash thanks to a campaign finance loophole.

Whitmer raised a staggering $8.6 million from Jan. 1 to July 20, a state record for a candidate in a non-election year. Nearly 44 percent of the money came from donors who gave more than Michigan’s $7,150 contribution limit, which Whitmer’s campaign says is allowed due to the multitude of recall petitions filed against the Democrat. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker (D.), oil executive Stacy Schusterman, and heiress and Colorado Democracy Alliance Cofounder Patricia Stryker, for example, combined to give Whitmer $750,000. None of the three billionaires live in Michigan.

Whitmer’s fundraising strategy did not stop the governor from railing against “out-of-state interests” for “pouring millions of dollars into Michigan to try and flip the governorship” in a Sunday campaign email. Whitmer—who has attacked Republicans for increasing campaign contribution limits and “infusing even more money into state politics”—also touted her campaign’s “grassroots” status. Michigan Freedom Fund executive director Tori Sachs said Whitmer “lied to the working class” through the fundraising plea.

“Whitmer’s ‘rules for thee, not for me’ playbook is so well known that Michiganders won’t be surprised by the governor’s dishonesty and hypocrisy,” Sachs said.

Whitmer did not return a request for comment.

Whitmer’s campaign has defended its decision to solicit unlimited contributions, pointing to a 1983 ruling from former Michigan secretary of state Richard Austin (D.), which established that a Michigan official can accept donations beyond the legal limit if a recall against the official is “actively being sought.” But the scheme has still attracted pushback from conservative groups. 

A July complaint from the Michigan Freedom Fund argues Whitmer is not facing an “active” recall, as the most recent petition drive to oust the Democrat approved by the Board of State Canvassers expired in late April. Whitmer received three contributions of $250,000 or more in the ensuing weeks. In addition, three former Michigan governors who faced recall efforts—Republicans Rick Snyder and John Engler and Democrat Jennifer Granholm—did not exploit the situation to accept excess campaign cash.

In addition to Pritzker, Schusterman, and Stryker, Whitmer received a combined $260,000 from Wrigley chewing gum heir Jim Offield, Democratic megadonor Karla Jurvetson, and the governor’s father, Richard Whitmer. Had Whitmer refused to accept contributions over $7,150, she would have raised just $5.9 million instead of $8.6 million, according to Michigan Campaign Finance Network executive director Simon Schuster. 

Whitmer has faced dozens of recall campaigns, most of which came in response to the Democrat’s far-reaching coronavirus restrictions. None of the efforts, however, have advanced past the petition signature collection phase. Whitmer may need to return the excess contributions “if there’s ultimately no recall election,” former Michigan Democratic Party chair Mark Brewer told Bridge Michigan. 

“This is not money that she’s going to be able to use next year in the general election,” Brewer added.

Whitmer took office in January 2019 after she defeated her GOP opponent, former state attorney general Bill Schuette, by 10 points. She is set to run for reelection in 2022.

Gretchen Whitmer Hates ‘Out-of-State Interest’ Money, Unless It’s Spent To Help Her (freebeacon.com)

Fellow Conservative:

We were right all along. It is becoming more and more apparent that Communist China directly caused COVID and that liberals – from the World Health Organization to the United Nations, to Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer – aren’t going to do anything about it.

Joe Biden is terrified of angering Communist China.

Millions are dead, the American economy in shambles and all of it can be tied back to Communist China. Joe Biden’s only response is capitulation and shaming anyone who dares to tell the truth.

Remember all the times Republicans – President Trump especially – were mocked for saying that China caused COVID-19? Remember all the times last year when we fought to close our borders to Chinese travelers, but Joe Biden and his friends on the left mocked us and called this common-sense move racist?

If they won’t do anything, then it is up to us. I am working overtime to expose the truth, save lives, do my part to take back the U.S. Senate for the Republican Party, and I need you to help me in this fight.

The outcome could decide the direction of our nation for generations and our ability to hold China accountable for harming the world.

I have been saying this for months, here is a clip of me on Fox News– if you aren’t angry after watching this, then you aren’t paying attention.

