Signs outside every physical polling place forbid electioneering. Each state has some form of restriction on political activities near polling locations when voting is taking place. These restrictions are usually on the display of signs, handing out campaign literature, attempting to influence voters, or soliciting votes within a predetermined distance (typically 50 to 200 feet) of a polling place. A list of the specific electioneering prohibitions adopted by each state can be found here.
Opposition to electioneering is the main reason election integrity advocates oppose allowing political activists to provide food and water to voters waiting in line at polling places. What has been portrayed as a measure to starve and dehydrate suffering voters is really a commonsense prohibition against electioneering. Allowing such practices would allow anybody with a few water bottles or a bag of sandwiches an opportunity to harangue, harass, or otherwise intimidate voters who are waiting in line to cast their ballots.
But nobody has yet come to terms with a new type of electioneering that goes hand in hand with universal absentee voting. We call it “remote electioneering” and define it as an attempt to influence or solicit votes among absentee voters between the time they receive their absentee ballot and the time they submit it to their election office. Obviously, the opportunities for what in normal circumstances would qualify as illegal electioneering multiply considerably with absentee voting, since there is no way of knowing the extent to which partisan activists attempt to influence the behavior of absentee voters.
CTCL’s Goal Was to Influence Absentee Voters
But we have a glimpse of the attitudes of Democrat election activists toward electioneering with absentee ballots through Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) documents, which outline the actions that the major recipients of their Covid-19 Response Grant Program would have to fulfill as conditions of keeping their grant money. By the admission of the activist election officials in Wisconsin who were funded by CTCL in 2020, absentee ballot electioneering was one of their major goals. Grant recipients were required to “Encourage and Increase Absentee Voting (By Mail and Early, In-Person),” mainly through providing “assistance” in their completion and the installation of ballot drop boxes. They were also to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents” in states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which in 2020 were flooded with no-excuse absentee ballots for the first time ever.
We know that absentee ballot electioneering occurred in areas in these states where CTCL had a substantial presence because it was part and parcel of CTCL’s requirement that absentee voting be promoted, assisted, and increased. Ongoing contact between activist election officials and millions of new absentee voters was not only encouraged in areas that received big CTCL money, it was required.
Wisconsin Illustrates Extravagant Plans
The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan, which served as the basic template for CTCL’s nationwide efforts during the 2020 election, provides documentation of their extravagant plans to use key election offices to electioneer the absentee vote that they were so intent on promoting.
Election officials in Wisconsin who were “on the street” had enough contact with voters to bemoan the fact that “countless [individuals]” in their municipalities attempted to submit cell phone “selfies” as valid photo ID. Explaining to them that this was not a valid form of photo ID and instructing them on how to properly submit valid ID reportedly “took considerable staff time and resources.”
If election officials had such knowledge, they must have had extensive contact with such low-information absentee voters while they were in the process of completing and submitting their ballots. If this were at the polling booth, it would qualify as illegal electioneering because election officials had “extensive contact” with in-person voters who were completing and submitting their ballots.
A great deal of concern was expressed about “Voters who, understandably, were completely confused about the timeline and rules for voting in the midst of a pandemic and required considerable public outreach and individual hand-holding to ensure their right to vote.” Figuratively “holding someone’s hand” as they cast a vote — whether absentee or in person — seems to be the very definition of electioneering.
The city of Green Bay planned to spend $45,000 to employ bilingual “voter navigators” to help residents properly upload valid photo ID, complete their ballots, comply with certification requirements, and offer witness signatures. But it would be illegal for poll workers to help voters complete their ballots when voting in person. Why should it not be illegal for partisan activists to help people complete their absentee ballots?
The city of Racine wished to create a corps of “vote ambassadors.” Racine officials said they would recruit, train, and employ such paid ambassadors to set up at the city’s community centers to assist voters with all aspects of absentee ballot requests. But how do we know that the diplomatic efforts of such “ambassadors” would not be exercised exclusively on behalf of their own partisan interests when “assisting” in the completion of absentee ballots?
Violating Voting Booth’s Sanctity
The sanctity of the voting booth used to be considered one of the sacred traditions of American democracy, as it protects the right of individuals to determine who will represent them in government. But the kind of Democracy™ that involves the indiscriminate mass mailing of no-excuse absentee ballots is a top-down endeavor, where most of the power, initiative, and agency is on the side of Democrat politicians and leftist election activists rather than voters.
Their plan is to influence, cajole, and incentivize the least civically engaged, least informed, most apathetic individuals within their jurisdictions to fill out absentee ballots in a way that validates the consolidation of Democratic Party power. Absentee ballot electioneering is the key to a more modern way of “stuffing the ballot box” in an era where activists have convinced a significant number of people that their voting rights have been fatally compromised if they are not permitted to cast a ballot in whatever way is most effortless for them.
The fact that opportunities for electioneering are so few at the polling place, and so plentiful during the time that elapses between the receipt of absentee ballots and their submission, suggests another reason those who wish to find new ways to interfere in legitimate elections are the most strident advocates of universal mail-in voting. It also provides yet another reason why people who believe in free and fair elections should spare no effort to resolutely oppose no-excuse absentee voting in 2022.
William Doyle, Ph.D., is principal researcher at Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. He specializes in economic history and the private funding of American elections. Previously, he was associate professor and chair in the Department of Economics at the University of Dallas. He can be contacted at doyle@rodneyinstitute.org.
The video (and audio) hits just keep on coming from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where a whistleblower secretly taped the aftermath of the chaos from the 2020 presidential election. Two recent recordings exclusively obtained by The Federalist from a source with knowledge of the recordings provide further evidence that systemic problems plague the large Pennsylvania county. The newest recordings provide some of the frankest discussion on how bad the behind-the-scenes situation was, with one election worker describing a part of the post-election situation as “abominable” and the attempt to do the impossible—reconcile some precincts’ voter sheets—as “a nightmare.”
The whistleblower, Regina Miller, began recording conversations involving Delaware County officials after she became concerned with what she saw as a contract worker assisting election employees. A source familiar with the videos explained that Miller made the recordings as election workers scrambled to find—and in some cases create—documentation in response to a “Right to Know” request that sought copies of the paperwork that would confirm the accuracy of the vote tallies certified for the 2020 election.
To date, the videos have exposed a wide array of problems with election integrity, including on-tape admissions that the election laws were not complied with, that 80 percent of provisional ballots lacked a proper chain-of-custody, that there were missing removable drives for some of the voting machines, and that election workers “recreated” new drives to response to the Right to Know request.
The most recent video, however, reveals a new area of concern related to the reconciliation of the voting totals in the precincts. Captured on film in this video was a conversation between one election worker and the whistleblower. With boxes of voting sheets lining the basement floor of a Delaware County building, the election worker tells Miller, “There were six precincts in one location and all of the machines were, all of the scanners were, programmed to accept any ballot of those six precincts.”
“It was a nightmare,” the Delaware County official explained, adding that “you couldn’t, there’s no way you could reconcile” the results.
The Pennsylvania Department of State checklist for the November 2020 election explained how the reconciliation process was to proceed. According to the Department of State, each precinct was required to compare the numbered list of voters created at the poll on election day to the number of votes recorded on the voting machines that appeared on the result tapes from the machines at the close of the polls. But with ballots from one precinct scanned into the voting machine of another precinct, as the Delaware County official noted happened, it would “be impossible to reconcile.”
The Pennsylvania election code required the election board to investigate any discrepancies or irregularities among the records. But, again, an investigation could not resolve any discrepancies because the ballots of six separate precincts were improperly comingled. More detail on the widespread problem of missing and comingled machine tapes was also revealed in a second conversation, with this discussion captured only on audio. That discussion began with the whistleblower again noting the chain-of-custody issues previously reported, where provisional ballots were transferred in unlocked bags.
This conversation added more insight to the potential risk caused by the lack of a chain of custody by exposing the number of hands the unsecured ballots passed through, each time providing a new opportunity for fraud. The unsecured ballots went from the “poll workers’ hands, then to return locations, then to the police officers, and then to us,” the whistleblower explained.
Miller then moved on to the issue of the machine tapes and inquired on the best way to have them returned to the county from each precinct. In response, an election worker is heard saying, “They have to be attached to the return sheet and they weren’t.” “We literally have two boxes that we got from the county of tapes,” the unnamed county official continued, “but they didn’t go with any ballot sheet.” Other machine tapes never made their way into the box, however, with the Delaware County official exclaiming: “It was abominable.” “When the community service people cleaned out the cages, they were finding tapes in there because someone just didn’t know what to do,” the election official noted in reference to the locked areas where the election machines are stored after the election. Then “we all panic, is that the fifth tape or the first tape?” he added. Some precinct workers thought if they just sent the tapes back, we’d figure out where they went, the recording continued. “You know, we couldn’t,” he told the whistleblower. When the whistleblower asked if it is a legal requirement or just the practice to staple the tapes to the return sheet, the election official said, “I think it’s a combination of both.”
He’s right. Under Pennsylvania’s election code, the return board must carefully review the tally papers and machine tapes and reconcile them with the general return sheets, but if the tapes are missing, such a reconciliation is impossible. That wasn’t the only reconciliation problem, however, as the undercover recording made clear. “We haven’t even talked about reconciling used and unused ballots,” the election worker noted, which Pennsylvania law also requires to be reconciled.
So now, added to the previous evidence of systemic defects in the 2020 Delaware County Pennsylvania election, we have additional details indicating the county’s mishandling of the last presidential election made it impossible for the county to fully reconcile the recorded votes to the number of votes cast and the number of ballots used and unused. Yet the county certified the election results.
What other counties in what other states likewise certified their election results notwithstanding similar, or worse, problems? We may never know, because what goes on in the canvasing of elections apparently stays in the basements and warehouses dotting every county in our country.
Without video evidence confirming cases of election malfeasance or fraud, politicians on both sides of the aisle will continue to put allegations—even from insiders—down as mere conspiracy theories. Sadly, even when there is video evidence such as here, the story is largely ignored by the corrupt press—or it will be until Democrats next take a beating at the polls.
Given the disaster Joe Biden has been, that is likely imminent.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The Obama/Biden Administration has killed a gas pipeline from Israel to Europe helping Russia and Iran instead. This is the second time the Obama/Biden Administration has killed this pipeline.
We first wrote about the Israel to Europe pipeline in 2019. This was related to George Papadopoulos. Obama targeted George Papadopoulos first to stop the construction of Israel’s natural gas pipeline to Europe in favor of Iran’s pipeline. Then Obama’s Deep State targeted Papadopoulos a second time to prevent candidate Trump from being President!
Papadopoulos tweeted about this back in 2019.
Clapper is an imbecile. Not only did he outsource spying on me to the Italians/UK/Australia, and involved the CIA, he admits on CNN that it was normal. The most disturbing part of this is that I was being spied upon for ties to an American ALLY, Israel.
Today it was reported that Obama/Biden have done it again. They successfully killed the Israeli gas pipeline to Europe. The Biden administration has abruptly withdrawn American support for the Eastern Mediterranean (EastMed) pipeline, a project aimed at shipping natural gas from Israel to European markets. The White House said the project was antithetical to its “climate goals.”
In reaching its decision, which effectively kills EastMed, the White House appears to have caved to pressure from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has vociferously opposed the underwater pipeline because it would bypass Turkey. Biden’s decision — reportedly coordinated with Turkey but reached without consulting Israel, Greece or Cyprus, the main countries involved in the project — undercuts three of the strongest American allies in the Mediterranean region.
The White House could not have chosen a less opportune moment to announce its decision. With tensions rising between Russia and Ukraine, Europe (which relies on Russia for approximately one-third of its natural gas supplies) is searching for alternative sources of gas to reduce its overreliance on Moscow.
The Biden administration’s decision also smacks of hypocrisy. The White House claims that it wants the Mediterranean region to transition to “clean energy,” but it recently announced its support for the Russia-backed Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would double shipments of Russian natural gas to Germany.
EastMed’s cancellation — variously described as a “disastrous decision,” a “strategic mistake” and an act of “appeasement” of Erdoğan — represents a major geopolitical victory for the Turkish strongman. Analysts worry that he will be emboldened to continue escalating tensions in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean in his quest to expand Turkish control over energy supply routes to Europe.
Joe Biden approved a pipeline from Russia to Germany — but prevents US ally Israel from building a pipeline to Europe. Whose side are they on anyway?
Joe Hoft is the twin brother of TGP’s founder, Jim Hoft, and a contributing editor at TGP. Joe’s reporting is often months ahead of the Mainstream media as was observed in his reporting on the Mueller sham investigation, the origins of the China coronavirus, and 2020 Election fraud. Joe was a corporate executive in Hong Kong for a decade and has years of experience in finance, IT, operations and auditing around the world. The knowledge gained in his career provide him with a unique perspective of current events in the US and globally. He has ten degrees or designations and is the author of three books. Joe is currently co-host of the morning radio show in St. Louis at 93.3 “Tomorrow’s News Today”. His new book: ‘In God We Trust: Not in Lying Liberal Lunatics’ is out now – please take a look and buy a copy.
The Times wrote that upon hearing the news about Freedom, “netizens swarmed” to Twitter “mocking the player who has been ignorant and arrogant on China’s core interests and internal affairs such as those involving Xinjiang, Xizang, and Taiwan.”
The paper added a comment from Chen Weihua, China Daily’s EU bureau chief, who said of Freedom: “Now you can be a full time John Bolton puppet.”
World Daily added that Freedom’s charge regarding Nike’s “alleged use of ‘forced labor’ in China … proved to be fictitious and fabricated.”
The paper also included what it said was a comment from “another netizen” regarding Freedom’s speaking slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference later in February in Orlando, Florida: “I always thought of you as someone that stood for freedom, and then I heard you’re going to CPAC, the exact people that are actively taking away freedoms in the US.” And a Beijing-based sports commentator who requested anonymity told the Global Times that Freedom “didn’t focus on basketball as a player and lost his job… And Chinese fans can expect to watch Boston’s games soon.” The paper added that “Freedom repeatedly made false and irresponsible comments regarding China’s Xinjiang in 2021. Meanwhile, he publicly declared his support for Xizang and Taiwan secessionists.”
Freedom correctly predicted in an PBS interview last week that he’d soon be gone from basketball due to his views.
"They're going to do everything they can to, I believe, not sign me now."
— Firing Line with Margaret Hoover (@FiringLineShow) February 10, 2022
Freedom became an American citizen last year and decided to officially change his name to Enes Kanter Freedom to mark the occasion. Last month, Freedom blasted Chamath Palihapitiya, a co-owner of the Golden State Warriors, for brushing off China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. “When genocides happen, it is people like this that let it happen,” Freedom said of Palihapitiya. Freedom added in a subsequent tweet that Palihapitiya’s “disgusting” comments are “against everything the @nbastands for; I want the #NBA commissioner Adam Silver & @warriors board members to step in and push him to [sell] his shares.”
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Former President Donald Trump said special counsel John Durham’s court filing provides “indisputable evidence” that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign spied on his campaign and presidency to “develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia,” which is a “bigger scandal” than Watergate.
“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution,” Trump said in a statement, referring to the scandal that forced President Richard Nixon to resign in 1974.
The statement comes after Durham’s team alleged that a Democrat-aligned tech executive was paid to spy on Trump’s residences and the White House while he was president.
“In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death. In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this,” the former president added.
Durham’s motion is about potential conflicts of interest related to the representation of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who has been charged with making a false statement to the FBI that he was not working on behalf of Clinton at the time. According to the filing, lawyers for the Clinton campaign allegedly paid the technology executive to infiltrate servers that belonged to the Trump Tower and the White House to establish an “inference” and “narrative” to tie Trump with the Russian government, The Epoch Times reported.
Sussmann “assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including (i) a technology executive (“Tech Executive-1”) at a U.S.-based Internet company (“Internet Company1”), and (ii) the Clinton Campaign,” the filing reads.
Sussmann’s “billing records reflect that” he “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations” and that the technology executive met and communicate with Mark Elias, a lawyer and operative who has filed numerous election-related lawsuits on behalf of the Democrats, said the Times.
In 2017, Sussmann came out with “an updated set of allegations” about Trump’s Russian connection to another government agency, the filing said, according to Fox News.
Sussmann alleged at the time that “Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations,” based on suspicious DNS lookups by Russian-affiliated IP addresses.
Durham said in the filing his office found “no support for these allegations.”
Kash Patel, former chief investigator of the Trump-Russia probe for the House Intelligence Committee under then-Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told Fox News that the filing provides “definitive” evidence that the Clinton campaign put together “a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia.”
CNN anchor Jake Tapper criticzed President Joe Biden on Sunday over his dismissive attitude toward military reports detailing the Biden administration’s failures that contributed to the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden was confronted about the reports in an interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt, and Biden said he was “rejecting” the conclusions and accounts shared in those reports.
Toward the end of CNN’s “State of the Union,” Tapper sharply criticized Biden for his sweeping dismissal of accounts critical of his administration’s Afghanistan exit.
“It’s difficult to overstate how insulting Biden’s sweeping rejection is to so many service members and veterans, given the full content of the 2,000 pages of documents in this U.S. Army investigation, which CNN has also obtained,” Tapper said.
“Many accounts are from troops who were on the ground at the gates near the canal around the airport, noncommissioned officers, junior officers, Joes, people with little political motivation to lie, and heavy legal and moral obligation to tell the truth in sworn statements,” he continued.
CNN's @JakeTapper on Biden dismissing a US Army report on the failures of the Afghanistan pullout: "I don't doubt President Biden cares, but I do not understand why he would not manifest that care into taking this investigation more seriously." #CNNSOTUpic.twitter.com/52CUlqXUu0
Tapper later added that he does not “doubt that President Biden cares” about the lives lost during the evacuation, but questioned Biden’s cavalier attitude toward the military reports.
“I do not understand why he would not manifest that care into taking this investigation more seriously, absorbing the tragic details, contemplating the obvious failures of his administration, failures that cost lives,” Tapper said.
“Now, Biden always bristles at this because he feels confident that ending the war in Afghanistan was the right decision. But that’s not the question at hand,” he explained. “It’s not whether, but how the war ended and what that means to the people who were there when it did finally end.”
Tapper also condemned Biden for dismissing the validity of military testimony about the chaotic exit on the basis of “that’s not what I was told.”
“If [the truth] was not what you were told, then what was? And don’t you have an obligation, sir, to be told?” Tapper questioned, adding that Biden must demonstrate he actually cares. “Otherwise, isn’t it just words?”
