DOE awarded $200 million to Microvast Holdings, a lithium battery company that operates out of China
House Republicans are calling on the Biden administration to halt a Department of Energy program that awarded $200 million last fall to a China-based battery company, pointing to the fact that federal officials have failed to answer basic questions from Congress about the funding process.
Rep. Frank Lucas (R., Okla.), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, sent a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Wednesday, asking her to “immediately pause any further funding or expenditures” for the grant program, which is funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law spearheaded by President Joe Biden.
The letter comes amid mounting frustration from House Republicans, who say the DOE has stonewalled requests for information about any China-related grants, despite provisions in the infrastructure law that were intended to block funding from going to China’s battery sector. Republicans have warned that China, a dominant player in the solar and battery industries, could benefit financially from the Biden administration’s aggressive green energy agenda.
In October, the DOE awarded $200 million to Microvast Holdings, a lithium battery company that operates primarily out of China, the Washington Free Beacon first reported last month. The award is intended to finance a battery separator facility Microvast is building in Tennessee.
“DOE has yet to provide any response to the committee that explains the Department’s vetting process or demonstrates that sufficient guardrails are in place to ensure that companies that receive awards do not transfer funding or technology to China, or are not subject to undue influence by the [Chinese Communist Party],” Lucas wrote in his letter to the DOE.
Lucas requested that the department turn over any “documents and communications referring or relating to project awards” for Microvast and over a dozen other companies that received grants from DOE funded by the infrastructure law.
“DOE’s apparent lack of sufficient guardrails in place to prevent federal funds from ultimately benefiting the CCP raises serious concerns about the Department’s ability to protect U.S. taxpayer dollars from exploitation,” wrote Lucas.
While the DOE described Microvast as a “majority U.S.-owned company, traded on NASDAQ” and “headquartered in Stafford, Texas,” financial records show the company operates primarily out of China. Microvast told the Securities and Exchange Commission last year that the Chinese government “exerts substantial influence over the manner in which we must conduct our business activities and may intervene, at any time and with no notice.”
The DOE has defended the grant, telling the Free Beacon that Microvast’s proposed facility in Tennessee “will use U.S. sourced raw materials in the proposed facility and equipment manufactured within the U.S. or by U.S. allies.”
The funding will also ensure that Microvast “no longer needs to look to China to establish its manufacturing facilities,” the DOE told Fox News last month.
The House committee is asking DOE to turn over records related to the award by Feb. 7. Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, also requested DOE records related to the funding in December, telling the department that the grant could “undermine the United States’ position in its race against China for technological supremacy.”
What do we want? A total and complete shutdown of rich white liberals having children until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
When do we want it? Now.
Why do we want it? To protect our fellow Americans from violence at the hands of spoiled youths corrupted by extremist ideology.
For example: Linwood Kaine, the adult son of Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.), was arrested in May 2017—less than a year after his father lost the presidential election as Hillary Clinton’s running mate—for disrupting a pro-Trump rally in Minnesota by lighting fireworks inside the state Capitol.
Background: Riley Dowell, the 23-year-old “nonbinary” daughter/son of Rep. Katherine Clark (D., Mass.), was arrested in Boston over the weekend for allegedly assaulting a police officer and vandalizing public property by spray-painting “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards) on a historic landmark.
(Context: Clark, who has expressed support for the controversial “defund the police” movement, is the second-highest ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives. She described her child’s alleged domestic terrorism as “a very difficult time in the cycle of joy and pain in parenting.”)
The leading Democrat’s wayward offspring was arrested on the same day that hundreds of left-wing radicals rioted in Atlanta. “If you build it, we will burn it,” the masked hooligans chanted as they destroyed property and set fire to police cars.
Atlanta police arrested several individuals for engaging in domestic terrorism. The New York Postexamined their backgrounds, and found that nearly all of them are white children of privilege who traveled from out of state:
• Madeleine “Henri” Feola—trans activist from Happy Valley, Oregon (median income $132,000); graduate of Oberlin College (Lena Dunham’s alma mater)
• Ivan J. Ferguson—award-winning professional clarinetist who studied at the prestigious San Francisco Conservatory of Music
• Francis Carroll—trust fund kid from Kennebunkport, Maine (95% white, median income $82,000); the wealthy vacation enclave is home to the Bush family’s summer estate
• Emily Kathryn Murphy—radical activist involved with Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project; hails from Grosse Ile Township, Michigan (94% white, median income $114,000)
Bottom line: Rich white liberals, a demographic that includes most Democratic politicians and professional journalists, are a bunch of hysterical doomsayers who nod in agreement when Nikole Hannah-Jones denounces the United States as “one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world.”
According to them, the world is on the brink of destruction due to climate change, our democracy is on the brink of destruction due to white supremacists pushing “Jim Crow on steroids,” and expressing an opinion they don’t like is literally an act of violence. All cops are bastards. All men are pigs. All white people, including “white Hispanics” and black people concerned about crime, are irredeemable racists.
They might not actually believe the things they say, but they shouldn’t be surprised when others, including their own children, take these ideas seriously and act out accordingly. Because if you actually believe this shit, becoming a domestic terrorist and trying to “save the world” by any means necessary is a perfectly logical response.
Who said it: Sen. Jon Tester (D., Mont.), the so-called centrist Democrat who has voted 91 percent of the time with President Joe Biden’s agenda and opposed the confirmation of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Why it matters: Tester made the superlative claim on Monday as he introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the 2010 Citizens United decision, which he credits with having destroyed “democracy” by shielding “big money” corporate donors from scrutiny.
Context: The Supreme Court has handed down far worse decisions in its history. Citizens United is not even in the top five.
In the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Court upheld the legal basis for chattel slavery in the United States, ruling that an enslaved black man who had traveled to free territories had to be kept in bondage. The case catalyzed support for the abolition of slavery, eventually leading to the outbreak of the Civil War.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) affirmed racial segregation laws under the “separate but equal” doctrine, leading to the shameful era of Jim Crow laws in the South.
The High Court’s 1927 ruling in Buck v. Bell permitted the forced sterilization of the mentally infirm “for the protection and health of the state,” according to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who infamously declared that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
In 1944, the Court ruled in Korematsu v. United States that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (D.) internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was justified to protect the nation against foreign espionage efforts.
And in 1973, the Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that the Constitution protected a right to abortion. Both liberal and conservative legal scholars have long considered its reasoning to be shaky, and it fomented decades of acrimonious Court decisions around social issues until being overturned last year.
Analysis: Tester was aware that he was making a sweeping claim, noting in a Twitter video that the Supreme Court had its fair share of bad rulings. Even the president of End Citizens United, Tiffany Muller, made a more qualified statement Monday, calling the Court’s opinion “one of the worst decisions in modern history.”
Tester is also not immune to the allure of taking money from corporate interests. An Associated Press fact check found Tester received more cash from lobbying groups than any other U.S. senator during the 2018 election, including from big corporate banks like Goldman Sachs.
Democrats frequently accuse Republicans of seeking to divide the American people with exaggerated, extremist rhetoric. A careful Washington Free Beacon review of the facts shows that Tester was doing exactly that.
Before scoring coveted role in Biden’s Energy Department, Jigar Shah represented China’s largest solar companies
When China’s largest solar companies faced costly U.S. tariffs, they turned to industry veteran Jigar Shah to lobby on their behalf. Now, President Joe Biden is handing that same man hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to invest in green energy companies, prompting concern that the money could benefit Beijing.
Shah in late 2011 partnered with three Chinese solar giants to form the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy, a nonprofit that mounted an aggressive campaign to kill U.S. tariffs on Chinese solar panels. As the group’s president, Shah said evidence that his Chinese clients accepted illegal subsidies from Beijing was merely part of an “anti-China crusade.” He also argued that American consumers could not afford solar panels without cheap Chinese goods, stressing the need for the two nations to “work together to solve our planet’s energy and environmental crisis.”
Years later, China could again stand to benefit from Shah’s work. Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in March 2021 tapped Shah to run the department’s Loan Programs Office, which is expected to flood the China-dominated green energy industry with billions of taxpayer dollars in the coming months. Shah’s leading role in distributing that money—and the Biden administration’s history of supporting Beijing-backed companies—have China hawks concerned that Biden’s push to usher in a “clean energy economy” will ultimately benefit America’s top adversary.
Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, for example, highlighted one loan application Shah’s office is considering from Lithium Americas. The Canadian company—which plans to mine tens of thousands of tons of lithium from a site in northern Nevada—counts a Chinese mineral giant with ties to the Chinese Communist Party as its largest shareholder, the Washington Free Beacon reported in September. Still, at an industry conference three months later, Lithium Americas expressed confidence that it will secure a loan from Shah’s office to fund the mine, according to a conference attendee. For Pompeo, that possibility is a troubling one.
“It should concern all Americans that a Biden administration political appointee at the Department of Energy once had deep ties to CCP-backed firms,” Pompeo told the Free Beacon. “It’s no secret that the CCP wants to control America’s domestic rare earth mineral supply, and now the Biden administration might just give it to them along with American tax dollars. This is a serious threat to our national security.”
An Energy Department spokesperson said Shah is “working to deliver on President Biden’s goal to build clean energy technologies at commercial scale in the United States, restore supply chains, and strengthen domestic manufacturing.” The spokesperson did not return detailed questions on Shah’s time as Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy president.
As Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy president, Shah minimized the group’s work with Chinese solar companies. The coalition’s website, which is no longer live, claimed that the group represented “the largest companies in the U.S. solar industry” and worked to protect “the affordability of solar energy and the American workforce.” As part of that domestic-focused messaging, Shah’s group opted to name the U.S. subsidiaries of its three Chinese partners on its online member list, rather than naming the companies’ Chinese parents.
But those three companies—Wuxi-based Suntech Power, Changzhou-based Trina Solar, and Baoding-based Yingli—have close relationships with China’s government. The companies relied on “direct government support” to fund their operations, Reuters reported in 2013, and Suntech founder Shi Zhengrong in a 2010 speech credited two senior CCP officials with the company’s rise. “Suntech,” Shi said one year later, “is a seed sown by the Communist Party of the Wuxi government.” It’s unclear how much money Shah’s Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy took from the three Chinese companies.
Shah’s bid to sink the tariffs was ultimately unsuccessful—then-president Barack Obama’s Commerce Department announced them in early 2012, though at a lower level than expected. Still, Shah’s Chinese partners would go on to fight with federal regulators for years. In December 2022, for example, Biden’s Commerce Department found that Trina Solar illegally circumvented U.S. trade laws and failed to show its independence from the CCP. U.S. Customs and Border Protection in June also seized shipments of Trina Solar equipment over concerns that the equipment was made with slave labor, according to Reuters.
Shah is now attempting to revive the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, which was largely dormant under former president Donald Trump after the Obama administration faced criticism over failed loans to green energy companies that went bankrupt. When Shah joined the office in 2021, it had roughly $44 billion in its coffers. Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act, however, gave the office hundreds of billions of dollars, meaning Shah now has nearly $400 billion at his disposal. Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), who is set to serve on a new House select committee meant to counter the CCP, told the Free Beacon he expects “many” of those billions to go to “communist China.”
“Chairman Xi couldn’t have written a more pro-China tax and spend bill,” Banks said of the Inflation Reduction Act. “The Biden administration will always put our Chinese competitors ahead of American workers.”
Iran threatens to shutter vital Persian Gulf shipping lane
The State Department said on Tuesday that it is monitoring “Iran’s attempts to have a military presence in the Western Hemisphere,” putting the Biden administration in an increasingly difficult position as it balances anti-regime protests, Iranian military escalation, and collapsing diplomacy over a revamped nuclear deal.
A State Department spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon that it is tracking a recent announcement by the commander of Iran’s navy indicating that warships will establish a presence in the Panama Canal as soon as next month. Already, two Iranian warships—including one equipped with “anti-ship cruise missiles, torpedoes, and naval cannons”—were granted permission to dock in Brazil earlier this week, according to documents published by the Brazilian Navy.
“We are aware of these claims by Iran’s navy,” the State Department spokesman told the Free Beacon. “We continue to monitor Iran’s attempts to have a military presence in the Western Hemisphere.” The official would not preview any potential action the Biden administration may take in response, or answer questions about how it views Iran’s growing military presence in Latin America.
Iran’s increasing influence in Latin America poses a unique problem for the Biden administration as it navigates diplomacy in the region amid a growing number of dictatorships that view an alliance with Tehran as beneficial. Venezuela, for instance, recently inked a massive foreign policy agreement with the Iranian government that will see Tehran increasing its role in the country’s lucrative energy sector. Iranian vessels have more frequently voyaged into the Latin American region, and this month’s announcement by the Iranian Navy indicates the hardline regime is seeking to protect its interests with force.
Iran has posed a challenge for President Joe Biden since he entered office with the goal of negotiating a revamped version of the 2015nuclear deal. Since that time, Iran has increased its global terrorism operations, including those targeting American interests. Now, with anti-government protests gaining momentum, the Biden administration has refused to admit diplomatic defeat and continues to try to cajole the hardline regime into rejoining the nuclear pact, which will provide it with billions of dollars in cash windfalls and solidify its grip on power.
The latest military announcement marks a major escalation by Tehran’s war forces to establish a military threat in America’s backyard, with the help of anti-American dictatorships in Latin America. It also sets up a potential showdown with the Biden administration, which is already being pressured to take action.
Joseph Humire, a national security analyst who focuses on Latin American issues as executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society think tank, said that with Iranian war ships already docked in Brazil, the Biden administration has an opportunity to sanction Tehran’s Latin American networks.
“The Iranian warships ported in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, are about one to two weeks away or more from entering the Canal Zone, giving the Biden administration time to leverage and enforce U.S. sanctions,” Humire said. “Integrated deterrence, which is the defense posture of the Biden administration, requires ‘integration across the spectrum of conflict to prevent competitors from altering the status quo in ways that harm U.S. vital interests.’”
Iran, Humire explained, “is literally testing the waters for further provocations in the near future. This cannot be allowed. And our defense posture is designed to deal with this.”
The two Iranian warships are expected to depart Brazil on Jan. 30 and head to Venezuela before entering the Panama Canal around Feb. 7, when President Joe Biden will be delivering his State of the Union address, according to Humire.
Iranian rear admiral Shahram Irani, the commander of Iran’s navy, said in recent remarks that the placement of warships in the Panama Canal is part of an effort by Iran to “strengthen our maritime presence in international waters.” Irani indicated that Iran’s navy is prepared for the long voyage and that “there is no scientific barrier to grow in that field.”
Iran’s footprint in the region has steadily grown for decades, bolstered by the hardline regime’s alliance with Russia and China—which also have prioritized relations with Latin American countries they see as a counterweight to U.S. influence in the region. Iran has helped Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed resistance group, increase ties with regional drug cartels that smuggle weapons and arms across Latin America.
Amid this growing threat in America’s backyard, Iran also says that it could take steps to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane in the Persian Gulf that is frequently the site of scuffles between the U.S. military and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the country’s paramilitary fighting force.
The State Department spokesman told the Free Beacon that Iran’s parliament is considering a measure that would restrict European commercial movement through the shipping lane. This would mark a major deterioration in ties between Europe and Iran as the European Union’s own parliament debates whether it will designate the IRGC as a terror group.
“We are aware of this discussion among some members of Iran’s Majles,” the State Department spokesman said, referring to Iran’s parliament. The official would not preview any potential reaction by the United States if Iran follows through on this threat.
Mohammad Hassan Asfari, vice chairman of the Internal Affairs and Councils Commission in Iran’s parliament, said the decision to block the Strait of Hormuz is meant as payback for Europe’s tough line on the IRGC.
“We will definitely not remain silent either,” Asfari was quoted as saying earlier this week in Iran’s state-controlled press. “Closing the Strait of Hormuz is on the agenda of the parliament.”
“If the Europeans are going to treat our armed forces and official forces like this, we will also put other options on the table, including restricting the traffic of European commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz,” Asfari said.
Iranian leaders also said on Tuesday that they will soon unveil new sanctions on the European Union and United Kingdom. These measures are also meant as payback for efforts in Europe to crack down on Iran’s terrorism enterprise.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and her multimillionaire husband sold up to $3 million in shares of Google in recent weeks—just before the Biden Justice Department launched an antitrust probe of the tech giant.
Paul Pelosi sold 30,000 shares of Google from Dec. 20 to Dec. 28, according to a financial disclosure filing the former House speaker submitted to the House Ethics Committee. The Pelosis made an undisclosed profit from the investments, according to the filing.
The trade proved timely. On Monday, the Justice Department and attorneys general from eight states—including California—sued Google over its monopoly on the digital ad market. The lawsuit could force Google to break up its online ad business, which generated nearly $55 billion in revenue for the company in the most recent quarter. Google’s stock has dropped around 6 percent since the Justice Department announced the lawsuit.
The trades are the latest in a string of questionable transactions for Paul and Nancy.
They saved roughly $600,000 in June by selling shares of microchip maker Nvidia weeks before the U.S. government placed restrictions on the company’s business in China and Russia. The Pelosis have seen their fortune grow $140 million since 2008, thanks largely to Paul Pelosi’s stock trades, according to a Washington Free Beaconanalysis.
Pelosi’s stock market charades have sparked calls for tougher regulations on members of Congress cashing in on their positions of power.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) on Tuesday introduced the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act—the PELOSI Act—to prohibit members of Congress and their spouses from owning or trading individual stocks.
“For too long, politicians in Washington have taken advantage of the economic system they write the rules for, turning profits for themselves at the expense of the American people,” Hawley said. “As members of Congress, both Senators and Representatives are tasked with providing oversight of the same companies they invest in, yet they continually buy and sell stocks, outperforming the market time and again.”
Pelosi’s office did not return a request for comment.
Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations – mRNA Scientific Planner: “There is something irregular about the menstrual cycles. So, people will have to investigate that down the line.”
Walker: “The [COVID] vaccine shouldn’t be interfering with that [menstrual cycles]. So, we don’t really know.”
Walker: “I hope we don’t find out that somehow this mRNA lingers in the body and like — because it has to be affecting something hormonal to impact menstrual cycles.”
Walker: “I hope we don’t discover something really bad down the line.”
Walker: “If something were to happen downstream and it was, like, really bad? I mean, the scale of that scandal would be enormous.”
[NEW YORK – Feb. 2, 2023] Project Veritas released a new video today featuring Pfizer Director, Jordon Trishton Walker, where he shares his concern about the COVID vaccine and its potential negative effects on women’s reproductive health.
In a conversation with an undercover journalist, Walker admits that something is off when he analyzes the impact of the COVID vaccine.
“There is something irregular about the menstrual cycles. So, people will have to investigate that down the line,” Walker said.
“The [COVID] vaccine shouldn’t be interfering with that [menstrual cycles]. So, we don’t really know,” he said.
The Pfizer Director appears to be worried that over time, more information may become known about the COVID vaccine’s potential side effects.
“I hope we don’t find out that somehow this mRNA lingers in the body and like — because it has to be affecting something hormonal to impact menstrual cycles,” he said.
“I hope we don’t discover something really bad down the line…If something were to happen downstream and it was, like, really bad? I mean, the scale of that scandal would be enormous.”
LIKE 2015, THE NUMBERS ARE STAGGERING. ONLY THIS TIME, THE HEADLINES AREN’T THERE.
In 2022 around 330,000 people crossed into Europe illegally, according to Frontex, the European Union’s border agency – the largest number since the Migrant Crisis of 2015-16 and a 64 percent increase on 2021. The figures do not include the 13 million refugees who fled Ukraine and entered the EU due to the conflict with Russia, ten million of whom have subsequently returned home.
This is the second year running with a steep increase in the number of migrants crossing into Europe, after a significant lull during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, with most of them now entering the European Union (EU) through the western Balkans. Almost 50 percent were from Syria, Afghanistan, and Tunisia, with the number of Syrians doubling to almost 95,000.
As during the now infamous migrant crisis of 2015/16, the vast majority of migrants were young men. Fewer than 10 percent of all the migrants were women, and the number of reported minors was also lower than 10 percent.
Of the total 300,000+ people, just over 71,000, or 37 percent, attempted to leave the EU for the United Kingdom, but not all were successful. Afghans, Iraqis, and Albanians were the most likely to attempt to leave the EU for the UK.
Although the recorded number of migrants is huge, it is also likely to be a significant underestimate. Whether or not the current wave is as big as the record numbers from half a decade ago will become clearer with time. During the first year of the migrant crisis, 1.3 million people entered Europe, the highest annual figure since the end of World War II. Most of the migrants then were Syrians, fleeing the country’s civil war, but there were also significant numbers of Afghans, Iraqis, and Africans.
The 2015 crisis was encouraged in part by the open-door policy of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who refused to put any kind of limit on the number of migrants Germany would accept, famously declaring “wir schaffen das” (“we can handle this”). The crisis deepened existing social, economic and political fractures across the continent, as well as creating new divides between pro-immigration countries, like Germany, and anti-immigration “conservative” countries like Poland and Hungary. The rise of populism within Europe, including such notable events as Brexit, is generally seen as a direct consequence of the events of the Migrant Crisis.
READ MORE BY RAW EGG NATIONALIST.
At the Highest Levels Since 2016.
The data also reveals a clear pattern in the routes of entry. The West African and Western Mediterranean routes have become significantly less popular, by 31 percent and 21 percent respectively, while Central and Eastern routes are now being favored by the vast majority of migrants.
The Central Mediterranean route, via Italy and its islands, remains popular, with about a third of all migrants choosing it, an increase of 51 percent on 2021. But the routes to the east, especially the Western Balkan route, through non-EU countries like Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, have exploded in popularity.
The Western Balkan route is now the most popular by far, with 145,000 reported entries, an increase of 136 percent over last year. This was also the most popular route in 2015-16.
Before 2015, most crossings were from Libya to Italy, as border controls collapsed in Libya due to the Second Libyan Civil War. Most of the migrants who crossed from Libya to Italy before 2015 were sub-Saharan Africans.
It’s almost certain that the figures from Frontex are an underestimate, perhaps a significant underestimate, of the total number of migrants entering the EU. The Hungarian government, for instance, announced that over 250,000 illegal crossings were thwarted along the country’s borders in 2022, more than double the 122,000 recorded in 2021.
Figures for asylum applications from within the EU may give a more accurate idea of the state of migration. Nearly 800,000 people applied for asylum from within the EU between January and October last year, according to EU Agency for Asylum chief Nina Gregori. That’s a 54 percent increase compared to the previous year, but still less than the highs experienced during the Migrant Crisis. Most asylum applicants came from Syria, Afghanistan, and Turkey.
Wir Schaffen Das? Not Really.
Talk of a “new normal” after the pandemic appears spectacularly misplaced in Europe, where a replay of the events of 2015/16 – the unhappy “old normal” – is now firmly on the cards, if it isn’t already happening. Nobody expects migration to do anything but continue to climb in the coming years now that the pandemic restrictions have been eased and Europe is once again “open for business”.
While Europe’s pro-migration regimes may feel slightly more secure with Trump out of the White House and after the recent failure of the right-wing challenge to Macron in France, there can be no doubt that the resumption of massive migration will cause another populist reaction.
The question is whether it can be successful this time, or whether demographic change and other factors have already made it impossible to prevent Europe from changing unrecognizably forever.
European governments are beginning to lean in even more heavily on deliberate replacement of their native citizens. Just recently it was announced that the British government would seek to “replenish” aging rural communities by settling them with migrants, who would be given incentives to remain for a period of at least five years. Net migration into Britain reached an all-time high last year, of 504,000, more than ten times the annual figure when Tony Blair’s New Labour came to power in 1997 – and this under a so-called “Conservative government”. Similar programs for rural “replenishment” have been announced in France and Spain as well.
Then there is also the prospect of so-called “climate migration”, which threatens to make matters so much worse. According to unhinged predictions that are gaining more exposure and credence by the day, billions will be forced to flee their homes in the coming decades as climate change makes whole swathes of the Third World uninhabitable. And where will they go? To the West – to Europe, America and the broader Anglosphere – of course.
In her recent book Nomad Century, Gaia Vince argues that since disastrous climate change is now inescapable, we must encourage the billions who are going to have to migrate anyway to do so now. Right now. This will help avoid unnecessary suffering, she says, but it will require a total transformation of the way we live, work and eat, including the disappearance of national identity and the nation-state as we know it. A “Great Reset”, in short.
This argument, unsurprisingly, was on prominent display at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos last week, when Al Gore suggested that a coming wave of one billion climate migrants would cause Western nations to “lose our capacity for self-governance”. He didn’t sound displeased at this prospect.
As strange as all this may sound, precedents have already been established, including a landmark ruling by the UN Human Rights Committee, that will make “climate migration” an unassailable reason for refugee status. And who would doubt that, given a chance to ensure a near unlimited supply of migrants, Western governments wouldn’t grab the opportunity with both hands?
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that he is counting on House Republicans to reach a deal with President Joe Biden to address the U.S. debt ceiling and avoid a first-ever default by Washington.
Given the Democrats’ slim Senate majority of 51-49 in the new Congress and the 60-vote filibuster threshold to pass legislation, McConnell predicted that any solution the upper chamber formulated to approve a debt ceiling hike would barely win approval from the Republican-controlled House.
“I can’t imagine any kind of debt ceiling measure that could pass the Senate would also pass the House,” McConnell told reporters on Jan. 24. “So even though the debt ceiling could originate in either the House or the Senate, in this current situation, the debt ceiling fix, if there is one, or how it’s to be dealt with, will have to come out of the House,” he added.
It comes days after the U.S. government hit its $31.4 trillion borrowing limit, prompting the Treasury to begin extraordinary measures that could stave off a default until early June. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called on Congress to move quickly to deliver a resolution to the debt ceiling fight. McConnell said last Thursday he is confident that the U.S. will never default on its debt and that he “would not be concerned about a financial crisis.”
The longest-serving Senate party leader has previously played crucial roles in dealing with Democrats and ending debt limit impasses. But he confirmed Tuesday that he will not lead the negotiation with the White House this time.
But efforts by congressional Republicans, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who are now demanding to exact spending cuts from Biden in exchange for a deal on the debt ceiling, won McConnell’s endorsement. Meanwhile, the White House and top Democrats have repeatedly rejected negotiations over spending cuts, and insist on the passage of a clean debt ceiling bill.
“It’s entirely reasonable for the new speaker and his team to put spending reduction on the table. I wish him well in talking to the president,” McConnell said. “That’s where a solution lies.”
Appearing on Fox News last week, McCarthy said that people should view the debate in the same way they would treat their “own household.” “If you had a child and you gave them a credit card, and they kept hitting the limit—you wouldn’t just keep increasing it,” the speaker said, while questioning the wasteful spending by the current administration. “You’d first see what are you spending your money on? How can we cut items out?”
President Joe Biden attends a worship service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., on Jan. 15, 2023. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Biden and McCarthy have agreed to meet to talk about the debt ceiling and other issues. But a meeting has yet to be scheduled.
Democrats
Biden and top Democrats have blamed Republicans for holding the debt limit hostage to reach a spending cut agreement, warning that such demands could lead to a worst-case scenario for the country’s economy.
“If the U.S. is allowed to default on its debt for the first time, the consequences will be severe and every single American will pay the price,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor Tuesday morning.
“A default means interest rates will spike on everything from car loans, to credit cards, to mortgages. It means that Americans will potentially have to pay thousands of dollars more a year on regular expenses. Homes will lose their value,” Schumer said. “Meanwhile, the millions of Americans who have saved for retirement will see their retirement plans like 401(k)s lose their value.”
The Democrat leader asked Republicans to bring their debt ceiling plan to the House floor.
“I say to my Republican colleagues: if you want to talk about spending cuts, then you have an obligation—an obligation—to show the American people precisely what kind of cuts you are talking about,” he said.
McCarthy said Medicare, Social Security, and the military wouldn’t be subject to spending cuts, but stressed that Biden’s demand for a debt ceiling increase without strings attached is “off the table.”
Republicans on the House Committee on the Budget, meanwhile, alleged that Democrats are shifting the public focus from the real problem.
Apocalyptic rhetoric from Dems over the debt ceiling is irresponsible & distracts from the real issue — the dire necessity of reining in our unsustainable deficit spending & preventing the catastrophic consequences of a sovereign debt crisis. @RepArringtonhttps://t.co/rha3LgY2kA
“This apocalyptic rhetoric over the debt ceiling from my Democrat colleagues is irresponsible and distracts from the real issue — the dire necessity of reining in our unsustainable deficit spending and preventing the catastrophic consequences of a sovereign debt crisis,” committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told Fox News.
For Arrington, the growing $31.4 trillion debt is more dangerous than a possible default.
“We have several months to reach a bipartisan deal, which Congress has successfully done numerous times in past debt ceiling negotiations,” he said in a Tuesday post on Twitter. “While defaulting on our debt is an unrealistic outcome, bankrupting the country and our children’s future is a real and irreparable scenario.”
The United States would likely run out of critical munitions during a major conflict with China’s communist regime due to its inability to adequately mobilize the defense industrial base, according to a new report.
The report, titled “Empty Bins in a Wartime Environment,” examines how the United States has depleted key arms reserves by supplying Ukraine’s resistance against Russian invasion, and extrapolates how a similar situation could negatively impact the nation in a wartime scenario.
“The U.S. defense industrial base is not adequately prepared for the competitive security environment that now exists,” says the report published on Jan. 23 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a security-focused think tank.
“In a major regional conflict—such as a war with China in the Taiwan Strait—the U.S. use of munitions would likely exceed the current stockpiles of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), leading to a problem of ‘empty bins.’”
“Empty Bins” follows closely behind the release of results from CSIS wargames, which found that the United States would suffer from low levels of vital munitions in a war with China over the continued de facto independence of Taiwan.
That wargame found that Japan and the United States could likely defeat an invasion of Taiwan by communist China, but only at great cost in lives and materiel. In such a conflict, the United States would likely run out of long-range anti-ship missiles (LRASMs) early on.
“The problem is the U.S. has such low stockpiles for those long-range anti-ship missiles that in our wargames, in multiple iterations of the wargame, we run out [of LRASMs] in less than a week virtually every time,” said Seth Jones, the author of “Empty Bins,” in an associated video.
“We cannot fight in that case in protracted war because we don’t have sufficient supply of munitions.”
US Unprepared for a Major War
The United States’ ill-preparedness for a conflict with communist China has long been a point of contention among lawmakers and defense policy experts.
Taiwanese navy launches a U.S.-made Standard missile from a frigate during the annual Han Kuang Drill on the sea near the Suao navy harbor in Yilan county, Taiwan, on July 26, 2022. (Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images)
Back in 2021, for example, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) warned that the United States would “probably lose” a war for Taiwan, and noted trends in wargames over the past several years in which the United States regularly lost to China in simulated invasions of Taiwan.
“Empty Bins” adds further context to the issue by analyzing how the United States has rapidly depleted critical munitions through its support of Ukraine, noting that the nation’s stockpiles of Stinger surface-to-air missiles, 155-millimeter howitzers and ammunition, and Javelin anti-tank missile systems have plummeted.
The report notes that the United States has sent more Stinger missiles to Ukraine in the last year than have been built for all non-U.S. customers over the last 20 years. Likewise, the nation has delivered more than 1 million 155-mm artillery rounds to Ukraine, and only placed orders to replace a fraction of that amount.
“More broadly, the war in Ukraine has demonstrated that competition and conflict between major powers will require a strong industrial base in the United States and in key ally and partner countries,” the report says.
“The effort to deploy, arm, feed, and supply forces is a monumental task, and the massive consumption of equipment, systems, vehicles, and munitions requires a large-scale industrial base for resupply.”
Thus, the report says, the problem is not that the United States is providing support to Ukraine, as a defense of Taiwan would draw largely on different kinds of munitions and weapons platforms. Instead, the problem rests in the United States’ sluggish procurement processes and lack of a robust defense industrial base for munitions manufacturing.
The Javelin surface-to-air missile system, for example, requires a production lead time of approximately 30 months. This means that, if the United States were to order new units of the system today, it would take more than two years before they were in the hands of the military.
Notably, such slow estimates are what is achievable in peacetime. During war, procurement could take much longer when supply chains are disrupted and vital components like rare earth elements are scarce.
“These shortfalls would make it extremely difficult for the United States to sustain a protracted conflict—and, equally concerning, the deficiencies undermine deterrence,” the report says.
“They also highlight that the U.S. defense industrial base lacks adequate surge capacity for a major war.”
To that end, the report recommends creating a “break-glass” plan in which the government could streamline industrial production, acquisition, and deployment in wartime.
Similarly, the report suggests that the United States create a strategic munitions reserve that would include subcomponents with long production lead times, like metals and electronics.
Only by shoring up its defenses and rebuilding its stockpiles now, the report says, can the United States deter or win a conflict later.
“The main problem is that the U.S. defense industrial base—including the munitions industrial base—is not currently equipped to support a protracted conventional war,” the report says.
“With growing competition between the United States and China—along with continuing threats from Russia, Iran, North Korea, and terrorist groups—the U.S. military needs to be prepared to fight at least one major war, if not two.”
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) is demanding to know why the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) is shelling out more than $1 billion annually in payments for people who aren’t eligible participants.
Comer told Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Kiran Ahuja in a Jan. 23 letter that a recent report compiled by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) found “that FEHB is riddled with ineligible ‘participants’ who are receiving benefits under the program. GAO estimates that ‘the program may be spending up to $1 billion per year on payments for ineligible members.’
“This is a flagrant waste of funds and may be driving up premium costs for eligible participants.”
The FEHBP, which is managed by OPM, is the health insurance program offered solely to the 2.2 million federal civil service employees, their families, and retirees. More than 8 million people currently are counted as participants in FEHBP.
The FEHBP, the largest health benefits program in the country, cost the federal government more than $59 billion in 2021. The OPM manages the federal government’s 2.2 million active career civil servants, as well as the Federal Employee Retirement System and the Civil Service Retirement System programs, which together represent the federal government’s third-largest entitlement program. There are about 2.7 million federal employee retirees.
The entrance to the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building, which houses the Office of Personnel Management headquarters in Washington, on June 5, 2015. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
In 2016, hackers linked to the Chinese Communist Party broke into OPM’s computer system and stole personal and financial information for nearly 5 million federal workers and retirees.
Comer told Ahuja that the GAO report “suggests OPM has been aware of this problem for years but has consistently failed to address it effectively. As GAO recounts, OPM acknowledged the possibility of a problem when it issued regulations in 2018 allowing agencies and participating insurers to request proof of eligibility for federal employees’ family members. OPM did not, however, actually require proof of eligibility.”
Then three years later, Comer said, citing the GAO report, “OPM issued verification requirements for ‘certain types’ of new enrollments, but left other new enrollments and all preexisting enrollments out of this verification regime. To this day, according to GAO, ‘OPM does not plan to establish a monitoring mechanism to identify and remove ineligible family members who already have FEHB coverage.’”
Making the potential magnitude of the problem much worse, “GAO determined OPM’s annual fraud risk assessment of the FEHB program fails to cover “fraud risks associated with ineligible members in the program,’” Comer pointed out.
The GAO analysis estimated that improper payments on behalf of one eligible FEHBP enrollee’s family with two ineligible enrollees exceeded $100,000 over a dozen years.
“Imagine the levels of waste, fraud, and abuse that OPM could already have uncovered and corrected if it had in place during each relevant year adequate verification, monitoring and auditing requirements for the FHEB program, which has covered approximately 8 million members annually since 2000,” Comer told Ahuja.
“Yet GAO stressed in its report that ‘OPM has not required employing offices or carriers to verify eligibility since the program’s inception in 1960.’ If GAO’s $1 billion estimate of annual impacts is correct, it is entirely possible OPM’s failure has led to several tens of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse over the program’s 60-plus year existence,” Comer wrote.
In the GAO report cited by Comer, the congressional investigators observed that “OPM performs an annual fraud risk assessment of the FEHB program but has not included ineligible members as a fraud risk to the program. In fiscal year 2020, OPM conducted a fraud risk assessment and documented a fraud risk profile for the FEHB program. OPM determined the program was at a low risk of fraud overall.”
However, the investigators claimed OPM failed to include in its assessment the effect of benefit payments being made to ineligible participants.
“OPM acknowledged in discussions with GAO that not verifying eligibility for current members carries a risk of fraud and improper payments. OPM’s Office of the Inspector General has also documented instances of fraud and improper payments associated with ineligible members in the FEHB program,” the GAO report said.
Comer told Ahuja the oversight panel wants all documents concerning OPM’s management of fraud risks in connection to the FEHBP program, including estimates of how much the agency has paid annually to ineligible participants.
It’s safe to say Democrats will never get over the end of Roe v. Wade. They have been fighting tooth and nail to protect their precious “abortion rights” ever since the Supreme Court overturned the 1970s decision.
Many red states celebrated the win by passing strict, pro-life laws. Democrats have pulled out all the stops to block these laws–which exist to protect unborn children. Two super-leftist groups teamed up to shut down Gov. DeSantis’s pro-life law. And now, the state Supreme Court is getting involved.
From Fox News:
The Florida Supreme Court has agreed to hear a legal challenge to Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, which was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April 2022…
However, the court did not grant their request for a temporary restraining order to block the state from enforcing it.
The law, called the Reducing Fetal and Infant Mortality Act or HB 5, will remain in effect as the lawsuit proceeds.
This is a big blow to the left’s plans to push their “abortion-only” agenda. Democrats within Planned Parenthood and the ACLU were hoping the court would block the law while the case is decided. That would have given abortionists a window to continue their work in the state.
But the highest court in Florida refused to lift the law, meaning it is still illegal in Florida to perform an abortion after 15 weeks. It’s unclear now how the court will ultimately rule. But given the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to grant state governments the power to decide abortion law, Democrats don’t have many legs to stand on.
There is nothing unconstitutional about this 15-week ban. Stricter bans are in place in Texas and other red states. Many states have outright banned abortion, and have won battles in court. Democrats have resorted to fighting state-by-state to force their abortion agenda onto Americans.
They won’t be satisfied unless abortion is the only choice for many low-income women. Democrats seem to think that unless you are part of the one percent, you shouldn’t have children. They attack pregnancy centers that provide alternatives to abortion for many women.
Perhaps Democrats think nobody should have children, these days? They do claim the earth is “overpopulated.” Maybe they won’t rest until abortion is the only option for everyone but the richest on the planet?
Key Takeaways:
The Florida Supreme Court upheld the state pro-life law, while a case is being decided.
Democrats sued the state to overturn a 15-week abortion ban.
The left has been waging many battles to force abortion rights onto red states.
With entities controlled by the Chinese Communist Party gobbling up American farmland, some in Congress are sounding the alarm and moving to stop what they see as a growing threat.
Texas Republican Congressman Chip Roy (TX-21) has introduced the Securing America’s Land from Foreign Interference Act to prevent the (CCP) from owning land in the United States.
“The Securing America’s Land from Foreign Interference Act will ensure that United States land never comes under the control of the CCP by prohibiting the purchase of U.S. public or private real estate by any members of the CCP or any entity under the control or influence of the CCP,” reads a statement from Roy’s office announcing the legislation.
“There is no reason we should allow one of our greatest adversaries – the Chinese Communist Party – to buy up land in the United States. If the Soviet Union had been doing this in the 80s, we’d have recognized the threat,” said Roy.
“China is not our friend; they want to dominate us and destroy our way of life; we need to wake up and start acting like it,” Roy added.
“Chinese firms have expanded their presence in American agriculture over the last decade by snapping up farmland and purchasing major agribusinesses, like pork processing giant Smithfield Foods,” POLITICO reports.
“By the start of 2020, Chinese owners controlled about 192,000 agricultural acres in the U.S., worth $1.9 billion, including land used for farming, ranching and forestry, according to the Agriculture Department,” POLITICO adds.
The farmland purchases appear to be both a plan by Chinese Communists to expand their economic investment and feed the world’s largest population, under the regime’s “One Belt One Road” program.
There may also be another motivation. Some of the purchased farmland is near key U.S. military installations.
“In November of 2021, Grand Forks, North Dakota announced that Fufeng Group of Shandong, China had selected the area as a location for a new wet corn mill,” American Military News reports.
“According to a May report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), the new Fufeng Group mill would be on a 370-acre plot of land located about 12 miles from the Grand Forks Air Force Base,” writes AMN.
“The U.S. Air Force base is home to some of the top U.S. intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. The base is home to 319th Reconnaissance Wing, which is one of the major operators of the RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicles. The base will also host a new space networking center which will help facilitate U.S. military communications across the globe,” AMN notes, adding ‘The USCC report said the land purchase near the U.S. military base could be “particularly convenient for monitoring air traffic flows in and out of the base, among other security-related concerns.’”
And it’s not just North Dakota.
“Prior to the Fufeng Group’s effort to buy up land near Grand Forks Air Force Base, another Chinese firm had begun efforts to buy up around 140,000 acres of land located about 70 miles from Laughlin Air Force Base,” AMN reports.
Roy’s bill was introduced with Reps. Jeff Duncan (SC-03), Mary Miller (IL-15), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14), Daniel Webster (FL-10), Pat Fallon (TX-04) and Wesley Hunt (TX-38) co-sponsoring.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Four young men have been arrested after a Louisiana State University student was allegedly raped in a car and then left on foot in a housing subdivision, where she was later fatally hit by a car just before 3 a.m. on Jan. 15.
Madison Brooks, 19, met the four while drinking at a Baton Rouge bar called Reggie’s, which describes itself on Google as “catering to LSU students with regular drinks specials & DJs spinning tunes.”
Police said two of the young men raped Brooks in the back seat of a car after she asked them for a ride home, The Advocate reported.