Multiple issues are being covered up:
• The “gain of function” research being conducted on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology;
• Big Tech’s censoring of the evidence for the lab-leak theory during last year’s election campaign;
• The three Wuhan scientists who got seriously ill in late 2019;
• The APPALING conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
• China no longer holding its Military Games in Wuhan.
• The bid for new repairs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that are going unquestioned…until now.

It is disgusting to see such weakness in the Oval Office. But, if we don’t take back the Senate to add some balance and strength to our government, I don’t know what will happen.

Please, your donation of $1,000, $500, $250, $100, even just $50 to do your part to take back the Senate could make a HUGE difference.

Republicans are fighting to hold China accountable for the lives it has destroyed. Every day, every hour, we cannot stop working to protect our families and the nation I love and served in the U.S. Navy to protect.

China must be held accountable. With your help, I will continue the fight to protect our great country. Please stand with me today.

For our children,

Rick Scott
U.S. Senator, Florida

The Space Force officer who was removed from his command post for condemning Marxism and critical race theory is leaving the military.

Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” that his last day in the service will be Sept. 1.

“I wrote a letter to then-Acting Secretary of the Air Force explaining certain circumstances, which I don’t plan to make public, but also requesting an early retirement, and a separation honorably from the service,” he said. “And they’ve denied me an early retirement, but agreed that they would separate me. And so my family and I have decided that that’s the best course of action for us right now, given the circumstances.”

“I believe I’m able to continue serving my country outside of the service and out of uniform, perhaps in a better way than I was able to, given the circumstances, in uniform at the moment.”

Lohmeier plans to accept public speaking engagements and offer consulting services.

He’s received a slew of invitations to various events and conferences in recent months.

Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Operations Command commander, relieved Lohmeier of his command of a squadron in May “due to loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead,” the Space Force said at the time.

Whiting made the move because of remarks Lohmeier made on a podcast. He also ordered an investigation into whether the comments constituted prohibited partisan political activity.

Lohmeier published a book warning about the spread of Marxism and critical race theory in the military and was on the podcast promoting the book.

During the appearance, Lohmeier claimed that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was promoting “diversity, inclusion, and equity,” which he and others have said are “rooted in critical race theory, which is rooted in Marxism.”

The Air Force Inspector General’s Office later took over the investigation.

Multiple members of Congress spoke out against what happened, including Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Based on the information the committee has received so far and what’s been reported in the press, I am concerned,” Inhofe said at the time. “Members of our military should not only be able to speak out against Marxism, but they should be encouraged to do so—as long as they follow the rules and laws already in place. Marxism is an ideology that goes against everything this country stands for, and it belongs, as Ronald Reagan said famously, ‘on the ash-heap of history.’”

Lohmeier told The Epoch Times that neither his book nor the remarks were politically partisan.

“It’s not politically partisan to expose Marxist ideology where it exists and to talk about critical race theory; that should be something we’re unitedly standing against,” he said.

He also said he attempted before writing the book to utilize internal mechanisms that let service members lodge complaints, but to no avail.

The Space Force and the Air Force didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Exclusive: Space Force Officer, Punished After Denouncing Marxism, to Leave Military (theepochtimes.com)

A Spanish-language flyer by the Red Cross provides detailed routes to the US southern border, shelter locations, and instructions on how to jump off a moving train safely

UVALDE, Texas—Rancher John Sewell recently picked up a pamphlet that had fallen from the backpack of an illegal immigrant who was trespassing on his property near Uvalde, Texas—about 50 miles from the U.S.–Mexico border.

On one side is a map that details transport routes from Panama to the United States. It pinpoints in great detail where migrants can find shelter or get medical help along the way. The other side is full of useful information, in Spanish, including how to more safely travel through forests and jungles, find shelter, get medical help, and deal with immigration authorities.

It was published by the Red Cross and is titled “Messages of Self-Help for Migrants.”

The pamphlet crosses a line beyond providing life-saving information to facilitating illegal immigration, according to Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.