The Washington Post obtained after-action military reports last week that lay bare the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. The reports include testimony from top U.S. military commanders who alleged the Biden administration failed to grasp the seriousness of the Taliban’s swift takeover of Afghanistan, thereby placing U.S. personnel and Afghan allies in great danger. Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan during the withdrawal operation, told Army investigators that military personnel would have been “much better prepared to conduct a more orderly” evacuation “if policymakers had paid attention to the indicators of what was happening on the ground.”
Among the more egregious accusations, one military officer told Army investigators that as military personnel worked to evacuate the U.S. embassy in Kabul, State Department employees and other diplomatic personnel were “intoxicated and cowering in rooms” while others were “operating like it was day-to-day operations with absolutely no sense of urgency or recognition of the situation.”
Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, chief of U.S. Central Command, admitted in an interview with the Post that military commanders “would have preferred” other evacuations plans than the one Biden approved, “but when the president makes a decision, it’s time for us to execute the president’s decision.”
Regarding the abandonment of Bagram Airfield, McKenzie also told the Post, “Everyone clearly saw some of the advantage of holding Bagram, but you cannot hold Bagram with the force level that was decided.”
Statements Hillary Clinton made just one week before the 2016 presidential election resurfaced over the weekend after a damning new report from special counsel John Durham. After a news report alleged in October 2016 that a server in Trump Tower was communicating with the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank, the Clinton campaign seized on the moment and claimed it was proof that then-candidate Donald Trump was colluding with Russia.
“This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow,” said Jake Sullivan, the current national security adviser, who at the time worked as Clinton’s senior policy adviser, in a statement after the story broke.
“This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists,” Sullivan added. “This line of communication may help explain Trump’s bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin and endorsement of so many pro-Kremlin positions throughout this campaign.”
In a second social media blast, Clinton’s campaign claimed Trump “has a secret server” that was “set up to communicate privately with a Putin-tied Russian bank,” the server was shut down when discovered, but a new one was later created under a new name with the same purpose as the first one.
The “smoking gun” story broke on Oct. 31, 2016. That is important because it came three days after then-FBI Director James Comey informed Congress the FBI was investigating new information related to the Clinton email scandal. Thus, Clinton’s campaign seized on the story to distract from its own problems.
The allegations, of course, were completely false.
What is this important now?
According to an explosive new filing by Durham, who is investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, lawyers connected to the Clinton campaign reportedly paid a technology company to penetrate servers in Trump Tower to fabricate a “narrative” linking Trump’s campaign to Russia.
In a motion filed on Feb. 11, Durham revealed that Michael Sussmann — a lawyer who advised the Clinton campaign who has been charged with lying to the FBI — brought allegations to the FBI about a connection between Trump and Alfa Bank. Sussmann, according to Durham, “assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign.”
Durham alleged that Sussmann worked with the tech executive, a law firm retained on behalf of the Clinton campaign, and other cyber researchers in July 2016 to prepare the information that Sussmann eventually turned over to the FBI.
“In connection with these efforts, Tech Executive-1 exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” Durham’s filing reportedly states. “Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.”
“Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” the filing says. “In doing so, Tech Executive-1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign.”
Kash Patel, who worked as the chief investigator on the Trump-Russia probe for the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News that Durham’s filing shows that lawyers associated with Clinton’s campaign worked to “infiltrate” Trump Tower and shows that “the Hillary Clinton campaign directly funded and ordered its lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia.”
According to a report just filed by Special Counsel John Durham, lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower and the White House in order to fabricate a narrative connecting Donald Trump to Russia.
Durham’s filing focuses on potential conflicts of interest related to the representation of Michael Sussman, a former lawyer for the Clinton campaign. Sussman has been charged with making a false statement to a federal agent. He has pleaded not guilty. The indictment against Sussman alleges that he told then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, less than two months before the 2016 presidential election, that he was not working “for any client” when he requested a meeting in which he provided the FBI with “purported data and ‘white papers’ that allegedly demonstrated a covert communications channel” between the Trump Organization and the Kremlin connected Alfa Bank.
In a section of Durham’s filing titled “Factual background,” it is revealed that Sussman “had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign.”
Durham’s filing says Sussman’s “billing records reflect” that he “repeatedly billed the Clinton campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations.”
Sussman and Tech Executive 1 had met and communicated with a law partner who served as General Counsel on the Clinton campaign. Fox News reports that this lawyer is Marc Elias. Per Durham, in 2016, Tech Executive 1 worked with Sussman, an American investigative law firm, several cyber researchers and employees at multiple internet companies to “assemble the purported data and white papers.”
The filing states, “In connection with these efforts, Tech Executive-1 exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data. Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.”
“Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” Durham states, “In doing so, Tech Executive-1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton Campaign.”
Fox News reports that at Sussman’s trial, Durham will establish that among the ill begotten data foraged by Tech Executive-1 and his associates is the domain name systems (DNS) internet traffic pertaining to “(i) a particular healthcare provider, (ii) Trump Tower, (iii) Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and (iv) the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP).”
The former chief investigator of the Trump-Russia probe for the House Intelligence Committee, Kash Patel, said the filing “definitively shows that the Hillary Clinton campaign directly funded and ordered its lawyers at Perkins Cole to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia.”
Biden Valentine’s Day where his achievements aren’t real, and his radial policies are a pile of schiff.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing to discuss the ongoing federal response to COVID-19 on May 11, 2021, in Washington, D.C. | Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images
In late January, Johns Hopkins published an intensively researched and explosive study about the destructive results of COVID-19 lockdowns: “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality.” Researchers concluded “while this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted … In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
The report asserted that while the lockdowns cut death rates by, at most, .2%, they indirectly caused substantial deaths associated with the lockdowns, like the increase in drug overdose deaths of 78,056. The study went so far as to conclude, “Lockdowns should be rejected out of hand.” This is in stark contrast to the claims by many leading health experts, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who have claimed the lockdowns saved “millions” of lives and were worth the damage it has caused to the American people and the economy. John Hopkins is arguably the top university in the world in health care-related fields, so this report is unimpeachable and demanding of full coverage.
Unfortunately, the media’s stake in previously defending lockdowns while slamming lockdown critics has caused a dangerous censoring of the report. Let me explain.
As reporter Joseph A. Wulfsohn has observed “the John Hopkins study received no mention on any of the five liberal networks this week. According to Gabien transcripts, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC all ignored the anti-lockdown findings after having spent much of the pandemic shaming red states with minimal restrictions and events deemed by critics as ‘superspreaders’.” It wasn’t just the networks avoiding the study. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Reuters, USA Today, Axios, Politico among other outlets also turned a blind eye to the findings.”
This is part of a disturbing media trend Americans have seen with other stories like the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and the censoring/downplaying of the lab leak theory of COVID origin. When information disputes the progressive talking points, the information is suppressed.
The John Hopkins researchers not only showed the indirect damage of lockdowns, but even found the lockdown policies likely helped further the spread of COVID: “[Shelter-in-place orders] may isolate an infected person at home with his/her family where he/she risks infecting family members with a higher viral load, causing more severe illness … often, lockdowns have limited peoples’ access to safe (outdoor) places such as beaches, parks, and zoos, or included outdoor mask mandates or strict outdoor gathering restrictions, pushing people to meet at less safe (indoor) places.”
This is in addition to a survey showing around 97% of American teachers claim students experienced learning loss. Skyrocketing unemployment and the shuttering of small businesses caused further havoc. The lockdowns turned out to be worse than useless. This information is critical as we must prepare to handle further waves, or even new pandemics.
During the lockdowns, which were primarily pushed and enforced by Democratic politicians, the media was relentless in denigrating the critics. They went so far as to claim, as Dr. Anthony Fauci has, that opponents of lockdowns are actually opponents of “science.” The following quote from the Global News was repeated in substance by much of the mainstream media over the past two years: “But defying lockdowns because you’re fatigued by the pandemic is completely different than what many of these protesters are doing, which is denying the science … (their actions) seems so counter-rational that it has to be emotionally fueled.”
It’s time for the Center for Disease Control, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and much of the mainstream media to show a modicum of humility. They have been proven wrong about the lockdowns. At the same time, some level of accountability is demanded of those who attacked lockdown critics. Freedom of speech was attacked over and over the past two years by those screaming about the dangers of “misinformation” or “disinformation.” It continues to this day.
As with the Global News article, the Left has even questioned the psychological well-being of lockdown critics, similar to what was done in the Soviet Union to those criticizing the party line. We have seen the same treatment of those who questioned the “party line” about COVID coming from a wet market, and not the Wuhan Institute of Virology (which most scientists now agree was the likely origin of COVID-19).
The Progressive Left, including allies in the media, cannot be allowed to continue their monopoly on what constitutes “science” and suppress everyone else. Science comes from continually questioning and demanding proof. That didn’t happen with lockdowns, and hundreds of millions suffered. Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). When it comes to determining the truth in this world, let’s allow the debates and disagreements necessary to find the truth.
Bill Connor, a retired Army Infantry colonel, author and Orangeburg attorney, has deployed multiple times to the Middle East. Connor was the senior U.S. military adviser to Afghan forces in Helmand Province, where he received the Bronze Star. A Citadel graduate with a JD from USC, he is also a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Army War College, earning his master of strategic studies. He is the author of the book Articles from War.
The Biden administration continues to make bizarre recruiting decisions for top government jobs on the basis of toxic identity politics. A recent addition to President Joe Biden’s motley crew of dubious hires is drag queen Sam Brinton, who was tapped last month as the “Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy.”
Rather than touting his qualifications for the job, Brinton — who lists his pronouns as “they”/”them” — bragged on Twitter about his unique status as the “first gender fluid person in federal government leadership.”
In a biographical statement on an LGBT website provided by Brinton, he boasted about having “worn his stilettos to Congress to advise legislators about nuclear policy and to the White House, where he advised President Obama and Michelle Obama on LGBT issues.”
The bio continued: “He shows young men and women everywhere he goes that they can be who they are and gives them courage. Once, while he was walking around Disney World in 6 inch stilettos with his boyfriend, a young gay boy saw Sam with his boyfriend and started crying. He told his mother, ‘It’s true, Mom. WE can be our own princess here.’”
Brinton is an active member of the Washington, D.C., chapter of a drag queen society known as the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” the National Pulse reported Thursday.
The drag queen has referred to White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci as “Daddy Fauci” and even called him a “saint.”
There are also photos on social media where he displays his fondness for “pup play,” a sexual role-playing game.
In a 2016 interview with the LGBT-focused Metro Weekly magazine, Brinton discussed his fetish in detail.
“Pup and I have what I feel is one of the most ideally perfect connections between our personal and kink life,” he said. “Both of us have other partners, so we come into this space, and then we come out of it, knowing the boundaries of where your kink and non-kink relationships begin and end.”
Brinton acknowledged that others didn’t understand his activities.
“One of the hardest things about being a handler is that I’ve honestly had people ask, ‘Wait, you have sex with animals?’” he told Metro Weekly. “They believe it’s abusive, that it’s taking advantage of someone who may not be acting up to a level of human responsibility. …
“The other misperception is that I have some really messed up background, like, did I have some horrible childhood trauma that made me like to have sex with animals.”
This is who’s helping Biden run the country right now, which is in shambles amid record inflation, soaring crime, race wars and ongoing border invasions.
People can do whatever they want in the privacy of their homes (provided it’s not illegal or hurting anyone), but the fact that the kinky sex life of a high-level Department of Energy executive overshadows his qualifications is truly alarming. This is how empires crash and burn.
Under Biden, we are witnessing the real-time destruction of America — economically, culturally and socially. And we’re only in Year 2 of his reign.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
The response to Covid-19 has accelerated a growing divide between parents and schools, which is mostly to say between parents and teachers’ unions. From denying students the ability to learn in-person to forced masking to teaching divisive, historically inaccurate curriculum based on critical race theory (CRT), the trend has been to sideline parents from their children’s educations.
In response to this, states are taking action to ensure parents remain the primary decision-makers for their kids. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a parents’ bill of rights in June 2021. Missouri is considering a similar proposal and in Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued 11 executive orders on his first day in office, two of which were related to education. Indiana is considering a parents’ bill of rights as part of a push to banish despicable materials that kids shouldn’t be taught.
At the national level, Sen. Josh Hawley has also proposed a Parents’ Bill of Rights, although so far it has not gained any traction. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, now president of Young America’s Foundation, declared “2022 is the Year of the Parent.” In other words, there’s a growing appetite among parents to take a more active role in education, whether through supporting legislation to empower them or taking the initiative to join their local school boards.
On Thursday, January 20, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott added Texas to the list of states attempting to tackle the divide when he announced his own Parental Bill of Rights, which will be voted on and perhaps enshrined into Texas’ constitution in January 2023. The initiative consists of seven points clarifying the fact that parents, not school boards or unions, are in charge of their kids’ educations.
In announcing the proposal, Abbott said, “The role of parents is being diminished by government itself across the U.S. Parents are losing a voice when it comes to their children’s education and health matters. Many parents feel powerless to do anything about it. That must end … Under the Parental Bill of Rights, we will amend the Texas Constitution to reinforce that parents are the main decision-makers in all matters involving their children.”
A key point in Texas’ proposed amendment, which could serve as a model starting point for other states reads, “Expand parents’ rights to access course curriculum and all material that is available in any education setting for their student through online posting and other methods so parents know what topics will be taught.” While Texas parents can currently get those materials, it requires an information request rather than the click of a mouse.
Submitting an information request is an unnecessary burden, particularly in an age in which schools are teaching children to be racists, encouraging them to be climate change alarmists, and pushing ludicrous and dangerous ideas about changing your sex or being “two-spirit.” Granted, two of those occurrences are from California, a state parents should just move away from rather than attempt to reform.
Even in Texas, though, there are leftist salvos in the culture war. Just last October, a mom in Keller, who with her husband had moved their family from California to avoid such things, discovered their new town’s library was offering a book featuring graphic depictions of oral sex. Parents in Leander, a town north of Austin and part of its greater metropolitan area, also discovered books with depictions and illustrations they don’t want their children to have access to without their permission.
While all these initiatives are worthy ideas, and Abbott’s proposal is the strongest yet, the jury is still out on whether they will resolve the issues parents are seeing with schools.
For starters, parental bills of rights require parents to actually be involved, which doesn’t always happen, even in the age of Zoom schooling. As a result, these various bills, amendments, and executive orders could result in nothing more than “won’t somebody please think of the children” activity. As the great men’s basketball coach, known for also educating his players, John Wooden said, “Never mistake activity for achievement.”
Elected officials such as Abbott, DeSantis, and Youngkin may be leading the nation on this front, but they’re doing so in response to their constituents. Youngkin’s victory was likely sealed, in fact, when his opponent Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Given that Youngkin’s implicit message is “Stop messing with our kids, you freaks!,” the tide on parents shipping their kids off to school and hoping for the best seems to be turning.
Parents’ bills of rights could still turn out to be gimmicks, an activity that doesn’t lead to achievement, but our kids’ educations are not the government’s job. But at least for those of us who do send our kids to government-run or -funded schools, such measures offer us a way to take more charge and ensure that we approve of what’s being taught in the classroom and offer recourse for times when we have legitimate criticisms.
The work is still up to us parents, but governors and legislatures can give us the tools we need to do that work more effectively.
Richard Cromwell is a writer and senior contributor at The Federalist. He lives in Northwest Arkansas with his wife, three daughters, and two crazy dogs. Co-host of the podcast Coffee & Cochon, you can find him on Facebook and Twitter, though you should probably avoid using social media.
Christian flag and American flag flying together | GettyImages/ sdgamez
I love America, but my hope for the future isn’t wrapped up in the American flag. If our government imploded tomorrow and all of our freedoms were jerked from our grasp, I would mourn, but I would not throw in the towel.
Some in the Christian community discuss politics as if our future depended on the outcome of every election. They say, “Our Christian freedoms are being eroded.” Many post scandalous, hateful, degrading memes about the opposition. Some advocate for a violent overthrow of the government.
For me, I’m a free man who was bought and paid for by the mercy of God. And since He owns me, I am here only to obey Him and glorify His name. When He bought me, I surrendered my old passport and voluntarily became a citizen of his kingdom. My citizenship is in Heaven (Phil. 3:20).
Did Jesus or the apostles give a hint of obsession about worldly governments? I can’t find it. The only thing Jesus said about government was, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Matt. 22:21).
Wasn’t Caesar corrupt? Weren’t elections rigged? Weren’t babies killed and innocent people executed? Did the citizens of the Roman empire have a Bill of Rights? The United States can’t hold a candle to the corruption of first-century Rome, but Jesus seemed to have no obsession with the quality of a government.
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t get involved and do good when we can — we should. But we are given specific instructions about how to be a leavening influence on culture, including politics.
Paul wrote, “I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people — for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness” (1 Tim. 2:1–2).
He’s talking about ushering in a revolution by praying and petitioning the Almighty to bring about political change.
He wrote, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves” (Romans 13:1–2).
In my opinion, there’s no ambiguity here. This passage says what it says. God is in charge.
Yes, work to change your culture, but if it becomes illegal to worship God again, should we just wait until we get the government’s approval before we can praise him? No, the advancing borders of God’s kingdom do not wait on worldly systems.
Sure, I openly speak about elections and social issues. I faithfully cast my vote. But all of my hope is in Jesus and His kingdom, not in any political system, including the United States of America.
Jesus said, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:33).
I made the decision a long time ago to seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness. Jesus promised that when I make his kingdom my number-one priority, God will supply all my needs, no matter how dire the political and social climate appears to be.
So far, Jesus hasn’t let me down.
The writer of Hebrews said about the persecuted saints, “They were foreigners and strangers on earth” (11:13).
Think about that. If I travel outside the United States, I don’t have the same rights as the citizens of the countries I visit. I can’t express my opinion about their government by voting in their elections. I can’t take up residence without getting permission to become a permanent resident. I am completely at the mercy of the systems that govern those countries. As a stranger in a foreign land, I often long for my humble abode on the banks of the Ouachita River.
Accepting that I’m a stranger here means I am liberated from the obligation to put my trust in anything that offers no hope beyond the here and now. It also sparks a desire to be with God in his kingdom where He wipes away every tear (Rev. 21:4).
There’s no more death, mourning, crying or pain. No corruption! No racism! No bigotry! No greed! And to top it off, our leader is a holy, righteous, perfect, all-powerful, and loving God. We will never see that in our worldly leaders. Never.
