Like Nero bragging about rebuilding Circus Maximus after burning it down, Joe Biden took to the podium tonight to take credit for solving a slew of problems he helped create.
At the top of his State of the Union address, the president boasted that he had “created more jobs in two years than any president created in four years.” No president — not Joe Biden nor Donald Trump — creates jobs. But Biden’s contention was exceptionally misleading, considering he inherited an economy that had been unplugged by an artificial, state-induced shutdown. If the government compels businesses to shutter, it doesn’t “create” jobs when allowing them to open.
On more than one occasion during the night, a mercurial Biden contended that Covid-19 had shut down the economy. No, states did. Politicians did. Biden was an aggressive proponent of those shutdowns. During the 2020 presidential campaign, the president regularly attacked Republican governors for opening too early and for ignoring federal health officials. Even in August of 2021, after it was clear that shutdowns hadn’t saved any lives, Biden was still criticizing Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis for rejecting a new round of Covid authoritarianism, telling him to “get out of the way” of those trying to “do the right thing.”
Three years ago, the unemployment rate was at 3.5 percent. Today, Biden reminded us that it was at a historic low of 3.4 percent. More than 30 million people lost their jobs to Covid lockdowns. Biden claims to have “created” 12 million jobs during the past two years. The one big difference is that the labor participation rate still hasn’t recovered to pre-Covid numbers. It’s great that people are working again. But millions fewer are in the market for jobs.
Biden also boasted that Americans were seeing “near” historic unemployment lows for black and Hispanic workers. These historic lows were achieved before Covid lockdowns. So, if Biden deserves credit for this, doesn’t Trump? Of course, there is no specific Biden economic policy that brought us near-historic unemployment lows for minorities or an unemployment rate 0.1 percent lower than the previous administration. Washington wasted trillions of dollars propping up an economy that it previously shut down.
Speaking of spending, Biden claimed that the preposterously misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” which you might recall was initially called “Build Back Better,” had helped alleviate spiking prices. Only when inflation became non-transitory, and a politically problematic issue, did Biden begin arguing that more spending would mitigate inflation. And only then did Democrats rename their bill, which was crammed with the same spending, corporate welfare, price fixing, and tax hikes — all long-desired progressive wish-list items. “The Inflation Reduction Act is also the most significant investment ever in climate change,” Biden said during his address, as if this sentence made any sense.
Presidents are often unduly blamed or given credit for economic events beyond their control. But it is no accident inflation took off as Democrats pumped hundreds of billions into a hot economy (in the case of the “infrastructure” bill, with the help of Senate Republicans) and aggravated foreseeable problems with policies that disincentivize work and undercut energy production. All this led to the biggest inflation spike since 1982. We are still at historic highs. A slew of products that consumers rely on still remain atypically expensive, and fears of additional price hikes have started to seriously corrode consumer confidence.
Biden lied that “25 percent” of the national federal debt was incurred by the previous administration when most of that debt was driven by entitlement programs passed, expanded, and revered by Democrats. And he misled the nation by claiming that his administration had “cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history,” when, in fact, those “cuts” were sunsetting pandemic emergency spending that Democrats had complained wasn’t enough.
Biden went into his well-worn platitudes and myths about how the rich don’t pay taxes — “[n]o billionaire should be paying a lower tax rate than a school teacher or a firefighter!” — and proposed higher rates on the wealthy and corporations. He also promised to micromanage the economy with a slew of new regulations that would interfere in voluntary contracts struck between employees and employers and consumers and businesses.
Biden implored Congress to pass the PRO Act, a bill that would empower the government to impose unions on businesses and workers who want no part of them. Biden hawked an entire menu of crude economic populism — including price controls and protectionist trade policies that would undermine growth, competition, job creation, and innovation while driving up the cost of virtually every construction project in the country.
There were numerous lies, half-truths, and deceptions. There was a slew of antiquated economic ideas and sloganeering. But, surely, the president’s biggest lie of the night was to claim, “I’m a capitalist.”
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
(Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia Summit)
The New York State Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that New York City cannot fire employees for not getting vaccinated against COVID-19, dealing a blow to Democratic Mayor Eric Adams’ pandemic policy. The court ordered the city to reinstate all fired employees and grant them backpay, citing the fact that being vaccinated against COVID-19 does not stop an individual from catching or spreading the virus, and thus being vaccinated does not grant enough community-wide benefit to warrant a mandate. The health commissioner “acted beyond his authority” by issuing an indefinite vaccine mandate rather than a temporary one, according to the court.
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 NY State Supreme Court reinstates all fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay, says the state violated rights, acted arbitrary & capricious, notes:“Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19.”https://t.co/nvOsWfa56Spic.twitter.com/WhH4wje2bQ
Adams said earlier this year his administration would not bring back workers who had been fired due to being unvaccinated. Roughly 1,400 workers were ultimately let go, including a number of firefighters and police officers. Adams came under fire for not allowing an exception to the mandate for those workers after he granted one to celebrities who were competing in sports or putting on performances in the city.
“States of emergency are meant to be temporary,” the court said in its ruling. “The question presented is whether the health commissioner has the authority to enact a permanent condition of employment during a state of emergency.”
Many COVID-19 vaccine mandates were put in place based on the rationale that the vaccines could drastically reduce the chances of a person becoming infected or transmitting the virus if they were infected, so getting vaccinated was not only a benefit to the individual getting the shots, but everyone around them.
However, as more data emerged to indicate that the vaccines are only marginally effective at stopping spread, particularly against newer variants of the virus, that rationale became less convincing. The New York Supreme Court pointed this out in its decision, saying “being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting COVID-19… the Petitioners should not have been terminated for choosing not to protect themselves.”
A well-known scientist who criticized Republican efforts to investigate a potential lab leak of COVID-19 and gain-of-function (GoF) research himself took part in such research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and did not disclose it to a commission he served on. Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine, funded a scientific study authored by Dr. Shi Zhengli, also known as WIV’s “bat lady,” describing their work creating a recombinant virus from two SARS-like coronaviruses, according to U.S. Right To Know (USRTK),
The scientist was also awarded an NIH grant between 2012 and 2017 for the purpose of researching a vaccine against SARS “due to possible zoonotic reintroduction into humans, accidental release from a laboratory or deliberate spreading of the virus through bioterrorism,” USRTK reported.
Peter Hotez said a congressional investigation into gain-of-function research was a “a plan to undermine the fabric of science in America”
Hotez also serves on The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, an investigative group formed by the scientific journal seeking to find the origin of COVID-19. Jeffrey Sachs, the former chairman of the commission before resigning due to conflicts of interest compromising several members, said Hotez routinely rejected any notion that a lab leak was possible.
Stanford microbiologist and biosecurity expert David Relman told USRTK that Hotez’s work with the WIV should probably have been subject to the NIH’s GoF research funding pause, which was active between 2014 and 2017.
“Whenever I discussed the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was a laboratory release, Hotez strongly rejected that possibility, but never explained to me or to the Lancet Commission that he actually had a grant that was based on that very kind of risk,” Sachs told USRTK. “He should certainly have been clear on that.”
Paul led a Senate hearing on GoF research last week, in which an expert panel testified that the work is too dangerous to continue without increased oversight from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and that a lab leak may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Hotez further accused Paul of playing politics and elevating fringe beliefs.
2/3 but it’s even worse than that. The far elements of the Senate and House have already shown their cards. If they gain power because of the midterm elections, they have a plan to undermine the fabric of science in America 🇺🇸 https://t.co/qcASp2VP41
“America is a nation built on science and technology and our great research universities and institutions. If we allow the extremists to undermine us, it’s a threat to the whole nation. Remember the scientists are the real patriots, not the chuckleheads,” Hotez tweeted in part.:
Rutgers University microbiologist Dr. Richard Ebright testified before the U.S. Senate Wednesday that top public health officials lied about dangerous gain-of-function (GoF) research experiments conducted in China. Ebright testified that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other U.S. federal agencies funded research that fit the definition of GoF at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) without proper oversight. His claim directly contradicts those made by numerous public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Live at Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight: @RandPaul noting that gain-of-function research "has the "potential to unleash a global pandemic that threatens the lives of millions" but Congress has not held a hearing on it.
Specifically, Ebright testified that research funded by federal agencies at the WIV in the 2010s violated an NIH pause on GoF research funding between 2014 and 2017. After the pause was lifted in 2017, Ebright claimed that GoF projects which continued did not properly go through the agency’s regulatory process for oversight. NIH and other federal agencies funded various experiments in the 2010s at the WIV which made bat-based coronaviruses more dangerous by increasing their fatality and infectiousness. According to the strict definition of GoF research, those experiments should’ve fallen under the GoF oversight process or been banned by the funding moratorium.
“Gain-of-function research of concern involves the creation of new health threats–health threats that did not exist previously and that might not have come to exist by natural means for tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of years,” Ebright said.
“The statements made on repeated occasions to the public, to the press and to policymakers by the NIAID director, Dr. Fauci, have been untruthful. I do not understand why those statements are being made because they are demonstrably false,” Ebright explained Wednesday.
Ebright’s assertion that the NIH-funded research is GoF work directly contradicts previous testimony by Fauci before the U.S. Senate.
“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci said in May 2021. “Dr. Baric does not do gain of function research and if it is, it is according to the guidelines and is being conducted in North Carolina, not in China.”
Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has frequently clashed with Fauci over whether or not the federal government funded GoF research. Fauci called Paul “entirely and completely incorrect” on the subject.
Wednesday’s hearing, initiated by Paul, was the first American lawmakers held regarding the subject of GoF research. Some experts have theorized that the COVID-19 pandemic could have been spawned by the research taking place at the WIV, claiming it’s possible that the virus leaked from the lab after experimentation by researchers. The epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic began just blocks away from the WIV.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
I guess Democrats realized that having feminist harpies fan out across the airwaves to shriek about the vital importance of aborting babies wasn’t helping, because we all woke up Monday morning to …
A NEW SURGE OF CORONAVIRUS!
Maybe that will distract the dingbats. They probably all think they have “long-haul COVID.”
In response to the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion returning abortion to the states, Hillary Clinton said: “Any American who says, ‘Look, I’m not a woman, this doesn’t affect me. I’m not Black, that doesn’t affect me. I’m not gay, that doesn’t affect me’ — once you allow this kind of extreme power to take hold, you have no idea who they will come for next.”
On the other hand …
1) Women themselves don’t seem to view abortion as a “women’s rights” issue — in fact, a lot of polls show women more opposed to abortion than men. Nobody’s wondering, for example, how Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted.
2) The “extreme power” Hillary’s talking about is: Letting people vote.
3) Idea! Maybe wait for what comes next to talk about what comes next.
Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., tweeted: “The Republicans won’t stop with banning abortion. They want to ban interracial marriage. Do you want to save that? Well, then you should probably vote.”
Yes — doubtless in an opinion written by Clarence Thomas.
Always on top of things, President Joe Biden’s response to the abortion opinion was to talk about … gay kids being thrown out of school. “What happens,” the advanced dementia patient asked, “if you have states change the law saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children?”
Wha …?
Why does every liberal argument about allowing Americans to vote on abortion immediately veer off into apocalyptic warnings about something else entirely? I’m beginning to suspect abortion is not as beloved as liberals claim it is. As Biden wrote in his 2007 book, “Promises to Keep”: “If we tried to make this a referendum on abortion rights … we’d lose.”
And yet, we keep being hectored about the runaway popularity of Roe v. Wade. Apparently, poll respondents just don’t want feminists to yell at them. Yes, absolutely, Roe is great. I don’t hate women, please leave me alone.
According to The New York Times — and I don’t think they’re exaggerating the opposition to abortion — two-thirds of Americans oppose abortion after the first trimester. That’s 12 weeks. The Mississippi abortion law that’s going to turn women into birthing machines bans abortion after 15 weeks.
Also inadvertently admitted in the Times: What percentage of abortions do you think take place after the first trimester? Answer: 8%.
That’s what the termagants are shrieking about? The 8% of abortions opposed by a substantial majority of Americans? No wonder they keep changing the subject to black people.
The winner of the most clinically insane response to the draft opinion is Amanda Taub of The New York Times. She explained that opposition to abortion is a sneaky way of opposing … women in the workforce? Contraception? Secularists?
Nope. Desegregation!
Taub begins with the counterfactual proposition that evangelicals don’t really care about abortion. (Because, c’mon, who would care about that?)
Her evidence: “It is hard to imagine now, but at the time Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973, abortion was not a major issue for the American right, or even for evangelical Christians. …”
Hmmm, why might that be? Maybe it’s because, until Roe, abortion was a crime in almost every state in the Union. Three-quarters of the states banned abortion at every stage of pregnancy. All this is admitted in the Roe opinion itself.
As Justice Samuel Alito’s draft puts it:
“Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe was handed down, no federal or state court had recognized such a right.”
Hey, Amanda! It is hard to imagine, but matricide isn’t a major issue for the American right, either. On the other hand, if the Supreme Court suddenly discovers a “constitutional right” to kill your mother, I would expect that to change
But the sleuth Taub presses on:
“The shift [to pro-life] was not spurred by abortion itself, but by desegregation. After the Supreme Court ordered schools in the South to desegregate, many white parents pulled their children from public schools and sent them to all-white private schools … the I.R.S. revoked those schools’ tax-exempt status, provoking widespread anger among white evangelical Christians and catalyzing their new role as a powerful conservative force in American politics.”
I’m sure the creation of private religious academies had nothing to do with the court banning prayer in the public schools, then banning prohibitions on teaching Darwinism and sex ed. Why would Christians care about any of that?
By the way, where did this champion of desegregation go to high school? ANSWER: Amanda Taub went to a university “lab” school that is only 5% black in a town that is 18% black.
The gigantic hypocrite concludes: “Publicly opposing desegregation was not really socially acceptable or palatable to a broader coalition. But opposing abortion was.”
Whereas the Taubs relied on admissions testing and grades to ensure their daughter went to a segregated school.
Democratic Party: Get these lunatics away from the media!
Now that a judge has stayed the federal mask mandate on public transportation, it’s important to have an honest accounting of what this entire mask situation was truly all about. A lot of people will make a lot of claims. A tiny sliver will continue to claim mask mandates actually helped mitigate the spread of Covid-19. They will be the outliers because, in terms of stopping the spread of Covid or any other virus, wearing a mask is the equivalent of doing a rain dance: it might make you feel better, and some quacks will tell you it works, but ultimately it does nothing except make you look foolish and give you a false sense of security. (Vaccine mandates were the modern equivalent of burning witches at the stake.)
It was all so stupid and foisted on us by people we’re supposed to trust, which is why we need this honest accounting of what it was really all about. A lot of people will claim the masks were about establishing and maintaining control. That’s fair, but it wasn’t their primary purpose. The primary purpose of the mask mandates was to make every person who wore one a walking advertisement for fear. If you were wearing a mask, then you were doing your job, because you had given up your right to free expression and replaced it with one, constant sentiment: “I’m afraid, and you should be too.”
That was the main purpose of the masks. That’s why they wanted everyone to keep wearing them. It was about control, yes, but far more than that, it was about promoting fear. That’s why they lied about the threat Covid poses. That’s why they inflated the number of deaths, counting so often all who died with as having died from. That’s why they convinced so many Americans that the threat of hospitalization or death is exponentially higher than it actually is. (For the record, the survival rate for Covid is 99.7 percent for unvaccinated adults, 99.9 percent for vaccinated adults, and 100 percent for unvaccinated children.)
All they did the entire time was work as hard as they could to promote as much fear as possible, and masks were an excellent weapon they could force on you to help spread their message of constant fear, division, and dehumanization. The mask stripped you of your right to free expression and replaced whatever you wanted to communicate with one single piece of speech: “Be afraid.”
That was the primary purpose. That’s why they were all so fired up about it. That’s why they were all so desperate for you and everybody else to wear them.
It’s important we have our heads around that because it will help us avoid letting them do it again in the future. It wasn’t just about control. It wasn’t just about dividing and dehumanizing us. It wasn’t just about turning us against each other and forcing us to deny science so we could devastate each other’s social, psychological, and emotional health.
All of those were welcome byproducts to the “public health experts” and other elites who to this day claim masking provides value. But the primary purpose was to promote fear, and to stifle your speech and expression so you perpetually signaled that fear to everyone else.
You were obedient, yes. But more than that, you were afraid. That was the message, whether you wanted to send it or not. It was the primary reason they made everyone wear them, and it’s important we never let them do that to us again.
Hrand Tookman is a Cleveland, Ohio native with a background in interpersonal communications. He writes with an objective of exposing media bias, and inspiring unity in defiance of so many forces today that thrive off of division.
On August 6, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control released a report that the agency claimed showed “Vaccination Offers Higher Protection than Previous COVID-19 Infection.” This assertion came amidst a public battle with Sen. Rand Paul, as the CDC released this data from Kentucky, Paul’s home state.
Yet after indisputable scientific evidence continued to pile up in favor of natural immunity, the CDC finally capitulated on January 19, 2022, recognizing the superiority of natural immunity over vaccination alone: “Between May and November 2021, people who were unvaccinated and did not have a prior COVID-19 infection remained at the highest risk of infection and hospitalization, while those who were previously infected, both with, or without prior vaccination, had the greatest protection.”
The CDC’s reversal came after its previous discounting of natural immunity caused mass layoffs, nursing home resident isolation, and hospital staffing shortages. It must not be forgotten or overlooked, and the CDC must be held accountable.
