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comments, ephemera, speculation, etc. (protected political speech and personal opinion) - If this is your 1st visit to this page, please start at the bottom - 2021- 2021-06-05 i NATAL NARRATIVE REFUTED (DEMOCRATS DESTROYED THE CONSTITUTION) Where was B.H.O. born: Mombasa
or Honolulu?
 This Kenyan birth certificate was posted by Malik Obama, brother of Barack Hussein Obama. You will be called a "birther" if you believe this document is authentic. 2021-06-05 h NATATION PARADISE RAVAGED (DEMOCRATS DESTROYED VENICE BEACH) Venice Beach Boardwalk – Wednesday June 2, 2021 7:46am pic.twitter.com/nI8y7XYSRy — Venice Beach Boardwalk (@BoardwalkVenice) June 3, 2021 2021-06-05 g NATIONAL PERVERSE RELIGION The Revenge of the Yankees
How Social Gospel became Social Justice [...] The culture of what might be called the NGO-academic-spook complex remained deeply rooted in the Social Gospel wing of Northern mainline Protestantism of the early 1900s. The Social Gospel progressivism these institutions have long embraced is a Janus-faced tradition. One face is technocratic, holding that social and global conflicts, rather than reflecting the tragic nature of human existence, are “problems” which can be “solved” by nonpartisan experts guided by something called “social science.” The other face of Social Gospelism is irrational, and rooted in post-millennial Protestant theology convinced that we are on the verge of a world of peace and prosperity, if only wicked people at home and wicked regimes abroad can be crushed once and for all. This mentality with its bizarre synthesis of science-inspired technocracy and millenniarian zeal, was shared by many turn-of-the-century Progressives, including Woodrow Wilson, a Southern-born Northern transplant. As Dorothy Ross points out in The Origins of American Social Science (1990), Wilson, like many leading American Progressives, was the child of a mainline Protestant minister. Shedding its specifically Northern mainline Protestant cultural attributes, a version of Social Gospel Protestantism has mutated into the secular religion of wokeness, the orthodoxy of the universities and the increasingly important nonprofit sector. Its converts include many of the affluent white secular children and grandchildren of members of mainline Protestant denominations like the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists, which are hemorrhaging membership to the category of religious “nones.” By evolving from an ethnoregional culture into a crusading secular creed disseminated by the universities, the public school system, the corporate media, and corporate HR departments, post-Protestant wokeness is capable of assimilating anyone, of any race or ethnicity, native-born or immigrant, who is willing to conform to its weird rituals and snobbish etiquette. The Long Island lockjaw accent has been replaced by the constantly updated “woke” dialect of the emerging American elite as a status marker. You may have an Asian or Spanish surname, but if you know what “nonbinary” means and say “Latinx” (a term rejected by the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American origin) then you are potentially eligible for membership in the new national ruling class. The recent conversion to wokeness of the legacy media and big business can be attributed to the increasing reliance of both sectors on a few prestige universities to recruit their top staff. In living memory, if you wanted a job in a prestigious law firm or company in Dallas or Atlanta, you would do well to attend the local state or elite private university, to make connections with the offspring of the local gentry; being an Ivy League graduate, far from being a plus, might well be held against you. The nationalization and globalization of American business, however, has produced a new, increasingly homogeneous managerial elite filtered through a small number of Ivy League schools and high-status public universities, which serve as finishing schools for the woke overclass. Although the woke managerial culture in the United States has lost most of the vestiges of its Yankee mainline Protestant origins, the emerging American national oligarchy has the same enemies as the old New England-Midwestern WASP oligarchy: white Southerners, Catholic white ethnics and observant Jews. This became clear in the summer of 2020. The woke left not only demanded the removal of statues of Confederate traitors—a perfectly reasonable demand—but also targeted Columbus, the icon of Italian Americans, and Spanish Catholic saints and conquistadors. Democratic liberals warned, in the tones of 19th-century Yankee Protestant nativists, that papists were taking over the Supreme Court. At the same time, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, Italian American by ancestry but woke by culture, exhibited a striking double standard when it came to public gatherings by left-wing protesters on the one hand and, on the other, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. The increasingly powerful and intolerant woke national overclass justifies its cultural iconoclasm in the name of oppressed minorities. But this is just an excuse for a top-down program of cultural imperialism by mostly white, affluent, college-educated managers and professionals and rentiers. Woke attitudes are much less common among Black Americans and Hispanic Americans than among the white college-educated elite. What we are witnessing is a power grab carried out chiefly by some white Americans against other white Americans. The goal of the new woke national establishment, the successor to the old Northeastern mainline Protestant establishment that was temporarily displaced by the neo-Jacksonian New Deal Democratic coalition, is to stigmatize, humiliate and disempower recalcitrant Southern, Catholic, and Jewish whites, along with members of ethnic and racial minorities who refuse to be assimilated into the new national orthodoxy disseminated from New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and the prestigious private universities of New England. Properly understood, the Great Awokening is the revenge of the Yankees. (read more) 2021-06-05 f NATIONAL PARADIGM REJECTION What If the “Big Lie” Is the
Big Lie?
Maybe now that Dr. Tony Fauci has begun to spill the beans on his doings in service to the Wuhan virology lab, the phrase “conspiracy theory,” flogged by the media as jauntily and incessantly as by the soviet kommissars of yore, will have worn out its welcome. In a sane polity, Dr. Fauci would be cooked. He looks circumstantially like an epic villain of history, who promoted and funded dangerous research activities knowingly, which led to an international disaster that killed millions of people and destroyed countless livelihoods and households, perhaps even the whole global economy, when all is said and done — and he appears to have lied at every step along the way. As a practical matter, what is the “Joe Biden” admin going to do about him? Throw him under the bus? I don’t think they can at this point. Dr. Fauci has come to represent not just the falsehoods employed around the Covid-19 fiasco but more generally the long campaign against truth itself by a grossly illiberal Jacobin Democratic Party seemingly out to punish and destroy Western Civ. Whether the Covid-19 pandemic was an overt tactic in that campaign, or just the result of Dr. Fauci’s catastrophic bad judgment, remains to be revealed. But at least half the country will conclude that there’s some connection between the terrible losses suffered in the pandemic year and the political bullshit they were force-fed in the four-year effort to defenestrate Donald Trump. All Joe Biden’s handlers can do now is fade Dr. Fauci out, keep him off the cable channels, and hope the public can be distracted with some new nonsense. You also have good reason to doubt that Merrick Garland will do anything but look the other way and whistle. The downfall of Dr. Fauci is a watershed moment. There were so many more authorities caught lying over the past five years, but who got off scot-free — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, James Comey (actually, the whole FBI and DOJ E-suites), John Brennan, James Clapper, Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissman, Adam Schiff, and the editors and producers of the news media, plus the execs of social media — who not only disabled the truth at every opportunity, but just about destroyed the public’s grip on reality. The result has been an utter collapse of authority in this land, so that now nobody who runs anything is credible, from the current pitiful president of the USA, to most elected and appointed officials, judges, corporate CEOs, college deans and presidents, and now “The Science” itself. Just remember: there is still a sizable faction in America of people who are deeply interested in ascertaining the truth about a lot of things. They are aiming to get at it, too, for example, the truth about the 2020 election. Maybe now you can begin to see why this is important. Yet the cable news channels were really at it last Thursday night with Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper of CNN, and the slippery crew at MSNBC, strenuously assailing the Arizona election audit with their usual battery of opprobrious slogans: it’s a “conspiracy theory,” “baseless,” a “Big Lie.” Is it perhaps more likely now that their Big Lie is the Big Lie? It looks like we are going to find out. And perhaps not just in Arizona, because other states are warming to the audit idea. “Joe Biden’s” DOJ may yet try to quash the AZ audit. But one subsidiary truth to be gleaned in all this is that the audit is solely a state prerogative as a constitutional matter and if the DOJ tries to lay some horseshit ruse about “civil rights” on the operation, they’ll end up with their pants on fire, maybe even an official nullification of federal action. Sound a little civil war-ish? So, we can see that the disclosures over Dr. Fauci’s role in the origins of Covid-19 and the potential discovery of 2020 election fraud are converging toward a deep constitutional crisis this summer. If a growing number of Americans come to believe that the pandemic was a number run on them by the authorities, they may be more disposed to going forward with election audits in several states. And what happens if solid evidence is discovered and fraud is proven? Whu-oh…! Does the country perhaps have to call a re-do of the election, this time without mail-in ballots and with a more serious effort to substantiate the votes? That’s a tall order. Or does “Joe Biden” just keep ridin’ out for ice cream cones? Geopolitics may determine that. Can the nation afford to keep such a weak and illegitimate regime in power? I’ll tell you something that could happen: “Joe Biden” (his handlers and their factotums, anyway) may try something else, another ruse to distract the public’s attention from a constitutional crisis: how about crashing the financial markets? That would do the trick, I’m sure. In fact, it looks like the Federal Reserve is already tuning that frequency in by announcing it’s “tapering” its bond buying activities, starting with corporate “junk” bonds. You know what will happen if they ramp up tapering of more bond purchases (currently around $120-billion-a-month)? Interest rates will rise — because who else will buy that paper at near-zero interest rates? (And, by the way, Russia just announced it’s about to sell off all its sovereign holdings in US dollars). And when interest rates rise quickly, Wall Street’s current business model goes south. Wait for that! (read more) 2021-06-05 e NATIONAL POPULIST RECKONING COVID-19 Has Forever Destroyed
Americans’ Trust in Ruling Class ‘Experts’
As even many casual observers of America’s fractious politics are aware, the overwhelming majority of lawmaking at the federal level no longer takes place in Congress as the Constitution’s framers intended. Instead, the vast majority of the “rule making” governing Americans’ day-to-day lives now takes place behind closed doors, deep in the bowels of the administrative state’s sprawling bureaucracy. The brainchild of progressive President Woodrow Wilson, arguments on behalf of the modern administrative state are ultimately rooted in, among other factors, a disdain for the messy give-and-take of republican politics and an epistemological preference for rule by enlightened clerisy. Put more simply, the most straightforward version of the argument offered by partisans of the administrative state amounts to, “Trust the experts.” And over the century-plus since Wilson’s presidency, the “trust the experts” leitmotif has moved well beyond the realm of prevailing dogma for mandarins in such agencies as the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. Rather, for large swaths of the citizenry and the elected official class, “trust the experts” now reigns supreme for everything from the military (“Trust the generals!”) to public health (“Trust the epidemiologists!”). And therein lies the rub. The trials and tribulations of COVID-19 in America have dealt an irreparable blow to the credibility of America’s ruling class and the ruling class’s implicit appeal to its authority as a coterie of highly trained and capable experts. No single person exemplifies this more than Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has attained celebrity status during the pandemic as the nation’s leading immunologist and forward-facing spokesman for our public policy response. As Steve Deace and Todd Erzen detail in their new book, “Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History,” Fauci has repeatedly contradicted himself throughout the pandemic, waffling on what the “science” demands at any given moment while still always seeming to err on the side of draconian overreaction. Recent Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests by BuzzFeed and The Washington Post only underscore the point. Perhaps most damningly, the FOIA requests revealed a February 2020 email to former Obama-era Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell explaining that store-bought face masks are “really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.” He also added that the “typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material.” Of course, barely over a month after Fauci’s unearthed email to Burwell, Americans were required to wear masks pretty much every time they left their house—and mask-skeptical posts were censored or deleted by the ruling class’s preferred private-sector enforcement arm, Big Tech. And none of this is to even broach the separate issue of the extensive COVID-19-era societal lockdowns, which were never justified on the scientific metrics despite being ubiquitously promoted by those excoriating lockdown-skeptical conservatives to just shut up and “trust the science.” In addition to the Fauci FOIA cache, there is also the Democratic Party and the media’s inexplicable 180-degree turn on the plausibility of the Wuhan lab leak theory—that is, the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic has as its origins not a zoonotic transmission at a local “wet market” but an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting dangerous coronavirus research (partially subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer) and happens to be located within the immediate vicinity of the then-novel virus’s first confirmed cases. The lab leak theory was always plausible, if not probable, but those who promoted it as a possibility from the onset—such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and then-President Donald Trump—were routinely lambasted as Sinophobic conspiracy theorists. There was never any compelling reason to dismiss the lab leak theory out of hand, and in retrospect, it seems that those who did so were likely motivated more by “orange man bad!”-style anti-Trump personal animus than anything else. The Biden administration has recently called for a 90-day intelligence community review into the origins of the pandemic, which is welcome news for those of us who have called COVID-19 a “Chinese Chernobyl” demanding serious geopolitical accountability since day one—but sad news for those who may have presumed a modicum of intellectual honesty from our political elites. American politics is currently in the throes of a populist moment. That populist moment is characterized by widespread distrust of elites and a perceived ever-widening chasm between the ruling class’s prerogatives and the wishes of the American people at large. As we finally begin to emerge from COVID-19, that chasm will only grow wider. The ruling class has finally sullied itself one time too many. (read more) 2021-06-05 d NATIONAL PREVARICATING RACKET Facebook, Instagram Using Fake
Fact Checks To Curb Reporting On Fauci Emails
Facebook is actively using its Big Tech powers to censor and suppress reporting about the release of Anthony Fauci’s emails. The Silicon Valley giant has long played an active role in censoring theories about COVID-19’s origin, even threatening those who alleged the virus could’ve been man made and leaked from the Wuhan lab with suspensions and bans. Shortly after [illegitimate] President Joe Biden reinstated an inquiry into the virus’s beginnings, however, Facebook announced it would no longer suppress claims that COVID-19 was not naturally created. While the Big Tech company has started to backtrack on some of its censorship efforts, Facebook still remains dedicated to removing “false claims” about any of the COVID-19 vaccines from its site and has reportedly begun censoring posts related to the release of Fauci’s emails. Several users took to Twitter on Wednesday and Thursday to complain that their comments and posts discussing the emails, or even posting a screenshot of the publicized information, were cited as reasons for their removal or event account suspension. Some of these alleged bans appeared to be enforced for at least three days. I got a 3 day ban
yesterday, within 30 seconds of posting this email
to Sylvia. (On Fedbook). pic.twitter.com/3ACmmSI2h3
— Charlotte Rose (@charlierose69) June 4, 2021 Others saw their posts on Facebook get slapped with fake “fact-checks” and labels cautioning that the posts were lacking pertinent information. One Federalist article was flagged by “independent fact-checkers” from Agence France-Presse, which found its start just four years ago in 2017, for an article that was supposedly “missing context.” The Federalist article accurately reported that Fauci pushed Americans to mask up even when he admitted masks weren’t very effective. Agence France-Presse, however, claimed, “Fauci’s email reflected the consensus at the time among US health experts, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the surgeon general, America’s leading public health spokesman.” “That consensus changed as new information emerged and concerns over the limited supply of masks for medical personnel subsided,” the phony fact-check concluded. (2 images) Facebook-owned Instagram also hopped on the fake “fact-checking” bandwagon. Shortly after a Federalist staffer posted a meme about the emails on his Instagram story, Facebook partially covered his post with a “missing context” flag encouraging users to look at how “the same information was reviewed by independent fact-checkers in another post.” The label disappeared hours later without a trace. (image) In addition to showing his mask hypocrisy and downplaying of U.S.-funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, Fauci’s emails also revealed that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases colluded with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to control the distribution of the federal government’s COVID-19 guidance across the website. “Your idea and proposal sound terrific. I would be happy to do a video for your hub,” Fauci replied to Zuckerberg’s proposals. “We need to reach as many people as possible and convince them to take mitigation strategies seriously or things will get much, much worse. Also, your idea about [REDACTED] is very exciting.” An additional offer to Fauci was fully redacted. Facebook did not respond to The Federalist’s questions or request for comment. (read more) 2021-06-05 c NATIONAL PROPHETIC RADICAL One of the
best videos opposing Critical Race Theory that
you’ll ever see. — Robby Starbuck
(@robbystarbuck) June
1, 2021 2021-06-05 b NATIONAL PRONOUN RADIO ‘A complete guide to lunacy’:
NPR gets an earful after publishing gender identity
‘glossary’ & tips on proper pronoun usage
NPR has riled
social media after releasing a comprehensive guide to
gender-identity terms and pronouns, with many accusing
the outlet of being disconnected from how people
actually interact with each other.