This realm in which we live is chock-full of disappointments. Sure, I experience joy and happiness here on earth, but when I look around, I can’t help but see pain and suffering: divorce, abuse, injustice, addictions, hatred, unrest, gossip, slander, discord, and other ugly sins. So, the promise to dwell with God where all that junk will be eradicated creates an intense longing to be there.
Peter wrote, “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with His promise, we are looking forward to a new Heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 3:11–13).
I love America. And yet, a better dwelling awaits.
When I tell people to act like a kingdom-driven follower of Christ, I am saying to be liberated from the disappointing rules of worldly systems. I’m saying not to let the temporary things of this world control your life.
You will never regret when you turn control of your life over to the one who is eternal, the one who is good. One day, you will dance with joy that you did not give your allegiance to the systems of this world.
Phil Robertson is a professional hunter who invented his own duck call and founded the successful Duck Commander Company. He also starred in the popular television series on A&E, Duck Dynasty, and is now the host of the new subscription television series In the Woods with Phil on CRTV.com. He is a New York Times bestselling author of The Theft of America’s Soul, Happy, Happy, Happy and UnPHILtered. He and his wife, Kay, live in West Monroe, Louisiana. He has five children, 18 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. His newest book, Uncanceled: Finding Meaning and Peace in a Culture of Accusations, Shame, and Condemnation, releases Feb. 8, 2022 and will be available wherever books are sold.
Artur Pawlowski, a native of Poland who currently serves as pastor of Street Church and the Cave of Adallum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, has compared the tactics used by his local government to enforce the coronavirus restrictions to actions taken by law enforcement officials when Poland was under Communist rule. | Artur Pawlowski
Pastor Artur Pawlowski, who has butted heads with Canadian authorities throughout the pandemic, was arrested again just before he was set to address a group of Canadian truckers opposed to vaccine mandates. Pawlowski of the Cave of Adallum Church and Street Church in Calgary, Alberta, was arrested at his home Tuesday as he was about to depart for a church service at a border blockade engineered by truckers protesting vaccine mandates and provincial leadership in Milk River, Alberta.
Pawlowski has gained notoriety in Canada and the United States for his outspoken opposition to coronavirus worship restrictions and has been arrested multiple times over the past year for holding a church service in violation of worship restrictions and protesting outside the home of Alberta Health Minister Jason Copping. Videos documenting Pawlowski’s tense exchanges with local law enforcement officials seeking to enforce coronavirus restrictions, where the pastor refers to them as “Nazis” and the “Gestapo,” have gone viral.
Video footage of Pawlowski’s most recent arrest was posted to the pastor’s YouTube channel Tuesday.
A law enforcement official informed Pawlowski that he was under arrest for “mischief.” As with his previous arrests, Pawlowski refused to walk with law enforcement. The officers lamented that he refused to “just stand up” and elected to “go dead fish” before carrying him away to the police car.
While Pawlowski remained quiet throughout most of the video, his brother Dawid confronted the officers, repeatedly referring to them as “Nazis” and “criminals” before urging them to “treat him with respect.” Pastor Pawlowski told the officers, “I do not cooperate with Nazis.”
Ezra Levant of Rebel News, which has supported Pawlowski in his ongoing legal battles with local government, elaborated on the events leading up to the arrest based on information he received from the pastor’s son, Nathaniel.
“There was an undercover police van staked out surveilling the family home,” Levant reported.
“They grabbed his dad, Artur Pawlowski, arrested him and took him off to jail,” he added.
According to Levant, the officers were “stopping him from going to speak to the trucker blockade down in Coutts, Alberta.”
Levant cited “the Calgary police literally arresting a Christian pastor who was planning on speaking to a peaceful protest” as the latest example of how “this is not the Canada that you thought that you were in.” He contended that the country had transformed into an “authoritarian Canada that’s verging on a police state.”
“This was clearly an attempt to stop him from expressing himself politically to these truckers,” Levant concluded. Members of Pawlowski’s family reacted to his arrest in a subsequent interview with Rebel News.
Nathaniel Pawlowski told the news outlet that “We were getting ready to head to Milk River; my dad was going to perform a church service for them there.” Before they could depart, the pastor was arrested for causing mischief by “blockading infrastructure” in a previous appearance at the protest.
He recalled that “they were staking out our home for hours, waiting for him to leave the house and then they grabbed him … right before he could go perform his duties as a clergyman.”
Dawid Pawlowski recounted that the arrest occurred after the pastor’s wife took their younger children to school.
Artur and Dawid Pawlowski emigrated to Canada from Poland. The pastor went viral last year when he compared the actions of the provincial authorities to what he saw growing up behind the Iron Curtain.
Pastor Pawlowski addressed his arrest in a phone call from prison, describing Calgary Chief of Police Mark Neufeld as a “disgrace to the uniform” and offering similar criticism of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. Pawlowski accused Kenney of hypocrisy for not abiding by the coronavirus restrictions he imposed on the people of Alberta.
Nearly two years into the coronavirus pandemic, outrage over coronavirus restrictions and mandates in Canada extends far beyond Pawlowski.
The Freedom Convoy, a group of truckers primarily concentrated in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, was established to protest the mandate requiring all truckers who travel across the U.S.-Canada border as part of their job to take the coronavirus vaccine or quarantine upon re-entry into the country. Truckers have walked off the job to participate in the weeks-long demonstration. Many truckers descended on Ottawa in late January to protest Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about their concerns, but truckers have spread out all across the U.S.-Canada border, in some cases, blocking border crossings, occupying roadways and clogging Ottowa’s downtown for days. The protests have also spread to other cities.
Many Canadians and Americans donated to the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe to help cover the costs of the truckers’ expenses. However, the platform removed the fundraiser from its website because of “multiple discussions with local law enforcement and police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.” The Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo has become the new home for fundraising efforts on behalf of the truckers who are seeking donations “to help with the cost of fuel first, and hopefully food and lodging to help ease the pressures of this arduous task.”
As of Thursday morning, the GiveSendGo fundraiser has raised just over $8 million. Government opposition to the Freedom Convoy is not limited to Alberta.
Trudeau condemned the multiracial group of protesters for perpetuating “antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia.” Ottawa police officers and city officials have seized fuel from truckers and those seeking to provide fuel for the truckers because they believe it is helping contribute to the “mischief” the truckers are causing in the capital city.
The Justice Centre, a legal organization that supports the Freedom Convoy, has criticized the seizure of fuel as illegal and unjustified. Justice Centre Counsel Nicholas Wansbutter described “taking fuel from Canadian citizens in the downtown Ottawa area” as “an illegal seizure in a context where no crimes are being committed, and no charges were laid against truckers or anyone else.”
“In my view, the truckers are not doing anything illegal by protesting peacefully against the 23 months of politicians restricting our Charter freedoms,” he stated. “Citizens have every right to bring food, water, fuel, and other necessities of life in the winter to other Canadians, including truckers.”
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
Vincent Zhou, the world-class figure skater forced to pull out of the Olympics because of COVID, can thank Anthony Fauci and our COVID-crazed media for his withdrawal.
In an agonizing Instagram post, Zhou expressed shock at the positive test, saying:
“It seems pretty unreal that of all the people, it would happen to myself. … I have been doing everything in my power to stay free of COVID since the start of the pandemic. I’ve taken all the precautions I can. I’ve isolated myself so much that the loneliness I felt in the last month or two has been crushing at times.”
His story is heart-wrenching not only because of his compelled withdrawal from the individual competition — and the loneliness he endured — but because our “public health authorities” lied to Zhou, leading him to do exactly the opposite of what he should have been doing to build up his immune system before the Winter Games.
Maybe nothing could have protected him — he was, of course, fully vaccinated — but the safest course would have been to expose himself to everything in 2021, not be the Boy in the Bubble. If only he’d gotten omicron back in December, like everybody else, his immune system wouldn’t have been a sitting duck for the tiniest whiff of COVID once he got to Beijing.
As Dylan H. Morris, a postdoctoral RNA virus researcher at UCLA, put it: “If you want to stay out of the hospital, giving your immune system a preview of the virus is valuable, even if that preview isn’t perfectly accurate.”
A few months into the pandemic, two basic models emerged for responding to COVID:
1) Make it endemic. Also known as “herd immunity” or, pejoratively, “Let ‘er rip!” Georgia and Florida, among other states, cautiously followed that path, as did the nation of Sweden.
2) Lock down the populace in order to prevent a single COVID molecule from ever drifting within 10 yards of a human being. Remember “Fifteen days to stop the spread!”? In the blue states, two weeks became two years — finally being abandoned this week only because Democrats fear the coming elections.
RESULT: Places that pursued the endemic route did no worse, and often quite a bit better, than the fascistlockdown states. Apart from preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed when the virus first hit New York, no benefit was derived from strict COVID policies.
The reason the virus hit so hard in 2020 was that our immune systems had never encountered anything like COVID before. “[T]he population was immunologically naive,” explained statistician Philippe Lemoine, “which means that nobody had immunity against it.” It’s the same reason Native Americans were annihilated by viruses that Europeans had lived with for centuries. Now their immune systems recognize those viruses, too.
Training your immune system to recognize the virus, through vaccination or the real thing, reduces the severity and duration of future infections. Additional exposures give the body practice dealing with the various twists and turns of each new variant. Avoiding contact with viruses to protect your immune system is like avoiding weight-lifting to protect your muscles.
The Scientist magazine, among others, has pointed out that there’s little reason to believe that omicron is actually less dangerous than delta; it just seems so because our immune systems now recognize COVID and are able to quickly kill it.
Zhou might have known all this, but whenever epidemiologists tried to tell us that, our “public health authorities” and doomsday media buried the dissenters in scorn and calumny. Back on Oct. 4, 2020, Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University produced The Great Barrington Declaration, pushing the endemic solution. Soon, thousands of scientists had signed the paper. Today, nearly 1 million have.
Four days later, on Oct. 8, 2020, Francis Collins, President Trump’s director of the NIH, emailed “The Science” Fauci, frantically warning that the declaration was getting too much attention! He urged a rapid response to discredit the signatories — one a Nobel Prize-winner in chemistry — and “take down” the paper’s ideas.
“The Science” permits no debate! (Though I suppose we’re lucky Collins merely called the renowned epidemiologists “fringe,” and not “white supremacists.”)
Governors, like Ron DeSantis in Florida, who listened to the epidemiologists rather than “public health authorities” were reviled by our media, amid florid predictions of disaster.
In April 2020, when Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia began lifting COVID restrictions, the Atlantic magazine blasted him with the headline: “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.” Longtime reporter Ron Fournier wrote: “Mark this day. Because two and three weeks from now, the Georgia death toll is blood on his hands.” (Take note, deplorables: Trump jumped on the bandwagon and publicly criticized Gov. Kemp for opening up, too.)
RESULTS: A month later, COVID cases in both states had declined, while cases continued to rise in the majority of other states.
Maybe that was a fluke. What’s the final score, two years later?
As of a week ago, among all 50 states, Georgia was ranked 15th in age-adjusted COVID deaths, well below communist-controlled New York and New Jersey. Florida was in the bottom half of all states, coming in at No. 31. Only 19 states did better.
As for Sweden, MSNBC and President Trump spoke as one in denouncing that country’s refusal to shut down. On April 20, 2020, Trump tweeted that Sweden was “paying heavily for its decision not to lock down.” A week ago, Sweden ranked 20th out of 31 nations in Europe in COVID deaths. Only 11 countries did better.
Even a tie score should go to the free states because their citizens didn’t have to stop living, learning, eating in restaurants, going to concerts, athletic events and on and on.
Not only did Armageddon not ensue in the free states, but their populations’ immune systems aren’t at risk of collapsing the next time a germ wafts their way. You know all those weird allergies to things like peanuts that didn’t exist 20 years ago? Wait until the kids who’ve spent their childhoods in masks encounter the Earth’s atmosphere again!
Naturally, there will be no consequences for our “public health authorities” who imposed cruel mandates and squelched opposing views: You can’t sue the government.
The rule should be that whenever our rulers claim emergency powers to impose draconian measures on the populace, they forfeit sovereign immunity. I know some epidemiologists who would be good expert witnesses for the lawsuits.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
The following is a copy of the new Biden’s DHS heightened alert. Much like the Obama administration, and the DHS under Obama, their political enemies are being targeted, like you and me. Unlike the Obama administration’s use of vailed language to describe the targeted sources of the heightened alert, the Biden DHS summarizes these threats in terms that are not so vague.
The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. Mass casualty attacks and other acts of targeted violence conducted by lone offenders and small groups acting in furtherance of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances pose an ongoing threat to the nation. While the conditions underlying the heightened threat landscape have not significantly changed over the last year, the convergence of the following factors has increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the threat environment: (1) the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions; (2) continued calls for violence directed at U.S. critical infrastructure; soft targets and mass gatherings; faith-based institutions, such as churches, synagogues, and mosques; institutions of higher education; racial and religious minorities; government facilities and personnel, including law enforcement and the military; the media; and perceived ideological opponents; and (3) calls by foreign terrorist organizations for attacks on the United States based on recent events.
Duration
Issued: February 07, 2022 02:00 pm Expires: June 07, 2022 02:00 pm
Additional Details
The primary terrorism-related threat to the United States continues to stem from lone offenders or small cells of individuals who are motivated by a range of foreign and/or domestic grievances often cultivated through the consumption of certain online content. The convergence of violent extremist ideologies, false or misleading narratives, and conspiracy theories have and will continue to contribute to a heightened threat of violence in the United States.
Key factors contributing to the current heightened threat environment include:
The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions:
For example, there is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19. Grievances associated with these themes inspired violent extremist attacks during 2021.
Malign foreign powers have and continue to amplify these false or misleading narratives in efforts to damage the United States.
Continued calls for violence directed at U.S. critical infrastructure; soft targets and mass gatherings; faith-based institutions, such as churches, synagogues, and mosques; institutions of higher education; racial and religious minorities; government facilities and personnel, including law enforcement and the military; the media; and perceived ideological opponents:
Foreign terrorist organizations and domestic threat actors continue to amplify pre-existing false or misleading narratives online to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions. Some of these actors do so to encourage unrest, which could lead to acts of violence against the facilities, individuals, institutions, and organizations cited above.
Violent extremists inspired by a range of grievances and ideologies continue to target crowded venues traditionally perceived to be soft targets, such as commercial and publicly accessible facilities, public gatherings, certain government and state facilities, and houses of worship.
The recent attack on a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas highlights the continuing threat of violence based upon racial or religious motivations, as well as threats against faith-based organizations.
Threats directed at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other colleges and universities, Jewish facilities, and churches cause concern and may inspire extremist threat actors to mobilize to violence.
As COVID-19 restrictions continue to decrease nationwide, increased access to commercial and government facilities and the rising number of mass gatherings could provide increased opportunities for individuals looking to commit acts of violence to do so, often with little or no warning. Meanwhile, COVID-19 mitigation measures—particularly COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates—have been used by domestic violent extremists to justify violence since 2020 and could continue to inspire these extremists to target government, healthcare, and academic institutions that they associate with those measures.
Domestic violent extremists have also viewed attacks against U.S. critical infrastructure as a means to create chaos and advance ideological goals, and have recently aspired to disrupt U.S. electric and communications critical infrastructure, including by spreading false or misleading narratives about 5G cellular technology.
Some domestic violent extremists have continued to advocate for violence in response to false or misleading narratives about unsubstantiated election fraud. The months preceding the upcoming 2022 midterm elections could provide additional opportunities for these extremists and other individuals to call for violence directed at democratic institutions, political candidates, party offices, election events, and election workers.
A small number of threat actors are attempting to use the evacuation and resettlement of Afghan nationals following the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan last year as a means to exacerbate long-standing grievances and justify attacks against immigrants.
Calls by foreign terrorist organizations for attacks on the United States based on recent events:
Foreign terrorist organizations will likely continue to maintain a highly visible online presence to attempt to inspire U.S.-based individuals to engage in violent activity.
Supporters of foreign terrorist organizations have encouraged copycat attacks following the January 15, 2022 attack on a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas.
Foreign terrorists remain intent on targeting the United States and U.S. persons, and may seek to capitalize on the evolving security environment overseas to plot attacks. The Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) or its affiliates may issue public calls for retaliation due to the strike that recently killed ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.
How We Are Responding
DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continue to share timely and actionable information and intelligence with the broadest audience possible. This includes sharing information and intelligence with our partners across every level of government and in the private sector. We conduct recurring threat briefings with private sector and state, local, tribal, territorial, and campus partners, including to inform security planning efforts. DHS remains committed to working with our partners to identify and prevent all forms of terrorism and targeted violence, and to support law enforcement efforts to keep our communities safe.
DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis established a new, dedicated domestic terrorism branch to produce the sound, timely intelligence needed to counter related threats. The Department expanded its evaluation of online activity as part of its efforts to assess and prevent acts of violence, while ensuring the protection of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.
In 2021, DHS designated domestic violent extremism as a “National Priority Area” within its Homeland Security Grant Program HSGP), resulting in at least $77 million being spent on preventing, preparing for, protecting against, and responding to related threats.
In 2021, DHS’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP) provided $180 million in funding to support target hardening and other physical security enhancements to non-profit organizations at high risk of terrorist attack.
DHS is working with public and private sector partners, as well as foreign counterparts, to identify and evaluate MDM, including false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories spread on social media and other online platforms that endorse or could inspire violence.
DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) works with public and private sector partners – including U.S. critical infrastructure owners and operators – to mitigate risk against our cyber and physical infrastructure and increase nationwide cybersecurity resilience.
How You Can Help
Stay Informed and Prepared
Be prepared for emergency situations and remain aware of circumstances that may place you at risk. Make note of your surroundings and the nearest security personnel.
If you know someone who is struggling with mental health issues or may pose a danger to themselves or others, seek help.
If You See Something, Say Something®. Report suspicious activity to local law enforcement or call 911.
The National Terrorism Advisory System provides Americans with alert information on homeland security threats. It is distributed by the Department of Homeland Security. More information is available at: www.dhs.gov/advisories. To receive mobile updates: twitter.com/dhsgov
If You See Something Say Something® used with permission of the NY Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
The global coup that in these two years of psycho-pandemic farce has been carried out by the globalist elite appears most clearly if we do not limit ourselves to considering what happened in individual Nations, but broaden our gaze to what has happened everywhere.