Last summer, guided by the CDC, President Biden claimed, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die.” Biden also spread misinformation about vaccinations preventing the spread of Covid-19 by stating, “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.”
Who is harmed the most by health misinformation produced by our president and his agencies? Those with low health literacy. Our rich-poor gap is growing in this country and lying about health issues only exacerbates it.
A Positive Test Doesn’t Always Mean Infectiousness
A deeper dive into the August natural immunity study reveals methodology that can be recognized as illogical, even to those without medical experience. The CDC researchers created two groups. The case group included people who tested positive in 2020 and then tested positive again during a two-month window in 2021. The control group included people who had a positive test in 2020 without another positive test during this artificial two-month window.
The study observed that non-vaccinated group registered a positive test 34.4 percent of the time, compared to 20.3 percent of fully vaccinated individuals. The CDC falsely defined the case group’s second positive test as a “reinfection.” This is the central lie of the study. This data conveniently omitted data on people actually becoming symptomatic or what a common person would call “reinfected.”
To illustrate this point, consider if a Covid-recovered person comes into contact with Sars-Cov-2 in their community. They might test positive on a PCR test. Their body can remember the virus, fight it off, and the person never becomes ill. However, shortly after the exposure, a PCR swab can detect bits of genetic material (even if it’s unviable virus). Therefore, this study could be more of a reflection of people’s likelihood of re-exposure to Sars-Cov-2, not reinfection, as the CDC claimed.
By conflating exposure and reinfection, the CDC misled the public. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stated, “This study shows you were twice as likely to get infected again if you are unvaccinated. Getting the vaccine is the best way to protect yourself and others around you, especially as the more contagious Delta variant spreads around the country.”
This guidance came when mounting evidence indicated Covid vaccines quickly lose their effectiveness against infection and transmission, which the CDC loathed to admit. Unfortunately, Walensky’s guidance undermined the credibility of the CDC for generations to come.
As a physician, it’s frightening that a public health official made a policy recommendation based on such a flawed study. We should encourage critical thinking and scientific skepticism, but such a blatantly flawed study design should not be tolerated in our leading health institutions.
Not an Isolated Incident for the CDC
This isn’t the only time the CDC has been caught misleading the public. Drawing ire from the medical community, the was an uncontrolled study of students in Arizona that Walensky referred to in discussing the CDC’s mask guidance for schools. This study defined a “covid outbreak” as “two or more” positive lab tests among students or staff. So, if your school had two asymptomatic third graders, you’ve got a “covid outbreak” on your hands. Even worse, the study weighted such an “outbreak” equally to a school with dozens of symptomatic teachers or students. According to the CDC, two equals 50—at least for “covid outbreaks.”
In a Georgia study that actually had a sufficient control arm, the CDC minimized the fact that there was no statistically significant difference between masked and unmasked student groups. They’ve also minimized the importance of diet and exercise during the pandemic. They failed to effectively communicate evidence-based, life-saving outpatient treatment protocols. The list goes on.
Why This Matters So Much
How does minimizing natural immunity cause harm in the real world? There are at least three deadly repercussions.
First, many hospitals following the CDC’s guidance mandated that only vaccinated health-care workers be allowed to work at their facilities. This means naturally immune health-care workers were wrongly excluded from the workforce. Based on a toxic lie fabricated by the CDC, hospitals continue to experience staffing shortages, contributing to the hospitalization overcapacity narrative they’ve used to demonize the unvaccinated.
Second, the same problem arose for nursing homes, where seniors were denied visitation rights from unvaccinated, naturally immune family and friends, even though less protected vaccinated people were allowed in. Lack of care workers also prevents patients from being discharged from hospitals to care facilities.
Third, the natural immunity lie also stripped countless Americans of their health coverage and livelihoods. During the delta wave, for example, a worker at Los Alamos National Laboratories was fired from his job for religiously objecting to vaccination, despite working entirely from home and having recovered from a previous Covid infection. The CDC now admits this worker’s immunity provides protection superior to that of his co-workers who had merely vaccine-induced immunity at that time. He lost his job while the less protected did not. By denying natural immunity’s superiority to vaccine-induced immunity, how many others have been fired and lost health-care access the moment we need our population to be at its healthiest?
Punishing People We Should Have Praised
Naturally immune people should have been identified early in the pandemic as the most protected, ushered into hospitals and nursing homes to serve our vulnerable, and certainly should have been allowed to keep their jobs. By refusing to acknowledge the harms of lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination, the CDC has brought everlasting shame to itself. There is clear evidence these types of interventions carry measurable risk. A better approach would have been to honestly discuss the risks and benefits with the public, much like I discuss surgical risks and benefits with my patients. This is the very tenet of informed consent, and better communication always results in a better relationship.
Americans need an unbiased, incorruptible, and credible CDC that provides reliable and scientifically sound public health guidance. These lies have de-legitimized and undermined public confidence in the institution of the CDC itself.
The consequences of lying about Covid-19 will spill into other areas of health care. Millions of Americans have lost trust in our hospitals and institutions and are now resorting to “under the table” health care. In health care, loss of trust equals lack of access. The CDC must return to the basics of evidence-based medicine to overcome its crisis of legitimacy.
Natural immunity from prior infection granted stronger levels of protection against the Delta variant of COVID-19 than vaccination alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a study released Wednesday. Before Delta became dominant, individuals who had natural immunity were experiencing higher case rates than individuals who were only vaccinated, the study found, but after Delta took hold, those with natural immunity caught COVID-19 less frequently than those who were only vaccinated.
The study examined four categories of people — unvaccinated and vaccinated who survived a previous COVID-19 infection, and unvaccinated and vaccinated who had never been infected — in California and New York between May and November 2021. The highest case rates were among those who had neither been vaccinated or previously infected. The most protection against infection and hospitalization was in those who had both been vaccinated and survived an earlier bout with the virus.
The agency cautioned that the data in question only measured results against the Delta variant and that Omicron may present new challenges that alter the calculus of natural immunity versus vaccination.
Biden administration officials and some public health experts have repeatedly downplayed the effectiveness of natural immunity against COVID-19, but this study is only the latest to indicate that recovery from prior infection can at least rival, if not surpass, that offered from vaccination alone. Most research has shown that for maximum protection against reinfection or severe illness, those who were previously infected should still get vaccinated.
Many legacy media outlets covered the study by minimizing the finding that natural immunity outperformed vaccines and emphasizing that a combination of both provided the best protection. Headlines from the New York Times, Associated Press, CNN and others claimed that vaccination offers the “best” or “safest” protection according to the study.
In a press call Wednesday, the CDC’s Dr. Benjamin Silk, an epidemiologist that co-authored the study, did not elaborate on the increased protection natural immunity provides and repeated the administration line that every American should get vaccinated.
Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.
This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expert—or, like me, just someone who reads and has common sense—predicted this false “cure” would hurt worse than the disease.
Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a “limited hangout.” That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.
Why are they all of the sudden simultaneously changing the narrative, and effectively admitting that they have been over-counting Covid hospitalizations? Why is it so coordinated and simultaneous? pic.twitter.com/CXpqY2G0nT
So we have outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, which have throughout the Covid era worked as government butt-coverers, now publishing articles admitting that lockdowns and continued rolling blackouts of school instruction is irrevocably damaging Americans, especially children and even more especially the poorest. The kids, as I pointed out in April 2020 and numerous times thereafter, will never as a generation recover.
Now that the damage is done, major corporate media organizations have decided to pivot to acknowledge just enough of the truth to cover their complicity. The Atlantic, for example, last week published an article titled “America’s Covid Rules Are A Dumpster Fire” (It took you two years to figure out what was apparent within the first month?).
CNN’s Brian Stelter recently did a segment acknowledging the foreseeable “mental health crisis” from lockdowns that is causing suicides, ruining marriages, putting formerly perfectly normal kids into rocking fetal positions, and erasing the credibility of formerly mostly ignored “public health experts” at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stelter made multiple statements that have gotten numerous conservatives punished by and erased from social media, such as that “Covid zero is…an impossibility” and “the CDC has turned into a punchline.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter: “It’s so sad, but it’s true, the CDC has turned into a punchline.”
Where was Stelter a year and a half ago, when data reflecting the exact same outcomes were also plentiful? Heck, Stelter was still legitimizing Covid panic one month ago, when CNN and other news organizations reinstituted lockdown measures amid omicron panic they helped inflame. Six months ago, Stelter was indicating Fox News had “blood on its hands” for reporting less hysterically than all the other major media organizations about Covid.
Clearly, Democrats are becoming ensnared by their own trap, and they’re trying to get out with this public reversal of their messaging. The limited hangout is afoot.
Brave NYT truth-teller David Leonhardt also recently published an article and an accompanying tweetstorm on the topic.
“The number of E.R. visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 percent from early 2019 to early 2021, according to the CDC,” he tweeted.
“Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit,” he noted in the article.
No sh-t, Sherlock. So why did The New York Times run hit pieces on Trump medical advisor Scott Atlas for being one of the few scientists courageous enough to point this long-ago known data out more than a year ago, when the damage could have been mitigated? Why did Stanford University colleagues and formerly respected medical journals, boosted by corporate media attack campaigns, try to discredit Atlas and colleagues such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things The New York Times, Atlantic, and CNN are admitting now?
Why did the CDC punish world-renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Martin Kulldorff for publicly disagreeing with them on vaccine safety? Why does Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shadowban nearly every Federalist article on anything touching Covid-19, and why did they spend two years on massive information suppression campaigns against scientists, politicians, podcasters, and just ordinary citizens who had some questions, contrary data, and objections to elites’ demanded Covid response?
Because it was politically expedient to sacrifice science, Americans’ civil rights, human lives, and the world’s future then, and it is not politically expedient to face the consequences for that choice now. And they think nobody can or will hold them accountable for their deadly and despicable lies.
All the misery these too-late admittals underscore appears to be true, but it also could have been prevented. CNN and The New York Times not only did nothing to help prevent this kind of irreversible damage, they willingly, even gleefully, participated in this completely unwarranted mass abuse of Americans. The left lied, children committed suicide.
The corporate left’s morally abominable Covid propaganda operation demands justice. The people who could and should have known, and in fact likely did know, that lockdowns would harm millions of innocents while not protecting the vulnerable can never be trusted again.
Did any of these people tell the truth back when it could have saved the generation that comprises the world’s future? Nope. They not only watched it happen, they cheered it on and viciously ostracized all who told the truth.
All these people have erased all their moral authority and their claims to expertise. The same goes for all the education “experts” and “leaders” who didn’t spend the last two years screaming at the top of their lungs that school shutdowns are a stupid, scientifically unwarranted, and evil idea. Yes, that’s basically all of them.
Experts who knowingly allow mass child abuse because they don’t want to harm their careers are not experts, they are cowards. They deserve not one ounce of public trust or even to retain their jobs. They certainly should have no public funds nor authority over any portion of the upbringing of American children.
Not one parent or elected official should give these education and public health “experts” the time of day. In a time of dire need, these keepers of the nation’s children and controllers of billions in public funds piled American children on a funeral pyre, lit it on fire, and cheered as it burned. Requiring that they find a more honest line of work would be an act of mercy.
These “experts” and “leaders” have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent at discharging their crucial public trust and duties. They should be relieved of those duties as soon as possible. If state lawmakers will not do it, citizens must. If they do not, they are also complicit cowards and also deserve to be sanctioned and socially shamed for their willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable for their personal comfort.
For a long time now, American parents have registered deep dissatisfaction with the public schools they feel forced to stick their kids in. Even before lockdowns, unscientific and education-damaging forced masking in schools, ridiculous repeated quarantines of healthy kids, and rolling “brownouts” of in-person schooling, polling shows most American parents wish they didn’t feel like the public schools in their ZIP code were their only option.
After all this incompetence-imposed life chaos, the current surge of parent outrage at local school board meetings is only the tip of the spear. As more evidence emerges of the unnecessary harms we knew beforehand would result from lockdowns, public anger will only grow. It won’t be limited to schools, either.
If more exciting school board meetings, primaries for craven politicians, and parents yanking funding from schools that don’t serve them are what it takes to run every one of these moral cretins out of every position of power they’ve abused throughout their careers, then go, Americans, go. Do it for the kids. Our future will remember who stood up for the truth, lives, and liberties, and who made billions of precious humans needlessly suffer.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
We’ve been censored. Hollered at by Karens in the grocery store and sometimes even outdoors. We’ve been lectured, demonized, scoffed at, and called murderers and rubes — all for the sin of ignoring mask security theater and daring to show the lower half of our faces in public. That’s why it’s just remarkable to hear the experts now admit that the same face coverings required in so many establishments and localities are not stopping any virus from spreading.
CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, who was previously president of abortion giant Planned Parenthood, said so on the network — and not only in reference to the current variant, as if new data has suddenly justified a change in guidance. She explicitly said cloth masks haven’t been effective since the dawn of the Wuhan virus.
“Cloth masks are not appropriate for this pandemic. It’s not appropriate for omicron, it was not appropriate for delta, alpha, or any of the previous variants either, because we’re dealing with something that’s airborne,” Wen said.
And just like that CNN admits cloth masks do not stop COVID
It isn’t just one floating head on CNN. In a letter to Capitol Hill staffers, the attending physician reportedly announced the end of blue surgical masks, cloth masks, and gaiters, ordering that “the more protective KN95 or N95 masks” must now be worn.
“…[S]urgical masks are NO LONGER ENOUGH for an airborne virus that’s transmitting as fast or faster than any virus known to mankind,”tweeted a paranoid professor from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Washington Post jumped in too.
And here’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spilling the beans that a surgical mask “is not considered respiratory protection.”
WebMD piled on also, urging Americans to discard the kind of cloth face masks worn by busybody fellow shoppers while they lecture the unmasked to cover their faces. Those aren’t good enough and never have been.
This is now the wisdom imparted by the experts, that the sweaty, flimsy, itchy muzzles that have been forced on schoolchildren, healthy athletes, socially distant employees, grocery-shopping moms, and even their toddlers are “not appropriate.” They’re nothing more than “facial decorations” against a virus that’s in the air and can’t be contained.
It’s almost like conservatives have been reading the available scientific studies and saying this since the beginning, like here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Maybe sweat-soaked cloth masks in the gym actually aren’t great for your health, many on the right suggested. My 3-year-old’s mask that she can’t stop touching probably isn’t keeping her healthier, others thought. Yet the response from the left to this pushback was routine scorn and censorship.
Amazon banned a book by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson that discussed the scientific evidence that mask mandates are ineffective. Big Tech weaponized fake fact-checks to choke out The Federalist’s science-backed reporting on masks. Former White House COVID Task Force advisor Dr. Scott Atlas was banned from publishing references to scientific mask studies, as CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta cheered Twitter on. Google-owned YouTube infamously nuked a June interview of Atlas.
Yet now, the left’s “experts” are going on network television to announce that we must stop wearing the cloth and surgical masks that have become synonymous with COVID morality, and they’re announcing that actually we’ve known these masks have been “inappropriate” all along.
Americans are just supposed to take this. In response to the gaslighting, they’re just supposed to obediently discard the cloth masks they’ve been berated and coerced into wearing and instead go buy some stronger mask to protect God-knows-who from this wave of a virus that manifests as the common cold for even the vast majority of the yet-unvaccinated.
While in many sane areas of the country, masks have long been an afterthought, that’s not the reality for other Americans. Mask mandates still prevail in too many places, with the entire state of Oregon tossing around the idea of a “permanent” mask mandate.
Other authoritarian pockets such as Madison, Wisconsin, just never let their temporary mandates expire. Of course, these mandates don’t require any particular kind of face covering. So as Wen said, the masks are nothing more than “facial decorations,” meaning the mandates are nothing more than political theater.
The gaslighting is enough to drive anyone absolutely mad, but with the experts’ admission that most of our masks aren’t cutting it, they’ve also admitted something far more consequential. These masks and the mandates that accompany them have never been about controlling a virus. They’ve always been about controlling people.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
A technology company that markets microchips believes that its invention is just the thing to serve as a way to document a person’s coronavirus vaccination status.
The Swedish startup DSruptive Subdermals is touting its microchip, which measures 2 millimeters by 16 millimeters and is injected under the skin, according to the Express.
Hannes Sjoblad, managing director of the company, said critics of the technology fail to understand that it can be put to good use.Advertisement – story continues below
“This technology exists and is used whether we like it or not,” he said. “I am happy that it is brought into the public conversation.”
“New technologies must be broadly debated and understood. Smart implants are a powerful health technology,” Sjoblad said.
Last week, the world glimpsed a future in which vaccine passports are implanted under the skin. A viral video from South China Morning Post profiled a Swedish start-up hub, Epicenter, that injects its employees with microchips.
“Right now it is very convenient to have a COVID passport always accessible on your implant,” its chief disruption officer, Hannes Sjöblad, told the interviewer. Oddly enough, he repeatedly spoke of chipping “arms” when we clearly see a woman opening doors with her hand.
Two years earlier, Sjöblad told ITV, “I want us humans to open up and improve our sensory universe, our cognitive functions. … I want to merge humans with technology and I think it will be awesome.”