Those two, 18-year-old Kaivon Washington and a 17-year-old who was not named because he is a minor, were arrested on charges of third-degree rape, the news outlet reported.
The other two told police they sat in the front seat of the car during the alleged sexual attack on Brooks. They were identified as Casen Carver, 18, and Everette Lee, 28, who were reportedly arrested on related charges of principal to third-degree rape.
Louisiana state law defines third-degree rape as occurring when the victim is “incapable of resisting or of understanding the nature of the act” due to an “intoxicating agent.” The offense carries a penalty of up to 25 years imprisonment.
“Surveillance footage and interviews with the suspects showed that she was obviously intoxicated when she left” the bar, according to The Advocate.
The 17-year-old turned himself in to police Sunday and the other three turned themselves in on Monday, according to the report.
Ron Haley, an attorney representing two of the suspects, said his clients have been unfairly charged, according to WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge.
Haley called the activity that occurred with Brooks “consensual sexual acts.”
“Absolutely not a rape,” he told the news outlet. “This is a tragedy, [but] definitely not a crime.”
Haley said there was video taken during the encounter that proves his case.
“Can you tell that she was intoxicated? Yes,” Haley said. “To the point under the law that you say you’re in a drunken stupor, to the point that you cannot lawfully give consent or answer questions? Absolutely that was not the case.”
According to The Advocate, police said Brooks blood alcohol content was .319, “nearly four times the legal limit to drive and enough to give someone alcohol poisoning and render them unconscious.”
The Advocate also reported that when Carver was asked by detectives if he thought Brooks was too drunk to consent, he responded, “I guess.”
When one of the suspects was asked if he thought the #LSU sophomore was “too impaired to consent to the sexual intercourse,” he allegedly responded, “I guess.”https://t.co/7x6hryFVwE
Haley also said his clients did not force Brooks out of the car.
“Based on a disagreement, she got out of the vehicle,” Haley told WAFB. “She indicated she was getting an Uber.
“I want the public to know that these young men, or really, the driver of the vehicle and the young men that were in there, did not put her off on the side of the road,” said Haley.
Brooks was standing in the middle of a road when she was hit by a car at about 3 a.m., WAFB reported.
“Haley believes the video will acquit his clients fully, and the real blame needs to be on the bars selling to underage drinkers,” WAFB reported.
LSU President William Tate IV called for action on underage drinking, according to The Advocate.
“Tate said it was time for ‘our collective grief and outrage’ [over Brooks’ death] to lead to action on underage drinking by the university and the Baton Rouge business community,” the outlet reported, adding that the campus community “has faced enormous scrutiny over alcohol-related deaths and sexual assault and harassment.”
After a wave of violence last week in Atlanta, an Antifa activist arrested on the scene has been revealed to have quite a curious background.
Teresa Yue Shen was arrested along with six other far-left insurgents after they took part in anti-police riots that were spurred by the opening of the new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.
According to the Daily Mail, Shen traveled all the way from Brooklyn to partake in demonstrations that turned violent after Georgia police shot a protester who had allegedly fired at them.
In the wake of her arrest, she has been charged with domestic terrorism and aggravated assault of an officer.
Delving into her background, it is clear that she grew up in a rather privileged and prestigious upbringing.
Her father, James Shen, is head of the Chinese publisher WiCON, based out of New Jersey.
WiCON owns Pharma China and has apparent “ties” to many pharmaceutical industries in the People’s Republic, as reported by the Daily Mail.
He claims that the company prides itself as a “family with generations of ties with the pharmaceutical industry in China” and described himself as a “strategist, advisor, and publisher” with keen insights into Chinese healthcare.
Shen’s mother, Xiao-Hua Shen, is also a successful businesswoman who was one of the first groups of Chinese citizens sent to study abroad by the CCP, earning her degree at Exeter University.
She dubs herself a “global diversity expert” who has expansive knowledge of how to do “successful business in China.
According to the Post Millennial, this is not Shen’s first encounter with the law.
She was previously arrested while attending an anti-ICE event at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey.
Before her Antifa activism, Shen interned at both Reuters and CNN before finally becoming a mental health consultant.
The violence that sent Shen to jail was a long time in the making, as far-left radicals have been protesting the new Public Safety Center since June of last year.
Things came to a head when one activist opened fire on police who were attempting to clear a campsite where the protesters were holed up.
The alleged shooter, Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, severely injured a Georgia State officer and was shot dead in response.
Teran’s death prompted a “Night of Rage” last Friday, with Antifa personnel encouraged to engage in “reciprocal violence” for their “fallen comrade,” according to the Daily Mail.
This latest violence in Georgia led to the arrests of five more Antifa members on Saturday, as reported by the Millennial.
During the clearing operation that led to the shootings, police discovered many weapons, including pellet guns, mortar-style fireworks, multi-edged weapons, gas masks, and a blowtorch.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre isn’t having the best month, and making matters worse for the White House is the growing discontent within the media ranks that until now, wasn’t necessarily much of a worry.
President Joe Biden’s classified documents scandal is creating enough chum in the water and journalists smell the blood. They’re asking increasingly tougher questions that Jean-Pierre doesn’t seem interested in answering, whatsoever. As a result, a side story is developing involving the growing rift between the White House and the media.
Jean-Pierre has dodged nearly every question related to the classified documents scandal since it became an issue, parroting the same reply to reporters that they should refer to the Justice Department for further information. On Tuesday, a foreign reporter, obviously frustrated with the situation, called out her ability to perform the job of White House press secretary.
Reporter @simonateba tells WH press sec she’s not fit for her job after she repeatedly fails to address Biden’s classified doc debacle pic.twitter.com/scKHYsxTzw
Reporter Simon Ateba asked Jean-Pierre, given that she refuses to respond on behalf of the president regarding the classified documents scandal if she’s a “good fit for this job.”
To say Jean-Pierre wasn’t thrilled with his question would be an understatement. Below, you can watch the full White House briefing from Tuesday.
In a follow-up after the briefing, Ateba tweeted an explanation of why he said what he said in his exchange with Jean-Pierre.
“Today was another crazy day in the White House briefing room. With @PressSec Karine Jean-Pierre no longer providing any answers to even basic questions on classified documents, I asked her whether she was still a good fit for the job. It’s sad what’s going on,” Ateba tweeted.
Today was another crazy day in the White House briefing room. With @PressSec Karine Jean-Pierre no longer providing any answers to even basic questions on classified documents, I asked her whether she was still a good fit for the job. It’s sad what’s going on. pic.twitter.com/zCU1gSeK5E
It’s not the first time Ateba questioned her ability to perform the duties required by the White House press secretary. Last week, he asked the same question as Jean-Pierre quickly shut down Friday’s briefing.
“I asked @PressSec Karine Jean-Pierre whether she is still a good fit for the job of press secretary after her recent performance on classified documents as frustration grows in the room with some reporters describing the briefing as a ‘waste of time’. WATCH,” Ateba tweeted Saturday.
I asked @PressSec Karine Jean-Pierre whether she is still a good fit for the job of press secretary after her recent performance on classified documents as frustration grows in the room with some reporters describing the briefing as a ‘waste of time’. WATCH pic.twitter.com/wSG8kUboxL
Tuesday’s press briefing seemed to go remarkably horrible for Jean-Pierre, as she directly contradicted Biden’s previous statement that the COVID-19 pandemic was over. According to Jean-Pierre, it’s not only not over, but it’s apparently worsening.
“Jean-Pierre: ‘Covid isn’t over. We’ve been very clear about that. Hundreds of Americans are dying every day and cases are increasing right now,’” Greg Price tweeted.
Jean-Pierre: “Covid isn’t over. We’ve been very clear about that. Hundreds of Americans are dying every day and cases are increasing right now.” pic.twitter.com/v6koZSI2sR
Add the backdrop of White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain recently announcing his resignation in the midst of the building documents scandal, and it’s clear that the Biden White House is on its heels.
Get your popcorn out, because there could be some wild weeks ahead in the White House press briefing room.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has selected two of the 20 Republican holdouts who delayed his election as speaker to serve on the House Rules Committee.
Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), both members of the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus, will serve on the influential panel.
McCarthy announced the committee memberships in a Jan. 23 Twitter post.
“Under Dem control, House committees were used to target political opponents and reward allies at the expense of addressing the country’s concerns. That ends now,” he wrote. “These Republican members will work to shift power back to the American people through their respective committees.”
After initially opposing McCarthy through the first 12 rounds of voting in the speakership election, both Roy and Norman eventually switched their votes in his favor after the California Republican agreed to several key concessions, including the appointment of more hardline conservatives to the Rules Committee.
Other Republicans selected for the panel include Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Reps. Michael Burgess (R-Texas), Guy Reschenthaler (R-Penn.), Michelle Fischbach (R-Minn.), Erin Houchin (R-Ind.), Nick Langworthy (R-N.Y.), and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).
Massie, who supported McCarthy for speaker, is not a Freedom Caucus member but is a conservative libertarian who often votes contrary to his Republican colleagues.
Divisions of Power
The House Rules Committee is one of the chamber’s oldest standing committees. Often referred to as “The Speaker’s Committee,” the 13-member panel is typically dominated by the speaker’s allies and effectively decides which pieces of legislation will be considered on the House floor and when.
But with Roy, Norman, and Massie on the committee, those dynamics could shift.
For instance, if the three Republicans were to butt heads with leadership on any given issue, they could vote with the Democrats to create a 7–6 majority and block that legislation from being considered.
Thus, in conceding that power to his detractors, McCarthy has limited his own.
Other McCarthy detractors, largely from the Freedom Caucus, have secured key committee assignments as well.
For example, Reps. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Scott Perry (R-Penn.), Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) all received seats on the House Oversight Committee. Meanwhile, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) will serve as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) was selected over moderate Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) to chair the Homeland Security Committee, on which freshman Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) will also serve.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a Freedom Caucus member who supported McCarthy but was stripped of her committee assignments in the last Congress, has also received key appointments to the Oversight and Homeland Security committees.
However, one noteworthy exclusion for the Freedom Caucus was on the House Intelligence Committee, a powerful panel that conducts oversight of the U.S. intelligence community and, as such, is privy to the most sensitive information of any House committee.
McCarthy released the names of those privileged members Monday as well, and the list largely comprised his more moderate allies, like Crenshaw and Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wa.), one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
Reactions
In a statement provided to Axios, Roy revealed that he had not requested to be placed on the Rules committee.
“Didn’t ask for it,” he said. “But you can’t push for change [and] not saddle up if asked.”
Cole issued a statement on Monday welcoming the “diverse slate” of Republican members.
“Between our returning members and those joining the panel for the first time, each has an important role to play and brings valuable perspective,” Cole said. “I look forward to working together to restore regular order, ensure thorough debate and ultimately advance real American priorities to the House floor.”
Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), however, had a different perspective on the matter, using just one word to express his thoughts on Twitter: “Yikes.”
Meanwhile, Libertarian Justin Amash—the former congressman from Michigan who left the Republican Party after voting to impeach Trump—appeared optimistic over the shakeup.
“Can’t wait to see @RepThomasMassie and @chiproytx on the Rules Committee,” he wrote in a tweet. “We might actually get a properly functioning legislative body if the other Republicans don’t screw things up at the behest of GOP leaders.”
“*Screwing things up is highly likely,” he added in a subsequent tweet.
The health director of the Washington county that encompasses Seattle confirmed the medical examiner’s office is struggling to store bodies due to rampant fentanyl overdoses across the city.
“A key indication of just how bad things are at the end of 2022, and likely to get worse and 2023, the medical examiner’s office is now struggling with the issue of storing bodies because the fentanyl-related death toll continues to climb,” Seattle-King County Public Health Director Dr. Faisal Khan said during a board meeting last week, captured on video by conservative local radio host Jason Rantz.
Khan noted that the King County Medical Examiner’s Office is “now struggling with the issue of storing bodies because the fentanyl-related death toll continues to climb” due to the “finite space in the coolers they use and that space is now being exceeded on a regular basis.”
His remarks came during a King County Board of Health meeting on Jan. 19. A dashboard provided by King County shows that 2022 saw the highest number of fentanyl poisonings—686—as compared with 2021, where only 385 fentanyl overdoses were confirmed.
“When the final review of fatal overdoses is completed in the upcoming weeks, I fear that 2022 will set another heartbreaking record for fatal overdoses in King County. It will more than double the number of lives lost compared to just three years ago, in 2019,” Khan said during last week’s meeting.
A spokesperson for Public Health—Seattle & King County told Rantz’s show on KTTH that officials “have options for temporary morgue surge capacity when our census count gets high, including storing decedents on autopsy gurneys and partnerships with funeral homes.”
“We’re exploring longer-term options for adding more capacity,” the spokesperson said.
Noting the insidious nature of fentanyl, Khan told the board that the powerful synthetic opioid often appears in fake prescription pills, or it can be made to look like cocaine or heroin. It’s now involved in about 70 percent of King County overdose deaths as of late 2022.
“People do no realize that they are taking fentanyl,” he said, adding that “the biggest driver of these fatal overdoses involves fentanyl in white powder and in fake pills, which are flooding the streets.”
Fentanyl, firearms, and cash confiscated by DEA Los Angeles. (Courtesy of DEA Los Angeles)
Fueling Homeless Deaths
Meanwhile, a record 310 homeless people died in the Seattle area last year, highlighting the region’s struggle to house the thousands of people living on its streets. The 310 deaths in King County surpassed the previous record of 195 homeless deaths set in 2018, the Seattle Times reported, and marked a 65 percent jump over 2021.
“That’s just appalling,” the paper quoted Chloe Gale, policy and strategy vice president for REACH, the largest homelessness outreach provider in Seattle, as saying.
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said it underscores his administration’s urgent need to get more people indoors.
Last year, Public Health—Seattle & King County distributed more than 10,000 kits of naloxone, a medication that can reverse opioid overdoses, and about 100,000 fentanyl test strips. The agency is leading public awareness campaigns about the synthetic opioid and helping people find treatment.
Brad Finegood, who leads the agency’s opioid and overdose response, said researchers keep watching the monthly overdose numbers, hoping to see rates flatten out.
“Maybe we’re plateauing at a really bad rate and maybe it’s going to get worse,” Finegood told The Associated Press. “I don’t know when it’s going to stop.”
Other Issues
A report issued in 2022 by a federal commission found that fentanyl and similar drugs are being manufactured in labs in Mexico. Those chemical precursors are mostly shipped from China.
“These drugs are synthesized entirely from chemicals (sometimes unregulated chemicals) that are easily acquired from countries with large chemical and pharmaceutical sectors, such as China and India,” the report, issued by the RAND Corporation, stated.
Last September, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) warned that fentanyl is now being sold in multicolored pills and powders, and it’s being marketed on social media to teens and younger adults as rainbow fentanyl. The rainbow pills have been seized in 21 states now, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said.
While fentanyl is still more commonly disguised as oxycodone or another prescription drug, the rainbow pills are on the increase. “We believe it is being marketed and aimed at young people,” said Milgram.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is introducing legislation to ban social media app TikTok from distribution in the United States.
Hawley announced the bill on Twitter early Jan. 24, saying that the app gives China’s communist regime a means of violating the privacy of Americans, including children.
“TikTok is China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives,” Hawley said. “It threatens our children’s privacy as well as their mental health.”
“Last month Congress banned it on all government devices. Now I will introduce legislation to ban it nationwide.”
TikTok decried the move, saying that a ban on the app would not solve Hawley’s national security concerns.
“Sen. Hawley’s call for a total ban of TikTok takes a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy, and online harms,” said a TikTok spokesperson in an email to The Epoch Times.
“We hope that he will focus his energies on efforts to address those issues holistically, rather than pretending that banning a single service would solve any of the problems he’s concerned about or make Americans any safer.”
TikTok Used by China to Violate Americans’ Rights
Hawley’s announcement is just the latest in a long series of blows to the embattled social media company, which has been dogged by reports of its connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state.
Hawley originally introduced the “No TikTok on Government Devices Act” in 2020, which sought to ban the use of the app on all government-owned devices due to such national security concerns. Another version of that bill was signed into law in late December 2022.
“In light of all we know, it is unthinkable to me that we should continue to permit federal employees, those workers entrusted with sensitive government data, to access this app on their work phones and computers,” Hawley said at the time.
“I’m encouraged by the bipartisan support we have seen in this body to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable and that includes, by the way, holding accountable those corporations who would just do China’s bidding.”
Similarly, national security and intelligence leaders have warned that TikTok poses a national security threat due to its connections to its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, which itself has numerous ties to the CCP.
“Because the parent company of TikTok is a Chinese company, the Chinese government is able to insist upon extracting the private data of a lot of TikTok users in this country, and also to shape the content of what goes on to TikTok as well to suit the interests of the Chinese leadership,” said CIA Director William Burns during a December interview with PBS.
Likewise, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the app could be used to collect data on Americans for the CCP and to conduct untold numbers of influence operations.
“The Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they so chose, or to control software on millions of devices which gives it opportunity to potentially technically compromise personal devices,” Wray said during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing in November.
Moreover, a class-action lawsuit filed in December claims that TikTok violates state laws against wiretapping, because the app records every keystroke, click, swipe, and text communication, including information written but not sent by the user, when users enter other websites through the app.
That data is not passively stored, nor is it kept in the United States.
An internal investigation revealed in December that employees at ByteDance used the company’s access to TikTok user data to illicitly track American journalists who broke stories documenting the company’s ties to the CCP regime.
In that instance, ByteDance employees stalked U.S. journalists on U.S. soil by gaining access to the journalists’ IP addresses and other user data through TikTok and then cross-referencing that data to identify whether the journalists had frequented the same areas as ByteDance employees.
Relatedly, because ByteDance transferred that data to China, it is now subject to the CCP’s national security, cybersecurity, and data laws, which mandate that companies in China provide any and all data to the communist regime upon request.
Hawley has not specified when his bill will be introduced. The Epoch Times has requested further comment from Hawley’s office.
Anita Dunn, who offered rapist “damage control advice,” could gain influence under new chief of staff
The departure of Ron Klain as Joe Biden’s chief of staff could see a top aide to the president who offered “damage control advice” to convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein gain even more influence in the White House, according to a Tuesday Politicoreport.
Klain, who plans to step down next month, has been hands-on as chief of staff in dealing with politics and legislative outreach, according to Politico. But White House sources told the outlet they expect Klain’s successor, Jeff Zients, to cede responsibility over those matters to former Weinstein adviser Anita Dunn and other senior aides.
“Zients will likely defer to top Biden aides Anita Dunn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Steve Ricchetti and others … while he focuses on the West Wing’s operations and processes,” Politico reported.
Dunn, who served as a communications director under the Obama administration, in 2017 helped disgraced Hollywood producer and Democratic megadonor Weinstein strategize ahead of the release of a New York Timesreport on accusations of sexual harassment against Weinstein. Dunn was not paid for her assistance.
After classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president were discovered in his offices at the Penn Biden Center, Dunn reportedly urged the White House to keep information on the discovery from the public. Her husband, Bob Bauer, is Biden’s top lawyer leading his legal strategy in the documents scandal.
Dunn, whom NBC News described as a “confidant whom [Biden] often turns to when his fortunes look bleak,” is not the only Biden aide with a controversial record who could see their political power grow with Klain’s departure.
Dillon, who founded a political advising firm linked to dark money groups and was presidential campaign manager for Biden and Beto O’Rourke, has advocated confiscating AR-15s and was accused by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.) of making an “incredibly insulting” offense by referencing Vice President Kamala Harris’s Asian heritage.
Ricchetti has faced scrutiny from ethics watchdogs due to his brother’s lucrative position lobbying the White House. Before joining the Biden administration, he briefly served as managing director of the Penn Biden Center, where Biden’s classified documents were discovered in November.
‘Doomsday Clock’ scientists celebrated Biden’s election, said he put ‘world on much better footing’
The world is closer than ever to nuclear annihilation with Joe Biden in the White House, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group which oversees the Doomsday Clock.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the clock on Tuesday to 90 seconds from midnight, the supposed time when all human life on earth will perish. The group cited the “mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine” as the reason for the shift.
Just two years ago, the group welcomed Biden’s election as putting “the world on a much better footing to address global problems.” Biden’s support of “international cooperation” could help avert nuclear apocalypse, a member of the group said in a statement after his inauguration. The group did not move the clock one way or another at the time.
“Finding a path to serious peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine could go a long way toward reducing the risk of escalation,”the group said in a Tuesday press release. “In this time of unprecedented global danger, concerted action is required, and every second counts.”
The last time the Doomsday Clock moved forward was in January 2020, when it sat at 100 seconds from midnight. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is helmed by Rachel Bronson, who is not a scientist but a former business school adjunct professor, cited the “continued corruption of the information ecosphere on which democracy and public decision making depend” as reason for the move.
“The war’s effects are not limited to an increase in nuclear danger; they also undermine global efforts to combat climate change,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said Tuesday. “Countries dependent on Russian oil and gas have sought to diversify their supplies and suppliers, leading to expanded investment in natural gas exactly when such investment should have been shrinking.”
The Doomsday Clock stood at seven minutes to midnight during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. And, in 2010, the Doomsday Clock’s second hand was moved backward one minutebecause of former president Barack Obama’s work on climate change.
The Washington Free Beacon asked the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in March 2022 to explain why the clock remained unchanged, despite the outbreak of a hot war in Europe involving a nuclear power. The group declined to answer.
Employees at Google are demanding “psychological safety” from their higher-ups after the tech company announced it is cutting 12,000 jobs.
During an all-hands meeting on Monday, Google’s overwhelmingly liberal workforce requested that executives protect workers from the mental stresses associated with corporate downsizing amid an economic downturn, Insiderreported.
“How are we supposed to ever feel safe again?” one employee asked the bosses at Google.
“How can we reestablish psychological safety for Googlers after these layoffs?” another staffer asked.
Tech companies in the past month have cut at least 50,000 jobs as record-high inflation and soaring interest rates under President Joe Biden have brought a decade-long tech hiring spree to an end.
Employees were upset about the uncertainty and the seeming randomness of the firings, Insider reported:
“The layoffs seem random,” one employee wrote in a submitted question. “I am pro-Google, but I’m pretty shook right now. Help me understand.”
This staffer and other colleagues were particularly stunned by layoffs of some Googlers who were high performers, or who had worked at the company for a long time. “Should I keep working superhard? Does it matter?” the staffer added.
Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler dismissed calls for “psychological safety” during the tense meeting.
“If you interpret psychological safety as removing all uncertainty, we can’t do this,” Schindler said. “The reality is sometimes we need to adjust priorities based on the external environment, and this is what happened here.”
Press ban comes after similar event was disrupted last year
NEW HAVEN, Conn.—Yale Law School promised student activists last week that it would bar press from a panel on free speech featuring Kristen Waggoner, the conservative lawyer whose last talk at the law school ended in a police escort. The group hosting the event, Yale Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society, agreed to those ground rules, students said.
On Tuesday, the school kept its word, barring the Washington Free Beacon from covering the event. Administrators stated that media were also forbidden from lingering in the hallways outside the event, in keeping with the law school’s published media policy, and asked that all attendees show a Yale Law School ID.
Whatever policies are on the books, this appears to be the first time many of them were enforced—and certainly the first time they were enforced so aggressively. Clustered outside and speaking on the condition of anonymity, students and professors alike said they had never seen such a forceful and well-coordinated attempt to control access to an event.
The spectacle suggests that last year’s meltdown, in which student protesters drowned out a panel on free speech featuring Waggoner and Monica Miller, an attorney with the American Humanist Association, still haunts the law school, which has been seeking to rehabilitate its reputation in the wake of the fallout. Fourteen federal judges announced this fall that they would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law, saying the incident—and the school’s failure to discipline those involved in it—demonstrated an unacceptable hostility to conservative views.
The event on Tuesday appears to have gone without a hitch. Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, joined Waggoner, the president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, for what was by all accounts a cordial, well-mannered discussion of First Amendment law. Students exiting the event said there were no ear-shattering chants, no profanity-laden signs, and no ad hominem questions.
“There was not even a peaceful protest,” Strossen told the Free Beacon.
It was a sharp contrast to last March, when protesters chanted, heckled, banged on doors, and cursed out attendees. The fracas was so intense that Waggoner, who has argued a slew of religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court, had to be escorted out of the building by the police.
In an apparent bid to avoid more controversy, the law school told student activists last week that “no press” signs would be “prominently displayed” and administrators would “enforce this.” It also said—to the activists’ chagrin—that it would not commit to making a public statement of support in the event that attendees were “doxxed,” saying that doing so might only draw more media attention.
Strossen on Monday criticized the school’s decision to ban press and undergraduates from the event. That move was “sadly ironic” for an event about free speech, Strossen said, calling it “unjustifiable.”
Robert Capodilupo, the president of the law school’s Federalist Society chapter, declined to comment on the press ban. But like Strossen, he noted the marked improvement over last year, saying it “was great to see so many students engage with our speakers and their arguments in good faith.”
For Waggoner, the placid proceedings justify some measure of optimism.
“While only time will tell if the Yale administration is committed to long-term meaningful change,” she said, “our hope is that this event begins a new era of tolerance for ideological diversity on campus.”
Foreign funding to UPenn tripled in the two years after the school teamed up with Biden
The House Foreign Affairs Committee is pressing Joe Biden’s secretary of state Antony Blinken for details on the sudden surge in foreign donations to the University of Pennsylvania after the establishment of the Penn Biden Center, where Blinken served as managing director.
The inquiry, led by HFAC chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas), could shed light on the Penn Biden Center’s funding and whether think tank officials had any involvement with the university’s solicitation of foreign donors. Foreign funding to the University of Pennsylvania tripled in the two years after the school teamed up with Biden to launch the Penn Biden Center in 2017, with most of that money—$61 million—coming from China, the Washington Free Beacon first reported in 2021.
The donations “raise questions about the center’s ties to—or benefits derived from—that funding, interactions you or others had with the donors, and whether People’s Republic of China (PRC) linked individuals ever entered the center and came within close proximity of classified U.S. intelligence information,” McCaul wrote in a letter to Blinken on Tuesday.
The Penn Biden Center has been under scrutiny after federal investigators discovered that classified documents from Biden’s vice presidency were being stored at the think tank’s offices in Washington, D.C., as well as at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Del.
McCaul asked Blinken to disclose his “involvement in fundraising activities for the Center or the University of Pennsylvania (including donor outreach/engagement), and whether you had knowledge of donations to the university by any PRC persons/sources,” as well as a list of all “PRC persons and/or their representatives you met with while employed at the Center.”
“Were you involved in meetings/engagements with foreign persons who had made or went on to make donations to the University of Pennsylvania or the Penn Biden Center?” he asked.
McCaul also asked Blinken for information on the classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center and whether any of these records originated from the State Department.
“The Foreign Affairs Committee is concerned about the national security and foreign policy implications of classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement,” wrote McCaul.
The University of Pennsylvania told the Free Beacon this month that no foreign donations were earmarked for the Penn Biden Center, and the think tank was financed by general university funds. The Penn Biden Center employed many of Biden’s top foreign policy aides before they joined the administration, including Pentagon policy chief Colin Kahl, U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Michael Carpenter, and U.S. deputy ambassador to the United Nations Jeffrey Prescott.
Since Biden’s inauguration, the University of Pennsylvania has disclosed at least $14 million in donations from China or Hong Kong, the Free Beacon reported last week. The names of these donors have yet to be disclosed by the Department of Education, breaking the precedent of prior administrations which published foreign donor names in a public database.
The Penn Biden Center is also under scrutiny for hosting events for other UPenn groups, including a pro-China-engagement bootcamp for congressional staffers in June, where attendees were able to walk around the D.C. offices unmonitored, the Free Beaconreported on Tuesday.
The true story of how Hunter Biden botched a family mission in California
Addiction has a congenital factor to it. My mother’s grandparents (and Mom) were addicts; even my father. It is very likely that Hunter inherited it from Jill and/or Joe. The family’s dirty money meant he got away with it more and for longer than most of us. Most likely Jill was the source in Hunter’s case. [US Patriot]
Amid the brouhaha over Joe Biden’s improper retention of classified documents and concerns that his son, Hunter Biden, had access to them, a 2018 form on which Hunter Biden claims to have spent nearly $50,000 a month on rent surfaced from the presidential son’s abandoned laptop.
On it, Hunter Biden lists his father’s Wilmington house as his address, raising questions about whether he was using rent payments to pass money to his father. The money, $49,910, was actually a reference to rental payment for a Washington, D.C., office space used by Hunter Biden. But the story of the document is more absurd, involving Biden family favor trading, scorned relatives, and an ultimately failed effort to get Hunter Biden’s troubled cousin a new probation officer.
The Washington Free Beacon traced the origin of the document to an attachment in a July 27, 2018, email from Hunter Biden to a luxury apartment complex in Los Angeles. The background check document was part of a rental application, and—though his communications with the building’s property manager indicated the apartment would be for him—text messages and emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop reveal it was in fact for his down-on-her-luck cousin, Caroline Biden, the daughter of Joe Biden’s brother Jim and his wife, Sara.
The president’s niece pleaded guilty in 2017 to buying more than $100,000 worth of makeup with a stolen credit card. While she managed to skirt a grand larceny charge and the prison sentence it carried, she was sentenced to two years of probation—time she wanted to serve in Los Angeles.
She texted Hunter Biden on July 26, 2018, from a New York City probation office, telling him she urgently needed a California address so her lawyer could transfer her probation there.
Keeping Caroline Biden out of prison was a Biden family affair and Hunter Biden was at the center of the effort. He moved to the West Coast at least in part to escape family drama, he explained in a July 17 message, saying his sister-in-law and former lover Hallie Biden had asked him to leave the state of Delaware. His day to day in California, text messages and passages from his 2021 autobiography reveal, was largely spent cooking up batches of crack cocaine and negotiating rates with prostitutes. But Joe Biden, according to a text from Caroline Biden to Hunter Biden, thought Hunter Biden was a “good influence” on her.
“Your dad thinks you’re a good influence which you are,” she wrote in a text message to Hunter Biden on July 20, 2018.
In text messages, Caroline Biden repeatedly referred to Hunter Biden as her “partner in crime,” and the pair commiserated over their “sick” family. She was trying to move to California to be closer to him.
Hunter Biden, Caroline Biden said, was the only family member she felt she could talk to, because “the majority of my family thinks I’m nuts and untalktoable.” She complained that “our family’s sick,” that she had “no relationship with my nuclear family,” and that she had to “do everything on my fucking own,” including finding a place to live in California.
That said, Caroline Biden does not appear to have been doing much on her own. Before Caroline Biden reached out to Hunter Biden for help, her father, Jim Biden, had asked Hunter Biden for help with the situation. “I need help with Caroline, she is off the rails,” Jim Biden told Hunter Biden in a July 13 message.
The idea to have Caroline Biden move to California appears to have been hatched in a follow-up conversation between Jim and Hunter Biden, but it was on Hunter Biden to deliver. Hunter Biden told Jim Biden as early as July 16 that he was looking for rentals in Laguna for his daughter. But by the time of Caroline Biden’s probation meeting when she messaged Hunter Biden about the address, he had still failed to secure a place.
“Hunter, parole officer needs Caroline’s address in CA in order to transfer to CA,” Sara Biden wrote to him on July 27. “Caroline also just said she needs to accept job by end of day today and tell them when she can start.”
Shortly after hearing from Sara Biden, Hunter Biden directed his assistant, Katie Dodge, to fill out a rental application on his behalf for an apartment at a luxury complex, the Villa Carlotta, a self-described “residential hideaway for free spirits drawn to the iconoclastic energy of bohemian Los Angeles.” He told Dodge she had 45 minutes to complete the task. Although the apartment was for his cousin, Hunter Biden told the property manager that he wanted to move into the unit that evening. I “only ha e [sic] a few bags,” he said in an email.
Hunter Biden email to assistant Katie Dodge
That form, now the subject of intrigue, was riddled with erroneous declarations, including Hunter Biden’s claim to have paid $49,910 in monthly rent. The figure matches the down payment his firm paid for Washington, D.C., office space at the beginning of its lease, as well as the amount the firm paid quarterly to rent the office space in the House of Sweden building on K Street, according to emails with the office building.
It is unclear whether Hunter Biden and his assistant meant to imply the money was for housing, and neither Hunter Biden nor Dodge responded to a request for comment. The form also declares that Hunter Biden had never been convicted of a crime or had a charge expunged from his record, though on at least one occasion he was arrested for possession of a controlled substance and had the charge expunged from his record.
The property manager, who did not respond to requests for comment, did not approve the Bidens for the apartment.
Jim Biden also asked his nephew to convince Caroline Biden to accept a job, another term of her transfer to California. But Caroline Biden, who at 31 had only had cushy jobs secured by her family and had no intention of lowering her standards.
Emails show she was a candidate for a job from Masimo Corporation, a California company owned by one of Joe Biden’s largest donors, with an $85,000 base salary, a guaranteed 10 percent bonus, and stock options. She was hesitant, she said, because the pay was insufficient.
“That’s below minimum wage in California after taxes,” she told her father in an email. “I cannot take this job. I have never made this little money in my life.” Caroline Biden said she couldn’t take a job for “less than $180,000.”
Caroline Biden appears to have interviewed for the job, but “bombed” the interview, telling Hunter Biden that she was nonetheless offered an internship because Joe Biden asked for a favor. “I didn’t get the job,” she told her cousin. “I was given an intern job at 31 years old because of your dad asking him to give me something even though I bombed it.”
By July 28, a dejected Caroline Biden told Hunter Biden that Joe Biden was “done” with her. And Jim Biden was losing his patience too. “Your dad told me he was done with me yesterday,” she said, adding that her father wasn’t going to let her go to California to see Hunter Biden without a place to stay. “Dad said he won’t let me come back until I have a place to stay and a car,” she wrote. “He’s not ‘paying for me to be out there for 6 weeks doing nothing.’”
Hunter Biden told his “crazy” cousin that everything would be fine. “Dont stress about the job shithead,” he said in a series of late night texts. “You are crazy im crazy and two crazies make…double the cray I guess. It’ll be fun we may just blow up a house and rob banks together.”
Hunter Biden’s efforts to get his cousin to California were a failure, and then he fell off the map. His uncle Jim Biden badgered him for help with his daughter for the next week, but Hunter Biden blew him off. “Did I do something to offend you?” Jim Biden wrote in a text message to Hunter on Aug. 8.
What Caroline Biden did next is unclear, but it appears she never left Pennsylvania: She was arrested for driving under the influence in the state in September 2020, but managed to avoid serving time after negotiating a plea bargain.
New details recently emerged in the case of slain Riverside County Sheriff’s Deputy Darnell Calhoun, one of two local deputies killed in shootings just two weeks apart.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said Calhoun, 30, was shot almost immediately upon his arrival at the scene on Jan. 13 in the unincorporated Lakeland Village neighborhood, which borders the city of Lake Elsinore, California, located about 55 miles southeast of Los Angeles.
“He got shot within the first 15 seconds,” Bianco told The Epoch Times.
The suspects in the deaths of Calhoun and Riverside County Deputy Isaiah Cordero, 32, on Dec. 29, 2022, both have criminal records, according to authorities.
Bianco said the suspect in the Calhoun shooting, Jesse Navarro, 42, of Lake Elsinore, is a known methamphetamine user and has a history of domestic violence complaints. Navarro is in custody and remains hospitalized. He’s listed in critical condition.
Navarro hasn’t yet been charged due to his current medical condition but ultimately will be with one count of murder and one count of attempted murder of a law enforcement official, according to Bianco.
Although it’s suspected that Navarro may have been using methamphetamine at the time of the shooting, lab results won’t be available for several weeks, Bianco said.
“He was allegedly under the influence at the time. We don’t know that for sure yet,” Bianco said. “But the family has said that he was always using meth and he was acting bizarre, and they attributed it to that, so we’re assuming that’s what it is.”
The domestic dispute turned out to be an argument between Navarro and his wife over him wanting to take his child shopping, Bianco said.
“But yet he shoots a cop when a cop gets there,” he said.
After reviewing the facts in the domestic dispute, he said Navarro wouldn’t have been arrested had he complied with police.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco honors slain Deputy Darnell Calhoun at the sheriff’s department’s station in Lake Elsinore, Calif., on Jan. 17, 2023. (Brad Jones/The Epoch Times)
Deputy Darnell Calhoun
Calhoun was shot while responding to a domestic violence complaint over a child custody dispute in the 18500 block of Hilldale Lane. He died in the hospital later that evening.
He was the first to respond on the scene. A second deputy arrived “probably within 30 seconds” of Calhoun to find him wounded in the street.
Navarro, armed with a handgun, allegedly opened fire on the second deputy who shot him in the ensuing gun battle, Bianco said.
“There were dozens of rounds fired,” he said.
Other police cruisers arrived within a minute of Calhoun, according to Bianco.
“It was all over by then,” he said.
The initial complaint was described as “unknown trouble” but appeared to be a domestic violence case over a child custody dispute and possibly “parental kidnapping,” Bianco said.
In cases like this, deputies must weigh the safety of potential victims over their own, he said.
Bianco announced Calhoun’s death at an evening press conference outside Inland Valley Medical Center in Wildomar, California, where he died.
“I shouldn’t be here tonight having to do this again,” he said at the time. “I’m devastated to tell of the loss of another of our deputy sheriffs who was killed in the line of duty.”
Before the deaths of Calhoun and Cordera, the last time a deputy was killed in the line of duty was in 2003, Bianco said.
After 11 p.m. that night, hundreds of people, some waving Thin Blue Line flags and signs in support of Calhoun’s family, lined the streets, freeways, and overpasses along Interstate 215 to pay tribute as a police procession transported the slain deputy’s body from the hospital to the Coroner’s Bureau in Perris, California.
Riverside County Sheriff’s Deputies surrounded by more than 1,500 mourners hold candles in honor of slain Deputy Darnell Calhoun at the sheriff’s department’s station in Lake Elsinore, Calif., on Jan. 17, 2023. (Brad Jones/The Epoch Times)
More than 1,500 mourners attended a candlelight vigil in honor of Calhoun in Lake Elsinore on Jan. 17, while another ceremony was held on Jan. 18 at the Town Square Park and Amphitheater in Murrieta, California.
The second deputy to arrive on the scene, whose name hasn’t yet been released, was placed on paid administrative leave, which is standard practice for all deputy-involved shootings, according to Bianco.
Deputy Isaiah Cordero
Cordero was shot and fatally wounded when the driver of a pickup truck he had pulled over in a traffic stop allegedly opened fire on him as he approached the vehicle in the 3900 block of Golden West Avenue in Jurupa Valley, California, a city near Riverside.
Police pursued the suspect, 44-year-old William Shae McKay, who led them on a manhunt, including a freeway chase in two counties. Ultimately, McKay was killed during a shootout with deputies after his truck crashed.
McKay had an extensive criminal history, including stabbing a California Highway Patrol canine in 2021. At the time of Cordero’s murder, he was out on bail after being arrested for failing to appear in court while awaiting a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life.
Bianco and Cordero’s family have called for the resignation of a Southern California judge who lowered McKay’s bail, allowing his release, claiming that he shouldn’t have been granted such on a “third strike” conviction while awaiting sentencing.
Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin speaks at a press conference in Riverside, Calif., on Jan. 18, 2018. (David McNew/Getty Images)
Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin told The Epoch Times that he agrees with Bianco’s assessment of McKay’s case.
“The suspect should have been in custody when the shooting happened,” he said.
Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva also told The Epoch Times that, as a convicted “third-striker,” McKay should have been sentenced immediately and taken into custody to start serving his time.
In 2012, California voters passed Proposition 36 to amend the three-strikes statute established by Proposition 184 in 1994, which was intended to increase prison sentences for repeat offenders. Prop. 36 changed the three strikes sentencing system to impose life sentences only when new felony convictions are serious or violent and allowed resentencing for some convicts serving life sentences.
With the White House refusing to turn over documents and communications relating to a scheme to use federal law enforcement to target parents critical of liberal education policies, the U.S. House of Representatives is warning that subpoenas, as possible contempt charges, are next.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, issued letters to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Attorney General Garland, FBI Director Wray, DHS Secretary Mayorkas, Education Secretary Cardona, ATF Director Dettelbach and DEA Administrator Milgram renewing outstanding requests for communications and documents concerning the misuse of federal criminal and counterterrorism resources to target concerned parents at school board meetings.
“For two years, the Biden Administration has stonewalled Congress, refused to comply with basic document requests, and avoided transparency and accountability for its failures,” Committee Republicans said in a press release.
“House Judiciary Republicans are committed to holding each agency accountable under the new majority and will use compulsory processes, if necessary, to get answers for the American people,” Committee Republicans added.
“Since the beginning of the Biden Administration, we have made several requests for information and documents concerning the misuse of federal criminal and counterterrorism resources to target concerned parents at school board meetings. These requests remain outstanding,” Jordan’s letter to Klain begins.
Not only has the White House refused to comply, it’s been openly contemptuous of any questioning.
“To date, you have not complied with our long-outstanding requests for information and documents. Instead, the Biden White House provided a perfunctory letter that discounted Congress’s constitutional oversight authorities, failed to produce any documents or information requested, and declined to address any matters of substance,” Jordan continues.
“The White House leaked this letter to the media, and briefed at least one reporter on it, before transmitting the letter to the Committee at 4:34 a.m.—severely undercutting the White House’s purported commitment to working with us in ‘good faith,’” Jordan adds.
Jordan then makes clear Congress is prepared to force White House officials to comply, under threat of contempt charges.
“The Administration’s stonewalling must stop. Accordingly, we reiterate our outstanding requests—itemized in our letter dated November 18, 2022, and its enclosure, and incorporated herein—and ask that you provide this material immediately,” Jordan writes.