Your protest, dear Canadian truck driver friends, joins a worldwide chorus that wants to oppose the establishment of the New World Order on the rubble of nation states, through the Great Reset desired by the World Economic Forum and by the United Nations under the name of Agenda 2030. And we know that many heads of government have participated in Klaus Schwab’s School for Young Leaders – the so-called Global Leaders for Tomorrow – beginning with Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, Jacinta Ardern and Boris Johnson, and before that Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Tony Blair.
It would seem that Canada is – along with Australia, Italy, Austria and France – one of the nations most infiltrated by the globalists. And in this infernal project we must not only consider the psycho-pandemic farce, but also the attack on traditions and Christian identity – indeed, more precisely the Catholic identity – of these countries.
You understood this instinctively, and your yearning for freedom was shown in all its coordinated harmony, moving towards the capital Ottawa. Dear truck drivers, you are facing great difficulties, not only because you give up your work to demonstrate, but also because of the adverse weather conditions, long nights in the cold, and attempts to be cleared away that you face. But along with these difficulties you have also experienced the closeness of many of your fellow citizens, who like you have understood the looming threat and want to support you in protesting against the regime. Allow me also to express to you my support and my spiritual closeness, to which I join the prayer that your event may be crowned with success and may also extend to other countries.
In these days we see the masks of tyrants from all over the world fall, and unfortunately we also see so much conformism, so much fearfulness, so much cowardice in people who up until yesterday we regarded as friends, even among our family members. Yet, precisely because of this extreme situation, we discover with amazement gestures of humanity made by strangers, signs of solidarity and brotherhood on the part of those who feel close to us in the common battle. We discover so much generosity and so much desire to shake us from this stupor. We discover that we are no longer willing to passively suffer the destruction of our world imposed by a cabal of unscrupulous criminals, thirsty for power and money.
In this relentless attack on the traditional world, not only your way of life and your identity have been affected, but also your possessions, your activities, and your work. This is the Great Reset, this is the future promised by slogans like Build Back Better, this is the future of billions of people being controlled in their every move, in all their transactions, in every purchase, every bureaucratic practice, every activity. Automatons without souls or wills, deprived of their identity, reduced to having a universal income that allows them to survive, to buy only what others have already decided to put up for sale, transformed by a gene serum into people who are chronically ill.
Today more than ever it is essential that you realize that it is no longer possible to passively assist: it is necessary to take a position, to fight for freedom, to demand respect for natural freedoms. But even more, dear Canadian brothers, it is necessary to understand that this dystopia serves to establish the dictatorship of the New World Order and totally erase every trace of Our Lord Jesus Christ from society, from history, and from the traditions of peoples.
Demonstrate for your rights, Canadian friends: but may these rights not be limited to a simple claim to the freedom to enter supermarkets or not to be vaccinated: may it also be a proud and courageous claim to your sacrosanct right to be free men. But your demonstration should be one of true freedom, reminding you that it is the Truth – that is, Our Lord Jesus Christ – who alone can guarantee you freedom: the truth will make you free.
Let us pray that Christ will return to reign in society, in your hearts and in your families. Take up the spiritual weapon of the Holy Rosary, and pray to the Blessed Virgin, Sainte Ann, Saint George and the Holy Canadian Martyrs to protect your homeland.
I would like to conclude my appeal by asking you to pray with me, with the words that Our Lord has taught us: may they be the seal of this awakening, of this national liberation. Let us all pray it together, out loud, so that our prayer may rise to Heaven, but also so that it may resound powerfully in these squares, in these streets, all the way to the palaces of the powerful:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. Amen.
Joe Hoft is the twin brother of TGP’s founder, Jim Hoft, and a contributing editor at TGP. Joe’s reporting is often months ahead of the Mainstream media as was observed in his reporting on the Mueller sham investigation, the origins of the China coronavirus, and 2020 Election fraud. Joe was a corporate executive in Hong Kong for a decade and has years of experience in finance, IT, operations and auditing around the world. The knowledge gained in his career provide him with a unique perspective of current events in the US and globally. He has ten degrees or designations and is the author of three books. Joe is currently co-host of the morning radio show in St. Louis at 93.3 “Tomorrow’s News Today”. His new book: ‘In God We Trust: Not in Lying Liberal Lunatics’ is out now – please take a look and buy a copy.
The State Department, along with over a dozen other Western governments, posted a joint statement expressing concerns about freedom of speech in Hong Kong. Perhaps these governments, beginning with our own, need to look in the mirror and recognize that their assault on basic human rights, including free speech, free association, and political and religious beliefs, is now on par with the behavior of the Chinese communists.
“The undersigned members of the Media Freedom Coalition express their deep concern at the Hong Kong and mainland Chinese authorities’ attacks on freedom of the press and their suppression of independent local media in Hong Kong,” began the statement, which was signed by countries like Australia that are now engaging in human rights violations under the color of COVID.
This is quite a rich statement proclaimed in the same week that the White House called on Spotify to censor Joe Rogan for having long-form engaging discussions with brilliant scientists like Drs. Robert Malone and Peter McCullough. As early as July, the White House called on Facebook to censor any information on the vaccine that is not in line with the views of the regime. The top doctors and scientists treating COVID have essentially been removed from nearly every media platform. How exactly is this different from China?
Well, you might suggest that at least they won’t hunt you down and treat you like a criminal for holding these views, as they might do in a country like China. However, can you really count on that, given what our government is already saying?
On Monday, the DHS posted its latest National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin. The number one terrorism threat, in the eyes of our government, is ordinary people who hold different views on COVID policies and election security. Under “Key factors contributing to the current heightened threat environment,” the very first factor listed is “The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions.”
You might think this is referring to those who verbally and sometimes physically assault people for not covering their faces in a store like women in Afghanistan. Or perhaps denying kidney transplants to people for not getting a Pfizer product. But no, they mean people like you and me. “For example, there is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19,” states the bulletin. “Grievances associated with these themes inspired violent extremist attacks during 2021.”
Can you list examples of violent extremist attacks from people who oppose COVID fascism?
This factor was listed ahead of the concern of foreign Islamic terrorism or any mention of the Colleyville synagogue hostage-taker. Our own government, for the first time in history, is seeking to criminalize political opposition and treat it on the same level as al Qaeda. Then again, the DHS bulletin made no mention of al Qaeda or the Chinese Communist Party.
The witch hunt against freedom of speech is so strong that even members of Congress are not immune to it. Earlier this week, the Federalist reported that the Capitol Hill Police inspector general is launching a probe into an allegation by one congressman that his office was illegally surveilled by police. According to Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas), Capitol Hill police stopped by his office in November and took a photo of legislative plans detailed on his whiteboard. The officers came back a few days later in plain clothes and questioned a staffer about a whiteboard that contained “suspicious writings mentioning body armor.” Specifically, Nehls was planning to introduce legislation banning the sale of faulty Chinese body armor, which was obvious by the text of his writing. Again, is this another case of projection, where the true Chinese-style authoritarians are accusing their opponents of a lack of patriotism?
On Tuesday, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) accused the Justice Department of spying on members of Congress as well. In a statement posted on Twitter, Gohmert contends that constituent mail was opened and stamped with “DOJ mailroom” and labeled “X-rayed,” seemingly indicating that the Justice Department first looked through his mail. This would violate the principle of separation of powers.
All this news comes amid the backdrop of a draft recommendation published by the House of Representatives inspector general calling on the sergeant at arms’ office to engage in internal “behavioral monitoring” to detect internal security threats. “The slim document suggested that the House Sergeant at Arms’ office — which leads security for the chamber — start a comprehensive insider threat program, which it currently lacks,” reports Politico.
Taken together, it’s beginning to look a lot like a despotic third world country. They used COVID to criminalize our breathing and bodies; they used Jan. 6 to criminalize political beliefs. Now they are using any opposition to their policies as pretext to shred the First Amendment rights of citizens and separation of powers of political opponents.
Republican governors in red states would be wise to work with state and local law enforcement and establish a principle of interposition against the looming federal assault on political opponents. They must make their states sanctuaries for the First Amendment by promising to arrest any federal official who comes to the state seeking to harass, question, or apprehend an individual who has broken no law other than espousing views unpopular with the regime.
We have all witnessed the remarkable transformation of Western democracies that have reverted to pre-enlightenment governing values in a matter of a few years. The virus might have begun in China, but it has turned Western governments into China. If we don’t first focus on the authoritarianism in our own back yard, we won’t have a refuge from Chinese tyranny, for our own government is nothing but a client state of the Chinese Communist Party. And clearly, China have taught our government well.
Iran has just unveiled a new missile that can strike targets in Israel and American military bases in the Middle East.
On Wednesday, the Iranian government debuted its new solid-fuel missile on state television. The missile has a range of 1,450 kilometers — roughly 900 miles — and is called the Khaibar-buster.
Khaibar was an ancient Jewish palace that was overrun by Muslim armies under the leadership of Muhammad in the early days of Islamic expansion.
The Khaibar-buster is manufactured completely domestically in Iran and, per the Times of Israel, may be able to circumvent sophisticated missile defense systems.
Iran debuted its new missile as the United States continues to re-negotiate the 2015 nuclear agreement. Iran has long claimed that it does not wish to develop nuclear weapons and insists that its missile development programs are simply a deterrent.
Iran isn’t able to launch the Khaibar-buster at intercontinental targets, but the new missile is able to reach American military bases in the Middle East.
Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff for the Iranian armed forces, described the Khaibar-buster as a “long-range missile” and said that “the enemies of the Revolution and the Islamic Republic do not understand anything but the language of power and force.”
Iranian leadership is dedicated to wiping the Jewish state of Israel off the map. Ayatollah Khamenei has even referred to the “Zionist regime” as a “long-lasting virus.”
Some argue that the Zionist regime is a reality that the region must come to terms with. Today the #Covid_19 is a reality; should it be accepted or fought?!\nThe long-lasting virus of Zionism will be uprooted thanks to the determination and faith of the youth. #Covid1948
Iran’s aggressiveness towards and perpetual harassment of Israel have led to the Jewish state hastening the development of new missile defense systems. Israel is 620 miles away from Iran, well within the Khaibar-buster’s range. This missile is capable of reaching targets deep inside Israel.
This past January, Iran successfully tested a solid-fuel rocket engine that is allegedly designed to launch satellites into orbit. According to an Iranian spokesperson, via Reuters, this rocket launched research devices into space at an “altitude of 470 km (290 miles) and at a speed of 7,350 meters per second.”
Satellite rocket engines are usually powered with liquid fuel, and pure solid-fuel rockets are typically associated with ballistic missile systems, so the international community remains highly skeptical of Iran’s intentions.
It’s unclear whether the rocket reached orbit, but the Iranian government confirmed, “The intended research objectives of this launch were achieved.”
According to the U.S. State Department, this launch violated a 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution. A State Department spokesperson said, “The United States remains concerned with Iran’s development of space launch vehicles which pose a significant proliferation concern.”
Last week, the State Department confirmed that Iran was merely weeks away from being able to fuel and power a nuclear weapon.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi signaled Wednesday that she would not block a bipartisan attempt to ban members of Congress from buying and selling individual stocks, a position that she herself has opposed.
“I do believe in the integrity of people in public service. I want the public to have that understanding. We have to do something to deter something that we see as a problem, but it is a confidence issue, and if that’s what the members want to do, then that’s what we’ll do,” Pelosi said during a press conference.
The comments were similar to ones she made in January, when she said that she didn’t believe new rules were necessary but that the House Administration Committee could review the issue. Pelosi is on record as personally opposing a ban, claiming in December that trading stocks allows members to “participate” in the U.S.’s “free market economy.”
WATCH:
Pelosi added in the press conference that she would prefer to “tighten the fines on those who violate the STOCK Act. It’s not sufficient to deter behavior.”
The STOCK Act requires members of Congress to file stock transactions with their chamber clerk within 45 days of conducting the trade. Members frequently flout the reporting requirement, but enforcement is uneven.
“The enforcement of the financial-disclosure requirements is virtually nonexistent,” a former investigative counsel in the House’s Office of Congressional Ethics reportedly told Business Insider. “The committee does not look for late filings. There is no notification or follow-up.”
Democrats and Republicans have introduced legislation that would prohibit Congress members and their direct family members from trading individual stocks. A bill proposed by Democratic Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger and Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy would require members, spouses and dependent children to place their investments in blind trusts, while legislation introduced by Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley would require members to surrender individual stocks to the Treasury Department if they are caught holding them.
Pelosi did not endorse any current legislation.
“I’m a big believer in our committees, and we tasked the House Administration Committee to review the options that members are putting forth, and they have different views on the subject,” she said.
The House speaker went on to criticize the Supreme Court’s ethics requirements, claiming that any financial reform would have to be “government-wide.” Although lower federal courts are bound by ethics rules legislated by Congress, the Supreme Court sets its own ethics and disclosure rules. Prominent liberals, most notably Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, have claimed that the Court’s lack of disclosure rules allow it to be controlled by right-wing dark money.
“We make a disclosure every year, our financial disclosure, that is what it is. And then in addition to
that, on regular basis, when there is a stock transaction, to report that. The court system, the third branch of government, the judiciary, has no reporting. The Supreme Court has no disclosure, it has no reporting of stock transactions, and it makes important decisions every day,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi conducted up to $30.4 million worth of stock trades in 2021, according to her ethics disclosures. According to the financial analysis blog Unusual Whales, Pelosi’s trades had the sixth-best performance of all members of Congress, and the best among Democrats. Notably, Pelosi exercised call options on Microsoft stock in March, less than two weeks before the U.S. Army announced a nearly $22 billion contract with the tech giant.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy revealed in January that he would consider a limit or ban on individual stock trades should Republicans take back the House of Representatives in the midterms. More than three-quarters of general election voters support banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks, a poll conducted in December by the Trafalgar Group found.Tags :
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
The inspector general for the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) has opened a formal investigation into whether the law enforcement agency tasked with securing the Capitol has been inappropriately surveilling elected members of Congress, their staff, and visitors to their offices, The Federalist has learned. The opening of the investigation follows news reports and accusations from lawmakers that USCP has overstepped its bounds as it tries to recover from the January 6 riots that tarnished both the Capitol and the reputation of the law enforcement agency that was supposed to keep it safe. USCP Chief J. Thomas Manger confirmed the opening of the inspector general investigation in his response to congressional inquiries about USCP police tactics, reported in a January 24 article published by Politico, including surveilling and compiling intelligence dossiers on members of Congress, their staff, and visitors.
“While I am confident in our methods, I am asking the USCP Office of the Inspector General to review the USCP’s programs related to these security assessments to assure both this Committee, the Congress as a whole, and the public that these processes are legal, necessary, and appropriate,” Manger wrote to seven Republican lawmakers.
According to the Politico article, USCP analysts had been directed by Julie Farnam, the acting director of USCP’s Intelligence and Interagency Coordination Division, to “run ‘background checks on people whom lawmakers planned to meet, including donors and associates.”
“When staff were listed as attending these meetings, Capitol Police intelligence analysts also got asked to check the social media accounts of the staffers,” the Politico article alleged.
In his letter to lawmakers, Manger denied the allegations detailed in the Politico article and claimed USCP’s activities were both appropriate and legal.
Suspicions that USCP may not be acting appropriately did not arise in a vacuum, however. In November 2021, a USCP officer entered the congressional office of Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Tex., and took a photo of a whiteboard in Nehls’ legislative office detailing various legislative plans being considered by Nehls and his staff. In a formal police report filed several days after the incident, the officer wrote that he had been conducting a routine security patrol on Saturday, November 21, and discovered that one of the doors to Nehls’ office was open. The report claimed that the officer entered Nehls’ office and found a whiteboard that contained “suspicious writings mentioning body armor[.]” The officer reportedly took a photo of the whiteboard, which was then passed around to analysts within USCP. The following Monday, USCP dispatched three plain-clothed intelligence officers to Nehls’ office and questioned a staffer who was there about the whiteboard and the legislative proposals it contained. Just days before the USCP officer entered Nehls’ office and took a picture of the whiteboard Nehls and his staff used to brainstorm and catalog legislative ideas, the Washington Post ran a story about a federal government contractor in rural Texas who defrauded the United States by supplying Chinese-made body armor instead of body armor manufactured in the United States.
“From his home in rural Texas, a would-be defense contractor spun a web of fake companies and testing reports to pass off Chinese-made body armor as American equipment that met rigorous standards for use by the State Department and U.S. law enforcement partners in Latin America,” the Washington Post wrote on November 16, 2021. “Tanner Jackson, 32, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Alexandria federal court to one count of wire fraud, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.”
According to Nehls, who previously served as sheriff of Fort Bend County, Texas, his office whiteboard specifically called out faulty Chinese body armor. In fact, that Washington Post article was a key catalyst spurring Nehls to consider drafting legislation banning the procurement of Chinese body armor, a spokesman for Nehls told The Federalist. What the police report did not include was any reference to multiple items on Nehls’ whiteboard immediately following the words “body armor” referencing Export Administration Regulations dealing specifically with Chinese imports or U.S. Department of Justice standards for certifying body armor.
In correspondence on the matter with the House Administration Committee, USCP Chief Manger said the responding officer who investigated Nehls’ office was also concerned by “an outline of the Rayburn Building with an X marked at the C Street entrance” drawn on the whiteboard. A Nehls spokesman told The Federalist it was little more than a crude map to help an intern find an ice machine in the Rayburn House Office Building.
“If Capitol Police leadership had spent as much time preparing for January 6 as they spent investigating my white board, the January 6 riot never would have happened,” Nehls, a former law enforcement officer, told The Federalist. “When I was a patrol officer responding to a call, I didn’t have the time or authority to go rifling through someone’s personal papers. There are serious 4th Amendment, constitutional issues at play here.”
Although Manger claimed in one e-mail that USCP agents were concerned the whiteboard may have contained a “veiled threat” to Nehls’ life, USCP never personally contacted Nehls to warn him that he may have been in danger, Nehls told The Federalist.
The Capitol Police’s treatment of Nehls and his office only fueled the fire of suspicion between lawmakers and USCP leadership that had been smoldering following the January 6 riot. One Republican congressional aide told The Federalist that rather than addressing the massive security and intelligence failures by USCP that allowed the post-election protests to spiral into riots, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi instead doubled down on failure and used the uproar as a pretext for turning the Capitol Police into her own force of political mercenaries.
“Instead of fixing the obvious problems with Capitol security, Pelosi used January 6 as an excuse to create her own personal Praetorian Guard,” the aide said.