Compiled with assistance from various LGBTQ organizations, the glossary and FAQ list was created in an effort to help NPR readers navigate the seemingly endlessly expanding lexicon of gender-identity-related language. “Our goal is to help people communicate accurately and respectfully with one another,” the broadcaster wrote, adding: “Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.” NPR acknowledged, however, that the guide was “not exhaustive” and is “Western and US-centric” – perhaps an indirect admission that it may not even be relevant in many countries. Terms included in the glossary ranged from “nonbinary” (“people who do not describe themselves or their genders as fitting into the categories of man or woman”) to “intersex” (“an umbrella term used to describe people… that don’t fit typical definitions of male and female”). Yes, there is even an entry for “gender-expansive” – a term purportedly used to describe people with a more “flexible” gender identity. The ‘guide’ then transitions into a lengthy FAQ section about pronoun usage. “What if I make a mistake and misgender someone, or use the wrong words?” reads one of the questions (NPR suggests that you “apologize and move on”). Another question asks why some people might alternate between pronouns, such as “he/they.” Citing an expert on the issue, the outlet recommends listening to “how people refer to themselves” before deploying a pronoun in their direction, although it’s likely that “either pronoun would be fine.” The broadcaster also offered an explanation about “why might someone’s name be different than what’s listed on their ID.” While the article
was applauded by some for being “well researched,” there
were many others who felt that NPR was making a
gendered mountain out of a molehill.
*
Others said that
they support progressive causes but that the left’s preoccupation with pronouns
and gender identity goes too far.
“I’d like to
remind you all that using a person’s proper name
and pronouns greatly improves their quality of
life. This is about being respectful and treating
others with dignity,” read one tweet.
“Propaganda
does not deceive people; it merely
helps them to deceive themselves.”
— Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind 2021-06-04 i TONY BALONEY IX Behind The SARS-CoV-2
Origination Backstory All Roads
Lead to Stop Trump
2021-06-04 hBallot audits notwithstanding, I doubt there is a bigger story that will surface this year and this one has familiar tentacles… As the discussion surrounding the release of emails from Anthony Fauci ripples through the media, we should all consider carefully the consequential ramifications of the discussion upon our nation. At the heart of the current debate is a question about whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from a bio research lab in Wuhan China. An article in Vanity Fair magazine provides some stark background to contemplate: [Excerpt] – […] In one State
Department meeting, officials seeking to demand
transparency from the Chinese government say they
were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore
the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function
research, because it would bring unwelcome
attention to U.S. government funding of it.
In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.” […] In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.” (read more) There are a lot of familiar institutions and people within the article highlighting just how political everything around the COVID outbreak became. As a nation we have all lived through the consequences of these political manipulations. However, the application of Occam’s razor can serve as a guide; and I think the data is aligning in one specific direction.
Whether the virus
originated in a Wuhan lab and was leaked
accidentally or whether it was created by Chinese
scientists and released purposefully is obviously
something that will be debated for quite some
time. For the sake of this particular point of
discussion that particular aspect is less
important. What is important,
and indeed more factually likely, is that
regardless of SARS-CoV-2 origination there were
political elements inside the U.S. who sought to
take advantage of the crisis. As President Obama’s former chief of staff and later Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, famously said: “never let a crisis go to waste.” I think the answers to the outcome of COVID-19 in the era of President Donald Trump can be identified within that statement. Unfortunately, that means the discussion of COVID-19 is going to be exponentially politicized and that means discovering the truth will be even more challenging. Nothing happens in a vacuum and as we have noted within these pages for years if you follow the sequence and timeline you get a better picture of what is really going on. Consider this sequence:
This shift in the overall narrative where the media, White House and Big Tech platforms like Facebook were now supporting discussion of the “lab leak theory” – starts to make sense when you put the engineering into the sequence. The release of the Anthony Fauci emails was part of a FOIA fulfillment. The administrative state knew these emails were going to be released, and that explains why multiple vested interests started trying to get out in front of the information by opening up the “lab leak” discussion for new approvals. In essence, knowing this information was about to enter the public bloodstream, all of those vested interests had a reason to get out in front of the story. Hence, the previously forbidden discussion(s) and topics were now approved for public debate. That brings us to a key question: Why would the Deep State release these emails, instead of just hiding them? This point, which will be overlooked by most, should be very familiar to CTH readers…. The FOIA fulfillment of these emails has a very distinct fingerprint that implies there is something much larger in the background. You will remember the Carter Page FISA application was also released under the guise of a FOIA fulfillment. On July 21, 2018, the Mueller team (led by Andrew Weissmann) released the Page FISA application, the first release of a FISA application in history. The motive was to hide/bury the much larger issue of President Obama’s administration using the Intelligence Community to conduct surveillance on their political opponents. Everyone jumped on the stories around the FISA release, and few people paused to ask why this “Top Secret” Title-1 Search and surveillance authorization document was released in the first place? Requesting the public release of such a top secret document would have been the easiest FOIA request to deny… but the DOJ choose to release it. The Mueller/Weissmann motive was simple: they needed to cloud the bigger issue of surveillance of a political campaign (they also knew SSCI Security Officer James Wolfe had already leaked it to the media on March 17th of 2017). Everyone was excited to read and discuss the content of the FISA application and exhaust thousands of column inches on the discussion as people took sides based on the DOJ/FBI justification for the FISA itself. The Weissmann release had the intended effect… people stopped debating whether President Obama was conducting political surveillance on behalf of Hillary Clinton and their political alignment. THAT debate was a much bigger issue that just disappeared with the emergence of the FISA application. The release of these Fauci emails has an almost identical smell, which would indicate there is a much bigger story in the background that this release is intended to dilute. Perhaps the bigger story is the creation of the virus; perhaps the bigger story is an intentional release of a manufactured virus; or perhaps the bigger story is the manipulation of the virus -the creation of a fraudulent narrative- to achieve political goals. Against the backdrop of “never letting a crisis go to waste”, the latter seems much more likely. The origination of SARS-CoV-2 (natural or lab leak) becomes a moot point. What matters is how the operatives in the U.S. sought to take advantage of the crisis the COVID outbreak provided. The timing of the steps they took to take advantage of the opportunity also align with the outbreak. Even the selection of Joe Biden as the front-man beneficiary just before Super-Tuesday 2020 fits into the opportunity timeline. The COVID-19 outbreak became a tool to achieve a variety of objectives: • The stalling of a fantastic economy that was benefiting every American voter. • Deployment of mail-in ballots that can be used and manipulated to achieve fraudulent results. • Controls over presidential debates to avoid a weak candidate being exposed or confronted. • The deployed ‘excuse‘ for a very visible lack of voter enthusiasm for the puppet (Biden). In short, without COVID as a tool the manipulated election outcome is more difficult. The ‘never let a crisis go to waste‘ strategy includes the necessary precursor of a crisis. Everything downstream was manipulated political opportunity. All roads lead to “stop Trump.” On February 25,
2020, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, former DOJ Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s sister, who was
director of the CDC’s National Center for
Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (link) held a conference call
with reporters. Messonnier’s
remarks were rogue and not approved by HHS
secretary Alex Azar. Messonnier’s remarks were
made without authorization from anyone in the
White House:
The alarming message from Dr. Messonnier was quickly picked up by most major news organizations and pushed into all reporting on the issue. The COVID panic had begun. While the attack weapons were previously being put into position it was Messonnier’s alarm that triggered the first wave of political confrontation against the Trump administration. The narrative was triggered. The alarms were sounded. The crisis was officially being exploited and COVID was now fully weaponized to eliminate the Presidency of Donald Trump. Just like the
release of the Carter Page FISA application was
cover for the bigger story, there’s
little doubt the administrative state sees the
release of these Fauci emails as a strategy toward
keeping political weaponization of the crisis, the
removal of President Donald Trump, hidden in the
background. (read
more) TONY BALONEY VIII 2021-06-04 g TONY BALONEY VII Reporter: "Do you have confidence in Dr. Fauci?" President Biden: "Yes, I'm very confident in Dr. Fauci." pic.twitter.com/Hf015HysXX — The Hill (@thehill) June 4, 2021 2021-06-04 f TONY BALONEY VI "His days are
numbered. I know an insider in the White House
who has spoken very openly to me that they are
talking about exit strategies for Anthony
Fauci. But it’s very, very clear, I’m happy
that his book deal is probably going to get
destroyed because this person has destroyed so
many lives… There were so many
inconsistencies. It seems like he was a
megalomaniac."