“We are prepared to resort to compulsory process, if necessary, to obtain this material,” Jordan warns.
Congress’ previous Democrat leaders made frequent use of contempt charges, finding five Trump administration figures, Attorney General William Barr, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Trump adviser Steve Bannon guilty of failure to fully comply with requests for testimony or documents.
Bannon’s contempt charge led to a grand jury indictment and a criminal conviction on two charges of contempt of Congress. He is currently free while appealing his conviction and sentence of four months in prison and a $6,500 fine.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
A Belgian family wanted to offer their house to a refugee family displaced by the war in Ukraine, but instead has lived through a nightmare.
According to the Belgium news website Ninofmedia Sven De Strijcker and Evy De Koninck of Ninove began with the best of intentions.
“We had offered a place for a woman with two children. We were assigned a family in June 2022. When we went to pick them up at the OCMW in Ninove, it turned out to be a pregnant woman, her husband and three children. That was the first problem, but not insurmountable,” De Strijcker said, using the acronym for Belgium’s Public Center for Social Welfare.
According to the website 7sur7, the family was not among the refugees from cosmopolitan urban centers such as Kyiv.
“We quickly noticed that this was no ordinary Ukrainian family. Two weeks later, the CPAS told us that they were Roma gypsies,” De Strijcker said.
The result was that the refugee family did not know how to use modern conveniences, such as a washing machine, dryer, or oven. The mother of the children was washing clothes in the tub.
Within a few weeks, the house — in which the couple was no longer living — had been transformed.
“Mildew appeared all over the windows, the walls were covered with inscriptions, the wood was torn from the frame of the bed, the doors and cabinets were damaged,” De Strijcker said.
“But that’s not all: all the chairs in the kitchen were broken, the molding was torn off the stairs, there were holes in the floor, our children’s toys were broken, even their piggy bank was opened,” he continued.
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But it got worse, he said, as Belgium’s Public Center for Social Assistance, known by the acronym of CPAS, did nothing to help as their problems spiraled.
“We should have drawn up a rental contract, but the CPAS never discussed it with us. They only said that we would receive compensation. We contacted the CPAS several times, but they were reluctant to see us. They simply told us: ‘Either we take the refugees, or they stay with you and you stop asking us,’” he said, adding that they gave the family a second chance.
By September of last year, they had reached their end, according to Ninofmedia.
“There was too much damage, the man refused three times to accept job offers for various reasons,” De Strijcker said, noting that the man preferred off-the-books black market work.
“We found out another family was staying here on the sly, we don’t know how long,” he said, adding that the alleged sister had simply arrived from Ukraine and not through proper channels.
De Strijcker told 7sur7 that at one point, the house had 11 people living in it.
“This could have caused big problems in the event of a fire, for example, as we had been persuaded to let them check in at our home address,” he said.
The refugees “also constantly asked us for money,” he said. “Once it was supposedly for their youngest daughter’s birthday present, but it turned out to be for a car, although we knew the man didn’t have a driver’s license.”
Eventually, the refugees left at the end of November. “It was not until the end of December that they came to collect all their belongings. It was a real mess,” he said.
The damage totaled 36,000 euros, which amounts to more than $39,000.
“The CPAS then told us that we would not receive any compensation. We were advised to sue the family in question through the Peace Court. We are going to do it, but the family lives on an integration income. How are they going to pay for this? We understand that 36,000 euros is a lot of money, but the CPAS could have covered part of the damage, which has been proven,” he said.
ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence system, passed a graduate-level business examination at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, according to a new research paper.
Christian Terwiesch, a professor at Wharton, considered one of the most prestigious business schools in the United States, said he wanted to test growing concerns about the chatbot’s potential. It comes amid a surge of concerns from academics that students would use the tool to cheat on their exams and homework.
In his paper titled “Would Chat GPT3 Get a Wharton MBA?” Terwiesch concluded that “Chat GPT3 would have received a B to B- grade on the exam,” which “has important implications for business school education.” He suggested the school overhaul its exam rules, teaching, and curriculum.
Elaborating, he wrote the AI system displayed “a remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general and specifically the knowledge workers in the jobs held by MBA graduates including analysts, managers, and consultants.” The bot was designed to give a human-like conversation via artificial intelligence.
The chatbot, designed for mass market usage, also “demonstrated the capability of performing professional tasks such as writing software code and preparing legal documents,” his paper said (pdf). During one instance, ChatGPT did “an amazing job” and provided answers that were correct or “excellent.”
“ChatGPT3 is remarkably good at modifying its answers in response to human hints. In other words, in the instances where it initially failed to match the problem with the right solution method, Chat GPT3 was able to correct itself after receiving an appropriate hint from a human expert,” his paper said.
Launched in November of last year, OpenAI says ChatGPT describes itself as a “large language model” that can be used for “natural language processing tasks such as text generation and language translation.” The “GPT” in the name is short for “Generative Pretrained Transformer.”
“One of the key features of ChatGPT is its ability to generate human-like text responses to prompts,” maker OpenAI says. “This makes it useful for a wide range of applications, such as creating chatbots for customer service, generating responses to questions in online forums, or even creating personalized content for social media posts.”
Terwiesch compared ChatGPT’s potential with the effect that electronic calculators had on the corporate world.
“Prior to the introduction of calculators and other computing devices, many firms employed hundreds of employees whose task it was to manually perform mathematical operations such as multiplications or matrix inversions,” he wrote. “Obviously, such tasks are now automated, and the value of the associated skills has dramatically decreased. In the same way any automation of the skills taught in our MBA programs could potentially reduce the value of an MBA education.”
But Terwiesch clarified that ChatGPT made some glaring errors. For example, the AI system made “surprising mistakes in relatively simple calculations” on sixth-grade-level math problems that were “massive in magnitude.”
The latest version currently is not “capable of handling more advanced process analysis questions, even when they are based on fairly standard templates,” he said. ChatGPT was able to correct itself after it received a hint, the researcher added, but because of the significantly wrong answers, “we still need a human in the loop.”
Investment
It comes as Microsoft confirmed Monday that it will invest billions in OpenAI. The exact amount was not disclosed by the firm.
“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a news release. “In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”
Around 27 percent of professionals at prominent consulting, technology, and financial services firms have used ChatGPT in various ways, according to a Fishbowl survey. It can give simple responses to questions, which some have said may imperil Google Search, the world’s most-used search engine.
A former top FBI official in New York has been arrested because of his alleged ties to a Russian oligarch, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Jan. 23.
Charles McGonigal, formerly the special agent in charge of counterintelligence in the FBI’s New York Field Office, was arrested because of his ties to Oleg Deripaska, according to a DOJ statement and court documents. Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, has been sanctioned by the United States and was criminally charged in 2022 for violating those sanctions.
Prosecutors say McGonigal and Sergey Shestakov—a court interpreter—were charged with violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act with money laundering and conspiring to commit money laundering. Specifically, Shestakov was charged with making misstatements to the FBI, according to the DOJ.
Both defendants were arrested on Jan. 21 and made an appearance on Jan. 23 before Magistrate Judge Sarah L. Cave in a Manhattan federal court, the DOJ stated. McGonigal is among the highest-ranking former FBI officials to ever have been charged with a crime.
“As alleged, Charles McGonigal, a former high-level FBI official, and Sergey Shestakov, a Court interpreter, violated U.S. sanctions by agreeing to provide services to Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “They both previously worked with Deripaska to attempt to have his sanctions removed, and, as public servants, they should have known better. This Office will continue to prosecute those who violate U.S. sanctions enacted in response to Russian belligerence in Ukraine in order to line their own pockets.”
McGonigal joined the bureau in 1996 and initially worked on Russian foreign counterintelligence and organized crime; later, he partook in investigations into the deadly TWA Flight 800 crash, the 1998 terrorist bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He was named special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence Division for the FBI New York Field Office in 2016.
While not referenced by the DOJ, McGonigal was also involved in the FBI’s investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign adviser Carter Page, according to messages that were released by Senate Republicans. He wrote in March 2017 to a colleague: “Our Team is currently talking to [Carter Page] re Russia.” It isn’t clear what role he had in the probe.
The Jan. 23 court filings say (pdf) McGonigal was charged with violating U.S. sanctions by attempting to get Deripaska off the sanctions list. The former FBI official and Shestakov allegedly agreed in 2021 to investigate a rival Russian oligarch in exchange for payments from Deripaska, according to prosecutors.
Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska speaks to the media outside his carmaker GAZ plant in Nizhny Novgorod on April 16, 2019. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)
“The FBI is committed to the enforcement of economic sanctions designed to protect the United States and our allies, especially against hostile activities of a foreign government and its actors,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge Michael Driscoll said in a statement. “Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska perform global malign influence on behalf of the Kremlin and are associated with acts of bribery, extortion, and violence.”
Driscoll said that both allegedly “acted on behalf of Deripaska and fraudulently used a U.S. entity to obscure their activity in violation of U.S. sanctions” and that “there are no exceptions for anyone, including a former FBI official like Mr. McGonigal.”
Shestakov is accused of lying to FBI investigators in 2021 about his relationship with Deripaska. For that, he was charged with making false statements.
An FBI spokesperson told media outlets on Jan. 23 that McGonigal was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York on Jan. 21 after returning from a flight from the Middle East.
Details about the attorneys for McGonigal and Shestakov weren’t immediately available.
Deripaska, an aluminum magnate who reportedly has close ties with the Kremlin, was sanctioned in 2018 by the Trump Treasury Department for the “totality of the Russian government’s ongoing and increasingly malign activities in the world.” Forbes magazine lists him among the wealthiest Russians, worth about $3 billion as of January 2023.
In late 2022, he was indicted by the DOJ on a charge of violating recent U.S. sanctions that were imposed in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the agency. Two others—a Russian national and a New Jersey resident—were also charged in connection to the case.
Deripaska is also one of the few Russian billionaires who have called for peace with regard to Russia’s war with Ukraine, saying in March 2022 that “we have already passed a point of no return.” Around the same time, he cautioned that “destroying Ukraine would be a colossal mistake.”
Concerns and controversy are swirling around the decision by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to alter an electrocardiogram test limit for pilots.
A researcher for an aviation advocacy group, US Freedom Flyers (USFF), stumbled upon the EKG change in December, several weeks after the FAA enacted it.
Because the revision was made without a published explanation, USFF turned to a nationally known cardiologist and other experts to assess its importance.
They say the FAA’s change involving “the PR interval” is significant. The PR interval represents the time it takes for an electrical impulse to travel from one part of the heart to another. It is an indicator of heart health.
But “the new normal” PR interval that the FAA set for pilots is 50 percent longer than the previous limit; it deviates from a long-accepted limit in cardiology.
Critics fear that expanding the limit could endanger pilots’ health and passengers’ safety.
This worry is especially acute amid rising reports of cardiac arrest and sudden death since the COVID pandemic began in 2020. Some researchers suggest that some heart conditions could be tied to aftereffects of COVID-19 injections or the virus. Because pilots were threatened with job termination, a large percentage of them took the COVID jabs.
These factors make a very worrisome mix, said Josh Yoder, a commercial airline pilot who heads the USFF advocacy group.
“This is a ticking time bomb on a level like we’ve never seen,” he told The Epoch Times in an interview.
While some people question whether that level of concern is justified, others agree with Yoder. For many months, he and others have railed against the FAA for declaring the COVID injections safe for pilots, as the Epoch Times reported previously.
Yoder and others say the FAA should be held accountable for relaxing the EKG standard. They say the new standard increases the odds that a pilot’s heart condition would slip past, undetected and untreated, setting the stage for disaster.
FAA Gives Partial Answer
In a Jan. 17 email to The Epoch Times, the FAA said there is “no evidence of aircraft accidents or incapacitations caused by pilots suffering medical complications associated with COVID-19 vaccines.” That was the same language the FAA used in previous responses to inquiries.
Critics allege that the FAA has found no such evidence because no investigation has been done.
Regarding the revised EKG standard, the FAA said: “When making changes to medical requirements and guidance, the FAA follows standard processes based on data and science.”
But the FAA has yet to reveal what data drove its decision to allow COVID injections for pilots. The agency has not disclosed the reasons for changing the acceptable range for pilots’ PR intervals.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) building is seen in Washington on March 13, 2019. (Eric Barada/AFP via Getty Images)
Stephen Carbone, a former FAA safety inspector, takes issue with the FAA on both counts–allowing the COVID shots and the new EKG standard for pilots.
“The FAA’s decision to lower the EKG standards is the latest assault on aviation safety from an organization that has pledged to put aviation safety ahead of all else,” he said in a Jan. 22 email to The Epoch Times. “It is nothing short of safety sacrilege; to those of us in aviation, safety is sacred.”
Whatever the reason for the FAA’s change to the PR interval limit, Carbone is distressed over its possible consequences.
“I can’t highlight enough how dangerous this is and how irresponsible,” he said. “It risks the lives of pilots; it risks the lives of passengers; and it risks the lives of anyone in a house, apartment building, school, car, beach, park, or museum under the aircraft’s path.”
100 Milliseconds Means a Lot
On an EKG reading, the PR interval indicates how well electrical impulses travel within the heart, “so the whole heart can contract at once,” cardiologist Dr. Thomas Levy, who serves as USFF’s medical adviser, told The Epoch Times.
Dr. Thomas Levy, cardiologist. (Thomas Levy)
A PR interval longer than 200 milliseconds (ms) is considered a red flag, said Florida-based Levy. Such a reading, by itself, doesn’t prove there is a heart problem.
Yet a reading above 200 ms does warrant further testing and “shouldn’t be ignored,” Levy said. That has been a given in cardiology for almost as long as EKGs have been used, Levy said.
That’s why, in Levy’s view, it makes no sense for the FAA to broaden the range significantly. Pilots with PR intervals longer than 200 ms used to require further evaluation. Now that happens when the pilots’ PR readings go beyond 300 ms.
Dr. Peter Chambers, a retired U.S. military Special Operations flight surgeon, agrees it was unwise for the FAA to change the PR interval limit.
“That removes the ‘safety zone’ that allows us to catch the problem early,” Chambers told The Epoch Times in an interview. “It’s like coming up on an intersection where the traffic light goes directly from green to red–and you’re in the center of the intersection, facing a semi that could hit you.”
“Maybe you get lucky, and the semi doesn’t hit you,” he said. “But how many times are you going to get lucky?”
Levy said PR intervals above 200 ms may indicate that the heart “is no longer completely healthy, and the conduction rate is slowing down.” He notes that PR readings tend to increase as a person ages, although some younger, healthy athletes have abnormally high PR intervals.
However, in many cases, a PR interval longer than 200 ms “is clearly associated with arrhythmias in the future, pacemakers, and early death,” Levy said, citing a respected Harvard study. He said those risks elevate with PR readings even slightly above 200 ms, not even close to the new 300 ms limit that the FAA has set.
In sum, Levy said, a PR interval longer than 200 ms “might be innocuous, but you can’t assume it to be innocuous,” particularly “in the setting of the pandemic.”
COVID Heightens Concerns
COVID’s spike protein “likes to hit” cardiac cells, Levy said. This can trigger “myocarditis,” or inflammation of the heart muscle cells. This condition has been considered rare. But since the advent of the pandemic, cardiologists have been seeing it more often, Levy said.
Myocarditis is one of several medical conditions that can prolong a PR interval. It also can touch off heart-rhythm problems because inflamed cardiac cells become “electrically unstable.” That can become life-threatening or deadly “if it’s in the wrong spot of the heart.”
A sudden surge of adrenalin can provoke the problem, Levy said. In the case of pilots, that could happen if they encounter an emergency during flight.
Levy is concerned that myocarditis could be lurking unnoticed in many people who received a COVID-19 injection or contracted the virus.
By February 2022, almost 60 percent of the U.S. population had been COVID-infected, the CDC estimated.
As of this month, as the pandemic entered its fourth year, about 69 percent of the U.S. population has had at least a “primary” COVID immunization, the CDC reports.
Yoder, president of the organization that consulted with Levy, said the percentage of COVID-inoculated pilots is almost certainly higher than the general population. He notes that some airlines publicly stated that more than 90 percent of their pilots had complied with demands to get the shots or be fired.
Pilot groups attacked the COVID shot mandates in court cases, challenging their enforceability. At the same time, word began to spread among pilots that they could obtain a religious-based exemption to the shot requirement. Still, many pilots had already taken the shot under duress.
Last year, disturbing statistics began to emerge, Yoder said. At one major commercial airline, between January and July 2022, “there was a 300 percent increase in long-term disability claims among pilots,” he said. That’s according to data from a pilots union, Yoder said. What caused the numbers to climb is not known, although Yoder notes the timing closely follows the vaccine mandates that affected pilots in late 2021.
A nurse receives a COVID-19 vaccination in Orange, Calif., on Dec. 16, 2020. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
What Should Be Done
Levy says the FAA “has its head in the sand” by not requiring additional testing until a pilot exceeds the 300 ms PR reading.
The 2022 FAA Guide for Aviation Medical Examiners says pilots should be cleared to fly at levels under 300 ms, provided that the examiner has no concerns and the patient reports no symptoms.
That’s inadequate protection for the public, Levy said. Many people with myocarditis and other heart issues may notice no problems; a medical crisis can strike these people suddenly.
Levy was shocked to learn that the FAA hasn’t routinely required cardiac stress testing for pilots–a much better way to screen for heart health, he said. Levy sees EKGs as merely an indicator that no heart attack has occurred.
A pair of blood tests, which check for proteins called D-dimer and troponin, should be widely used screening tools, he said in a Jan. 5 publication.
While the D-dimer test checks for evidence of blood clotting, the troponin test can detect signs of damaged cardiac cells.
Levy said the troponin test is critical, not just for pilots.
“Everyone should have this test done, even if they are feeling perfectly well,” he wrote in the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service article. Thus, the tests can show a “normal” baseline for a person or detect any suspected low-grade myocardial inflammation.
Levy said he would avoid flying with any pilot registering abnormal results on either of those tests. Ditto for one with a 200-plus PR interval but no further testing.
“For the purposes of a safe flight, it doesn’t matter” what might be causing out-of-the-norm results, Levy said. What matters is that the problem is detected, investigated, and treated.
Some people have suggested that a pilot shortage, which pre-dates COVID, could have influenced FAA to make the PR interval change. The broadened range could give more leeway for older pilots to continue flying.
But Levy sees that as no justification for the changed PR interval and the lack of extra testing. He thinks the public should be “stunned and outraged,” and ought to demand accountability from the FAA.
‘Working Completely Blind’
Dr. Theresa Long, a flight surgeon specializing in military pilots’ medical health, has repeatedly expressed concerns over pilot safety and the COVID shots. She has been under whistleblower protection.
Now, emphasizing that she is expressing her personal opinion–not that of the U.S. military–Long told The Epoch Times why she is puzzled and concerned about the FAA’s new PR interval guideline.
Long said cardiologists have told her that “it would be negligent of me to see a PR interval of 290 and do nothing.”
She can’t understand why the FAA would elevate the acceptable PR interval to 300.
Long notes that, even before the PR interval change, the FAA’s medical standards for pilots were less stringent than those in the military. She also said it’s atypical for the FAA to make such a change without citing a study or specific rationale.
The FAA’s decision to relax the PR interval standard seems especially odd, Long said, considering that—to her knowledge—no national medical organization has recommended such a change.
A nurse checks an electrocardiogram in Bagnolet, near Paris, France, on April 8, 2020. (Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images)
In aviation, “everything is a calculated risk,” Long said. Pre-COVID, her job as a flight surgeon was more clear-cut and less stressful. Most of the pilots whose medical histories she reviewed were healthy and young; check the box, and they’re cleared to fly.
For the few pilots with certain health conditions, Long could consult medical study tables or aeromedical policy letters for each disorder.
But now, because COVID is relatively new and clinical trials on the COVID shots were done quickly, there is no reference guide to help flight surgeons decide whether it’s safe to put a COVID-inoculated pilot in the cockpit.
For example, flight surgeons such as Long have no idea what percentage of people who took the shots develop myocarditis.
“I am working completely blind,” Long said. “So I’m taking on an unknown amount of risk. Every pilot we put in there who’s vaccinated, it’s completely unknown.”
More than a year ago, Long spoke with an FAA federal air surgeon cardiologist. Confiding with Long on condition of anonymity, the doctor agreed that all COVID-inoculated pilots should undergo cardiac screening and that all COVID shots for pilots should cease. Long made a sworn statement attesting to those statements in a court case.
Since then, the FAA has been alerted to those recommendations, Long said. As far as she knows, the FAA has yet to respond. That, says Long, is shocking.
Theories and Facts
Tom Oltorik, Florida director of MoveFreelyAmerica.org, said he, too, is concerned about pilots’ health after COVID infections and injections.
Oltorik, who has nearly 40 years of experience as a commercial pilot and a military pilot, said, “it’s undeniable” that many people, including pilots, are experiencing health problems from the COVID spike protein.
He is not ready to opine on the FAA’s possible motivation for changing the PR interval. But he wishes the FAA would explain. “Until we get a clear answer out of the FAA, we’re just chasing our tails,” Oltorik said.
The retired flight surgeon, Chambers, isn’t holding his breath. He said everything related to COVID is so politically charged, free discourse is being shut down.
Investigations into what is happening to pilots’ health should be launched. But “you’re not even allowed to ask the questions,” he said.
He keeps hearing that more and more pilots, including young ones, are losing their flight clearance certificates over heart-health issues.
But when Chambers tries to talk about that phenomenon with his flight surgeon buddies in the military, they say they have been “ordered not to talk about it.” He finds it disturbing that they can’t even discuss the problem confidentially and informally with a longtime friend and fellow medical professional.
“It’s keeping us from doing our normal doctor thing, which is, ‘Let’s have a conference about this,’” Chambers said. “But we can’t. Because it’s the ‘elephant in the room.’”
Then, tossing away that idiom, Chambers revised his statement. “Actually, it’s the ‘elephant’–and the ‘donkey’–in the room,” he said, referring to the Republican and Democrat mascots. “It gets political.”
Yet, he said, politics should play no part in any discussion of aviation safety. “It’s a zero-defect environment; there is no room for error,” he said. “A pilot with your family on board, that’s a zero-defect environment…We can’t fudge.”
Rep. Katherine Clark’s child Jared Dowell apprehended Saturday during anti-police protest
House Minority Whip Katherine Clark’s (D., Mass.) child Jared Dowell was arrested in Boston on Saturday for allegedly assaulting police.
Law enforcement apprehended Dowell after the 23-year-old allegedly graffitied “No Cop City” and “ACAB,” which stands for “All Cops Are Bastards,” on a bandstand in Boston Common. A group of 20 protesters circled the officers during the arrest, and an officer “was hit in the face and could be seen bleeding from the nose and mouth,” according to a police report.
Dowell, who identifies as “nonbinary” and goes by the name “Riley,” faces charges of assault by means of a dangerous weapon, destruction of personal property, and damage of property by graffiti.
Clark said in a tweet Sunday that “this is a very difficult time in the cycle of joy and pain in parenting.”
“This will be evaluated by the legal system, and I am confident in that process,” Clark added.
Clark, who this month ascended to the number-two leadership position in the Democratic caucus, has long voiced opposition to police. In August 2020, she said, “Until we take action against racism and police brutality, tragedies will continue.” In a March 2021 tweet, Clark said that no “single policy” can “erase the decades of systemic racism.”
“It’s time for meaningful reforms,” Clark added, with the hashtag “BLM.”
Dowell’s arrest came the same day anti-police Antifa activists rioted in downtown Atlanta, damaging businesses and setting a police vehicle on fire.
Democrats promised to ‘shut down’ the virus. (They did not.)
FACT: They never tried to kill the virus. Rather, they are doing everything they can to extend it and force it to mutate so there is a perpetual pandemic- under WHO control (and by WHO, I mean China) [US Patriot]
What happened:
White House chief of staff Ron Klain announced he is stepping down next month. He will be replaced by Jeff Zients, a former Bain consultant who served alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci as the Biden administration’s COVID-19 czar from January 2021 to April 2022.
Why it matters:
Being the president’s chief of staff is a tough gig under any circumstances. When the president is Joe Biden, a cognitively compromised octogenarian requiring full-time care and supervision, the White House chief of staff is basically the most important job in the world. The American people deserve to know if Zients is up to the task. Evaluating his record as COVID czar, for example, should give us some insight into his leadership skills.
COVID-19 deaths on Zients’s watch:
• 573,648 total
• 38,243 per month
• 9,106 per week
• 1,301 per day
• 54 per hour
• 1 per minute
Context:
About 400,000 Americans died from COVID-19 under former president Donald Trump, who was repeatedly accused of having “blood on his hands.”
Bottom line:
Actually, being good at one’s job and delivering results is not a requirement for professional advancement within the Democratic Party.
White House chief of staff Ron Klain announced he is stepping down next month. He will be replaced by Jeff Zients, a former Bain consultant who served alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci as the Biden administration’s COVID-19 czar from January 2021 to April 2022.
Why it matters:
Being the president’s chief of staff is a tough gig under any circumstances. When the president is Joe Biden, a cognitively compromised octogenarian requiring full-time care and supervision, the White House chief of staff is basically the most important job in the world. The American people deserve to know if Zients is up to the task. Evaluating his record as COVID czar, for example, should give us some insight into his leadership skills.
COVID-19 deaths on Zients’s watch:
• 573,648 total
• 38,243 per month
• 9,106 per week
• 1,301 per day
• 54 per hour
• 1 per minute
Context:
About 400,000 Americans died from COVID-19 under former president Donald Trump, who was repeatedly accused of having “blood on his hands.”
Bottom line:
Actually being good at one’s job and delivering results is not a requirement for professional advancement within the Democratic Party.
Joe Biden’s Democratic allies have started turning on him in light of his classified documents scandal, with Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.) saying the president should be “embarrassed,” Bloombergreported Sunday.
FBI agents on Friday found another batch of mishandled classified documents during a more than 12 hour search of Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home. The slow drip of scandal has left high-ranking Democrats irritated at the president.
Biden “should be embarrassed by the situation,” Durbin, the Senate’s number-two Democrat and a longtime ally of the president, told CNN on Sunday. Mishandling documents as the president did is “just unacceptable,” Durbin said.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) told NBC that Biden “should have a lot of regrets,” calling the president’s actions “irresponsible.”
Durbin’s and Manchin’s words are a sharp contrast from Biden’s comments on the scandal.
“I have no regrets,” Biden said Thursday, one week after his attorney general announced the creation of a special counsel to investigate the mishandled documents.
News broke this month that Biden’s lawyers had found classified documents in the president’s think-tank office. More documents then surfaced at his Wilmington residence, likely prompting the FBI search that found the latest batch.
Biden in recent days has faced other bad news: His already low poll numbers have plummeted amid the scandal, while his powerful chief of staff, Ron Klain, is planning to resign.
While Democrats distance themselves from the president, Republicans have started wondering where the documents imbroglio will lead, Politicoreported.
“Watergate started as a very small burglary,” House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas) told ABC on Sunday, “and it led to the president of the United States resigning.”
Teenager who hit mother and baby with car was killed after completing light sentence mandated by George Gascón
The latest murder victim in Los Angeles is one of the criminals let off easy by radical prosecutor George Gascón.
In a turn of events that captures the epidemic of lawlessness affecting the city, a Los Angeles teenager who hit a mother and baby with his car was shot and killed just weeks after completing his time in a diversionary program.
Kristopher Baca, who pleaded guilty in June 2022 to mowing down the mother walking her child in a stroller in August 2021, was shot to death on Wednesday in Palmdale, Calif., the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced Friday. The mother, who says she voted for Gascón but later left Los Angeles over his “soft-on-crime” approach, told Fox 11 that the “universe delivered the justice we weren’t given in court, but a much harsher punishment than he’d have been dealt in a court of law.”
The sequence of events shows how crime can compound in many “reform-minded” prosecutors’ districts, as their offices pursue lighter sentences and alternatives to incarceration that keep dangerous offenders on the street. Los Angeles’s murder rate reached a 15-year high in 2021.
Gascón is one of several so-called progressive prosecutors boosted into office by liberal billionaire George Soros. Elected on a platform to reduce “mass incarceration,” the embattled district attorney has faced two potential recall elections over his policies.
After winning office, Gascón announced he would no longer try juvenile criminals as adults, but was forced to reverse course in 2022 after facing backlash. Soros donated $2 million to Gascón’s 2020 campaign.
Gascón’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Gascón’s office told Fox News in June 2022 that a five to seven months’ sentence at a “youth camp” was an “appropriate resolution” in Baca’s case. “Fortunately, the baby was uninjured, and the mother received a laceration to her elbow,” the office said. Baca had also admitted in court that he had a prior felony conviction from 2019 for poisoning a girl at his high school who later had to be hospitalized.
Prosecutors in Gascón’s office described the youth diversion camp as “less than a military school and a little bit tougher than a summer camp.” They promised Baca would “be held accountable for his actions and receive the needed services to foster positive development to keep him from committing future offenses.”
A receptionist at Camp Glenn Rockey, where Baca served his sentence, told the Washington Free Beacon that it could not disclose when the juvenile offender had been released. The Los Angeles Timesreported that Baca was last seen at the camp in October, four months after he pleaded guilty to the hit-and-run.
Baca’s attempted murder of the mother and her baby kickstarted a recall campaign last year against Gascón, which the prosecutor narrowly dodged after signatures for its petition were rejected at a “shockingly” high rate, according to its organizers. The mother, who on the recall group’s website chooses to go by her first name, Rachel, said she turned on Gascón over his handling of her case.
“The criminal who tried to kill me and my baby was only sentenced to five months in a juvenile camp,” she says in a video featured on the Recall DA George Gascón website. “What he’s doing is pro-criminal and anti-victim.”
“I was also told that his record would be wiped clean when he turns 18,” the mother also told Fox. “How on earth can that be? He tried to murder two innocent pedestrians. Murder. And we have video evidence. My child would be dead if I hadn’t been there to protect him.”
The recall campaigners sued the Los Angeles County Registrar’s Office in October for discarding what they claimed were enough valid signatures to trigger a recall.
Warnock received a tax-free $7,417 monthly housing allowance from his church in his last term
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.), who received a lucrative monthly housing allowance from his church during his first term in the Senate, will soon reside in a luxurious Capitol Hill townhouse as tenants of his ministry’s low-income apartment building continue to live in squalor.
At first glance, the $1,149,000 Washington, D.C., townhouse that Warnock purchased on Jan. 4 appears to be outside his means. The Georgia Democrat took out a $549,000 loan on the property, real estate records show, indicating Warnock put down a massive $600,000 down payment on the home. Warnock owned assets valued between $654,000 and $1,353,000 at the end of 2021, the bulk of which was tied up in his church’s pension plan. He also owed up to $600,000 on his Atlanta home in 2021, according to his latest available financial disclosures.
Fortunately for Warnock, he was also the beneficiary of a tax-free, $7,417 monthly housing allowance in 2021 from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he continues to preach on occasion. The church also owns a pest-infected subsidized apartment building in Atlanta that moved to evict residents during the pandemic for as little as $28.55 in past-due rent, the Washington Free Beaconreported.
Ebenezer Baptist Church structured Warnock’s housing allowance as an employment benefit so that he could bypass the Senate’s $29,595 outside income limitation in 2021. It’s not known at this time if the church helped finance Warnock’s new Capitol Hill townhouse. Ebenezer did not return a request for comment.
Warnock’s new home is situated less than two miles away from the Capitol and comes equipped with a brand-new gourmet kitchen, a wine refrigerator, and a private backyard patio. The four-bedroom, four-bathroom home provides the “rare opportunity to experience a life of leisure and comfort,” a listing for the property boasts.
The townhouse also comes with a separate basement unit cordoned off with its own living area, bedroom, and bathroom. The Free Beacon inquired how much Warnock will rent his basement unit for. The senator’s office did not respond.
Warnock’s financial ties to the church and its low-income apartment became a sticking point for the Democrat during his reelection campaign in 2022. Warnock claimed during a debate with Republican challenger Herschel Walker that there had been no evictions from the building, but court records showed otherwise. Fulton County marshals carried out two court-ordered evictions on residents at the church’s property during the pandemic, one in August 2020 and the other in February 2022.
Warnock’s church owns 99 percent of the Columbia Tower apartment building in Atlanta through a network of shell companies linked to a charity that identifies the senator as its principal officer. The church tapped Columbia Residential, one of the nation’s leading eviction-filers, to manage the property on its behalf. The building is plagued by pests, maintenance problems, and filth, residents told the Free Beacon.
Columbia Residential dropped its eviction cases against five of the building’s residents a few days before Warnock’s runoff election in December, but only after the Free Beaconreported that it had been trying to evict a Vietnam War veteran who had already paid his back rent.
Claim: “You can’t negotiate with people who take hostages.”
Who said it:
Ron Klain, the soon-to-be-former White House chief of staff, according to a senior congressional Democrat who spoke to the Washington Post about the Biden administration’s approach to negotiating with Republicans over debt and spending cuts.
“This debate is simple: We want to do the responsible thing, and they want to take the entire American economy hostage to cut Social Security and Medicare,” said the member of Congress, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations. Klain told the lawmaker that the fight could result in substantial political benefits for the Democratic Party. “The point he was making was clear: You can’t negotiate with people who take hostages.”
Why it matters:
Given the rapid deterioration of President Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical health, Klain is arguably the most powerful man in the world. Mainstream journalists have a moral duty to fact-check his statements, but they’re only interested in speaking truth to power when Republicans are in charge. That’s why the Washington Free Beacon exists.
Context:
Klain’s successor, former Bain consultant Jeff Zients, oversaw the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response from January 2021 to April 2022. More than 570,000 Americans died on his watch.
Analysis:
The assertion that Democrats “can’t negotiate with people who take hostages” is contradicted by the evidence.
Last month, for example, the Biden administration negotiated with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for the release of Brittany Griner, a WNBA player caught in the act of drug smuggling. In exchange for Griner, the United States agreed to release Viktor Bout, a.k.a. “the Merchant of Death,” a reviled arms dealer convicted of plotting to murder American citizens. Paul Whelan, a former Marine detained in Russia on bogus charges since 2018, remains in Putin’s custody.
President Biden and his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, willingly negotiated with the government of Iran, one of the most notorious hostage-takers in modern history. In 2016, the Obama administration sent a plane filled with $400 million in cash to Iran on the same day the terrorist regime released four American captives. Obama also negotiated with the communist regime in Cuba, securing the release of American hostage Alan Gross as part of a controversial deal to lift economic sanctions on the rogue island nation.
To our knowledge, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) has never taken an American citizen hostage to extract concessions from the U.S. government.
The Biden administration is withholding scores of documents and communications related to its botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to the newly installed chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“I will not tolerate the Biden administration’s blatant obstruction of numerous congressional requests relating to the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Washington Free Beacon. “Democrats have utterly failed to hold this administration accountable when our veterans and gold star wives deserve answers.”
McCaul says Republicans are ramping up oversight efforts meant to expose how the United States ignored intelligence indicating the country would fall to the Taliban. Upon taking the reins at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, McCaul sent a letter to the State Department asking it to turn over documents that could be used to provide the American public with a full account of the chaotic operation.
The State Department has refused for nearly a year and a half to hand over information about how many Americans remain stranded in the country, intelligence reports warning the country could collapse, internal assessments about the threat posed by ISIS and the Taliban, information about the Biden administration’s current engagement with the Taliban, and internal documents related to the deadly strike on Hamid Karzai International Airport that killed 13 American military members.
Without these documents, lawmakers are unable to piece together how the Biden administration’s hurried evacuation from the country fell apart. This information is viewed as central to efforts by both Democrats and Republicans to hold the administration accountable for its actions during the 2021 withdrawal.
“Past requests for documents and information on the withdrawal dating back to August 2021 have generally gone unanswered for well over a year,” McCaul wrote in the Jan. 12 letter to the State Department. “It is imperative that the State Department provide complete responses to these longstanding requests, and the committee will not tolerate continued delay.”
Congressional sources familiar with the issue said the State Department has not provided any documents requested by lawmakers as far back as August 2021.
The amount of information and documentation being withheld by the State Department comprises nearly 10 pages of McCaul’s letter, revealing the sheer number of documents the administration is keeping hidden.
This includes “all reports, intelligence assessments, and intelligence community products” centered on “the potential collapse or sustainability of the pre-Taliban government.” These documents are seen as vital to questions about whether the Biden administration knew its planned withdrawal would create the conditions needed for the Taliban to resurface and take power.
McCaul also wants “all documents resulting from State Department internal reviews related to the Afghanistan withdrawal.” This information could show the State Department did not adequately plan to evacuate U.S. personnel from the country and was caught off guard when the Taliban began preventing Americans from leaving the country. In the weeks after the 2021 evacuation, it became clear that the Biden administration has abandoned far more Americans than it publicly admitted, the Free Beacon reported at the time.
The Foreign Affairs Committee also is seeking “a list of all State Department and all other U.S. Government meetings and engagements with the Taliban since January 20, 2021.” These documents will show exactly how the United States is conducting diplomacy with the Taliban since they retook power. The Biden administration has been slow to answer specific questions about whether it is propping up the Taliban government and still providing it with taxpayer funds.
The State Department would not answer Free Beacon questions about McCaul’s oversight efforts, instead directing a reporter to recent remarks by spokesman Ned Price.
“This secretary is committed to engagement with this Congress,” Price said at a Jan. 12 press briefing. “We deeply believe, truly believe, that our foreign policy will be more effective, it will convey more legitimacy when the Congress understands what it is that we are doing, why are we seeking to do it, and optimally if it has bipartisan support.”
Price said McCaul was able to raise his concerns during meetings with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other senior officials held on Jan. 11.
Asked if the administration will comply with McCaul’s oversight efforts, Price said, “we look forward to continuing our engagement with this Congress on those areas that are of interest to them and that most importantly are of priority to the American people.”
Pentagon’s Foreign Military Sales program is ‘risk-averse, inefficient, and sluggish,’ says report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies
The armaments industry that provides the Department of Defense’s weapon supply is “not adequately prepared” for any major regional conflicts, including a war with China in the Taiwan Strait, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
The Washington, D.C.-based think tank found through a series of war games that the United States would quickly run out of munitions, particularly long-range, precision-guided munitions, if it ever faced a Taiwan Strait conflict. Outdated military contracting procedures and a sluggish bureaucracy are among the weaknesses that make it “extremely difficult for the United States to sustain a protracted conflict.”
The report took aim at the Foreign Military Sales program under President Joe Biden for failing to adapt to the current security environment and remaining “risk-averse, inefficient, and sluggish.” CSIS senior vice president Seth Jones, who wrote the report, is concerned that the problems with the industrial base are hurting the country’s ability to deter conflict in the Indo-Pacific region.
“How do you effectively deter if you don’t have sufficient stockpiles of the kinds of munitions you’re going to need for a China-Taiwan Strait kind of scenario?” Jones told the Wall Street Journal. “The bottom line is the defense industrial base, in my judgment, is not prepared for the security environment that now exists.”
The Biden administration’s military aid to Ukraine has exposed these major weaknesses, the study reports. The $27 billion worth of military supplies the United States has doled out to Ukraine has drained the U.S. munitions inventory to low levels, and defense manufacturers are not equipped to replenish them quickly, the Journal reports:
The number of Javelin shoulder-fired missiles sent to Ukraine since last August, for example, is equal to about seven years of production based on fiscal 2022 production rates, the study said.
The number of antiaircraft Stinger systems provided to Kyiv represent roughly the same number of systems exported abroad over the past 20 years, the study said. Meanwhile, the more than one million rounds of 155 mm ammunition sent to Ukraine by Washington has shrunk the U.S. military’s own supplies, which the study says are now considered low.
“The U.S. Department of Defense, in coordination with Congress, should develop a plan now that involves taking steps to streamline and improve production, acquisitions, replenishment, Foreign Military Sales, [International Traffic in Arms Regulations], and other policies and procedures,” the report’s summary says. “It is time to prepare for the era of competition that now exists.”
Would cost the league (which loses $10 million annually) an estimated $30 million per year
WNBA power forward Breanna Stewart said she wants to negotiate “a deal that helps subsidize charter travel for the entire WNBA.”
Context:
Stewart, who won the league’s MVP award in 2018, is a free agent courting offers from several teams during the off-season and has reportedly raised the issue of private air travel as part of these negotiations. According to ESPN, it’s an issue being discussed throughout the league due to the “assumption” that when former Russian convict Brittney Griner returns to the WNBA, she “will need to fly privately due to security concerns.”
Griner was arrested on drug smuggling charges at a Moscow airport in February 2022. She was subsequently convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison. Griner was released in December in exchange for Viktor Bout, a.k.a. “the Merchant of Death,” a notorious arms-dealer convicted of plotting to kill Americans.
The alleged “security concerns” that would make it unsafe for Griner to fly on a commercial flight within the United States are not specified.
The WNBA costs about $70 million per year to operate and generates just $60 million in revenue. The NBA, which makes money because people like to watch it, subsidizes the women’s league in the name of equity. WNBA teams typically travel on commercial airlines to save money. Chartering private planes for the entire league would cost an estimated $30 million per year.
Why it matters:
Liberals complain that WNBA players don’t make as much money as their NBA counterparts, which is why Griner, Stewart, and others are forced to play abroad in Russia or Turkey. Griner and Stewart are among the league’s highest-paid players, taking home $228,000 per year (not including bonuses) on top of endorsement deals worth about $1 million.
Former president Barack Obama defined “wealthy” as an individual earning more than $200,000 annually and called for higher taxes on these individuals to pay for government programs. “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” he said in 2010. (Obama and his wife are estimated to have a net worth approaching $100 million.)