“It’s practically a road map or a TripTech for an illegal migrant,” she told The Epoch Times. “It’s one thing to give out water to migrants. It’s quite another thing to help them migrate illegally—and breach the sovereignty of a border.”

The pamphlet includes advice such as that “it’s always safer to travel in a group, especially for women,” and to stay in contact with relatives and friends, “especially before crossing the border.”

It warns against getting on or off a train when it’s moving or wet, but then advises: “If you do get off a train when it’s moving, keep running so that others don’t fall on top of you,” and “Try not to get on a train if you haven’t eaten or rested. You may fall off if you are sleepy.”

It goes on to say: “Don’t hide in vehicles or in small places where you might suffocate, drown, or get sick. Be sure you have enough space to breathe.”

In Uvalde, where Sewell obtained the pamphlet, Border Patrol has seen a 911 percent increase this year in stowaway illegal aliens on freight trains traveling from the border to San Antonio.

On Aug. 13, on one train inspected by Border Patrol, agents found 20 illegal aliens hiding in the beds of new pickup trucks being hauled in two different train cars. Several of the aliens had been apprehended the previous day by the same agent at the same location. All were single males from Mexico and Honduras.

The map also highlights Red Cross shelters in Mexico and other places that are run by religious organizations, such as the Good Samaritan House in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Catholic Charities in Tucson, Arizona.

Vaughan said that, rather than being a “benign underground railroad-type of exercise,” the pamphlet is “enticing criminal behavior that is also very, very dangerous and illegal.”

She said the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations should be telling migrants not to come. She said most illegal immigrants entering the United States don’t meet the criteria for asylum and won’t be granted asylum status by an immigration judge. Many Central Americans, the largest population of illegal immigrants, don’t end up claiming asylum once they’re in the United States, and of those who do, less than 15 percent are granted relief.

A spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said the organization doesn’t prevent or encourage migration.

“As an impartial, neutral and independent organization, our actions are focused on addressing the humanitarian needs of migrants to ensure they are treated with dignity, both in their countries of origin, transit and destination, and regardless of their immigration status,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email.

The ICRC didn’t respond to a question asking where it makes the pamphlets available, but the Red Cross logos from seven countries are printed on the flyer, including the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama.

The spokesperson said the organization provides humanitarian assistance at key points along the route.

“We also inform them of risks they’re undertaking while using the migration route,” the spokesperson said.

“It is essential to prevent the loss of lives and to promote a humanitarian approach. Addressing the needs of this vulnerable population is a shared responsibility, of the authorities in the countries of origin, transit and destination, and of the international community.”

The Geneva-based ICRC operated in 100 countries in 2019 and spent more than $2 billion, according to its latest annual report. It is funded mainly by voluntary donations from governments, and national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, according to its website.

Vaughan said the United States should investigate how the flyer came to be published and with whose funding.

“They should be helping people in the countries where the migrants live, not aid and abet this illegal migration that is so dangerous and has created so many problems for all of the countries where it occurs,” she said.

Red Cross Pamphlet Facilitates Illegal Immigration, Says Expert (theepochtimes.com)

‘Squad’ member collected rent as she vilified landlords

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) collected up to $50,000 in rent payments last year, even as she publicly criticized landlords and supported an eviction moratorium that has hurt other small landlords.

Tlaib—who in December stressed the need to protect Americans from “landlords and bill collectors in the midst of a pandemic”—disclosed in an annual financial statement this month that she took in between $15,000 and $50,000 in rent on a Detroit property.

Tlaib is not the only “Squad” member who has raked in thousands of dollars as a landlord. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.) collected up to $15,000 in rental income in both 2019 and 2020 through a Boston property she owns, her financial disclosures show. Like Tlaib, Pressley slammed landlords for collecting rent during the pandemic, calling the issue “literally a matter of life and death.”

While Tlaib collected rent from her tenants, other small landlords in the United States have not been so lucky. Numerous reports have detailed small landlords’ struggles to make ends meet amid the eviction moratorium, which Tlaib has supported since early last year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention implemented a ban on evictions last September. The Biden administration extended the eviction freeze through October of this year.