— Rep. Madison Cawthorn 2021-06-04 e TONY BALONEY V .@PressSec is asked about Dr. Fauci’s emails: “He’s been an undeniable asset
in our country’s pandemic response but it’s — Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 3, 2021 *Under
questioning from Peter Doocy, Jen Psaki decries
“attacks” against And when Doocy asked about
gain of function research, Psaki refused to answer TONY BALONEY IV Fauci under Global Attack
2021-06-04
cFauci is under attack globally and has shown himself to be unreliable and should be fired – PERIOD! All the emails that have come out from an FOIA request are interesting, and it show he has information that was credible concerning a leak from the lab in Wuhan. Let me make this PERFECTLY clear! This was NOT a DELIBERATE leak by the Chinese government. If China wanted to really hurt the West, the technology is there where a virus can be used as a delivery system, and as such, it can be designed to attack specific genetic sequences meaning that it could target just Italians, Greeks, English, Germans, or whoever. COVID-19, based upon everything I see from our model and reliable sources, was created in a lab and was DELIBERATELY unleashed to further this Great Reset. I BELIEVE someone from this agenda bribed a lab technician to release it in the local community. China did NOT benefit from this pandemic. The only ones who benefited were the World Economic Forum (WEF) consortium, which I know sold stocks and bonds ahead of the crash. They are also in league with the World Health Organization (WHO), and the head of the WHO is a politician and not even a doctor. That is like putting me in charge of surgery at a hospital. How can Tedros Adhanom be in such a position with no background in the subject matter? Tedros appears at the World Economic Forum and has participated in its agenda. The WHO should be compelled to turn over ALL emails and communication ASAP. My bet is they pull a Hillary…Oh sorry. They were hacked by Russians who destroyed everything. The World Economic
Forum is at the center of everything. When will
someone investigate all of these connections right
down to creating the slogan, Build Back
Better? Of course, they will
call this a conspiracy theory so they can avoid
having to actually investigate anything. My point is
simple: produce the evidence and prove this is just
a conspiracy theory. (read
more) TONY BALONEY III The Fauci Files, The WuFlu and
the War to Come
2021-06-04
bIsn’t is amazing how quickly things seem to change when it’s in the interest of those that think they run the world? For years we’ve been trying to get access to Hillary Clinton’s missing e-mails as Secretary of State but to no avail. However, at the most opportune time in the collapsing COVID story, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails are uncovered and broadcast to the world. The same mechanism, FOIA, that Hillary has stonewalled us on for six years uncovers Fauci’s emails in six weeks? Doesn’t that strike you as just the slightest bit odd? Fauci was the hero bureaucrat facing down the evil and ignorant President Trump over COVID-19. He became a national celebrity playing down treatments like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, flip-flopped on wearing masks and running cover for a corrupt WHO/CDC while whitewashing his own involvement in COVID’s origin. For all intents and purposes this lying, evil, Janus-faced troll set policy for the entire country. And from the moment anyone broke a story about the origins of COVID-19, the damage control began behind the scenes and the public shaming and deplatforming began. And democrats of all stripes cheered him on, simply because he came with the right credentials and an antipathy to Trump. As the face of the the scientific establishment, he terrorized millions into submission of Americans using fear over a virus not much more deadly than the annual flu. His constant changing the goalposts on ending lockdowns and spread prevention guidelines while needing to remain in front of the narrative kept people crazy with imaginary death statistics, fraudulent models and overwrought case counts while elevating the prevention principle beloved by state-worshipping Boomers and their younger ‘adjacents’ to its most ludicrous extreme. Because of him we became a nation even more divided than before the Coronapocalypse, which is clear he was an integral part of the operation. Thanks to Fauci the mask became a symbol of virtue for shitlibs and your unadorned face their symbol of evil. I predicted this would happen in the early months of COVID. I demanded that #FireFauci be the ‘Rallying Cry for a Generation.” For more than a year we had to suffer this man who:
For more than a year we’ve had to suffer insufferable shitlibs (but I repeat myself) telling us to ‘respect the science.’ Well, their high priest of scientism just got caught saying one thing in private and telling them the exact opposite in public, validating everything those dirty spreader Republicans, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers told them. Moveover, from the beginning this thing was an operation designed to do exactly what it has done — leave people in love with their mask which makes them sick, genuflecting to Big Brother and doubling down on their paranoia simply because they are too ashamed to admit to themselves (no less those evil MAGA folks) that they were duped by yet another bad script from the House that Klaus Built. Because Fauci, like all the other so-called experts paraded in front of us for the past year are nothing more than political operatives told to just keep the narrative alive for as long as possible. He’s now being sacrificed alongside Bill Gates and the other hired help like Andrew Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer while also securing a multi-million dollar book deal as his gold watch for a job well done. The question I have now for all those terrorized and radicalized into frothing brain-eating zombies will some of them finally wake up from the real virus they succumbed to, the mind virus of government propaganda, and have the kind of memetic collapse which brings them back from the brink of literal insanity? Or will they simply pivot to the latest deflection of blame from Fauci’s Davos masters and fall for the simple version of the story, that it was China alone that set COVID-19 on us as a bioterror weapon. Because without this controlling idea and the constant threat of the fake bogeyman of the Omnipotent Russian Secret Agent, who is now being blamed for the JBS cyberattack, how else will they continue doomscrolling through their Twitter feed simping for Rachel Maddow’s quivering Adam’s apple and still be able to scream into their cameras on TikTok? This is the real problem I see in front of us. That narrative is here now, building on years of propaganda to gin up a war with China. Now, don’t take what I’m about to say as any kind of apologia for China’s involvement in the COVID-19 scam. There is plenty of blame to lay at their feat. But don’t you think it’s a little convenient to all of a sudden flip the script about COVID on its head overnight in order to spoon feed the Left the new bogeyman, China? Trump did a fine job of this while in office, blaming China for everything and whipping his base into an anti-China frenzy. However, when Trump was in power and he called it the China Virus, Maddow’s Army was all aTwitter with opprobrium for him and his racism and blamed him for deaths literally caused by Fauci, Gates, Whitmer and Cuomo. “China was a victim too.” “Trump listen to the SCIENCE!” Blah blah blah. But the science was wrong and we now know it was all just politics. Now within the last couple of weeks we have a coherent narrative form around both Bill Gates and Dr. Death that it was, most likely, a man-made virus funded by U.S. taxpayers and visited upon us by the evil CCP while we all huddled in our homes hoping the Angel of Death would pass over us. This new narrative along with putting all the blame on Fauci and Gates creates the perfect deflection away from Davos who were the ones capitalizing on this, if not behind the whole thing. If you think I’m running out of tin foil spinning out this tale stop and think for just one second and ask the only question that ever matters in matters like these… Cui bono? Who benefits? Because if there is one thing that could unite Americans at this point it would be turning on China for having ‘done this to us!’ MAGAtards and Shitlibs, marching down the streets of Atlanta singing the Battle Hymn of the Dying Republic, holding hands (well, okay, bumping elbows) and ratcheting up the belligerence until something dumb happens, like re-electing Trump in 2024. Who benefits from China and the U.S. at each other’s throats? Who benefits from a collapse of the global economy as trade embargoes proliferate? Who benefits from conflicts in the South China Sea? Taiwan? Hong Kong? Los Angeles? Ukraine? Belarus? Israel? Who benefits from the cyberattacks on our infrastructure, the closing of our pipelines? The Freezing of Texas? Who? Really? China? No. China loves selling us their stuff. Who actually created the policies which hollowed out our manufacturing, domestic production, turned us into fake-money addicted YouPorners and gender fluid deracinated children? It wasn’t China. I’ll tell you who benefits. The European Union and Davos. Why else do you think The Davos Crowd worked so hard to get Biden installed as president? Control of the U.S. military is the main reason. This is why Biden is pulling back from the Middle East. It’s why he’s leaving Israel out to hang while renegotiating the JCPOA. If you want to set yourself up as the next great power how else are you going to do that without fomenting a war between those bigger than you? Who do you really think controls our courts? Who bought all all of those insane Attorneys General and Secretaries of State? Who actually is actually fighting the election fraud cases? China? Really? If you believe that then I suggest therapy. And the saddest part is that most people won’t see this coming and we’ll stumble blindly into it as we take our political revenge for Davos’ and China’s dirty deeds in the 2020 election and beyond. At this point there’s no scenario I see that doesn’t have the Republicans return to power in 2022, controlling both the Senate and the House, especially if Democratic opposition to these election audits crumbles. That’ll happen later this year after the German elections, and just in time for the beginning of the mid-term primary season to begin. The 2022 mid-terms are shaping up now to be a referendum on the events since the world broke in March 2020. By then the vandals in the White House will have done enough damage that the stage will be set for the final act of this pathetic psychodrama. The next shift is for the U.S. to redeploy assets away from Central Asia, cede that area to the inevitability of the Russia/China/Iran alliance and the final nail in the coffin of Halford Mackinder inspired Heartland geopolitics. Those assets will be needed for what comes next. Europe can’t stop the flow of oil globally but it can certainly cripple the U.S. with multiple assaults by foreign powers to weaken it from within. Pipelines shut down, ‘cyberattacks’ on our food and energy production, election integrity destroyed, courts fully politicized, tech corporations turned into behavioral thought police and people fleeing the insanity of cities intentionally allowed to turn into dystopian nightmares that play like a pastiche of a Philip K. Dick novel and a John Carpenter movie. Let’s call it “Escape of the Electric Sheep from New York” The Steve Bannonites still want to call him China Joe, but Joe isn’t owned by China, he’s owned by Davos. That conclusion fits the data better. Because China would never throw Fauci under the bus like this, it doesn’t serve their purpose. China’s MO has always been to suppress criticism of it. They are very predictable that way. Gates didn’t work for China, he worked for Davos. Davos is cleaning out “The Help” and there’s no one for China to negotiate with the U.S. to stop this nonsense. This is why there’s been such overt diplomatic incompetence since Biden took office. Do you think these provocations of China over Taiwan or the Uyghurs, as amateurish as the are hypocritical, were just gaffes? Really? Is that air you think you’re breathing? No, the point here is to cut off any possibility of rapprochement, to permanently sour relations between China (and Russia) and the West. Joe’s going to go to Geneva in two weeks to try and neutralize Putin and buy him off with gas into Europe while turning his focus away from Russia to China. Hopefully it won’t work. Hopefully Putin is too savvy to see what’s happening. Just wait until Biden and Obama no longer serve their purpose. They’ll be served up like chum to the justified anger of the conservatives who will seek someone to blame. All the while both sides of the political aisle will be united for the first time in trying to ‘get our country back.’ So while I’ve described the benefits to Europe and Davos for this. I haven’t given you the reason why Davos is throwing China under the same bus it’s throwing Gates and Fauci. Simple. It goes back to this year’s virtual Davos summit where Xi gave lip service to the Green New Deal and the Great Reset and Putin told Schwab, politely but firmly to go fuck himself. So now China has to be neutralized in the longer term by hopefully getting into a war with the U.S. neither wins but cripples both. How else are you going to attract global capital to the economic wasteland that is modern Europe? I’m not saying this truly insane and megalomaniacal plan will work, I’m just calling it out the way I see it. I’m happy to hear some other version of these events, but this story makes sense because it truly encapsulates the mindset of those who are they are willing to burn the world to the ground rather than lose their status. That’s the real war we’re fighting, not some Great Powers game of the last century which is the last war, the ones politicians and generals are fantastic at preparing us to fight. And we all know how
well that goes. (read
more) TONY BALONEY II The FBI's Strange Anthrax
Investigation Sheds Light on COVID Lab-Leak Theory
and Fauci's Emails
2021-06-04
aMainstream institutions doubted the FBI had solved the 2001 anthrax case. Either way, revelations that emerged about U.S. Government bio-labs have newfound relevance. [...] But what we do know for certain from this anthrax investigation is quite serious. And because it is quite relevant to the current debates over the origins of COVID-19, it is well-worth reviewing. A trove of emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci — who was the government’s top infectious disease specialist during the AIDS pandemic, the anthrax attacks, and the COVID pandemic — was published on Monday by BuzzFeed after they were produced pursuant to a FOIA request. Among other things, they reveal that in February and March of last year — at the time that Fauci and others were dismissing any real possibility that the coronavirus inadvertently escaped from a lab, to the point that the Silicon Valley monopolies Facebook and Google banned any discussion of that theory -- Fauci and his associates and colleagues were privately discussing the possibility that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly as part of a U.S.-funded joint program with the scientists at that lab. Last week, BBC reported that “in recent weeks the controversial claim that the pandemic might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory — once dismissed by many as a fringe conspiracy theory — has been gaining traction.” President Biden ordered an investigation into this lab-leak possibility. And with Democrats now open to this possibility, “Facebook reversed course Thursday and said that it would no longer remove posts that claim the virus is man-made,” reported The Washington Post. Nobody can rationally claim to know the origins of COVID, and that is exactly why — as I explained in an interview on the Rising program this morning — it should be so disturbing that Silicon Valley monopolies and the WHO/Fauci-led scientific community spent a full year pretending to have certainty about that “debunked” theory that they plainly did not possess, to the point where discussions of it were prohibited on social media. What we know — but have largely forgotten — from the anthrax case is now vital to recall. What made the anthrax attacks of 2001 particularly frightening was how sophisticated and deadly the strain was. It was not naturally occurring anthrax. Scientists quickly identified it as the notorious Ames strain, which researchers at the U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick had essentially invented. As PBS’ Frontline program put it in 2011: “in October 2001, Northern Arizona University microbiologist Dr. Paul Keim identified that the anthrax used in the attack letters was the Ames strain, a development he described as ‘chilling’ because that particular strain was developed in U.S. government laboratories.” As Dr. Keim recalled in that Frontline interview about his 2001 analysis of the anthrax strain:
Why was the U.S. government creating exotic and extraordinarily deadly infectious bacterial strains and viruses that, even in small quantities, could kill large numbers of people? The official position of the U.S. Government is that it does not engage in offensive bioweapons research: meaning research designed to create weaponized viruses as weapons of war. The U.S. has signed treaties barring such research. But in the wake of the anthrax attacks — especially once the FBI’s own theory was that the anthrax was sent by a U.S. Army scientist from his stash at Fort Detrick — U.S. officials were forced to acknowledge that they do engage in defensive bioweapons research: meaning research designed to allow the development of vaccines and other defenses in the event that another country unleashes a biological attack. But ultimately, that distinction barely matters. For both offensive and defensive bioweapons research, scientists must create, cultivate, manipulate and store non-natural viruses or infectious bacteria in their labs, whether to study them for weaponization or for vaccines. A fascinating-in-retrospect New Yorker article from March, 2002, featured the suspicions of molecular biologist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who had “strongly implied that the F.B.I. was moving much more slowly in its anthrax investigation than it had any reason to.” Like The New York Times, the magazine (without naming him) detailed her speculation that Dr. Hatfill was the perpetrator (though her theory about his motive — that he wanted to scare people about anthrax in order to increase funding for research — was virtually identical to the FBI’s ultimate accusations about Dr. Ivins’ motives). But the key point that is particularly relevant now is what all of this said about the kind of very dangerous research the U.S. Government, along with other large governments, conducts in bioweapons research labs. Namely, they manufacture and store extremely lethal biological agents that, if they escape from the lab either deliberately or inadvertently, can jeopardize the human species. As the article put it:
Having extensively reported on the FBI’s investigation into the anthrax case and ultimate claim to have solved it, I continue to share all the doubts that were so widely expressed at the time about whether any of that was true. But what we know for certain is that the U.S. government and other governments do conduct research which requires the manufacture of deadly viruses and infectious bacterial strains. Dr. Fauci has acknowledged that the U.S. government indirectly funded research by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into coronaviruses, though he denies that this was for so-called “gain of function” research, whereby naturally occurring viruses are manipulated to make them more transmissible and/or more harmful to humans. We do not know for sure if the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, another lab, or jumped from animals to humans. But what we do know for certain — from the anthrax investigation — is that governments most definitely conduct the sort of research that could produce novel coronaviruses. Dr. Rosenberg, the subject of the 2002 New Yorker article, was suggesting that the F.B.I. was purposely impeding its own investigation because they knew that the anthrax actually came from the U.S. government’s own lab and wanted to prevent exposure of the real bio-research that is done there. We should again ponder why the pervasive mainstream doubts about the F.B.I.’s case against Ivins have been memory-holed. We should also reflect on what we learned about government research into highly lethal viruses and bacterial strains from that still-strange episode. (read more) TONY BALONEY I Fauci's Burden
(with apologies to Rudyard Kipling) Take up the Deep State's burden— No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of germ and reaper grim— The tale of common thugs. The spores ye shall deliver, Vile loads ye shall outspread, Go fake them with your fibbing, And mark them all as dead. 2021-06-03 i ENEMY OF THE STATE DESERVES LETHAL INJECTION Tucker Carlson's devastating