Bottom line:
Women’s sports will never be as popular or profitable as men’s sports, and that’s okay.
The Bush China Foundation supports Chinese leaders and has criticized pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong
Every year, the State Department gives $100 million in grants to fund public diplomacy programs that “enhance national security.” Under Biden, some of that money has gone to an organization with extensive ties to a Chinese Communist Party front group.
According to federal spending records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, the State Department in September gave $180,076 to the George H.W. Bush China Foundation, which has partnered with the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, an organization that promotes the interests of Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party. The China-U.S. Exchange Foundation donated $5 million to the Bush China Foundation, a significant portion of its annual revenue, in 2019, Axiosreported.
The Bush China Foundation’s ties to the China-United States Exchange Foundation make it an odd choice for the government grants, which are meant to advance “U.S. foreign policy goals.” The China-United States Exchange Foundation is a top organization in the Chinese government’s United Front system, which the Chinese Communist Party uses to influence foreigners in favor of Beijing’s policies.
American officials have long expressed concern that the China-United States Exchange Foundation is engaged in covert influence operations for Beijing. CIA director William Burns has said he cut ties with the organization because of its connections to Beijing after he took over at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a prominent foreign policy think tank.
The Bush China Foundation has maintained its ties to the China-United States Exchange Foundation amid scrutiny of the relationship. Neil Bush, the Bush China Foundation’s founder and chair, praised the Chinese think tank’s founder, Tung Chee-hwa, at an event in January 2021. Tung is vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a political advisory group for the Chinese Communist Party.
At a Bush China Foundation event with China’s ambassador in July 2021, Bush lamented an “onslaught of anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S. over recent years that has led to growing suspicion of China and her motives.”
Bush has been an outspoken defender of Beijing’s controversial national security policies. In a 2019 interview with Chinese state television, he criticized pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong upset over a Beijing-backed national security law used to arrest dissenters and shut down news organizations critical of the Chinese Communist Party.
“My first question would be, what freedoms are you seeking that you don’t already enjoy? What setbacks have you incurred,” said Bush, who also suggested that “outside forces” were behind the protests.
The Bush China Foundation also received another State Department grant to help develop a “digital mental health network” for American and Chinese “mental health stakeholders.”
At an event with the China-United States Exchange Foundation in 2019, Bush said he would “advise my American friends not to meddle in the internal affairs of China.”
Bush has extensive business ties to China. He came under fire during his brother’s presidency for signing business deals in China. In 2002, he received $400,000 from a Chinese semiconductor manufacturer. In 2009, he attempted to secure a deal for China’s oil company, Sinopec, to purchase oil from Ghana.
While leading the Bush China Foundation, Bush has organized an annual forum in China, the International Symposium for the Peaceful Use of Space Technology, with officials from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), a state-owned space and defense contractor that the United States has blacklisted because of its links to China’s military.
An official from the organization attended the symposium in November, where Bush served as honorary chairman. Bush leads the symposium with his partner at the Chinese property developer CIIC. In 2019, Bush and his partner, Wang Tianyi, signed a “strategic cooperation framework agreement” with CASC that called for the “exchange of international space innovation technology.”
The State Department declined to comment on the grants. The Bush China Foundation did not return a request for comment.
The Biden think tank at the University of Pennsylvania where the president stashed classified documents didn’t just have lax security—it also hosted events in partnership with organizations that promoted closer engagement with China, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
The Penn Biden Center hosted a two-day “bootcamp” for congressional staffers in June that encouraged closer ties with China on issues like green energy and academia, according to a source. One of the organizing groups has an advisory board member who served as spokesman for the controversial Chinese tech giant Baidu. The event was held as anonymous donors from China have poured millions into the University of Pennsylvania.
There were no posted security officials at the Penn Biden Center during the June conference—just regular Penn staffers—and attendees were able to walk around the center unmonitored and make use of unused rooms for phone calls and other private work during the conference.
The news raises questions about security at the Penn Biden Center following revelations that classified documents from Joe Biden’s vice presidency had been improperly stored at the think tank in Washington, D.C., and at his home in Wilmington, Del. Biden has pushed back against notions that he mishandled information, describing the Penn Biden Center as a place where his lawyers “set up an office for me—a secure office in the Capitol, when I—the four years after being vice president, I was a professor at Penn.”
The events also raise questions about the extent of the Biden team’s involvement in the University of Pennsylvania’s opaquely funded China initiatives, which ramped up in recent years as millions of dollars in Chinese donations poured into the university. The university has denied that the contributions have any connection to the Penn Biden Center, and a spokesman told the Free Beacon that no foreign donations were specifically earmarked for the think tank.
Rebeccah Heinrichs, a national security expert and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said the news that outside groups hosted events at the Penn Biden Center while classified documents were stored at the office was ‘incredibly alarming.”
‘The fact that [the documents] were not secured, [were] open and uncared for, and also that you had this other activity going on inside this facility, with individuals that may not have the best interests of the American people at heart, is shocking,” said Heinrichs.
‘I would like to know more about … who was going in and out of these specific workshops, these discussions, who has been through this facility,” Heinrichs added. ‘The American people deserve a full accounting of who may have had easy access to these documents.”
The University of Pennsylvania did not respond to a request for comment on the event.
The two-day “congressional bootcamp,” which was held at the Penn Biden Center in D.C., was co-organized by the university’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China, the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, according to the university’s website.
A dozen fellows from the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations spoke at the congressional bootcamp, according to the website. The project is financed by Penn’s China Research and Engagement Fund, which is “designed to stimulate and support activity in China” and engagement with the Penn Wharton China Center but does not disclose its individual donors.
The Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations’s advisory board includes Kaiser Kuo, the former spokesman for Chinese tech giant Baidu, who is now editor at large of a news outlet called SupChina. Members of Congress have been probing SupChina—which recently changed its name to the China Project—for potentially acting as an unregistered agent for China, Semaforreported in October.
The allegations are based on a sworn statement a former SupChina reporter, Shannon Van Sant, filed with the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission that month.
In the complaint, Van Sant claimed Kuo said during an editorial meeting that the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong were organized by the U.S. government.
“He said, ‘the United States government is orchestrating the protests in Hong Kong through funding and training provided by the National Endowment for Democracy,”’ she wrote. “Kuo said the U.S. government was responsible for the unrest in Hong Kong, forcing China to impose national security legislation to protect the city.”
Van Sant said the outlet’s leadership pushed writers to adopt a pro-Beijing slant and consulted with Chinese Communist Party entities on story ideas. One of SupChina’s funders, financial consultant Clarence Kwan, was also a board member of the China Overseas Exchange Association, a group that works under the Chinese government’s United Front foreign influence department, according to Semafor.
Kuo was not listed as a speaker at the congressional bootcamp, according to a conference schedule obtained by the Free Beacon. Speakers included Penn professor Jacques deLisle, China studies chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Jude Blanchette, and former Obama administration China adviser Ryan Hass.
Panel topics included “China’s Climate and Energy Policies,” “Beijing’s Evolving Strategy on Taiwan,” and “Public Opinion in China: What Do We Know?” The two-day conference closed with a reception at Bistro Bis, a restaurant at the nearby Kimpton George Hotel.
Former public school administrator Emily Mais filed a lawsuit against the Albemarle County School Board for creating a racially hostile work environment.
For Emily Mais, a former assistant principal in Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia, the early days of returning to school during the COVID-19 pandemic were overwhelming. Teachers were tasked with implementing a myriad of health and safety procedures.
But it was then that her school district introduced controversial policies and mandatory teacher trainings based on critical race theory (CRT), with the stated goal of eliminating racism in the school system. Contrary to the goal, however, the curriculum promotes racial division and encourages racial harassment.
Even with the difficulties posed by the pandemic, Emily loved her job. But, after a period of intense harassment, she was forced out of that job in September 2021 because she questioned the school district’s radical racial policy.
Who is Emily Mais?
For as long as she can remember, Emily wanted to be an elementary school teacher. Demonstrating her commitment to the craft, she took the extra step of obtaining a master’s degree in teaching.
After working for more than a decade as an elementary school art teacher and administrator in Maryland, Emily moved with her family to Albemarle County. In October 2018, she began serving as assistant principal at Agnor-Hurt Elementary School in Charlottesville.
Less than three years later, she would be forced out of her job after enduring sustained racial harassment.
When the school district introduced its so-called “Anti-Racism Policy,” Emily was concerned. She perceived how the policy focused on “equity” rather than equal treatment. Calling for “equity” meant the school district was advocating for students (and employees) to be treated differently based on the color of their skin.
For example, the curriculum teaches that acts of “racism” can only be committed by members of the “dominant race,” which it defines as white people.
All staff members were encouraged to “speak their truth” during the teacher trainings. Still, Emily saw how white staff members who wanted to participate were shut down or dismissed. One administrator told teachers they needed to consider whether they were on the “anti-racism school bus, or if you need help finding your seat and keeping your seat, or if it’s time for you to just get off the bus.”
Even more disturbing: When parents expressed concerns about the curriculum at a school board meeting, an assistant superintendent told administrators the very next day that he received the parents’ comments as if those parents were slave owners who had raped his mother and sister, beaten him, and were now telling him not to talk about it.
This hostility led Emily to speak up in one of the training sessions, during which the group discussed the school district’s race-related hiring practices.
Emily made a comment on the topic, intending to use the phrase “people of color.” But she accidentally said “colored” instead. She immediately apologized—profusely and repeatedly—but one staff member ignored her apology and proceeded to berate her in front of the entire group.
This slip of the tongue led to months of abuse and harassment directed at Emily, eventually ending with her resigning from her position as assistant principal—a job that she loved.
Over and over again, Emily was accused of being a racist for her simple slip of the tongue. Other employees openly cursed about her and called her vulgar names at work.
Some fellow coworkers came to Emily in tears about what was being said about her. But due to the hostile environment created by the policy, they dared not speak out in support of her. Emily raised her concerns about the racially charged mistreatment with numerous administrators, but her words fell on deaf ears. No administrator came to her aid.
To show that she was leaving her job on good terms, Emily had to endure a final public apology meeting—orchestrated by administrators—which sent the message to other employees about what they could expect if they questioned the policy.
Emily was retaliated against for her speech opposing the policy, discriminated against for her point of view, and subjected to a racially hostile environment.
The school district humiliated and shamed Emily, gave other employees free rein to abuse her and make her life miserable, prevented colleagues from visibly supporting her, told her that her hurt and distress were further proof of her racism, and shamed in front of her colleagues.
ADF attorneys filed a lawsuit against the Albemarle County School Board on Emily’s behalf on April 13, 2022.
What’s at stake?
Public schools cannot foster racially hostile environments for teachers and students, while intimidating those who dissent into silence and punishing those who speak up against racial discrimination.
“The training sets up a classic Catch-22,” said ADF Senior Counsel Kate Anderson, director of the ADF Center for Parental Rights. “It encourages all staff members to ‘speak their truth,’ but when a white person like Emily raises concerns about the divisive content, she is deemed a racist in need of further ‘anti-racism’ instruction.”
Teachers and administrators like Emily don’t forfeit their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse doors. And they cannot be used as mouthpieces to personally affirm an agenda that discriminates against others based on their race.
Emily’s case is not only about securing justice for her. It’s also about encouraging teachers, parents, and others to stand strong who have been vilified for speaking the truth.
Case timeline
September 2021: Emily Mais resigned as assistant principal at Agnor-Hurt Elementary School in Charlottesville, Virginia, after being subjected to racial abuse and harassment.
April 2022: ADF attorneys representing Emily filed a lawsuit against the Albemarle County School Board, asking the Albemarle County Circuit Court to grant her compensatory and punitive damages for the school board’s violations of Virginia law.
The bottom line
Teachers should be free to advocate for the good of their students without enduring racial harassment, and the government cannot force them to endorse an ideology that violates their beliefs.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, has accused the White House of “stonewalling” an investigation by Republicans into the handling of classified documents found at President Joe Biden’s former office and one of his homes.
In a Jan. 22 interview for “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News, Comer told host Maria Bartiromo that he believes the documents marked as classified may have been moved around to multiple locations.
The Kentucky lawmaker said that he plans to send letters to the secret service on Monday requesting further information regarding the documents, including any type of correspondence, emails, and documentation that can help Republicans determine who may have had access to the newly-discovered documents.
“It’s very concerning. We’re not going to let up. I think that we’ve got plenty of information to move forward. This would be a lot easier if the White House would work with us,” Comer said, adding that the Biden administration is “stonewalling our investigation.”
“And hopefully the Secret Service will work with us despite the fact that this White House is not,” Comer said.
The Epoch Times has contacted the White House for comment.
Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) speaks to reporters on his way to a closed-door GOP caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 10, 2023. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
More Classified Documents Discovered
Comer’s comments come shortly after yet more classified documents were discovered by the Department of Justice (DOJ) during a 13-hour search of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, on Friday.
Biden’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer, announced the findings on Saturday, noting that the documents seized were from Biden’s time as a senator as well as from his tenure as vice president under Barack Obama.
“DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President,” Bauer said. “DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years.”
Biden and first lady Jill Biden were not present during the search, White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a separate statement on Saturday. Instead, they were spending the weekend at another home they own in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Previously, classified materials were found at both the Delaware property and the Penn Biden Center in Washington.
The first batch of classified government records was discovered on Nov. 2 at the Penn Biden Center, where Biden previously had an office after his term as vice president under Obama. While they were found just before the midterm elections, the public was not informed until two months later.
According to the White House, that initial discovery prompted a follow-up search leading to more classified documents being found on Dec. 20 in the garage of the president’s Wilmington home. On Jan. 11 and Jan. 12, more documents were found in the president’s home library.
Biden’s personal attorneys previously conducted a search of the Rehoboth Beach residence and said they did not find any official documents or classified records, The Associated Press reported.
Classified documents were discovered at President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Del., shown here on Jan. 15, 2023. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Biden Has ‘No Regrets’
At a press conference on Thursday in Aptos, California, Biden said the newly-discovered documents had simply been “filed in the wrong place” before they were turned over to the archives of the Justice Department.
The president said that he was “fully cooperating” with special counsel Robert Hur’s probe into his handling of the documents and is “looking forward to getting this resolved quickly.”
“I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there. I have no regrets. I’m following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. That’s exactly what we’re doing. There’s no ‘there there,’” Biden added.
Comer told Fox News on Sunday that the White House “isn’t being truthful with the American people.”
“We need to know now who had access to those documents because our national security could be at risk,” the lawmaker added.
One week prior, Comer wrote on Twitter that the National Archives has not yet provided the GOP-led probe with a “simple briefing” regarding the classified documents despite Comer sending a letter to the agency nearly a week ago requesting information and documents.
“The Archives isn’t being transparent with the American people,” Comer wrote in the post. “So many questions remain unanswered. I will use the power of the gavel to get answers.”
“NEVER UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S ABILITY TO F*CK THINGS UP,” AS OBAMA ONCE WARNED US.
Low unemployment, moderating inflation, a teetering housing market, and unprecedented household debt all combine to drive economists to tarot cards, animal sacrifice, and Ouija boards to make their next predictions. Deconstructing and reconstructing the issues help gain an understanding of where the economy will go in 2023.
Unemployment.
Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent in December 2022 – almost full employment. The layoffs are starting, however, driven by tech companies. Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, and Vimeo have announced a combined layoff of nearly 50,000 employees.
Strong unemployment numbers drove television pundits to claim that the U.S. will avoid recession in 2023. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan however claimed, of a recession, “if it comes, won’t be as bad a s people fear.” Moynihan said he expects the “U.S. economy to contract by just 1% for the first three quarters of 2023, then return to positive growth.”
Many recessions begin when unemployment is relatively low, today’s unemployment situation looks very much like the situation before the 1969-1970 recession, which started with the unemployment rate at 3.5 perecnt. The 1969-1970 recession was induced by the Fed as it raised rates to try and cool inflation, driven by government spending. The recession lasted 11 months and GDP was only reduced by 0.8 percent.
Inflation.
The December consumer price inflation (CPI) numbers saw the rate of annual inflation decrease from 7.1 percent in November 2022 to 6.5 percent. The decrease in the growth of inflation was driven by a decrease in the price of gas and used cars. Necessities such as food, shelter, and fuel oil, however, were all up, with fuel oil up 41.5 percent year-over-year, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Simply put, prices are still going up, but not as fast as in previous months. And, the price of gas has been increasing throughout the new year, which does not bode well for January’s CPI report. Per the travel club AAA, the “national average retail price (of gasoline) was at $3.32 per gallon,” on January 17, approximately 17 cents higher than a month ago.
Housing.
The housing market continues to teeter on the brink of collapse, with only the learnings from the housing crisis of 2008 keeping the market afloat. The sales of existing homes in the U.S. slowed “for the 11th consecutive month in December as higher mortgage rates, surging inflation and steep home prices sapped consumer demand from the housing market. Existing home sales are down 34 percent when compared to December 2021.” This is despite the fact that mortgage rates are at their lowest levels since September 2022.
People continue to back out of signed mortgage contracts at record rates as well. About 60,000 home purchase agreements fell through in October 2022 (the latest data available) according to Redfin, the most since Redfin started tracking that data in 2013.
The lessons learned from the previous housing crisis are the only reason we have not yet seen a collapse of the housing market.
Subprime mortgages are virtually non-existent. In Q2 2022, only three percent of “newly originated mortgages were originated to subprime borrowers, a sharp contrast to the 13% average between 2003-2007,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
In the run-up to the 2008 housing crisis, approximately 35 percent of mortgages generated were adjustable rate, including 80 percent of subprime mortgages. In September 2022, adjustable rate mortgages represented only 9 percent of mortgage originations. With so many people sitting on fixed rate mortgages with relatively low interest rates, the inventory of available housing for sale has stayed low, which has kept prices high, saving the market… for now.
Household Debt.
Household debt grew at the fastest rate in 15 years in Q3 2022, driven by increases in credit card usage and mortgage balances, per the Federal Reserve. Collective household debt was at $16.5 trillion, an increase of 2.2 percent from Q1 2022 and 8.3 percent from 2021.
The average credit card user was carrying a balance of nearly $5,500 in the fall of 2022, up 13 percent from 2021, and half of credit card users are carrying debt from month-to-month at a time when credit card interest rates are at near all-time high. More than a third of households used credit cards or loans to cover spending on necessities in September 2022, an increase of 19.3 percent from the previous year.
What does is it all mean?
As the talking heads on the various cable financial news networks continue to talk the economy into recession, the data does actually point that way in 2023. History teaches that this recession should be short and mild. In the words of former president, Barack Obama, however, “never underestimate Joe’s [Biden] ability to f*ck things up.” If Republicans in the House do take a firmer stand on the debt ceiling, spending, and taxes, and give Biden his wish list of spending, the recession will be long and painful.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to simplify the current COVID-19 vaccination strategy to be more like an annual flu shot, according to briefing documents released on Jan. 23 ahead of a key advisory meeting to be held on Jan. 26.
The FDA’s proposal, as outlined in the documents, is to simplify COVID-19 vaccine composition and annual immunization schedules.
Currently, people first get two doses of the original COVID-19 vaccine spaced several weeks apart, followed a few months later by a bivalent booster tailored to protect against newer variants. The FDA’s proposal wants to change that.
Instead, the primary dose and booster would be combined into a single product for healthy adults, developed in spring based on prevailing strains and given once a year in the fall, much like how flu shots are administered.
There would still be a two-dose vaccine—and corresponding immunization schedule—for very young children, as well as the elderly and people with compromised immunity who might not get the same kind of immune response from a single shot.
The proposed changes would basically mean that the bulk of COVID-19 vaccines would become bivalent, while Pfizer and Moderna’s bivalent shots would be used for all doses, not just boosters.
Some experts say the proposed change could boost vaccine uptake.
Key Question
The key question that the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will be asked to vote on at its Jan. 26 meeting, according to one of the documents (pdf), is as follows:
“Does the committee recommend harmonizing the vaccine strain composition of primary series and booster doses in the U.S. to a single composition, e.g., the composition for all vaccines administered currently would be a bivalent vaccine (Original plus Omicron BA.4/BA.5)?”
Besides that question being put to a vote, the panel also will discuss simplifying the process for determining the need for periodic COVID-19 vaccine updates and the timing of such updates.
The idea is to establish a process for vaccine strain selection recommendations that is similar to the one used for seasonal influenza vaccines. Namely, it would be based on assessing the predominant—or predicted—variants in the springtime so that corresponding vaccines could be produced by the fall.
Such strain selection meetings, which would take place at least once per year, would take place more frequently as needed in order to “address a more pathogenic escape variant,” the main briefing document (pdf) indicates.
The FDA’s proposal followed the agency’s announcement in December 2022 of plans for the expert panel to consider updating the COVID-19 vaccination strategy in the face of waning protection and the emergence of new variants.
People would presumably find it easier under a simplified process to take the recommended COVID-19 shot once a year rather than having to track when they got their prior jabs and whether they were primary or booster doses.
If the panel endorses the FDA’s proposal on Jan. 26, the agency will then work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to hash out the details.
The advisers would then meet again next spring to decide on the specific strain to include in the single combined shot.
Boosters and Waning Immunity
Waning immunity from COVID-19 vaccinations and the emergence of new variants have so far led regulators to recommend boosters based on prevailing strains.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently recommends that everyone aged 6 months and older should get a booster a minimum of two months after their last shot. That’s been unpopular with the public, however, with booster uptake in the United States hovering at around 15 percent, according to CDC data.
There’s also disagreement among health experts as to whether a booster strategy based on emerging variants is the way to go.
In December 2022, Bloomberg polled 13 vaccine specialists, infectious disease doctors, and public health experts on the booster approach, with less than half fully endorsing the CDC-recommended booster strategy.
“The situation is becoming more like influenza in that vaccine efficacy is modest and efficacy is mainly against serious disease,” Stanley Plotkin, a vaccinologist and professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, told the outlet.
Besides the waning effectiveness of primary doses, protection from booster doses also drops off rapidly, researchers have found.
The FDA’s proposal to combine doses into a single bivalent shot comes after the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) emergency task force said late last year that bivalent doses could be used in previously unvaccinated children and adults.
EMA made its recommendation based on data that showed primary vaccination with the adapted bivalent vaccines should result in a broad immune response in people who haven’t been vaccinated against COVID-19 or who hadn’t experienced a prior infection.
Prior infection and recovery confer a type of protection known as natural immunity. While studies have consistently shown that severe COVID-19 infections induce natural immunity, researchers recently found that even milder cases still gave long-lasting protection.
Gun controllers and their collaborators in the regime press are wishcasting again. According to anti-gun advocates cited in a January 13 Politico item titled “Gun policy debate moves to the ballot box,” a recent narrow gun control victory on the ballot in deep blue Oregon “validate[s] all those polls over the years that show people — even people who put conservative lawmakers in state government — do want more gun regulation.” Back here in on earth, ballot initiative results show the exact opposite.
On November 8, Oregon voters approved gun control Measure 114 by the razor thin margin of 50.65-49.35 percent. To put that in some context, Joe Biden won the Beaver State by more than 16 points. Moreover, an October poll commissioned by the Oregonian recorded a 12-point lead for the pro-Measure 114 camp.
In fact, gun control initiatives continue to expose the shortcoming of public opinion polling.
Consider ballot initiatives to criminalize the private sale of firearms – often inaccurately referred to as “universal background checks.” The public is constantly told that some 90-percent of Americans support this policy.
In 2016, gun control supporters asked Maine voters to vote for Question 3, which would have required background checks on private firearm transfers. Mainers rejected the measure 52-48 percent.
That same year, an unlawful ballot measure asked Nevadans to support the criminalization of private transfers. The poorly constructed measure barely passed; 50.45-49.55 percent.
In 2014, Washington voters approved the deeply-flawed I-594, which criminalized private transfers. More popular than the other initiatives, the measure still only passed 59-41 percent.
The enormous divergence between the polling and election day results on these ballot initiatives proved too much for even the gun confiscation advocates at the New York Times to ignore.
In a March 2018 piece for the New York Times, titled “Support for Gun Control Seems Strong. But It May Be Softer Than It Looks,” Margot Sanger-Katz confronted this disconnect. The author noted that “While a wide range of gun control laws appear popular in polls, support may soften once details emerge and they’re subjected to a robust political debate.”
This was followed by a June 2022 New York Times article by Nate Cohn, titled “Voters Say They Want Gun Control. Their Votes Say Something Different.” Cohn explained that while some polling may show significant support for the criminalization of private transfers, voter behavior makes clear that Americans are divided on the policy. Cohn began,
It’s one of the most puzzling questions for Democrats in American politics: Why is the political system so unresponsive to gun violence? Expanded background checks routinely receive more than 80 percent or 90 percent support in polling. Yet gun control legislation usually gets stymied in Washington and Republicans never seem to pay a political price for their opposition.
After listing some of the usual explanations for this reality, Cohn noted, “But there’s another possibility, one that might be the most sobering of all for gun control supporters: Their problem could also be the voters, not just politicians or special interests.”
The author then proceeded to point out that in every instance where so-called “universal background checks” appeared on the ballot, the policy wildly underperformed expectations based on polling.
For instance, based on survey data, 86-percent of Nevadans supposedly supported the criminalization of private transfers in 2016. Similarly, according to the New York Times item, 83-percent of Mainers were expected to support their background check ballot measure.
Cohn went on to point out,
The usual theories for America’s conservative gun politics do not explain the poor showings. The supporters of the initiatives outspent the all-powerful gun lobby. All manner of voters, not just single-issue voters or politicians, got an equal say. The Senate was not to blame; indeed, the results suggested that a national referendum on background checks would have lost.
NRA members and other gun rights supporters shouldn’t let gun control advocates and the regime media distort the gun control debate by citing bogus polls that fit their anti-gun agenda. When someone spouts a talking point based on this flawed data, confront them with the facts.
To be sure, it’s already as plain as day that these product do NOT prevent infection and transmission of the virus. Deborah Birx and Rochelle Walensky have expressly stated this on national television.
To me, the most notable sentence in Irrgang’s abstract is the following:
Here, we report that several months after the second vaccination, SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies were increasingly composed of non-inflammatory IgG4, which were further boosted by a third mRNA vaccination and/or SARS-CoV-2 variant breakthrough infections. IgG4 antibodies among all spike-specific IgG antibodies rose on average from 0.04% shortly after the second vaccination to 19.27% late after the third vaccination.
The rise of IgG4 antibodies “to 19.27% late after the third vaccination” was completely unexpected, and, as the authors note later in the study:
The IgG4 subclass does not prevail after repeated vaccination with tetanus toxoid or respiratory syncytial virus infection.
I’ll let the immunologists debate about the significance of this finding and limit my commentary to a few basic observations.
1). The paper is further evidence that the developers of the COVID-19 mRNA shots did NOT understand precisely how they would affect the human immune response.
2). The developers of these products had NO IDEA how they would affect the immune response after three shots.
3). The developers of these products cannot know what will happen in the event of lgG4 antibody prevalence because they have never observed it before.
Though the authors do not explicitly state it, the careful reader logically deduces that the dramatic rise of lgG4 antibodies relative to other spike-specific lgG antibodies may impair the immune response to SARS-CoV-2. To be sure, the authors try to downplay this concern—probably because they know the danger of challenging COVID-19 Vaccine Orthodoxy—but their findings are nevertheless inherently a matter of concern.
The Irrgang paper reminded me of the Academy of Projectors on the Island of Legado in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travelers, who perform pointless experiments that benefit no one.
The COVID-19 mRNA gene transfer program is an example of scientists grossly and arrogantly overestimating their understanding of nature. Now we see immunologists stating, in effect:“Gee whiz, we didn’t expect that outcome after receiving three shots of a vaccine that doesn’t prevent infection and transmission.”
This is the equivalent of an automobile brake manufacturer saying, “Gee whiz, we didn’t expect our brakes to fade at that temperature, though we are still confident our brakes are a great product.”
It’s not often when a piece of media comes out that is so wretched, offensive and tasteless that seemingly everyone — whether they’re far left or the far right, men or women, old or young — ends up unified in their collective disdain for it.
In today’s hyper-divisive climate, it would seem almost impossible to create such a product, yet that appears to be exactly what HBO Max’s ballyhooed “Scooby-Doo” re-imagining, “Velma,” is.
For those who are blissfully unaware: “Velma” has been promoted and pushed as an adult cartoon re-imagining of the beloved 1969 children’s cartoon.
While I haven’t personally viewed the show itself, I’ve seen enough clips and excerpts to tell you that in this “adult cartoon,” HBO Max has stripped the original cartoon of the campy and goofy hijinks it was so known for and replaced it with a high school murder mystery drama centered on a re-imagined cast of the Mystery Inc. members.
There is no talking dog anymore, so Scooby is out. Shaggy goes by his real name this time around (Norville) and has been recast as a young, black teenager. Daphne is now Asian. Fred is presented as an insultingly stupid white person. And Velma is now Indian. And bisexual. Because why not.
Given the enduring success of adult cartoons like “South Park” or “Rick and Morty,” it’s not hard to imagine a world in which “Velma” is a rousing smash success that gobbles up all sorts of awards.
But that won’t be in this world.
“Velma” has the ignominious distinction of being one of the poorest rated shows to grace movie database IMDb, and a cursory glance at the numbers paints a bleak picture for the beleaguered show.
Did this show do the “Scooby Doo” franchise justice?Yes No
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According to this data filter on IMDb, “Velma” is officially the third lowest rated show for any TV show that has received at least 5,000 reviews on IMDb, garnering a meager 1.3 out of a possible 10 stars.
That 5,000 review benchmark is actually important because looking at the poorest rated shows in IMDb history, they all typically notch around 5,000 to 15,000 reviews.
In fact, the two shows that currently rate poorer than “Velma” have 13,681 and 9,541 reviews, respectively.
(For the morbidly curious, the two series rated poorer than “Velma” are “The Pogmentary,” which is a biographical look at soccer star Paul Pogba, and “Iste Bu Benim Masalim,” which appears to be a foreign TV series about a singer.)
“Velma,” meanwhile, has garnered such a vitriolic response that it has notched 41,955 reviews. That’s almost double the amount of reviews as the two shows “ahead” of it combined.
Watch just a couple of clips of “Velma,” and you can tell that the show is supremely unfunny in just about every way imaginable:
WARNING: The following clips contain language and imagery that the reader may find disturbing, particularly the third clip, which does show a cartoon leg being cutoff by a paper cutter.
Looking at IMDb’s bottom 20 shows, only one other bad show (ironically also another Warner Bros. property) has garnered more total reviews than “Velma” — and that was another woke mess, “Batwoman.” That CW superhero series garnered 44,515 total reviews.
Even then, “Batwoman” at least got an average score of 3.4 stars. That’s still putrid, but more than double what “Velma” got.
And yet, actually looking at the reviews paints an even bleaker picture.
“Worse than people say,” begins one review. “Should be on a top 10 worst tv shows of all time list,” another review is titled. “‘Comedy’ tag needs to be removed,” “Zoinks,” and “You can tell the creators think it’s hysterical” are just some of the damning review titles featured.
Unfortunately for Warner Bros. and HBO, an even more granular look at those IMDb reviews shows that this issue isn’t afflicting any lone sub-group of people. There’s a nigh-universal disdain for “Velma.”
Of the 41,955 votes cast for “Velma,” the overwhelming majority of those votes were for one lonely star out of a possible 10 stars; 37,462 votes were cast giving the show just 1 star. Interestingly, the next highest voter turnout happened among those giving “Velma” 10 stars out of 10, with 1,521 voters going with the perfect score. The next highest voter tally is those who voted for just two stars, which numbers 1,074 people.
Looking at demographics, it doesn’t get much better for “Velma.”
The 18-29 age group, which is ostensibly the ideal target audience for an adult cartoon, actually rated this show the lowest.
Interestingly, women did typically view “Velma” more favorably than men, but only to the score of about 2.7, which is still pretty bad in the grand scheme of things (for comparison, “The View” has a 2.5 star rating on IMDb.)
At the end of the day, the reasoning may vary on why people have soured on “Velma” so violently (“It’s woke, LGBT propaganda nonsense,” a conservative may say. “It’s an unfunny psyop meant to discredit the left,” a leftist may say), but there does appear to be an underlying theme — Why was this project ever green lit?
If you’re going to do a show like this, why bastardize the good name of Scooby-Doo to do it? The exact same adult cartoon, but based on original characters instead of the Mystery Inc. gang, would likely still have gotten lampooned, but not to this degree.
Either way, what’s done is done. “Velma” creator Mindy Kaling will have to deal with this fallout, and its an issue entirely of her own doing.
Yep, this is all normal. Jacob Sanchez, age 35 A middle school coach and teacher at Devine Independent School District died suddenly of a heart attack after collapsing in front of his students early in January. pic.twitter.com/wJjvorvpZY
Darnell said Sanchez had a strong rapport with his students.
Are more young people “dying suddenly” nowadays?Yes No
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“He was a kid’s teacher, I’ll put it that way. He took time out to connect with the kids,” she said.
Rebecca Powe, Sanchez’s widow, issued a statement in his memory.
“My honey was the light of our lives. He kept our family on our toes, constantly going, and always laughing. We shared a beautiful life together. He loved us with his whole heart and loved his life. He was dedicated to the community of Devine and the kids were his motivation every day,” she said.
Devine Middle School posted a tribute to Sanchez on its Facebook account.
“We lost a friend, colleague, and just a good man today. Jacob was the kind of person who would do anything to help out others. He was a kids’ teacher. He worked hard to connect with all of our kids not just our athletes. Our kids are going to have a tough time, but our DMS family will be there to help our kids as well as each other,” Darnell posted.
“On a personal level I feel as if I’ve lost a son. I’ve known Jacob since he was little. He and my son were in the same class. I taught Jacob. As a principal I counted on Jacob to help with some of our tougher customers. I would get him to talk to them,” she wrote.
She said Sanchez “was one of the first ones to volunteer to chaperone dances, field trips etc… He would do anything for the kids. There will be a big void in our hearts. Pray for his family, our kids, and our community. RIP Jacob.”
According to an obituary in the Devine News, “Jacob had a love for the beach. In the summer he would take his family down for weeks at a time to stay in their camper. He woke early and plotted their day of fishing. He was always after the biggest catch.”
“Throughout Jacob’s life his love for people shined through in many ways. He initiated a few projects to help his community, mowing yards for those who couldn’t do for themselves and collecting shoes for students in need. He would often have snacks available in his classroom and sneak in food for his students and buy tacos and doughnuts for his colleagues,” the obituary said.
“He was the kind of guy that made you feel like you mattered, no matter what your background was. Jacob would tell you if you were in the wrong and how to turn it around. He believed in supporting one another, however possible.”
The U.S. Navy has confirmed former SEAL Daniel Swift, who was listed as absent without leave, was killed on Wednesday while fighting alongside Ukrainian forces against Russian invaders, as first reported by Time magazine.
The U.S. State Department issued a statement acknowledging an American was killed in action there, but did not identify that person by name.
“We can confirm the recent death of a U.S. citizen fighting in Ukraine,” the statement read. “We are in touch with his family and providing all possible consular assistance. Out of respect for the privacy of the family during this difficult time, we have nothing further to add.”
Adding a bit of intrigue to the situation is the fact that Swift has been, according to the Navy, in “an active deserter status since March 11, 2019.”
How long the Navy Special Warfare Operator First Class had been in Ukraine and why he was fighting there remains a mystery for the time being.
Swift reportedly died from wounds suffered as a result of Russian strikes in the eastern front city of Bakhmut, an American intelligence official told Rolling Stone.
Adam Thiemann, a former U.S. Army Ranger who fought alongside Swift in Ukraine and kept in contact with him, told Rolling Stone the former Navy SEAL suffered severe head trauma and was in critical condition before his death.
Thiemann had previously taken to Facebook to explain that Ukrainian troops were doing everything possible to save Swift’s life, according to Rolling Stone, but that resources were stretched thin among all the wounded fighters.
Should Daniel Swift be considered a hero?Yes No
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Swift appeared to have something of a checkered past that included not only an impressive record of military service, but also stints as a police officer in the Pacific Northwest.
He would later run afoul of law enforcement.
Time magazine reported Swift’s records include an Iraq Campaign Medal, an Afghanistan Campaign Medal, a Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal and a Legion of Merit.
“He was one of the hardest and most tactically proficient men I have ever met,” Thiemann told Rolling Stone.
Swift served as a police officer for the Washington State Patrol and the Medford Police Department in Oregon, Rolling Stone reported.
A month before he was declared a deserter by the Navy, a felony bench warrant was issued for Swift on the primary charge of false imprisonment related to his divorce.
Swift’s classification as an “active deserter” caused him to lose his status as a Navy SEAL.
The Sea, Air and Land — SEAL — teams are the Navy’s primary special operations force and a component of the Naval Special Warfare Command.
The main function of SEAL teams are to conduct small-unit special operations in maritime, jungle, urban, arctic, mountain and desert environments.
SEAL teams typically take part in capturing or killing high-level targets or gathering intelligence behind enemy lines.
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014.
Since then, tens of thousands of people have died on both sides of the conflict, and the invasion precipitated what is Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II.
I have a source that tells me that the majority of sex addicts are LGBT, so it’s not likely biology but psychology. Further, we have special needs programs for certain folks already. These maggots are doing this to gain attention and waste time and money, and to injure the 95 percenters. [US Patriot]
So, this is the transgender version of the Emmett Till story?
The national mania over the sexually disturbed — men and women who claim they can deny being men and women simply because they want to — reached a new high earlier this month when a teenage girl in Santee, California, went to her city council with the story of an encounter with a naked man in the local YMCA’s women’s showers.
It reached a new low last week when the man she encountered compared the controversy to one of the ugliest crimes of the civil rights era.
The man, who goes by the name Christynne Lili Wrene Wood, went public with his role in the incident in an interview with KGTV-TV in San Diego published Wednesday.
Wood, 66, claimed he was “absolutely crushed” at the statements made by 17-year-old Rebecca Phillips about catching sight of a man in the women’s shower, according to KGTV.
At the council meeting, Phillips said she did not actually engage with the man she saw — she “hid behind their flimsy excuse for a curtain until he was gone.” But she had no doubt about what had happened, and worried about what it could mean for women and young girls — such as her 5-year-old sister — that a man would be allowed into such sensitive quarters.
Check out her statement here. It’s only three minutes long, and worth every second:
Wood’s chief gripe with Phillips appears to be that her story was interpreted in some news outlets to include a claim that she’d seen the man’s penis. However, she never said that to the Santee City Council, and later told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that she’d seen the man’s backside. (After all, it really doesn’t take a biologist to distinguish between men and women, front or back.)
Should locker rooms be strictly for those of the same sex?Yes No
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To be fair, the “penis” problem did arise in one of the chyrons that appeared while Phillips was speaking on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Wednesday. It also showed up in a New York Post headline. But it did not, and this is important, figure into Phillips’ complaint.
Wood and his supporters claim to believe that Phillips was imagining reasons to be afraid. So a man’s in the women’s showers! Not a problem. He’s so well-adjusted he actually thinks he’s a woman. Why should that make any woman nervous, while she’s naked and shivering in public?
And not only that, Wood claims that it’s actually Phillips’ supporters who are the real threat.
And at a rally Wednesday outside the Y, according to the Times of San Diego, an online news outlet, Wood invoked the name of Emmett Till, the black 14-year-old from Chicago who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
It’s a comparison no decent person would make lightly.
Till wasn’t just murdered. He was beaten so badly, he was disfigured beyond recognition. He was shot and thrown into the Tallahatchie River, weighed down with a metal fan tied to his neck with barbed wire, as the FBI records show.
About the only thing Wood has in common with Till is that he’s black. But that’s enough, apparently to draw a connection of victimhood across the ages.
idk where it shows her being crushed. concerned maybe not really surprised tho “I’m Christynne Lili Wrene Wood. I’m the scary transgender woman who that child misidentified as a man.” https://t.co/oN5NLrxcfb 4:15 pic.twitter.com/1k7B2muo81
Then Wood went on to refer, apparently, to the “lie” that Phillips never uttered, that she’d seen a man’s penis in the shower. Wood apparently doesn’t have a penis to see anymore, according to the Times of San Diego, because he’s had “gender confirmation” surgery.
“I don’t know what’s in the mind of that child,” he told Times of San Diego.
It was the kind of snap-back that liberals love to use — pretending the problem is in the mind of conservative critics rather than in the insanity of progressive politics.
(By the way, most readers can probably guess what “gender confirmation” surgery means when it comes to a man who denies he has a penis that can be seen. But it’s a term that, like most modern phrases from the left, means literally the opposite of what it should — like “reproductive health” when they’re talking about abortion.)
“I don’t know what’s in the mind of that child” – Christynne Lili Wrene Wood in regards to Rebecca Philips.
Assuming his claim of SRS is true, here’s something that may blow their minds–
“So there’s a movie out right now about how that kind of a lie and hysteria can lead to tragedy,” Wood said at the rally Wednesday.
It got worse when he leveled a slanderous accusation against protesters who were also demonstrating at the Y on Wednesday against the kind of permissive policy that lets a man into a women’s shower if he claims to be a woman.
“The movie’s called ‘Till’ about Emmett Till. The lies of a person got that child beat to death and that’s just the kind of group [here] that would love to pull a stunt like that,” he said, according to the Times of San Diego.
As obscene as comparing his own case — which amounts to having been criticized in a widely seen video (without his name even being used) — to a name that’s become part of civil rights legend, what was worse was how Wood cavalierly assigned murderous intent to Phillips’ supporters who simply want men and women to have separate spaces for performing their bodies’ most private functions.