Tlaib, Pressley, and other “Squad” members introduced legislation to cancel rent and mortgage payments. The bill would require the federal government to reimburse landlords for lost rent during the pandemic, allowing Tlaib and Pressley to recoup any potential losses.

“Cancelling rent and mortgage payments for the duration of the COVID-19 virus pandemic would relieve financial pressure, allow residents to stay home from work without the added concern of losing their housing and limit the spread of the virus,” Tlaib said in March 2020.

Tlaib has at times portrayed landlords as preying on their renters.

“Always tons of agreement for tools of war and destroying families abroad, but never this much enthusiasm for protecting American families at home from landlords and bill collectors in the midst of a pandemic,” she tweeted in December.

Tlaib did not disclose the address for the rental property on her financial statement, though details from her filings and local real estate records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon suggest she purchased the property using a $118,600 loan in 2016. Two years later, Tlaib listed the property for $2,000 a month rent before lowering the asking price to $1,800. Assuming Tlaib has not changed the monthly price, she collected rent for at least eight months in 2020, meaning she received payments throughout the pandemic.

According to local real estate records, Tlaib refinanced the three-bedroom home as a multifamily investment property in April 2019. The designation requires the Democrat to maintain rent loss insurance.

Neither Tlaib nor Pressley returned requests for comment.

Rent Cancellation Advocate Rashida Tlaib Cleaned Up as Landlord During Pandemic (freebeacon.com)

My sources along with media reports have made it clear: Big Tech is offering their multi-billion-dollar platforms to terrorists.

Up until yesterday, the Taliban had been using Facebook’s WhatsApp to coordinate their terrorist activities in Afghanistan.

The rapid takeover of Afghanistan was made possible with the messaging tool WhatsApp, which is owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.

For years, I have been screaming about the presence of Islamic terrorists on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This isn’t a new phenomenon.

If you recall, CAIR, an Islamic terrorist organization even lobbied Twitter to remove my account.

As for Twitter, they’re allowing the Taliban to operate freely on their platform despite the group being sanctioned as a terrorist organization under U.S. Law.

Twitter acknowledged that they will continue to allow Taliban communication and coordination to take place on Twitter despite the fact that the Taliban is carrying out a murderous rampage in Afghanistan as I write this email to you.

As President Trump remains permanently banned over fears of “inciting violence”, an actual Islamic terrorist group is allowed to operate on Twitter!

This has to end!

Help fund my new lawsuit against Big Tech. Help me stop them.

The Taliban’s spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, is on Twitter with 321k followers and growing.

And thanks to Jack Dorsey and Twitter, the Taliban is quickly gaining support around the world.

A Twitter user named Mohammad Abbas from Pakistan tweeted:
 

Congratulations to the Taliban on their victory over Americans and against NATO. May Allah help the Taliban to run an ideal Islamic government in Afghanistan.

And as American troops are arriving to retake Kabul airport to safely evacuate people, Twitter is allowing coordination like this with Taliban leaders:
 

The tower of Kabul Airfield should not be taken over by the Americans. They should destroy “this system” after it arrives. – Taliban supporter to Zabihullah Mujahid
Facebook and Twitter are aiding and abetting terrorists!

Yet, here in the United States, we can’t even discuss COVID without censorship! We can’t share our conservative views without being banned! A sitting United States President was banned from Twitter, but Islamic terrorists are free to tweet.

This should be eye-opening to you – it was to me. And it has been for years.

This is no longer just about censorship.
 

Twitter is a national security threat, an argument I’ve been making for years.

Twitter is allowing terrorists to organize and coordinate the killing of American soldiers and innocent Afghans who are fleeing for their lives.

It’s happening as you read this email!

An administration that took national security seriously would have Twitter shut down by the morning – but we know that won’t happen under the Biden Regime.

So we’ll have to stop them ourselves, and the best immediate shot we have is forcing them to change through the courts . . . and that’s exactly what I’m doing.

The cost has been great to me. Every spare dime I have is going to fund my legal work and I need your help more than ever.

Chip in as much as you can if you can help.

Thanks so much for your support and please, help me keep fighting.