analysis of Fauci emails leads to call for 'criminal
investigation'
As analysts pore through the thousands of pages of Fauci emails released under FOIA, we are getting a better handle on his efforts to prevent exposure of his own role in funding gain of function research in the Wuhan lab where it appears COVID-19 was invented, and from which it leaked. Moreover, the emails expose Fauci's efforts to shape media coverage, his correspondence with billionaires Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and his early acknowledgment that masks are useless in protecting a wearer from infection. So far, nobody has done a better job of putting it all together than Tucker Carlson, who began his Fox News show last night with a long segment on what the emails tell us. His basic thesis is that Fauci feared that the pandemic, which at first looked to be deadlier than it eventually turned out to be, would lead to his being held responsible for evading U.S. restrictions on funding gain of function research, and maybe for the pandemic itself. As a timeline of his words and actions emerges, we are getting a better sense of his responses to the developing situation. Particularly telling was his juxtaposition of Fauci's denial of gain of function research with his emails' reference to it. That "looks a lot like perjury." Referring to redactions of email contents under a law that mentions doing so if it would interfere with criminal investigations, Tucker wonders whether such investigation is underway. If you didn't see the show last night, do yourself a favor and watch at least the first 15 minutes of the show, including the interview with truth-teller Alex Berenson. (read more and watch video) 2021-06-03 h OSSIFIED STATESMEN DISSED AS DINOSAURS The Democrats’ Dinosaur
Problem
 In a more perfect world, politicians not subject to term limits would be, like other perishable goods, stamped with a “sell by” date. An electorally safe county, district, or reliably one-party state may convince some of them that theirs is a sinecure for life, but such self-reverence comes at a cost to the people they represent. As they stick around beyond their usefulness, and simple survival becomes their paramount concern, constituents are left with indifferent advocates, little more than glad handing automatons. They can even sometimes become real obstacles to the maintenance of sensible policy. Their attempts to shore up their waning influence and hold onto their prized perks, only work to crowd out abler aspirants coming off the non-stop assembly line of bright, ambitious office seekers. Lest we be accused of practicing “ageism” (FYI: I’m no spring chicken myself), it’s necessary to add that the condition’s not always solely a function of advancing years. But alas, after stubbornly clinging to office for long periods, politicians -- even relatively younger ones -- develop a warmed-over, cosmetically salvaged look consisting of one part vanity to two parts desperation. Try as they might to appear fresh and earnest as when they first arrived on the scene, with each snooze-inducing congressional hearing or insipid Sunday TV appearance, it is a losing battle. Like songwriters, politicians have a finite number of productive years, after which they’re just taking up space, replaying the old hits, and living off past glories. While this sort of on-the-job ossification commonly afflicts both political parties, it’s become particularly acute in the leadership of the Democrats these days. On the surface, Democrats would appear to be basking in the sunlight. They continue to hold, albeit precariously, both houses of Congress. By hook or by crook -- let’s leave it at that for this writing -- they’ve managed to install their most prominent dinosaur (if you don’t count Hillary Clinton) in the Oval Office. The threat to end the Senate filibuster and its attendant court-packing implications seem to have effectively chased Chief Justice Roberts into some sort of judicial protection program. And the master/servant relationship (you pick which) the Dems have with the great mass of the media has made it possible to posit with a straight face that the elementary requirement of proving one’s identity before performing the most significant task of any responsible free citizen is, in reality, a racist act of voter suppression. While the freshly de-chaired Liz Cheney generously provides needed cover by whining incessantly about 2020 voter fraud being “THE BIG LIE,” Democrats single-mindedly work to federally codify and incorporate unverifiable mail-in ballots and other questionable COVID-inspired ballot security shortcuts into all future elections. So at least in the first quarter of this year, Biden and the Dems appeared to have landed smack on the center of the fairway. The Trump vaccines and the natural immunity of previously infected people seemed to indicate that we are -- at least here in the U.S. -- at the tail end of the COVID-19 crisis. As a result, without undue interference, our economy was poised to strongly rebound. All Joe had to do was sit back and observe the time-honored political tradition of taking full credit for his predecessor’s hard work, and he’d soon be putting for an easy birdie. But no, that wasn’t quite “progressive” enough to suit the powers that be, whoever they truly are. Instead, they present us with their customized version of China’s early ‘60s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, an ideologically-driven economic and political makeover that would re-order American society by bulldozing any institution or convention that stands in its way. So we find that our southern border has effectively disappeared along with the now more critically vital Keystone XL pipeline; out of control inflationary spending is now the starting point of sham negotiations, threatening that aforementioned rebound while paying scant attention to the fact that for ordinary people, food, fuel, and building materials are steadily climbing in price. Have half the country, Biden included, now become avid readers of Das Kapital or The Thoughts of Chairman Mao -- convinced internationalists who no longer recognize national borders nor private property rights? While it’s beyond argument that socialist concepts have gained considerable sway among younger Democrats for years, it does not fully explain the Marxist mainstreaming that’s crept into the Dem caucus these days. Aside from its woeful ignorance of history (blame our schools for that one), there is something else at play, something that’s enabled the radicals to gain traction and considerably eased their path to influence. In addition to their other shortcomings, Democrats have failed as a self-renewing political organism; neglecting to identify and promote a new generation of moderate, responsible leaders. The result is a reasonability gap, filled -- as moral voids tend to be -- by the reflexively unreasonable. They’ve allowed their growing stable of over-the-hill dinosaurs -- the true “bitter clingers” -- to selfishly retain their roles at the head of the party way beyond their productive (fundraising not included) years. Consequently, new and talented personnel have been largely shut out of Dem leadership circles. The high echelon holdovers, self-obsessed and too weak to oppose the radical tide, have left the doors wide open for the bomb throwers. In the House, like exhausted, overwhelmed grandparents of spoiled, unruly children, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and James Clyburn survive the din by indulging the likes of “The Squad” and various other squeaky wheel mediocrities who’ve defaulted their way to prominence in the absence of more promising talent. The Senate Democrats offer nothing better: Charles Schumer, Richard Durbin, and Patty Murray, worn out and bereft of ideas, hope to gain a political second wind by thumbing a ride on the radical “Change America” convoy, cravenly ignoring its soul-killing nonchalance towards violence and intimidation as ready political tools -- an ugly propensity we’re seeing practiced in our decaying cities way too frequently. How revealing it is that Bernie Sanders -- a man who hasn’t entertained a new thought since Stalin planted it -- serves as the party’s ideological guide and guru. And to repeat, there’s no truer example of the political dinosaur species than our recently minted [illegitimate] forty-sixth president. The fossilization of Democrat leadership must serve as a lesson for Republicans. Unlike the Dems, they enjoy an abundance of outstanding young leaders on the local, state, and federal levels. They must be allowed to flourish and assume their rightful positions of authority within the party hierarchy; recognition they’ve earned through hard work, integrity, and competence. As time marches on, dinosaur disengagement will be a recurring issue. Though it may seem callous on its face, regardless of past service, Republicans must see to it that their obstinate over stayers receive a dignified, but timely send-off -- for no better reason than to avoid the extinction towards which traditional, moderate Democrats appear inexorably headed. (read more) 2021-06-03 g JEWISH STATE DISINTEGRATION TAKES BLM TURN Progressive
Jews Delude Themselves
To my Jewish brethren who in their heart of hearts think they are being virtuous, you must understand that the Black Lives Matter movement that so many of you marched for, sent money to, and still support with admiration has at its core the deep desire to annihilate Jews and destroy Israel. Here is the proof. In 2015 at a panel discussion at Harvard Law School, [Only] Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors called for the end of Israel. It does not matter what denomination of Judaism you belong to or if you even believe in G-d but as a thinking being you must begin now to acknowledge that supporting a group that calls for the annihilation of your fellow Jews should go against every fiber of your moral being. There is no distinction between hating a country and seeking to wipe out its inhabitants. Israel is always the target with leftist groups like [Only] Black Lives Matter. In fact, the latest form of Jew hatred is the delegitimization of the Jewish people. It "represents a fundamentally different set of characteristics from prior expressions of hate" and it operates "differently from prior forms of anti-Jewish expression." Historically, the
Anti-Defamation League's 'model of measuring
anti-Semitic attitudes focused on group traits and
individual behaviors. This approach, developed in
the post Second World War era, does not take into
account how as a people and nation-state, Jews
today are being re-defined and demonized.'
The 'global Jew' is being identified as destroying established cultural and religious norms while promoting Jewish influence and control. The other objective, in connection with this new assault, is the delegitimization of the State of Israel. In particular, the left-wing Jew hater is now using "whiteness" as a part of the new Jew hatred -- race being a core belief of Critical Race Theory taught in many schools in the United States. Today’s
anti-Semitism has a different set of
'influencers' as social media provides the key
delivery system of hate messaging. 'Whiteness' and
'Delegitimization' are the new standards by which
Jews and Judaism are being judged. For the
anti-Semite, Israel serves as the collective
embodiment of the 'international' Jew.
These ideas are being constructed and introduced on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Messenger, and various other social media platforms. Zionism is not racist. Hatred of a people and a desire to commit genocide of them is racist. It was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who stated: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism." As alleged People of the Book, far too many Jews have ignored the importance of words. Thus equity seems to mean equality. So progressive Jews argue that rights should be afforded to one group of people but not to another by dint of their race. And they disingenuously deem this the banner of inclusion and equity. Do they not see the illogic, the hypocrisy, the hatred? When you left your kippah at the synagogue, did that mean you abandoned common sense? To paraphrase Hillel, if you are not for yourself first, you are actually not for anybody else. Do you not realize you are being used, in fact, abused as a tool of the Left who simultaneously seeks to wipe you out? You ignore the fact that "in the critical social justice paradigm, Jews, who have never been seen as white for those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil." You who keep watering down Jewish education, have accepted that social justice is the same as tzedakah or true righteousness. They are not. Thus, you allow ignorance of Judaism as well as cult-like acceptance of Critical Race Theory to muddy the waters. You would not be indifferent to the ethical beliefs of business partners, yet you ignore the present administration's anti-Israel staffers -- who publicly show their animus to Jews and the State of Israel. What you probably don't know about 'Joe and the Jews' should truly shock and worry you! You continue to subscribe and read the New York Times despite its massive fabrications about Israel. You send your children to universities that teach the most heinous lies about Israel. Why are you not up in arms that ill-educated students proudly claim to be woke as they send money to terrorists whose goal is to blow up Israeli kindergartens? Why are you not banging on the doors of administrators demanding that your Jewish children be safe at college? Why is American Jewry closing its eyes to the calamitous events that directly impinge on them? Jew hatred attacks are on the rise in the country but too many Jews do not want to investigate the Jew hatred teachings of Islam or acknowledge that the Left has always despised Israel. Instead, they continue to vote Democrat even though there is "the emergence of a new sort of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. The new form of Jew-hatred is a combination of anti-Zionism and identity politics. It is convoluted and hard to follow. But contradictions and all, it has arrived." Consider that "logic is itself seen as a tool of white supremacy, thereby invalidating it as a legitimate way of making a case. Perhaps this is how people who subscribe to critical social justice ideology can be blind to the inherent anti-Semitism within it. They must adopt the doctrine as a belief system rather than doing the critical thinking necessary to work through its internal logic." The upshot is that progressive rabbis will absolve Rev. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, for his Jew hatred language demonizing Israel just after the Trump administration opened the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Moreover, progressive Jews accommodate the Democrats' new Jew hatred as they agree "to redefine Judaism as progressivism and anti-Semitism as everything that isn't progressive. And if Democrats express anti-Semitism, and even build themselves up on the basis of such expressions, as Tlaib and Beinart and Warnock do, then that's a good thing" because that is what progressives do -- they assert their hatred of Jews, Judaism, and Israel. So to be a good progressive Jew, you must despise Israel, denigrate Judaism, and ignore attacks on Jews. Where are the million-people marches to support Israel, to push back on the Jew hatred of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and foes of Israel like Elizabeth Warren, who call for Israel to be banned from obtaining U.S. military aid? Never once is the issue of Palestinian Jew-hatred raised. American Jews, where is your indignation when "no one notices or cares about the blinding Jew-hatred that is at the very core of modern Palestinian national identity? They can only be made in a world where that hatred is the 'elephant in the room' and everyone studiously ignores it, while blaming the consequences of that hatred -- political violence, Israeli counter-terror measures, war -- on the victims of the hatred, the Jews." In fact, "[t]he key to the world's prolonged success in ignoring the Palestinian [hatred of Jews] is the widespread denial that anti-Zionism, and using a double standard to judge Israel, are forms of anti-Semitism. In a world where it is unacceptable to say that the Jews alone among the people of the earth are to be denied self-determination in their ancestral homeland, it would be similarly unacceptable for the Palestinians to define their national identity through their rejection of the Jews and co-opting of Jewish history." Leftist Jews see Israel as a cause of Jew hatred, not a response to it. Where are the Jewish leaders who speak out against the demonization of Jews? When will Jews stop supporting nongovernmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch that lie and claim that Israel is an apartheid state? Nothing could be further from the truth. As George Orwell asserted "During the times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." American Jews need to seek the truth and throw off the cape of left-wing treachery. It will be truly liberating to be freed from the House of Bondage of leftist and progressive ideology. (read more) 2021-06-03 f JEWISH STATE DISINTEGRATION TAKES BOLD TURN (Bye, bye, Bibi - Maybe) Israel’s new Prime
Minister only got 5% of the vote. A fake
conservative,
this weasel sold out his nation by joining islamist & lefty parties sworn to its demise. With Netanyahu gone, I expect Biden to squeeze israel to make dangerous concessions to Islam. Another globalists win! pic.twitter.com/ddjmGiAsn0 — inbal shaky (@InbalShaky) June 3, 2021 2021-06-03 e MENTAL STATE DETERIORATION TAKES CENTER STAGE Joe Biden thinks
January was 15 months ago pic.twitter.com/FcjrWelREC
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 2, 2021 2021-06-03 d PENN STATE DELEGATION TAKES IT'S TURN Pennsylvania
and Arizona Legislators are currently getting a
brief
from the AZ forensic audit team. — AZ Audit War Room (@AuditWarRoom) June 2, 2021 * PA delegation arrives
on floor of AZ Audit. pic.twitter.com/xljwCZb4jP
— Christina Bobb (@christina_bobb) June 2, 2021 2021-06-03 c NANNY STATE TAKES BIZARRE TURN Rep. Bizzarro Seeks to Address
Fireworks Complaints
We're still five weeks away from the Fourth of July, but that's not stopping some people from already setting off fireworks. And if you're one of the many Erie residents frustrated with fireworks going off in your neighborhood, a local state representative is looking to do something about it. State Rep. Ryan Bizzarro (D-Erie) says he has received dozens and dozens of complaints about fireworks going off during all hours of the night. He says the issue really started last year during the pandemic and is only getting worse as we get into another summer season. To combat the issue, Bizzarro recently co-sponsored House Bill 988, which would repeal a 2017 law that made it legal for Pennsylvanians to buy commercial grade fireworks. He told us he wants people to enjoy fireworks, but many simply aren't doing it safely. "I did co-sponsor the bill," said Bizzarro. "Not because I'm trying to be a Debbie Downer, or trying to not let people have the ability to enjoy fireworks, but because of all the complaints we're receiving in my district and throughout Erie County." Bizzarro says if you are adamant about setting off fireworks, try to be a courteous neighbor and remember Pennsylvania state laws says you must stay 150 feet away from any building. (read more) 2021-06-03 b MULTIPLE BRAWLS IN DEEPEST, DARKEST ERIE, PA Waldameer's Owner Responds to
Memorial Day Brawls at Park
What started off as a day for family fun at Waldameer Amusement Park, quickly turned violent after multiple brawls broke out on Memorial Day. According to Millcreek police, half a dozen fights took place on and off from 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Monday. That's nearly three hours of fighting. Police have arrested two teens, one male and one female. Both teens were involved in separate fights and face charges of disorderly conduct. Erie News Now spoke with the owner of Waldameer, Paul Nelson who is disappointed about the incidents and plans to press charges on the suspects. "Grow up. Be part of the community think of others. I don't run my park that way," said Paul Nelson, owner of Waldameer & Water World. This isn't the first time a violent incident happened at Waldameer. Steve Gorman, the President of Waldameer & Water World said in 25 years he has only seen two incidents like this but wants to make sure it never happens again. "We will make some changes, particularly on the days when we expect this kind of activity like the holidays. We will make a plan, and people will learn about it before we open on July 4 for instance," said Steve Gorman, President of Waldameer & Water World. The park management nor police know what caused the brawls. Police are asking those who were injured in the fight to come forward and notify police. (read more ans watch video) See also: 'It's Honestly Disappointing.' Waldameer Owner Plans to Press Charges Following Weekend Fights 2021-06-03 a The horrific death toll from the corona cold virus "vaccines" (actually, experimental gene therapy) is best understood in this context: “The world today has 6.8
billion people…that’s headed up to about 9 billion.