This is not a big ask, remember. In fact, it’s been a foundation of human society from the beginning of time until about yesterday.
In saner generations, the idea of women’s showers being reserved for women was more or less the point of having them, like women’s sports were meant for women athletes.
Now, however, when one of the country’s two major political parties has been taken over by a brand of insanity that denies the reality of human bodies, when it claims the power to impose its progressive vision objective truth, a questions so obvious even Phillips 5-year-old sister could answer it suddenly becomes a matter of controversy.
To settle any question that what’s happening here is provocation more than anything else, it’s the second time Wood has gotten into a public fight with a San Diego County YMCA over shower facilities, the Times of San Diego noted.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, he reached a settlement with the Y in El Cajon, a short distance from Santee, over his complaint that the Y had denied him access to the women’s locker room. As the saying goes, “two’s a pattern ….”
The man at the center of the @ymca Santee debate, Christynne Lili Wrene Wood, has a history of suing gyms to get into women’s spaces. pic.twitter.com/KSXC1xJO8q
What makes Wood’s “argument” even more egregious is that, according to KGTV, the Y in Santee actually has private shower stalls that are gender-neutral and are available for anyone’s use.
In other words, Wood didn’t have to use the women’s shower because he felt uncomfortable in the men’s facilities. He didn’t have to be there at all. And if he’d stayed out of it, Rebecca Phillips would never have been so frightened she decided to speak to the city council about it.
But he’s insisting on it, on the grounds that his obviously fallacious understanding of reality (he was born a boy, he’s now a man, no matter what a surgeon’s scalpel might have to say on the subject) trumps the understanding of all the men and women on this planet who have the use of their eyes and mental faculties
And he’s using one of the most famous victims of real hatred in this country to claim a fallacious victimhood of his own.
The modern left stakes part of its ever-weakening claims to credibility on tying itself to the civil rights glories of the past. Its partisans are going to keep on doing it for as long as the establishment media market will bear it. And with the establishment’s leftist bent, that market’s going to be healthy for a long time to come.
It’s a new low, all right. But it likely won’t be the last.
It seems as if the federal government’s good name suffers more damage each week, these days, and continues with the actions of a hacker in Switzerland being only the latest blow to law enforcement’s once stellar reputation for security.
On Thursday, a security researcher posted a blog entry showing how she allegedly easily hacked an unsecure server and was able to gain access to the U.S. government’s Terrorist Screening Database and its controversial “No Fly List,” which contains the names of hundreds of thousands of people suspected of ties to terrorism or other illegal activities.
The server was apparently under the control of the U.S. national airline CommuteAir and her hacking led her to the government files.
In her blog post, the hacker, known as “maia arson crimew,” said that within a half hour, she had uncovered the names and schedules of CommuteAir’s crews and found security credentials that would allow her to access the Transportation Safety Administration’s (TSA) No Fly list.
The list that she found had more than 1.5 million names on it, along with the lists of aliases under which they may travel, and names that the federal government tagged as banned from U.S. air travel, the Daily Dot reported.
“On the list were several notable figures, including the recently freed Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, alongside over 16 potential aliases for him,” the Daily Dot added.
The list had a huge number of people with Arab and Middle Eastern-sounding names, as well as suspected members of the Irish paramilitary force, the IRA, and other terrorists. One individual was eight years old according to the corresponding date of birth associated with the name.
“It’s just crazy to me how big that Terrorism Screening Database is and yet there is still very clear trends towards almost exclusively Arabic and Russian sounding names throughout the million entries,” crimew told Daily Dot.
The TSA released a statement merely saying they are “aware of a potential cybersecurity incident” with the airline’s servers and the FBI did not comment at all on the incident.
For its part, CommuteAir said that the server the hacker breached was not its working server, but was a “development server,” one used to store training materials and programs.
CommuteAir added that the server, which they have since taken offline, also contained no customer information.
The airline also noted that the No Fly list the hacker found was an outdated one.
“The server contained data from a 2019 version of the federal no-fly list that included first and last names and dates of birth,” CommuteAir Corporate Communications Manager Erik Kane told Daily Dot.
“In addition, certain CommuteAir employee and flight information was accessible. We have submitted notification to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and we are continuing with a full investigation.”
While that may be true, the server did contain the names, addresses, and even the passport numbers of around 900 CommuteAir employees and it also offers a problem for airport security.
Activists have blasted the No Fly list for its bias against Arab and Middle Eastern names, and crimew also made note of the seeming bias, telling Business Insider, “Looking at the files, it just confirmed a lot of the things me, and probably everyone else, kind of suspected in terms of what biases are in that list. Just scrolling through it, you will see almost every name is Middle Eastern.”
Interestingly, the No Fly list is not considered a classified document due to the vast number of agencies and companies that need to have access to it. Still, this is one of the first times it has ever been revealed by people outside the travel industry and law enforcement. But it has also become even more controversial lately when airlines began adding names of customers who would not wear a mask during the pandemic.
Business Insider noted that the hacker is a “staunch self-described leftist and anti-capitalist,” who was previously “indicted for conspiracy, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft related to a previous hack in 2021.” The case of the hacking of U.S. security camera is still pending.
“The DOJ alleges she and several co-conspirators ‘hacked dozens of companies and government entities and posted the private victim data of more than 100 entities on the web.’” Insider added.
As it happens, CommuteAir was hacked back in Nov., as well. That fact spurred crimew to dryly note that this second security breach may finally get the company to get serious about its cybersecurity.
“Even the fact that they had already been hacked before apparently wasn’t enough for them to really invest in it. And that really just shows like where the priorities lie,” crimew said, adding, “I just hope they maybe learned their lesson the second time.”
Whether the list crimew exposed was “outdated” or not, though, is entirely beside the point. The fact that the hacker was able to find such sensitive information and access points that would allow her to conduct further breaches is the real problem. It shows that far too many companies with access to government servers and information do not take their computer security seriously enough, a fact that makes us all vulnerable to attack.
So, $190 billion to teach transgenderism, ESG, DEI, Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter (even though more blacks die at the hands of other blacks than at any other time), Defund the Police, etc. [US Patriot]
The federal government poured $190 billion into state coffers in 2020 and 2021 to help schools deal with the effects of COVID-19 on the nation’s education system.
While some school districts quickly spent the funds on things such as tutoring, teacher salaries, school bus Wi-Fi, and new HVAC systems, other districts have struggled to determine the best use for the money to meet federal program deadlines.
As the first of three spending deadlines approaches, a report examines the way the nation’s largest school districts have used the money so far and how much remains unspent.
Relief Funding for Education
As the rate of COVID-19 infections rose in early 2020, Congress created the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) to help the nation prepare for the threat to school operations.
ESSER was expanded twice over the following 12 months, reaching a total of nearly $190 billion. The allocations became known as ESSER I, ESSER II, and ESSER III.
President Joe Biden signs the American Rescue Plan in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on March 11, 2021. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
ESSER I, which provided $13.2 billion to schools, was authorized in March 2020 through the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security Act to provide emergency relief for schools dealing with the coronavirus.
ESSER II added $54.3 billion in December 2020 through the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act.
ESSER III expanded the fund by $122 billion in March 2021 through the American Rescue Plan Act to help safely reopen and sustain school operations and address problems in the student population caused by the disruption.
Funds were allocated to the states based on plans approved by the Department of Education. Amounts for each state were determined using the formula for Title I funding, which provides federal aid based on the percentage of children from low-income families.
Nonprofit private schools are eligible for ESSER funding through the local education agency in which they operate, usually a public school district.
By the end of 2021, state education agencies had received the largest single federal allocation for K-12 education in the nation’s history, more than three times the federal budget for education in 2019 and amounting to some $3,700 per student.
Ninety percent of that amount was to be passed through to local agencies, creating a $171 billion windfall for the country’s roughly 98,000 public and 32,000 private schools.
Targeting Problems
From 2020 through 2022, teacher shortages, school closures, quarantines, and remote learning took a toll on both educational achievement and student well-being.
The Nation’s Report Card, a periodic rating of student performance, showed a large drop in learning between 2019 and 2022.
Fourth-grade reading scores fell to 217 from 221 during that time, reaching their lowest level since 1998. Eighth-grade math scores dropped to 236 from 241.
Julie Kraemer looks at improved test scores of high school students for the first half of the school year in her office in Hutsonville, Ill., on Dec. 17, 2021. (Cara Ding/The Epoch Times)
The learning loss in math during that period was greater than that reported for children evacuated after Hurricane Katrina, according to the Brookings Institute.
Since returning to full-time instruction, schools have reported increased emotional and behavioral problems in students.
The first rounds of ESSER funding were intended to help schools prepare for and operate through the height of the pandemic, and the $122 billion in ESSER III funding was intended to address these and other problems resulting from the disruption in education during the early part of the pandemic.
Broad Local Discretion
ESSER funding guidelines are broad, leaving local agencies significant discretion to tailor spending to the needs of their schools and students.
According to the Department of Education, allowable activities could include providing mental health services to students who have suffered trauma or programs to re-engage students who had become uninterested in learning, even if that trauma or disengagement predated the pandemic.
Other potential uses include addressing digital equity and access, implementing new curriculums, expanding summer learning and enrichment programs, and providing support for families with disabled children.
Students in a classroom in New York City on Sept. 27, 2021. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
Recruiting and retaining staff, including hiring teachers, improving compensation, and offering retention bonuses are allowed uses of the funds.
Some improvements to school buildings, including new construction, can be funded through ESSER if they involve removing unhealthy conditions from the learning environment, especially by improving air quality. Modifications could include new roofing, plumbing repairs, and radon or asbestos remediation.
Nearly any educational expense that can be linked to problems arising from COVID-19 and its aftermath could qualify.
For example, the COVID recovery plan for Vermont’s Winooski School District includes both $2.8 million for increased staffing and $4.4 million to replace HVAC systems.
ESSER III Spending Surveyed
A report produced by Burbio, a school data tracking organization, examines the spending plans for ESSER III funds from 6,000 of the nation’s largest school districts. Those districts received $92 billion in ESSER III funding, or about 75 percent of the total, and include 83 percent of the nation’s K–12 students.
The largest target of ESSER III funds so far is academic intervention to bring learning to pre-2020 levels or higher; that category accounted for 31 percent of ESSER III spending plans in the districts surveyed.
Planned interventions included after-school and extended day programs, which are slated for the highest level of funding at $6.5 billion. Another $1.7 billion is designated for tutoring programs, $1.6 billion to purchase instructional materials, and $1.9 billion for professional development for teachers.
The remainder targets a variety of instructional purposes, including early childhood programs, software, student assessments, and social and emotional learning.
Staffing and retention was the next-highest spending category at 23 percent of the total. Facilities and operations accounted for 22 percent of the total.
Technology items amounted to 9 percent of the planned spending, mental and physical health programs for 7 percent, and the remainder was on miscellaneous categories including nutrition programs, bus Wi-Fi, water bottle filling stations, and athletic facilities.
Spending Challenges for Administrators
Some state and local agencies have moved quickly to make use of their federal COVID-19 relief funds, while others have been slower to spend the money.
Texas moved fast enough in using COVID-19 relief funds to trigger a mandatory federal review.
The Texas governor’s office withdrew its entire $307 million allotment of the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER) on June 26, 2020. GEER is a federal education relief program similar to ESSER. Though no wrongdoing was discovered, the state voluntarily returned $68.7 million that hadn’t yet been awarded to grantees.
In other cases, local authorities have been slower to spend relief funds.
Administrative challenges, staffing problems, and the lack of strategic planning and operational capacity caused problems for more than 90 percent of school administrators, according to a McKinsey & Company report.
About $45 billion of the $190 billion total ESSER funds had been spent by November 2021, the report said.
By early December 2022, approximately, one year after ESSER III funds were released to the states, the school districts surveyed by Burbio had spent less than 25 percent of their allotment.
ESSER funds have an expiration date, the first being Jan. 28. So school districts must use or lose the remaining $145 billion in less than two years.
That spending is regular federal funding for K–12 education, which amounts to more than $60 billion a year, according to education data.
Shannae Anderson speaks at a school board meeting at the Conejo Valley Unified School District in Thousand Oaks, Calif., on June 14, 2022. (Screenshot via Conejo Valley Unified School District)
“Districts are experiencing pressure to spend quickly and also produce strong results. This leaves little time to think strategically about how to allocate these funds to maximize their impact,” an unnamed writer from the education consulting firm Afton wrote.
For ESSER I funds, school districts had to “obligate” the money, meaning contract to spend it by Sept. 30, 2022, and spend it within 120 days after.
ESSER II funds must be obligated by Sept. 30, 2023, and spent by Jan. 28, 2024.
ESSER III funds must be obligated by Sept. 30, 2024, and spent by Jan. 28, 2025.
School districts can apply for a 180-day extension on each spending deadline.
Oklahoma returned $919,000 in 2021 because it missed the deadline for transferring those funds to local education agencies. The state also returned $1.5 million in funds designated for a tutoring program but were left over at its conclusion and another $420,000 that had been designated for a virtual learning program but not used.
A Financial Cliff
Some experts see a looming crisis for some school districts as enrollment trends down and the end of ESSER approaches.
While ESSER spending must relate to the impact of the coronavirus, guidelines are generous enough to allow spending on things that might be considered normal expenses, such as computers and teacher salaries.
“Any strategic leader recognizes the danger of allocating one-time funds for recurring operating costs, such as teachers’ salaries or instructional positions. If district leaders come to rely on this surplus of funds, they will be confronted with a deficit if the money isn’t available in the next year or two,” the Afton blog stated.
The New York City Department of Education has used a share of its $7 billion in federal relief funds for new or expanded programs that may not be sustainable without ESSER funding, according to a report by Advocates for Children of New York.
Those programs include a plan to double K–3 enrollment, expand access to summer enrichment programs, and increase the number of community schools.
An empty classroom is seen at Hollywood High School in Hollywood, Calif., on Aug. 13, 2020. (Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images)
New York mayor Eric Adams announced this month that he will delay cutting $80 million in funding for the city’s schools, which have seen a sharp decline in enrollment in recent years.
Nationwide K–12 enrollment in public schools dropped by 1.4 million between fall 2019 and fall 2020.
These trends could spell trouble for school districts over the next two to three years.
“The looming prospect of a ‘fiscal cliff’ when the stimulus funding expires, along with longer-term declining enrollment trends, could create financial challenges for some districts down the road,” according to an article by McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Far-left Antifa rioters on Saturday rampaged through downtown Atlanta, smashing storefront windows and torching a police cruiser.
Several agitators were armed with explosive devices, which they used to destroy an Atlanta Police Department vehicle, according to police chief Darin Schierbaum. The anti-police rioters also damaged three businesses and threw rocks and fireworks at the Atlanta Police Foundation building.
Police arrested six rioters, several of whom came from out of state, according to Mayor Andre Dickens.
The chaos broke out after the far-left group Scenes from the Atlanta Forest called for a “Night of Rage” to carry out “reciprocal violence” against police. The group’s members objected to the killing of Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, who on Wednesday shot a Georgia State Patrol trooper at the site of a new police training facility. Law enforcement returned fire, killing the 26-year-old assailant.
The violence in Atlanta comes two and half years after Antifa rioters helped lead violent uprisings in cities across the country, causing up to $2 billion in property damage.
Georgia Republican governor Brian Kemp condemned Saturday’s violence, saying the crimes “will not be tolerated in Georgia and will be prosecuted fully.”
Democrats and the media have long defended Antifa. During a 2020 presidential debate, President Joe Biden dismissed concerns about the far-left anarchist movement, calling Antifa “an idea, not an organization, not militias.” Journalists have compared black-clad Antifa rioters to U.S. soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy during World War II.
“Friend points out on D-Day anniversary that the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy were the true and original antifa,” tweetedWashington Post media reporter Paul Farhi in June 2020.
The California Democrat has raised tens of millions of dollars since 2016
Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) wants voters to think he’s a selfless patriot who risked his career and lost his committee assignments to hold former president Donald Trump accountable.
But his financial records tell a different story: that of a relatively unknown congressman who hitched himself to the “Resistance” bandwagon and milked tens of millions of dollars from donors across the country.
A Washington Free Beacon review of Schiff’s financial disclosures shows that the California Democrat ramped up fundraising efforts just as he began his quest to impeach Trump. Schiff, who spent just $134,000 on fundraising in 2016, by 2018 poured nearly $2 million into ads urging supporters to “chip in” to help with his investigations into Trump’s alleged dirty dealings.
But these donations didn’t go toward oversight efforts, which are funded by congressional committees. Instead, they went right into Schiff’s campaign coffers, which now hold $21 million. Schiff, who has represented his deep-blue Los Angeles district since 2001, won 10 of his 11 elections without such a massive war chest. But the money could soon come in handy.
Schiff is widely believed to be eyeing Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D., Calif.) Senate seat, in what will likely be a contentious Democratic primary. Schiff’s fellow California progressive Rep. Katie Porter (D.) has already announced her intention to run in 2024 to replace Feinstein, who has yet to announce her retirement. Winning the nomination will require cash, fundraising chops, and name recognition. Thanks to his tussle with Trump, Schiff now has all three.
In 2016, Schiff had little national name recognition and just $2.1 million on hand. But as the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, he was in a prime position to boost his profile as rumors began to swirl about the then-president-elect’s alleged ties to Russia.
In early March 2017, Schiff started hinting to reporters that he had seen evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The New Yorker soon dubbed him an “unlikely liberal hero” who was “ready to investigate Trump.” By the end of the month, Schiff’s name was splashed across headlines, and the congressman was a fixture on cable news.
On April 6, 2017, the Los Angeles Times declared that Schiff’s “aggressive role in the Trump-Russia investigation” made him the “hottest commodity” in California politics. On April 14, his campaign placed a $25,000 web ad buy, its largest to date.
Thus began a cycle in which Schiff would follow a media blitz with a massive fundraising push. At the height of Russiagate fever, Schiff spent tens of thousands of dollars on social media ads timed to press leaks.
On the day that news broke of Special Counsel Robert Mueller filing his report with the Justice Department outlining Trump’s Russia ties, the Schiff campaign spent $50,000 on ads. It dropped another $250,000 in the days after the attorney general released findings from that report and another $50,000 two days before the New York Times said Schiff had a preview of Russiagate whistleblower allegations.
On March 22, 2019, the Justice Department received Mueller’s report, which exonerated Trump. By that point, Schiff had already moved on. The previous month, Schiff, now chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, announced he was taking a “broader” look at Trump’s finances to see if business interests were influencing his presidential decisions.
Schiff didn’t find anything nefarious, but it did allow him to build his brand as Trump’s nemesis. His campaign flooded social media with ads suggesting that donations would help the congressman tackle the president. “This ends now,” read a September 2019 Facebook ad claiming Schiff could personally bring Trump to justice. As late as 2019, Schiff solicited donations with a Facebook ad crying persecution. “Trump is unhinged and attacking Adam,” the ad reads. “Let Adam know you have his back in his fight for truth and justice.”
On January 22, 2020, Schiff led the House’s impeachment trial of Trump. In the days immediately after the hearings, he spent $600,000 on ad buys. One Facebook ad from the end of January urges supporters to “help Adam fight for transparency, accountability, and fairness on the House floor without having to spend time fundraising.” By the time Trump left office in January 2021, Schiff had over $13 million in his campaign coffers—a nearly seven-fold increase from when Trump took office.
With Trump out of office and the Russia hoax thoroughly debunked, Schiff has sought out greener pastures. In July 2021, then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Schiff to the select congressional committee tasked with probing Trump’s culpability in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. That month, Schiff spent $540,000 on fundraising ads tied to the appointment.
Schiff’s campaign dropped more than $1.2 million in ads in the months surrounding the October release of his book Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. The book is billed as an “inside account of American democracy in its darkest hour, from the rise of autocracy unleashed by Trump to the January 6 insurrection.”
A week after its release, Schiff petitioned the Federal Election Commission to let him rent his donor email list with his publisher to boost book sales. In December 2021, the FEC ruled in his favor.
Schiff’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Former Bain consultant Jeff Zients will succeed Ron Klain as White House chief of staff
Joe Biden’s new chief of staff, Jeff Zients, is a centimillionaire businessman who, like the failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, got his start as a consultant at Bain Consulting. (For Romney and Bain, in Biden’s telling, that was just a pit stop on the road to putting Americans “through hell and back.”)
Zients will take over for Ron Klain in February. The former head of the White House’s COVID response, Zients amassed a vast fortune working for Bain & Company and other management consulting firms. But at Bain, according to the Wall Street Journal, Zients “fell in love with Bain’s culture, teamwork … and analytical rigor.” By age 35, his estimated net worth was nearly $150 million.
Zients’s appointment is riddled with irony. Biden’s role in the 2012 presidential election, when he served as former president Barack Obama’s running mate, was to attack Romney, the Republican nominee. Like Zients, Romney began his business career at Bain & Company before serving as CEO of Bain Capital, a private equity company he cofounded with Bill Bain.
But unlike Zients, Romney’s association with Bain and wealth was the subject of Biden’s vituperation. At campaign stops throughout the country, the then-vice president accused Romney of unethical business practices in an attempt to paint him as untrustworthy and out of touch. Bain Capital, Biden claimed, was in part responsible for the decline in domestic manufacturing over the past half century.
“There’s Romney economics, which says as long as the government helps the guys at the very top do well, workers and small businesses and communities can be left to fend for themselves,” Biden told an Ohio audience in May 2012. “You’ve been through hell and back. Outsourcing. Padlocked plants. How many times have you opened your newspaper to find out another factory was closing down? And you probably knew someone who worked there too. Or maybe it was you.”
Zients’s financial disclosures show that he has parked a significant portion of his wealth in gold, a traditional hedge against inflation: He owns as much as $5 million in gold bars and as much as $25 million in a security tied to the value of gold. Under Biden, inflation has hit a 40-year high.
As a straight white male, Zients’s appointment is expected to “disappoint some Democrats,” according to Politico. Biden has promised to oversee the most diverse cabinet in U.S. history.
Bill and Melinda Gates and Ford Foundations funded projects at Chinese universities, government agencies
Two of America’s largest liberal nonprofits, the Bill and Melinda Gates and Ford Foundations, funneled $39 million to China in 2021—money that in some cases went to Chinese government agencies and universities that conduct military research.
The Gates Foundation, according to its latest IRS disclosure, sent nearly $30 million to Chinese organizations in 2021, including $2.5 million to the communist nation’s National Health Commission and $1.4 million to its Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. The Ford Foundation, meanwhile, sent $9.3 million to China in 2021—recipients included three public universities that are overseen by the Chinese government’s defense industry agency.
Both the Gates and Ford Foundations have long boasted of their work to influence policy and advance technology in China. But the foundations’ partnerships with Chinese Communist Party-controlled entities—including some that work with China’s military—is raising eyebrows among U.S. lawmakers and China experts, who argue that the CCP’s iron grip on the nation means the party is likely to hijack data that advances its interests.
“If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that we need to heavily scrutinize every American dollar that goes to CCP-affiliated entities,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), who is set to chair a House select committee tasked with countering China, told the Washington Free Beacon. “Any American foundation contributing to causes that advance CCP-aligned interests in the developing world has serious questions to answer.”
Neither the Gates nor Ford Foundations returned requests for comment.
While both foundations appear committed to continue funding Chinese projects, many U.S. researchers are reevaluating their work in the communist nation over fears of aiding China’s military. American and German scientists, for example, partnered with researchers at China’s Peking University to release a 2020 study on robotic fish. Such robots can be used militarily as underwater unmanned vehicles, Newsweekreported last week, and two of the study’s co-authors work with the Chinese research facility tasked with developing hypersonic weapons. The Gates and Ford Foundations combined to send Peking University more than $1.7 million in 2021, tax filings show.
The Gates Foundation labeled most of its grants to Chinese government agencies and universities—including the $2.5 million it sent to China’s National Health Commission—as supporting “global health and development public awareness and analysis.” The Ford Foundation’s Chinese grants cover a wider range of issues, such as climate change, education, and finance. One $150,000 Ford Foundation grant to Beijing Normal University funds research on Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a CCP tool to subjugate foreign nations through direct infrastructure investment.
While the two foundations’ Chinese grants largely differ in purpose, both nonprofits sent funding to public universities that are tied to China’s military and national defense industry. The Gates and Ford Foundations, for example, combined in 2021 to give nearly $3.5 million to Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University—universities that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute designates as “high risk” or “very high risk” due to their “high level[s] of defense research” and alleged involvement in foreign cyber attacks. All three universities, according to the institute, are under the supervision of China’s State Administration of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense, which aims to deepen university involvement in the defense sector.
The foundations in 2021 also sent nearly $500,000 to Beijing Normal University, which has worked with the Chinese government to develop military vehicles, according to a 2021 Foundation for Defense of Democracies report. The university in June 2021 also hosted a two-week military training session.
For American Foreign Policy Council fellow Michael Sobolik, the Gates and Ford Foundations’ China grants “work directly against America’s national security interests.”
“The Ford Foundation is funding research for Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Party’s strategy to overtake America. Meanwhile, Bill Gates funded global health projects inside China while protecting the CCP from accountability,” Sobolik told the Free Beacon. “It is simply unacceptable for Americans to aid our adversary, yet this embarrassing behavior remains persistent and pervasive—from professional sports and universities to Wall Street and wealthy foundations.”
This is not the first time Gates has faced criticism for partnering with questionable Chinese entities. From November 2018 to March 2019, Microsoft—the tech giant Gates cofounded in 1975—published three papers with researchers at China’s National University of Defense Technology, which the Chinese military controls. One of those papers described a new artificial intelligence method to “recreate detailed environmental maps by analyzing human faces, which experts say could have clear applications for surveillance and censorship,” Financial Times reported.
Gates also vehemently defended China’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which saw the communist nation cover up the virus when it first emerged in Wuhan in December 2019. For Gates, any criticism of that cover up was “a distraction,” and “unfair.” “China did a lot of things right at the beginning,” the billionaire said during an April 2020 CNN interview.
Beyond the millions of dollars the Gates and Ford Foundations sent to China, the two nonprofits are known for their staunch support of liberal dark money groups. The foundations in 2021 combined to send more than $85 million to left-wing nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm that oversees a massive dark money network. That network pumped tens of millions of dollars into the 2020 election to help Democrats, money that came from anonymous liberal megadonors.
Electric vehicle (EV) “mania” might be at an end, or, at a minimum, easing down, according to research, as concerns about supply chains, lithium sourcing, inflation, and more affect production capacities while customer demand decelerates globally, as evidenced by industry leader Tesla cutting prices in order to increase sales.
In Europe, EV car manufacturers are slowing production due to uncertainties around lithium supply for batteries as well as electric vehicles proving to be expensive for the middle class, according to a Jan. 18 Institute for Energy Research (IER) post. This year, Europe is expected to output 12 million cars, which is a million less than earlier estimates.
The average price of an EV in Europe during the first half of 2022 was 55,821 euros, up by over 14 percent from 48,942 euros in 2015, according to a report by automotive market research firm JATO. An EV in Europe is 27 percent more expensive than a gasoline car. These factors raise an affordability challenge for the sector in a region where EV-adoption is generally more accepted than in North America.
The issue of lithium sourcing, as a challenge for EVs becoming mainstream, was highlighted by geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan in September last year.
“The lithium comes from one place, and it’s all processed in China. So, just building the alternate processing infrastructure … and by the way, we have to invade Russia too … just to get the materials to do EVs at scale is just laughable for the next decade,” he said at the time.
Meanwhile, in the UK, production estimates for electric cars and vans in 2025 have been reduced from 360,000 to 280,000. Consumers in the UK are worried about the operating costs of EVs since the average cost of charging an electric car has risen by 58 percent since last May.
In the United States, sales of electric cars rose in 2022 by 66 percent compared to the overall decline in auto sales of roughly 8 percent.
The IER believes that “the EV mania may be over or at least slowing” down given interest rate hikes, supply chain shortages, inflation, and restriction on tax credits.
“While some politicians are following in California’s footsteps by banning gasoline-powered vehicles and President [Joe] Biden has a goal for 50 percent of new car sales in 2030 to be electric, those feats may not be attainable due to problems in manufacturing and selling of electric vehicles,” the IER said.
“Range and performance problems still exist making consumers wary. And with escalating electric rates, operating costs may not be less than those for gasoline vehicles as Europe is seeing.”
An analysis by The Wall Street Journal in December shows that drivers of Tesla’s Model 3 had to pay 18.46 euros at a Tesla supercharger station in Europe for a 100-mile drive.
In contrast, drivers in Germany had to shell out a slightly lower 18.31 euros to drive the same distance on a Honda Civic 4-door, which is the Tesla Model 3’s combustion engine equivalent.
Global EV Sales, Tesla Price Cuts
A KPMG survey of more than 910 auto executives conducted last year found that expectations of worldwide EV sales have tempered.
In 2021, auto execs were “very optimistic” about the prospects of global EV sales, expecting the vehicles to capture as much as 70 percent market share by 2030. But in the 2022 survey, the expected market share plummeted to 40 percent at most.
“The closer the expert is to the customer, the lower the EV share expectations seem to be,” says the report. “For example, U.S. executives say car dealers expect EVs to capture 22 percent of the market by 2030, eight percentage points less than OEMs predict,” referring to the original equipment manufacturers.
Tesla has cut prices of its cars by up to 20 percent in Europe and the United States in a bid to boost demand. By doing so, the company is sacrificing some of its profits to raise sales volume.
By reducing prices, some of the lower tier electric car models being sold in the United States will qualify for federal tax credits worth $7,500.
Restricting EV Sales in America
In the United States, some states are seeking to restrict the sale of EV’s. In Wyoming, six Republican lawmakers are pushing to phase out the sale of new electric vehicles by 2035 to protect its oil and gas industries as well as to preserve crucial resources.
In a recently introduced bill, the lawmakers note that allowing the proliferation of electric vehicles at the expense of gas-powered vehicles will seriously affect the state’s economy as well as its communities.
Moreover, the batteries used in the EVs contain critical minerals needed in many other applications. The domestic supply of these minerals is limited and at “risk of disruption,” the bill stated.
In addition to that, these critical minerals are “are not easily recyclable or disposable, meaning that municipal landfills in Wyoming and elsewhere will be required to develop practices to dispose of these minerals in a safe and responsible manner,” the bill adds.
In California, the local administration is pushing for greater use of EVs. However, the state’s poor power infrastructure is raising a question about the possibility of such a transition. In September, California’s electric grid regulator had asked people to avoid charging their EVs so as to avoid outages.
EVs are also seen as some of the least reliable vehicles sold in the United States. According to the Consumer Reports 2022 Annual Auto Reliability survey published in November that looked at 24 auto brands, hybrid vehicles and mid-sized or large and gas-powered sedans are seen as among the most reliable vehicles sold in the country.
In contrast, full-size pickup trucks and electric vehicles were seen as problematic. Owners of EVs reported issues with electric motors, batteries, and charging systems. Out of the 11 EV models in the survey, only four had average or better than average predicted reliability.
At least two Democratic senators have called for a full investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified materials, after several batches of documents were found at an office and his home in Delaware.
“The reports about President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents are extremely irresponsible and disturbing,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) told Fox News on Jan. 20. “These allegations should be investigated fully.”
The development “raises serious questions, and the appointment of an unbiased special prosecutor to investigate the matter is the right step,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told Fox.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who recently confirmed she won’t be running for reelection in 2024, told NBC News last week that the reports of handling classified documents are a bad look for the White House.
“Well, it’s certainly embarrassing, right?” Stabenow said. “They don’t think it’s the right thing, and they’ve been moving to correct it, working with the Department of Justice, working with everyone involved, with the [National] Archives, and so from my perspective, you know, it’s one of those moments that obviously they wish hadn’t happened.”
Their comments came just hours before Biden’s lawyer confirmed that the Department of Justice (DOJ) had searched his Delaware residence. An FBI spokesperson confirmed to Fox News on Jan. 21 that the search had taken place.
“DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President,” Bob Bauer, Biden’s attorney, said. “DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years.”
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) speaks to reporters in the Hart Senate Office building in Washington on Aug. 1, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Fitzpatrick confirmed on Jan. 21 that the FBI had executed “a planned, consensual search” of the president’s residence in Wilmington. The president and First Lady Jill Biden weren’t at the home when it was searched. They were spending the weekend at their home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Speaking to reporters during a trip to California on Jan. 19, Biden said he was “fully cooperating and looking forward to getting this resolved quickly.”
“We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place,” Biden said. “We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department.”
The Biden investigation has also complicated the Justice Department’s investigation on former President Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents and official records after he left office. The DOJ says Trump took hundreds of records marked classified with him upon leaving the White House in early 2021 and that it had to obtain a search warrant to retrieve them.
After the initial discovery of Biden’s documents, Trump has asserted that the DOJ is treating the president differently.
“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” Trump asked in a social media post earlier in January.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed former Maryland U.S. Attorney Robert Hur as a special counsel to investigate any potential wrongdoing surrounding the Biden documents. Hur is set to take over from Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney John Lausch of Illinois in overseeing the probe.
“Since the beginning, the President has been committed to handling this responsibly because he takes this seriously,” White House lawyer Richard Sauber said on Jan. 21. “The President’s lawyers and White House Counsel’s Office will continue to cooperate with DOJ and the Special Counsel to help ensure this process is conducted swiftly and efficiently.”
And all of the information will be kept “private.” Hell, I don’t even use the Blue Rhino propane exchange system because the cylinders get jacked up by the maggot renters. Can you imagine a world in which all cars are rentals? Shows what elitists think of the lower and middle classes. Long live gasoline! [US Patriot]
The era of cars as the ultimate tool for personal freedom and mobility will, if the future the World Economic Forum (WEF) envisions comes to pass, soon be over. Cars will be something you ask to borrow, and the cloud will be taking the wheel.
Speaking in Davos, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said that “the car is becoming a connected computer on wheels.” Like cellphones, he said, “everything around us is becoming connected intelligence.”
The automotive industry is becoming part of the “industrial to digital transformation,” Amon said. “The technology transformation in the industry is electrification and is digital.”
Increasingly, car makers are partnering with tech companies such as Qualcomm and IBM.
Tech visionaries say that computerized cars will be integrated into the cloud, where they can be monitored and controlled by a centralized network that can prevent collisions, alert you about road conditions, and manage traffic.
While much of this technology already exists via cellphones and some cars already track your gaze to alert you when your eyes stray from the road, the next step is linking the car’s systems together with manufacturers and other vehicles and allowing for continuous third-party tracking.
These developments are moving in lockstep with efforts to compel consumers to buy electric vehicles, including laws in California, Washington, and many European countries to ban the sale of gas-fueled cars by 2035 or sooner. Many carmakers, such as GM and Volkswagen, have stated that their entire fleets will soon be electric.
Automotive Tech Trends
An October 2022 McKinsey study identified four trends in automotive tech, which they call ACES: autonomous driving, connectivity, electrification, and shared mobility. Regarding connectivity, the report states: “Intelligent communication within and outside of the car is a key enabler for autonomous technologies.”
Regarding shared mobility, it states that the “ownership model of cars is evolving to renting and sharing as customer preferences shift.” Cloud technology is already a feature of many electric cars, including mapping, road conditions, weather, the location of charging stations, and ideal routes for charging their cars during long-distance drives.
However, among the realities that undermine the “green” EV narrative is that the minerals required to make batteries are mined under highly pollutive and environmentally devastating conditions and then refined and manufactured primarily in China, often using coal power. In addition to the environmental impact of producing electric vehicles, some industry experts also question whether enough minerals can be mined and processed to meet the expected demand.
The WEF has suggested a simple solution for this: Don’t buy a car. In a report titled “3 Circular Economy Approaches to Reduce Demand for Critical Metals,” the WEF states that the average car in the UK is driven only 4 percent of a given day, and therefore consumers shouldn’t buy cars but rather borrow them.
“Car sharing platforms such as Getaround and BlueSG have already seized that opportunity to offer vehicles where you pay per hour used,” the WEF report states. “To enable a broader transition from ownership to usership, the way we design things and systems need to change too.”
These changes include phone app keys that allow multiple users and personal profiles that can distinguish between use for work and for leisure.
“A design process that focuses on fulfilling the underlying need instead of designing for product purchasing is fundamental to this transition,” the WEF report states. “This is the mindset needed to redesign cities to reduce private vehicles.”
Advancing External Control of Cars
The WEF prides itself on being the biggest global advocate for public–private cooperation, and governments in the United States and Europe are doing their part to advance external control of cars.
Carmakers will be forced by President Joe Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Act to install new features on cars in the coming years, including breathalyzers, speed limiters, vision and voice trackers, and “kill switches” that automatically shut the vehicle off.
Arguably, these features can reduce injuries; however, they also involve new surveillance technology that will monitor peoples’ behavior and make decisions for them. There are also concerns that building in controls that aren’t in the hands of the driver leaves consumers vulnerable to dangerous computer hacks.
Like your smartphone today, the car of the future is going to know quite a lot about you. And as the WEF famously stated, “you will own nothing and be happy.”
If there truly is a climate crisis, why would there need to be a group (OK, many groups) to keep on drilling the panic into us? Here are a couple of my quick references, I’m not even on Twitter [US Patriot]:
An organization that says it is a coalition of “climate and anti-disinformation organisations” says Twitter under CEO Elon Musk is allowing more dissenting views on climate change.
Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), released a Jan. 19 study (pdf), accusing Musk of allowing misinformation about the climate crisis to spread on the social media platform.
The study accused Twitter of boosting the hashtag “#ClimateScam” to users when searching the word “climate,” as its top search result.
The hashtag has suddenly spiked on Twitter search results since July 2022, with its appearance increasing ever since, according to CAAD.
The report said that “in 2022, denialist content made a stark comeback on Twitter in particular.”
Twitter Search
CAAD alleged that at least 91,000 Twitter users reported the #ClimateScam hashtag more than 362,000 times by December.
“The source of its virality is entirely unclear, and re-emphasises the need for transparency on how and why platforms surface content to users,” said the study’s authors.
They said that term appeared to be trending despite “data that shows more activity and engagement on other hashtags such as #ClimateCrisis and #ClimateEmergency.”
The research team claimed that the rise of the term in search results could not be explained by user personalization, the volume of content, or popularity.
“A basic search for ‘climate’ on Facebook did not autofill with overtly sceptic or denialist terms; searching explicitly for #ClimateScam only showed 1.5k users mentioning the term, versus 72k for #ClimateEmergency and 160k for #ClimateCrisis.”
CAAD complained that the source of the #ClimateScam hashtag was unclear and that there was a need for transparency on how the search result came up.
“Equally, TikTok returned no search results for #ClimateScam, but instead suggested the phrase ‘may be associated with behaviour or content that violates our guidelines.’”
Interest Groups
The authors said that not enough of the content was labeled as misinformation by Twitter’s new management and claimed that it could not find a comparable trend or uptick in “#ClimateScam” on other platforms.
CAAD is partially funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank, which is heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The ISD said it is working with social media platforms to explore radicalization online, to minimize the impact of extremist recruitment by groups in Europe and North America.
Since buying Twitter in October, Elon Musk has reduced the social media team’s staff by 50 percent and cut down its content moderation team to protect freedom of expression.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee on Jan. 19 is investigating the Biden administration’s handling of the border crisis amid record numbers of illegal aliens entering the United States from Mexico and continued fentanyl smuggling into the country.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the committee, issued a letter (pdf) to Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), requesting documents and internal DHS communications “to understand DHS’s policies, the costs of the emergency measures needed to respond to the worsening crisis, and the national security risks created by these policies.”
He also called on chief border patrol officials to testify at an upcoming hearing to be held on the week of Feb. 6. Chief Border Patrol agents Jason Owens, Gregory Bovino, Gloria Chavez, and acting chief Patricia McGurk-Daniel, who oversee border sectors in Texas, Arizona, and California, were called to testify at the hearing about “how U.S. Border Patrol agents are managing the crisis and the impact of the crisis on their mission to secure the border.”
“Biden’s radical open borders agenda has ignited the worst border crisis in American history. The Biden Administration’s deliberate actions are fueling human smuggling, stimulating drug cartel operations, enabling deadly drugs such as fentanyl to flow into American communities, and encouraging illegal immigrants to flout U.S. immigration laws,” Comer said in a statement announcing the border investigation.
“Republicans will hold the Biden Administration accountable for this ongoing humanitarian, national security, and public health crisis that has turned every town into a border town.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas prepares to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee on Capitol Hill on Nov. 15, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/ Getty Images)
Mayorkas was asked to produce documents “about DHS’s role in undermining efforts to secure the southern border,” Comer’s office announced.
Such documents include communications about the numbers of illegal aliens released from DHS custody into the United States, as well as communications on any plans to secure the border and increase the seizure rate of dangerous drugs like fentanyl.
Comer also requested communications related to the decision to end former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” (Migrant Protection Protocols) policy; communications on how the soaring illegal crossings have affected retention, recruitment, and morale among border agents; and much more.
“DHS will respond to members of Congress through official channels,” a DHS spokeswoman said in a statement.
‘Failed Policies’
In the letter to Mayorkas, Comer accused the Biden administration of having failed to ensure that the U.S. immigration system is safe, orderly, and humane. The Oversight chairman also accused President Joe Biden of having “waited until there was a Republican majority in the House of Representatives to finally visit the border” in early January.
“The visit, however, comes long after DHS’s rollback of deterrent-focused policies that were working to reduce the number of illegal border crossings,” Comer told Mayorkas, adding that the rollback has given power to human smuggling groups and cartel criminals over the past two years.
Comer also charged that the Biden administration’s recently-announced “parole program” for people from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti is an “unlawful abuse of the parole process.”