Naturally, some Christians see the Mark of the Beast. In a sane world, the idea of having your hand chipped to access public goods or private property—to receive a mark in order to “buy, sell, or trade”—should alarm anyone, regardless of religious persuasion. The same goes for using an implanted brain-computer interface to access the digital realm, as Elon Musk plans to do with Neuralink.
Yet for a growing fringe, this invasive tech isn’t just desirable. It’s already normal. Presently, some 5,000 Swedes use implanted radio frequency identification (RFID) chips to open doors, pay cashless, present medical records, access concert venues, and ride public transportation. According to Ars Technica, as of 2018 an estimated 50,000-100,000 people worldwide have microchip implants, primarily in their hands.
A 2019 analysis in Nature reported about 160,000 people have deep brain stimulation devices implanted in their heads. Currently, this is only done out of necessity to treat disorders like epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease, or even addiction and depression. Of these devices, only 34 are true brain-computer interfaces. However, with current advances in technology, enormous injections of capital, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) recent approval, that number will rapidly climb.
Since the first human-grade RFID implant was patented in 1997, followed by FDA approval in 2004, subdermal microchips have become just another device in a growing cyborg toolkit. Drawing on that cache, the Internet of Bodies paradigm has gained enormous traction among the medical establishment. At the extreme end, the concept of natural-born humanity is to be abolished.
For more than six decades, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funded Human 2.0 projects, with particular interest in brain-computer interfaces. Citing these and many other human-machine hybrids, the World Economic Forum’s chairman Klaus Schwab recently spelled out his vision of civilizational transformation. His widely read books—“The Fourth Industrial Revolution” (2016) and “The Great Reset” (2020)—both describe inexorable progress toward total technocracy. The same idea emerges in a 2019 government analysis by Policy Horizons Canada, entitled “Exploring Biodigital Convergence.” According to the authors, “Digital technology can be embedded in organisms [and today] biotechnology may be at the cusp of a period of rapid expansion—possibly analogous to digital computing circa 1985.” Its success will hinge on sweeping surveillance. The document goes on to describe tracking chips, wearable bio-sensors, internal organ sensors, Web-connected neurotech, swallowable digital pills—merging body and brain with the digital beehive.
Last spring, the UK’s Ministry of Defense published the jarring study, “Human Augmentation: The Dawn of a New Paradigm.” The authors promise this “will become increasingly relevant, partly because it can directly enhance human capability and behaviour, and partly because it is the binding agent between people and machines.” Surveying today’s cyborgs, they write, “Once inserted, these ‘chips’ can…replace many of our keys and passwords, allowing us to unlock doors, start vehicles, and even log onto computers and smartphones.”
All the above authors fret over ethics in a perfunctory fashion, but most accept the “inevitable” fusion of man with machine. If military strategists, corporate elites, and government officials are taking this prospect seriously, so should we.
The New Normal Is Total Digitalization
For people with any sense at all, the notion of having a microchip jabbed into your hand (or your head) triggers animal revulsion. Disturbing as it may be, a more immediate concern is the widespread use of non-invasive biometric systems.
Wherever the New Normal takes hold, access to society is granted or denied on the basis of arbitrary “health and safety” concerns. Today, it’s masks or vaccine status. Tomorrow, it could be ideology. Authorities don’t have to chip you if they can simply scan your smartphone and tell you to get lost, or lock you in your dwelling pod whenever “the numbers” rise.
To cite one common example among many, the biometric company Clear rode the Patriot Act to prominence. Today, Clear is contracting to provide biometric and QR code-based vaxxports to fully jabbed citizens on the go. It won’t stop there. Not without a fight. As Clear’s CEO Caryn Seidman-Becker told CNBC last year, “Just like screening was forever changed post-9/11, in a post-Covid environment you’re going to see screening and public safety significantly shift. But this time it’s beyond airports. It’s sports stadiums, it’s retail, its office buildings, its restaurants.”
Taking a more cerebral angle, tech mogul Bryan Johnson founded Kernel to develop non-invasive brain-scanning helmets to enhance your health and happiness. The devices can also gather users’ neurological data. Last summer, Johnson told Bloomberg Businessweek that by 2030 he’d like to put his BCI helmets in every American household. These people want to completely transform our mental and physical spaces. It isn’t even a secret. They want some form of transhumanism, whether they use the term or not. It’s past time to smash their devices.
America Cannot Let This Happen
One by one across the globe, canaries are falling dead in the digital coal mine. We see implanted vaxxports in Sweden, lockdowns for the unvaccinated in Austria and Germany, and yes, quarantine camps in Australia. The Untact program in South Korea is specifically designed to replace human interaction with social robots and the Metaverse. At the pandemic’s outset, American writers at The Atlantic and CNN urged U.S. leaders to adopt Chinese authoritarianism. Their wish is beginning to come true.
While I doubt any population will be forcibly chipped like wayward housecats—at least not in the near future—no nightmarish policy is truly off the table. In the past 21 months, the United States has seen mandated mRNA gene therapies, QR code-based vaccine passports, mass deletion of supposed “misinformation,” and even drone surveillance to monitor social distancing. Meanwhile, more young adults died from fentanyl overdoses than from any transmissible disease.
If the biosecurity state can force you to wear an obedience mask to buy groceries, what can’t they do? Resist their measures at every turn. Drag these people down from the seats of power. Dismantle the structures they’ve already put in place.
I’m no absolutist. Tools are tools, and every naked ape needs one. For the most part, I couldn’t care less if techno-fetishists chip themselves or refashion their appendages. Had their subculture remained on the fringe, I’d still find such people fascinating. But that’s not what’s happening. Riding waves of germaphobia—the ultimate organic disruption—tech titans and their think tank ministers are establishing a secular religion. The world’s wealthiest men, wielding the most powerful tools on earth, are erecting inescapable systems of control. We can’t combat them if we don’t acknowledge what they are.
Scientism is their faith. Technology is their sacrament. Their cult is a cyborg theocracy. Even if they rain fire from the sky with the press of a button, never bend the knee to their silicon gods.
Joe Allen is a fellow primate who wonders why we ever came down from the trees. For years, he worked as a rigger on various concert tours. Between gigs, he studied religion and science at UTK and Boston University. Find him at www.joebot.xyz or @JOEBOTxyz.
The logic of vaccine mandates eludes me, particularly in the health care sphere.
The country is, at present, gearing up for what should be (God willing) the last major winter wave of COVID-19. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment for the frontline medical professionals — the ones who braved SARS-CoV-2 in its early stages, the ones Americans applauded from apartment balconies in those grim, confusing early days.
The administration and some politicians — usually Democrats — are convinced that zero-tolerance vaccine mandates are one of the critical components when it comes to blunting the force of that wave. Plenty don’t agree. Some COVID survivors — and researchers — maintain that natural immunity provides more protection than the vaccine does. Some have moral objections to the vaccine. Some don’t trust the speed with which it was developed. Some believe the mandates to be an infringement on bodily autonomy.
Does the reasoning behind vaccine mandates hold water? Does it matter? The point is that forcing the recalcitrant is a difficult task for the COVID hawks on the left, particularly given their dire predictions about ICU usage this winter and a labor shortage that doesn’t seem to be abating. The solution, therefore, is to force health care professionals to take the vaccine or consider themselves out of a job as we approach the all-hands-on-deck moment.
You may perhaps begin to see the problem here. Granted, the intent was to force unvaccinated health care professionals to swallow their objections and take one for the team. Instead, the practical effect is that the team is getting winnowed down — as proven by the case of Dr. Christopher Rake.
According to The Sacramento Bee, Rake is an anesthesiologist at UCLA Health hospital system in Los Angeles who has become a vocal social media critic of COVID vaccines. UCLA Health executives decided they had had enough of that and had him escorted out of his workplace Oct. 4 — but not without Rake livestreaming the whole affair.
“They are escorting me out of the building,” Rake said in the video, posted to Twitter on Tuesday by Beverly Hills Courier staff writer Samuel Braslow. The doctor asked for the title of the men escorting him out, although he didn’t get it.
“This is what happens when you stand up for freedom and when you show up to work, willing to work, despite being unvaccinated, and this is the price you have to pay sometimes,” Rake said, turning the camera on himself.
Then he sketched out his plan: He’s going to keep fighting the mandatory vaccination regime, no matter what it costs him.
“But what they don’t realize is that I’m willing to go lose everything,” he said. “Job, paycheck, freedom, even my life for this cause.”
UCLA anesthesiologist Dr. Chris Rake, a COVID-19 vaccine mandate opponent, was escorted out of the UCLA medical plaza yesterday and placed on unpaid administrative leave for refusing to get vaccinated or request an exemption.
“Be well. United we stand, divided we fall,” Rake concluded.
The UCLA Health System requires workers to have a COVID-19 vaccination or “an exemption in accordance with University of California policy and a state public health order issued on Aug. 5, which only exempts workers on the basis of religious beliefs or medical reasons,” according to the Bee.
“Those out of compliance are subject to progressive discipline, including restricting access to work sites and being placed on leave,” a UCLA representative told McClatchy Newspapers, the Bee’s parent company.
Rake’s profile was still listed on UCLA Health’s website as of Monday morning Eastern Time, indicating he hadn’t been terminated. However, there’s been ample time for “progressive discipline,” given he began speaking out against vaccines publicly as early as August.
While he was once a frontline hero for his work with COVID, Rake said at an anti-vaccination rally in Santa Monica Aug. 29, “this year I’m a zero.”
“They want to force a vaccination or medication or treatment into my body that I don’t want. So they’re telling me, ‘Take the jab or we take your job,’” Rake said.
“And I’m here to say no. That’s not OK.”
He also urged those who are vaccinated to consider the implications of vaccine mandates and said he wanted them with the cause “because they deserve medical freedom.”
“Many of them are going to wake up when the government says, ‘hey, by the way, you need a third booster shot,’” Rake said. “And you know, they say, ‘I felt pretty bad after that second one, can I just pass?’ No. You are now out of alignment with what the government wants and cannot go to your child’s baseball game, you can’t go to the movie theater, you can’t go to the grocery store. They’re going to take everything away.”
UCLA Health responded with a tweet saying, “These comments do not represent the views of UCLA Health. Unvaccinated people are more likely to contract COVID-19 & we encourage employees to be vaccinated. We adhere to the state public health order requiring health care workers to be vaccinated or undergo regular testing.”
Dr. Christopher Rake, an anesthesiologist from UCLA medical center, tells the crowd, “They want to force a vaccination or medication or treatment into my body that I don’t want. So they’re telling me, ‘Take the jab or we take your job.’ And I’m here to say no. That’s not ok.” pic.twitter.com/wP2kZyS1o7
I’m not a medical expert, but I don’t agree with Dr. Rake’s position — and it’s a moot point anyway, given the fact I’m fully vaccinated and I’m unaware of any way to pull the Pfizer solution out of my arm at this point. However, I agree with Dr. Rake’s ability to state his position — and to live by it. If UCLA Health was testing him, there was no reason to escort him off of their property. He plays no role in administering or championing vaccines. He plays a vital role in the operation of the emergency room. This shouldn’t be difficult.
And yet, it is. Because of vaccine mandates in health care, hospitals have lacked the requisite nurses needed to deliver babies. Outside the medical field, law enforcement officers are leaving their jobs. Experienced members of the military are considering leaving the service.
We once celebrated our frontline medical workers for keeping us alive. Now we have to hope there are enough of them left as we’re told COVID cases are “overwhelming hospitals” — all because of what the vaccine mandate hath wrought.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
Yes, we’ve heard all about Joe Biden’s alleged vaccine mandate for private companies employing 100 or more people. It was all over the news even before he announced it on September 9. His announcement has jeopardized the employment of millions of Americans and increased worker shortages in critical domains such as health care.
There’s only one problem. It’s all a mirage. Biden’s so-called vaccine mandate doesn’t exist — at least, not yet. So far, all we have is his press conference and other such made-for-media huff-puffing. No such rule even claiming to be legally binding has been issued yet.
That’s why nearly two dozen Republican attorneys general who have publicly voiced their opposition to the clearly unconstitutional and illegal mandate haven’t yet filed suit against it, the Office of the Indiana Attorney General confirmed for me. There is no mandate to haul into court. And that may be part of the plan.
According to several sources, so far it appears no such mandate has been sent to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs yet for approval. The White House, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Department of Labor haven’t released any official guidance for the alleged mandate. There is no executive order. There’s nothing but press statements.
Despite what you may have been falsely led to believe by the media fantasy projection machine, press statements have exactly zero legal authority.
“There is nothing there yet that gives employers any mandate,” Stephanie McFarland, spokeswoman for the Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told me Oct. 6. “The president made an announcement on this asking OSHA to do it, but we’ve not yet seen anything come from it yet,” she also said. When the state agency gets any further information, she said, they’ll review it.
To impose the public perception of a mandate, the Biden administration is following an unusual rule-making process it also employed earlier this year, called an emergency temporary standard (ETS). The spring ETS rule took nearly six months to issue. Meanwhile, companies are telling reporters their vaccine mandates will have at the latest December deadlines. (For those who can’t calendar, that’s four months after Biden’s non-existent mandate was proclaimed. According to OSHA, an ETS takes up to six months to go into effect after the initial mandate is issued in the Federal Register — which, again, for the proclaimed 100-employee mandate hasn’t happened yet.)
Lawyers for big business were blunt about their love for this mandate mirage: “Everybody loves this cover,” Minneapolis employment lawyer Kate Bischoff told Bloomberg Law in September. “Many were already looking down the road at doing this, but the fact that they get to blame Biden is like manna from heaven.”
Using the ETS procedure instead of normal federal rule-making processes both allows the Biden administration to push its demands faster and without any public input or requirement of responding to public input, which is normally required of even legally laughable federal rule-making like this one would be. That is part of why ETS rules have been overwhelmingly overturned in courts.
“OSHA has used that legal authority only 10 times in 50 years,” David Rivkin Jr. and Robert Alt wrote in the Wall Street Journal in September. “Courts have decided challenges to six of those standards, nixing five and upholding only one.”
There are many other reasons any federal vaccine mandate would be obviously illegal and unconstitutional, Rivkin and Alt write, including that “The states have plenary police power to regulate health and safety. Congress has only those limited powers enumerated in the Constitution. That wouldn’t include the authority to impose a $155 fine (today’s equivalent of the $5 at stake in Jacobson) on an individual who declines to be vaccinated, much less to prevent him from earning a livelihood.”
But who needs the Constitution when you have an American people conditioned for compliance with even wildly outlandish things the screen people insist they must think and do?
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal published a letter from Bruce Atkinson making several excellent observations about the nonexistent mandate, including the following:
The mandate’s nonexistence shields the Biden administration from legal challenges that may ultimately restrict the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s authority. Yet the mandate is still effective at compelling industries and companies into compliance, as it leaves room for any eventual issuance to target noncompliant entities. This implied cudgel is particularly effective on industries and companies that are dependent on federal spending or the goodwill of federal regulators. The nonexistent mandate also allows so-inclined state and local governments and companies to issue their own mandates, seemingly in lockstep with Washington.
The Biden White House has been well-served by presenting a nonexistent mandate as a done deal.
Now, let me see, what presidential administration does all this remind you of? Why, that of Mr. “Pen and Phone” himself, Barack Obama.
His also wildly unconstitutional Deferred Action for Child Arrivals was simply a two-page memo, for example, but it is still allowing some 616,000 people to simply ignore major U.S. laws, and could easily be reinstated by courts as litigation continues nearly a decade later. It seems that, given such unchecked gains from openly lawless actions Democrats have turned into standard operating procedure over the years, Joe Biden feels free to reduce that constitutional contempt to simply a phone now.
What this “government by press release” also allows is for Republicans like Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb to complain about Biden’s tyranny while using zip, nada, zilch of their elected authority to stop it. Holcomb has used the same executive rule-by-decree throughout the lockdown era without effective restraint by a supermajority-Republican state legislature, even telling the press churches were required to deliver Christ’s Body and Blood his way while quietly keeping that part out of his executive orders, surely because government dictating religious exercise is obviously unconstitutional and would quickly have generated lawsuits.
All this allows weak Republicans and evil Democrats to shadowbox each other for the cameras while ordinary Americans suffer under their abdicated leadership. By the time Republican attorneys general get around to filing lawsuits over any eventually issued legal documents that fulfill Biden’s promises, the vast majority of people not wanting government to force them into medical procedures will likely be unemployed, forcibly injected with treatments that have almost no track record, forced from their education paths, provided with fake documents like these citizens are beneath COVID-rule-exempt illegal aliens, and all the rest.
This is how weak Republicans keep letting Democrats go right on gleefully disemboweling our rights just like they have nearly 50 million of the American unborn. Gee, thanks, “public servants.” Tell me another one about how you love American liberties and the Bill of Rights. I’ll believe that when I see you sacrificing anything substantial to fight for them.
What Democrats are doing as Republicans stand down yet again is a moral and constitutional abomination. Not even the fig-leaf pose of a pen signing balderdash-filled documents is needed for today’s Democrats. Whatever they say, you do. You have no rights or say in the matter, no possibility for objecting to even them forcibly injecting things into your own body and the bodies of your children.
These people believe they are royalty, and too many Americans are acting like they’re these losers’ serfs instead of citizens endowed by God with inalienable rights, including the right to consent — through elected representatives, not never-elected dictatorial bureaucrats — to rules that restrict our rights, everyday lives, and human dignity.