Comments and recommendations for mandatory background checks on staff by Pelosi’s hand-picked Capitol security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, have also done little to quell suspicions that Pelosi is using the January 6 proceedings to justify increased surveillance of her political enemies in Congress.
“We made recommendations that everyone coming into the Capitol get background checks, the entire congressional staff,” Honore told CNN last April. “All of them need to get background checks is what we recommended.”
Those recommendations found their way into the formal report compiled by the January 6 response task force that Honore ran, leading several lawmakers to question the USCP denial that it is surveilling and profiling members, staff, and visitors.
“There are way too many unanswered questions,” Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Ill., the top Republican on the congressional committee with oversight over the Capitol Police, told The Federalist. “The Capitol Police have a lot of explaining to do.”
“My main concern is that the entire Capitol Police board structure is dependent on political leadership to make security decisions,” Davis said. “Security decisions are being made based on politics, not on real data.”
“I’m not convinced we’re in any better security position today than we were on January 6,” he added, blaming Pelosi’s control of the process for the lack of real progress or improvements.
Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., echoed Davis’s concerns about the Capitol’s security posture.
“The Capitol is no more prepared today than it was on January 6,” Banks, who is heading up an ad hoc committee of Republicans to make security improvement recommendations, told The Federalist. “There is a lot of work to do to restore trust in the leadership of the Capitol Police.”
“It’s painfully clear to all of us that the sham January 6 commission is not at all interested in making the Capitol safer or preventing something like January 6 from ever happening again,” Banks said. “It’s clear that the January 6 commission is just a witch hunt against the political enemies of Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney.”
In a statement provided to The Federalist, USCP categorically denied that it had surveilled lawmakers or their staff and claimed the January 24 Politico article was inaccurate.
“We do not conduct surveillance on Members, their staff, or their offices,” a spokesman for the Capitol Police told The Federalist. “The USCP does not conduct any ‘insider threats’ related surveillance of intelligence gathering on Members, staff, or visitors to the Capitol Complex.”
The spokesman said that Manger, the USCP chief, had specifically asked the inspector general to conduct a full review of the agency’s operations in light of the allegations of improper profiling and surveillance.
“The inspector general is independent, so we cannot comment on his behalf,” a USCP spokesman told The Federalist. “But the chief has requested such a review as he is confident the USCP security assessments are legal, appropriate, and strictly limited to gathering basic information about events to ensure the safety of members of Congress.”
The USCP inspector general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Sean Davis is a co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.
Demonstrators in Keene, New Hampshire, gather at a “Save the Children Rally” to protest child sex trafficking and pedophilia around the world, on September 19, 2020. | AFP via Getty Images/Joseph Prezioso
“I’m going to throw up. My stomach is literally twisting. God please help us!” That was the response of a viewer on my YouTube channel after watching video clips of two professors advocating adult-child sex — including coercive sex. Wanting to throw up is a very natural reaction.
To be sure, I’ve heard these arguments before. In fact, one of the most sickening chapters to write in my 2011 book A Queer Thing Happened to America was the chapter quoting pedophile advocates. NAMBLA (the North American Man Boy Love Association) has more advocates than we could care to imagine.
As quoted in A Queer Thing Happened to America (and cited from Louis Berman’s book, The Puzzle), “The Dutch lawyer Edward Brongersma wrote an article sympathetic to man-boy love. He cites (page 160) a report (Rossman, 1976) that ‘gives several examples of social workers achieving miracles with apparently incorrigible young delinquents — not by preaching to them, but by sleeping with them. Affection demonstrated by sexual arousal upon contact with the boy’s body, by obvious pleasure taken in giving pleasure to the boy, did far more good than years in reformatories.’ Brongersma (page 160) tells of an Amsterdam juvenile judge who in a public speech ‘openly advocated this form of social therapy.’ This is a sample of the persuasive case that man-boy lovers make to support their position.”
Anyone else feel like throwing up?
Yet these video clips are even more disturbing, featuring Professor Stephen Kershnar of the State University of New York at Fredonia and Professor Thaddeus Russell, who now associates with “Renegade University.”
The two professors are laughing about the subject of adult-child sex, with Russell commenting that he’s been advocating for this for more than 20 years in his classrooms. Twenty years! How on earth did he get away with this? (Russell is also an outspoken advocate of lowering the age of consent.)
And to be clear, they were not just talking about an adult having sex with a younger teenager (which they also endorse; the technical term is ephebophilia). Instead, they explicitly talk about adult-child sex in distinction from ephebophilia.
And these men are college professors? (Kershnar is listed by his school as a distinguished professor of philosophy.) These men have been influencing your children? These men have been speaking freely and openly about these subjects, and in some cases writing about them too, and they were never reported or disciplined? How can this be?
Read Kershnar’s words if you don’t believe me: “Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl. Imagine that she’s a willing participant. A very standard, very widely held view is that there’s something deeply wrong about this — and it’s wrong independent of it being criminalized.
“It’s not obvious to me that it’s in fact wrong. I think this is a mistake. And I think exploring that why it’s a mistake will tell us not only things about adult/sex and statutory rape and also fundamental principles of morality.”
Watching the videos, these professors are glib and flippant, incredulous that people could object to pedophilia. Really now, if there are good results from pedophilia, who are we to object to it?
Yet it gets worse.
These two men openly advocate for coercive adult-child sex. I kid you not. Watch the clips for yourself if you don’t believe me.
Yes, they explain, a child lives his or her entire life under adult coercion. To paraphrase, the parents tell their kids, “You go to sleep at this time. You go to the school to which we send you. You make your bed. You take piano lessons. You do what your parents tell you to do.”
Indeed, they argue, a child sometimes is required to do something simply for the pleasure of a parent. Why not sex? They actually compare it to being told you have to go your uncle’s funeral even though you don’t want to. How different is this from being forced to have sex?
What madness!
The good news is that Kershnar’s university has disavowed his comments, calling the video “reprehensible.” And he has now been “reassigned.” (Why not fired?)
The bad news is that his official bio page noted that, “Kershnar has written one hundred articles and book chapters on such diverse topics as abortion, adult-child sex, hell, most valuable player, pornography, punishment, sexual fantasies, slavery, and torture.”
This begs the question, were other professors totally unaware of his views? Did no administrators know about it? Did no students ever complain? Was the university totally in the dark?
What Kershnar and Russell advocate is monstrously evil. The fact that they could do it for decades as paid professors shaping the views of our children is mind-boggling and sickening.
May they find repentance before they face the one who said, “If anyone causes one of these little ones — those who believe in me — to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” And, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven” (the words of Jesus, Matthew 18:6, 10).
What a dreadful day that will be for those who support adult-child sex. (And let us never forget the children who have been brutally victimized!)
An Iranian flag flutters in front of the United Nations headquarters in Vienna, Austria, June 17, 2014. | Reuters/Heinz-Peter Bader
Intelligence agents in Iran’s Khuzestan Province have instructed 10 Christian converts who had been cleared of all charges to participate in “re-education” classes led by Islamic clerics, according to a watchdog report. Agents of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps told the 10 Christians, including eight who were cleared last November of any crime in a court in Dezful, on Jan. 29 that they will have to attend 10 sessions with Islamic clerics to “guide them back onto the right path,” Article 18, a nonprofit that promotes religious freedom and tolerance for Christians in Iran, reported.
The IRGC had summoned more converts, but they didn’t appear. However, those who didn’t appear were called and asked why they hadn’t appeared.
The IRGC arrested four converts in the southwestern city of Dezful last April and charged them with “propaganda against the Islamic Republic” because they participated in a house church, according to an earlier report from Article 18. The IRGC also summoned other Christian converts for interrogation at the time. The four arrested had personal property confiscated for nearly six months, including necessary items for their children’s schoolwork, laptops and mobile phones.
The U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern states that the “mandatory Islamic re-education classes directly conflict with the rulings of the Civil and Revolutionary Court of Dezful that said the group ‘merely converted to a different religion.’”
“The court noted that this apostasy could be punished under Islamic Sharia law but was ‘not criminalized in the laws of Iran,’” ICC noted in a statement.
In reference to other charges that Iranian Christians often face, the courts also ruled they “didn’t carry out any propaganda against other groups,” ICC added.
In 2021, Revolutionary Guards were responsible for 12 of the 38 documented incidents of Christians being arrested or their homes and churches being raided, Article 18 noted.
“So-called ‘re-education’ sessions have become much more common in recent years, even appearing in the list of ‘corrective punishments’ on official court papers,”Article 18 detailed.
Converts from Islam to Christianity are most at risk of persecution in Iran, especially by the government and to a lesser extent by society and their families, Open Doors USA states in a fact sheet on Iran.
“The government sees the growth of the church in Iran as an attempt by Western countries to undermine Islam and the Islamic regime of Iran, the fact sheet states. “House groups made up of converts from Muslim backgrounds are often raided, and both their leaders and members have been arrested, prosecuted and given long prison sentences for ‘crimes against national security.’”
Iran is an Islamic republic, and Shia Islam is the official religion of the country. It is illegal for Muslim citizens to convert or renounce their religious beliefs. Conversion from Islam is considered a crime punishable by death. It is also unlawful for Christians to share the Gospel with Muslims. Proselytizing is also a criminal offense. Those who convert to Christianity usually practice their faith in secret. However, in 2020, a survey of about 50,000 Iranians over the age of 20 found that 1.5% of respondents identify as Christian. Applied across Iran’s population of more than 80 million, the number of Christians in Iran is “without doubt in the order of magnitude of several hundreds of thousands and growing beyond a million,” the Netherlands-based secular research group GAMAAN, stated after the study.
Iran ranks as the 9th worst country globally when it comes to Christian persecution, according to Open Doors USA’s 2021 World Watch List. Iran is listed by the U.S. State Department as a “country of particular concern” for engaging in severe violations of religious freedom.
A private school in Providence, Rhode Island, recommended that students avoid giving their peers Valentine’s Day cards that portray “only white people,” according to the National Pulse.
In a letter to parents and students, Osvaldo Jose Marti, head of the Moses Brown Lower School, said, “As we approach the month of February, we are writing to share some guidelines for the selection and exchange of Valentines in the Lower School. If your child wishes to bring cards for classmates, please consider these recommendations, which we make in an effort to promote kindness and inclusivity within our community …”
“Please coach your child if purchasing commercially produced cards to select something that does not feel ‘gender normative,’” the letter said, “Also, consider talking to your child about avoiding cards that portray only White human characters. Representation matters and our students of color also deserve to see themselves in some of the cards they receive, unless we can find cards without people pictured at all.”
This is not the first time that Moses Brown embraced woke insanity. Parents have complained that the school has an “obsession” with “transgender themes” and encourages students to proclaim “it is ok to be Gay.”
One mother told a regional radio show in New England that a teacher explained to her four-year-old daughter that someday the child “might want to marry another girl.” Children enrolled in Moses Brown’s pre-primary education program are taught to announce their pronouns to their class.
According to the school’s website, Moses Brown’s Lower School — which looks after children starting with nursery care through the 4th grade — emphasizes “the importance of being responsible citizens, and caring for others and the world beyond their doorstep” and helping students “develop their talents in a way that is uniquely theirs, while appreciating and celebrating the different abilities of those around them.”
Moses Brown’s high school provides students with several “service/awareness” organizations to participate in. These include the Gender Sexuality Alliance Club where students are encouraged to “explore issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity/expression” and “Equal Voice,” which “focuses on issues of feminism and equality.”
Moses Brown is a Quaker school system. The school says that the “world needs ethical leadership” and its mission as a Quaker school “is to provide the rising generation with an ethical core, an unshakable foundation of integrity that fosters respect, non-violent resolution of conflict, and the desire to make a positive difference in the world.”
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
A three-year battle in Vermont is coming to a head over Proposal 5, an amendment to the state constitution that would enshrine existing Vermont abortion “liberties” to terminate pregnancies up until birth.
Roe v. Wade established “viability” as the determinant of when state governments hold a “compelling” interest to protect children. The current challenge to Roe in the Supreme Court concerns a Mississippi law that would ban abortions after 15 weeks. Vermont’s Proposal 5 essentially defines fetal viability at 40 weeks (birth), ignoring both Roe and the science of human development.
The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wadesought to balance not just competing moral and political views, but the two lives at issue:
The pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy. She carries an embryo and, later, a fetus, if one accepts the medical definitions of the developing young in the human uterus… Each grows in substantiality as the woman approaches term and, at a point during pregnancy, each becomes ‘compelling.’ With respect to the state’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the ‘compelling’ point is at viability.
Modern medicine has revealed the miracle of human development, increasing public awareness of that second person even acknowledged by Roe. This reality drives increased public opposition to late-term abortions: recent polls show 80 percent of Americans oppose them. Medical science is also clear about what the Supreme Court described as viability:
Periviability, also referred to as borderline viability, is defined as the earliest stage of fetal maturity (i.e., between 22 and 26 weeks gestation) when there is a reasonable chance, although not a high likelihood, of extrauterine survival.
The current Mississippi dispute, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, seeks to protect unborn children from abortion prior to current scientific consensus on viability, at 15 weeks. Abortion proponents portray that as restrictive, and indeed treat any objection to late-term abortions as moralizing religiosity, yet secular France is currently embroiled in a parliamentary dispute over whether to expand long-standing restrictions on abortions there from 12 weeks to 14.
Vermont’s Abortion Law
Vermont established “abortion protections” through delivery in 2019, in its “no-limits” H.57, overcoming Republican efforts to impose a 24-week limitation, or to exempt minor girls. Proposal 5 now seeks to cement those same horrors into the Vermont constitution, and compel conservative elected representatives to swear an oath to its abhorrent provisions.
Women and young girls around the nation and world (Vermont provides free abortions to unlawful entrants) who make last-minute decisions to terminate their pregnancies may have no place to turn for “rescue” except the ghoulish Green Mountain State.
Vermont has long embraced this barbaric extremism with regard to the unborn. Its leftist legislature has steadfastly avoided acknowledging fetal personhood at any age, which leaves pregnant women gravely unprotected from domestic abusers who murder their unborn children — there is no Vermont recognition of these as homicides, even if the child is viable.
In one heartbreaking case, a young mother lost her twins at six months’ gestation when she was struck by an impaired driver. The Vermont legislature has repeatedly refused to honor her loss, or protect other mothers whose children are similarly murdered. Instead of acknowledging Roe’s “compelling” interest to protect the constitutional rights of viable children, Vermont uses its laws to deny the acknowledgment such children ever lived.
Proposal 5 Is Even Worse
Proposal 5 tightens that noose: unborn children in Vermont are not safe from murder by abortion when viable, only when they pass their mother’s cervix and breath air on their own. Vermont’s Proposal 5 will legally deny the recognition of the existence of that person Roe federally acknowledged in its “viability” rule. Thus Vermont has scorned even Roe’s political, moral, and scientific balancing efforts.
The Vermont progressive minority that has belched forth this abominable legislation is hell-bent on “preserving” its obscene accomplishments in constitutional cement. Planned Parenthood has even improperly cooperated with the Vermont attorney general’s office. Progressives invoke the eugenics horrors and the 15-week Mississippi attack on Roe as justification for Proposal 5. Vermont also offers sterilizing transgender hormone therapies to minor children without parental consent, in the same hospital that performs the majority of the late-term “procedures” in the state.
Supreme Court Must Address this Inequity
Vermont progressives are inviting the fall of Roe they fear. If states refuse to protect that second life acknowledged by Roe, and public sentiment continues to escalate in revulsion to abortion because of growing scientific awareness of the miraculousness of fetal development, is it not appropriate for the U.S. Supreme Court to take the required next step? Certainly there is no state constitutional recourse in Vermont on behalf of tortured viable children if its Constitution is amended to preempt that very possibility.
Roe v. Wade concerned the constitutional right to privacy of women while acknowledging a constitutional right to human personhood in the unborn at viability. It established federal preemptive boundaries to protect the first class, but left it to states to protect the second — and Vermont isn’t.
It is illogical for the U.S. Supreme Court not to address this glaring jurisprudential inequity. Does the U.S. Constitution contain a “right” for women to privately murder viable children? Roe specifically held they do not. But Roe did not articulate federal boundaries of constitutional protection for that child. As Justice Potter Stewart noted in his concurrence:
….the protection of a person’s general right to privacy – his right to be let alone by other people – is like the protection of his property and of his very life, left largely to the law of the individual States.
Many speculate that Mississippi’s law may be affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The New York Times proclaims“If the justices were to approve the law, Roe’s viability standard would no longer be the law of the land.” That does not bode well for Vermont’s extremist left minority.
The Supreme Court must declare that there is a gestation date beyond which women cannot constitutionally exterminate their young in the womb, and acknowledge what science proves: there is a separate human at issue, who must not be marginalized. Even if at a post-viable stage of 30 weeks, once federal fetal personhood is rightly acknowledged (much like when women and racial minorities were included in the Constitution’s protections), unconscionable laws like Proposal 5 will collapse under federal preemption.
Extremism such as Vermont’s demands federal rescue.
John Klar is an attorney, writer, pastor, and farmer who lives off-grid in Vermont. John blogs for Mother Earth News on agriculture issues, and maintains a weekly commentary in The Newport Daily Express.
It’s now certain that the military’s health surveillance system — DMED — showed a massive increase in sickness and injury diagnoses in 2021 over previous years, particularly in the neurological, cardiovascular, oncological, and reproductive health categories. The military, in a very terse and cryptic statement to PolitiFact last week, admitted as much, but claimed without any further explanation that the data in the system accessed by several military doctors working with attorney Thomas Renz was only a “fraction” of the true numbers that existed. In the words of the Pentagon spokesman, it was a “glitch in the database.” Where those true numbers existed, why they weren’t in the system for five years, what exactly was in the system, and why the 2021 numbers were accurate according to the DOD account remain a mystery.
However, one by one, the military public health officials have been adding back random numbers to the 2016 through 2020 codes. I’m told by Renz and two of the whistleblowers that throughout the past week, they have queried the same data again, and in most of the ICD categories, they have found that the numbers from 2016 through 2020 were “increased” exponentially to look as though 2021 was not an abnormal year. This has been done without any transparency, any press release, any statement of narrative, and sloppily in a way that makes the already unbelievable narrative simply impossible to believe.
In addition to believing that every epidemiological report for five years was somehow completely tainted with false data — including during the first year of the pandemic itself — we would have to believe that the minute they discovered this from Renz, they suddenly discovered the exact numbers. A five-year mistake fixed overnight!