“As the border crisis worsens, DHS and the Biden Administration continue to implement failed policies,” Comer wrote, adding, “Instead of working to resolve the situation, the Biden Administration is lying to the American people that the border is secure—despite thousands of illegal aliens and massive quantities of deadly fentanyl evading apprehension every day—and persisting in its ultimate goal to enact a massive amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.”
Illegal aliens seeking asylum line up to be processed by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents at a gap in the border fence U.S.-Mexico near San Luis, Ariz., on Dec. 26, 2022. (Rebecca Noble/AFP via Getty Images)
Since Biden took office in 2021 and scaled back or terminated key Trump-era policies, illegal immigration has soared to record levels.
The DHS has since struggled to manage the influx of illegal immigrants, even though Mayorkas has repeatedly claimed that the border is closed and that no crisis exists. More than 2.3 million apprehensions were recorded at the U.S.–Mexico border in fiscal year 2022, which ended on Sept. 30, 2022—up about 37 percent from the previous year.
Republicans have threatened to impeach Mayorkas, with Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) in early January filing three articles of impeachment against the DHS chief. But Mayorkas has no plans to resign, the DHS confirmed. The department asserted that the charges against Mayorkas were not only factually inaccurate but also failed to meet the constitutional standard of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Meanwhile, Biden, in early January, pushed back at congressional Republicans for having “rejected” his administration’s request back in December 2022 for an additional $3.5 billion in funding for the DHS that he said would “secure the border.” Biden also said that Congress had also rejected his request for funds for 2,000 new asylum officers and personnel, and 100 new immigration judges “so people don’t have to wait years to get their claims adjudicated.”
Tom Homan, former acting ICE director and Heritage visiting fellow, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement on Friday: “Joe Biden is the first president in my lifetime to intentionally un-secure the border. By way of more than 90 executive orders, he undid the successful Trump-era policies that brought illegal immigration to a 40-year low and gave us the most secure border of our lifetimes.”
He added: “More Americans than ever dying from fentanyl flooding across the southwest border. More women and children abused and sexually assaulted on the dangerous journey through Central America and Mexico. More migrants found dead on U.S. soil than ever. Record profits for the cartels as they traffic and smuggle historic numbers of drugs and people across the border. It’s inhumane.
“It’s a slap in the face to the men and women of the Border Patrol, who are absolutely overwhelmed, as well as to ICE agents who’ve been told they can’t detain or deport most of those who break our laws. Joe Biden and Secretary Mayorkas have embraced open borders for political benefit, and innocent people are the ones paying the consequences.”
Charlotte Cuthbertson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
I like it. It may never pass, but this kind of idea does make a statement, if nothing else. [US Patriot]
RE: ABORTION “Millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child – what is left but for me to kill you and you kill me?” (MOTHER TERESA)
Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington on Jan. 20 to demonstrate their opposition to abortion in the first March for Life annual event since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and delivered a long-sought victory to the pro-life movement.
Participants spread across a section of the National Mall to hear speeches and later took part in a march, holding signs with phrases such as “It’s a Child, Not a Choice,” “I Demand Protection at Conception,” and “I Am The Post-Roe Generation.”
The mention of being part of the “post-Roe generation” refers to the fact that, on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ruling that there’s no constitutional right to abortion and thus returning the regulation of abortion to the states. That decision effectively overturned the high court’s landmark decision on Jan. 22, 1973, in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide.
Pro-life and pro-abortion rights activists protest during the 50th annual March for Life rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 20, 2023. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, spoke at the event, calling it “a somber reminder of the millions of lives lost to abortion in the past 50 years, but also a celebration of how far we have come and where we as a movement need to focus our effort as we enter this new era in our quest to protect life.”
Some movement leaders hope to persuade congressional lawmakers to impose a federal abortion restriction in the future. Such a proposal would likely face stern opposition in the Democrat-held Senate.
One of those to speak at the rally was House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who encouraged participants to stay focused on “the mission” of extending protections for the unborn.
“You are showing us and giving us hope that the young people of America support life, defend life, are here to march for life,” he said. “When you’re in a battle, it’s important to keep your focus on what the mission is. But every step of the way, it’s also critical that we celebrate victories along the way. And boy, did we get a huge victory just a few months ago when Roe was overturned.”
People participate in the March for Life rally in Washington on Jan. 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Elsewhere in Washington, President Joe Biden delivered a counterpoint by issuing a proclamation highlighting the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, praising it as a “balanced decision” that protected a “woman’s constitutional right to choose,” while denouncing the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn it as “extreme.”
“Today, trailblazers who fought heroically for the Roe v. Wade decision are watching the next generation grow up without its protections,” Biden said.
He said he would use his executive powers where possible to preserve abortion while urging Congress to enshrine it in law.
About 15 or so activists gathered outside the court building in a counter-protest to the pro-life march, holding signs of their own with phrases such as “Bans off our Bodies,” “Stop Prosecuting Abortion,” and “I Will Aid & Abet Abortion.”
Since the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade, the legality of abortion has become a matter for states to decide, with roughly a dozen implementing near-total abortion bans.
In the run-up to the Jan. 20 March for Life, congressional Republicans issued a flurry of anti-abortion proposals.
Abortion rights activists protest during the 50th annual March for Life rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 20, 2023. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Republicans Introduce Anti-Abortion Bills
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) proposed a new draft measure on Jan. 20 that aims to defund Planned Parenthood by placing a one-year moratorium on federal funding to the organization.
“The nation’s largest abortion provider has no business receiving taxpayer dollars,” Boebert said in a Jan. 20 statement. “Planned Parenthood claims these funds go to healthcare for women, but last year, Planned Parenthood performed a record number of abortions while also reducing the number of well-woman exams and breast cancer screenings it performed.”
The bill, named the “Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2023” (pdf), aims to prohibit federal funds from being made available to the organization or any of its affiliates or clinics unless they certify that they won’t perform abortions. Exceptions are made for abortions in cases of rape, incest, or when a woman’s life is in danger.
The Planned Parenthood in St. Louis on June 24, 2022. (Jeff Roberson/AP Photo)
Planned Parenthood replied to a request for comment from The Epoch Times by pointing to the organization’s response to prior “defund” initiatives, which states that such moves keep patients from receiving preventive services such as birth control and screenings for cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.
Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) on Jan. 20 introduced the Teleabortion Prevention Act, which would mandate that individuals seeking an abortion pill must have a physical examination, take the medication on-site at the clinic, and attend a post-treatment visit.
“Abortion is always wrong under any circumstance but allowing women to have chemical abortions alone without ever being physically examined is outright dangerous,” Good wrote in a post on Twitter on Jan. 20.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas.) on Jan. 20 introduced the Protecting Individuals with Down Syndrome Act and the Protecting Life on College Campus Act in their respective chambers.
The proposed Protecting Individuals with Down Syndrome Act would prohibit doctors from performing abortions because of a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis and make it illegal for anyone to coerce a mother into having an abortion for that reason.
“Every life is created with God-given dignity and potential—no matter how small or how many chromosomes they may have,” Daines wrote in a tweet. “I’ll always fight to protect young moms and their unborn children from the violence of abortion.”
The Protecting Life on College Campus Act would bar colleges and universities that have abortion clinics targeted at students or staff or have affiliations with such clinics from receiving federal funding.
The Republicans’ pro-life legislation is likely to face opposition from Democrats and other groups that oppose curbs on access to abortions.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) has proposed a new draft bill that aims to defund Planned Parenthood by placing a one-year moratorium on federal funding to the organization, in line with the longstanding goal of many Republicans who oppose the organization’s provision of abortions.
The bill is Boebert’s first in the 118th Congress, which Republicans took control of in the midterm elections and are now pressing ahead with their “Commitment to America” agenda.
“The nation’s largest abortion provider has no business receiving taxpayer dollars,” Boebert said in a Jan. 20 press release. “Planned Parenthood claims these funds go to healthcare for women, but last year, Planned Parenthood performed a record number of abortions while also reducing the number of well-woman exams and breast cancer screenings it performed.”
The bill, named “Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2023” (pdf), aims to prohibit federal funds from being made available to the organization, or any of its affiliates or clinics, unless they certify that they will not perform abortions. Exceptions are made for abortions in cases of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is in danger.
The Planned Parenthood in St. Louis on June 24, 2022. (Jeff Roberson/AP Photo)
The legislation also requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Agriculture to recover any federal aid received by Planned Parenthood or its affiliates or clinics, in case of non-compliance with the certification that they will not perform abortions during the moratorium period.
Federal tax dollars that would have gone to Planned Parenthood would instead be directed to community health centers, according to the draft bill. Specifically, the bill seeks to redirect $235 million to such centers across the United States that provide healthcare to women.
Republicans have also introduced three other pro-life bills this week that seek to impose conditions on the use of abortion pills, restrict abortions due to a Down syndrome diagnosis, and curb federal funding for colleges and universities that have on-campus abortion clinics.
‘Profit Off the Violence of Abortion’
Boebert’s bill has been endorsed by Students for Life of America, the National Right to Life Committee, Heritage Action, and Concerned Women for America.
“There’s no single entity that stands to make a profit off the violence of abortion more than Planned Parenthood,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, said in a statement.
“Deceitfully, Planned Parenthood guises their business model as one that helps women while their latest annual report shows they made $633 MILLION from taxpayers while ending 383,460 little lives in that same time frame,” Hawkins said, adding that screening services provided by Planned Parenthood have dropped by double digit percentages “proving they’re in the business of abortion.”
Since 2010, there has been a 74 percent decrease in cancer screenings, a 72 percent decrease in prenatal care, and a 41 percent decrease in contraceptive services provided by Planned Parenthood, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, citing Planned Parenthood’s own annual reports.
From July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021, Planned Parenthood received $633.4 million in government funding, up from $618.1 million the previous year, according to the organization’s latest annual report (pdf).
Planned Parenthood replied to a request for comment from The Epoch Times by pointing to the organization’s response to prior “defund” initiatives, which states that such moves keep patients from receiving preventive services like birth control and screenings for cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.
Background
The move to defund Planned Parenthood has been a longstanding goal of many Republicans, who object to the organization’s provision of abortion services. They argue that federal funds should not be used to support an organization that performs abortions, and that the money should instead be redirected to other healthcare providers.
Planned Parenthood, on the other hand, has argued that it provides a wide range of critical healthcare services, including cancer screenings, birth control, and testing for sexually transmitted infections, in addition to providing abortion services.
The organization has argued that defunding it would result in a loss of access to important non-abortion services for many low-income communities.
If passed, the Defund Planned Parenthood bill would likely face significant opposition from Democrats and abortion advocates, who would see it as an attack on women’s reproductive rights and access to healthcare.
The bill’s future is uncertain as it will need to pass through several legislative stages before it can become law.
Introduction of the bill comes amidst a larger conversation in the country regarding abortion rights.
The Supreme Court recently ruled in a case that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
Other Anti-Abortion Legislative Actions
Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) on Friday introduced the Teleabortion Prevention Act, which would mandate that individuals seeking an abortion pill must have a physical examination, take the medication on-site at the clinic, and attend a post-treatment visit.
“Abortion is always wrong under any circumstance but allowing women to have chemical abortions alone without ever being physically examined is outright dangerous,” Good wrote in a post on Twitter on Friday.
Also on Friday, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced the Protecting Individuals with Down Syndrome Act and the Protecting Life on College Campus Act in their respective chambers.
The proposed Protecting Individuals with Down Syndrome Act would prohibit doctors from performing abortions due to a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis and make it illegal for anyone to coerce a mother into having an abortion for this reason.
Those who break the law would face fines and/or up to five years in prison, but the mother would not face prosecution.
“Every life is created with God-given dignity and potential—no matter how small or how many chromosomes they may have,” Daines wrote in a tweet. “I’ll always fight to protect young moms and their unborn children from the violence of abortion.”
The Protecting Life on College Campus Act would bar colleges and universities that have abortion clinics targeted at students or staff, or have affiliations with such clinics, from receiving federal funding.
Like Boebert’s bill to defund Planned Parenthood, the other pro-life legislation is likely to face opposition by Democrats and other groups that oppose curbs on access to abortions.
Abbott Laboratories is being investigated by U.S. authorities for possible criminal conduct that led to last year’s shutdown of an infant formula plant in Sturgis, Michigan, due to product contamination, according to the company.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is probing the matter, a spokesperson told news outlets.
“DOJ has informed us of its investigation and we’re cooperating fully,” the Abbott spokesperson said.
Abbott didn’t respond to a request for more information. DOJ officials didn’t return an inquiry.
Abbott, one of the largest U.S. formula manufacturers in the country, issued a voluntary recall in February 2022 after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned Americans not to use some products made at one of the company’s plants in Sturgis. An investigation uncovered unsanitary conditions there following a whistleblower complaint.
Dr. Robert Califf, Food and Drug Administration commissioner, said during a congressional hearing that the investigation results “were shocking,” describing conditions he said were “egregiously unsanitary.”
Regulators discovered the presence of Cronobacter sakazakii, a bacteria that can contaminate dry products such as infant formula powder, at the facility. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention opened a probe into multiple cases, including several deaths, potentially linked to the contamination. Authorities said they were unable to find a definitive connection between the illnesses and Abbott’s products. Abbott has said that none of the formula it distributed tested positive for Cronobacter.
The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 prohibits “adulterated food,” or food that “contains any poisonous or deleterious substance which may render it injurious to health,” with some exceptions. People or companies that enter adulterated food into “interstate commerce “can be prosecuted under the law.
Examples of interstate commerce include selling a product, shipping it to another state, or contracting with another company or person to ship the good to another state.
Baby formula sits in the kitchen of Daisy Strongin as she cradles her newborn son in northeastern Illinois on Nov. 1, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
The plant shutdown lead to baby formula shortages that plagued new parents for months.
The Sturgis plant reopened in mid-2022 after U.S. authorities and Abbott agreed to a plan outlining steps that the company needed to take to correct deficiencies.
“We understand the urgent need for formula and our top priority is getting high-quality, safe formula into the hands of families across America,” Abbott said as the plant reopened.
“We will ramp production as quickly as we can, while meeting all requirements. We’re committed to safety and quality and will do everything we can to re-earn the trust parents, caregivers and health care providers have placed in us for 130 years.”
Elon Musk said he felt like he “was dying” after his second COVID-19 booster shot.
“I had major side effects from my second booster shot,” the new Twitter boss wrote in a social media post. “Felt like I was dying for several days. Hopefully, no permanent damage, but I don’t know.”
Musk didn’t provide medical records to back his claim. Neither did he say which company’s COVID booster he took.
The Epoch Times can’t verify his claim independently.
Moderna and Pfizer didn’t respond to requests for comments at the time when the article was published.
He took Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine and the first mRNA booster without side effects, Musk said.
Musk posted a string of Twitter posts in response to a post by Rasmussen Reports which is criticizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s narrative that major side effects after COVID vaccination are “rare.”
Americans Link COVID Vaccines to Mysterious Deaths
A new Rasmussen Reports poll, released on January 2 and based on a representative sample of 1,000 American adults, shows that nearly half of Americans believe that the COVID-19 vaccines probably caused a “significant number of unexplained deaths,” while over a quarter said they personally know someone whose death may have been caused by vaccination side effects.
Pollsters asked people a series of questions, including whether they got the COVID-19 shot and how likely is it that the jab’s side effects “have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths.”
Forty-nine percent of the respondents said they think it’s “likely” that the COVID-19 vaccine’s side effects are responsible for a significant number of deaths that remain unexplained.
A large majority (71 percent) said they themselves have been vaccinated against COVID-19, with 38 percent of those believing that the vaccine side effects are at least somewhat likely responsible for unexplained deaths.
A nurse administers a COVID-19 vaccine booster to a person at a hospital in Hines, Ill., on April 1, 2022. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Among the 26 percent who said they haven’t been jabbed, 77 percent said it’s at least somewhat likely that the vaccination’s side effects caused significant numbers of mysterious deaths, the survey found.
Another question was whether people think there are “legitimate reasons” to be worried about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, or whether people who are concerned about vaccine safety “are spreading conspiracy theories.”
Forty-eight percent of respondents said they think there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about COVID-19 vaccine safety, 37 percent think people who are worried about this issue are pushing conspiracy theories, and 15 percent aren’t sure.
The Vermont Supreme Court ruled on Jan. 20 that the city of Montpelier didn’t violate the state constitution by allowing foreign nationals to vote in municipal elections.
The lawsuit stemmed from a 2018 amendment to Montpelier’s charter that permits “noncitizen voters” to “register to vote in Montpelier City elections.” The amendment was placed on that year’s general election ballot and approved by voters.
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, vetoed the General Assembly’s authorization of the changes in June 2021, only to have his veto overridden.
Since its adoption in 1777, Chapter II, Section 42 of the Vermont Constitution has been listing U.S. citizenship as a requirement one must meet to be entitled to “the privileges of a voter in this state.” However, the Jan. 20 decision (pdf) states that legal precedent and a close reading of the provision proved that local elections can have different voter qualifications from statewide elections.
“The text of Section 42 reviewed through a historical lens and our precedents support the conclusion that Section 42 does not apply to municipal elections,” wrote a panel of five judges, including Chief Justice Paul Reiber.
The original complaint, backed by the Vermont Republican Party, argued that the nature of municipal elections has changed so substantially since the Revolutionary era that “all Vermont elections affect statewide affairs and therefore must be conducted in accordance with” Section 42. The judges found that argument unconvincing.
“This Court has stated that the framers drafted Chapter II with an intent to form ‘a plan for the general government of the State,’” the judges wrote.
“The idea that the Constitution sought to provide a framework for statewide government specifically and therefore the provisions in Chapter II do not apply to local government … is prevalent throughout our precedents.”
Scott, who was reelected to a second term in 2022, said in his veto message that he wanted the state Legislature to take time to debate on that matter and come up with a consistent policy, instead of simply approving each town’s proposed changes.
“This is an important policy discussion that deserves further consideration and debate,” Scott told the lawmakers. “Allowing a highly variable town-by-town approach to municipal voting creates inconsistency in election policy, as well as separate and unequal classes of residents potentially eligible to vote on local issues.
“I believe it is the role of the Legislature to establish clarity and consistency on this matter. This should include defining how municipalities determine which legal residents may vote on local issues, as well as specifying the local matters they may vote on.”
“Mother Teresa was one of the gentlest and most compassionate women of the twentieth century. Yet when it came to discussing abortion, she was totally bold and fearless in letting world leaders know how evil a practice it is. In fact, while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, she told an international audience: “Millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child – what is left but for me to kill you and you kill me?” 1
Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington on Jan. 20 to demonstrate their opposition to abortion in the first March for Life annual event since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and delivered a long-sought victory to the pro-life movement.
Participants spread across a section of the National Mall to hear speeches and later took part in a march, holding signs with phrases such as “It’s a Child, Not a Choice,” “I Demand Protection at Conception,” and “I Am The Post-Roe Generation.”
The mention of being part of the “post-Roe generation” refers to the fact that, on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ruling that there’s no constitutional right to abortion and thus returning the regulation of abortion to the states. That decision effectively overturned the high court’s landmark decision on Jan. 22, 1973, in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide.
Pro-life and pro-abortion rights activists protest during the 50th annual March for Life rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 20, 2023. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, spoke at the event, calling it “a somber reminder of the millions of lives lost to abortion in the past 50 years, but also a celebration of how far we have come and where we as a movement need to focus our effort as we enter this new era in our quest to protect life.”
Some movement leaders hope to persuade congressional lawmakers to impose a federal abortion restriction in the future. Such a proposal would likely face stern opposition in the Democrat-held Senate.
One of those to speak at the rally was House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who encouraged participants to stay focused on “the mission” of extending protections for the unborn.
“You are showing us and giving us hope that the young people of America support life, defend life, are here to march for life,” he said. “When you’re in a battle, it’s important to keep your focus on what the mission is. But every step of the way, it’s also critical that we celebrate victories along the way. And boy, did we get a huge victory just a few months ago when Roe was overturned.”
People participate in the March for Life rally in Washington on Jan. 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Elsewhere in Washington, President Joe Biden delivered a counterpoint by issuing a proclamation highlighting the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, praising it as a “balanced decision” that protected a “woman’s constitutional right to choose,” while denouncing the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn it as “extreme.”
“Today, trailblazers who fought heroically for the Roe v. Wade decision are watching the next generation grow up without its protections,” Biden said.
He said he would use his executive powers where possible to preserve abortion while urging Congress to enshrine it in law.
About 15 or so activists gathered outside the court building in a counter-protest to the pro-life march, holding signs of their own with phrases such as “Bans off our Bodies,” “Stop Prosecuting Abortion,” and “I Will Aid & Abet Abortion.”
Since the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade, the legality of abortion has become a matter for states to decide, with roughly a dozen implementing near-total abortion bans.
In the run-up to the Jan. 20 March for Life, congressional Republicans issued a flurry of anti-abortion proposals.
Abortion rights activists protest during the 50th annual March for Life rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 20, 2023. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Republicans Introduce Anti-Abortion Bills
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) proposed a new draft measure on Jan. 20 that aims to defund Planned Parenthood by placing a one-year moratorium on federal funding to the organization.
“The nation’s largest abortion provider has no business receiving taxpayer dollars,” Boebert said in a Jan. 20 statement. “Planned Parenthood claims these funds go to healthcare for women, but last year, Planned Parenthood performed a record number of abortions while also reducing the number of well-woman exams and breast cancer screenings it performed.”
The bill, named the “Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2023” (pdf), aims to prohibit federal funds from being made available to the organization or any of its affiliates or clinics unless they certify that they won’t perform abortions. Exceptions are made for abortions in cases of rape, incest, or when a woman’s life is in danger.
The Planned Parenthood in St. Louis on June 24, 2022. (Jeff Roberson/AP Photo)
Planned Parenthood replied to a request for comment from The Epoch Times by pointing to the organization’s response to prior “defund” initiatives, which states that such moves keep patients from receiving preventive services such as birth control and screenings for cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.
Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) on Jan. 20 introduced the Teleabortion Prevention Act, which would mandate that individuals seeking an abortion pill must have a physical examination, take the medication on-site at the clinic, and attend a post-treatment visit.
“Abortion is always wrong under any circumstance but allowing women to have chemical abortions alone without ever being physically examined is outright dangerous,” Good wrote in a post on Twitter on Jan. 20.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas.) on Jan. 20 introduced the Protecting Individuals with Down Syndrome Act and the Protecting Life on College Campus Act in their respective chambers.
The proposed Protecting Individuals with Down Syndrome Act would prohibit doctors from performing abortions because of a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis and make it illegal for anyone to coerce a mother into having an abortion for that reason.
“Every life is created with God-given dignity and potential—no matter how small or how many chromosomes they may have,” Daines wrote in a tweet. “I’ll always fight to protect young moms and their unborn children from the violence of abortion.”
The Protecting Life on College Campus Act would bar colleges and universities that have abortion clinics targeted at students or staff or have affiliations with such clinics from receiving federal funding.
The Republicans’ pro-life legislation is likely to face opposition from Democrats and other groups that oppose curbs on access to abortions.
Picture of “The Impeachables” (or at least, the most impeachbles) [US Patriot]
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) says he is open to the possibility of impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, as millions of illegal aliens cross the border.
During a Breitbart interview, Emmer pointed out that there has been an absence of oversight of the current government. Further, there is a “double standard” when it comes to holding Biden and former President Donald Trump accountable for “breaches of public trust, and maybe more.”
Biden and Mayorkas “haven’t taken steps to secure” the southern border. “It shouldn’t have been lost on anybody that Joe Biden doesn’t make one visit to the southern border until a new Republican majority is literally taking over in the House in Washington, D.C. Then, he mysteriously suddenly finds religion and goes down to the border,” he said.
“I’ll let the committee process do its work, but if the case is built, I would imagine that once that case is built, if it rises to the level of an impeachable malfeasance or misfeasance, high crimes, and misdemeanors, yeah, it’ll come to the floor.”
President Biden visited the southern border for the first time during his presidency only on Jan. 8.
Border Crisis Under Biden and Mayorkas
Biden became president in January 2021, with Mayorkas sworn in as the Secretary of Homeland Security a month later. Under their watch, there have been more than 5.5 million illegal border crossings and more than 1.2 million known “got-aways”—illegal immigrants spotted but not caught or processed.
During fiscal year 2020, there were 458,088 apprehensions at the southern border. This rose to 1.73 million in fiscal year 2021, a jump of 278 percent, and then to 2.3 million in fiscal 2022, according to data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) already filed impeachment articles this month against Mayorkas, criticizing him as well as the president for not taking any steps to secure the southern border.
On Jan. 10, Fallon introduced House Resolution 8, seeking to impeach Mayorkas for “high crimes and misdemeanor.” Mayorkas is accused of failing to execute “Secure the Fence Act of 2006,” which requires the Homeland Security secretary to “maintain operational control” over America’s land and maritime borders.
“Biden inherited the most secure border in U.S. history. He intentionally and maliciously terminated every protection that was put in place. If @SpeakerMcCarthy & the @GOP are serious about holding this administration accountable, then they should impeach Biden on this issue alone,” Jason D. Meister, former Trump advisory board member, stated in a tweet on Jan. 10.
Possessing Classified Documents
Meanwhile, the intelligence, judiciary, and oversight committees are also probing the issue of Biden possessing classified documents. If accused of wrongdoing, Republicans can use it to initiate impeachment articles against Biden.
The first batch of documents was found in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center, where the president worked before his current term at the White House.
Biden became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, where he led the Penn Biden Center. Biden had been vice president for two terms during the Obama administration between 2009 and 2017.
On Jan. 12, Biden’s lawyer announced that a second batch of classified documents was found in his Delaware residences in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach. During his transition from vice president to a private citizen in 2017, files from Biden’s vice presidential office are believed to have been shipped to these two homes.
“Why was Joe Biden in possession of classified information after leaving office as vice president? This is serious and must be investigated,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) stated in a tweet on Jan. 12. In a video linked in the tweet, Greene pointed out that vice presidents cannot declassify documents.
In recent years, transgender ideologues have mounted a cultural offensive that swept all rationality before them. First, biological science and objective reality were trashed as internal feelings came to matter more than biological facts. Then, existing procedures for dealing with transgender ideation were trashed, allowing anyone who believed themselves to be the opposite sex to simply declare their new identity—and, presto-chango—that’s what they are.
Next came language engineering in which lexicon police require media, employers, colleagues, and family to use the preferred pronouns declared by transgendered people under threat of social media exclusion, loss of employment, and in some cases, losing custody of one’s own children. Biden administration bureaucrats promulgated regulations that required doctors to provide transgender hormones and surgeries even if they violated their moral and religious beliefs. Catholic hospitals have been sued, some successfully, for refusing to perform transgender hysterectomies.
Soon, womanhood itself was canceled. Females began to be called by ridiculous terms such as “people with uteruses.” We were told ubiquitously that “men can give birth” and “women have penises.” Female athletes were forced to compete with transgender “women” in sports such as track, swimming, golf, and volleyball. Girls’ and women’s locker rooms were opened to anyone claiming to be female, regardless of genitalia.
Then, they came for the children. Activists took to social media platforms such as TikTok to push transgender ideology onto youth and silently invaded even the most culturally traditional households. The number of children who claim to be the opposite sex went from a bare trickle to a flash flood. In the name of preventing youth suicides, the Biden administration, medical associations, and professional journals crafted standards of care requiring that youngsters and teenagers claiming to be transgender or nonbinary receive only “gender-affirming” support—meaning that their ideation is to be accepted unquestioningly.
Under the new regime, children claiming to not be their biological sex first receive unquestioning “social affirmation”— they are never called by their “dead (given) names” and are referred to only by their “preferred” pronouns. Some schools secretly affirm these ideations by openly promoting transgender ideology in classrooms and, sometimes, hiding ongoing student “transitions” from parents. Children were invited to “family friendly” drag queen performances that had the impact—and probably the point—of sexualizing childhood.
Worse, children and adolescents are next given “gender-affirming” medical care, in which doctors prescribe drugs and hormones to prevent normal puberty. Gender transition surgeries have become increasingly routine with thousands of girls as young as age 12 having had their breasts removed. Teenagers receive invasive facial reconstruction surgeries to masculinize or feminize their faces. A few even had their genitals reconstructed.
For too long, it looked as if this subversive social revolution was unstoppable. But now, the tide seems on the verge of turning. A cultural counter-offensive is gaining steam that, if successful, could halt the transgender juggernaut. Here are some of the new developments that may be changing the tide.
Socially Liberal Countries Are Hitting the Brakes
Contrary to what the ideologues tell us, “the science” around transgenderism—particularly with regard to caring for gender dysphoric children—is not “settled.”
The public health sectors in the UK, France, Finland, and Sweden—not exactly Bible-belt countries—have published new directives urging “great caution” in blocking the puberties of children or performing body-altering surgeries precisely because of the paucity of good scientific information and the potential for serious harm. The UK’s recently published guidelines noted specifically that childhood gender dysphoria is often “transitory.” Authorities in France, Sweden, and Finland worry that the number of children identifying as transgender has increased so dramatically that it can be deemed an “epidemic.” The new guidelines strongly encourage extended psychological exploration and care instead of puberty blocking and surgically altering the bodies of minors.
‘Detransitioners’ Are Telling Their Stories
The transgender movement has been propelled by stories of children celebrating their surgeries and worries about suicides. Now, young people who transitioned are increasingly returning to their born sex, a process known as “detransitioning.” Their stories are often tragic and compelling. For example, Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old detransitioner, recounts how she was “affirmed” in her sex confusion at age 12 and had her breasts removed at 15. Now 18, she understands she is a woman and is issuing a clarion warning, saying, “My teenage life has been the culmination of excruciating pain, regret, and most importantly injustice.”
Cole isn’t alone. A new documentary, “The Detransition Diaries,” follows three young women whose bodies were harmed by medical and, in one case, surgical “gender affirmation,” issuing a warning to protect children from transgender ideology and transition procedures.
Attack of the Trial Lawyers
Cole has decided to sue the doctors who she says allowed her to be irreversibly harmed by medical and surgical interventions. Other cases are being threatened or filed. In Oregon, Camille Kiefel, 32, announced a lawsuit against the health professionals who, she says, approved her mastectomy after only two brief Zoom meetings.
If trial lawyers smell the scent of money, they could swarm the transgender medical community the way litigators did the tobacco and asbestos industries.
States Are Passing Youth-Protecting Laws
Conservative states have started enacting laws to protect children from being propagandized by transgender ideology and having medical and surgical transitions. Florida forbids discussion of sensitive sexual issues, including transgenderism, through the third grade. Several states have banned biological boys from competing against girls in sports. Some have required people to use the public restroom of their biological sex. Arkansas, Alabama, and Arizona have outlawed medical and surgical transitions in youth, with more such laws likely on the way.
Gender ideology is one of the direst cultural threats Western society faces. Not only are the bodies and minds of precious people—particularly children—at risk, but if all that matters ultimately are feelings, if we cast objective truth aside to accommodate deeply held personal desires, then the stability of civilization itself is at material risk.
The time has come for an intense but mutually respectful societal conversation that focuses not only on the causes of transgenderism and the potential benefits of transitioning such people but also on the many risks and alternatives that can care compassionately for suffering people while maintaining cultural equilibrium. Our future thriving requires nothing less.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
This week Steven Crowder made headlines for turning down a 50 million dollar term sheet offered by The Daily Wire. The term sheet, which would have forced Steven to sign over his email list, social media accounts, and revenue streams from his Mug Club, among other things from his life’s work, raised concerns about censorship and the gatekeeping of content creators by large conservative media companies and their owners.
The point of this article is to open your eyes to why your favorite conservative media outlets are not on our side and help you understand that they exist to keep you from discussing ideas that threaten the power of the Regime. These types of exploitative gatekeeping deals are not the outlier; they are the norm. Unlike most of the talking heads I have no gatekeeping contracts and thus can speak freely on these matters and tell you the unfortunate truth that you need to hear.
The Daily Wire is currently trying to gaslight Crowder and make this issue about money or greed when anyone paying attention knows that is not the case. This is a projection on their part because money is indeed what they care about here and in general. They can’t imagine that someone would reject that much money, and it “offends” them. They cry out in pain as they strike Crowder with a terrible one-sided deal for his soul.
It’s not about money, it’s about controlling the narrative.
Clearly, money is not an issue for a man willing to turn down $50 million and go public to dispute the predatory practices of a very large conservative media company. It’s also noteworthy that Steven claims to have been friends with everyone involved for the past decade, so this likely wasn’t an easy decision on his part from any angle. He’s burning bridges here in a big way.
It’s difficult for many people to wrap their heads around what appears on the surface to be a large sum of money. Most of us could never imagine turning down that sum to make Youtube videos. Still, for a creator as big as Crowder with an already established large audience and revenue-generating business, that amount of money over a multi-year period isn’t all that large. Likely, Crowder is already generating millions of dollars annually with his business.
Crowder’s business is worth a significant amount of money between his successful Mug Club monetization strategy, his established audience, and the potential for advertiser deals. Remember, the Daily Wire deal is not just for Steven himself, but for the entire operation he has built up over the past decade, including his library of content, the talent of his team, and the various revenue-generating business models he built. The money would be used to continue funding and expand the operational costs of his business.
The bigger picture here is that some things are worth more than any amount of money—things like dignity, principles, and the ability to speak freely without asking permission from Ben Shapiro.
One of the main issues with the term sheet was that it would have required Steven to censor himself to avoid being banned by Big Tech platforms or face steep financial penalties from The Daily Wire. In other words, Steven would have had to compromise his principles in order to maintain his operational income and continue to reach his audience. He would be beholden to the gatekeeping whims of Ben Shapiro and Big Tech.
Crowder made the right choice in rejecting the deal with The Daily Wire. He has set an important example for other content creators and media figures and exposed the dark underbelly of exploitative contracts in media companies like the Daily Wire, who put on a facade of “fighting back against the Regime,” when in reality, they are the controlled opposition that operates on behalf of it. Still, there is much more to this story.
Gatekeepers of the Regime are not our friends.
We live in a time when the Friend/Enemy Distinction is essential to understand. This may be difficult for many of you to accept, but Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire are not our friends. Nor are Fox News, Prager U, The Blaze, Charlie Kirk, and many others in the “conservative” media landscape. Not even Crowder himself, for that matter, but hopefully, that is about to change.
These people are working on behalf of our enemies. They aim to keep you within a tightly controlled narrative box of what the Regime deems “acceptable oppositional discourse.” Anyone who steps outside that line is blacklisted, smeared, and banned by these “conservative” media outlets for daring to speak the Truth.
Ask yourself why in a culture of censorship unlike anything ever seen before in this country, has Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire, and all of the other “popular” conservative media outlets I mentioned never faced any modicum of censorship over the past seven years? Why is Ben Shapiro “shadow-boosted” into Facebook and YouTube feeds while the rest of us are banned, demonetized, and shadowbanned?
You may think that it’s because he is paying Facebook millions of dollars, and that would be a very logical assumption, but what is going on here is much bigger than that. Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire, and the rest of Conservative Inc. exist for one reason and one reason only: to keep you from entertaining forbidden opinions. They are a release valve that herds those who would otherwise be genuinely right-wing (and thus a threat to the Regime) into bland, “acceptable” conservatism that threatens nothing.
That’s why they are not only allowed on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter by our enemies but also boosted and promoted by them. They pose no real threat to those in power; instead, they are an asset to them. They give the illusion of opposition to the totality of the Regime’s grasp on government, media, entertainment, banking, and technology.
Shapiro is boosted artificially so much by Big Tech that he consistently appears in the top shared links on Facebook, not because his content is novel, interesting, or talented, but rather because our enemies are inflating him on purpose. That purpose is to corral the conversation and prevent you from listening to anyone with ideas that legitimately threaten the existing power structure. For the life of me, I can’t understand how people could possibly listen to his annoying nasally speed talking for hours, but I digress.
Control the media, control the narrative, control the world.
The Daily Wire and Conservative Inc aren’t interested in free speech. They are interested in Controlled Speech. That’s their job. They rope you in by giving off the appearance of cultural resistance, and when it really matters, they sideswipe their conservative Christian audience with Regime-approved narratives. There are many examples of this – too many to count. Christians need to wise up to what is going on here.
Conservative Inc lures you in with culture war distractions, convincing you that they share your values and are fighting back against the Regime. The reality is they exist to pull a bait and switch on you and force Regime-approved narratives about critical issues down your throat from a “right-wing” perspective. Big Con is conning you, and many of you don’t realize it yet, but hopefully, with what Crowder is exposing here, you are starting to get the picture. Conservative Inc is not your friend.
What happens when you sell your soul to Conservative Inc?
Let’s look at what happens when someone signs on the dotted line with a Conservative Inc company like The Daily Wire. Jordan Peterson did just that several months ago. The first videos Peterson released after joining The Daily Wire chastised Muslims and Christians with criticism and scolding. Noticeably he provided none of the same complaints and scolding to people of the Jewish faith. Instead, he is now making trips to Israel, crying on stage, praising them, and doing glowing interviews with Benjamin Netanyahu. This is what it looks like to sell your soul for money and become a dancing clown for Ben Shapiro and Israel.
As it turns out, the same group of people are behind Steven Crowder’s exploitative term sheet offer from The Daily Wire. So, it appears Ye indeed had a point about exploitative contracts from Jewish media moguls. These are the facts, and the gatekeepers at Conservative Inc don’t want you to discuss these uncomfortable truths. It’s not Christians running these companies and making these deals. Ye told you who is running them, and they destroyed him for it.
When Ye’s friend Candace Owens, who works for The Daily Wire, went to bat to defend him, Ben Shapiro quickly put her in her place to stop it. Signing on the dotted line with The Daily Wire means you are forbidden from discussing topics that make Ben Shapiro uncomfortable. Topics that are essential to breaking down the problems in our society and that are culturally, spiritually, and politically relevant. Taking the deal with the Devil means you must shut your mouth about these topics and must leave your friends and principles hanging under the bus.
Money can be a powerful motivator for many people, but there are some things that no money can buy. You cannot serve God and money (Matthew 6:24). The Bible tells us:
“A little that a righteous man hath is better than the riches of many wicked.
For the arms of the wicked shall be broken: but the Lord upholdeth the righteous.“Psalms 37:16-17
It’s easy to see the appeal of making a deal like this for Crowder, Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, and others. Many on the right are making a point about the “large sum of money,” but are missing the bigger picture about this deal: no amount of money is worth being a “wage slave” and selling your life’s work to Ben Shapiro. None. Not $50 million.
Big Tech companies have a huge influence over the distribution of information and content. We must support and protect the rights of creators to produce content freely and without censorship. That’s what we have been doing here at Gab for over six years now, and it’s what we will continue to do going forward. Why do you think none of the Conservative Inc personalities and media companies are on Gab? They can’t control the narrative here. It’s that simple.
We Need to Support Christian Leaders At Christian Media Companies. Period.
Last summer, I said that to be a leader or influencer on the right, you need to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and be a Christian. I said in no uncertain terms that people like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have no place in any serious right-wing movement and resistance to the Regime unless they become Christians. I got a lot of flack for this from the media and many people on the right, but I stand by it, and now you see why.
This Daily Wire situation with Crowder is a great example. Christians don’t act the way Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing act. They don’t refer to themselves as “god-kings.” They don’t write soul-buying exploitative contracts. They don’t refer to employees as “wage slaves.” They don’t force people to throw their friends under the bus. These people don’t act like Christians because they aren’t Christians, and the Christians who do work for them and have made a deal with the Devil–people like Matt Walsh–should be ashamed of themselves. If they had any self-respect and cared about the truth and fighting the Regime, they would move on to bigger and better things.
When you support The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, and Conservative Inc, this is the behavior you are endorsing and making possible. This is why we need to explicitly support Christian businesses, creators, media companies, and leaders only. Period.
I wish Crowder all the best with whatever comes next and pray that he starts speaking a little more boldly, stops punching right, and remains independent from the Conservative Inc machine.
Andrew Torba CEO, Gab.com Jesus Christ is the King of kings
Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s CEO sent a note to employees Friday announcing the elimination of 12,000 jobs, as a response to economic changes over the past two years.
The move—coming two days after a similar number of job cuts from Microsoft—will affect both U.S. and overseas employees.
“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today,” Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote.
‘Difficult Economic Cycles’
Alphabet’s layoffs followed a review of its people and priorities, leading to a workforce reduction hitting various geographies, Pichai said. Among those losing their jobs are recruiters, corporate staff, and people working on engineering and product teams.
For the U.S. layoffs, the tech giant will provide a severance package and for overseas employees they will follow local practices.
“As an almost 25-year-old company, we’re bound to go through difficult economic cycles. These are important moments to sharpen our focus, reengineer our cost base, and direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities,” he wrote.
Echoing Microsoft’s announcement, Pichai talked about the company’s focus on artificial intelligence. This reflects renewed competition between the tech giants sparked by Microsoft’s growing partnership with the San Francisco startup OpenAI.
“We have a substantial opportunity in front of us with AI across our products and are prepared to approach it boldly and responsibly,” he wrote.
The 12,000 jobs amount to 6 percent of Alphabet’s workforce. Pichai became CEO of Alphabet and Google in 2019.
Susannah Streeter, an analyst with Hargreaves Lansdown, said advertising, the key business underpinning Google’s search engine and YouTube, was not immune to economic turbulence.
“Ad growth has come off the boil, a sharp contrast from the busy days of the post-pandemic re-opening which saw a surge in consumer spending,” she said. The company faces competitive and regulatory threats as well, she said.
It was unclear if Alphabet would take a one-time financial charge related to the job cuts. Microsoft’s severance packages, lease consolidation, and hardware-lineup changes will cost the company more than $1 billion, it said earlier this week.