Respectfully,


Laura Loomer

P.S. Tomorrow I have a call with my attorneys to go over the final draft of my initial court filing. During that call, I expect to hear that my retainer has been depleted because this case is MASSIVE. Please give me a hand to keep going.

My Fellow American:

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been wrong time and time again during this COVID-19 Pandemic, and we need to stop allowing him to set public policy.

He was wrong about closing the schools.

He was wrong about mask mandates.

He was wrong about the origin of this disease.

He is wrong to support eviction moratoriums.

I am working to ensure our rights are never taken away like this again, and I need your help.

In the coming months, you will hear politicians explain away their unconstitutional lockdowns and mandates as “following the science.” Don’t let them get away with it.

They are scaredy-cats who abdicated their responsibility to lead our nation because they were afraid of being made fun of on Saturday Night Live or at the DC Cocktail parties.

I am sick of these cowards taking away our liberties and then throwing their hands up when we prove them wrong AGAIN.

I won’t forget, and we need to make sure that the rest of the nation doesn’t either. I am working with the Republican Liberty Caucus – and that’s why I am asking you to stand with me in support of their organization.

Put simply, the RLC is the conscience of the Republican Party – something we need now, more than ever. A group of freedom-loving individuals focused on ensuring no elected or appointed member of our government can trample on our Constitutional Rights.

Just as we need to rebuild our nation’s economy, we need to rebuild the Republican Party and those who represent us in government. That hard work begins right now, and with your support, it will be led by the Republican Liberty Caucus.

We seem to have forgotten the principles that make us great during the Pandemic. You, me, and the Republican Liberty Caucus are going to remind them.

Please, your donation of $45 or more could make all the difference as we seek to Take Back America.

If you believe in America, if you believe in the Republican Party, and if you believe in finding out the truth about COVID-19 and putting our economy back on track, then please donate today.

Thank you for your time. God Bless America.

Rand Paul
U.S. Senator, Kentucky

Rudy Giuliani was still the mayor the last time New York City saw so many people shot. By mid-August, 1,163 were shot in the Big Apple. That’s the most recorded by this time of the year since 2000, according to NYPD data.

The wave of violence started in May last year coinciding with the mass protests and rioting initiated after the killing of George Floyd, a black man, during an arrest in Minneapolis. High incidence of shootings has been plaguing the city ever since.

Last weekend alone, 35 people were shot, all non-fatally, The New York Post reported.

While the total number of more serious crimes has slightly declined compared to last year, shooting incidents are up nearly 11 percent. The data indicates more people are surviving the shootings as murder is up only 0.7 percent.

In 2020, more than 1,850 were shot, fatally and non-fatally. That’s more than double the year before.

Meanwhile, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) is down about 1,500 officers since 2019 due to a wave of retirements and resignations. Some officers and experts previously told The Epoch Times that people are leaving the department because of anti-police sentiments in the city as well as obstacles to the profession created by the city and state governments.

Last year, the state outlawed officers from using a knee on a suspect’s back or chest as a restraint technique during an arrest. Police officers and experts have criticized the law for criminalizing martial arts techniques used by police to safely subdue resisting subjects.

The city implemented new laws regarding bail that banned judges from requiring cash bail for most nonviolent and some lower-level violent crimes, resulting in criminals returning to the street after an arrest. Some officers called the policy demoralizing.

Less than two weeks ago, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared “a disaster emergency on gun violence,” calling for the targeting of crime hotspots, curbing the sale of illegal firearms, rebuilding trust between communities and local law enforcement, and other initiatives. Cuomo has since resigned.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, the frontrunner in the November mayoral election, is a former NYPD officer running partly on public safety platform.

New York City used to be notorious for high levels of violence and street crime, particularly during the crack epidemic in the 1980s. Shooting numbers dropped precipitously during the 1990s and continued a gradual decline, reaching historic lows of less than 1,000 people shot a year in 2017-2019.

NYC: 1,163 Shot so Far This Year, Two-Decade Record (theepochtimes.com)

The pending report from special counsel John Durham, who was tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s Trump–Russia probe, should be released to the public, Senate Republicans argued in a letter this week.