Jessica Berg Wilson’s obituary described the Seattle woman as “an exceptionally healthy and vibrant 37-year-old young mother with no underlying health conditions” who “died unexpectedly on Sep. 7 from COVID-19 Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia (VITT).”
The obituary on Legacy.com continued: “Jessica fully embraced motherhood, sharing her passion for life with her daughters. Jessica’s motherly commitment was intense, with unwavering determination to nurture her children to be confident, humble, responsible, and to have concern and compassion for others with high morals built on Faith.”
“Jessica’s greatest passion was to be the best mother possible for Bridget and Clara. Nothing would stand in her way to be present in their lives,” it said. “During the last weeks of her life, however, the world turned dark with heavy-handed vaccine mandates. Local and state governments were determined to strip away her right to consult her wisdom and enjoy her freedom.
“She had been vehemently opposed to taking the vaccine, knowing she was in good health and of a young age and thus not at risk for serious illness. In her mind, the known and unknown risks of the unproven vaccine were more of a threat.
“But, slowly, day by day, her freedom to choose was stripped away. Her passion to be actively involved in her children’s education—which included being a Room Mom—was, once again, blocked by government mandate. Ultimately, those who closed doors and separated mothers from their children prevailed.
“It cost Jessica her life. It cost her children the loving embrace of their caring mother. And it cost her husband the sacred love of his devoted wife. It cost God’s Kingdom on earth a very special soul who was just making her love felt in the hearts of so many.”
This very sad story was made even worse by the Twitter Police.
When a Twitter user shared Wilson’s obituary on Friday, adding in the caption that she had not wanted to get vaccinated, the post was slapped with a warning label.
“This Tweet is misleading,” it said. “Find out why health officials consider COVID-19 vaccines safe for most people.”
It provided a link so users could “find out more,” adding, “This Tweet can’t be replied to, shared or liked.”
Here is a screenshot of the Twitter warning label, which apparently was removed after many users complained about it.
This is what popped up if you clicked on the retweet button.
Misleading? On the contrary, it’s very clear. A healthy young woman, who believed that the vaccine posed a greater risk to her health than contracting the virus itself, was forced to comply with the school’s vaccine requirement for visitors if she wanted to be involved in her children’s classrooms. She took the vaccine and then died of a vaccine-induced blood clot. She was one of the unlucky ones.
The author of the tweet was not misleading readers, either. She was simply mourning the loss of a young mother who would not have gotten the vaccine (and therefore likely would not have died) had she not been forced to. Nobody was trying to convince others not to take the vaccine or claiming that it will cause mass deaths.
I am not anti-vax. Vaccines are a potent tool in the fight against COVID. That said, these vaccines do pose a risk to some individuals. Some might have medical reasons for rejecting the vaccine, and others are highly skeptical about taking a vaccine that was developed so quickly. Not everyone needs to be vaccinated.
This is tyranny, and it’s hard to believe this is happening in America.
Elizabeth is a contract writer at The Western Journal. Her articles have appeared on many conservative websites including RedState, Newsmax, The Federalist, Bongino.com, HotAir, Australian National Review, Independent Journal Review, Instapundit, MSN and RealClearPolitics. Please follow Elizabeth on Twitter.@StaufferVaughn
On Aug. 31, 2021, John Stokes was preparing for his senior season playing Division 1 NCAA golf at Tennessee State University. By Sept. 6, the 21-year-old was hospitalized with heart complications. What changed during the span of those four days? According to Stokes, he received the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“I am a Division 1 student-athlete with no prior health issues, and I got the second COVID shot Tuesday [on Aug. 31],” he said in a now-viral TikTok video. “And within four days, I have been diagnosed with myocarditis and was told that I probably won’t be able to play my senior season now.”
According to his profile on Tennessee State’s website, Stokes was set to begin his second and final season with the program. His newly developed heart condition is putting his ability to play in jeopardy.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines myocarditis as “inflammation of the heart muscle,” and the agency says it can be caused by an immune system response to some trigger, such as an infection. The CDC has admitted myocarditis, along with an “inflammation of the outer lining of the heart” known as pericarditis, has been reported after mRNA COVID vaccines.
The agency even went as far as to say that these side effects are most common in adolescent or young adult males after receiving the second vaccine dose from either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna. Yet the CDC continues to push the vaccine even on this specific group.
“CDC continues to recommend that everyone aged 12 years and older get vaccinated for COVID-19,” the agency says on its website.
“The known risks of COVID-19 illness and its related, possibly severe complications, such as long-term health problems, hospitalization, and even death, far outweigh the potential risks of having a rare adverse reaction to vaccination, including the possible risk of myocarditis or pericarditis.”
A simple study of the numbers will prove that this theory is questionable, at best. According to Statista, there had been 3,043 COVID-19 deaths among Americans aged 18-29 as of Sept. 8, 2021. In another chart, Statista reported 7,148,719 COVID-19 cases among Americans aged 18-29. That means that if you get COVID-19 between the ages of 18-29, you have approximately a .04 percent chance of dying from the virus.
In addition, that only takes into account known positive cases of COVID-19. It does not include unreported cases, nor does it include Americans aged 18-29 who never even get COVID-19. Suffice to say, the chances of 18 to 29-year-old Americans dying from COVID-19 are very slim.
While cases of myocarditis and pericarditis as a result of the vaccine are admittedly rare, they are at least a possibility. Many 18 to 29-year-olds are not willing to take that risk to protect themselves from a virus that has an extremely low chance of killing them. Even if you feel that 18 to 29-year-olds should be vaccinated, you should at least be able to see the problem with mandating a vaccine that has some potential to cause heart inflammation. The CDC’s argument that the risks of COVID-19 outweigh the risks of the vaccine is a choice that Americans should make for themselves, not one that the government gets to decide for them.
“It isn’t right for people to be forced to take the vaccine because there are actual side effects like this that could happen to you,” Stokes said. “Everyone should be informed of the side effects, and no one should be forced to take something that could cause what has happened to me.”
While the CDC says the possible long-term effects from COVID-19 are a reason to get the vaccine, Stokes said the possible long-term effects from the vaccine itself are unknown.
“No one knows the long-term effects of what’s possibly going to happen from this,” he said. “It’s kind of uncharted territory because everyone else with the same heart issues from the vaccine as me, we’re all being tracked and monitored.’
“We’re basically like test subjects from the vaccine, so it’s a very serious issue that really needs to be spread.”
Just as living unvaccinated could present a higher risk of getting COVID-19, receiving the vaccine presents its own risks. The choice of which risk to take has always been and must remain a personal one.
Grant is a graduate of Virginia Tech with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He has five years of writing experience with various outlets and enjoys covering politics and sports.
For the past year and a half, those of us who have felt the pandemic was being used as a tool to manipulate people have been labeled conspiracy theorists by the establishment media and leftist elites. As time goes on, more evidence emerges that seems to suggest we were right all along.
According to the Post Millennial, students at Eatonville High School in Washington were forced to wear ankle monitors in order to participate in athletics.
An anonymous mother who spoke to the outlet said she received a text from her 15-year-old daughter saying she was asked to wear a monitor at a school volleyball practice. When her daughter did not answer her subsequent texts and calls and no one at the school was able to answer her questions, the mother eventually drove to the school’s campus.
School employees told her that a meeting had been held the prior week to discuss the implementation of a monitoring program. It was “allegedly designed for contact tracing in the event of a positive COVID test of a student,” the Post Millennial reported.
Both unvaccinated and vaccinated students were reportedly told to wear ankle monitors. If someone tested positive for COVID-19, unvaccinated students who were identified as close contacts would be required to quarantine for 14 days, while vaccinated students would not.
The device is called TraceTag and is manufactured by a company called Triax, according to the Post Millennial.
“Being able to properly comply with social distancing guidelines is critical to containing and slowing the spread of COVID-19,” the company says in its description of the product.
“Additionally, having a log of all worker interactions for contact tracing, in the event that a worker is diagnosed with COVID-19, will help to accelerate the process for further containment and isolation.”
See, it’s no big deal. Why would you even have an issue with being forced to wear a tracking device? It’s for your own good.
The device also emits “a visual and audible alarm, so individuals know when to adjust their current distance to a proper social distance.” In other words, don’t get too close to someone if you don’t want your ankle monitor to sound the alarm.
Forcing students to wear these devices is a ludicrous idea on its face. Ankle monitors are meant for prisoners, not minors just trying to play school sports.
To make matters worse, the mother said she was never contacted about the program. The school’s head football coach told her forms were provided at the aforementioned meeting for those who wanted to opt out of the program, but the mother said she was never even informed that the meeting was taking place.
According to the Post Millennial, the school’s athletic director “acknowledged the error and apologized for the ‘slip up’ of not getting her consent.”
This was not just an innocent “slip-up.” It’s a symptom of the growing assumption that people should be forced to give up any number of basic rights in the name of “public health.”
For months, the establishment media has been telling people they essentially have no right to choose whether they want certain substances injected into their bodies. If public and private employers are allowed to tell their workers what to put in their bodies, why wouldn’t school administrators be allowed to tell students what to attach to them?
The reality is that students in Washington state are being forced to wear ankle monitors. That is not a conspiracy theory — it’s real life. If we don’t stop this kind of invasive behavior now, there is no telling how far it will go.
Grant is a graduate of Virginia Tech with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He has five years of writing experience with various outlets and enjoys covering politics and sports.
There’s something in the air this week. Can you feel it?
It’s not just the super-duper scary Delta variant — it’s the rising consternation of Americans who are being told that, despite the willingness of millions to submit themselves to the novel COVID-19 vaccine so life could “get back to normal,” they’re now being told they need to mask up, regardless of vaccination status, even at home around their own children — some of whom may even be diving into yet another semester of distance learning, if things keep up, all thanks to said Delta variant.
While COVID-19 cases have indeed risen in the U.S. in recent weeks, which is being blamed on Delta, there’s a good chance that the media and health officials may be blowing its long-term impact on daily life out of proportion. Shocking — I know
According to the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, the Delta variant may actually be more widespread than is being reported, but this could signal that hope is right around the corner.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb explained while speaking with CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he believes we are “much further” into the resurgence of COVID-19 than we realize, but, based on the trajectory seen in the United Kingdom just a few weeks ago, we might just have a few more weeks ourselves before cases once again decline.
“I believe there’s more virus than we’re picking up right now,” he said, noting that cases detected by at-home antigen tests or infections among younger Americans who might be asymptomatic won’t show up in government data.
“If you look at the U.K. in the last seven days, they do appear to be turning the corner,” Gottlieb explained.
He said that while it’s “unclear” if this downward trajectory is going to be sustained as the U.K. only recently lifted mitigation measures that were previously in place, if our friends across the pond are any indication, “we are perhaps further into this epidemic and hopefully going to turn a corner in the next two or maybe three weeks.”
He repeated his prediction for CNBC’s Squawk Box later in the week while discussing transmission between and mask guidance for vaccinated individuals.
“The bottom line is, the vaccine does not make you impervious to infection,” Gottlieb explained. “There are some people who are developing mild and asymptomatic infections even after vaccination.”
Although the Delta variant is indeed “much more transmissible” than the previous strain, Gottlieb said, and vaccinated individuals should still consider wearing masks, particularly around the vulnerable, he also noted that this shouldn’t necessarily “translate into general guidance” for mask-wearing and vaccine requirements.
“I don’t think we’re going to get enough bang for our buck by telling vaccinated people they have to wear masks at all times to make it worth our while,” he said. “I think we’re further into this Delta wave than we’re picking up. I think in another two or three weeks we’ll be through this.
"If you are vaccinated in a high prevalence area, in contact with virus, you think you might have the virus because you have mild symptoms–be prudent, get tested, maybe wear a mask especially if you are around a vulnerable person," says @ScottGottliebMD. pic.twitter.com/LFlMffkfe9
It’s also worth noting that “this,” i.e. a resurgence of COVID-19 cases as compared to previous months, isn’t anywhere near as scary as the Chicken Little state and media establishments seem to want us to believe. While cases are indeed rising, deaths due to COVID-19 remain at a 16-month low, as Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff recently tweeted.
No one wants to hear about packed ICUs or young people on ventilators, and there is not a single life in this nation that needs to be reduced to a mere statistic. But since, pragmatically, the statistics are both what public health guidance should be based on and what we’re told it is based on, it’s pretty safe to conclude that there simply may not be a reason to panic. Certainly, there’s no telling what the next few weeks will bring, and Gottlieb was merely making predictions based on the trajectory of cases in a different country than our own.
If we can look at declining case rates in the U.K. as an indication that we may see the same trajectory here at home, perhaps we should also look to their “keep calm and carry on” attitude when it comes to examining the data. But will Americans keep calm as officials seem ready to send us into a new wave of lockdowns and school closures? That, just like the trajectory of COVID-19 cases, remains to be seen.
Isa grew up in San Francisco, where she was briefly a far-left socialist before finding Jesus and her husband in Hawaii. She now homeschools their two boys and freelances in the Ozarks.@crunchyconmama
Schools in the U.S. should fully reopen to in-person learning in the fall and allow vaccinated teachers and students to not wear masks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced Friday. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stated in February that schools could safely reopen for in-person learning even if teachers and students haven’t been vaccinated, but President Joe Biden’s White House quickly walked back the statement. The CDC is now urging schools to reopen in the fall “regardless of whether all of the prevention strategies can be implemented at the school.”
The CDC does recommend physical distancing and masking for students and teachers who are not vaccinated, however.
A teacher welcomes students entering a classroom in a high-school of an Athens suburb on April 12, 2021, as students and teachers in Greece are required to use kits for self-administered Covid-19 test twice a week as the country reopens high-schools for students in the three final grades. (Photo by Louisa GOULIAMAKI / AFP) (Photo by LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP via Getty Images)
When Walensky said much the same in February, White House press secretary Jen Psaki distanced the administration from her comments.
“The president — let me be crystal clear — wants schools to open,” Psaki said during a Feb. 4 press briefing. “He wants them to stay open. And he wants to do that safely. And he wants health and medical experts to be the guides for how we should do exactly that.”
“Dr. Walensky spoke to this in her personal capacity,” Psaki continued. “Obviously, she’s the head of the CDC, but we’re going to wait for the final guidance to come out so we can use that as a guide for schools around the country.”
Biden’s goal was to reopen “most” schools to in-person learning within his first 100 days in office, which the administration did not reach. Biden and the rest of his administration appeared to repeatedly contradict one another on which schools they wanted to open and what constituted reopening.
Psaki said Feb. 10 that the administration would consider a school “open” if it held in-person classes “at least” one day per week. Biden later called that statement “a mistake in communication” and said his administration is working to reopen schools in-person five days a week.
ARE WE GOING TO TRUST OUR CHILDREN, GRANDCHILDREN AND GREAT-GRANDCHILDREN TO THIS INCOMPOTANT MAN?
Imagine if someone had said these words in October:
“In the midst of everything COVID, people were sort of putting down that cause of death as COVID … It is important to go back and do this accounting to see if COVID was actually the cause of death.”
It would have taken five minutes for Snopes and PolitiFact to cancel this person entirely. They would have been branded a conspiracy theorist, a blackguard, a scoundrel. If they had any platform, it would be taken away posthaste. You could even make a case there would be Facebook and Twitter censorship involved — this being COVID-19 misinformation, after all.
But those words were spoken Friday by University of California San Francisco professor of medicine Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert. She was speaking to San Francisco’s KPIX-TV regarding the announcement that Santa Clara County, California, had revised its official COVID-19 death toll downward by 22 percent.
According to KPIX, the announcement was made after the county “refined its approach in reporting the data.”
Santa Clara County — home to San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley — is the sixth-largest among California’s 58 counties in terms of population, with 1,927,470 residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau data compiled by Cubit.
This isn’t minor, in other words.
Before refining its approach, the county had recorded 2,201 COVID deaths. Now, that’s been reduced to 1,696.
“It is important to go back and do this accounting to see if COVID was actually the cause of death,” Gandhi said, according to KPIX.
“I think that transparent communication is an upside, I mean, in the sense that it’s true that if we did this across the nation, it would bring our death rate lower. A downside of that, could be that people will say, ‘Well, it wasn’t as serious as you said.’”
Gandhi added she thought this was going to encourage coronavirus vaccine holdouts to get vaccinated.
“Because a lot of people have kind of said, ‘I’ve heard people are dying anyway of COVID, what’s the point?’ And it is very important to say, ‘No, did they die of COVID or were they in the hospital for something else and they died of that?’” Gandhi said. “That helps people say, ‘Oh, the risk of breakthrough infection is so low I want to go ahead and get vaccinated.’ So I think it’s very good for vaccine hesitancy.”
Santa Clara County wasn’t the only county in California to reassess its data, either. According to KGO-TV, Alameda County revised its numbers downward in early June, saying it had an over-count of COVID deaths greater than 400 individuals. On June 4, the number of deaths in the Bay Area county attributed to COVID-19 dropped from 1,634 to 1,223. Alameda County, home to Oakland and Berkeley, is the seventh-largest in the state in terms of population with 1,656,754 residents.
“According to the Health Department, the 25% decrease was made to comply with the state’s definition of a COVID-19 death, which requires COVID-19 to be a direct or contributing factor or a situation in which it can’t be ruled out,” KGO reported.
“Alameda County previously included any person who died while infected with the virus in the total COVID-19 deaths for the County,” wrote Neetu Balram with the Alameda County Health Department in a news release dated June 4.