If we do a really great job on vaccines, health
care, reproductive health services, we could lower
that by perhaps 10 to 15 percent.”
— Bill Gates 2021-06-02 i The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) "As of May 28, VAERS contains 4,561 reports of post-Covid jab fatalities." Part One: Exposing the Media’s
Plot to Hide Record Vaccine Deaths and Deceive
Americans
“What is happening now, for whatever reason, is not even close to normal.” That’s what Tucker Carlson claimed, at any rate, prompting outraged denials from the old-guard media and those self-appointed “fact-checkers” who sprung up out of nowhere a few years back, claiming to be the final arbiters of truth. Carlson was referring to the unusually large number of reports of people who’ve died after getting vaccinated for COVID-19 piling up in the CDC’s official database, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). And, if nothing else, we learned that those who control which facts and figures become objects of national obsession — those who most of us will never hear a word about — are hell-bent on keeping the VAERS data firmly in the latter camp. As of May 28, VAERS contains 4,561 reports of post-Covid jab fatalities. That’s liable to not sound like very much if, like virtually everyone, you’ve never heard of VAERS. After all, though most folks have been mesmerized into pretending otherwise about COVID-19 itself, we all know dying with isn’t really the same thing as dying from. Nor is dying after. So, given that around 8,000 Americans ordinarily perish in a single day, what’s so odd about finding 4,500 post-vaccination fatalities in five months during which time half the country got jabbed? The attempts to portray Carlson as a malignant demagogue fomenting unjustified panic about a perfectly harmless but absolutely essential drug all leaned heavily on that point. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake was typical: The fact is that lots
of people have received the vaccine — so many that
plenty were going to die of something in the
months that followed. [Washington
Post]
But the pack of media scoundrels desperately yelling, “Nothing to see here!” are the ones playing fast and loose with the facts. Indeed, they’ve resorted to so much deception to ensure that Carlson’s report gives birth to no wider discussion that their evident zeal to hide this year’s extraordinary increase in adverse event reports — for which the Covid vaccines are entirely responsible — raises even more disturbing questions than the data itself, as troubling as it is. Massive Undercounting of Potential Side Effects VAERS is what’s called a passive surveillance system, meaning that instead of actively searching for potential side-effects, it relies entirely on voluntary reporting. And, though neither Blake nor any of the others determined to stifle discussion mention it, Carlson explicitly noted that it’s been established for over a decade that VAERS’ detection rate is abysmal. A report submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2010 concluded that, quote, “Fewer than one percent of vaccine adverse events are reported by the VAER System.” The report mentioned was the product of a million-dollar grant the Department of Health and Human Services gave some Harvard Medical School researchers to develop a computerized “active” system that would perform better than VAERS and then run randomized trials evaluating both. The researchers don’t say how they arrived at that dismal 1% detection rate. But the data they do present paints an equally bleak picture. From June 2006 through October 2009, they exhaustively searched for potential side effects among the 715,000 patients of Atrius Health, “a large multi-specialty group practice with over 35 facilities.” Every patient
receiving a vaccine was automatically identified,
and for the next 30 days, their health care
diagnostic codes, laboratory tests, and medication
prescriptions were evaluated for values suggestive
of an adverse vaccine event. [AHRQ.Gov]
Around half wound up getting some type of vaccine, and 35,570 potential adverse side effects were identified. Yet for the same period, VAERS recorded only around 73,000 within 30 days of vaccination in the entire country. In other words, in a population 420 times as large, VAERS only managed to capture fewer than twice as many potential vaccine adverse events. Feature or Bug? No one should be surprised by the Harvard team’s findings. A system of voluntary reporting about which hardly anyone even knows is, after all, bound to miss virtually everything. Nor is VAERS obscurity restricted to the general public. A 2013 study by researchers from the CDC itself found that almost 30% of health care professionals had never heard of it. Among those who’d come across a potential vaccine side effect and had, a jarring 83% still failed to file any report. Yet, according to the CDC, VAERS is supposed to be “the nation’s frontline system for monitoring vaccine safety,” raising the obvious question: Why on earth is the CDC still using a passive surveillance system proven completely worthless over a decade ago that anyone could see was bound to massively undercount potential side effects, as nothing has been done to ensure public awareness of such a reporting system in the first place? And, unfortunately, the only answer seems to be that, for whatever dark reason, that’s exactly what the CDC wants. And not just because they’ve made no effort to publicize VAERS and increase the dismal reporting rate among medical professionals nor replaced it with something better. Not only was the Harvard team’s automated system never adopted. They weren’t even able to run the clinical trials comparing its effectiveness to VAERS’ because — after spending three years and a million taxpayer dollars — they found themselves ghosted by the CDC:
Unfortunately, there was never an opportunity to
perform system performance assessments because the
necessary CDC contacts were no longer available
and the CDC consultants responsible for receiving
data were no longer responsive to our multiple
requests to proceed with testing and evaluation.
[AHRQ.Gov]
Truncated Safety Trials Sans Legal Liability Because only six months of safety data is required for FDA approval, a “frontline system” for detecting potential side effects after vaccines go on the market that actually works is important. But with regard to the COVID-19 vaccines, none of which even has FDA approval, the need is orders of magnitude greater. If you’re surprised to hear about that lack of FDA approval, don’t blame yourself. The fact that the vaccine has only received what’s called an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) — like so much else about COVID-19 — is being systematically suppressed. Anthony Fauci even lied on camera (yet again) when asked, “Which of the COVID-19 vaccines have been officially approved by the FDA?” “Three of them,” replied Fauci, naming the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines that, in reality, only have EUAs. Something the odious little man was later forced to admit when the podcast host — who’d actually done his homework — called him out. But you can understand why Fauci thought he could get away with lying given how rarely the media mentions any COVID-19 vaccine regulatory deficiencies. Neither the flagship New York Times nor the Washington Post even bothered doing so in their stories announcing that the first Covid vaccine was going on the market. And though CNN was a rare exception, they made the difference between an EUA and FDA approval sound like some trifling bureaucratic formality: Pfizer would have to
file a separate application for its vaccine to be
fully licensed by the FDA. [CNN]
What they’re not mentioning is all the neglected safety testing which that separate application would need to include. A biologics license application required for FDA approval requires six months of data. But for COVID-19, the EUA requirement was cut down to only two months. Another crucial piece of information being withheld raising the stakes even further. CNBC headlined one of the rare media stories mentioning that you can’t sue Pfizer or Moderna if you have severe Covid vaccine side effects. The government likely won’t compensate you for damages either. Nor will you be able to sue Johnson & Johnson or anyone else lucky enough to wind up in the very lucrative Covid vaccine business. The manufacturers and federal government have so much confidence in that truncated two months of safety testing that the former were granted the same immunity from liability the FDA already has. And, of course, once again, not a finger has been lifted to make sure the American people know that, should anything go wrong, they’ve no one but themselves to legally blame — making the notion of informed consent the cruelest of jokes. Making matters worse, when a vaccine goes on the market with only an EUA, the FDA is required to ensure that anyone taking it knows it’s only been authorized for emergency use, and apprise them of any known risks, as well as to the extent to which risks are unknown. And it’s a bit tough to see how that duty could have possibly been discharged when hardly anyone even knows that the Covid vaccines were only granted an EUA. Or that the reason was the long-term safety testing required for FDA approval wasn’t done. Or that the manufacturers are immune from liability should that or any other deficiency prove tragic. Or, for that matter — as another person the media has tried to silence, Alex Berenson, noted — that in the five months since the first vaccine hit the market, there have already been almost as many reports of post-Covid vaccine deaths than for every other vaccine combined in the database’s entire 30-year history. VAERS now up to 3,486
post-Covid vaccine deaths – almost as many as have
been
reported for every other vaccine combined in the database’s 30-year history. Lucky us, EVERY SINGLE ONE WAS A COINCIDENCE! Phew. I was starting to get worried. pic.twitter.com/tarjDhgO7e — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) April 20, 2021 You see, all those big media outlets and “fact-checkers” claiming it’s irresponsible to bring a mere 4,000 deaths to the public’s attention aren’t just ignoring VAERS’ abysmal detection rate. They’re also lying through misdirection about what those they seek to silence think it’s important that you know. It’s the jaw-dropping increase in COVID-vaccine reports, not the absolute number, that Tucker Carlson, Alex Berenson, and others are getting hammered for trying to alert you about. Here’s a picture that ought to be worth a thousand very disconcerting words.  That’s what the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, PolitiFact, and a host of less influential outlets are trying to tell you isn’t worth noticing. Or rather, that’s what they’re trying to hide from you when they focus solely on the absolute number of post-Covid vaccine death reports without mentioning that there have already been more submitted in just five months than in the previous 27 years for all other vaccines combined. And it’s not because more Covid vaccines were administered than other vaccines. More were jabbed for the flu in just the last season alone. And that’s not even considering all the other 55 available vaccines. It’s unquestionable that Tucker Carlson was right. Something extraordinary is occurring. Anyone denying it would look like an idiot. So they lie about what the issue is instead, then lie some more to tear down the strawman they’ve built. Another tactic they use is to vilify anyone trying to make the real cause of concern public with terms like “far-right extremist.” It’s of course possible that this extraordinary data has some harmless explanation. But it’s also possible it represents a profoundly serious problem. Especially since VAERS’ apparently intentional lousy detection rate means we’ve no clue what the real number of adverse events even is. We won’t have answers until someone takes the time to find them. And the fact that no one in charge seems to give a damn and, indeed, that they sit back in silence as the world’s most influential news outlets flagrantly lie in a desperate effort to stop the public from even learning there’s anything that needs explaining is, as we’ll see, merely the first of many signs that a rushed-to-market deadly vaccine, as bad as that would be, is the least of our worries. (read more) 2021-06-02 h Editor's Note: Yes, species
reassignment surgery is impossible, not to mention
ridiculous.
Gender reassignment surgery (the partisans also call it gender confirmation surgery) is also impossible. However, physicians who forgot, "First, do no harm," perform what is best called, genital mutilation surgery. Biological gender cannot be changed. If you can read this, you were born either XX (female) or XY (male). Those having combinations of three sex chromosomes are generally mentally retarded and unable to read. Real gender dysphoria is a very rare condition. Most calling themselves "trans" are either heterosexual teen or adult males who are sexually aroused wearing women's clothing (the fetish is called autogynephilia) or teen girls seeking attention and validation through the social contagion called, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. “Transgendered men
do not become women, nor do transgendered women
become men. All (including Bruce Jenner) become
feminized men or masculinized women,
counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with
which they ‘identify.’ In that lies their
problematic future.”