More than 38,000 tech-industry workers have faced layoffs this year alone, after nearly 155,000 lost their jobs in 2022, tracking website Layoffs.fyi stated.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Top civil rights lawyers say the program is a clear-cut violation of federal law
Princeton University Press is handing out book development grants based on race, part of a program for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color” that top civil rights lawyers say violates federal law.
The publisher, which is independent of Princeton University, has since 2021 been running the “Supporting Diverse Voices” initiative, which pairs minority authors with “book coaches” who help them write book proposals. The first round of grants was for “Woman, transgender, and gender-expansive authors in science and mathematics,” according to the program’s website. The next three rounds were for “BIPOC scholars” in the social sciences, humanities, and hard sciences. A fifth round will open on February 1 for minorities in social science.
Though the publisher calls these collaborations “grants,” they appear to be contracts based on the terms of the program. In exchange for coaching, the program website states, “grantees agree to give [Princeton University Press] the right to consider the resulting proposals exclusively, before they are submitted to any other publishers for consideration.” That means the grants likely violate the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans race discrimination in contracting.
“Absolutely contracts awarded on the basis of race are illegal,” said Adam Mortara, the lead trial lawyer for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court case that could outlaw affirmative action in higher education. “I’m fairly certain the publisher’s counsel could not possibly have blessed this violation of federal law.”
Three other lawyers—Dan Morenoff at the American Civil Rights Project, David Bernstein at George Mason University law school, and Gail Heriot at the University of San Diego law school—echoed Mortara’s analysis, saying the program was almost certainly illegal.
“It’s as if they think the law no longer applies to them,” said Heriot, who also sits on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “What worries me is that with the present administration, they may be right.”
The director of Princeton University Press, Christie Henry, declined to comment, writing only to confirm that the publisher is legally separate from the university.
The grants are part of the parade of race-conscious programs, both public and private, that have swept through the United States since 2020. The Biden administration denied pandemic relief funds to white-owned restaurants. State governments and private hospitals rationed scarce COVID treatments based on race. Major corporations, including Pfizer, Amazon, Google, and Starbucks, have faced legal scrutiny over their minority-only fellowships.
The trend has been especially acute in academia, where lawsuits haven’t deterred schools from running racially discriminatory programs. Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill between them have at least six programs that bar white applicants—even as the schools’ affirmative action policies are under review by the Supreme Court.
Other than Princeton University Press, most academic publishers have steered clear of overt quotas. A grant program at MIT Press, for example, focuses on “excluded and chronically underrepresented” groups but does not specify any racial criteria for the grants.
The program nonetheless makes clear what its priorities are.
GOP-controlled committee makes advancing DEI a priority
Democrats may have lost control of the House of Representatives, but it appears Republicans are embracing their legacy of so-called diversity and inclusion.
The Subcommittee on Capital Markets, led by Republican Ann Wagner of Missouri, for example, will identify “best practices and policies that continue to strengthen diversity and inclusion in the capital markets industry.” And the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, led by Republican Bill Huizenga of Michigan, is tasked with making sure there is “agency and programmatic commitment to diversity and inclusion policies.” No other specific oversight focuses were listed.
Diversity and inclusion, two members of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion triumvirate now commonly referred to as DEI, have become an obsession for Democrats and left-wing activists in recent years. Republicans won a narrow majority in the midterm elections at least in part due to promises that they would end the Democrats’ DEI craze. It was a common barb from the Republican National Committee, for example, that “Democrats prioritize wokeness over solving real problems.”
McHenry, a close ally of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), was tapped to chair the influential committee in December. His initial announcement of committee priorities under his leadership included conducting “aggressive oversight” of the Biden administration, putting Americans back in control of their financial data, and regulating the crypto market. In a statement to the Washington Free Beacon, McHenry said the committee’s Republican leadership would “refocus the committee on the kitchen table issues that matter to American families.”
“For four years, Democrats wasted the valuable and limited time and resources of our committee to push burdensome mandates on American job creators,” McHenry said. “Democrats’ goal was to name and shame companies until they parroted their woke social agenda.”
The statement made no mention of diversity and inclusion.
Although one of McHenry’s first acts as chairman was to dissolve the Subcommittee on Diversity and Inclusion established by his predecessor Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), the task set out by that subcommittee now appears to have bled into the entire committee’s work. Each of those subcommittees, all led by Republicans, includes the term “diversity and inclusion” in the brief description of its jurisdiction.
McHenry also established a new committee, the Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Inclusion. Under the leadership of Arkansas Republican French Hill, the subcommittee is tasked with “identifying best practices and policies that continue to strengthen diversity and inclusion in the digital asset ecosystem.”
Rep. Warren Davidson (R., Ohio), who chairs the Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance, will work on “identifying best practices and policies that continue to strengthen diversity and inclusion in the housing industry.” Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer’s (R., Mo.) Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions will “continue to strengthen diversity and inclusion within the national security and international finance industry,” and Rep. Andy Barr’s (R., Ky.) Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Monetary Policy will identify “best practices and policies that continue to strengthen the financial industry’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.”
None of the six subcommittee chairs would comment on how they plan to follow through on their “diversity and inclusion” goals.
Republicans reportedly struggled with the decision to eliminate the Subcommittee on Diversity and Inclusion, with Politicoreporting that McHenry considered making it “part of another committee.” The Consumer Bankers Association, a trade organization, wrote in a February 2019 memo that McHenry “expressed his support for the creation of the new subcommittee” during a hearing on “diversity trends in the financial services industry.”
It is unclear whether Democrats pressured Republicans into including “diversity and inclusion” in the announcement, but the inclusion of the woke term did not satisfy Waters. The committee’s former Democratic chairwoman on Thursday slammed her Republican colleagues for the “insufficient” step.
“Their pledge to make diversity a component of each sub-panel is simply insufficient,” Waters said. “We know that a diversity and inclusion strategy with no tangible goals, accountability measures, or a senior point of contact, rarely leads to significant impact.”
“My Democratic colleagues and I will continue to hold our Republican colleagues accountable,” Waters added, “and do the work to make sure diversity and inclusion is at the forefront of our agenda because as we’ve proven these past four years, diversity matters, and we will not be silent on this important topic.”
Comments come as Alejandro Mayorkas faces potential impeachment proceedings over record-high migration
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday downplayed the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border, saying it is not “unique” to the United States.
The comments come as the new House Republican majority gears up for hearings on the border crisis and potential impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas.
“If anybody is a prime candidate for impeachment in this town, it’s Mayorkas,” Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) told CNN this week.
Border authorities tallied a record-high 2.4 million migrant encounters in fiscal year 2022. There were 233,740 encounters at the southern border in November alone, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
Mayorkas in December issued a gag order barring border officials from sharing information with reporters about the magnitude of illegal immigration at the southern border.
The secretary on Thursday said U.S. immigration is “a broken system in desperate need of legislative reform.”
A far-left Washington, D.C., councilwoman wants the city to pay up to $1,200 per person to residents who buy electric bicycles, WUSA9 reported this week.
Under the bill introduced by Democratic councilwoman Brooke Pinto, a D.C. resident who earns below 80 percent of the median family income could receive “up to $1,200” to pay for an electric bike. Residents who earn 80 percent or more of the median income could receive up to $500.
While Pinto touted electric bikes as “an environmentally friendly way to more easily get around the city,” D.C. residents may not feel safe riding around in the open air. The city in 2021 saw the highest murder rate in almost 20 years and is still facing a scourge of carjackings.
Claim: Pete Buttigieg is “a star of Biden’s cabinet.”
Who said it:
The failing New York Times, in an article published Friday about how the nation’s “air travel debacles” have “placed an unwelcome spotlight” on the secretary of transportation. It goes on to describe Buttigieg as “a cabinet member whose prior managerial experience came on a far smaller stage” and “whose image relies heavily on his technocratic wonkiness.”
Context:
Buttigieg, 41, ran for president after serving two terms as mayor of South Bend, the fifth-largest city in Indiana, the 17th-largest state in America. Based on this experience, as well as his ability to appeal to Democratic primary voters in irrelevant states (Iowa and New Hampshire) that are 90 percent white, President Joe Biden decided to put Buttigieg in charge of the U.S. Department of Transportation. He’s notvery goodat his job.
Additional context:
Before entering politics, Buttigieg worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, where he served on the front lines of corporate downsizing and advised a Canadian supermarket chain that was fixing bread prices.
Why it matters:
The mainstream media are hopelessly out of touch with the average American voter. Political journalists and other so-called experts continue to insist that Buttigieg is a rising star in the Democratic Party. They said the same thing about Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams and Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris, among others.
Journalists are obsessed with politicians like Buttigieg—a boring nerd who enjoys homework—because he reminds them of themselves. They are convinced the world would be a better place if people like them had the power to tell ordinary Americans how to live their lives. He has been called a “brilliant person” and a “Michael Jordan-level cable TV guest,” among other false claims.
Though it’s true that Buttigieg is a part of Biden’s cabinet, there is no compelling evidence to suggest he is a “star” member of that cabinet. It seems especially ill-advised to use that word in an article that readily acknowledges his lack of experience and explains how his tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of poor leadership. The sooner these people realize Pete Buttigieg is never going to be president, the better.
George Soros-backed prosecutor Kim Foxx dropped murder charges after shootout
Holy Planet of the Apes without the makeup. How did she ever get elected? Oh yeah. Soros [US Patriot]
A “reform-minded” prosecutor in Chicago refused last week to bring murder charges against a felon who killed one person and wounded another in a shootout that prosecutors now say was “self-defense.”
Chicago police last week arrested Ferba and charged him with murder and attempted murder. But prosecutors tossed the charges out and instead slapped the gunman with illegally possessing a firearm, which they say he had used “for self-defense.”
Ferba has served prison time for one prior violent felony conviction, court records show. A pre-trial public safety assessment also gave him a four in six chance of committing another crime. He remains in custody after failing to pay $1,000 bail.
Foxx is among a group of so-called criminal justice reform prosecutors boosted into office by George Soros. The left-wing billionaire donated $2 million to Foxx’s 2020 campaign. Like Soros-backed Philadelphia prosecutor Larry Krasner (D.), Foxx has overseen a decades-high murder rate, with more than 800 homicides recorded in Chicago in 2021.
A spokeswoman for Foxx said the office is “unable to comment on pending litigation.”
Jason Johnson, the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, told the Washington Free Beacon that Foxx “drops felony cases, especially those involving violence and gun offenses, at an alarming rate.”
“While it’s appalling, it’s unsurprising that a radical D.A. like Kim Foxx would give leniency to a convicted felon committing violence with an illegal gun because she’s done it over and over again,” Johnson said, pointing to at least twoother cases. Both involved girls as young as seven and eight years old killed in shootouts.
“She only folded after the police and mayor publicly excoriated her,” he said of the first case. “And just last year, the police themselves had to file charges against an admitted killer after Foxx plain refused.”
A 2022 Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund report found that Soros’s philanthropy network has spent more than $40 million in the last decade to elect 75 liberal prosecutors, including Foxx, in half of America’s largest jurisdictions. Under Foxx’s leadership, Cook County has seen a 27 percent decrease in convictions and a 54 percent increase in dismissed cases, another Legal Defense Fund report shows.
Veteran prosecutors have fled Foxx’s office in recent years, saying her approach is contributing to a citywide crime spike, the Daily Mailreported.
A judge ordered Ferba to pay $1,000 bail and submit to electronic monitoring. Foxx’s office said the gunman is expected in court again on Feb. 1.
Yet another loophole to allow illegal alien scumbags, criminals, and terrorists to enter the US [US Patriot]
The Biden administration will release into the country nearly 3,000 illegal immigrants, who otherwise faced deportation, because U.S. officials in November inadvertently published their personal information, the Los Angeles Timesreported.
The migrants, whose names and birthdates were included in the data accidentally published by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, could face threats of violence from gangs and corrupt government officials once deported to their origin country, the agency said. The Biden administration is also offering to bring back some migrants whom officials deported before the leak was discovered.
“Though unintentional, this release of information is a breach of policy and the agency is investigating the incident and taking all corrective actions necessary,” an agency official said in a statement.
New York City mayor Eric Adams this week pleaded for migrants to stop coming to his city, which has “no more room,” the Democrat said.
The leak comes just one month after the Department of Homeland Security “inadvertently tipped off” Havana about Cuban migrants the agency sought to deport, the Times reported:
A Homeland Security official communicating with the Cuban government about deportation flights to the country “unintentionally” indicated that some of the 103 Cubans who could have been placed on a flight had been affected by the late November data breach, ICE officials told Congress in December.
The Homeland Security official did not name any specific individuals. But telling Cuba that some of the potential deportees had been affected by the ICE leak amounted to confirming that they had sought shelter in the U.S. Every person whose information was leaked had sought U.S. protection, and the leak was widely covered in U.S. media.
A left-wing media advocacy group is coming to the defense of Joe Biden’s embattled Federal Communications Commission nominee, a 61-year-old white woman, saying she has faced “anti-Black dog whistles” from critics.
“Since Biden nominated public-interest champion Gigi Sohn to fill the fifth tie-breaking seat at the FCC, she has faced anti-Semitic, homophobic, and deceitful attacks,” Free Press said in a Thursday fundraising letter, “including anti-Black dog whistles from a police union.”
Biden’s nomination of Sohn stalled in committee in January 2021, after which the president renominated her for the position. Senators, including some Democrats, have opposed Sohn for her comments calling on the FCC to investigate conservative networks and describing Fox News as “state-sponsored propaganda.”
The Fraternal Order of Police has opposed Sohn for endorsing calls to defund the police and for her role at an organization that has fought to hinder police in obtaining users’ encrypted communications. The union said Sohn’s record demonstrates her “serious animus towards law enforcement officers and the rule of law.”
Free Press said in its fundraising call that the union’s accusation was an “anti-Black dog whistle that’s often levied against public-interest advocates.”
Free Press did not return a request for comment on how the Fraternal Order of Police’s criticism of Sohn amounted to a dog whistle.
The media advocacy group was founded in 2002 by socialist professor Robert McChesney, who praised Venezuela under former dictator Hugo Chávez and called for “remov[ing] brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.” Free Press has also received millions of dollars from far-left billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
Claim: “Washington-based think tanks have been notoriously slow to implement the same conflict of interest policies and disclosures commonly implemented by journalists, academics, and scientists.”
Who said it: Eli Clifton, a senior adviser at the isolationist Quincy Institute and “Investigative-Journalist-at-Large” at Responsible Statecraft, the Quincy Institute’s online magazine.
After the Free Beacon reached out to the Atlantic Council, CNBC added a lengthy editor’s note to the story that noted the “obvious conflict of interest.” The Atlantic Council, meanwhile, added notes to its other stories about the UAE and acknowledged its failure to properly disclose the UAE donations in other stories on its website.
Context: Since forming in 2019, the Quincy Institute has been marred by a series of conflicts of interest involving scholars linked to foreign governments. Its cofounder is Trita Parsi, a pro-Iran activist accused of serving as a foreign agent of Tehran.
The European Parliament last year suspended Quincy contributor Eldar Mamedov over his undisclosed lobbying for Morocco and Qatar. Mamedov, who advised the European Parliament, has authored more than 50 articles for Quincy, none of which disclose his foreign influence work.
Amir Handjani, a non-resident scholar at Quincy, has been linked to a spy operation targeting critics of Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al Qasimi, the authoritarian ruler of Ras Al Khaimah, one of the seven kingdoms of the United Arab Emirates. Handjani has served as a fellow at the Atlantic Council as well.
Analysis: It’s true that the Atlantic Council shills for Turkey and once took donations from a shady Ukrainian energy firm linked to Hunter Biden. But the Quincy Institute has its fair share of foreign conflicts of interest, too.
As the old saying goes, those who live in corrupt houses shouldn’t throw around accusations of financial impropriety. Sure, Quincy’s claim about “Washington-based think tanks” may be true, but the institute glosses over the fact that its scholars are covered in just as much muck as the influence-peddlers at the Atlantic Council.
But this is a fact check. And like all fact checkers, we here at the Free Beacon are unbiased adjudicators. So, we have no choice but to evaluate the truth of the Quincy Institute’s claim in a vacuum—even though outside of a vacuum, this is a clear case of the isolationist pot calling the kettle black.
News outlets slammed Trump-era plans to use public land for energy projects
Because sub-light particles with no mass have “tons” of energy, right? Dumb @$$e$!! [US Patriot]
The media have been largely silent on a Biden administration energy project that one conservationist said would be “armageddon” for public lands. It’s a far cry from how reporters covered similar proposals under former president Donald Trump.
National outlets took a far more critical approach to Trump-era land use proposals. “Where Will Trump’s War on Public Lands End?” the New Yorker wondered in 2017. The following year, a New York Times headline lamented that a “Trump Drilling Plan Threatens 9 Million Acres of Sage Grouse Habitat.” The coverage gap indicates a media bias, not just against Trump, but also for green energy.
The Biden administration’s plan would expand on an Obama-era agreement that spurred solar developments in six southwestern states, some of which piqued the ire of locals and environmentalists. The Bureau of Land Management now wants to relax the initial deal’s development restrictions and expand solar developments into five additional states.
A Nevada conservationist who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon on condition of anonymity said that a planned 26,000 acre solar farm in the state’s desert has residents worried. “It’s armageddon for those of us who live out here,” he said, noting that the massive solar farms are an eyesore for nearby residents and also emit heat and blinding glares.
Nowhere are the downsides of solar energy clearer than in California, which draws roughly a third of its power from renewable sources. Californians have seen electricity prices skyrocket nearly 70 percent since 2010, as the state started its big embrace of solar energy. California households pay nearly 83 percent more than the average for homes elsewhere in the United States. Last summer saw rolling blackouts for the first time in 20 years, as the grid buckled under the strain of air conditioning use during a heat wave.
Solar panels themselves are fraught with problems. Many of these units are made with nonrenewable, rare earth minerals. Some are manufactured in Chinese factories that rely on forced labor. And discarded solar panels are leaking toxic waste into California’s landfills.
The Bureau of Land Management did not respond to requests for comment.
Maine has become the latest state to ban TikTok from state-owned devices that connect to the government network.
The video-sharing app is owned and operated by ByteDance, which is a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020.
More than 28 U.S. states and the federal government have banned the popular app from state-owned devices. The U.S. armed forces have also have prohibited it on military devices.
Maine Information Technology notified executive branch workers on Thursday that TikTok poses a serious threat to the state’s network infrastructure.
Maine IT says the directive (pdf) is in response to “well-documented national security risks posed by TikTok” and “recently enacted federal legislation that prohibits the use of the application on all federal government devices.”
The directive requires TikTok to be removed from all state-owned and personal devices that connect to the government’s network by Feb. 1.
“If previously installed, any covered technology must be immediately uninstalled to circumvent any exposure of sensitive information,” the directive states. “Failure to meet the requirements of this directive may result in disciplinary action up to and including termination.”
The new requirement does not affect personal devices that don’t connect to the state government’s network.
The FBI and Federal Communications Commission have issued warnings of possible threats TikTok poses to U.S. national security, including that user data obtained by the app—such as browsing history and location—could be shared with the authoritarian Chinese regime.
Concerns were heightened in late 2022 amid media reports that staff of ByteDance used the company’s access to TikTok user data to improperly track American journalists.
While TikTok has previously said that all U.S. user data was stored within the United States, it has since admitted that this is not true. In a September 2022 congressional hearing, TikTok executives refused to commit to stopping the flow of American data to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
TikTok rose in popularity in the United States in 2017 after ByteDance acquired Chinese-owned social media company Musical.ly and paired its Santa Monica office with TikTok.
TikTok did not inform U.S. officials about the Musical.ly–TikTok merger despite both companies’ ties to China, independent investigative journalist Geoffrey Cain previously told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
Casey Fleming, a cybersecurity expert and CEO of strategic advisory firm BlackOps Partners, previously told The Epoch Times, “All of your data on that phone, everything you do, and everything that you have stored on your phone is being sent out of the country, possibly to be used against you.”
Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote on Twitter in June 2022, “TikTok doesn’t just see its users’ dance videos.”
Besides national security concerns, many have raised concerns about TikTok’s content and its potential harms to the mental health of adolescents. In December 2022, the state of Indiana filed two lawsuits against the company, accusing it of sending user data to the CCP and also of falsely claiming that its product was safe for children.
A vote-counting error caused some votes to be double-counted and could flip the outcome of a school board race in New Jersey, according to two candidates involved in the race.
Election Systems and Software said that a reporting error was discovered during the Nov. 8 election in Monmouth County, occurring when votes were uploaded via a flash drive. The company, known as ES&S, is the vendor for Monmouth’s election equipment.
The company described the issue to the New Jersey Globe as an “isolated incident occurred due to a human procedural error,” and “an audit of the system yielded this information.” The Epoch Times has contacted ES&S for comment.
“A technician inadvertently loaded votes twice in error,” ES&S spokesperson Katina Granger told CNN on Thursday. “Typically our software blocks this from happening. Unfortunately, a human error in a July software re-installment missed the step that would have flagged the mistake.”
After the re-installing of the software, she added that “a human procedural error during reinstallation excluded a step, which optimizes the system database and ensures USB flash media cannot be read twice during the results loading process” and “because the database was not optimized, the user was not notified when the USB flash media were loaded twice into the results reporting module.”
Outcome
Elaborating, the error occurred when a USB flash drive uploaded the voting results “twice” on the “results reporting module,” Granger said.
The school board race that was incorrectly counted was for the nonpartisan Ocean Township Board of Election race, said a Tuesday statement (pdf) from the school district. In the Nov. 8 race, Steve Clayton had unseated incumbent Jeffrey Weinstein by about 20 votes, but Weinstein may have actually won by one vote, according to the Globe’s analysis.
Clayton received 3,523 votes to Weinstein’s 3,503 votes during the midterm elections, taking office earlier this month, according to reports. Clayton told local media that under the new totals, he is now one vote behind Weinstein pending a recount which has to be certified by a judge.
“I’m a board member until I’m not a board member. My main concern is the integrity of the election and that whoever ends up taking the seat, the people have confidence in the outcome,” Clayton told the Ashbury Park Press.
Speaking to CNN Thursday, Clayton added that he received a call from the Monmouth County Clerk’s office earlier this week informing him of the error, was “shocked,” and is consulting his lawyer. “I’m not giving up yet,” he said. “We’re exploring our options.”
Weinstein said he received a call from local officials telling him of the error and is “just letting it go through its process.” According to reviews of their social media posts in mid-November, both Weinstein and Clayton had urged caution after the Nov. 8 election results were being counted.
“I don’t think I was thinking something like this might occur,” he told CNN. “Every election has its emotional ups and downs, but I didn’t think this would be part of it.”
Recertify?
On Thursday, Monmouth election officials asked the New Jersey Division of Elections to recertify the election machines and software updates after the error was confirmed.
“Monmouth County Election Offices also ask the state to create a new state mandated test and checklist to perform before elections to ensure the election software works properly,” Monmouth election officials told the Globe.
“Monmouth County followed the current state protocol to test the system prior to the 2022 General Election, but the only current tests provided by the state would not catch the step missed and acknowledged by ES&S which allowed votes to be counted twice.”
Going a step further, Democrat state Sen. Vin Gopal said he’s calling for a full investigation into the matter, describing the situation as “completely unacceptable.”
“Reversing the outcome of a race over two months after the election is completely unacceptable and creates an opening for questions about the integrity of elections in Monmouth County, and the state,” Gopal said in a statement to local media.
“Monmouth County, and the state, owes voters complete transparency on how these errors occurred and what steps are being taken to ensure they never repeat. A full investigation of all processes of the County Clerk and Board of Elections, in addition to anything relating to the elections process, needs to happen immediately.”
Companies have halted an advanced trial of an HIV vaccine because the shot was found to not prevent infection.
Results from the stage 3 trial led to the determination that the vaccine “was not effective in preventing HIV infection compared to placebo among study participants,” Johnson & Johnson and its partners said in a statement.
The vaccine, dubbed Mosaico, was developed by Janssen, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary.
The study’s Data and Safety Monitoring Board, or a group of independent experts that was monitoring the research, made the determination.
The study is being discontinued because of the determination, Johnson & Johnson said.
“We are disappointed with this outcome and stand in solidarity with the people and communities vulnerable to and affected by HIV,” Dr. Penny Heaton, an executive at Janssen, said in a statement.
“We remain steadfast in our commitment to advancing innovation in HIV, and we hope the data from Mosaico will provide insights for future efforts to develop a safe and effective vaccine,” Heaton added.
The study was launched in 2019 with funding from the U.S. government. It was designed to identify whether Janssen’s vaccine could prevent HIV infection in men.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health, which provided funding for the study, said that the results would be further analyzed.
“In its scheduled data review, the [monitoring board] determined there were no safety issues with the experimental vaccine regimen. However, the number of HIV infections [was] equivalent between the vaccine and placebo arms of the study,” the agency said in a statement.
The study involved 3,900 people aged 18 to 60 in Europe and the Americas.
When launched, Dr. Susan Buchbinder, a University of California, San Francisco professor who helped lead the trial, said it was “an important step toward developing a safe and effective HIV vaccine for people worldwide.”
Buchbinder said this week that the results were disappointing.
“Although HIV continues to prove uniquely challenging for [the] development of a vaccine, the HIV research community remains fully committed to doing just that, and each study brings us a step closer to this realization,” she added.
HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, attacks a person’s immune system and can lead to AIDS, or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, if not treated. The illness is primarily contracted by men who have sex with other men. There is no known cure but treatment, in the form of pills and shots, can prevent progression to AIDS.
As of 2019, approximately 1.2 million people aged 13 and older had HIV in the United States, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. Thousands of people die each year with the disease. According to the World Health Organization, of an estimated 84 million people worldwide who were infected with HIV as of 2021, 47 percent have died from the illness.
After phase 2 testing in women, a different Janssen vaccine trial ended in 2021 after a monitoring board found it did not provide adequate protection against infection.
The results showed that 63 people who received a placebo were infected and 51 who received the shot were infected. The efficacy was just 25.2 percent.
U.S. regulators generally consider 50 percent to be the bar for an effective vaccine, though they have allowed that standard to be bypassed by COVID-19 vaccines.
Vaccine Technology
The adenovirus-based vaccines were built on so-called mosaic immunogens, or multiple HIV subtypes. Investigators hoped they would induce immune responses that resulted in protection against infection. Trial participants who received the Janssen vaccine also received a bivalent shot that contained aluminum phosphate.
Preclinical studies had shown the Janssen vaccines protected monkeys against infection with an HIV-like virus, which led to human trials.
Results from an earlier trial testing a combination of vaccines from Sanofi Pasteur and the Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases found 31 percent efficacy. Vaccines aimed at improving efficacy have not done so, including the Johnson & Johnson shots. A trial testing a Sanofi Pasteur vaccine with a vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline showed the vaccines did not prevent infection, the companies announced in 2020.
Multiple other HIV vaccines based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology are still being evaluated in trials. A U.S.-government-backed trial for three such vaccines was launched in early 2022, with results expected later this year.
Several COVID-19 vaccines are built with mRNA but have proved increasingly ineffective against infection, the purpose for which they’re authorized or approved. Real-world data suggest the vaccines help against severe illness, but that protection has also waned after the emergence of Omicron and its subvariants in late 2021.
“Finding an HIV vaccine has proven to be a daunting scientific challenge,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until recently, said in a statement when the mRNA HIV vaccine trial was started. “With the success of safe and highly effective COVID-19 vaccines, we have an exciting opportunity to learn whether mRNA technology can achieve similar results against HIV infection.”
President Donald Trump on Friday urged Republicans in Congress not to cut Social Security or Medicare as some GOP lawmakers have signaled they would use the looming debt ceiling battle as leverage to push for more spending cuts.
“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security,” Trump said in a campaign-style video posted on Truth Social. Instead, Trump said that they should focus on cuts to funding to “corrupt foreign countries,” “climate extremism,” “left-wing gender programs from our military,” and “waste” and “abuse” in the government.
Trump said that while Republicans should cut the Biden administration’s spending agenda, they should not penalize seniors and retirees who rely on Social Security payments and Medicare. The former president has made similar statements on the issue, although some Republicans ahead of the midterms suggested cutting funding for both programs.
“The pain should be borne by Washington bureaucrats, not by hard-working American families and American seniors,” Trump said in a video, which appeared to be a warning to fellow party members. “The seniors are being absolutely destroyed in the last two years.”
Amid the debt ceiling battle, the former president said: “Cut waste, fraud and abuse everywhere that we can find it and there is plenty there’s plenty of it. But do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security, don’t destroy it.”
With Trump’s statement, he’s putting more pressure on some GOP lawmakers who have openly discussed using the debt ceiling to issue spending cuts, including Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.), who in January said the debt limit may “present an opportunity” to do so. Neither Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) nor House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) have signaled they would back such a move.
Trump’s recent comments on the two social programs are in line with the White House’s messaging. President Joe Biden and other administration officials have warned Republicans not to try and cut those programs and would veto any such efforts amid the debt ceiling fight.
Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) last week told Fox News that in reference to Social Security and Medicare, “if we really want to talk about the debt and spending, it’s the entitlements program.” On Twitter, White House chief of staff Ron Klain used his statement to criticize Republicans.
When Trump took office after the 2016 election, he battled with then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who said he had wanted to cut Medicare and Social Security under the Trump administration. “He and I fought about Medicare and entitlement reform all the time,” Ryan, now a Fox News executive, said of Trump last year. “It became clear to me there was no way he wanted to embrace that.”
Trump’s statement on Friday is among several videos that the former president has released online in recent days, coming two months after he announced his third presidential bid. Next week, Trump is scheduled to be at an event in South Carolina to make announcements regarding his campaign staffers.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen delivers remarks during a press conference at the Treasury Department in Washington, on July 28, 2022. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Debt Ceiling
On Thursday, meanwhile, the United States reached the debt ceiling, according to the Treasury Department. Last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned her agency would have to take “extraordinary measures” and suggested the U.S. could face a default in June.
Corporate leaders and at least one credit ratings agency warned a long standoff could rattle markets and unsettle an already shaky global economy. Yellen warned that the June date was subject to “considerable uncertainty” due to the challenge of forecasting payments and government revenues months into the future.
“I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States,” Yellen told congressional leaders in a letter Thursday.
Republicans are trying to use their narrow House majority and the debt ceiling to force cuts to government programs, and argue that the Treasury could avoid default during a standoff by prioritizing debt payments. This idea has been explored in past standoffs, but financial experts have questioned its feasibility, but the White House is rejecting the idea out of hand.
“There will be no negotiations over the debt ceiling,” White House deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton reiterated Thursday aboard Air Force One. “Congress must address this without conditions as they did three times under Donald Trump,”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis plans to let a controversial law giving hospitals immunity related to COVID-19 expire in June, a high-ranking administration official with direct knowledge of the plan told The Epoch Times on the condition of anonymity.
A spokesperson for DeSantis declined to comment on the information.
Hearing that their governor won’t seek to extend the law thrilled some medical freedom activists in the state. Others expressed frustration that the law would stay in place for five more months. Now, some told The Epoch Times, they hope the Republican-led Legislature will stand down as well.
The law, they say, has led to countless unnecessary deaths by giving hospitals immunity from malpractice cases in their treatment of COVID-19.
“We’ve been working on [getting rid of] that for two years,” said Gainesville, Florida, attorney Jeff Childers.
‘Evils’ of Blanket Immunity
Childers used to focus strictly on business law. He quickly jumped into medical-freedom cases after the pandemic erupted.
Soon after lockdowns began, Childers helped business owners and parents of school children fight forced masking. He organized lawyers nationwide in a group to share information on how to win those and other COVID-related cases.
He helped government and hospital employees push back against vaccinate-or-terminate policies. He helped assist patient families seeking alternative COVID-19 treatments for hospitalized loved ones.
Of late, one of his main aims has been to reverse hospitality immunity laws.
Removing hospital immunity will save lives, Childers and others told The Epoch Times.
“The hospitals now have blanket immunity for following a preset protocol for every patient that’s dictated by federal officials, regardless of the patient’s individual circumstances, their co-morbidities, their personal medical situation, and especially their desires” for treatment, Childers said.
Yet, “the current hospital protocol has not changed in three years, despite our having learned an entire Encyclopedia Britannica-worth of information about this virus, which is weird,” he said.
Early in the pandemic, hospitals wouldn’t “admit you until your oxygen levels were life-threateningly low,” he said. “They would send people home” from the emergency department.
When patients worsened at home and returned to the hospital for care, “they immediately put you on Remdesivir and on the ventilator, and then you’re most likely to die. The mortality rates are off the charts for that treatment protocol.”
And, Childers added, because of laws giving hospitals immunity for following that federally recommended treatment, “you can go into the hospital with a broken toe, and if they test you, and you test positive [for COVID-19] in the ER, you’re going to be on the COVID floor.
“And they’re going to start you on steroids and Remdesivir, which leads—in 25 percent of the cases, according to the best studies that I’ve seen—to kidney failure. So then, you’re going to be in a medically induced coma and on a ventilator.”
An ampule of Gilead Sciences COVID-19 antiviral remdesivir is pictured at the University Hospital Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany, on April 8, 2020. (Ulrich Perrey/Pool via Reuters)
“And here’s the point,” Childers said. “Hospitals have no incentive to change that protocol.
“But it’s not entirely the hospitals’ fault, because the hospitals enjoy liability protection if they follow the prescribed protocol. They have risks if they vary from that protocol, not to mention massive financial incentives for adhering to it.”
So if Remdesivir and ventilator use are linked to a higher likelihood of death, why hasn’t the treatment protocol recommended by the federal government changed, he challenged.
“That’s the $64,000 question.”
His best guess: because of the money tied to lucrative vaccine and medication sales.
And if government officials acknowledged a good alternative treatment for COVID-19, the vaccines would no longer be able to be distributed under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), he said.
“It’s evil of the worst kind, in possibly its most fully-flowered form.”
Genesis of Hospital Immunity Laws
Childers has joined others in lobbying DeSantis vigorously to end hospital immunity in Florida.
With letters, calls, and visits to his office, they’ve begged the governor to dismantle the measures giving hospitals special protections.
By stripping the immunity, they’ve argued, it would force doctors and hospitals to listen more to patients’ wishes about COVID-19 treatment, rather than adhering strictly to protocols recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Laws giving hospitals immunity in the treatment of COVID-19 blasted through 29 state legislatures across the country at the urging of officials within the administration of former President Donald Trump.
Early in the pandemic, Trump officials argued that hospitals needed protection in treating the unknown novel virus, which was spreading rapidly, leaving a trail of funerals in its wake.
President Donald Trump greets the crowd before he leaves at the Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Summit on Dec. 8, 2020 in Washington. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
And despite a swelling contingent of activists calling for hospitals to try treatments that were not part of the CDC-recommended protocols, only a narrow approach of COVID-19 treatment was approved for immunity from liability.
Testimonies of successful alternative treatments were flooding professional medical blogs and social media. Related posts were routinely censored by big tech platforms.
Often, those success stories touted the effectiveness of a detailed regimen outlined by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. That treatment plan calls for specific doses of ivermectin, vitamins, and other medications approved for other uses by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Shawn McBride, an attorney with the American Freedom Information Institute in Maitland, Florida, drafted a letter in early 2022 signed by organizations representing hundreds of thousands of Floridians. It was a plea asking DeSantis to veto the immunity extension bill sent to his desk by Florida lawmakers. Without an extension, the bill would have expired in March 2022.
Activists said they were bewildered when DeSantis signed the bill extending hospital immunity until at least June 2023. But they also told The Epoch Times they were willing to trust his leadership.
That same day, DeSantis expanded freedoms in three areas related to COVID-19.
He announced a new policy shielding doctors in Florida who offer medical treatments they feel are best for their patients, even if they deviate from CDC and NIH guidelines.
The new guidelines also eliminated forced masking of employees in the state; reduced COVID-19 quarantines in schools, child-care centers, and workplaces; and added treatment guidelines “empowering health care practitioners to follow science” and not the “status quo,” his office said.
Nick Caturano speaks at an Oct. 13, 2022 press conference he organized in Kissimmee, Fla., to allow families tell how they believe hospital treatments for COVID-19 were to blame for the deaths of their loved ones’ deaths. (Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times)
But then medical freedom activists grew increasingly impatient about the hospital immunity laws.
Those legal measures must be reversed, activist Nick Caturano told The Epoch Times in November 2022. Only then will doctors feel free to do what they think is best for patients.
“We will continue to appeal to Gov. DeSantis to repeal hospital immunity and to get straightforward laws that protect our rights to choose our medical treatments, [to have] informed consent, and to abolish any and all avenues, loopholes, and powers of discrimination based on health status and medical choices,” Caturano said.
Sending Hope
Caturano sighed heavily two months later when told of DeSantis’s plans to halt hospital immunity in the state.
“It can’t come soon enough,” Caturano said wearily. “People shouldn’t still be dying of COVID.”
He’s been organizing families whose loved ones died in hospitals to speak about their COVID experiences. All families have blamed hospitals for the tragic outcomes.
Family members upset about hospital treatment for COVID-19 displayed these posters at a press conference on Oct. 13, 2022 in Kissimmee, Fla. (Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times)
Caturano blames hospitals, too, for their adherence to treatments recommended for COVID-19 by the federal government.
“If DeSantis does this, he’ll send a message to the rest of the country,” Caturano said. “That’s the beautiful thing. It will send hope. ”
Family members who believe their loved ones died unnecessarily from COVID-19 in hospitals “just want to see the killing stopped,” he said.
He compared their hopelessness to how family members must have felt watching loved ones loaded onto trains headed for the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-controlled Germany.
“We just want to see the trains stopped, the protections to go away,” he said. “That will help the healing begin. That’s what these families need. I just hope that it’s sooner than later.”
He prays that other governors will follow with similar actions.
“DeSantis … he’s brave,” Caturano said.
Cynthia Schrock speaks about the death of her husband, who was treated in a hospital for COVID-19, at a press conference spotlighting the families of COVID-19 victims in Kissimmee, Fla. on Oct. 13, 2022. (Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times)
Cynthia Schrock spoke at a press conference that Caturano organized in October 2022 in Kissimmee, Florida. From the podium, she told of how her husband, a 56-year-old real estate broker, died after seeking treatment at a Florida hospital.
For three weeks, Eric Schrock received treatment that strictly followed the CDC-approved protocols.
A year after his death, his widow asked an independent doctor to review the hospital records. His revelation broke her heart afresh.
Her husband had died, not of COVID-19—for which he’d tested positive—but of a heart attack left untreated for three weeks, records showed.
She sucked in her breath in a ragged gasp when she heard that DeSantis hopes to allow hospital immunity to die in the state.
“I’ve been on my knees before the Lord asking Him to make that [law] go away,” she told The Epoch Times through a rush of tears. “Accountability would happen if those laws were removed. It would bring justice.
Eric and Cynthia Schrock, before he fell ill and was treated in a hospital for COVID-19, despite records that she says show he was suffering from an untreated heart attack. (Courtesy of Cynthia Schrock)
“Just today, I prayed, and I said, ‘Lord…”
Her voice trailed off, and she began to weep again. She knows she can’t sue the hospital that she believes killed her husband. But people have told her that Eric would be proud that she’s still fighting to change how hospitals treat COVID-19.
And now, that just might happen.
“I’m just amazed,” she said, stifling a sob. “I do believe he’d be proud.”
Amid escalating calls for his resignation and piling allegations of lies and misconduct, Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) told The Epoch Times that he has no intention of doing so and instead is focused on serving his constituents.
Earlier this week, despite a mounting pressure campaign from critics on both sides of the aisle, Santos, 34, was assigned to two committees, the House Committee on Small Business, and the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
The congressman, who is facing investigations reportedly by federal authorities over potential campaign finance violations, and by local prosecutors over misrepresentations during the campaign, said that rather than resigning, he would refer the matter back to voters in two years when he would sit for reelection.
“I was hired by the voters and I will be fired by the voters, not by the Democrat Party or the Republican Party or the media,” Santos said.
“I serve the 142,000 voters who voted for me and the other 125,000 or so voters who didn’t vote for me. So my goal within the next two years is to service them to the best extent of my capacity,” he added.
Santos is accused of lying about a growing list of topics, including his education, work history, his Jewish heritage, that he’s the descendent of Holocaust survivors, and that his mother survived the 9/11 attack.
Santos has admitted to lying about attending college, while also conceding to embellishing his resume in claiming that he worked for Wall Street firms when he actually worked with other companies that did business with them.
“I’m human, and I made a bad decision. Lying is never excusable,” he told The Epoch Times.
“On the higher education stuff, I did not graduate from an institution of higher education,” he added. “I am sorry for misleading folks into believing that.”
A group of GOP officials and lawmakers, many from New York, have called for Santos’s resignation.
The congressman said some who publicly called for his resignation gave him the “heads up that they were doing it for political reasons.”
“I won’t name names, but they then checked up on me afterwards and said, ‘Look, I understand this is politics,’” he said.
“I have had an enormous amount of support from people who say, “Hey, I’ve been through this locally. I know it’s a little different when it’s national. But you’ll get through this.”
U.S. Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) (L) talks to Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y) in the House Chamber during the third day of elections for Speaker of the House at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 05, 2023 in Washington. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Committee Assignments
Santos said he was thankful to have the opportunity to work on the Small Business, and Space, Science and Technology committees.
Previously, Santos told The Epoch Times that he was hoping for a committee assignment to financial services, but withdrew from consideration for that panel in the wake of the controversy.
“Obviously, I wanted financial services, but not with all the controversy. That’s a very big committee with big assignments and it was smart for me to withdraw consideration from there,” so as not to distract from the work of the committee, the congressman said.