By way of example, Balram wrote:
“Using the older definition of COVID-19 deaths, a resident who had COVID-19 but died due to another cause, like a car accident, this person would be included in the total number of reported COVID-19 deaths for Alameda County. Under the updated definition of COVID-19 deaths, this person would not be included in the total because COVID-19 was not a contributing factor in the death.”
At the time, another doctor at the University of California San Francisco, epidemiologist Dr. George Rutherford, told KGO he was “betting it’s very specific to Alameda County, which had a lot of cases early on and had to do a lot of on-the-fly definitions and systems and now they are being brought into alignment.”
Gandhi apparently didn’t think that was the case after Santa Clara reported its revised total. KPIX reported that “Gandhi believes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may soon ask all counties to do the same as Alameda and Santa Clara Counties and that the nation could also see a drop in its COVID-19 death toll.”
This is what voices — mostly conservative voices — have been saying for over a year. Even raising the issue, however, got one branded as a conspiracy theorist.
Take the state of Washington. In May 2020, during a media briefing, Dr. Katie Hutchinson of the Washington State Department of Health announced that some people who obviously hadn’t died of COVID were being included in the state’s death totals.
“We currently do have some deaths that are being reported that are clearly from other causes,” Hutchinson said. “We have about five deaths — less than five deaths — that we know of that are related to obvious other causes. In this case, they are from gunshot wounds.”
If there were five deaths that they could identify as just being from gunshot wounds — out of 1,078 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the state at the time — that still doesn’t speak well of the state’s reporting mechanisms. That means, as the conservative think tank Freedom Foundation pointed out at the time, there were likely individuals who died of other causes more anodyne than a gunshot wound who were being counted among COVID deaths.
Yet, Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee blasted anyone who questioned whether there was over-counting going on.
“The problem is you got some people out there who are fanning these conspiracy claims from the planet Pluto,” Inslee said, according to KOMO-TV. “And it’s just disgusting what they’re trying to say of all these crazy deep-state malarkey. Who are kinda suggests that this not a problem in our state. I find that hard to accept with the number of dead in our state. So, that’s a problem. And I hope it gets resolved.”
This is such “deep-state malarkey” that jurisdictions now revising their COVID death toll downward include [checks notes] two famously liberal Bay Area counties in California, one home to Berkeley and the other the center of Silicon Valley. These stories were out there if you looked — individuals who died of gunshot wounds or motorcycle accidents that were counted as COVID victims. If you raised questions, however, you were branded a conspiracy theorist.
Even now, Gandhi seems to lament the fact Santa Clara County’s deaths have been revised downward: “A downside of that, could be that people will say, ‘Well, it wasn’t as serious as you said,’” she told KPIX.
Why would that be your reaction? And, perhaps more importantly, why would nobody with a brain be surprised to hear the same reaction from editors, politicians and members of the medical and scientific communities?
After a year of lockdowns based on an unholy alliance among untruthful media, scientists with zero sense and a power-hungry left, we’re left with the conclusion that big numbers drove public policy in a direction all of these entities wanted — in an election year when the left was tarring the sitting president with blame for all things COVID.
While the numbers weren’t ginned up to create a crisis that didn’t exist, it’s not as if politicians and scientists acted with alacrity to fix obvious deficiencies in reporting COVID deaths, either. Santa Clara and Alameda Counties are emblematic of how wrong some jurisdictions got it.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
For months, coronavirus vaccine skeptics have been mocked, shunned, turned away from events and labeled as tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists for their refusal to be injected with a novel breed of vaccines. But there are reasons to be cautious.
Michigan resident Jacob Clynick had just completed the eighth grade and looked forward to starting his freshman year at Saginaw’s Carrollton High School this fall when the 13-year-old got his second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on June 13 at a local Walgreens pharmacy, the Detroit Free Press reported.
When we’re 13, life seems so vast and rife with possibilities. We either look forward to — or dread — turning the page to write our lives’ next chapter, but, in our own peculiar ways, we each anticipate the journey.
Jacob never got the chance to move on.
s the days separating his vaccination from his death came and went, Jacob reported having typical side effects — fever, upset stomach and fatigue — his aunt, Tammy Burages told the Free Press. In most cases, such mild symptoms are little cause for concern — especially from a healthy 13-year-old with no underlying medical conditions.
When Jacob went to bed June 15, he had a stomach ache, Burges told the newspaper. He died overnight.
Now, authorities are investigating whether Jacob’s death was related to the vaccination, the Free Press reported.
“The family was told that preliminary autopsy findings suggest Jacob’s heart was enlarged when he died and there was fluid around his heart, Burges said,” according to the Free Press.
The Michigan Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine would not confirm this information, the Free Press reported.
“We can verify that we are managing the investigation, and that’s the extent of what I can share,” Randy Pfau, director of operations for the institute, told the newspaper.
“It’s still an ongoing investigation,” he added, “I know the doctors are working on this case as a priority.”
As the Free Press noted, a Centers for Disease Control advisory committee has acknowledged previous instances of post-vaccine heart inflammation (aka myocarditis), saying that a “likely association” exists between the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and heart issues in younger recipients.
However, the CDC still comes down in favor of vaccination.
“The known and potential benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks, including the possible risk of myocarditis or pericarditis,” its website states. “Also, most patients with myocarditis and pericarditis who received care responded well to treatment and rest and quickly felt better.”
Still, the side effects are clearly real. How many more children have to share the same experience before liberals stop promoting vaccines for those in age groups at low risk for COVID-19?
Aside from the kid controversy, the adverse reactions, the horror stories and the borderline creepy governmental push surrounding these novel vaccines are exactly why mandates are a bad idea for everyone. These vaccines — aside from being the first of the mRNA breed — have only been on the market for a few short months, unlike traditional vaccines we’ve had for decades (e.g. those for rubella, measles or chickenpox). We know very little about the long-term side effects. We know very little about how our bodies will respond to this new “technology” as time goes on.
It’s only natural to be reluctant.
No definite link between Jacob’s death and his vaccination has been established. However, there’s no shortage of cases where young, healthy recipients experienced heart trouble after their immunizations. Even a CDC advisory committee has acknowledged it.
Am I saying everyone is going to die or experience adverse reactions from COVID vaccines? Of course not. But I am encouraging all readers to do what you feel is best for yourselves and your families. Get vaccinated on your own terms, not the government’s, not some official’s. If you don’t want to get vaccinated, that’s your prerogative too. Above all, have the courage to think for yourself. That’s the bravest thing you can do.
Taylor Penley is a political commentator residing in Northwest Georgia. She holds a BA in English with minors in rhetoric/writing and global studies from Dalton State College. As a student, she worked in government relations and interned for Georgia’s 14th congressional district. She previously published an article with Future Female Leaders and published a rhetorical analysis of President Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate Address in a collegiate journal. She aspires to earn an MA and a PhD in journalism in the near future.
When the disastrous April jobs report came out, President Joe Biden was asked by a reporter whether or not the Democratic push to keep expanded $300 weekly federal unemployment checks contributed to the historic miss.
“No, nothing measurable,” Biden said during a media briefing on May 7, according to a transcript.
“I know some employers are having trouble filling jobs. But what this report shows is that there’s a much bigger problem. … It is that our economy still has 8 million fewer jobs than when this pandemic started. The data shows that more — more workers — more workers are looking for jobs, and many can’t find them. While jobs are coming back, there are still millions of people out there looking for work.”
That’s still the official administration line after two months of disappointing jobs numbers. The fact that the federal government is paying people not to work has nothing to do with the promised economic rebound falling flat, at least when it comes to jobs.
During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina wasn’t having it. As he questioned Shalanda Young, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, he said he had relatives who weren’t working because unemployment benefits were so high. Graham was arguing that the benefits should be killed before they’re set to expire in September.
“There’s a lot of jobs out there that are unfilled and will never be filled until you change the benefit structure. Does that logic make sense to you, given where we’re at in our economy?” Graham asked Young.
“I understand the logic, but I’ve also not met Americans who would prefer not to work,” Young replied. “There’s a dignity to work in this country.”
A chuckling Graham used his relatives to show why this is problematic. “I got a lot of people in my family that ain’t working because they’re getting — I’ll show you some of my family,” Graham said.
“Bottom line is I think there are people out there, they’re not bad people, but they’re not going to work for $15 an hour if they make $23 unemployed,” he added.
“That doesn’t make you a bad person. If you’re working for $15 an hour, that makes you almost a chump.”
The expanded benefits have been part of a tug-of-war between the White House and Republicans on Capitol Hill and in governor’s mansions. As part of the American Rescue Plan, Biden kept the $300-a-week checks going through Sept. 6. As The New York Times reported last week, the administration has promised not to renew them, but has no plans to cancel the additional aid early.
However, many Republicans have seen enough, with 25 states having already ended the benefits starting this month.
In a Friday media briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said“that’s OK,”although the Biden administration still sees the $300 payments as an “extra helping hand.”
“Every governor is going to make their own decision,” Psaki told reporters.
That decision should become markedly easier when staring down two months of dreadful jobs reports. April is the month that sticks out; that’s when economists were expecting a million new jobs and the total was 278,000. And let’s not forget May. The 559,000 jobs added still came in below expectations of 675,000 jobs. Let’s also not forget that a roaring economy was set to be a Democratic talking point going into 2022.
Even though the Biden administration inherited a strong economy before lockdowns shuttered businesses, and even though the beginning of mass vaccinations was felicitously timed with Biden’s inauguration, the massive bounceback the White House was counting on hasn’t quite happened yet. But the weekly $300 checks have nothing to do with it, they swear. After all, who wouldn’t choose the dignity of work over getting paid to sit on the couch?
It isn’t just Shalanda Young making this argument — during the May 7 media briefing on the April jobs numbers, Biden claimed “most middle-class, working-class people that I know think the way my dad did.
“He used to say — and I know I’m repeating myself, but I’m going to continue to because I think it’s critical. ‘A job is a lot more than a paycheck,’ he’d say. ‘Joey, it’s about your respect, your dignity, your place in the community.’ More than a paycheck. It’s people’s pride. It’s about being able to look at your child in the eye and say, ‘Honey, it’s going to be OK.’”
I know, empurpled prose like that makes the tears well up in your eyes. However, if you stay at home for $23 an hour instead of working for $15 an hour, it’s a lot easier to look your child in the eye and say, “Honey, it’s going to be OK.” Yes, a job might be “people’s pride.” It’s not the kind of pride that goeth before the fall, but it’s the kind of pride that, in this case, goeth before making considerably less money for doing actual work.
Now, was Graham making a rhetorical point, throwing his family under the bus, or both? Whatever the case, one hopes they — as well as millions of other Americans — get off the dole with all due rapidity.
In a country where anyone over 12 can get a vaccine with ease and employers are desperately looking for workers, the federal government needn’t be throwing $300 a week at the unemployed in the name of recovery.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.@CillianZeal
Demonstrators rally outside the Pennsylvania Capitol Building to protest the continued closure of businesses due to the coronavirus pandemic on May 15, 2020, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Mark Makela / Getty Images)
In one of the first signs that American citizens are cognizant of the country’s dangerous descent into a one-party rule, residents of Pennsylvania sent a powerful message to those responsible on Tuesday: Stop!
The pandemic provided governors, mayors and other local leaders with extraordinary opportunities to expand their influence over the citizens in their states. Nowhere were these emergency powers more egregiously abused than in states, cities and towns governed by Democrats. By all measures, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf was one of the worst offenders.
WHYY-TV reported that two constitutional amendments passed statewide referenda that will provide the state’s General Assembly with “more power to block emergency declarations.”
The amendment to Article III, Section 9 of the Pennsylvania Constitution grants the legislature the ability to “terminate the Governor’s Covid-19 disaster emergency declaration without presenting it to the Governor for his approval.”
Prior to this amendment, measures passed by both the state House and Senate required the approval of the governor. Needless to say, all of the Republican-controlled legislature’s attempts to end or minimize Wolf’s orders ended in vetoes which required a two-thirds vote in both chambers to override. With the passage of this resolution, a simple majority vote in the state House and the Senate is all that is necessary. Veto power is no longer available to the governor.
Under the old law, the governor had the authority to issue an emergency order which would remain in effect for 90 days, at which point he or she could either renew it or end it. The new amendment stipulates that a “disaster emergency declaration will expire automatically after 21 days, regardless of the severity of the emergency, unless the General Assembly takes action to extend the disaster emergency.”
WHYY noted that a COVID-19 emergency order is currently in effect and is set to expire on Memorial Day. If Wolf chooses to renew it, a simple majority vote in the state House and Senate could end it in 21 days.
Democrats are reportedly worried that the legislature will act “to cancel COVID-19 emergency declarations without considering public health or consulting with the Governor’s office.”
State House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff and Speaker Bryan Cutler, both Republicans, sought to reassure them in a joint statement which said, “We stand ready to reasonably and responsibly manage Pennsylvania through this ongoing global pandemic, the scourge of opioid addiction, and other long-term challenges that may come to face this Commonwealth.”
State Republican lawmakers Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward and Senate President Jake Corman were more direct. In a joint statement, they wrote, “This decision by the people is not about taking power away from any one branch of government. It’s about re-establishing the balance of power between three equal branches of government as guaranteed by the constitution.”
Gov. Wolf, unsurprisingly, vehemently opposed these amendments. According to The Morning Call, the governor said in January that “Republicans were injecting partisan politics into emergency disaster response in a ‘thinly veiled power grab.’ Just last week, he warned that the provisions were a threat to a functioning society that must respond to increasingly complicated disasters.”
A thinly veiled power grab? I’m practically speechless. What stunning hypocrisy coming from a man who used the COVID-19 pandemic to trample all over his constituents’ rights by shutting down businesses, halting participation in high school sports, closing schools and mandating mask-wearing outside the home.
Anyway, the governor held a news conference on Wednesday in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He said he’d spoken to leaders of both parties in the legislature to discuss “a path forward,” the Morning Call reported.
“We’re starting that conversation. You can’t just flick a switch and make the change,” he told reporters. “But the voters have spoken, and we’re going to do what I think the voters expect us to do and make the best of it.”
WHYY reported the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency expressed its disappointment with the election results in a statement which read, “The constitutional amendments have the potential to politicize future disasters and their management. PEMA always stands ready to respond to any situation but we’re extremely disappointed that our efforts, and the efforts of our other state agencies, could be constrained by partisan politics, which has no place in emergency response efforts.”
The passage of these amendments was a victory for those with whom the principles of liberty and freedom still have meaning. In an email provided to The Western Journal, Commonwealth Foundation President and CEO Charles Mitchell reacted to the passage of these amendments with tremendous joy and relief. He called Tuesday a “momentous day in the history of Pennsylvania and the United States” and wrote that “voters have defended some of our most important founding principles, including the separation of powers between branches of government and the fundamental importance of each citizen’s liberty.”
Many governors “saw their emergency powers laws as a vehicle for them to act in contradiction to their own state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution for as long as they’d like.” Most of us would agree with that statement.
Mitchell quoted James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 51: “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others … it may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.”
“Two hundred and thirty-three years after Madison wrote that statement, voters in Pennsylvania reaffirmed its truth,” Mitchell concluded.
Elizabeth is a contract writer at The Western Journal. Her articles have appeared on many conservative websites including RedState, Newsmax, The Federalist, Bongino.com, HotAir, Instapundit, MSN and RealClearPolitics. Please visit Elizabeth’s new conservative blog: TheAmericanCrisis.org
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.
Imagine if we could have saved 81% of those who ultimately died from the virus by treating them early with a cheap, safe drug, along with other cheap therapeutic cocktails. Well, for one, more people would be alive today. But more important to the powers at be, there would have been no excuse to fear the virus and sow panic and tyranny. Also, there would have been no market for expensive therapeutics and vaccines that are much more experimental and unproven. Which is likely why the WHO is refusing to recommend ivermectin for early COVID treatment, even as its own data prove it should be championed as a cure.
On Wednesday, the WHO updated its guide on therapeutics and COVID-19. Under ivermectin, the meta-analysis shows an 81% drop in mortality among those who used ivermectin as opposed to standard care. It also shows a 64% decrease in hospitalization. Nonetheless, the WHO refuses to endorse it because it claims the confidence level is low.
Image source: WHO screenshot
“The issue with the Ivermectin is that based on initial study and the currently available data, it is not strong enough for us to advocate the use of Ivermectin for treatment of COVID or prevention of COVID,”said WHO representative to the Philippines Rabindra Abeyasinghe on Tuesday. He claimed that using it without “strong” evidence is “harmful” since it would give “false confidence” to the public.
Gee, that sure sounds a lot like telling people if they wear a mask indoors, they won’t get COVID. Tragically, when they invariably do get the virus, the global health elites have nothing to treat them with.
In total, there have been 49 studies, 26 of them randomized controlled trials, showing that ivermectin works against the virus. The pooled results show an 80% improvement when used early, 89% when used as prophylaxis, and even a 50% improvement at late stages. It is simply shocking that the global elites would continue to treat this long-used drug as experimental while treating novel vaccines that were only studied by the companies creating them as ironclad. Consider that the vaccines have not been approved by the FDA, on label or off label, there is no liability, and there is no data on long-term safety issues.