Just take a look at the following statement given to the Epoch Times, the only other public comment delivered by an authorized Pentagon spokesman:
“Comparing the DMED database to the source data contained in DMSS, AFHSD discovered that the total number of medical diagnoses from 2016-2020 that were accessible in DMED represented only a small fraction of actual medical diagnoses for those years. In contrast, the 2021 total number of medical diagnoses were up to date in DMED. Comparison of 2021 to 2016-2020 resulted in the appearance of significant increased occurrence of all medical diagnoses in 2021 because of the under-reported data for 2016-2020. AFHSD has taken DMED offline to identify and correct the root-cause of the data corruption,” said Maj. Charlie Dietz.
That’s it! They are only concerned with downplaying any potential culpability of the vaccine, not explaining how they were flying blind, according to their official narrative, on such an important endeavor for so many years. Just consider the fact that at last week’s meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), officials revealed that they have been monitoring vaccine safety data from the DOD, among other places.
You know what that means? The CDC was looking at data for months that showed insane safety signals and did nothing about it, and somehow nobody in HHS or the DOD all along thought the data was a “glitch.”
Moreover, the DOD’s new data (as presented on Renz’s website) that was somehow updated so quickly is impossible to believe for a number of other reasons. Take a look at the top-line number of ICD codes in 2016-2020, as reflected in the data before the DOD tampered with it to input the new updated numbers.
Here is the original data of total annual outpatient diagnoses in DMED before the Pentagon changed it:
And here is the top-line tally for 2016-2020 based on the new numbers added:
This is a bar graph presentation from Thomas Renz contrasting the 2016-2020 total outpatient ICD diagnosis codes in the military before the DOD change and after the change. As you can see, during a typical year, there were about 2 million diagnosis codes, jumping almost tenfold in 2021. However, based on the changes made last week, 2021 is exactly in line with every other year (even though 2021 remains slightly lower; the data does not include numbers from December).
Here’s the problem with such an alleged presentation of the data. Putting the vaccines aside, the DOD’s “new” model would literally erase the existence of COVID off the face of the planet as if we never had the biggest pandemic of our lifetime. Even if the vaccine never caused a single doctor’s visit, COVID alone had to increase the codes. Yes, the military is generally very young, and deaths and hospitalizations were relatively low, but it’s impossible to believe that especially during the vicious Delta outbreak since the summer, there was no increase in COVID-related doctor’s visits. Just long COVID alone had to register a meaningful increase. Ironically, the Biden administration is forcing a vaccine mandate for a virus that, according to this alleged new data, didn’t cause even a 1% increase in baseline outpatient doctor’s visits this year!
The data originally reflected on DMED that was downloaded by the whistleblowers a few weeks ago makes much more sense because it accommodates both COVID and vaccine injury, which would explain the unprecedented increase. Now, obviously, COVID alone can’t explain all the increases, because some of the specific data points presented have already been associated with the vaccine injury, per VAERS and other studies, as opposed to the virus.
More fundamentally, it is simply ludicrous to suggest that there are this many diagnoses in the military in a given year. All active-duty soldiers have to be medically screened. Obesity, diabetes, and heart conditions are very rare, and the population is generally very young. If we really have over 20 million diagnoses every year in the military (consisting of about 1.4 million active-duty personnel), there is something seriously wrong, and that in itself is a huge story.
Let’s drill down to some specific ICD codes to drive home this point.
Take a look at the data for nervous system diagnoses before the numbers were altered:
Now look at the new numbers:
We are to believe that there was ZERO increase in the year of the Delta pandemic as well as what we already know from the civilian world about vertigo and migraines following the shots? We were all shocked by the percentage increase, but to say there was no increase whatsoever defies any expectation. Moreover, we are to believe that there are nearly 1 million nervous system diagnoses in the military every year in a fighting force of 1.4 million?
To further explore this point, let’s look at the number of pulmonary embolism diagnoses before and after the DOD “fixed” the data. Blood clotting in the longs is a clear consequence of the spike protein, which sticks to CD-147 receptors on blood vessels.
Here are the numbers before:
And here are the numbers after the DOD alteration:
While even the “revised” numbers do show some degree of increase, it is not enough to account for the unprecedented nature of both COVID and the COVID vaccines. But the more serious issue is how can a military of healthy young people have such a high baseline of pulmonary embolisms every year? One estimate of pulmonary embolism prevalence in the U.S. is between 60 and 70 per 100,000 per year. But that is almost exclusively in the elderly and sicker population. Soldiers 20 to 25 years old don’t exactly get pulmonary embolisms. So even accounting for the fact that these are diagnosis codes and not unique individuals (some might have had a few visits in a year), the numbers are way too high.
Finally, it’s important to note that the DOD is so overprotective of the vaccine that it revised numbers to show zero increase in ailments that are universally understood to have increased – at least to some extent – because of the vaccine. Although they were smart enough to still show a baseline increase in myocarditis (everyone knows that), the new numbers would indicate zero increase for pericarditis.
Here is the original data queried by the whistleblowers:
And here is the new data, which seem to indicate no unusual increase, even if we add in the missing month for 2021:
The silence both from the media and congressional members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees is astounding. One of two things is true: Either there was mass vaccine injury in the military, or our military has been very unhealthy and the Pentagon completely lost control over epidemiological surveillance of these health issues for years. Either way, this is the story of the year.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
This morning Defend Florida released its Interim Report On Election Integrity Risks in the State of Florida. The results of their canvassing work are shocking.
Defend Florida released an interim report of their canvassing results in Florida to date. The group of volunteers canvassed 14,631 individuals across numerous counties. Only around 60% of those canvassed verified their registrations, nearly a third didn’t validate their registrations. Of the remaining voters interviewed (5,571), 89% didn’t live at the address where they were registered at.
In addition, the report acknowledges that 800,000 registered voters in the 2020 Election should have been recorded as inactive.
We discovered that there are more than 800,000 voters who have not voted in 10 years or more. By Florida law, the Florida Supervisors of Elections are required to set a voter to “inactive” after two years of not voting and remove the voter who is inactive if they remain inactive for 4 additional years. Some Supervisors of Elections have stated that the law is unclear and that they cannot remove inactive voters from the voting rolls. This conflict between the Florida law, its interpretation, and procedures and processes will likely require legislative action to address technical fixes in the law, administrative fixes in the executive branch of the Florida government, and changes within the Supervisor of Elections offices.
Defend Florida examined the 800,000 inactive voters. We discovered that 110,000 of these inactive voters who should not be on the rolls, voted in 2020. We attempted contact with 26,453 voters. We succeeded in gathering information on 14,631 voters, which is a small percent (0.13%) of the whole. We discovered significant problems with the subset of voters who we could contact.
It looks like Florida has some work to do to address fraudulent registrations in the state. Here is the press conference from today.
See the report below. Others have warned about the Democrats using invalid registrations to steal the state.
It looks like it’s time for Florida to get rid of the ERIC voter registration system and start using something that will address the voter registration issues in the state.
Joe Hoft is the twin brother of TGP’s founder, Jim Hoft, and a contributing editor at TGP. Joe’s reporting is often months ahead of the Mainstream media as was observed in his reporting on the Mueller sham investigation, the origins of the China coronavirus, and 2020 Election fraud. Joe was a corporate executive in Hong Kong for a decade and has years of experience in finance, IT, operations and auditing around the world. The knowledge gained in his career provide him with a unique perspective of current events in the US and globally. He has ten degrees or designations and is the author of three books. Joe is currently co-host of the morning radio show in St. Louis at 93.3 “Tomorrow’s News Today”. His new book: ‘In God We Trust: Not in Lying Liberal Lunatics’ is out now – please take a look and buy a copy.
Activists protest against the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics outside the Consulate of China in Los Angeles, California, on February 3, 2022. Activists protested against the many human rights abuses of the Chinese Communist Party and called for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. | FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
This is part 2 of The Christian Post’s series on China’s human rights abuses under the spotlight of the Olympic Games and takes a look at accusations that multinational corporations’ are complicit in such crimes. The series will also feature testimonies from religious minorities persecuted under the communist regime. Read part 1 here.
“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, OK?” Golden State Warriors’ minority owner and billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya told his co-host, Jason Calacanis, on their Jan. 15 “All-in” podcast. “You bring it up because you really care, and I think it’s nice that you really care. The rest of us don’t care.”
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom stated in its 2021 annual report how the Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic minority group native to the Xinjiang (pronounced shin·jaang) province of western China, have faced increasing persecution from the government along with other religious minorities such as Christians, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners.
The report highlighted how the Australian Strategic Policy Institute identified at least 380 detention centers across the Uyghur region where members of the predominantly Muslim community are detained for reasons like “wearing long beards, refusing alcohol, or exhibiting other behaviors deemed signs of ‘religious extremism.’”
“Former detainees reported torture, rape, sterilization, and other abuses in custody. Experts raised concerns that the Chinese government’s ongoing actions in Xinjiang could amount to genocide under international law,” the report stated, highlighting the use of Uyghur forced labor in internment and prison camps as well as factories and industrial parks in the region.
An estimated 1 million to 3 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have been imprisoned in detention camps throughout western China. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have recognized China’s actions against Uyghurs as “genocide.” Several countries have also condemned China for human rights violations. As a result, the U.S. and several other nations have announced diplomatic boycotts of the Beijing Games that begin Friday.
Still, Palihapitiya defended his now-viral comments that “nobody cares” about what’s happening to the Uyghurs as a “very hard ugly truth.” And when it comes to the business community and the human rights abuses in China, USCIRF Vice Chair Nury Turkel, a Uyghur advocate born in a re-education camp in China in 1970 who fled 27 years ago, says the billionaire’s comments are honest.
“I don’t like to use the word honesty when describing this person and his despicable public admission, but what he’s saying is true,” Turkel told The Christian Post in a recent interview.
“From how much silence and pushback that we’ve been getting from the business community, it is an emblematic problem. It’s just a symptom of broader, bigger issues that as a civilization that we’re dealing with,” he continued. “What we have now is a very vibrant and powerful business lobby, business community, fighting against our own government.”
On Dec. 23, 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into law. The legislation passed with strong bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate and builds on previous efforts by the U.S. government to clamp down on forced labor practices and human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The law prohibits all imports from Xinjiang into the U.S. starting June 21, 2022. Getting to this point, however, was not easy.
Nike, Apple and Coca-Cola were reportedly among major companies and business groups that lobbied Congress to weaken the legislation. Nike, Coca-Cola, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Campbell Soup Company, Costco, H&M, Patagonia, the Kraft Heinz Co., Tommy Hilfiger and others were also listed as companies suspected of ties to forced labor in Xinjiang in a March 2020 report from a bipartisan group of lawmakers called the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. The report cited credible evidence of many products being made with forced labor — yarn, clothing, gloves, bedding, carpet, cotton, cell phones, computer hardware, noodles, cakes, shoes and tea.
Several companies, such as Nike and Apple, denied lobbying against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. But in a letter to Congress in September 2020, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the law “would prove ineffective and may hinder efforts to prevent human rights abuses.”
“Past attempts to utilize domestic U.S. securities law to combat human rights abuses provide a cautionary tale. For example, a well-intentioned effort to resolve abuses related to the mining of conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in many cases worsened the situation on the ground in that country,” the business organization wrote.
“The absence of a qualified inspection and audit systems made it nearly impossible for companies to ensure accurate disclosures. This, in turn, caused many companies to implement a de facto embargo against material sourced in the region, which then hurt legitimate miners. At the same time, the original targets of the provision simply shifted their activities to avoid being impacted.”
For Turkel, the problem isn’t just with U.S. businesses.
A protester holds up a “Boycott Beijing 2022” sign after marching across the Golden Gate Bridge during a demonstration against the 2022 Beijing winter Olympic Games, in San Francisco, California, on February 3, 2022. Activists protested against the many human rights abuses of the Chinese Communist Party and called for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics due to be held in Beijing. United States, Britain, Canada and Australia are among countries staging a diplomatic boycott over China’s human rights record, particularly the fate of the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. | JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. was recently joined by Australia, Britain, Canada and Japan in an ongoing diplomatic boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics to protest China’s human rights record. Turkel believes the boycott is working to some extent but says more could have been done.
“There should have been more broader, full boycott, more pressure to postpone or relocate. If relocating doesn’t work, [it] would have been an ideal solution to the problem,” he said. “Number one, there is a historic reason. We don’t want, as a civilization, to embolden a dictatorial regime like the one in Beijing to witness us repeat history. The international community apparently has not learned a lesson from the 1936 Nazi Olympics allowing this Olympics in 2022 — the genocide Olympics — to take place.”
Turkel is concerned that no one can guarantee the safety of athletes under China’s current regime.
“It is a diplomatic boycott. We welcome the additional countries announced [last month], but the biggest problem now is who can guarantee the safety of athletes? The athletes have already been told that they should not engage in politics. So, when the Chinese make that kind of warning, you cannot ignore it. They mean it,” he said.
“One of the biggest problems that the international community keeps making is ignoring the Chinese warning, Chinese policy statements. [They say], ‘Well, it will not happen.’ China apologists, policy experts, academics, business leaders never thought, if they could be honest, that China would commit genocide on the world’s watch. And the same is true with Hong Kong. The brutality showed to upend Hong Kong’s democracy is something the people thought would not happen.”
Turkel believes China will go after athletes or businesses that speak out against the human rights abuses. He pointed to athletes like NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom, who has been vocal about the persecution of the Uyghurs. But he said he doesn’t have much faith in the business community.
“I don’t hold my breath on the business community’s ability to get out on the right side of history. But athletes might because they are normal human beings just like you and I,” he said.
“We’ve seen the athletes speaking up. … So, there is some movement within the sports world, but the business world — the politicians, the consumers — have a lot to catch up with. So, I worry about the safety of the athletes taking the risk to go there in the face of the COVID surge, in the face of the naked warning by the Chinese authorities,” Turkel said. “They’ll be monitored. Their phones will be monitored. Their social media will be monitored. … And China will not hesitate to punish anyone regardless of their non-Chinese citizen status.”
How big business influences politics
While big business interests couldn’t stop legislation aimed at addressing China’s persecution of the Uyghurs, their influence is much more substantial in other countries. Turkel is convinced it’s a significant reason why more countries haven’t joined the diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics.
“China has been doing a number of things effectively, much to our dismay and disappointment. Because the civilized world, liberal democracies, are not even investing nearly enough time and energy to push back,” Turkel added.
“So, what the Chinese have been doing, if you look at The Global Times statement in defense of Palihapitiya, that there will be consequences. So it is that explicit.”
“For anyone who has the slightest knowledge of Xinjiang, the lurid claims of human rights abuses or even ‘genocide’ in the region are pure lies made up by the US government as pretext to crack down on China. The criticism against Palihapitiya has nothing to do with his lack of empathy but with his refusal to observe political correctness and repeat the lies of the US government about Xinjiang without questioning,” The Global Times argued. It also said American businesses are likely to suffer consequences as a result.
“Specifically, US businesses will have a tough time to operate in the Chinese market where they make hundreds of billions of dollars each year, as political correctness pushes them into an impossible position of having to choose between their consumers and their government,” the publication maintained.
“We have already seen the implications in many cases, and more will likely fall into the same trap set up by the US government. The question is, when will US businesses and others stand up and say enough is enough? How much losses are they willing to take before that?”
Turkel insists, however, that these consequences from China are part of a “collaborated, systematic, orchestrated, organized bullying of the business community.”
“They are essentially telling the business community, who told us since China joined the WTO that Americans, we should just sleep at ease at night because the business community has figured out how to deal with China. But guess what? They’re caught in the crossfire,” the official for the independent commission that advises the U.S. government and Congress said.
“Even a [scenario] as major as taking down or making a public statement as H&M, Nike and Intel did, they’re suggesting that no Xinjiang suppliers were met with a state-sponsored boycott, so they backed down,” Turkel said. “There is a collaborated, systematic, orchestrated, organized bullying of the business community that has spent the last two decades to tell the consumer that everything is fine. Guess what? Everything was not fine, and everything is not fine.”
After warning suppliers last month that it had been “required to ensure that its supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region” following restrictions imposed by “multiple governments,” U.S. microchip maker Intel had to apologize in China after significant backlash.
“We apologize for the trouble caused to our respected Chinese customers, partners and the public. Intel is committed to becoming a trusted technology partner and accelerating joint development with China,” Intel said in a statement.
Craig Smith, chief executive of the China operation of global snowboarding firm Burton, headquartered in Vermont, recently defended his company working in Xinjiang in an interview with the BBC.
“If there are any type of human rights violations in Xinjiang … you know, I don’t know. Not my expertise by any means, so I’m not going to judge,” he said.
“The reason being is we have two choices. We can either divorce ourselves from Xinjiang and say, ‘No, we’re not going to do anything out there,’ or [what] we could do is we can try to understand what’s going on in Xinjiang better. And you know, yes, there may be some factually, I don’t know, I’m not a politician, I’ve never studied any type of aspect.”
“I can’t change that,” Burton’s CEO added. “We’ll focus on what we can change for the better. The people who live in Xinjiang, they’re fabulous people who I’ve met in Xinjiang. And that’s who I know. That’s what I know. And that’s all I can address. And I address that by sharing the fun of snowboarding and going to the mountains together, having a meal together, high-fiving each other after a fun powder run.”
Turkel was not amused by Smith’s feigning ignorance about what’s happening in Xinjiang.
“We’ve been fooled. We’ve been used as a tool for these money-making machines. We are addicted to cheap products from China, and I knew it, but most people did not, that we’ve been benefiting from slave labor,” he said. “The United States does not use slavery for making consumer products, [but] China does. So even in a competition aspect, in a basic human rights and religious freedom aspect, this is an emblematic problem in communist China that has been used for political economy and political repression.”
According to the United Nations, genocide means “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
“You know, a few years ago, if somebody said, ‘American businesses are OK with slavery’ … you might think this is a person who needs to have their head examined. But this is the sad reality,” Turkel said.
“There are 152 state parties to the Genocide Convention. Only seven of them, including our own government, have spoken out. Where are the rest of the state parties? They need to get onto the right side of history by fulfilling the treaty obligations and preventing important legal tools, international legal tools, from becoming a deadbeat letter.”
When told that some critics question the application of the term genocide to what’s happening to the approximately 12 million-strong Uyghur community in China, Turkel, who has not physically seen his parents in China in 27 years, suggested it could perhaps be because they have not experienced the persecution of the Uyghur people.