On Science, Space, and Technology, Santos said the United States is particularly vulnerable to technology from China that is deployed here.
“China is definitely going to be a big talking point there. We need to make sure that we can understand the vulnerabilities we have with China, Russia, and all the cybersecurity threats that they pose to the United States,” he said.
In small business, Santos said he would like to see the agency “supporting businesses to give them the foundations to build strong foundations. So that in times of crisis, they can withstand a crisis.”
Specifically, he’d like to see more by the SBA to create accessibility for growth capital loans offered by the agency.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the SBA for comment.
Allegations
In addition to alleged false claims during the campaign trail, reports have emerged of potential campaign finance violations. Santos is accused of improper fundraising and spending activities, both of which have been the subject of Federal Electoral Commission complaints.
When asked about the alleged violations, Santos expressed puzzlement, saying he hired a compliance firm to run his campaign spending for both election cycles in 2022 and 2020, during his unsuccessful Congress bid.
“To the best of my knowledge, they’ve always done a great job. We’ve never received any violations. And it wasn’t until the media hysteria started that now they’re claiming that I’ve misappropriated campaign funds,” he said.
“So I’m just trying to understand where’s this all coming from because the same company I hired represents many high-profile Republicans and I seem to be the only one that’s getting heat.”
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said on Sunday that Santos will be removed from Congress if he broke campaign finance rules.
“He’s a bad guy,” Comer told CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “It’s not up to me or any other member of Congress to determine whether he can be kicked out for lying. Now, if he broke campaign finance laws, then he will be removed from Congress.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has said he will leave the Ethics Committee and voters to decide on the issue of Santos’s fate.
In response to revelations that prosecutors in Brazil have revived a 2008 fraud case into Santos regarding a stolen checkbook, the congressman said that he has not been in contact with authorities there.
“I’ve retained a lawyer there to go look at this and see what’s going on,” he said. “They have not been able to deliver a confession letter, they have not been able to deliver a mug shot, fingerprints, or anything that proves these allegations against me.”
“Part of the proof I am not a wanted criminal there is between the years of 2008 and 2015, I was issued two brand new Brazilian passports by the Federal Police there, which is the equivalent of Homeland Security/FBI over here in the United States,” he added.
“I had about eight entries into the country within that timeframe. Never once was I stopped, detained or asked questions about any crimes.”
The Republican congressman alleged that the media and the Democrats are applying a double standard to him that didn’t apply in the cases of Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who made false claims about his Vietnam War record, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who lied about her Native American heritage.
“I also believe that the media is trying to command the narrative and trying to create some kind of opportunity for a special election, knowing that in a special election, this seat would go to Democrats. This is all it’s about. This has nothing to do with me,” Santos added.
Despite the international community’s pledge to depend on renewable energy to achieve its net-zero emissions goal by 2050, the world will need oil and gas for the next 50 years, according to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.
While speaking in an interview with CNBC in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 19, Dimon warned that if the global economy abandoned fossil fuels altogether, there would be a “calamity” and “global depression.”
“We need oil and gas. We need cheaper oil for 50 years. It’s 100 million barrels a day that are used by the world to heat, fuel, feed people,” he said.
In response to host Joe Kernen, who noted that “true climate zealots want to end it now,” Dimon replied, “You then have a calamity, a global depression.”
This isn’t the first time that Dimon has championed the need for oil and gas and lamented about public policymakers trying to shift away from fossil fuels.
In October 2022, he told CNBC that the U.S. government is “getting energy completely wrong.” Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, President Vladimir Putin would inevitably turn off the gas and send crude oil prices higher, Dimon said.
A crude oil pump jack in the Permian Basin in Loving County, Texas, on Nov. 22, 2019. (Angus Mordant/Reuters)
As energy prices soared in 2022, many poorer nations turned to dirtier fuel sources, including coal-fired power plants.
“We have a longer-term problem now, which is the world is not producing enough oil and gas to reduce coal, make the transition, create security for people. So I would put it in the critical category, and this should be treated almost as a matter of war at this point,” he said.
During an appearance before the House of Representatives in September 2022, Dimon was asked if his bank maintains “a policy against funding new oil and gas products.”
“Absolutely not, and that would be the road to hell for America,” he said.
“We aren’t getting this one right,” Dimon said. “You’ve all seen it because of the high price of oil and gas, particularly for the rest of the world. So you’ve seen everyone going back to coal, not just poor nations like India and China, Indonesia, and Vietnam, but also wealthy nations like Germany, the Netherlands, and France.
“We’ve all learned that energy supply globally is not secure. It’s still precarious.”
Estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA) show that global coal consumption rose by 1.2 percent in 2022, surpassing 8 billion tons in a single year for the first time and topping a previous record made in 2013.
A report from the China Electricity Council suggests that the world’s second-largest economy will add 70 gigawatts of coal-fired power output this year, up 75 percent from a year ago. In 2022, China produced an all-time high of 4.5 billion tons of coal, up 9 percent from the previous year.
Is Dimon Right?
Although many countries have pledged to wean themselves off of crude oil and natural gas in the coming decades, a growing number of reports from prominent organizations concede that oil will remain a significant form of energy through 2050 worldwide.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) published its Annual Energy Outlook in March 2022 (pdf) and predicted that global energy demand would increase by 47 percent. But while the growth in renewables will increase by 2050, oil will still be the top source, as well as natural gas and coal.
“We do see a lot of impact from the growth in renewables and such in reducing carbon intensity,” Chris Namovicz, EIA’s Electricity, Coal, and Renewables Modeling Team lead, said in the outlook. “That being said, demand is still growing, and there are still portions of demand that are most economically satisfied through burning of fossil fuels.”
Gasoline will also remain the primary transportation fuel.
In October 2022, the IEA projected that oil and gas would maintain their energy dominance, even in the group’s net-zero carbon scenario. Last year, oil and gas supplied more than half of the world’s energy needs. By 2050, they’ll continue to provide 47 percent of global energy consumption.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) recently forecasted that crude oil, natural gas, and coal will remain critical global energy sources by 2045.
“Long-term non-OECD demand is expected to increase by 24 mb/d [million barrels per day], driven by an expanding middle class, high population growth, and stronger economic growth potential,” OPEC stated in its report. “As a result, global oil demand is projected to increase by 12.9 mb/d, rising to 109.8 mb/d in 2045.”
According to a McKinsey report, even in an “accelerated energy-transition scenario,” the oil and gas sector will need new production levels of 23 million barrels per day to satisfy worldwide demand after 2030.
‘Their joint statement is an outright repudiation of the progressivist higher education agenda,’ Florida Commissioner of Education says.
In a show of support for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the leaders of the Florida College System (FCS) vowed not to support or fund critical race theory (CRT)—unless it is taught objectively along with other concepts—and to eliminate “woke positions and ideologies.”
During comments at the Jan. 18 state Board of Education meeting, Florida State College of Jacksonville President John Avendano, representing Florida’s 28 colleges in the state’s college system, thanked DeSantis for “his continued support of education at all levels of education in the great state of Florida.”
Dr. John Avendano, president of Florida State College of Jacksonville, reads a prepared statement on behalf of all 28 Florida College System presidents at the Jan. 18, 2023, meeting of the Florida Board of Education. (Screenshot/The Florida Channel)
He also read a statement (pdf) on behalf of his 27 colleagues.
“Historically, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives serve to increase diversity of thought as well as the enrollment and the success of the underrepresented populations,” Avendano read from the prepared statement.
However, he acknowledged the Board’s awareness that those same initiatives have come to “mean and accomplish the very opposite and seek to push ideology such as critical race theory and its related tenants.”
Stop W.O.K.E. Act
On April 22, 2022, DeSantis signed HB 7 into law. The legislation (pdf)—otherwise known as the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act”—prohibits CRT from being included in school curriculum and workplace training and allows private individuals to sue if the ban is violated.
As previously reported by The Epoch Times, HB 7 was the Florida Legislature’s follow-through of a proposal DeSantis made on Dec. 15, 2021. In January 2022, the law’s restrictions, placed on colleges and universities, were challenged. Since then, the law has faced many legal challenges, which are still ongoing.
Despite those legal challenges, the statement issued by the state’s 28 college presidents and read before the Florida Board of Education confirmed their unanimous support for the governor’s agenda.
“To be clear in this environment, the FCS presidents, by and through the FCS Council of Presidents, will ensure that all initiatives, instruction, and activities do not promote any ideology that suppresses intellectual and academic freedom, freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, and the pursuit of truth in teaching and learning,” Avendano read further. “As such, our institutions will not fund or support any institutional practice or policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality or the idea that the systems of oppression should be the primary lens through which teaching and learning are analyzed and/or improved upon.”
He further promised that “if critical race theory or related concepts are taught as part of an appropriate postsecondary subject’s curriculum,” Florida’s 28 higher learning “institutions will only deliver instruction that includes critical race theory as one of several theories and in an objective manner.”
The FCS presidents affirmed the college system’s commitment to “developing campus environments” where students and faculty can “pursue their academic interests without fear of reprisal or being canceled,” to maintain “nondiscrimination in hiring, onboarding and professional development, merit, reason, fairness, civil debate,” and to have “fully evaluated and removed any institutional instruction, training, and policies opposed to the forms of discrimination” by Feb. 1, 2023.
‘Keep Pressing’
Following Avendano’s reading of the joint FCS statement, Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz Jr., expressed pleasure in knowing they support the governor’s vision of higher education, “one free from indoctrination.”
“Their joint statement is an outright repudiation of the progressivist higher education agenda and commits to removing all woke positions and ideologies,” Diaz said.
Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz Jr. provides comments during the Jan. 18, 2023, meeting of the Florida Board of Education. (Screenshot/The Florida Channel)
“Today’s bold statement by the Florida College System presidents shows their commitment to providing students with higher education opportunities that are free from indoctrination and woke ideology,” Diaz said in an additional statement regarding the days events, posted on the Florida Department of Education website. “I would like to commend our presidents for ensuring our state colleges are environments where all students can embrace educational freedom and acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for a thriving career.”
On Dec. 28, Diaz and Chancellor Ray Rodrigues were informed (pdf) by Chris Spencer, DeSantis’ director for the office of policy and budget, that every institution in the Florida College System had to provide an accounting of “every expenditure of state resources on programs and initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory.”
DeSantis appointed Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute thinktank and a prominent voice against CRT, to the New College of Florida’s board of trustees.
Rufo says the tide is turning.
“All of the Florida public university presidents have released this letter pledging to reign in their D.E.I. departments and ensure that they are not promoting left-wing racialist ideology and political activism,” Rufo said in a Jan. 18 social media post. “The momentum is starting to shift. Keep pressing.”
On Friday, January 13, the ATF announced a new rule stating that stabilizing braces on what they had previously classified as “pistols” are now to be considered “short-barreled rifles.” Also, they must be registered as such by all manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and owners within 120 days or be charged with a felony. The apparent purpose of such a ruling is to punish the 40 million owners of such guns because they pose an electoral, political, and cultural threat to the ruling regime. And lest anyone be confused, the “ruling regime” does not mean the nominal head installed in the White House; it means the Permanent Government, of which the Administrative State is a major part, which includes the ATF.
That the Administrative State and its organs, such as the ATF, even exist is an affront to the heritage of the U.S. Constitution and Anglo-Saxon common law tradition. The Constitution you thought we had no longer exists. Our form of government originates in Anglo-Saxon witans, which represented the nation as a whole and developed and enforced the common law as it was handed down over the generations. Having armies of parasitic bureaucrats responsible to no one decreeing their laws is far more akin to empires that lorded over innumerable slaves. It is not something a free people tolerate. But such is the American Total State. All of life is politicized and lorded over by unelected vermin.
And the point of the Administrative State in our decaying global empire is to enforce anarcho-tyranny. Look at the ATF, for example. Right now, America is facing the greatest epidemic of violent gun crime in decades (perhaps ever, as crime statistics are often underreported for propagandistic reasons). After the “mostly peaceful” anti-white race-hate riots of 2020, American police pulled back from actively policing high-crime urban neighborhoods. This was a matter of policy giving in to the rioters’ demands and out of officer self-preservation (what officer wants to be the next Derek Chauvin, sent to prison for decades for aggressively restraining the wrong overdosing felon at the wrong time?). As a result of the police withdrawal in these urban areas, black gun deaths and traffic deaths have significantly increased, as well as violent crime overall. Things have gotten so bad that the violent crime has begun to spill out of the major cities and even into sleepy farm towns, such as Janesville, MN, population of 2453 (and ten minutes from where I sit writing this).
You would think the agency dealing with illegal weapons would be all hands on deck mitigating the urban gun crime epidemic. And also the ubiquitous andvery illegal Glock switches, regularly used in the commission of inner-city gang violence. But if you thought that, you would be dead wrong. The ATF is far more concerned with rural, white men owning AR pistols (for defense against criminals invading their home, no less!) than they are about dead black children shot in the head during drive-by shootings.
This is only hypocrisy if you don’t understand what is going on. The Regime and its Administrative State understand the fundamental rule of politics—politics is about rewarding friends and harming enemies. The ATF using its vast resources to investigate and prosecute the suppliers of illegal weapons used in urban crime, would reward its enemies and harm its friends. Allowing urban crime to metastasize harms the enemies of the Regime, and the criminals themselves are very much the Regime’s friends—the BLM riots have shown us just how useful and loyal they are to the Regime. It is no coincidence that every arsonist looter Kyle Rittenhouse justifiably shot was a criminal. The foot soldiers of Leftism, from 1789 to 1917 to today, are always criminals, the “useful idiots.” Meanwhile, guys in F-250s flying MAGA flags that have a braced AR pistol? The Regime would love any excuse to throw guys like that in prison.
The kind of extremely dangerous criminals the ATF is after.
Speaking of Rittenhouse, that needs to be your example of how the Globalist Total State works. Good, decent people will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, while criminals in service of the Regime will always be let off the hook. Instead of whining like Ben Shapiro or other Con, Inc. grift artists, “wow, look at the hypocrisy, imagine if the situation were reversed,” you need to understand that the hypocrisy is the point. Besides, no “third party” will see their hypocrisy and put things right. No referee will see how unfair things are and take apart the regime. The political power to do that is possessed almost entirely by our enemies.
But it is not as though there is no hope. I am pointing out the realities of our situation not to discourage you but to direct you to right action. In 2020, (at least) 80 million people voted for an imperfect man who attempted to represent many of our interests. Even with the rapid replacement of those 80 million by millions of illegals in the last two years, that is a massive number of people, and their existence is the single, most outstanding liability to the regime (hence the aggressive plan for demographic replacement). The problem with the 80 million is that despite their great numbers and not insignificant collective wealth, they are wholly disorganized, like sheep without a shepherd. The political party that ostensibly represents them, the GOP, is horribly corrupt and ineffective. Their churches—the organization of local political organizing for the first 300 years of American history—are emasculated and led by men terrified of offending anyone (other than white, straight, Christian men). They usually are isolated with very few friends in real life. All of this is by design. The Regime has the 80 million right where it wants them. The question is, what if it didn’t?
What if our churches were led by men who feared God alone who instead of giving weekly inoffensive TED talks between soft rock concerts were able to rally together the men of his local community who understand that we are dominated by people who hate us? What if our pastors preached the authority of King Jesus over all of life, including the Regime and its treacherous Administrative State? What if in those local communities, all those enemies of the Regime gathered together? What if they began to live and work together as a city-within-their-city, a small-town-within-their-small-town? What if all these men and families began to develop strong bonds around their faith in Christ and devotion to one another? What would happen if communities like this were built up in every town and suburban neighborhood in the country, and all of them were at least loosely connected together? What would happen if each of them began to take leadership in their local GOP, their city council, their county commissioners board, their sheriff’s office, their county prosecutor’s office, etc.?
In 2008, we all laughed when this skinny black dude from Chicago’s only job he ever had was “community organizer.” It sounded like a made-up, make-work job for a deadbeat Ivy League grad. And while Obama himself may well have been a deadbeat, the role he held was anything but worthless. The Regime is as well organized as it is because it has legions of such people. There is no end to the Regime funding of NGOs to drive their various causes to destroy all that is true, good, and beautiful and to make life miserable for decent, productive people. Meanwhile, those proper, hardworking, ordinary people are isolated and alone—sheep ready to be devoured by obese, purple-haired, septum-pierced wolves.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The Greek word that Jesus used that we translate as “church” in our Bibles is ekklesia. In Ancient Greece, this was the assembly of citizens who ruled the Greek city-states. What is the church in the New Testament? It is a parallel society within the existing society. It is the heavenly city within the earthly city. It is the city obeying God’s will on earth as it obeyed in heaven. Far from mocking the function of “community organizing,” Christ has given us the responsibility to organize heavenly communities here on earth. When Christians begin to realize this and the tens of millions of us are no longer isolated and alone, we will no longer be sitting and waiting to be consumed by the Regime and its minions like the ATF. Instead, we will be a well-organized, nation-within-the-nation, and the worst fears of the godless Regime will be realized. So, find good churches. Plant them if they do not exist near you. Find like-minded Christian men. Build communities in real life. Build a new Christian nation. Build a Parallel Christian Society so that your children will no longer be under the thumb of tyrants.
Andrew Isker is the pastor of 4th Street Evangelical Church in Waseca, MN. He is a graduate of Minnesota State University and Greyfriar’s Hall Ministerial Training School, and he has served churches in Missouri, West Virginia, and Minnesota. He is the author (with Andrew Torba) of Christian Nationalism, and the author of the forthcoming book, The Boniface Option. Andrew, his wife Kara, and their five children reside in his hometown of Waseca, MN. He can be found on Gab @BonifaceOption.
First Liberty and the law firm Anderson & Reynolds recently sent a letter urging officials in Westmoreland, Tennessee to withdraw a cease-and-desist letter preventing a religious homeless and drug rehabilitation ministry from operating.
The letter informs the city that it is violating state and federal law by keeping the ministry from fulfilling its mission to provide housing.
Living Water Full Gospel Church operates The Father’s House Sober Living, which provides housing and support for men seeking to escape drug addiction. More than two decades ago, the city approved the building for the ministry to operate as a “new addition” for “institutional” use. The city’s zoning ordinances specifically permit residential living in the attached structure owned by the church.
Last year, church leaders asked whether they needed additional permits to provide housing in their already permitted facility and were told there were no additional requirements or conditions that had to be met.
However, in August, the city sent the church a cease-and-desist letter based on an alleged violation of the city’s building code. The city claims the church must spend $85,000 to install a new sprinkler system and firewalls in its building, even though it never raised these issues in previous discussions. Our legal team argues the city is singling out the church.
Ryan Gardner, Counsel for First Liberty Institute, explains:
“Simply put, The Father’s House is already complying with the city’s zoning ordinances. There is simply no basis in the zoning ordinances—nor in any applicable building code—which justifies the city’s ‘Cease and Desist’ letter. The city is violating both state and federal law by blocking The Father’s House from fulfilling its religious mission.”
Not only are the city’s actions illegal, but they also defy common sense. Houses of worship and religious organizations like The Father’s House do tremendous work to care for vulnerable communities. Providing housing and assistance to help men become better and more productive citizens should be encouraged, rather than prevented.
More efficient and effective than government agencies alone, faith-based organizations offer more than temporary assistance. They also seek to address the root spiritual needs of those they serve. Whether it’s providing shelter or critical services such as counseling, rehabilitation, job placement, food, clothing or other essential goods, faith-based ministries fill the gap where it’s most needed. Numerous studies have demonstrated the positive contributions of faith-based organizations to the health and welfare of millions of Americans. Bottom line, they make our country a better place and greatly improve the lives of people.
The Father’s House welcomes the opportunity to resolve this issue. Singling out and harassing religious ministries only hurts the most vulnerable among us. When it comes to helping people in need, we should encourage the cooperation between church and state. And that starts by government following the law and treating houses of worship fairly. After all, when religious organizations are free to live out their faith and serve their neighbors, all Americans win.
The Biden administration hasn’t had a few good weeks, lately. What are we saying? It’s never had a few good weeks. This White House has been one of the worst we’ve ever seen. Biden has stumbled from one failure after another. And, in a matter of days or weeks, the old man is preparing to announce his re-election bid.
Really? You’d think Biden would just want to get out of this term alive. Yet, he still claims he has what it takes to be re-elected as president. Not so fast, Joe. Because one of the worst decisions he made–at the very start of his administration–is coming back to haunt him, big time.
From Fox News:
Power the Future, a group that represents the interests of U.S. energy workers, published a video blasting the Biden administration for its decision two years ago to nix the Keystone XL pipeline…
The video… noted the pipeline cancellation… led to thousands of job losses. It also highlighted comments Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry made following the cancellation arguing that fossil fuel jobs would be replaced with clean energy jobs…
Power the Future, though, included in its video various media reports showing declining and lost green energy jobs in the solar and wind industries.
When Biden shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, it led to the destruction of thousands of jobs. Not just ones to build the pipeline, but the many jobs that would have been created, thanks to the arrival of safe, affordable oil.
At the time, John Kerry–Biden’s “green” lap dog–claimed that it was a good thing that Joe was destroying the fossil fuel industry. Because it was so harmful to the folks who depended on it for work! And Kerry crassly said that people who earned degrees and spent decades working in the industry could just jump into the “green” market and get a job.
All lies. The video revealed that there has been declining opportunity for green jobs for years, as solar and wind have failed to provide enough energy to power America. On top of that, the video featured energy workers who learned the hard way that you can’t get a “green” job, if you’ve been trained to drill for oil or gas.
Biden sold us a pack of lies. Shutting down the fossil fuel industry wasn’t about “saving the earth.” It was about destroying an American industry to please radical environmentalists and our rivals overseas. Biden knew it. Kerry knew it. And all those energy workers now without jobs know it.
Key Takeaways:
A new video exposes the damage Biden caused when he shut down the Keystone XL pipeline.
Thousands of jobs were lost as Biden lied about workers getting “green” jobs.
The green industry is losing jobs and fossil fuel workers are unable to switch careers.
Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz offered his take on the discovery of unclassified documents by President Joe Biden’s lawyers in an office at the Penn-Biden Center he had used after leaving the White House in 2017, in the garage of his Wilmington, Delaware, residence, and inside the home.
He told Fox News Digital on Wednesday, “There’s an element to this that feels like the Democrats are taking out Joe Biden.”
“I don’t know that that’s the case, but I don’t know that it’s not,” Gaetz said. “But just as Joe Biden is hardening the cement around his decision to run for president again, they start looking for what classified documents might have been tucked away eight years ago.”
We learned last week that the first batch had been found on Nov. 2 and the second batch on Dec. 20, according to a timeline published by the Associated Press. And at least one additional classified document turned up inside the residence last week.
Before we knew it, Attorney General Merrick Garland had appointed a special counsel to take over the investigation from U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch Jr.
Gaetz continued, “I mean, there’s an element of this where it’s Joe Biden’s lawyer who turns this information over, it’s Joe Biden’s own Justice Department that’s appointed a special counsel to investigate him — maybe the Democrats have realized that Joe Biden is not useful to them anymore, and they just as soon toss him out and get a younger crop of candidates engaged in the next presidential race.”
He pointed to reports that unnamed Chinese nationals had made significant donations to the University of Pennsylvania, the sponsor of the Penn Biden Center, and worried about a potential connection. In April 2022, The New York Post reported that Chinese donations to the university totaled $54 million.
“We have a lot to learn about the content and substance of those documents, and if they relate to China, and if they were at that Biden Center at UPenn funded by China,” Gaetz said. “That’s going to be a far more grave concern.”
“What if the documents relate to our economy?” he asked. “What if Joe Biden was hustling information to his CCP funders at the Biden Center for UPenn and that gave China economic advantage over Americans? That would create a nexus between those documents and our economic woes at the hands of rising China. I don’t know because I don’t know what the documents pertain to, but documents in and of themselves don’t seem to have an obvious connection to the quality of life of my constituents, in the absence of understanding their content and context.”
He noted that his constituents aren’t overly concerned about this brewing scandal yet, because it doesn’t really affect them. He told Fox, “I haven’t been frothing at the mouth over the mere existence of some documents in a garage in Delaware. You know, I believe Americans are more worried about the weaponization of government against them than they are, you know, what papers Joe Biden stuffed in [the] glove box of his Corvette.”
“If the documents pertain to China and were at a repository funded by China, one could reasonably assess that the scandal runs deeper and would have a real damaging effect on our country,” he said. “If they are mementos or, you know, documents that have far outlived any sort of functional relevance quite some time ago, then I think that’s different.”
I guess my view would change if the Biden docs related to China, as the CCP was functionally underwriting the Biden Center. https://t.co/PfqAO4NMi5
First, it was odd that Biden’s top lawyers were personally searching his old office. And second, it was surprising that they would immediately alert the National Archives and Records Administration. After all, knowing the media firestorm that would surely ensue, why wouldn’t his personal attorneys, who ostensibly had their client’s best interests in mind, quietly settle the matter on their own?
I’m not saying it would have been right to bypass NARA officials, but since when have the Democrats worried about playing by the rules?
It all feels very contrived. As far as Biden’s alleged transgressions go, the discovery of a handful of misplaced documents seems the least of them. And if that’s true, there must be a reason. It could very well be that his party wants to prevent him from running for re-election.
In a December 2020 podcast, just two months prior to his death, Rush Limbaugh warned Biden the “regime” could one day turn on him. He told listeners that Biden would “serve at the pleasure of Barack Obama. If Obama gives the green light to Democrats to take Biden out, there will be ample evidence that Biden has lied about his knowledge, his family was selling his name and office with his permission. …”
Fox News contributor Dan Bongino, who worked as a secret service agent during the Obama administration, provided some interesting insight into this story. In the clip below, he questioned whether this was “a sabotage hit job by Democrats who want Joe Biden out of the race? Which is likely, right? Or was this an effort to cover up mistakes Joe Biden made that may be illegal, unlawful, and illicit?”
He asked his Fox colleagues, “You don’t find it a little bit suspicious that lawyers deeply connected to Barack Obama [a reference to Dana Remus in particular], who’s got a long ongoing feud with Biden? They do. Don’t let anyone, I worked in the White House. These two men really do not like each other. Obama always thought Biden was a buffoon and Biden was always jealous of Obama. That’s why he’s doing the whole, ‘I’m the new FDR’ thing now.”
“Something bigger is going on here”; Dan Bongino offers two bombshell theories about Bidens document scandal
As Joe Biden’s classified document scandal continues to develop, the president’s protectors are reportedly prepared to provide even more fuel for the fire.
The U.S. Secret Service could reveal the names of individuals who have visited Biden’s Delaware home, where two batches of classified documents were held by the former vice president, according to Fox News.
The White House has insisted that no formal record is kept of visitors to the home. However, Fox reported that the Secret Service does “collect information on guests with regular access to the home.”
If Congress requests that information, the Secret Service will give up the names of vetted guests who could have had access to the classified documents, a source told Fox.
According to Secret Service chief of communications Anthony Guglielmi, “the Secret Service does not maintain visitor logs at the private residences of protectees.”
“While the Secret Service does generate law enforcement and criminal justice information records for various individuals who may come into contact with Secret Service protected sites, we are not able to comment further as this speaks to the means and methods of our protective operations,” Guglielmi said.
When the White House claimed that no visitor log was kept, many, including National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, were skeptical.
“Don’t believe for a moment the Secret Service doesn’t know who visits Biden’s house,” McCarthy wrote in a piece for the New York Post.
“The Secret Service is responsible for keeping these private residences secure even when the president is not on site. If the FBI told the Secret Service that it was critical to get such visitor information, do you really think the Secret Service would respond, ‘Gee, sorry, we don’t keep logs for that’?”
It didn’t take long for McCarthy’s hunch to be vindicated.
With Fox now reporting that not only does the Secret Service keep some records of visitors, but is also able to share them with Congress, the Biden White House seems to have been contradicted.
When pressed by reporters on Tuesday about the document scandal, the president ignored their questions. The reporters were herded out of the room by White House staff, according to Fox.
The White House continues to feel the pressure after last week’s revelation that classified documents from Biden’s vice presidency had been found at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., in November.
The Justice Department has appointed a special counsel to ascertain why Biden kept these documents for so long when he did not have the authority to do so.
When even the White House press corps notices, you know there’s a problem.
With the principal exception of Fox News Peter Doocy, the “journalists” who’ve spent two years pretending to cover President Joe Biden administration had seemingly mastered the art of ignoring the obvious incompetence of the chief executive and the incompetents around him.
But White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre seems to have broken through even with that blinkered bunch.
According to a report Wednesday by CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter — of all places — Biden’s press secretary has managed to alienate even the cheering section in the White House briefing room.
The same stenographers who acted like love-struck chorus girls for former White House press secretary Jen Psaki have never been as entirely rah-rah-and-pom-poms for Jean-Pierre — despite her being the first black press secretary, as well as the first press secretary to be openly lesbian. (You can probably still find “Jen” circled in hearts in press corps notebooks.)
But it’s undeniable the press corps likes her. Since Jean-Pierre took over the job in May, she’s been treated with the kind of kid gloves no press secretary serving, say, former President Donald Trump could have dreamed of.
Jean-Pierre’s mannerisms — like incessantly consulting a binder for answers — and inaccuracies — like actually reading the wrong answer from that same binder — have gone largely unremarked.
Again, with the principal exception of Doocy, who makes a habit of acting like a professional reporter, the press corps has been largely docile.
But amid the scandal over Biden’s squirreled away classified documents, Jean-Pierre has been flatfooted too many times for even the indulgent liberals of the establishment media assigned to cover for the White House.
Is Karine Jean-Pierre the worst press secretary in U.S. history?Yes No
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And, as “Reliable Sources” writer Oliver Darcy records, some are speaking out — albeit with the understanding that their names aren’t used. (God forbid the American public know who’s actually saying what in Washington.)
Even the binders have been noticed.
“You just get the feeling that you’re wasting your time and whatever is in front of her in the binder is all she is going to say, no matter how many times you ask the question,” Darcy wrote that one journalist told him. “It’s just a painful waste of time.”
“She is arguably the least effective White House press secretary of the television era,” Darcy quoted one correspondent as saying.
(Things aren’t utterly insane, though. Darcy made of point of noting that his unnamed interlocutor specifically excluded the Trump White House press secretaries from that comparison. Even a blithering, inept Democratic appointee has to be better than anyone associated with Trump, despite the memorably effective performances in the podium by Kayleigh McEnany and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.)
“In recent days, Jean-Pierre has faced a noticeably vexed White House press corps that is openly revolting against her,” Darcy wrote. “Many of the questions she has fielded have not been about the subject matter, but have centered on her very credibility and how she has performed in the job.”
To an eye unindoctrinated by the bias that infects the establishment media, questions about Jean-Pierre’s credibility were obvious from the outset. Her predictable, amateur partisanship might qualify her for a CNN seat, but not as a spokeswoman to all Americans.
Her occasionally jaw-dropping gaffes make it clear that being a black woman and lesbian are probably her three most relevant qualifications for the job. (Not necessarily in that order.)
But now, the eagle eyes of the nation’s political press are apparently opened to Jean-Pierre’s faults thanks to the classified documents scandal, particularly after Jean-Pierre assured reporters assembled Friday that all the documents that were to be found had been found — only to have the discovery of more announced the very next day.
Even worse, those new documents had been found on Thursday — before Jean-Pierre told reporters there would be no more.
“On Friday, you stood here, though, and were asked about this documents issue, by our count, some 18 times,” Cecilia Vega of ABC News said at Tuesday’s briefing, according to Darcy.
“At that point, the president’s lawyers had found these five additional pages of classified documents. So, did you not know on Friday that those documents had been found when you were at the podium? Or are you being directed by someone to not be forthcoming on this issue?”
Translation: Are you ignorant or a liar?
That’s not a great question for a press secretary. It’s the kind of question the Trump press secretaries had to deal with daily — either explicitly or implicitly — but it’s new here because the liberals of the White House press corps are hard-wired to go soft-and-cuddly with a Democrat.
“She is really liked, personally, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for her competence professionally,” one White House scribe reportedly told Darcy.
Jean-Pierre’s problems are unavoidable, even men and women who are being paid largely to overlook them have to face it: And when the White House press corps notices, you know there’s a problem.
Amid discussion that former President Donald Trump may return to Twitter as part of his 2024 campaign for the presidency, Twitter owner Elon Musk is worried that the ripple effects could seriously rock Twitter’s boat.
Recently, an anonymous Republican source close to Trump told NBC News that Trump’s return to Twitter is likely imminent. The report said Trump is seeking to return to Facebook as well. Both social media platforms banned Trump after the Capitol incursion in 2021.
Musk referenced the speculation in a tweet on Wednesday.
Will be interesting to see how the Biden administration reacts to this.
They may try to weaponize Federal agencies against Twitter.
“Will be interesting to see how the Biden administration reacts to this. They may try to weaponize Federal agencies against Twitter,” Musk wrote. He did not provide specifics.
However, in multiple releases dubbed the “Twitter Files,” journalists given access to inside Twitter documents have shown a pattern of government efforts to use its clout to influence what was posted on the social media platform. One commentator said that could happen again.
“In all, the ‘Twitter Files’ paint a picture of a wide-ranging federal effort to exert control over the editorial policies of a major media company. The feds might be doing the same at other social media companies, such as Facebook and YouTube. And since the U.S. government has the power to make things very unpleasant for companies that resist, the temptation to comply may prove irresistible,” Hiawatha Bray wrote for the Boston Globe.
“It’s all in the name of protecting us from fake news. But when our political leaders set the terms of permissible debate, how will we protect ourselves from them?” Bray continued.
Will Biden use the federal government to go after Twitter?Yes No
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Musk restored Trump’s Twitter account on Nov. 19, but at the time, Trump said he would continue using his Truth Social platform and had no immediate plan to begin tweeting again.
However, on Wednesday, Trump representative Liz Harrington hinted that a return could be in the cards, according to the Epoch Times.
Speaking on the NTD-Epoch Times show “Newsmakers” she hedged a bit at first.
“We’ll have to see what happens,” she said. “I’m not here to make any announcement as of yet.”
She then gave a plug for Truth Social while noting that Twitter could have a use.
“We do know that Truth Social is doing incredibly well. There’s no shadow banning, there’s no censorship, there’s really hardly any bots on the platform. It’s a great platform for free speech. But we will see if [Trump is] going to return to Twitter and use it as an asset for the campaign,” she said.
“I think the more platforms, the better, the more open and free they are, and it is important to reach masses of audiences. Nobody has done it better than President Trump than the way he’s skillfully used not just Twitter but now launching Truth Social, which has been really such a success and important platform to have more voices involved, so that will continue,” she said.
As for possible threats against Twitter, Harrington said the “Twitter Files” revealed that the First Amendment “has been under attack.”
“That’s something that’s so unacceptable. I think the more speech, the better,” she said.
“President Trump has already laid out his plan to curb the censorship regime — which is exactly what it is — and he’s going to be continuing to make steps to end that as well. We can’t have First Amendment if half the country is not able to speak freely,” Harrington said.
“It’s even more so than that, it’s not even a right or left issue. It’s an issue with all types of censorship on all type of viewpoints that are deemed ‘inappropriate’ by the censorship regime. That is very unhealthy for the Constitutional Republic. It violates our constitutional rights,” she said.
Democrats in the House of Representatives have introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United v. FEC decision made in 2010.
The court ruled 5–4 that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations and overruled an earlier decision that banned corporations from making “electioneering communications.”
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif). said in a press release he and Democrat colleagues introduced the “Democracy For All Amendment” to “overturn legal precedents that have allowed unrestrained campaign spending and dark money to corrupt American democracy.” He has introduced the constitutional amendment every year since 2013, according to the release.
“The flow of unrestricted corporate and dark money into our elections has dangerously eroded the American people’s faith in our democracy, and in our government’s ability to deliver for them and their families,” Schiff said in a press release. “Citizens United was one of the most egregious enablers of special interest money, but it was only the latest in a long line of Supreme Court cases that opened the floodgates. To truly rein in dark money, we must amend our Constitution.”
Schiff said the amendment would close “legal loopholes” that he said allows “wealthy megadonors, corporations, and special interest groups” to exploit the political system.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
Schiff said the move comes before the 13th anniversary of the decision on Jan. 21, which the Associated Press said came from a “bitterly divided U.S. Supreme Court.”
The AP said the decision “vastly increased the power of big business and labor unions to influence government decisions by freeing them to spend their millions directly to sway elections for president and Congress.”
The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibited corporations and labor unions from using general funds to make election communications or speech that expressly advocated for a candidate in a federal election, including broadcasts, cable or satellite communication that is publicly distributed within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election, according to the FEC.
Demonstrators march in the snow through Lafayette Park, outside the White House, during a rally against the Supreme Court’s decision in 2010 favor of Citizens United, which allows private citizens and corporations to make unlimited donations for political campaigns, in Washington, DC on Jan. 21, 2015. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
In January 2008, Citizens United, a non-profit organization, released a film about then-Senator Hillary Clinton, prior to the Democratic Party’s 2008 primary elections.
The group wanted to pay cable companies to make the film available for free through video-on-demand services. It planned to make the film available within 30 days of the primaries, but feared it would be covered by the Act’s ban, according to the FEC, which could have subjected them to civil and criminal penalties.
The group sought declaratory and injunctive relief against the FEC arguing the Act was unconstitutional. The District Court denied the preliminary injunction and granted the Commission’s motion for summary judgment.
The Supreme Court noted jurisdiction and found that they were “required to consider the facial validity” of the Act’s ban in regard to freedom of speech.
The Court held the Act was a ban on speech and “political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it, whether by design or inadvertence.”
It held disclaimer and disclosure requirements are “constitutional as applied to both the broadcast of the film and the ads promoting the film itself, since the ads qualify as electioneering communications.”
Additional Democrat Support
Schiff proposed the amendment alongside Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.).
A press release said the amendment would also “address the fundamental flaws underlying the Court’s reasoning in that and an entire line of cases dating back to the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which prevented meaningful regulation of campaign expenditures by corporations and special interest groups.”
“Thirteen years after the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United decision, we are still feeling its disastrous effects–and they’re getting worse,” said Tiffany Muller, President of End Citizens United/Let America Vote Action Fund. “Each year, we see more and more dark corporate money pouring into our elections, letting billionaires and corporate America buy influence and power in Washington.”
‘Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap’
An election integrity group said 10.9 million out of a total 22.1 million ballots that had been mailed out to registered voters during the 2022 midterm elections went “unaccounted for,” according to a Jan. 18 report.
“Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap,” the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) said on Monday. “The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address.”
The watchdog released the two-page report (pdf) detailing what it called “the failures” of California’s first mass-mail balloting election following the passage of Assembly Bill 37 (AB 37), which requires that ballots automatically be mailed to all active registered voters statewide. The bill, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2021, makes vote-by-mail ballots, a practice implemented in the 2020 general election in conjunction with the COVID-19 pandemic, permanent for all elections.
California has more registered voters than any other state. Yet its vote-by-mail policies—among the nation’s most expansive—have resulted in large numbers of ballots “disappearing at poll closing time,” PILF’s data show.
“After accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding, meaning election officials do not know what happened to them,” reads the Wednesday report.
“It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients. But, under mass-mail elections, we can only assume what happened,” it continued.
Besides the almost half unaccounted-for mail ballots, data show that 9.8 million were accepted, over 120,000 were rejected, and 1.4 million were counted from in-person voting centers.
The Golden State, which has been a Democratic stronghold for over two decades, mailed out more than 22.1 million ballots to its registered voters—nearly 47 percent Democrats and 24 percent Republicans—during the 2022 elections. A GOP victory in California on Nov. 16 granted the party slim control of the U.S. House.
Mail-In Ballot Rejects
PILF, after finding that election officials in California had rejected 226,250 mail-in ballots during the 2022 primary and general elections, argued that the switch to mail balloting has taken away voters’ rights.
According to the report, the state would reject mail ballots primarily for nine reasons, including mismatched or missing signatures, and double voting when a registrant casts a vote both in-person and by-mail, which took place 813 times in the past midterms.
The most common reason, which researchers said is “endemic to mail voting,” turned out to be late-arriving ballots—taking up 48 percent of all rejects during the 2022 elections, finding show.
Every registered voter in California should receive a ballot in the mail a month prior to Election Day. All ballots returned by mail must be postmarked by Nov. 8 to be counted, and received within seven days by county election officials, who would then verify the signatures on the return envelopes and process ballots through their vote tallying system.
“In the November contests, more than 57,000 ballots arrived after November 15, setting them up for rejection,” PILF stated.
“The official datasets do not differentiate between ballots postmarked too late or delivered too late. The U.S. Postal Service also touts its 2022 performance by claiming that 99 percent of mail ballots were delivered nationally within 3 days to officials for counting once in their custody,” the repost reads, noting that the Post Office sets the success rate at 94 percent for timely delivery of political mail.
“So the failure to deliver ballots on time is not surprising.”
Mail-in ballots are placed in bins to be processed after arriving at the Sacramento County Registrar of Voters in Sacramento, Calif., on Oct. 22, 2018. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo)
PILF President J. Christian Adams agrees that mail-in ballots can “disenfranchise” voters.
“There are many reasons mail ballots fail ultimately to count. No one casting a ballot at home can correct an error before it’s too late,” the chairman said. “California’s vote-by-mail demonstration should serve as a warning to state legislators elsewhere.”
Mail-in ballots may still be counted when a postmark is missing or illegible, but it depends on the circumstances. Under the new legislation, Californians can also bring ballots to a polling place in person or drop them in an official ballot box, if they wish.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the California secretary of state’s office and Newsom’s office for comment.