Ivermectin, on the other hand, has been dispensed billions of times for decades and has proven itself as one of the safest drugs around. William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura were awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology in 2015 for discovering the drug as a cure to river blindness. Here is an excerpt from the press release of the Nobel Assembly:
“Today the Avermectin-derivative Ivermectin is used in all parts of the world that are plagued by parasitic diseases. Ivermectin is highly effective against a range of parasites, has limited side effects and is freely available across the globe. The importance of Ivermectin for improving the health and wellbeing of millions of individuals with River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis, primarily in the poorest regions of the world, is immeasurable. Treatment is so successful that these diseases are on the verge of eradication, which would be a major feat in the medical history of humankind.”
That sure sounds like a dangerous drug, doesn’t it?
But suddenly when it comes to eradicating COVID and pre-empting lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, it’s a problem! It’s the worst thing known to man.
Consider the fact that even some unicorn idea of mask efficacy can only conceivably reduce transmission by a small amount, yet they treat masks as mandatory to the point that they enforce them against 2-year-olds, rape victims, and people with disabilities. Imagine if they poured that much vigor into promotion of ivermectin.
And as any doctor who has actually studied the early stages of the virus will tell you, this is not just about ivermectin or any single drug. It’s about a cocktail of drugs. Aside from ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, imagine if everyone with a positive test were given a cocktail with vitamins, steroids, and other drugs that have proven to work well over the past year, rather than waiting until someone has already experienced the inflammatory response, when it’s much harder to treat.
In other words, how come the people who claim to care the most about COVID don’t really care about saving people from it?
For example, if the global elites were really about saving lives, why wouldn’t they have made vitamin D the new mask? The studies on the correlation between high vitamin D levels and positive outcomes with COVID have been impervious. The Karolinska Institute just published a comprehensive synthesis in the journal Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology on how vitamin D offers a great degree of protection against all respiratory viruses. Based on an analysis of three randomized and placebo-controlled studies involving 49,000 people, they found that a daily dose of vitamin D offers extra protection against respiratory diseases. They observed this to be particularly important for people with low vitamin D levels, such as those with dark skin, overweight people, and the elderly.
Why has this information not gotten out to Americans? Why didn’t vitamin D become the new toilet paper? Last week, Dr. Ryan Cole, a board-certified pathologist in Idaho who runs the largest independent laboratory in Idaho, where he’s overseen 100,000 COVID tests, explained on my podcast exactly how vitamin D works against the inflammatory response to this virus. He showed how vitamin D is the master key of the immune system and prevents any dysregulation of the immune response that leads to the cytokine storm, which is responsible for most COVID deaths.
There are other cheap therapeutics that have been proven effective by respected research, such as low-dose aspirin. A recent study from George Washington University published in the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia showed that those given aspirin immediately in the hospital were 44% less likely to go on a ventilator, 43% less likely to need to go to the intensive care unit, and 47% less likely to die in the hospital. Imagine if people took it daily from the moment they feel symptoms or test positive.
Again, why are people who test positive, especially the elderly, still being denied information and prescriptions for cheap, life-saving cocktails early in the viral replication process? Last night, I got a panicked email from a listener whose 74-year-old mother with health conditions was vaccinated four weeks ago, but just came down with a fever and tested positive. Her doctor won’t prescribe her ivermectin. This is the tragedy of the vaccine being treated as proven and proven therapeutics being treated as experimental and even dangerous. A full year into this virus, our medical establishment have turned our civilization upside down and inside out under the guise of saving lives, but they have censored the one thing that will actually keep people out of the hospital. The question is why.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson speaks at a news conference about election security and later-than-typical results being expected in the state’s presidential primary next week on Thursday, March 5, 2020, at the Romney Building in Lansing, Mich. Benson said clerks will face challenges because it is the first major … David Eggert/AP Photo
A Michigan judge ruled last week Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) broke state law when she unilaterally issued rules related to absentee balloting, legitimizing a key claim made by the Trump campaign in its legal challenges to the 2020 election.
Benson issued several unilateral orders during the 2020 election including sending absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. She also issued “guidance” on how to evaluate absentee ballots, a move Michigan Court of Claims Chief Judge Christopher Murray held violated the state’s Administrative Procedures Act.
In the guidance, Benson said “slight similarities” in signatures on absentee ballots should lead a counter to decide “in favor of finding that the voter’s signature was valid.”
Murray ruled Benson violated the law “because the guidance issued by the Secretary of State on October 6, 2020, with respect to signature matching standards was issued in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).”
“I’m glad the court sees Secretary of State Benson’s attempts at lawmaking for what they are — clear violations of her authority,” Michigan state Rep. Matt Hall (R) said in a statement.
“If she wants to make changes like these, she needs to work with the Legislature or properly promulgate them through the laws we have on the books — in this case the Administrative Procedures Act,” he continued.
Murray’s ruling came after Allegan County Clerk Bob Genetski sued Benson and state Director of Elections Jonathan Brater over Benson’s order which Hall described as a “mandatory directive requiring local election officials to apply a presumption of validity to all signatures on absent voter ballots.”
According to the suit, Genetski argued “the presumption contained in the guidance issued by defendant Benson will allow invalid votes to be counted,” but Genetski did not allege “that this guidance caused him to accept a signature that he believed was invalid.”
The court’s opinion concluded:
…nowhere in this state’s election law has the Legislature indicated that signatures are to be presumed valid, nor did the Legislature require that signatures are to be accepted so long as there are any redeeming qualities in the application or return envelope as compared with the signature on file. Policy determinations like the one at issue — which places the thumb on the scale in favor of a signature’s validity — should be made pursuant to properly promulgated rules under the APA or by the Legislature.
Like other progressive secretaries of state, Benson put an aggressive emphasis on voting by absentee ballot in the name of safety amid the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. Over 3.1 million Michigan voters cast an absentee ballot out of a possible 7.7 million voters, WWMT News reported.
In May 2020, Benson used $4.5 million in funds from the CARES Act — the original coronavirus stimulus — to send absentee ballot applications to all voters, according to Breitbart News.
“By mailing applications, we have ensured that no Michigander has to choose between their health and their right to vote,”Benson said according to NBC 25.
“Voting by mail is easy, convenient, safe, and secure, and every voter in Michigan has the right to do it,” she continued.
Hall noted, “The Legislature is an equal branch of government charged with crafting laws. This is not the role of the Secretary of State, and there is a clear process that must be respected.”
Signature validation rules created without the approval of a legislature was one of the issues the Trump campaign and Republicans claimed was done illegally in the 2020 election. Trump’s campaign and Republicans argued in cases nationwide that Article II of the Constitution requires state legislatures to make the rules governing presidential elections, and state election officials and courts lack the authority to change those rules.
Murray’s ruling undercuts the Democrat narrative that Republican legal challenges to 2020 election procedures were without merit and had therefore all been rejected by the courts. The original suit was filed October 6, 2020 — prior to the presidential election — but was not decided until March 9, 2021.
The case is Genetski v. Benson, No. 20-216-MM in the Court of Claims for the State of Michigan.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kyle Olson is a reporter for Breitbart News. He is also host of “The Kyle Olson Show,” syndicated on Michigan radio stations on Saturdays — download full podcast episodes. Follow him on Parler.
Andrew Cuomo’s COVID Reign Has Been Devastating, And It’s Time For A Reckoning
We need a full, thorough, and independent investigation with subpoenas to Department of Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, the governor’s staff, and the governor himself.
A few weeks ago, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, without a hint of self-awareness, said, “Incompetent government kills people. More people died than needed to die in COVID.” Sadly, I couldn’t agree more.
While many in corporate media glorified Cuomo’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, helping create a cult of personality for him among Democrats across the country, an examination of his decision-making reveals that he failed New Yorkers on many fronts.
Cuomo was given near-unilateral emergency powers to tackle the pandemic, with the state legislature forfeiting all decision-making and responsibility to the governor and his team. Thus, Cuomo’s decisions and the repercussions of his actions fall squarely on his shoulders. First, and most jarring, is the revelation that the Cuomo administration’s decided to cover up the true cost of their Department of Health order on March 25 that sent COVID-positive patients back into nursing homes. That fateful order was subsequently deleted from the state’s Department of Health website in the beginning of the cover-up by the Cuomo administration.
Following that order, tens of thousands of nursing home residents lost their lives and the Cuomo administration moved into overdrive on blocking transparency efforts, shutting down inquiries at every turn, and even releasing a phony report absolving them of any responsibility. Two weeks ago, we learned in a report by New York Attorney General Tish James, a Democrat, that Cuomo’s administration hid the true cost to lives of this non-scientific order, under-counting nursing home deaths by almost 50 percent. Just this weekend, we learned the Cuomo administration intentionally hid and withheld information from federal authorities.
We need a full, thorough, and independent investigation with subpoenas to Department of Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, the governor’s staff, and the governor himself.
It also speaks volumes that for months on end, the governor stonewalled transparency efforts by families that lost loved ones while mocking their efforts. His cruelty in this regard was on full display in January when he said “Who cares?” when asked about the death toll.
We care, governor. Those families deserve answers and justice.
Second, Cuomo’s administration forced out many of the public health experts who should have been developing New York’s vaccine plan, deciding instead to recruit expensive consulting firms. This led to an incredibly slow, ineffectual, and confusing rollout of the vaccine. My legislative office is still receiving daily calls from seniors older than 80 who simply cannot get an appointment no matter how hard they look.
While media outlets continue to sing Cuomo’s praises, the reality on the ground is that his top-down, Soviet-esque management style has hampered the efficacy and speed of the vaccine rollout, tying local health departments in knots. Every county health department in New York already has a mass vaccination plan, yet the governor refused for weeks to let them use those plans, instead of forcing them into the system created by his high-priced and high-brow consulting firms, all at taxpayers’ expense.
Third, Cuomo’s extensive lockdowns and subsequent non-scientific decisions to limit capacity in houses of worship shut down indoor dining, and restrict in-person learning (even temporarily) have hurt millions more. Setting unconstitutional caps on houses of worship was rejected by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision, a case that shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place. Many houses of worship, spanning all types of faiths, were already setting limits on themselves to ensure the health and safety of their worshippers. Recommending that they be shut down or capped was ludicrous, and an affront to the basic right to freedom of religion in our nation.
Another group whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by Cuomo’s insatiable desire for control is restaurant owners and restaurant workers. Shutting down indoor dining in New York City made zero sense at the time, with people being infected at less than 1.5 percent (lower than the state positivity rate) when dining indoors. Now, Cuomo has reopened dining when the infection rate has climbed significantly.
These decisions are not being made based on science, but what the governor “feels” is the right move. That is a recipe for disaster that cannot be allowed to continue. Cuomo’s actions are driven by his need for control, his ego, and his ability to legislate freely, as Democrats in the state legislature have completely abdicated all their duties as a co-equal branch of government.
Finally, it’s clear that New York students are rapidly falling behind other students around the globe. The lack of in-person interaction and learning is having devastating impacts on our children’s academic and social futures, as they are not learning the important lessons we all learned in grade school. To the governor’s credit, he didn’t outright ban in-person learning, but he certainly hasn’t been a champion for it either. Hybrid-learning programs are still leaving our kids behind, and his silence on this subject is deafening. I’d hazard a guess he’s spent more time bashing former President Trump at his press conferences than he has talked about the needs of our students.
In short, the governor’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been nothing short of disastrous for the millions of New Yorkers who call the Empire State home. While CNN, MSNBC, and other major news outlets remain busy pumping up Cuomo’s ego and image to the American public, Americans need to hear that his decisions cost tens of thousands of New Yorkers their lives, hundreds of thousands of students their educational advancement, and millions of New Yorkers their livelihoods.
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.
Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton claimed Tuesday that President Joe Biden is “keeping America closed” with reported travel restrictions while opening the southern border with a non-deportation order.
“It is crazy. The Biden administration has put in placed a moratorium on all deportations,” Cotton told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”
“They further are proposing that they will ignore serious crimes like assault or DUI when it comes to deportations,” Cotton said, while noting reports like the one from Jackson County, Texas sheriff A.J. Louderback, who suggested to Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that illegal aliens are being allowed into the U.S. without a coronavirus test.
Under President Joe Biden’s non-deportation rules, immigrants can’t be deported if they get a DUI, commit fraud, tax crimes or assault, Fox News reported, noting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be stood down. In January, a federal judge in Texas ruled against the Biden administration’s plan to have a 100-day moratorium on most deportations.
Cotton said Biden is keeping America closed with reported travel restrictions that include requiring anyone flying domestically to successfully pass a coronavirus test first.
“Just think about that. Illegal aliens can come into our country without vaccination, without even a negative test but we may not be able to fly in our own country without a negative test.”
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) told Politifact that agents perform inspections for symptoms of COVID-19 on immigrants who cross the border and refer them to local hospitals if they are at risk. CBP also told Politifact that procedures on the coronavirus have been in place since the beginning of the pandemic. Procedures included “screening individuals for COVID-19 symptoms when they are initially processed at a facility, and continued monitoring for potential COVID-19 symptoms for as long as they remain in CBP custody,” according to a 2020 inspector general report.
“Joe Biden is keeping America closed but is keeping our borders open,” Cotton added.
Biden’s eight-year path to citizenship plan would allow all illegal immigrants living in the U.S. as of Jan. 1, 2021 to achieve temporary legal status in five years and to apply for citizenship after an additional three years.
Honduran migrants walk towards the Honduras-Guatemala border as part of their journey to the U.S. on Jan. 15, 2021 in Nueva Arcadia, Honduras. (Photo by Milo Espinoza/Getty Images)
Individuals would be expected to pay taxes and be subject to background checks during this process.
The Biden administration is not encouraging migrants to cross the southern border and has attempted to reduce expectations of mass asylum.
A top United States official said recently that the “most credible” theory for how the coronavirus pandemic started is that the pathogen escaped from a Chinese laboratory. U.S. deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger told British parliamentarians last week that even Chinese leaders have started to acknowledge that the virus did not originate in the Wuhan wet market as initially reported. Instead, he said, it likely escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology located just 11 miles away.
“There is a growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus,” Pottinger said during a Zoom conference about China, according to the Daily Mail. “Even establishment figures in Beijing have openly dismissed the wet market story.”
Whether the virus escaped by “leak or accident,” he could not confirm.
The theory has been widely disseminated since earlier this year, when citizen investigators used publicly available information to make the case.
Reporters noticed all-too-coincidental job openings posted by the lab in November and December 2019 — right as mysterious pneumonia-like cases were popping up in Wuhan — which requested scientists to come “research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats” and indicated that help was needed to handle a dangerous leak.
That is not to mention the fact that the lab was the first in all of China to achieve BSL-4 clearance, or the level of bioresearch safety required to study the world’s most dangerous pathogens. Though some thought that clearance was granted prematurely.
Shortly after the discovery of the job postings, a pair of leaked State Department cables from 2018 found that U.S. officials visiting the lab were so concerned about its “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators” in concert with its study of “SARS-like coronaviruses in bats” that they felt the need to notify the U.S. government.
According to the Daily Mail, Pottinger’s confidence in the theory comes as a result of conversations the U.S. has had with a whistleblower from the Wuhan lab.
“I was told the US have an ex-scientist from the laboratory in America at the moment,” said former Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, who attended the meeting. “That was what I heard a few weeks ago.”
“I was led to believe this is how they have been able to stiffen up their position on how this outbreak originated,” he added.
Pottinger’s comments come as a team of experts from the World Health Organization prepare to travel to Wuhan to investigate the pandemic’s origins, though some critics fear the investigation won’t reveal anything given the organization’s coziness with China.
MN State Rep. Mary Franson (L) and MN State Sen. Scott Jensen (R) join Mark Steyn
Two Minnesota legislators said Tuesday that coronavirus deaths in the state are being deliberately inflated and a national audit is required to determine how many people are actually dying from another cause.
“I enlisted some people that are really good at understanding data … to go through those death files and what I found was shocking because I was just hoping that it was a myth, but indeed, Minnesota is classifying some deaths as COVID when clearly, they should not be,” Republican Minnesota State Rep. Mary Franson told Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“We should not have people dying in motor vehicle collisions, suicides, drownings, et cetera and being classified as a COVID death,” said Franson, adding that the presumed death toll is one of the chief reasons “our state is locked down. Our kids are now going to have to wear masks while playing basketball and hockey.”(RELATED: US Could Reach ‘Herd Immunity’ By Spring, Fauci Says)
She noted that people in the state are only allowed to eat at restaurants “but it’s got to be outside. Today in Minnesota, we’ve got a blizzard. People are losing their livelihoods, we have the greatest transfer of wealth taking place right now — and we need an audit.”
Republican Minnesota State Sen. Scott Jensen suggested health care dollars are affecting the official COVID-19 death rate.
“When the Department of Health and the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] decided to change the rules that had been in place for 17 years by encouraging the diagnosis of COVID-19 in situations that we never would have otherwise, they were abandoning their long-held commitment to precisely identifying the inciting or the initiating event that would lead to a sequence of events that would lead to a person’s demise,” Jensen said.
“What we saw subsequently was … enhanced payments to hospitals for Medicare patients and then we saw … the old adage — follow the money — and we saw if hospitals could somehow hit 161 admissions with COVID-19, then they would be eligible for a $77,000 per admission payment through the CARES Act,” he said.
“I don’t think there’s any questions that reverse incentives have been created.”