The Chinese government claims that its “re-education” camps aim to combat Islamic extremism, crime and separatism.
“I don’t know if they will say the same thing if their children are taken away from them by the state to state orphanages,” Turkel said of critics of the genocide label. “I don’t know if they will say the same if their middle-aged wife, mother or sisters need to go through forced sterilization. And I don’t know if they will say the same thing, where expressing any type of skepticism when the ethnic group or religious group that they belong to are being subjected to the total destruction or destruction in part.”
“I don’t know if they will be OK to say, ‘We’ll … show this kind of push back if their government or any government says publicly that no mercy in dealing with this particular group because of their ethnicity and race.’ So at least several of the legal definitions of genocide is met in the way that China is treating them,” Turkel asserted.
“China has been purposefully and deliberately destroying, in part or whole, this proud, historical, ethnic and religious group. China has prevented natural population growth, through forced abortion, forced sterilization. In 2019 to 2020 alone, the population growth [of the Uyghurs] declined by 25 percent. So, this is a staggering number. Close to 800,000 to 1 million Uyghur kids have been taken away from their parents. So that’s my answer to those skeptics.”
Why consumers need to take a stand
A recent report from FTI Consulting showed that some 40% of Americans are no longer interested in buying products labeled “Made in China.” Nearly 80% are also willing to pay higher prices to companies that close their Chinese factories. If consumers in the U.S. and around the world want to take a stand against human rights abuses in China, they will have to speak with their dollars.
“When you look at the kind of people China sends to Western assembly lines, oftentimes they are vulnerable religious or ethnic groups. So, this is a much larger problem that’s transnational. It’s not only exclusively a matter that the United States should tackle alone,” Turkel said.
“This is a matter of conscience. This is a matter of consumer decency that the consumer should tell the American corporate executive, ‘Not on my watch. I’m not going to wear, I’m not going to let my baby wear baby pajamas made by enslaved fellow human beings. I’m not going to wrap my baby in clothes made by enslaved Uyghurs.'”
Turkey said that the consumer has “so much that they can do to pressure the businesses.”
“It is a serious problem. It has to be tackled globally, multilaterally, bilaterally, societally, legally,” he emphasized. “Business leaders need to know that there will be a reputational risk, there will be legal risks, and there will be a consumer risk if they continue the status quo.”
A Dutch reporter was physically manhandled and forced off the air during a live shot as he covered the Beijing Olympics. Sjoerd den Daas, the Greater China/East Asia correspondent for Dutch public broadcaster NOS, was pulled off camera by Chinese guards as he reported live on Friday from the Beijing Olympics. Video captured the moment Chinese guards dragged away den Daas — who was standing in front of the National Stadium — and blocked the camera.
“We are now being pulled out of here,” den Daas said while still on camera. “We have just been expelled from another area, so I’m afraid we’ll have to come back to you later.”
“Our correspondent @sjoerddendaas was pulled away from the camera by security guards at 12:00 pm live in the NOS Journaal,” NOS tweeted Friday, shortly after the video began gaining traction. “Unfortunately, this is increasingly becoming a daily reality for journalists in China. He is fine and was able to finish his story a few minutes later.”
The Daily Mail reported Friday, “The interruption came from a man wearing a black jacket and a red band around the sleeve which appears to distinguish him a ‘Public Security Volunteer,’ a citizen-led neighborhood watch established to help police maintain order.”
The opening ceremony for the 2022 Beijing Olympics is under way.
The original video has been viewed more than 200,000 times at the time of this reporting.
Onze correspondent @sjoerddendaas werd om 12.00u live in het NOS Journaal door beveiligers voor de camera weggetrokken. Helaas is dit steeds vaker de dagelijkse realiteit voor journalisten in China. Hij is in orde en kon zijn verhaal gelukkig een paar minuten later afmaken pic.twitter.com/GLTZRlZV96
NOS editor in chief Marcel Gelauff said that the incident is a blatantly “painful illustration” of how foreign press is treated in the communist state.
“Sjoerd has often told and shown that it is difficult as a journalist in China,” he told Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, according to a report from Insider. “There is a far-reaching tendency to curtail freedoms, and this may be even stronger because of [COVID-19],” said Gelauff.
“I haven’t spoken to Sjoerd yet, but from what I saw on the images I didn’t get the idea that he was in the way,” Dabbled added.
The 2022 Olympics kicked off on Friday despite ongoing outrage over the genocide and crimes against humanity taking place in Xinjiang.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg scrapped two policies Friday following immense public backlash as the city sees a rise in violent crime. Bragg appeared to deflect blame onto his staff in his memo released Friday, noting his Jan. 3 memo was meant to provide “framework” with which his office should follow.
“As I emphasized in my remarks to the office, you were hired for your keen judgment, and I want you to use that judgment – and experience – in every case,” Bragg wrote.
US President Joe Biden’s motorcade drive past New York Police Department officers near the NYPD Headquarters in New York on February 3, 2022. (YUKI IWAMURA/AFP via Getty Images)
Under the new memo, Bragg said commercial robberies committed with a gun “will be charged as a felony” regardless of if the gun “is operable, loaded, or a realistic imitation.” Robberies committed at knifepoint or with another weapon will also be charged as a felony, according to the memo. Bragg also said “people walking the streets with guns will be prosecuted and held accountable” and that the “default in gun cases is a felony prosecution.”
“Violence against police officers will not be tolerated,” the memo continued. “We will prosecute any person who harms or attempts to harm a police officer.”
Prior to the changes, Bragg’s initial memo said armed robberies would be treated as petty larceny, a misdemeanor, if no victim was seriously injured and there was no “genuine risk of physical harm.”
Widow of slain New York Police Department Officer Jason Rivera, Dominique Luzuriaga, slammed Bragg for not keeping the city safe during her husband’s funeral service.
WATCH: Widow of @NYPDnews officer Jason Rivera slams @ManhattanDA though not by name: "We are not safe anymore. Not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these laws, especially the ones from the new DA. I hope he's watching you speak through me right now." pic.twitter.com/zHPQ1scMgy
“The system continues to fail us,” Luzuriaga said. “We are not safe anymore, not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these new laws, especially the ones from the new DA. I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now.”
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Foreigners are voting in our elections. It isn’t just in the sanctuary city of New York, where 800,000 foreigners just got the power to vote in municipal elections. Foreigners voting occurs all over the country. Over the past few years, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, has uncovered government records showing foreigners voting in Pennsylvania, Texas, New Jersey, and California.
Voter fraud deniers do not want to talk about the fact that foreigners are registering and voting in U.S. elections. They forget that the foreigners voting in American elections are sometimes victims of third-party voter registration drives that jeopardize their immigration status. These voter registration drives sign anyone up without regard to eligibility.
States are also victimizing these foreigners. Pennsylvania let aliens register to vote for more than two decades on a broken department of motor vehicles registration process. Unwitting aliens often don’t know they aren’t allowed to register and vote. Meanwhile, committing an election crime such as illegal voting subjects them to deportation. The only winner is the political party that reliably gets their votes.
Just this week, we uncovered more evidence of foreigners voting in our elections, this time in the swing state of North Carolina. In 2019, the North Carolina State Board of Elections denied the foundation access to documents relating to foreigners registering and voting, so the foundation sued the board. Following a ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirming that the National Voter Registration Act requires disclosure of these documents, the board agreed to settle the case. In the settlement, the board agreed to disclose the records relating to foreigners registering and voting. There have already been 38indictments of foreigners registering to vote and some casting ballots. These records will conclusively show how many foreigners have been voting in North Carolina elections.
Inspecting these list maintenance documents serves an important purpose by allowing one to identify how foreigners are getting registered to vote. That is a key first step to improve the system and ensure that these errors do not continue to happen.
Often, it is the fault of the government. For example, a voter registration form will have a question at the top asking if the potential registrant is an American. One may check “no” and, due to errors by local elections officials, still get registered to vote. The same mistakes can happen when the potential registrant leaves the checkbox blank. The mistake may also be on the part of the potential registrant, incorrectly checking the box attesting that he or she is a U.S. citizen. The bottom line is foreigners are registering and voting in states across the country.
Nobody should want this. Only Americans should be electing American leaders. States need to examine their voter list maintenance procedures and ensure they are keeping non-citizens off the voter rolls.
We will continue the effort to catalog and expose government mistakes and election malfeasance. Americans have a right to know about the vulnerabilities in our election system.
J. Christian Adams is the President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.
It’s been less than two months since an associate professor teamed up with a pro-pedophile organization in an attempt to normalize the most repugnant crimes imaginable. Now, yet another unhinged professor has been caught advocating for pedophilia, this time even more brazenly. Stephen Kershnar is a professor at State University of New York at Fredonia, and a pedophilia apologist. Here’s Kershnar on video saying that an adult male having sex with a 12-year-old girl is not obviously wrong, and that calling it wrong is a “mistake.” In the same clip, he refers to pedophilic rape as “adult-child sex,” another euphemism that, just like “minor-attracted person,” is being used in an attempt to run cover for evil.
It gets worse. Twelve isn’t young enough for Kershnar. He continues to defend pedophilia, remarking “The notion that it’s wrong even with a one-year-old is not quite obvious to me.” He goes on. “I don’t think it’s blanket wrong at any age.”
Kershnar even argues that children can consent to sex with adults, comparing it to a child willfully engaging in kickball or participating in bar mitzvah lessons.
What are the legal ramifications of such an unspeakably vile perspective? Kershnar lays it out. Since he’s not sure if raping infants is good or bad, “the thumb on the scale should go to liberty.” Liberty for who? Moral monsters who want to rape infants.
Kershnar is open to the idea that pedophilia is deeply harmful to victims, but he just can’t put his finger on why. He thinks it could be because of bigots like you and me, who go “berserk” when pedophiles rape kids. He even argues that we often make children do things they don’t want to do, like “go to church” or “go to temple” or “go to their sister’s ballet recital.” His perspective is backed up by podcast host Thaddeus Russel, who makes an equally monstrous argument when he says, “all a child’s life is, is coercion by adults … often to make the child do something for the adult’s pleasure only.”
It’s also telling that these dangerous viewpoints have found their way into the mainstream through left-wing outlets. At one point, Russel boasts that he authored an article in The Daily Beast that argued for lowering consent laws.
If SUNY Fredonia would like to right this wrong, it can begin by correcting Kershnar’s bio, which adopts the language of child groomers by calling pedophilia “adult-child sex.” Thus far, SUNY Fredonia’s response has been swift, although incomplete. In a statement, the university remarked that Kershnar’s views are “reprehensible and do not represent the values of SUNY Fredonia in any way, shape or form” also noting that “The matter is being reviewed.”
Only one moral decision can be made following such a review. Half measures, or any other move to placate those who are correctly outraged at the situation rather than remedy the crisis, are entirely unacceptable and unbecoming of any institution that hopes to maintain a shred of legitimacy. Although SUNY Fredonia may in fact come to the correct decision, it must be recognized that these sentiments did not come out of nowhere. The institution is responding to a high-profile case that’s just now been exposed.
Some of the school’s alumni weren’t the least bit surprised. After all, we’re talking about a professor who published a book titled “Pedophilia and Adult-Child Sex: A Philosophical Analysis” all the way back in 2015. That SUNY at Fredonia is only now responding to this moral crisis in response to public outcry is disgraceful and deceptive.
Kershnar Is Not Alone
When hearing about such an outrageous situation, it can be easy to believe that it is an isolated experience, that such insane notions couldn’t possibly have taken root elsewhere. Unfortunately, this would be a misconception. As mentioned previously, it hasn’t been long since a former professor at Old Dominion University rebranded pedophiles as “minor-attracted persons.” Even this instance was not unique.
A professor at Yale University by the name of Joe Fischel publicly argued that children should be shown nudity, thereby victimized by acts of indecent exposure, at LGBT pride parades. His article was replete with the same strategies that child groomers use, as I outlined previously. These handful of pedophilia apologist professors are just the tip of the iceberg, one facet of a wider campaign to normalize pedophilia. The logical results of these sentiments have trickled down into K-12 institutions, with gay pornography being featured in school libraries, while other government-run schools host LGBT clubs for four-year-olds, all while refusing to reveal if parents were required to be present on these clubs’ Zoom calls.
The crisis isn’t relegated to education, either, with similar themes popping up in a number of totally different sectors. A commercial from Twix featured child cross-dressing, just one more example of the elite attempt to groom children.
A YMCA’s LGBT center hosts youth-only events, and hosted a man who creates drawings that feature characters from children’s shows having sex. Meanwhile, a broader push to foist transgenderism on children has a dark and storied history of pedophilia, child abuse, and psychological torment. Make no mistake, there is a broad and deliberate push in nearly all areas of public life to normalize pedophilia. This push must be fought wherever it is found, without reservation.
Here’s How To Fight Pedophilia’s Normalization
Let’s be abundantly clear: this is not a complicated issue. In fact, there can be no simpler issue. Pedophilia is evil. That’s it. We shouldn’t accept the notion that pro-pedophilia sentiments are valid ideas to be contended with in the marketplace of ideas by the use of rhetorical flourish or superior philosophizing. Illiberalism is no crime when your opponent uses bad-faith arguments to justify moral atrocities that target the most vulnerable among us, victimizing them in ways they can’t even comprehend. These ideas, just like those who use their institutional positions to normalize this horrid evil, must be ostracized, shamed, shunned, stigmatized, and mocked out of any and all forms of socio-political or academic influence. This is not extreme. It’s the natural immune system response that any healthy society enacts when confronted with a rising tide of danger and evil.
Here are some simple ways you can reject it:
Refuse to use euphemistic and manipulated language.
By using euphemisms, you fight the battle against child groomers on their terms. You must completely reject phrases like “minor-attracted person,” or “adult-child sex,” both of which seek to grant sympathy and dignity to these atrocities and those who commit them. Maintain the moral high ground with terms that accurately identify evil.
Become comfortable with being intolerant.
Tolerance is a vice, not a virtue, when you are asked to tolerate unspeakable moral crimes. Our society has begun to see tolerance as the mark of an enlightened person. Reject this faulty framing, and all the degeneracy and spiritual rot that has followed closely behind it.
Fight, fight, fight.
If there was ever a time to be uncompromising, to cling to your beliefs with unrelenting zeal, this is it. The only proper response to situations such as this is action backed by righteous anger. Root out attempts to normalize pedophilia anywhere and everywhere you find it. Publicize it. Send examples like this to The Federalist. Demand that institutions that are home to these sentiments condemn it wholeheartedly in speech and in action. Fight, fight, fight.
Kershnar did not respond to a request for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
(Photo by Sgt. Isaiah Campbell / U.S. Marine Corps via Getty Images)
As many as 9,000 American citizens were left in Afghanistan when the U.S. military withdrew from the country Aug. 31, according to a report released Thursday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In public statements, Biden administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, claimed that only 100-150 Americans remained in Afghanistan and had contacted the U.S. government with a desire to leave. The State Department and Defense Department officials stuck to that number, even as the government publicly admitted that large numbers of American citizens were still leaving the country.
The report, signed by Foreign Relations ranking member Jim Risch of Idaho, reveals that State Department officials believed that between 10,000 and 15,000 Americans were in Afghanistan as late as Aug. 17. In the next two weeks, only 6,000 Americans were able to escape the country ahead of the Taliban takeover. In testimony in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, however, Blinken claimed that “approximately 100-150 remained in Afghanistan who still wished to depart.”
Estimating the number of Americans residing or visiting a country like Afghanistan is “50% art and 50% science and educated guesswork,” staffers of the former Kabul Embassy reportedly said, since Americans are encouraged but not required to register with the State Department when they enter a country. The staffers noted that host countries are generally able to provide better estimates than the embassy, but that Afghanistan was not capable of doing so.
Officials like Blinken and U.S. Central Command leader Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth McKenzie frequently qualified their statements about the number of Americans remaining in-country by saying that they were in contact with smaller numbers who “want to leave.”
Contributing the failure was the Biden administration’s lack of preparation for the execution of the withdrawal. National security officials were still working to formulate a withdrawal plan a day before Kabul fell to the Taliban, despite the fact that Biden announced that American forces would withdraw from Afghanistan four months before the collapse of the U.S.-allied government. The National Security Council failed to coordinate withdrawal operations between the State and Defense departments, and rapid troop withdrawals exacerbated the failed evacuation process, according to the report.
After Kabul fell to the Taliban, the Biden administration was still slow to organize contingency responses for withdrawal. The Transportation Department waited five days to issue an order allowing foreign airlines to deliver evacuees to American airports, and seven days to activate the Civil Reserve Aircraft Fleet (CRAF). The CRAF is a private airline fleet that can aid the U.S. military in a crisis, but “was barely used and did little to impact evacuation operations.”
Government officials had warned as early as 2007 that plans for withdrawal from unsafe and hostile nations would need a significant overhaul, particularly the reporting requirements for American citizens in those countries. A key factor in those plans is the reliance on the host government in providing an accurate number of Americans in need of evacuation. This issue has not been corrected across four presidential administrations.
“The lack of host nation accounting for Americans is likely not unique to Afghanistan and will be a persistent feature in countries with weak central governments and inefficient accounting systems,” the report notes. “It is exactly these countries that are most prone to rapid onsets of instability requiring the evacuation of Americans.”
Despite these logistical failures, as well as the death of 13 American service members in an ISIS-K terrorist attack, the Biden administration has claimed its withdrawal efforts a success.
“We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history. With more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety, that number is more than double what most experts thought was possible. No nation – no nation has ever done anything like it in all the history,” Biden said in a speech marking the final withdrawal of American forces and embassy officials.
“The bottom line: 90% of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave,” he added.
An illegal immigrant accused of killing a Texas teenager in a hit-and-run car crash will be spared deportation under the Biden administration’s new rules governing who should be removed from the country.
Heriberto Fuerte-Padilla was driving while intoxicated in November 2020 when he smashed his pickup truck into a car driven by 19-year-old Adrienne Sophia Exum, expelling her from her vehicle. Exum died on the scene. Fuerte-Padilla reportedly tried to flee the area but was picked up by police shortly after and charged with a DWI and failure to render aid.
Though initially requesting that authorities deport Fuerte-Padilla after Texas issued its punishment, the Department of Homeland Security has since dropped its request, arguing he doesn’t qualify for priority deportation under new rules issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in September, the Washington Times reported.