— Dr. Paul McHugh, Harvard educated physician and formerly University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine 2021-06-02 g AFTER SPECIES REASSIGNMENT SURGERY, AOC TURNED INTO A FEMALE DOG I don’t know what’s
worse- living in luxury while abandoning your
family
to this squalor (and blaming your political enemies no longer in office), or using it for cheap Twitter likes and that sweet, sweet social media attention. https://t.co/d681QHp90y — Tony Lockard (@TonyLockard) June 2, 2021 * Hi AOC. Many Americans
also cannot make critical, sometimes lifesaving
decisions because you and the rest of the Democrat party tanked our economy. Sorry about your grandma. Maybe you can use part of your $174,000.00 salary to help her? I know that’s what I would do. Good luck! https://t.co/7xf79DuNFx — Ms. Laura (@LtotheL2) June 2, 2021 * Honey, you drive a
Tesla and have two apartments. If your grandmother
is living
poor that’s because you don’t help her out. I’m surprised that a socialist wouldn’t redistribute that wealth to their grandma. Sad! https://t.co/rJVSM2HOWR — Lavern Spicer (@lavern_spicer) June 2, 2021 2021-06-02 f AFTER SPECIES REASSIGNMENT SURGERY, DR. FAUCI TURNED INTO A SKUNK White House staff are
actively discussing an exit strategy for Dr
Anthony Fauci
following the release of his emails yesterday, per WH official — AntifaBook.com (@JackPosobiec) June 2, 2021 * 2021-06-02 e AFTER SPECIES REASSIGNMENT SURGERY, SCIENTISTS TURNED INTO BONOBOS The Half-Monkey Offspring of
an Unworthy Elite
A recent vote on chimera experiments is a timely reminder that neither scientists nor Democrats are minimally fit to rule We have all been reminded innumerable times about the paramount importance of “learning the lessons” of COVID-19, with the frequency and shrillness steadily increasing as the bootheel slowly lifts. Some of it is harmless stuff—wash your hands often with soap and water—though we can, of course, object to the implicit suggestion (victim-blaming?) that anything we might have done could have prevented the catastrophe rained down by a few hubristic (U.S.-funded) bioscience researchers in Wuhan. And yet, in spite of the now un-debunked theory that scientific arrogance lies at the root of the last year’s disaster, the next admonition of the media and the left is inevitably to “trust the scientists” (or “the experts”) with blind, unflinching faith while they dictate the precise ways that your life should be upturned in the name of scientific prudence. Now, I’ll wash my hands, sure. But trust scientists? Why? On my personal scale of trusted classes, scientists rank somewhere between used car salesmen and that guy running three-card monte on the corner of the street. The United States Senate delivered a clear reminder of why we should not trust scientists and their cheerleaders last week, by voting down Sen. Mike Braun’s (R-Ind.) proposed amendment to the tech-booster Endless Frontier Act, which would have banned U.S. taxpayer funding of human chimera experiments—the creation of organisms with both human and non-human animal cells—anywhere in the world. Of the Senate’s 50 Republicans, 48 voted to pass the amendment. Two—Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Thom Tillis (N.C.)—did not vote. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) likewise abstained, while all 49 other Senate Democrats united to kill the proposal. This is the third failed Republican attempt to legislate a federal ban, after the Human Chimera Prohibition Act introduced by Sen. Samuel Brownback (Kan.) in 2005, and the Human-Animal Chimera Prohibition Act of 2016 introduced by Rep. Christopher Smith (N.J.). In introducing this most recent effort, Braun had argued that “human life is distinct and sacred, and research that creates an animal-human hybrid or transfers a human embryo into an animal womb or vice versa should be completely prohibited, and engaging in such unethical experiments should be a crime.” In saner times, this would be entirely uncontroversial. We do not live in sane times. Lab-created chimeras have been an enduring element of cutting-edge bioscience for roughly half a century, and it was only a matter of time before the mingling of rats with mice and sheep with goats gave way to more arrogant, more sinister experimentation. One such endeavor made headlines recently, when a group of scientists led by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte of the Salk Institute published a paper in the journal Cell this April claiming to have successfully produced chimeric human-monkey embryos. The last surviving of the embryos was terminated after 19 days, which the scientists apparently think obviates any potential moral concerns that might have arisen if development had been allowed to continue further. It is, of course, worth noting that the moral assumption that underlies this line of thought—that there is some substantial difference between an embryo at 19 days and that same embryo at 20 days (or at 9 months) that ought to alter the balance of our moral calculations—is both in error and responsible for the worst mass atrocity in the history of mankind. Maybe we should just be grateful that the moral hazards are being acknowledged at all. The question being asked is a familiar one, and heightened attention to it is certainly welcome: What constitutes human personhood? How do we treat something we have created that we cannot see without doubt to be human as we understand it, but that is undeniably human in its genes? The question that really matters, that is, is how human are they? As a Discover magazine write-up put it in mid-May: There’s
currently little consensus on how we should view
animals that have been made more human. Are they
deserving of additional rights? Is there a
definite line between human and non-human in a
chimeric animal? Questions like these remain to be
answered, by both scientists and society at large.
To restate an earlier point: Scientists—certainly the scientists undertaking the experiments in question—are just about the absolute last people to whom I’d present these questions to be answered. We can grant the most noble possible motivations, such as a desire to decrease human suffering through improved medical research, and still see that entering this territory disqualifies them from any pretension to authority in determining social order. The best-case scenario proposed by the science-cheering crowd, in which human organs can be grown inside lab-created chimeras to prolong life contra naturam, is downright dystopian. But even barring the long-term prospect of industrial pig-man organ farms, the fundamental problem of personhood remains an immediate concern. Neither scientists nor science can be trusted to provide answers to a moral conundrum, especially when it has been raised by an unbound faith in science itself. But even traditional moral frameworks may be strained in attempting to address the concerns of our brave new world. The moral status, for instance, of a mouse with human brain cells that shows signs of increased cognitive function is not (as far as I know) a question for which we have an answer. This is uncharted territory that ought to have stayed that way. The mere fact that it has been broached is a damning indictment of the ethos at play here. There are clearly defined limits in nature that circumscribe the bounds of human conduct, and outside of them any action inevitably devolves into barbarity and chaos. As those who claim a right to rule buck up against these limits, the relevant question may well be “how human are they?” after all. A voting majority of the upper chamber of the United States Congress has deemed it fair game to erase the line between human and inhuman. This is no mere question of policy, no procedural quibble to be ironed out in good-faith debate between disagreeing parties. The nature of humanity—in particular what sets us apart from the rest of creation, what makes social life both necessary and worthwhile—is the fundamental question of politics, and without agreement on that no meaningful common ground can be found elsewhere. The left’s stance on where the line of personhood exists in nature was bad enough already, but they have now moved on to dissolving it altogether in the name of scientific progress. When that line gets broken down, little else can be left standing. We might remember that the last time the world had a chimera problem, the solution was Bellerophon with a spear. (read more) 2021-06-02 d AFTER SPECIES REASSIGNMENT SURGERY, SIX FLAGS PATRONS TURNED INTO JACKALS So now we stealing
turkeys legs from #Sixflags
smmfh pic.twitter.com/QNkVoGPOjJ
— TheRealJFella (@TheRealJFella) June 1, 2021 * They’re fighting over
turkey legs at six flags 🦃🍗😂 #Sixflags
pic.twitter.com/iO9jrOj7M7
— Younis Hussein (@Younis_Hussein_) June 1, 2021 2021-06-02 c AFTER SPECIES REASSIGNMENT SURGERY, JUSTICES TURNED INTO WEASELS Unpacked and Undivided: Is The
Court Sending A Message With A Litany Of 9-0
Decisions?
Today the Supreme Court issued two more unanimous decisions in Garland v. Dai and United States v. Cooley. This follow two unanimous decisions last week. The weekly display of unanimity is notable given the calls by Democratic leaders to pack the Court. Yesterday, I wrote about how the heavy-handed campaigns might backfire with the justices. As we await important and likely divided decisions on issues like abortion, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues seem to be sending a message that the Court is not so rigidly ideological as Democratic members and activists suggest. In the Garland case, the court ruled (again) unanimously to reverse the Ninth Circuit in an opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch on the rule in immigration disputes regarding the credibility of noncitizens’ testimony. In Cooley, the Court unanimously ruled in an opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer that a tribal police officer has authority to detain temporarily and to search a non-Native American traveling on a public right-of-way running through a reservation. Last week, there were two unanimous opinions making this six 9-0 rulings in two weeks. Justice Sotomayor wrote the opinion in United States v. Palomar-Santiago, an immigration decision that ruled for the government and against an immigrant. It also ruled unanimously in Territory of Guam v. United States, in an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas. The Court ruled in favor of Guam on the collection of funding from the U.S. government to remediate environmental pollution on the island. This is an extraordinary litany of unanimous decisions and could in part reflect an implied message from the justices that this is a court that is not nearly as rigid and divided as suggested by Democratic members and activists. Recently, Breyer warned against any move to expand the Supreme Court. He also rejected the characterization of the current Court as “conservative” or ideologically rigid. Breyer was swiftly denounced by figures like cable news host Mehdi Hasan who called him “naive” and called for his retirement. Demand Justice, a liberal group calling for court packing, had a billboard truck in Washington the next day in the streets of Washington warning “Breyer, retire. Don’t risk your legacy.” (Demand Justice once employed White House press secretary Jen Psaki as a communications consultant, and Psaki was on the advisory board of one of its voting projects.) Other justices have denounced such court packing schemes. Shortly before she died, Ruth Bader Ginsburg publicly warned against the move: “If anything would make the court look partisan, it would be that—one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’” Nevertheless, Democratic members have continued to call the Court, to use Joe Biden’s words, “out of whack” due to the conservative majority. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and more recently Sen. Richard Blumenthal have warned conservative justices of dire consequences for the Court if they did not rule with their liberal colleagues on high-profile cases expected in the next two weeks. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. not only endorsed the court-packing scheme but went even further to question why we should listen to just nine people on such important questions. She appeared to question the very basis for Marbury v. Madison — the [flawed] case laying the foundation for the Supreme Court in our [judiciary über alles] con[trived] system. AOC challenged the role of the Court in overturning laws. She questioned “just, functionally, the idea that nine people, that a nine person court, can overturn laws that thousand– hundreds and thousands of legislators, advocates and policymakers drew consensus on.” She then added “How much does the current structure benefit us? And I don’t think it does.” The scheduling of these unanimous opinions may be the Court clearing its throat on these campaigns and threats. The litany of unanimous rulings amplifies the fact that most cases are resolved with compromise and different alignments of the justices. There are always “big ticket” cases that produce more ideological divisions but they are the exception rather than the rule for the Court. These are honest ideological differences and we want the justices to be consistent on their underlying principles. However, most of the work of the Court remains less ideologically driven on issues ranging from statutory interpretation to evidentiary rules. There remains a bright-line preventing justices from speaking on political issues or controversies, though this rule is sometimes honored in the breach. However, there are times when the justices speak loudest through their opinions, particularly when they speak with one voice. In these cases, the justices are discussing different subjects but they clearly want the public to see them speaking as one. One court. Unpacked and undivided. (read more) 2021-06-02 b AFTER SPECIES REASSIGNMENT SURGERY, SAN DIEGO COPS TURNED INTO ASSES San Diego Police Department
adopts new rules for interactions with transgender
and nonbinary citizens
Citing a commitment to better meeting the diverse needs of the communities it serves, the San Diego Police Department Tuesday released a new set of policies guiding officer interactions with transgender and gender-nonbinary people. “Historically, many members of our LGBTQ community — particularly those who identify as transgender or nonbinary — have not been recognized or respected for who they are,” Mayor Todd Gloria said in a statement. “That changes with this procedure. This is a much-needed and welcome change that is symbolic of the respect we should have for one another and how we create a San Diego that is truly for all of us.” The rules are designed to create a mutual understanding among community members and police on the procedures that will be followed, to prevent conflict and to ensure appropriate interactions with transgender and gender-nonbinary citizens, according to city officials. “The San Diego Police
Department continually looks at how we can enhance
or add new policies and procedures to better our
police practices and interactions with all
community members,” SDPD Chief David Nisleit said.
“These new guidelines were developed in
coordination with our LGBTQ community and set
clear expectations for interactions between SDPD
officers and transgender and gender-nonbinary
community members.”
Key components of San Diego Police Department Procedure 6.34 require that SDPD personnel: — use visual and verbal cues to become aware of a person’s gender identification, accept it and refer to them by their preferred pronouns; — properly document a person’s gender identity in police reports and share that information on a need-to-know basis with other department members to ensure continuity of treatment in subsequent interactions; — give people who identifies as transgender or nonbinary the choice of the gender of the officer who will perform a search on them and ensure that searches of transgender or gender-nonbinary persons are not more invasive than searches of cisgender people; — follow all department procedures for transporting people who identify as female, including transgender women and the nonbinary, including recording the transport on uniform-worn cameras and notifying a dispatcher of the beginning and ending mileage of the police vehicle used; — book transgender and nonbinary people into a jail facility that aligns with their preferred identity; and — make every reasonable attempt to recover medications for the arrestee and take them to the jail facility with their personal property, as missing medications used as part of a person’s transition can be life- threatening. In 2014, the Police Department issued a training bulletin for officers to follow for interactions with transgender community members. Procedure 6.34 brings that order up to date and expands it to include nonbinary individuals. The new policy “lets our community know the San Diego Police Department understands the needs of our community and the appropriate treatment of all individuals based on their preferred gender identity,” LGBTQ Liaison Officer Christine Garcia said. “As a member of the transgender and LGBTQ community, I strive to work with the community to ensure our police officers can respect and serve our transgender, gender-nonbinary and LGBTQ community.” The new policies follow the recent launch of the SDPD Safe Place Program, which helps San Diegans report suspicious activity and identify businesses that can serve as havens for victims of hate crimes. The program was developed with an initial emphasis on LGBTQ-safe businesses and is in the process of being expanded to businesses serving Asian American and Pacific Islander community members. “There has been outstanding progress and great change when it comes to the San Diego Police Department and our LGBTQ community,” said Julia Legaspi, an LGBTQ community leader and the first transgender woman to be appointed to a San Diego city commission. “That there are now even transgender police officers working to protect our communities speaks volumes about this change.” (read more) 2021-06-02 a “The supreme trick of
mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only
abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in
the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to
resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if
we do not understand that people rarely have the
strength to be uncommon.”