White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx speaks during a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing at the U.S. Department of Education July 8, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
At that time, two-thirds of Americans also expressed doubt over the official coronavirus numbers. A poll found that 40% of Republicans believed the coronavirus death toll was inflated, while just 7% of Democrats believed the number of deaths were being over-counted.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci warned in November that the U.S. would experience a COVID-19 surge within a surge during the Thanksgiving holiday.
So much for peace on earth and goodwill to men. America’s legacy media elites used the Sunday before Christmas for extra Christian-bashing, with white evangelicals the preferred targets.
Writing in The New Yorker, Michael Luo complained that “white evangelical Protestants, once again, overwhelmingly supported President Trump in the election,” and that “churches, particularly conservative ones, fought lockdown orders and rebuffed public-health warnings.”
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof interviewed leftist pastor Jim Wallis, with the conversation quickly turning to accusations that “White evangelicalism has destroyed the ‘evangel.’” At The Dispatch, Time columnist David French concluded that much of the scorn white evangelical Christians receive is deserved. He says the world often “rejects Christians because Christians are cruel.”
Yeah, well, merry Christmas to you too.
To be sure, Christians should humbly accept correction if it is deserved, even when the word of reproof is delivered by pagans. But the above writers’ broad indictments against American evangelicals do not withstand scrutiny. Although each criticism has particular errors, they are united by two shared mistakes. The first is a failure to account for differences of denomination and devotion. Lumping Pentecostals, Presbyterians, and prosperity-gospel preachers together is sloppy, as is neglecting to distinguish between those who are committed churchgoers and those who are only nominally evangelical.
It might be said that these varieties of white evangelicals have in common an overwhelming political support for Donald Trump, but this retort only highlights the second error shared by these writers: the assumption that voting for Trump was necessarily immoral.
It is easy to pick out Trumpian words and deeds that are not compatible with the gospel. It is also easy to do the same with his Democratic opponents and their policies. Asserting that voting for Trump is a moral stain on evangelicals, without weighing the alternatives, presumes what is in question. This error is shared by each writer (and Kristof’s interview subject), but each finds some unique ways to express it.
Luo, for instance, unfavorably compares the response of today’s Christians to the pandemic with Christians’ response to past plagues. But although he is correct that reckless churches should be rebuked, he makes no effort to distinguish between the reckless and those cautiously meeting in person, or to value preserving the gathering of believers. Nor does he quantify how many churches are foregoing precautions, or show how many of these congregations fall under the “white evangelical” category.
He suggests that, to eliminate risk, Christians should forgo all in-person meeting, and he dismisses the religious liberty claims that have been raised against capricious government restrictions on churches. But if the casinos, strip clubs, and abortion clinics are getting better treatment than churches, then anti-Christian discrimination has replaced public health policy.
Furthermore, even from a secular public health perspective, eliminating church services would do more harm than good, as churchgoing seems to have been essential to helping many Americans make it through the difficulties of this year. We are physical beings, not disembodied minds who can live in the cloud indefinitely.
Meanwhile, Kristof and his interview subject Wallis presume that technocratic welfare-statism is the obvious way to care for the poor and oppressed, so they dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as bad Christians. This complacent assumption of moral and political rectitude precludes them from understanding those they condemn.
Thus, although Kristof recently wrote a column of questions about Christians and abortion, he seems to have ignored the manyresponsesexplaining its paramount importance as a political issue for conservative Christians. His indifference is particularly notable at Christmas, because Luke’s advent narrative emphasizes the humanity of both the unborn John the Baptist and of Jesus. And if the unborn are human, then Christians cannot support the party of abortion on demand.
Kristof and Wallis’s reflexive acceptance of the left’s shibboleths of the moment also leads to ridiculous anachronisms such as declaring Jesus a “person of color.” This conceptual colonization of first-century Israel by modern American racial concepts is odious and misleading—“person of color”makes no sense in that context.
It is, indeed, worse than the depictions of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus (are there many of those?) that Wallis complains about. Portrayals of Jesus and other biblical figures in local style and appearance have been a common, if inaccurate, artistic practice across centuries and cultures.
Race is also central to French’s condemnation of his fellow white evangelicals. In his telling, they are guilty of “some outright racism” but perhaps even more of being seduced by a “Christian nationalism” that “will always minimize America’s historic sins and the present legacy (and reality) of American racism.”French is, for instance, upset that more white evangelicals do not believe that racism is an “extremely” or “very serious” threat to “America and America’s future.”
But even if white evangelicals are wrong in their assessment of the depth and danger of America’s racial problems, this is not enough to condemn them as cruel. It is, in fact, precisely the sort of issue on which Christians may reasonably disagree.
Furthermore, the data French cites does not account for crucial factors such as whether respondents are regular churchgoers or merely culturally evangelical. In addition, French ignores education and class in his analysis, even though the study he relies on emphasizes the importance of these factors in understanding the politics of white evangelical subgroups.
French’s article, like the others, is mostly an impressionistic interpretation of white evangelicalism in America. By their reckoning, white evangelicals have become reckless plague-bearers with no regard for the poor and oppressed, and their cruelty rightly earns them the world’s opprobrium.
There may be some individuals who match this grim depiction, but as a general description of tens of millions of evangelicals, it is obviously untrue. Look around the country and evangelical churches are holding services with masks, distancing, and lots of hand sanitizer. Evangelicals, both individually and corporately, are caring for those in need in their communities and around the world, and treating people of all races with dignity and respect.
In this Christmas season, French, Kristof, and Luo should stop building evangelical strawmen to burn in effigy. Instead, they, like all of us, should contemplate and rejoice in the miracle of God become man to save His people from their sins.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nathanael Blake is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist. He has a PhD in political theory. He lives in Missouri.
In a video released on Friday, two Minnesota lawmakers called for a full audit of all death certificates marked as COVID-19 deaths.
In the video, state Rep. Mary Franson and Sen. Scott Jensen revealed their own findings after look over thousands of “death certificate data points” and found that the number of COVID deaths was being inflated by roughly 40 percent.
According to Rep. Franson, the investigation uncovered various un-COVID related deaths being counted as COVID deaths, including a freshwater drowning and a vehicle fatality, among others.
Advertisement – story continues below
Back in April, Jensen had criticized the Minnesota Department of Health for following federal guidelines outlining when doctors should characterize a death as due to COVID-19, the Star Tribune reported.
Michael Austin graduated from Iowa State University with a bachelor’s in English before joining The Western Journal. He has written for various entertainment sites and volunteered in PragerU’s influencer program.
Back in 2000, I left my job in San Francisco working for an entrepreneur named Bruce Carlisle. From scratch, Bruce had co-founded an online advertising agency named SFInteractive, eventually growing the business to 200 employees. I successfully started his analytics department, and then flew the coop. Los Angeles was calling me, and I’ve never looked back. The day I left, I made a pact with myself to never work for anyone else. I saw what Bruce had created and set out to create something of my own. Outside of a short stint working for the city of Malibu and a Christmas gig at Williams Sonoma in L.A., that’s exactly what I’ve done.
In 2003, my wife and I were expecting our first child, and we hadn’t figured out how to pay for her arrival yet. We were both freelancing reading movie scripts for film companies. It was enough for the two of us, and a lot of fun, but we didn’t have enough steady income to raise a family.
A wise acquaintance once said to me, “Every baby comes with its own basket of bread.”Interesting idea, I thought. Sometime after, almost on cue, my old roommate from New York reached out and asked if I knew anyone who could sell French tours on the internet to Americans.
After some serious convincing on my part (I’d never worked in travel before), my roommate vouched for me and we got the contract. Our business and child arrived at virtually the same time. We were off to the races.
For almost 20 years now my wife, Laura, and I have run Link Paris, a small boutique French travel company. We’ve had our ups and downs, but we survived the great recession in 2008, the aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris in 2015 and 2016, and the reality of giant competitors eventually moving into our niche.
On the upside, we’ve served more than 80,000 happy customers and in 2014 we were voted the “Best Online Tour Operator” by the French Government Tourist Office. We truly love this business and our customers.
Our No. 1 product is a day trip from Paris to visit the landing beaches in Normandy. It is a destination every American should see if he or she visits France. We are very proud to have helped so many people visit this hallowed ground.
Now, here we are, 10 months into COVID. Our revenue is down more than 99 percent. We’ve had a total of two clients since March — a father and daughter who were receiving medical treatment in Paris. They, and others like them, are among the very few Americans allowed abroad.
We’re still standing, but how much longer can we? How much longer can any disrupted small business last? We are hurting in my industry and many others.
This is a horrible virus and I fully understand and support the fight against it. The worry is that the government is implicitly saying to us, and a million other small businesses, that we’re simply collateral damage of the pandemic. “Yes, you had a decent life, but that is over now. You need to accept your limited prospects and move on. Tough break. But, you know, the virus.”
Yes, there has been some aid. The Paycheck Protection Program helped, and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan helped even more. But, after ten months of zero revenue, it isn’t enough.
To complicate matters, the Small Business Administration lowered the maximum EIDL loan amount from $500,000 to $150,000 in April — although not before people like Rep. Ilhan Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, and others got their loans approved for the full amount.
Mynett’s company made $2.2 million this year from Omar’s reelection campaign. Where exactly did he suffer an “economic injury?” I’m sure there are many examples on the other side of the aisle as well. This isn’t a partisan issue, but the point is the same: the well-connected aren’t just barely getting by — they’re thriving.
Indeed, we wouldn’t have even received the EIDL loan if it hadn’t been for a Reddit user who helped us, along with a thousand other people, resubmit our application. When I originally submitted, I’d had made an error, and the SBA was so overwhelmed at the time that amending an application was near impossible — until I found the EIDL subreddit and an anonymous user named Cue378. He (or she) knew exactly what to do and we got it fixed. When someone else started a GoFundMe page for this person as a thank you, more than $100,000 was raised.
In the end, we received a loan. We are grateful for it, but compare it to the $500 million credit facility that our main competitor (Trip Advisor) initiated, and it’s essentially nothing. That is the unintended, or intended, consequence of all of this. The big and connected are getting much stronger, while the small are having their dreams destroyed.
No small business could’ve prepared for this. What started as “15 days to slow the spread” has turned into something far different. I get it — six weeks to beat the Germans in World War I turned into four long years of trench warfare. Things change.
But Washington needs to give small businesses a genuine, real chance to survive. Big business may do the heavy lifting, but we make up 45 percent of America’s GDP. Small business is the lifeblood of this economy. Don’t let us bleed dry.
John Romano is the co-founder and operator of LinkParis.com, a small boutique French travel company.
The past nine months have seen more than a quarter-million Americans die from the coronavirus. Each and every death represents a tragedy — a life cut short, an empty place at the family table this holiday season, children mourning their parents, even parents mourning their children.
But a separate and ongoing tragedy has also struck at countless more than another quarter-million Americans: Children who have disappeared from school following last spring’s COVID-19 closures.A survey conducted by CBS’s “60 Minutes” found that among 78 of the largest school districts in the country, at least 240,000 students remained unaccounted for when school resumed, in many cases virtually, this fall. This number doesn’t, of course, include the many other children schools have lost in other districts.
Each and every one of those cases also represents a tragedy. Indeed, it’s a slow-moving crisis. Every child who doesn’t return to school to complete his or her education represents dreams unfulfilled. It means diminished career prospects, lower earnings, an increased risk of trouble with law enforcement or substance misuse, more expense to society through the criminal justice and welfare systems, and on, and on, and on.
Just as these students have fallen through the proverbial cracks, however, policymakers do not seem to be doing nearly enough to solve the problem.
Obstacles to Online Learning
In their reporting on these missing children, “60 Minutes” spoke with one of them, a high school senior in Tampa, Fla. named Kiara. Kiara said she had moved around town eight or nine times since elementary school; her stepfather lost her job when the pandemic hit, and she was currently living in a motel.
A school district administrator said Kiara had been a good student before the pandemic but started failing classes when learning went virtual. Listening to her describe her situation, it’s not hard to figure out why her performance suffered:
Not having that teacher to really talk to was kinda difficult and just me not having a laptop at the time was difficult doing it on my phone. Just such a small screen. …
[Doing virtual learning via her phone] was very difficult because my phone is really skinny. At the time, I didn’t have glasses so I’d have to, like, slide to the left and slide to the right and slide up. So it was just really iffy. …
Definitely, I definitely come outside [to escape her crowded motel room]. I’ll sit here and study. But sometimes, you know, the mosquitoes are coming, you know. It’s hard.
At times, Kiara would walk a mile to a nearby park to get some peace and quiet to complete her work — but the park didn’t have WiFi or an electrical outlet. She said she would “try to make it work as best I could,” but it doesn’t take a doctorate in education to realize why any student’s performance would suffer in that environment.
In some respects, Kiara represents one of the luckier victims of the school shutdowns. She has big dreams — she wants to become a dental hygienist, and eventually a dentist — and fought through the obstacles the COVID-19 closures put in her path. But it’s sadly understandable to see how some families and some children would just give up.
Enrollment Down, and It’s Not All Homeschooling
Across the country, public school enrollment has declined for the current academic year. Outside D.C., Montgomery County, Maryland’s public school enrollment declined by 3,300, or about 2 percent, this fall; on the other side of the Potomac River, Fairfax County, Virginia’s enrollment declined by nearly 5 percent. In Missouri, public school enrollment dropped 3.2 percent statewide, with a 31 percent drop in preschool enrollment and a nearly 10 percent decline in kindergarten enrollment.
These changes represent two distinct trends — both ends of the proverbial barbell. In Montgomery County, Fairfax County, and other wealthy enclaves, the enrollment declines come from affluent families enrolling their children in private schools to escape another year of virtual or hybrid learning in public education. At the other end of the spectrum, children like Kiara in families facing financial and other logistical difficulties dropped out of virtual learning entirely.
Open the Schools
The chaos children like Kiara continue to face with virtual learning — a national scandal if there ever was one — argues for a major expansion of school choice, so that no child faces these kinds of obstacles again. Thankfully, Ohio just enacted a major expansion of school choice, giving students an early Christmas present; other states should follow suit (in the interests of full disclosure, I have worked on a variety of projects advocating for school choice; however, no clients had input into this article).
Until every parent has access to school choice, school districts should start taking steps to reopen their classrooms to in-person instruction. There are fine and valid disagreements to be had over the necessity of business closures during the pandemic, but the idea that bars should remain open yet schools remain closed runs counter to any sense of logic, not to mention good public policy.
The future of hundreds of thousands of children lies in the hands of policymakers and school officials coming up with a plan to open their doors as soon as possible, and keep them open. Kiara and students like her deserve far better than what they have received during the past nine months — and they deserve it now.
The Supreme Court’s ruling last Wednesday against discriminatory targeting of religious groups with COVID-19 restrictions marked a significant victory in the ongoing battle to preserve religious liberty. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, hostile stakeholders in public office have assaulted the first freedom through superciliously labeling religious services “nonessential.” Christians in much of the country now find themselves in the demeaning and intolerable position of being allowed to worship only in the manner and on terms dictated by politically motivated governors.
Respecting authorities’ claims about an unknown disease made sense early in the outbreak, but now after better scientific information shows many initial fears are false. Yet politicians refuse to come clean while ignoring their own rules forbidding us from fulfilling our Christian duties. So it is time for us once again to assert that church is the most essential activity, period. Instead of valiantly fighting in the vanguard, however, many religious leaders have quickly retreated.
It is one thing for a church leader to prayerfully consider the individual needs of his church, striving to maintain unity among members in disagreements, protecting the health of the vulnerable, and offering stability amid uncertainty. It is quite another for shepherds to forsake the assembling of their flocks and enable the propaganda that congregating freely to worship God is selfish and “could kill grandma.” This unbiblical stance also overlooks the hypocrites in public office and the media who don’t even play by their own silly rules and ignore the data, for much lesser purposes than the health of our souls.
Many such religious leaders are neglecting the soul-saving mission of the church. The notion that being a good Christian requires indefinite cessation of communal worship — and for Catholics, the suspension of the sacraments — to prevent the spread of illness is a falsehood that has confused the faithful and undermined religious freedom.
Supreme Court Upholds Religious Liberty
In the case brought by the Orthodox Jewish group Agudath Israel of America and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York, against Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the Supreme Court held that “the restrictions at issue here, by effectively barring many from attending religious services, strike at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.” In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch posed a pertinent rhetorical question: “Who knew that public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience?”
Gorsuch held that “the only explanation for treating religious places differently seems to be a judgment that what happens there just isn’t as ‘essential’ as what happens in secular spaces.” He warned that “in too many places, for far too long, our first freedom has fallen on deaf ears.”
For several months now, elected officials and many church leaders around the country have flagrantly ignored religious liberty. States such as California, Oregon, and Washington have witnessed a new wave of post-election crackdowns on religious services. In San Diego County, churches are currently prohibited from holding indoor services. Meanwhile, a San Diego court just issued a temporary order exempting coronavirus restrictions from applying to a strip club, ruling that such entertainment constitutes “constitutionally protected speech.”
In Oregon, new restrictions limit faith-based gatherings to a maximum of 25 people regardless of church size but allow businesses to continue operating at a reduced percentage of their total capacity. Archbishop of Portland Alexander Sample rightly argued that allowing a measly 25 worshipers in a cathedral that can seat 1,000 isn’t data-driven and doesn’t make sense.