More than 40 Republican senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), signed a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking that Durham, a former U.S. attorney, be allowed to continue his investigation and that his report is released to the public.

There have been questions about whether Durham’s investigation will lack funding past the end of the federal government’s fiscal year on Sept. 30. He was tapped by then-Attorney General William Barr to investigate the FBI’s operations when it surveilled former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Barr elevated Durham to become special counsel in October 2020.

“The Special Counsel’s ongoing work is important to many Americans who were disturbed that government agents subverted lawful process to conduct inappropriate surveillance for political purposes,” the Republican senators’ letter reads. “The truth pursued by this investigation is necessary to ensure transparency in our intelligence agencies and restore faith in our civil liberties. Thus, it is essential that the Special Counsel’s ongoing review should be allowed to continue unimpeded and without undue limitations.”

The Republicans called on Garland to make a pledge to release the full report and allow Durham to investigate past September.

“We are over two years into the investigation of how the Obama–Biden FBI spied on an incoming president, and we still do not have answers. America’s national security apparatus was weaponized to take down President Trump, and the American people deserve to know how this occurred,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who is leading the effort, said in a statement.

In recent months, however, there have been scant reports about the progress of Durham’s investigation. According to an Aug. 13 report from The Wall Street Journal, Durham’s investigation is still active and is presenting evidence to a grand jury. The WSJ report cited anonymous sources.

If Durham presents evidence before a grand jury, it suggests that he’s considering more criminal charges beyond the case against former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to altering an email about former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. During the 2016 campaign, Page was placed under FBI surveillance in an operation that was later flagged in a December 2019 report (pdf) conducted by the Department of Justice’s inspector general, who found errors and omissions in how the agency operated.

The Department of Justice didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

44 Senate Republicans Demand John Durham Report Be Made Public (theepochtimes.com)

Officials at the U.S. State Department declined on Aug. 19 to say why Secretary of State Antony Blinken “paused” a special evacuation unit formed by his predecessor, even as the firestorm of reaction to the bungled Afghanistan withdrawal intensified.

In June, Blinken signed off on the department’s fiscal year 2022 budget justification request submitted to Congress that included a notation that, while $50.8 million was sought for the Crisis and Contingency Response (CCR) program, “the department has paused implementation pending a policy review.”

When asked by The Epoch Times “Why was [CCR] paused, is that still State’s intent, and is [CCR] being utilized now in the Kabul evacs,” the department spokesman declined to respond.

Instead, the spokesman repeated a statement previously provided to media inquiries, saying:

“It is important to note that not only would the proposed [CCR] not have introduced any new capabilities to the department, it was never formally established. Some administrative steps were taken before its establishment was paused, but the day-to-day operations of the team have not changed.

“Every requirement the department delivered on last year, and, since the proposed establishment of the bureau, can be delivered on today in the same manner if appropriate to do so.”

But interviews on Aug. 19 with former senior State Department officials indicate the CCR program had been up and functioning effectively for months when Blinken and his team took over operations following his Jan. 26 Senate confirmation.

A former official pointed to the State Department’s evacuation of U.S. citizens from Wuhan, China, at the outset of the pandemic caused by the CCP virus, which is also known as the novel coronavirus.

“This was the group of brave Americans that rescued more than 800 people from Wuhan in February 2020, when we knew little about the virulence of the virus and danger of that mission,” the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told The Epoch Times.

“These committed civil servants are heroes, and the American citizens and Afghans who helped in the anti-terrorism fight could use their expertise right now.”

Then-State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus described the Wuhan evacuation as “a joint effort by the Department of State, the CDC, HHS, the Department of Defense, and state and local authorities to bring home Americans in need. In total, we evacuated over 800 passengers from Wuhan.”

Throughout the pandemic, the State Department evacuated an estimated 100,000 U.S. citizens from locations around the world, the official said.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley described the present evacuation effort from Kabul as “likely the second-largest” such operation by the United States since more than 20,000 Americans were rescued during a destructive volcanic eruption in the Philippines in 1991.