— Eugene Ionesco 2021-06-01 i ACADEMIC WITCH HUNTS (looking for racism where none exists) Cambridge’s plunge into
wokedom
The vice-chancellor seems blind to the damage he is doing to our university’s reputation. Strange days in Cambridge. An innocent observer might suppose that we are in the grip of an epidemic of racist and sexist aggressions so appalling that the university authorities have been obliged to take extreme measures to crush them. The Doge of Venice had the ‘Lion’s Mouth’ letterbox for anonymous denunciations. The vice-chancellor of Cambridge, as the world now knows, set up an online version – a website featuring a list of so-called microaggressions, on which staff and students could report ‘inappropriate’ behaviour. The justification, of course, is that this is to protect students and other victims. Are students really so terrified, the innocent observer might be wondering? They don’t seem so to me, as I get on with teaching this year’s bunch, female, male, and from three ethnic groups. As far as I can tell, they are the usual curious, enthusiastic and friendly people whom it is a privilege to teach. We meet in that mutually respectful but informal atmosphere that I have known for decades. Apart from an excited tweet from one professor stating that ‘White lives don’t matter’, I can’t remember ever having heard a racist statement along the banks of the Cam. But of course, I might be blind and deaf to it all. Racism, so the university’s highest authorities have declared to all its staff, is systemic and omnipresent, like witchcraft in the 17th century, and to deny this – or, like me I suppose, to be oblivious to it – is a sign of guilt. Indeed, so insidious is Cambridge racism that even its victims may be unaware of it until it is ‘validated’ by the official ‘narrative’, aimed at encouraging complaints. The Lion’s Mouth must be fed. One of the best pieces of advice I was given during my first week as a callow undergraduate was that ‘academics are good with books, not people’. Academics and students are not always socially skilled, and if they are to be hauled over the coals for any unintended social solecism that can be presented as (possibly) racist or sexist, the impact may be considerable. At the very least, the vice-chancellor’s remedy – which encourages people to feel victimised even if they didn’t before – is vastly worse than the disease. It will lead to ill feeling, mutual suspicion (including between students from different ethnic groups) and even to a few personal tragedies. It risks blighting the system of informal small-group tuition that students repeatedly say is what they find most valuable in the Cambridge system: who, student or teacher, would be brave enough to say anything controversial? Moreover, all this is unnecessary. Students’ welfare and grievances are mostly dealt with by their colleges, where problems can be dealt with quickly and without undue fuss. Isn’t that what sensible university authorities would want? But perhaps more important than common sense is cultivating a woke public image. So to help us all to root out witchcraft – sorry, systemic racism – the university has appointed two ‘champions’. One might have thought that a suitable candidate would be, let us say, an experienced tutor who had spent years helping and understanding Cambridge students. Better still, one of Cambridge’s academic stars from an ethnic minority who had come through the British school system and knew the university and its foibles from the inside. Nothing so banal. In its infinite wisdom, the university appointed a specialist on racism in Mexico and a business strategist. Who better to uncover the systemic racism that less expert eyes might not have noticed at all? Everything the university authorities have done in this area in recent months has shown mistrust of those who work in it. The vice-chancellor and his aides must – or so I hope – be unaware of how insulting their pronouncements are. The best outcome would be that this latest piece of impertinence will simply be ignored by the generally sensible and civilised members of the university, both junior and senior. But it only takes a tiny minority of the highly sensitive or the ideologically charged to do a good deal of damage with anonymous denunciations of the sort the vice-chancellor is encouraging. Free speech is not something that seems to enthuse those presently running the university administration. Perry Anderson recently remarked amusingly in the New Left Review that ‘at Cambridge, the vice-chancellor’s office censored unwelcome opinion with stone-walling worthy of the Writers’ Union under Brezhnev’. The vice-chancellor has now told us with a straight face that some of the examples published as sufficient cause for anonymous denunciation (‘raised eyebrows’ etc) were posted in error. Who is to blame for this latest discreditable debacle? Many think that it is the vice-chancellor himself, Professor Stephen Toope. Or is it his pro-vice-chancellor for institutional and international relations, Professor Eilís Ferran, under whose name the now notorious policy was promulgated? Or some anonymous bureaucrat eager to foster a ‘woke’ image? Do they really think that the best students and scholars from around the world will flock to the university that they are creating? Is anyone, I wonder, ‘considering their position’ following the terrible damage done to Cambridge’s reputation? Fortunately, the university as a community of scholars still retains, and occasionally uses, its rights of self-government. Perhaps it is time to give the powers that be another sharp rap over the knuckles, as was done when the Regent House recently voted to require them to liberalise their free speech policy. After the university bureaucracy had delayed and resisted this change, the vice-chancellor – to the surprise of many – professed himself delighted with it. A respected former senior proctor has commented that: ‘It is high time the proctors informed the vice-chancellor that they are the officers responsible for discipline in the university, not him, and that ordinances are the place for rules, which must be approved by grace of the Regent House’ – that is to say, by university legislation passed by a vote. We can but hope. (read more) 2021-06-01 h THE FEAR FACTORY "Be afraid. Be very afraid." The manufacturing of fear
The media have terrorised the public during the pandemic. That
is how the media approached Covid. Be afraid of
everything, from ice cream to semen. Be afraid of being tall. Be afraid of being bald. Be afraid of going to
the shops and accepting home deliveries. And if you’re a man,
it’s not just semen you should worry about, but also
your testicles, your erectile function and your fertility. Even your toes are in danger.
The media have served us a cornucopia of frightening articles and news items about Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021. While writing my new book, A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I encountered a panoply of doom-mongering headlines. These were an indication of the significant role the media have played in creating our state of fear. Of course, news media should not shy away from
reporting frightening news during a pandemic. They
should make us aware of the numbers of deaths, the
policies being implemented to tackle the pandemic and
the latest scientific developments. But during Covid,
the media went beyond reporting on the pandemic.
Instead, they appeared beholden to the old commercial
imperatives, ‘If it scares, it airs’, and ‘If it
bleeds, it leads’. It seems fear does sell. The anxious, frightened climate this has helped to create has been suffocating. Death tolls were constantly brandished without the context of how many people die every day in the UK, and hospital admissions were reported while recoveries were not. As a result, Covid often appeared as a death sentence, an illness you did not recover from – even though it was known from the outset that Covid was a mild illness for the majority of people. Given the wall-to-wall doom, it is therefore no surprise that the British were one of the most frightened populations in the world. Various studies showed that we were more concerned than other countries about the spread of Covid and less confident in the ability of our government to deal with it. One survey in July 2020 showed that the British public thought between six and seven per cent of the population had died from Covid – which was around 100 times the actual death rate at the time. Indeed, if six or seven per cent of Brits had died from Covid, that would have amounted to about 4,500,000 bodies – we’d have noticed, don’t you think? While researching A State of Fear, I interviewed members of the general public about how they were impacted by the ‘campaign of fear’ during the epidemic. Many talked of how the media had elevated their alarm. ‘There wasn’t much to do’, Darren told me, ‘so we’d watch TV and we saw programmes about disinfecting your shopping when it arrives, and having a safezone in the kitchen. The nightly bulletins on the TV about death tolls, the big graphs with huge spikes on them, came at us “boom, boom, boom!”. It was a constant barrage of doom and gloom. My fear of the virus went through the roof.’ Sarah told me she had to stop watching the BBC. As her daughter put it, ‘If you just watched or listened to the BBC every day, what hope would you have had?’. Jane, meanwhile, described the ‘gruesome headlines’ that came at her ‘thick and fast’. The fearmongering about Covid began even before the pandemic hit the UK. We were primed by videos from Wuhan in China, which were then widely circulated by UK-based media outlets. These painted an apocalyptic picture, featuring collapsed citizens, medics in Hazmat suits, concerned bystanders and a city grinding to a halt. In one memorable video, which went viral, so to speak, a woman fell, stiff as a board, flat on her face, on a pavement. The split second where she falters is a giveaway – this was a set-up. If the rest of the world had Covid, China had ‘Stunt Covid’. These videos were carried by and reported on by major UK newspapers online without their authenticity being verified. Headlines referred to ‘zombies’, a ‘killer bug’ and the ‘apocalypse’. Over and over again, reports and commentaries described these Chinese Covid videos as ‘disturbing’. The coverage was saturated by horror-film and ‘end of days’ references. A Sun headline ‘Zombieland’ travelled with the speed of a virulent sneeze through the copycat global media. The media have a responsibility to inform us. But they also have a responsibility to be balanced. That didn’t happen when Covid first emerged in China. And it didn’t happen when it hit the UK. Instead, we were treated to contextless coverage of daily death tolls. Add this to the ghoulish headlines and the scary graphs, and the media had left us adrift in a monoculture of fear. Some of the people I interviewed told me about the considerable negative effect this coverage had on their perception of the world, not to mention their mental wellbeing. The media should serve the public. But over the past year, they have been terrorising us. Newspapers, news shows and so on owe their readers and viewers the best available version of the truth. Something that can be ascertained by careful questioning. So what has gone wrong? Journalists are human, of course, and subject to the same worries as the rest of us. We are all made of the same psychological stuff. Perhaps their own fears clouded their judgement and reporting. Maybe they did not have time, in the teeth of the crisis, to investigate every image and video supplied by the picture desk with the requisite thoroughness, or to provide the Covid data with the necessary context. But alongside journalists’ own fears and their lack of time, there are other factors that might explain the widespread media fearmongering. One of which is the financial incentive to be as sensationalist as possible. As one broadsheet comment writer put it to me, when I asked him why newspapers used so many doom-laden headlines: ‘Narcissism and greed drive this.’ He went on: ‘Pay rises are linked to the top-performing articles. The journalists who get the highest views for articles and the most subscriptions generated for the paper get the biggest pay rises. So you want your stories to get the most views.’ Compensating writers for clicks might not lead to the most balanced news reporting. A pro-lockdown mediaThe No10 press briefings were often characterised by bland and unchallenging questions from journalists, such as ‘When will the epidemic be over?’. Little wonder that when the Press Gazette ran a poll asking, ‘Do you think journalists have done a good job of holding the government to account during the daily UK Covid-19 press briefings?’, 70 per cent answered ‘No’. In general, mainstream journalists approached
the epidemic as if the lockdown was the only correct
response. They didn’t investigate and interrogate the
idea of lockdown in general. When journalists did
challenge the government, almost performing the role
of the unelected opposition, they didn’t challenge the
lockdown orthodoxy, or the safetyism that underpins
it. They merely urged the government to go further,
and lock down sooner and harder. Close businesses?
What about closing schools? Tier Three? Why not Tier
Four? It was as if journalists had come to see
themselves as political activists whose job it was to
hold prime minister Boris Johnson to account for not
being sufficiently pro-lockdown. Some have even
attempted to turn the pandemic into a simplistic
morality play, with Covid deaths held up as proof of
the evil Tories’ failure to lock down soon enough. By and large, journalists have shied away from asking more challenging questions of the response to the pandemic. This may be because of the proximity of mass media to political and economic power, as Noam Chomsky has it in Manufacturing Consent. As well as editor and proprietor bias, journalists might feel pressured to maintain good relationships with press officers who, in return, will release privileged information to them, often late in the day. And then there’s the fact that the government and Public Health England became two of the biggest advertisers in the UK. Did the media dare to bite the hand that fed them? In addition to proprietor bias, the influence of advertising revenue, the lure of the clickbait headline and the journalist’s own tendency to feel the fear and allow that to influence reporting, another worrying factor affected media coverage of the epidemic — state pressure. On 23 March 2020, Ofcom, the UK’s communication regulator, issued strict guidance about Covid coverage. It asked broadcasters to be alert to ‘health claims related to the virus which may be harmful; medical advice which may be harmful; accuracy or material misleadingness in programmes in relation to the virus or public policy regarding it’. This will have inhibited any media outlets thinking of pursuing any stories that ran counter to government advice. It was hardly a surprise to find that a Dutch study on our fear of Covid had concluded that our exposure to media increased our fear. ‘Stronger messages in the media may induce more fear and therefore more compliance with the social distancing and lockdown policies imposed’, it stated. ‘However, we caution against using media messages to induce more fear in the general public… as this may only increase distress. Furthermore, a substantial proportion of respondents in our sample were concerned about the role of (social) media, mass panic and hysteria. Hence, fear-appeals in the media should be used carefully.’ This is not advice the UK government and its advisers have heeded. The media have actively induced fear, and therefore prompted more compliance with lockdown measures. But not only did the Fourth Estate help to shape citizens’ behaviour during lockdown, it is also now impeding our exit from lockdown. Dangerous times aheadEven though the vaccine rollout is proving a success, the media are still fearmongering about Covid. The language in headlines and articles continues to play up the risks and threats on the horizon. As Bloomberg had it recently, ‘We must start planning for a permanent pandemic – with coronavirus mutations pitted against vaccinations in a global arms race, we may never go back to normal’. And those who do not conform to the safety-first orthodoxy continue to be demonised. It feels as if dangerous times are ahead. In Israel, for instance, Haaretz described ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not follow the state’s rules as ‘Covid insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’. In a particularly hyperbolic description, ‘maskless individuals’ were accused of setting off ‘epidemiological time bombs’. Once we feared bombs that might be dropped on us following the pressing of a red button in a faraway country. Then we feared bombs strapped to terrorists. Now human beings are bombs. Back in the UK, media coverage of Covid has taken a similarly bio-political turn. People are being conjured up as threats, indeed biohazards. A recent Times headline – ‘Hunt for mystery person who tested positive for Brazilian Covid-19 variant, then vanished’ – evoked an image of a hunt for a person carrying a new Covid variant as if it was a weapon. As Nick Cohen wrote in the Guardian, ‘It is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated’. History reverberates with examples of deliberate attempts to dehumanise and divide people and it has never ended well. It is a worrying development. Let us observe how we report on events in our time and consciously choose to write a better story. There is much talk right now of the forthcoming inquiry into the handling of Covid. While there should be a great deal of focus on the government and the state, it might be wise to consider the role of the media, too. Something seems to have gone seriously awry. Bad news has had too many wings. The media have not been dispassionately reporting on the pandemic – they have been making fear fly. Perhaps in the future, the media need new imperatives: if it leads, let it be vigorously fact-checked; and if it airs, let the sources be verified. And please, don’t try to make us afraid. (read more) 2021-06-01 gDIVERSITY IN DEEPEST, DARKEST FORT MYERS BEACH BREAKING: A brand new
look at a shooting on Fort Myers Beach.
Crime scene tape is still up on the sand tonight. No one was hurt. @AndryannaTV talked with a witness. What they saw and heard at 10 and 11. — Rebecca Ollier (@BeccaOllier) May 31, 2021 2021-06-01 f WATCH OUT FOR SOY BOYS Long-term Soy Consumption
Makes Monkeys Aggressive Loners: Shocking Study with
Possible Human Implications, 2021
If long-term consumption of soy isoflavones can make monkeys into aggressive loners, as a 2004 scientific study suggests, what about humans? Soybean oil is the most widely consumed oil in the United States and is a ubiquitous part of processed foods. A few days ago we reported on a shocking recent study which showed that soybean oil caused serious genetic dysfunction in mice, leading to weight gain and serious neurological problems. These results should be cause for alarm for one simple reason: soybean oil is the most widely consumed oil in the United States. Indeed, there has been a 100-fold increase in soybean oil consumption during the 20th century. Soybean oil is everywhere, especially in the processed foods which make up a significant portion, even a majority, of the diets of most people in America and much of the rest of the developed world (see for instance this study from Brazil). It is becoming increasingly clear that
vegetable oils in general, including soybean oil, are
seriously bad not just for mice but people too.