The outlet added that U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers told Texas authorities that it was also “canceling deportation requests — known as ‘detainers’ — on other illegal immigrants, including some who pleaded guilty to felony charges of evading arrest or had convictions for drunken driving, drug possession or domestic assault injuring a family member.”
Those illegal aliens who were once subject to deportation are no longer considered “priority lifts” under the new rules.
On Sept. 30, Mayorkas issued a memo that outlined a dramatic shift in U.S. immigration enforcement policy. No longer would being in the country illegally be a sufficient cause for that individual’s deportation, nor would simply committing a crime. The new rules — which intended to focus in on only the most serious illegal immigrant targets — specified that an individual must be a “threat to national security,” a “threat to public safety,” or a recent border crosser to be considered for deportation.
“The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them,” Mayorkas said in the memo. “We will use our discretion and focus our enforcement resources in a more targeted way. Justice and our country’s well-being require it.”
The new “public safety” criterion would prove to be the most difficult to assess.
In the memo, Mayorkas noted that someone would be considered a public safety threat if they committed “serious criminal conduct,” before vaguely adding that the determination should not be made “according to bright lines or categories” but rather “the totality of the facts and circumstances.”
It’s unclear why the department ultimately determined that Fuerte-Padilla and other illegal immigrant offenders didn’t fit the criteria. But no matter the explanations, the deportation request cancellations are undoubtedly frustrating to local law enforcement.
“Here we have a law enforcement agency handing ICE a criminal alien on a silver platter and ICE saying, ‘No thank you,’ and then the law enforcement agency saying, ‘Really?’ And ICE saying, ‘No, we really don’t want to take this person,'” Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told the Times.
The Times noted that attorneys general in Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Montana, and Ohio are currently challenging the new DHS rules in court in two separate cases.
A long-term study from Vanderbilt University found that children who attended Tennessee’s state pre-k program underperformed in the sixth grade compared to children who did not attend the program.
“Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children,” the study found. The “strongest negative effects” were found in sixth graders.
The study also found a negative effect for “disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.”
The Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten program (TN-VPK) operates under the control of the state department of education and is used by low-income families statewide, according to Vanderbilt University. Tennessee has dumped $86 million worth of funding into the program since 2005, giving 15,000 preschoolers statewide access to the program and opening 786 new classrooms.
The study tracked 2,990 preschoolers from low-income backgrounds who applied for the oversubscribed TN-VPK, and researchers observed students who were accepted as well as rejected. This allowed the study to create a “statistically appropriate control group,” as all students came from families who wanted the children in pre-k, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The researchers also stated that there are “no distinctive characteristics of the Tennessee program have yet been identified that are a likely explanation for the disappointing findings,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
President Joe Biden, along with progressives in Congress, has also been pushing universal pre-k for all 3-and-4-year-olds as part of his administration’s Build Back Better framework. The Build Back Better Act, which was set to cost $2 trillion, was blocked in the Senate after Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin stated“this is a no on this piece of legislation,” and that he would not vote for it.
Manchin stated Tuesday that Build Back Better was “dead” and that “there is no Build Back Better bill,” the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. However, Manchin has shown support for certain elements of the bill, including universal preschool.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
A now-deleted portion of the Riverside, Califonia school district’s website obtained by The Federalist displays that the district promoted an essay that attacks people based on their inborn skin color. The essay, titled “Decentering Whiteness” by Jeff Hitchcock and Charley Flint, claimed that “attacking whiteness is not enough.” It sought to divide people on the basis of their race and argued that “whiteness” should be pushed to “the margin,”
Riverside Unified School District promoted the essay at least three separate times, under the “Professional Learning,” “Community Engagement,” and “Culture and Climate” sections of their Equity, Access, and Community Engagement resources page, according to screenshots.
The Federalist previously revealed that both Riverside Superintendent Renee Hill and Board of Education member Tom Hunt lied about the district teaching critical race theory. One parent from the district, who wished to remain unnamed, told The Federalist that the resources list that contained “Decentering Whiteness” was removed from the website following the exposé of the district’s dishonesty.
When asked why the resources had been removed, Communication Director Diana Meza stated that the district is “updating the Equity, Access & Community Engagement google site and landing page, the page should be back up soon.”
The school district has charge of nearly 40,000 students, according to federal data, and 35 percent of those students are white. School families’ median income is significantly above the national average, at approximately $73,000 per year.
Decentering Whiteness
The removed 19-page “resources” document, which can be viewed here, not only condemned “whiteness” but served as a guidebook for how institutions can fight it, so that “whiteness itself can be made more marginal.” The paper explained, “Decentering whiteness, as we envision it, is a collective process that can take place in organizations, sectors of society, personal lives, etc., over periods of days, months, years and generations.”
While launching into both anti-white attacks and blatant attempts to divide people on the basis of their immutable characteristics, the paper engaged in race essentialism. It cast race as a defining rather than incidental characteristic when it tells readers to “Assume whiteness, and race, always structures our experience, and thus needs to be consciously considered as part of any social process.”
White people are also openly villainized in the materials. One line reads, “white culture has, on balance, been based on principles of conquest and exploitation” while another says that in the attempt to marginalize whiteness, “simply attacking whiteness is not enough.”
The document did not oppose attacking “whiteness” out of an opposition to racism, nor did it express any concern over the potential fallout of seizing on racial fault lines for socio-political ends. Rather, it simply argued that openly attacking whiteness wouldn’t be strategically effective. It remarked “Simply attacking whiteness is not enough to accomplish this goal. Assaults on whiteness, depending on their nature, may have the effect of confirming and solidifying the central position of whiteness in American society.”
Lighter skin color has been and continues to be one of the prime targets of critical race theory. Noel Ignatiev, a Marxist Harvard professor who is cited in “Decentering Whiteness,” infamously claimed that “treasonous to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”
He also remarked, “Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed—not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.”
Perhaps most sinister, “Decentering Whiteness” clearly sought to encourage racial division and even racial conflict, calling on a multiracial coalition to “displace” whiteness. It read “It will take a multiracial effort to displace whiteness, one that includes people from all racial/cultural groups.”
How exactly any of this rhetoric benefits the students or staff at Riverside Unified School District is entirely unclear. The presence of this material in a school climate is in fact both un-American and undeniably harmful, not only to the white people who are maligned by it but also those of all other racial backgrounds whom the article attempts to conscript into a race-based power struggle.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com. SPENCER LINDQUISTVISIT ON TWITTER@SPENCERLNDQST
In a recent editorial published in the Washington Post, Dr. Leana Wen — CNN’s medical expert — called for lifting COVID-19 restrictions across the country as the Omicron variant’s presence begins to wane. Dr. Wen acknowledged that many Americans are likely feeling fatigued with safety precautions that have faded in relevance, such as masking, social distancing, and self-isolating. Omicron was one of several variants that sent society into a tizzy, Wen acknowledges, and it likely won’t be the last now that COVID-19 is endemic.
The likely emergence of new variants that could very well be more lethal than Omicron is precisely why Dr. Wen encouraged relaxing COVID restrictions. She said “new and possibly dangerous variants are likely to emerge. But it is precisely because of this future threat that we need to allow normalcy now.” However, Dr. Wen, as indicated by the last word in her statement, isn’t calling for society to return to normal in perpetuity. She calls for COVID-19 restrictions to be lifted to give people a breather right before reimplementing them upon the premiere of the next variant.
Wen writes, “In areas where hospitalizations are declining, the rapid removal of restrictions with the understanding that they may need to come back if new threats emerge. Doing so could give weary Americans much-needed respite while also preserving public-health authority for when it’s needed again.”
She also calls for the local and federal government and businesses to implement rigorous vaccine requirements while allowing the vaccinated to forgo COVID-19 restrictions. Essentially, Dr. Wen is calling for those who received a COVID-19 vaccination not to be burdened by restrictions, while those who are unvaccinated must continue to deal with them.
Paradoxically, Dr. Wen writes, “Keep vaccine requirements and drop everything else. The vaccinated who have done everything right, should not have any restrictions placed on them; it’s not fair to them and it disincentivizes vaccination.”
What Dr. Wen is clearly advocating for is a tiered society in which those who are compliant with vaccination mandates are allowed to participate uninhibited while those who don’t receive the vaccine must continue to jump through hoops on a day-to-day basis.
Dr. Wen wants to force the American public to receive the vaccine. She calls for an end to masking for the vaccinated while hoping for a reality where the unvaccinated are shamed into vaccination due to the embarrassment of wearing a mask.
Wen’s warped wish list for reality comes as Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admit that a lot of the protocols implemented as COVID restrictions were products of social engineering; they wanted to see what people would tolerate.
That said, a new study from Johns Hopkins University revealed that COVID-19 lockdowns and preventive restrictions had little to no effect on reducing COVID’s mortality rate while “imposing numerous economic and social costs.”
The study states that these procedures are “ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.” But, considering that people like Dr. Wen are more concerned with cramming their worldview down the throats of the American people, rather than following the science, it is likely this research will not find its way into public policy anytime soon.
It’s utterly senseless. Pfizer is now asking to authorize a dangerous, outdated shot for babies and toddlers, for whom the virus does not pose a statistical risk and for a virus against which the shots have failed to show any benefit. Yet, just as taxes and death are a certainty in life, you can bank on the FDA never turning down any Pfizer request. This is where Republican governors must serve as the safety net for the people. They must actively oppose expanding the shots to the final control group against the greatest experiment on mankind.
In one of the most shocking and immoral moves since the beginning of the pandemic, Pfizer is submitting its request this week for emergency use authorization of its COVID shot for babies as young as 6 months old through 5 years old. They are quite literally pushing a shot with the hopes of ameliorating symptoms (not stopping transmission) of a virus that is a cold for young children and much less dangerous than RSV. But here’s the kicker: The trial they conducted showed that two doses failed to even produce positive results, and they are still working on a trial for a three-dose regimen. Plus, we have a new variant. So, what exactly are they seeking authorization for?
As other countries are already recommending against vaccinating those under 12, our government will likely approve this shot for babies and young children based on a failed trial. There was never any efficacy in the shot because no child in the trial got seriously ill to begin with. So, they chose a trial endpoint around levels of antibody titers. Putting aside for a moment the premise that higher antibody titers (as opposed to T cells) are necessarily a good thing and won’t cause original antigenic sin, their own trial failed to achieve these endpoints in 2- to 4-year-olds. Which is why Pfizer announced in December that it was beginning a trial on a three-dose regimen. So how can they seek authorization of the failed two-dose trial for what is essentially a new virus?
One of the precepts of the Nuremberg Code: “The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.” There is no way pursuit of an already flawed vaccine can be justified on young children, even if it still had a degree of efficacy and wasn’t outdated. A recent study from the U.K. showed that even immunocompromised children were not at an elevated risk for severe COVID. The study of 1,527 immunocompromised children and young adults found “no increased risk of severe SARS-CoV-2 infection.” None of those even more vulnerable children died.
While there likely have been a tiny number of severely ill children who have died of the virus, it’s extremely hard to tell how many of the recorded deaths were legitimately caused by the virus itself. A large COVID study conducted in Germany found just three pediatric COVID deaths out of a million. The same analyst found zero deaths occurred in children under 5.
Already among older children, no positive benefit was found in the vaccine, even when the vaccine was working better. An Israeli study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found ZERO deaths or severe illnesses BOTH in the vaccinated and in the control (unvaccinated) groups of 12- to 18-year-olds in a 29-day follow-up of their vaccination. Under what pretext could the government possibly justify COVID as an emergency in this age group, and based on what evidence does this vaccine address that “emergency?”
On the flip side, the CDC, in a study in published in JAMA just conceded that the VAERS data on myocarditis was indeed an accurate reflection of an increased risk of heart inflammation following the vaccines. “Based on passive surveillance reporting in the US, the risk of myocarditis after receiving mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines was increased across multiple age and sex strata and was highest after the second vaccination dose in adolescent males and young men,” concluded the CDC researchers. “This risk should be considered in the context of the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination.”
More broadly, over 22,600 vaccine deaths and over 1 million injuries have been reported to VAERS. We already know from previous studies that VAERS only captures 1% of adverse events, and no other shot has come with such a stigma against reporting it for harm, often at the threat of the physician losing his job. Medicare data seems to hint at a much broader cohort of vaccine casualties. The military’s epidemiological database also seems to indicate a very disturbing trend of neurological and cardiological disorders rising in association with the take-up of the vaccine.
How can this be foisted upon the youngest children — with no apparent benefit — when they concede, “Long-term outcome data are not yet available for COVID-19 vaccine–associated myocarditis cases”?
There are no long-term cancer studies, there are no long-term studies on what this does to one’s immune system, and there are no long-term studies on autoimmune diseases, even though the VAERS data and the Pfizer surveillance data from early 2021 raises some concerns. Plus the vaccine is for a virus that is not a threat to children.
Think about it: Monoclonal antibodies can get their existing EUA pulled based on the arrival of a new variant, yet shots that have already proven to be outdated – and are associated with greater infection rates – can secure official full approval and then EUA for babies with a new variant that was never run through a clinical trial.
As such, for a governors to merely take a neutral stance while allowing this travesty to plague the children of their states is unacceptable. Governors have a responsibility to direct their respective health departments to conduct the proper oversight that the FDA has abdicated and demand a moratorium on shots for children until a proper cost-benefit analysis can be conducted. At a minimum, they should join together in a lawsuit to enjoin the EUA because Pfizer has failed to prove the shots meet the eligibility thresholds in the EUA statute.
Moreover, Republican governors and legislators have an obligation to treat Pfizer like Planned Parenthood and cut all political ties with the company’s lobbying groups. Bio-medical fascism and the breach of informed consent is a greater pro-life cause than opposition to abortion right now, because its practitioners are encouraging all children to get something with only a potential downside. It is the equivalent of forcing abortions upon us, not just permitting them.
The final precept of the Nuremberg Code reads as follows: “During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.” If after everything we have learned, they won’t even discontinue this experiment on babies, then we truly have learned nothing since that dark era of history.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
In debates about critical race theory and other manifestations of identity politics, Americans are being confronted with a particularly virulent form of Marxism, which some call cultural Marxism. Its adherents think they can create a new reality, because at bottom they do not believe in objective nature. Conservatives engaged in an important conversation over the exact proportion of natural law and natural rights must ensure their attention is not diverted from sworn opponents who deny the existence of either.
Very roughly, the natural-law crowd emphasizes society’s “common good,” while those on the natural-rights side stress individual liberties. They have bigger problems than each other though.
Adherents of a new left have no time for fundamental truths, but believe that each era’s conceptual framework is what creates reality. Man may apprehend natural phenomena through his senses, but he can only comprehend the world through society’s reigning concepts.
Marxist Belief
Marxists believe those in power create this perceptional superstructure. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” Marx himself wrote in “The Communist Manifesto.” Max Horkheimer, the neo-communist who led the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and ’40s and first came up with Critical Theory, was as usual more wordy, but essentially said the same thing.
“The power of healthy human understanding, or common sense … are conditioned by the fact that the world of objects to be judged is in large measure produced by an activity that is itself determined by the very ideas which help the individual to recognize that world and to grasp it conceptually,” Horkheimer wrote in a foundational 1935 essay.
To critical race theory, an American mutation of critical theory, that powerful conceptual framework is white supremacy. In fact, the first task of CRT, wrote the editors of the 1995 collection of essays that serves as the theory’s tablet (which they refer to as “The Big Red Book”), is “to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America.”
It is embedded in the “‘ordinary business’ of society,” wrote Richard Delgado in his far slimmer primer on CRT.
Man Creates Reality
The obvious implication is that, if you eliminate the conceptual framework — presto! you change nature and reality. Horkheimer says this is what happens with each passing historical era: “There are connections between the forms of judgment and the historical periods. A brief indication will show what is meant. The classificatory judgment is typical of prebourgeois society: this is the way it is, and man can do nothing about it…. Critical theory maintains: it need not be so; man can change reality” (italics added for emphasis).
From this, we can extrapolate why members of this new left believe that man can change his sex, which is just “assigned” at birth: because they are both Godless and materialist, they believe man is omnipotent. Things are not as they are because God or nature made them that way. Things are as they are because we conceive them so. Man creates reality.
This turns philosophy and theory on their head. Philosophy studies the true nature of things. But since there is no fundamental truth, philosophy becomes the motor to create a new reality.
Marx himself, once again, started it, writing in 1843, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Five years later, he added in the Manifesto, “Communism abolishes eternal truths. It abolishes all religion and all morality.”
CRT’s Goals to Dismantle Society
About a century and a half later, Harvard University’s Derrick Bell, the godfather of CRT, wrote, “As I see it, critical race theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with the radical assessment of it.” The works of CRT are suffused with calls for “theoretical deconstruction” and the like.
These are the true foes of those who want to conserve what is good about America (i.e., conservatives). They see all of American society as an oppressive hegemonic narrative that should be destroyed and replaced with a counter-narrative. “I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society,”says Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter, a force that has already done a lot of cultural dismantling.
But starting in late 2020, a force has risen to push back: parents. “It didn’t take long for parents of all races to figure out that their children were being indoctrinated into a repellent ideology. Since the implementation of CRT at the school level began, genuine parental resistance to it bubbled up,” writes Abe Greenwald in a Commentary piece chronicling the counter-revolution.
Conservatives Shouldn’t Forget Common Enemy
Bright conservative minds engaged in an intellectual debate over the future of conservatism cannot forget this other fight against our common enemies. On one side of the conservative debate (and this is an oversimplification) are some who believe the emphasis should be on natural law (the eternal precepts that govern man’s action); on the other are those who stress the natural rights, or the individual rights, that man has because of his nature.
As Catholic University’s Melissa Moschella recently told me, they are tied at the hip, however. We have a natural right to free speech because our nature permits us to speak, but also because free speech is a prerequisite for discovering truth, an aspect of human flourishing. Our nature also permits us to commit murder, but we have no right to exercise that capacity because it is contrary to human flourishing, and therefore to natural law. These distinctions, let me assure you, are lost on Marx, Bell, or Garza.
I have good friends and mentors on both sides of the conservative debate. They are intelligent, patriotic, and courageous. Their issues do matter. But let’s remember who are the real enemies of fundamental truth, and not become immersed in internal debates over theological principles, as the Byzantines did in 1453 when the Ottomans were at the gate.
Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at The Heritage Foundation, spent close to 20 years as a journalist, 15 of them reporting from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He is the author of the new book, “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free.” MIKE GONZALEZ MORE ARTICLES
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