The CCR was specifically authorized by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sept. 21, 2020, to be developed from the department’s existing OpMed program.

Congress was notified Oct. 13, 2020, about the new organization, and the official reorganization plan was approved Nov. 16, 2020. The official “standup” of CCR was ordered on Dec. 23, 2020.

Pompeo viewed the CCR as needed to upgrade the department’s ability to prevent a repeat of the Benghazi tragedy in Libya in 2012, when Islamic terrorists stormed a U.S. facility there, killing three security personnel and Ambassador Christopher Stevens before U.S. forces arrived on the scene.

As was often the case with new initiatives during President Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, the creation of CCR prompted opposition from among the department’s career ranks.

Diplopundit reported in October 2020 that many career employees “are said to be up in arms about the rapid formation of this new bureau—which happened in a span of just four months—with apparently no input from the field.”

Regarding the present confused situation in Afghanistan, another former senior official told The Epoch Times that “the French are doing armed runs into Kabul to get their people,” and that “they and the Brits will do that until they get everyone they want out and then they will pack up and go without telling us.”

As The Epoch Times has reported, Biden told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that U.S. officials estimate there are between 10,000 and 15,000 Americans in Afghanistan, and the “estimate we’re giving” is 50,000 to 65,000 Afghan allies, including family members.

“Americans should understand that we’re going to try to get it done before Aug. 31,” Biden said in the interview, his first one since the Taliban took over the country. The president said the U.S. military will attempt to evacuate all Americans out of the South Asian country by that date.

Earlier this week, a spokesman for the Taliban warned in a Sky News interview that U.S. forces need to withdraw from the country by Sept. 11, which is the date of the terrorist attacks that toppled the Twin Towers in New York 20 years ago.

State Department Mum on Why It Killed Pompeo’s Crisis Evacuation Unit (theepochtimes.com)

The thousands of prisoners freed by the Taliban in Afghanistan after the terrorist group took over the country pose a “serious concern to the security of the United States,” top Republicans in the House of Representatives warned national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Wednesday.

Prisoners freed from Pul-e-Charkhi prison and Bagram Air Base, among other lockups, are reported to include Taliban terrorists, senior Al-Qaeda operatives, and former Guantanamo Bay detainees.

“This development is found to be more troubling considering recent reports of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General [Mark] Milley’s observation that terror groups like Al-Qaeda could build up in Afghanistan much sooner than earlier intelligence estimates suggested. With the very real prospect that seasoned terrorist operatives now roam freely in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, we write to urgently request information on how the U.S. Government plans to mitigate threats to U.S. interests and the homeland,” the Republicans wrote to Sullivan.

They’re asking for detailed information on the prisoners, including whether the U.S. government is aware of any who were previously involved in plotting terror attacks against the United States.

“As the American people prepare to mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, we are soberly reminded of the dangers posed to the homeland by threats borne out of terror safe havens, like Afghanistan,” Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) and two other top Republicans said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Sullivan told reporters on Tuesday that the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan was presenting broad challenges.

“We will remain persistently vigilant against the terrorism threat in Afghanistan,” Sullivan said, asserting that the United States “has proven in other places that we can suppress terrorism without a permanent military presence on the ground.”

“We are going to have to deal with the potential threat of terrorism from Afghanistan going forward, just as we have to deal with potential threat of terrorism in dozens of countries, in multiple continents around the world,” he added.

Katko, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) also linked the threat to the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, where thousands of people are crossing illegally every day.

Border agents have encountered known or suspected terrorists from far-flung countries. The outgoing Border Patrol Chief said recently that “Unprecedented numbers of known or suspected terrorists have crossed the southern border in recent months.”

As part of their inquiry, the lawmakers want to know whether the intelligence community and U.S. immigration enforcement officials are sharing information related to known or suspected terrorists “seeking to exploit vulnerabilities along the southwest border.”

Katko is the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee. McCaul is the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Rogers is the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.

Prisoners Released by Taliban in Afghanistan Pose ‘Serious Concern’ to US Security, Republicans Warn (theepochtimes.com)