Recently we dubbed vegetable oil ‘one
of the worst things you can eat’, and also included vegetable-oil-laden
processed food as one of the main foods that make
you ugly.
Processed food has been under intense scrutiny, as a
result of a new documentary that aired on the BBC last
week. For
a period of a month, a British doctor conducted a
self-experiment by eating a diet composed of 80%
processed food, a diet consumed by as much as
two-thirds of the adult population in the UK. The fruits of the
doctor’s televised experiment included serious
weight gain, piles (hemorrhoids), anxiety,
sleeplessness, loss of libido and, most shockingly
of all, changes to the structure of his brain
considered to be typical of drug addicts. Weeks
after the experiment ended, scans revealed that the
neurological changes had not been reversed. The
doctor is now quite literally hard-wired to want to
eat processed food.
In light of this focus on not just the physical but the mental and emotional effects of consuming vegetable-oil laden processed food, one aspect of the soybean oil study that has generated discussion in recent weeks is the finding that soybean oil consumption caused dysregulation of the mice’s oxytocin system. Only some of the implications of this were discussed in the study, leaving readers to enlarge upon them. As well as being involved in the regulation of weight gain, oxytocin also has an important role to play in the expression of empathy and social bonding. (read more) 2021-06-01 e COVID CLOSURES WERE BAD FOR GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS (Teachers' unions shot themselves in both feet.) Homeschooling Skyrocketed In
2020, As Much As 700 Percent In Some States
Since public schools are spectacularly successful leftist recruitment centers, weakening public attachment to them through lockdowns was a dangerous move for Democrats. Between May and October 2020, homeschooling more than doubled among U.S. households with school-age children, from 5.4 percent that spring to 11.1 percent that fall, according to new Census Bureau data. Black and Hispanic Americans were the most likely to switch to homeschooling, while white and Asian Americans were the least likely. This could be due to the fact that African-American children are the most likely to be financially locked into poor-quality school districts, or that black Americans have been the most likely to exhibit COVID caution, or some combination. All demographics reported large increases in homeschooling between spring and fall 2020, but black Americans increased homeschooling the most, quintupling from 3.3. percent to 16.1 percent. The data show wide differences among states in the 2020 homeschooling surge. Families in Alaska showed the largest homeschooling increase, from 9.6 percent to 27. 5 percent, a 17-point jump. Florida went from 5 percent to 18 percent homeschoolers, and Vermont went from 4 percent to 17 percent homeschoolers, in the second- and third-largest homeschooling jumps by states in 2020, respectively. Other states that saw 10 percent or more increases in homeschooling were: Massachusetts (from 1.5 to 12.1 percent), Mississippi (from 3 to 14 percent), Montana (from 8 to 18 percent), Nevada (from 2.5 to 13.1 percent), Oklahoma (from 7.7 to 20 percent), Vermont (from 4 to 17 percent), and West Virginia (from 5.4 to 16.6 percent). Homeschooling in New York increased seven-fold, from 1.2 to 10.1 percent, quadrupled in Kansas, tripled in Connecticut and North Dakota, and more than doubled in Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Wisconsin. It seems pretty clear that their experiences governors and local governments constantly changing the rules and expectations in spring 2020, plenty of parents decided they were not going through that insanity again in the fall. Even when schools did open in person, would you send your child to a place that looks like this photo from a February 2021 Wall Street Journal story about Chicago schools? It looks like some kind of a dystopian novel. Or a prison. Researcher Nicholas Zill points out that, while homeschooling has been gradually increasing over time in the United States, the 2020 jump is “unprecedented.” Here’s his chart. (graphic) Since lockdowns and the great school unsettling began, however, Congress has been showering deficit-funded billions on public schools that were largely closed to in-person instruction and hemorrhaging students. “Congress has included more than $192 billion for K-12 schools — roughly six times the amount of the fiscal year 2021 base federal funding — in the three big Covid relief bills passed since last March,” notes a recent CNN story. “Each piece of legislation sent more money to K-12 schools than the last.” While Congress sends more money to support institutions that have horribly mismanaged their response to the COVID outbreak, public support has grown for instead giving parents more control and flexibility over education spending instead of relegating families to one-size-fits-nobody institutions. One April poll found among its highest support ever for school choice via parental control of education tax dollars, at 71 percent of respondents. A different poll that has measured public opinion on schooling monthly since the beginning of the lockdowns shows similarly high support for parent-directed education in its latest results. The latter poll, from the organization EdChoice, also found 64 percent of respondents saying their opinion of homeschooling has become more positive “as a result of the coronavirus,” with just 21 percent saying COVID has made them less positive about homeschooling. A question ripe for speculation is whether the dramatic increase in homeschooling will continue or fade with the pandemic. It’s impossible to foretell, of course, but important to note that dissatisfaction with public schooling has grown along with homeschooling over the past several decades, and current conditions suggest that dissatisfaction will only grow. For example, the critical race curriculum battles are reaching even into conservative communities. Zill also points out that many of the underlying reasons parents traditionally homeschool are only increasing: lack of moral instruction and presence of a negative peer environment in public schools, as well as the availability of one parent at home. A Gallup poll this February found that 20 percent of parents had either quit a job or reduced their hours to help their kids with online schooling, and mothers who quit or were laid off during COVID lockdowns are still largely not back in the workforce. In addition, there is evidence that once parents switch from government to private education, they typically like it much better. Parents who privately direct their children’s education, either in a private school or through homeschooling, report massively higher satisfaction with that education than do public-school parents. Here are two examples of that from the latest EdChoice poll, and it’s a consistent finding across surveys: (graphics) Realities like this are why the anti-scientific school shutdowns Democrats pushed at the behest of their union donors may come back to bite their behinds. Since public schools are spectacularly successful leftist recruitment centers, weakening public attachment to them through lockdowns was a dangerous move for Democrats. In short, their hubris has raised a nemesis. As I wrote last summer, when two-thirds of Americans supported sending kids back to school in person yet most were denied that opportunity thanks to Democrats’ stranglehold on schools: Once this exodus
starts, it will be hard to stop. Parents have for
years told
pollsters that private education is their
top choice, not public education. They haven’t
left yet because it hasn’t gotten bad enough.
Long-term coronavirus schooling is easily a
tipping point towards ‘bad enough to finally
leave.’ It will likely create a cascade effect of
long-term parental divestment from public
schooling.
Sure, some parents who
homeschooled over COVID will return to public schools.
But the fact that one in ten American
parents — three times as many as before — now have a
largely positive experience with homeschooling will
have network effects.The past two years of politically disrupted education make public schooling less default. It is no longer the automatic conveyor belt leftists need it to be. And they’re doing even more offensive and extremist things that will further sabotage their mind control factories. In addition, the higher education bubble has quietly burst amid the lockdown abuse of college-age Americans, as well. Millions of young people put off college over lockdowns, and millions who stayed were treated like inmates while paying dearly for the abuse. Nearly half of parents now want alternative pathways into adult life that aren’t a four-year degree. That’s a significant shift away from the hardened previous preference for “everyone going to college.” These are cracks in a big dam. But they are significant cracks. And it doesn’t take many to open the way for a flood. (read more) 2021-06-01 d DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS (Transplants might not californicate the Lone Star State.) New Poll Finds All Those
People Moving To Texas Aren’t Going To Be Voting For
Democrats
It’s not just high-profile movers like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. They’re joined by about three-quarters of a million people a year. It is no secret that pro-growth policies — low taxes and a light regulatory burden — have propelled population growth in Texas and Florida while the opposite has occurred in California, Illinois, and New York. Elected officials’ response to COVID-19 likely accelerated this trend in 2020, with Florida and Texas netting more than half of the nation’s 1.15 million population increase from mid-2019 to mid-2020. Each state has its own migration patterns, and these shift constantly in response to conditions and economic opportunities. The advent of reliable and affordable air conditioning, for example, opened the South to migrants from the North who sought to escape harsh winters. This is especially seen in the constant flow of retirees from New York and surrounding states to Florida and from the northern Midwest to Arizona. Also, states such as California and New York that have consistently lost population to other states have often more than made up for the loss through international immigration. When population growth in a state occurs through people moving, it generates fear from natives and established residents that the newcomers will bring their voting habits with them, turning their thriving new red state homes into the failed blue states they abandoned. It’s a popular narrative. In Texas’s case, polling says it’s wrong. But you can’t blame the old-timers for being concerned. It’s not just high-profile movers like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. They’re joined by about three-quarters of a million people a year. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between mid-2015 to mid-2019, 3.8 million people moved to Texas. Of these, 2.7 million moved in from other states and 1.1 million moved to Texas from Puerto Rico or foreign nations — 13 percent of Texas’s population of 29 million people in only half a decade. Indeed, about 40 percent of Texans weren’t born in Texas, a testament to America’s continued, though slowing, mobility. On the other side of the ledger, almost 2.3 million Texans moved out of state in the same period. This resulted in a net inbound domestic migration of 461,000. Of note, compared to the 1.1 million immigrants from overseas, net domestic migration represented only 30 percent of the overall population gain Texas gained from migration. At the gross level, 71 percent of the new movers to Texas over the past five years are from domestic migration. It has long been a fear of conservative-minded Texans — and a hope of left-wing urban Texans — that new arrivals would tip the Lone Star State’s political balance speculation. This has fueled polling on the question. In 2013, the Texas Tribune and UT Austin conducted a poll surveying the political orientation of California expats. The California arrivals were 57 percent conservative compared to 27 percent liberal. “OK,” one might expect Texans to respond skeptically, “But what about the others?” In a 2018 exit poll in the hard-fought U.S. Senate race between Sen. Ted Cruz (who had moved to Texas) and then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke (a Texas native), natives preferred O’Rourke by plus-3 points whereas movers favored Cruz by plus 15. Cruz won the race by 2.6 percent, meaning that if it were up to people who were Texans by birth, Cruz would have lost reelection. So, who are these new Texans? Over the past five years, 29 percent of the 3.8 million new arrivals are from overseas, although few, other than about 15,000 annually from Puerto Rico or other U.S. island territories, are eligible to vote immediately. Some 14 percent of the new arrivals come from the South Atlantic Seaboard region stretching from Washington, D.C. to Florida, with 13 percent hailing from the Pacific region, of which almost 10 percent are former Californians — the largest single state contingent. The Texas Public Policy Foundation has conducted two polls of registered voters to test attitudes between natives and non-natives. Its January 2020 poll of 800 registered voters found native Texans supported President Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 7-point margin compared to transplants, who supported Trump by a 12-point margin. From February to May 2021, TPPF partnered with polling firm WPA Intelligence, asking 3,228 Texas voters if they were born in Texas or moved here and, if they moved to Texas, from where did they move? TPPF polled 1,284 (40 percent) people who moved to Texas and 1,944 (60 percent) who were born in Texas. This ratio reflects the composition of Texas voters who are natives versus non-natives. TPPF’s polling found there was no statistical difference in voter preferences for either former President Trump or President Joe Biden in the 2020 election among natives versus non-natives. In both samples, support for the two candidates was balanced, with neither seeing an advantage. In the 2020 election, Trump received 52 percent of the vote while Biden received 46 percent, so TPPF’s polling sample slightly overrepresented Biden supporters while underrepresenting Trump supporters. When looking at where the movers to Texas came from, patterns emerge. Movers from other states were about 1 percent more likely to have voted for Trump than were natives, while movers from overseas favored Biden by 9 percent over natives. Among domestic migrants to Texas, Trump was most heavily favored by arrivals from the Mountain West, where Trump enjoyed a plus 13-point margin over the support of native Texans followed by the four-state region of Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee with a plus-8 advantage. Counterintuitively — at least among Texans with an opinion — the area with the third-highest support for Trump among movers was California, where movers were 5 percent more likely to have supported Trump than were natives. The region that sent the greatest share of Biden supporters was the South Atlantic Seaboard region, where movers favored Biden over Trump by 9 points more than did natives — the same margin as Biden was favored among voters who were born in another country. While naturalized Texans preferred Biden in 2020 compared to domestic movers, they were almost as conservative (42 percent to 44 percent), less liberal (14 percent to 18 percent), and far more moderate (45 percent to 37 percent), signaling that overseas immigrants to Texas are up for grabs politically and are likely taking a dim view of the modern left’s full-embrace of all things woke. There are two takeaways from this data for Texas. First, because America is unlikely to adopt internal passports (vaccine passports aside), people are free to move about the nation. Thus, the only way Texas could make itself an unattractive place to move would be to adopt California’s model of high taxes and heavy regulations. Second, moving takes a lot of effort and is usually the consequence of big personal decisions. People moving to Texas have their own reasons for doing so shaped by their own attitudes and, as a result, don’t necessarily reflect the prevailing cultural and political mores of the place they left behind. Ultimately, the battle for the political future of Texas has just begun. (read more) 2021-06-01 c DISINFORMATION, INFORMATION OR MISINFORMATION? New York Times propagandist Maggie Haberman tweeted: Trump has been telling
a number of people he’s in contact with that he
expects
he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information). https://t.co/kaXSXKnpF0 — Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 1, 2021 2021-06-01 b ARIZONA AUDIT Great election audit
news! We surpassed counting 50% of the Maricopa
ballots last week.
The audit continues! — Maricopa Arizona Audit (@ArizonaAudit) May 31, 2021 * Update: The third
shift of the Maricopa election audit starts on
June 1st.
Thank you to our AZ volunteers! — Maricopa Arizona Audit (@ArizonaAudit) May 31, 2021 2021-06-01 a “The state is a human
institution, not a superhuman being. He who says
‘state’ means coercion and compulsion. He who says:
There should be a law concerning this matter, means:
The armed men of the government should force people
to do what they do not want to do, or not to do what
they like. He who says: This law should be better
enforced, means: The police should force people to
obey this law. He who says: The state is God,
deifies arms and prisons. The worship of the state
is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous
menace to civilization than a government of
incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils
which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by
bad governments. The state can be and has often been
in the course of history the main source of mischief
and disaster.”
— Ludwig von Mises ______________________ Permission is hereby granted to any and all to copy and paste any entry on this page and convey it electronically along with its URL, http://www.usaapay.com/comm.html ______________________ 2021 ARCHIVE
2020 ARCHIVE
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News and facts for
those sick and tired of the National Propaganda Radio
version of reality.
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