The Church Is Essential
I expressed concern back in May about politicians labeling religious services “nonessential” and allowing the state to determine on what terms churches can hold services. At that time, Washington bishops effectively thumbed their noses at President Trump for declaring that state governments should allow houses of worship to reopen.
The bishops instead hitched their wagon to Gov. Jay Inslee’s rogue horse. Hence six months down the road, Inslee again targeted Washington churches as part of his latest round of arbitrary fiats. Church capacity is reduced to 25 percent, and congregational and choral singing is prohibited.
Meanwhile, the very authorities who tut-tut and wag fingers clearly don’t adhere to or believe in the merits of their own nonsense rules. Sanctimonious public officeholders have lectured us about keeping business closed, taking unemployment on the chin, staying home, and wearing masks while they visit salons, attend private dinners, and jet off out of state for holidays with family. The duplicity of notorious mask shamers such as CNN’s Chris Cuomo and White House correspondents Kaitlan Collins and Jonathan Karl has similarly been on display.
The hypocrisy is not limited to the secular sphere. Pope Francis condemned peaceful lockdown protests despite the World Health Organization’s warning against using lockdowns as the primary means of controlling the virus. Francis believes that closing churches, businesses, and schools, and forcing people out of work are all “necessary for people’s protection.” He has even canceled public celebration of Christmas liturgies at the Vatican.
Yet Francis didn’t appear particularly worried about Wuhan virus transmission when, free from any semblance of social distancing and masks, he enjoyed a cozy chat about poverty and social justice with a group of handsomely paid NBA players and fellow pals of the Chinese Communist Party. Evidently, on protecting the freedom to assemble, to provide for one’s family, and even to freely worship, government-imposed restrictions are non-negotiable, but when it’s about racial and economic politics, the holy grail of neo-Marxists, lockdowns are a suggestion only.
Against this backdrop, Christians should be prepared for the usual suspects in public office and the press, facilitated by an array of religious leaders, to crack down on Christmas celebrations. We will no doubt hear more of the “we do this not out of fear but out of love” mantra. Given, however, that the survival rate is 94.6 percent for those 70 years and older and between 99.5-99.997 percent for those 69 and younger, rapid breakthroughs in therapeutics have been announced, three reportedly effective vaccines are on the way, and government authorities are flouting their own restrictions, the “love thy neighbor”lecture is becoming as tedious as it is false.
Christians Need Church to Obey God’s Commands
The Gospels tell us the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind. We cannot fulfill the second greatest commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves if that love is not solidly founded in an encounter with God. This means gathering with the faithful in sung praise and thanksgiving, as we read in Psalms and was the custom from the earliest church, as well as explicitly commanded in scripture.
The Greek word for church, “ekklesia,” comes from the Old Testament and originally referred to the assembly of the people of Israel. When St. Paul first used the term, he intended it as the new community of believers in Christ. This “ekklesia” is not a human association borne of common interests and beliefs but a summoning by God himself.
For Catholics, the encounter with God is achieved even more profoundly through the sacrament of the Eucharist. Jesus is literally and wholly present — body and blood, soul and divinity — under the appearances of consecrated bread and wine. Whatever way you look at it, religious services are essential, and church leaders should say so.
Religious leaders must get their priorities straight. No doubt, pastors are genuinely concerned for the health of the most vulnerable in their communities and trying to accommodate the confusion and fears of their congregants. Some must feel their hands are tied by unsupportive leadership. Still others, I suspect, find themselves effectively cornered by congregants whose political indoctrination runs deeper than their catechesis.
Nevertheless, the role of preachers is to win souls for Christ, not to protect us or themselves from physical infirmity. St. Paul urges a return to God through Christ and cautions against domination by earthly pleasures and preoccupations. In other words, if, as St. Ambrose of Milan taught, we have a wound to heal, Christ is the doctor; if we are parched by fever, he is the spring; if we fear death, he is life; and if we are in darkness, he is light.
After a dismal year, and in sober anticipation of Joe Biden’s threatened “dark winter,” it is more important than ever for Christians to unite in praise of the Light that shines in the darkness and which the darkness has never put out. We should demand that our religious leaders mark the Nativity with fitting pomp and ceremony and refuse to support churches whose pastors spread or cower behind the lie that the celebration of Christmas is nonessential.
ABOUT TYHE AUTHOR:
Carina Benton is a native Australian living in Washington state. She is a practicing Catholic and has taught for many years in Catholic and Christian schools. She is a mother of two young children.
COVID-19 cases in the United States are growing, but the media is selectively covering the states with the highest numbers.
On Tuesday, the United States reported there were at least 2,216 new COVID-19 deaths and approximately 178,200 new cases. Some states, despite strict coronavirus mandates and guidelines meant to prevent spread, are suffering from the most cases and deaths. Instead, however, big news seems to be focused on continuing to shame GOP politicians for refusing to completely shut down their states again.
Months after outlets such as CNN, NPR, the Washington Post, and others continually targeted Florida for increasing coronavirus cases, the corporate media ignored Illinois, which recorded 15,415 cases in just one day. That’s more than Florida ever reported in a single day, yet Florida is singled out for negative news attention.
“This is despite Illinois’ population being 40% lower,” Youyang Gu, creator of a COVID-19 projection website reported.
While Illinois continues to see climbing cases and deaths, outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, and CNN are choosing to hyper-focus on states with Republican leaders such as Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who have chosen different COVID-19 mitigation techniques.
While Illinois enacted mask mandates, closed restaurants, and discouraged people from holiday travel and gatherings, Gu notes that the state is still experiencing an exceptional amount of cases and deaths per capita compared to states with much higher populations such as Florida, California, and Texas.
“We hear a lot of the talk about how the deaths in Florida were ‘preventable’. What about the ones in Illinois?” Gu questioned.
“I don’t want to spark a political debate here. I just hope that more people can recognize that the news we consume online can be inherently biased. They often serve to fuel division (and clicks),” he wrote.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.
My parents and in-laws haven’t seen their grandkids in nearly a year. Because we live states apart, the most time we spend together is during the holidays and a week in the summer. Due to the lockdown this year, the grandparents have only been able to see our kids during video calls.
It could be worse; some dear friends of ours buried a parent during the lockdown with no guests or funeral, and the grandchildren had to stay away. Family bonds do more than just unite people with the same origin or name, however. Those bonds hold us up and together during times of struggle and grief.
These painful life events can shape our perspectives for the remainder of our time on Earth. I learned a lot about dealing with grief when I attended family funerals growing up. When my grandmother passed away years ago, my cousins and I stood solemnly together as we watched our aunts and uncles say their final graveside goodbyes.
When our uncles walked my grandpa to her casket, we witnessed this quiet, strong man cry for the first time in our lives. I would not have been able to watch it without the rest of my family there. He didn’t just cry; his sobs shook his thin, 6’3” frame and threw him off balance. He leaned on the casket to help support his weight, and we gave him a moment before swarming him for comfort.
The sight was a shock that swept us into a new reality: We, the grandkids, wouldn’t be “the grandkids” in our family’s hierarchy much longer. Each generation took one step up that imaginary staircase with the death of our grandparents. Our kids assumed the step below us where we once stood. The presence of family makes that meeting with mortality easier to process.
I had just given birth to my second child when my grandfather passed away, living long enough to learn that his second great-grandson was on this Earth, miles away from him, but healthy. I didn’t get to attend his funeral because it was too soon after childbirth, the day I brought my baby home.
That night, I rocked my son to sleep in the solitude and darkness of his nursery and cried until there was nothing left in my soul to expend. That heavy sort of grief is meant to be borne by more than one. It took a long while to get past that.
Lockdowns Have Caused Immense Harm
That’s the closest experience I have to compare when I read about grief during lockdowns. This is why my heart truly breaks over stories from others who were forced by lockdowns and restrictions to endure this with their loved ones.
The emotional dam of a non-political, grief-stricken friend burst forth on Facebook after she read about politicians defending protest gatherings while she and her sister had to bury their father alone, just themselves, on a cold, clear March day earlier this year. The pain seems endless, and the lockdowns have predictably caused immense unintended consequences:
Depression rates for every age demographic have tripled.
Sixty percent of small businesses that closed during the last lockdown will not reopen, and others barely hanging on are giving up.
Even though schools aren’t superspreaders and medical professionals have been telling districts to reopen, many haven’t. New York City just closed its schools again.
Deaths from non-coronavirus health issues have climbed since the start of the last lockdown as people don’t seek medical care for treatable illnesses. The lockdown could kill more than the virus.
‘Experts’ Have Given Us Every Reason Not to Trust Them
Later, Fauci admitted he lied when he told people masks weren’t essential. Politicians and “experts” shouldn’t be surprised when their actions like these make reasonable people lose faith in their leadership and unwilling to follow their rules.
Many of us comforted ourselves through the dark, lonely spring and desolate summer with visions of family gatherings over the holidays. Now we’re told to skip those too or just have a “virtual Thanksgiving.” If you can’t do that, limit guests, make everyone wear masks, stay away from each other, and have everyone bring their own food — unless your name rhymes with Schmavin Twosome, that is:
California Medical Association officials were among the guests seated next to Gov. Gavin Newsom at a top California political operative’s opulent birthday dinner at the French Laundry restaurant this month.
CEO Dustin Corcoran and top CMA lobbyist Janus Norman both joined the dinner at the French Laundry, an elite Napa fine dining restaurant, to celebrate the 50th birthday of lobbyist and longtime Newsom adviser Jason Kinney, a representative of the powerful interest group confirmed Wednesday morning.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker dodged a reporter’s question about his family’s Thanksgiving plans — they traveled to their second home in Florida — and it made the rounds on social media. Pritzker had to return to do damage control: “I was taken aback by yesterday’s question about my family’s holiday plans, in part because my wife and I were in the process of making the very hard decision that we may need to celebrate Thanksgiving apart from one another for the first time ever, and it was weighing heavily on my mind.”
He was “taken aback” that reporters, during a press conference about COVID-19 Thanksgiving plans, asked him if he was going to follow his own lockdown orders — especially knowing that Pritzker’s wife violated the last lockdown by fleeing to their multimillion-dollar equestrian estate in Florida?
We would be fined for this, but these Democratic governors are exempt from coronavirus and lockdown concerns, apparently. It’s not just governors, however. Don’t forget House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the shuttered salon.
Before her was Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her lockdown salon trip. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser locked down residents while she attended Biden rallies. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo refused to wear a mask and self-quarantine.
California lawmakers lived it up in Maui during lockdown on the excuse of a “conference” (We all have to Zoom, why can’t they?). New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio went to the gym while you were locked down at home. The Daily Caller compiled a list of hypocritical lawmakers violating lockdown, and you can find an additional great thread here.
Americans Are Sick of the Double Standard
We have all sacrificed, some more than others, and we are tired of the double standard. We are sick of bureaucrats leading us around, treating us like children instead of the employers whose tax dollars form their paychecks.
Americans are weary of speculation presented as science. We are tired of being told that our businesses are nonessential, that worker lives are nonessential, and that our kids and their wellbeing are nonessential. We are sick of hearing that any deviation from the mandates passed down to us by politicians who refuse to follow the rules means sentencing our neighbors to death.
I rejected that outright:
I wrote about this accusation in April, noting that the intent of our elitist overlords is murky. Who are they to decide which workers are essential? By the politicians’ own rhetoric, those “essential” workers are actually “expendable,” since they are most susceptible to the same virus the electeds use to scare the rest of us into our homes.
For those maligning business owners as murderous monsters because they simply want to pay their bills consider this — certain businesses were declared essential: Food delivery is essential but cancer treatment isn’t. So you’re fine with risking the lives of delivery drivers to avoid picking up your pizza yourself? Is it acceptable to risk the lives of restaurant staff because you don’t want to make your own food? Is it acceptable to risk the lives and health stability of cancer patients as well as the livelihood of medical staff being furloughed around the country to demonstrate a devotion to saving lives? If you want to discuss murkiness of intent, this is it. By declaring that some people are essential, haven’t you already decided that some lives are expendable?
This is an awful virus. Unlike a military battle, this is a foe that will never be vanquished. We can vaccinate against it and build up our immunities, but just as with chickenpox, polio, and other illnesses before this virus, there is no cure, only prevention and acclimation. Overreaction is a lesser enemy, and moderation is an ally. There is a difference between reasonable concern and “Chicken Little” hysteria.
The hysteria is exhausting. We are tired of being told that contracting the virus means instant death when it emphatically does not — it has a 99.98 percent survivability rate. We are tired of being told that because some can’t venture out, no one should. Nothing in life is perfectly safe, including freedom. But freedom is a lot safer than the statist systems so many leftists champion.
It’s Time to Declare Our Freedom
As a daughter who doesn’t have much of her family left, whose kids are growing up faster than she can even capture with her phone camera, I am not going to miss out on life. I am not going to let my parents age out of this world while lying to my own heart that it’s OK if I missed an entire year or more with them. I am not going to tell my children that it’s alright if they don’t see their family anymore because we have to hide in our homes.
More than anything else, I am sick of being told I don’t have the right of risk when risk is part of freedom. I will not be lectured by people who say that eating in a restaurant with health protocols is riskier than shutting down the largest economy in the world. I won’t be bullied by bureaucrats who say it’s risker to reopen schools than to force an entire generation into lockdown for nearly a year, stunting them in every way but loneliness. I will not be shamed by lawmakers who don’t follow their own rules. I won’t be preached at by pundits too purposefully obtuse to see nuance over their partisanship.
I am going to host my parents for Thanksgiving, and I hope to host my in-laws for Christmas. I will continue living as a free and responsible American with liberties for which my family has taken bullets and mine shards, until the day comes that our government wants to stage a modernized version of 1776 by trying to end that perfectly wonderful freedom.
As Teddy Roosevelt said, “For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know.” Freedom is beautiful and scary. It’s up to each of us to maintain it.
Dana Loesch is a nationally syndicated talk radio host of “The Dana Show” with Radio America and a best-selling author.
Doctors have attributed a Croatian man’s death to the Wuhan coronavirus even though he died after falling off a ladder, according to the Journal of Forensic Pathology.
The 51-year-old man died in what appeared to be a workplace incident, falling off a 10-foot ladder while working on a home this year. The man suffered minor external injuries, as well as a subarachnoid hemorrhage, described as “bleeding within the subarachnoid space, which is the area between the brain and the tissues that cover the brain” — an often fatal condition. However, the autopsy also discovered “visceral congestion,” particularly in his lungs.”
During the autopsy, doctors found that large swaths of the man’s lungs were blocked. The finding then led scientists to conclude that he suffered from Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) — a life-threatening condition that can be caused by COVID-19.
According to the journal, the man had been complaining about a respiratory-like illness in the days leading to the fatal incident, experiencing symptoms including a headache, fever, cough, fatigue, and shortness of breath.
“He had refused the suggestion to see a doctor and had kept working until the moment he died,” the journal wrote.
A test taken postmortem showed him testing positive for the Chinese coronavirus.
“Based on all findings, the death was ruled as natural, caused by COVID-19,” the journal wrote:
Informed by this case, we would like to send a message to healthcare providers working in autopsy suites and to coroners to be vigilant, even with suspected violent deaths, SARS-CoV-2 can be hidden as the natural cause of death. The full autopsy performed on the deceased contributes greatly to the limited data available on the pathological findings in COVID-19 cases.
The case furthers mounting concerns among critics, who fear data is not giving a clear picture due to the way deaths are reported, as well as the purported failure to place an emphasis on the prevalence of comorbidities.
This issue arose again in July after Florida’s Orange County Health Officer Dr. Raul Pino revealed that one of their reported coronavirus victims died in a motorcycle accident.
Roughly 20 million people could be vaccinated against the coronavirus in December, the head of the Trump administration’s vaccine and drug accelerator said Friday. Americans can expect that about 25 to 30 million people could be vaccinated each month afterward, said Moncef Slaoui, co-lead of Operation Warp Speed, during a Rose Garden event with President Donald Trump and other top health officials.
That timeline depends on the Food and Drug Administration authorizing the emergency use of one or more vaccines — which could happen in a matter of weeks, Slaoui noted.
Pfizer announced promising data this week suggesting its vaccine is more than 90 percent effective, and has said it will apply to FDA later this month. Moderna, which is working closely with the National Institutes of Health, is preparing to announce its own efficacy data in a matter of days. An emergency-use application could soon follow, Slaoui said.
Gen. Gustave Perna, Operation Warp Speed’s chief operating officer, said that the government would begin vaccination within 24 hours after a shot secures emergency authorization.
But while manufacturers have developed coronavirus vaccines in record speed, and dozens more are still in the pipeline, Slaoui’s projections mean it will likely take months just for first-priority groups such as health care workers and the elderly to get a shot.
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are given as two doses, effectively cutting in half the government’s initial order of 100 million doses from each of the those manufacturers.
But Slaoui added that there could be more authorized vaccines in the spring, boosting chances for more people to get vaccinated. Four vaccines, including the Pfizer and Moderna shots, are now in late-stage U.S. trials, and at least one other company plans to start such a study this month.
“We may be able to immunize a larger number of Americans on an ongoing basis, per month,” Slaoui said after name-checking other promising candidates from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
The government has not yet released a comprehensive plan to distribute any coronavirus vaccines, including how it will handle logistics for shots that need to be shipped in below-freezing temperatures and outreach to skeptical communities.
Because of the real-world challenges of vaccine distribution and supply, federal health officials including CDC Director Robert Redfield project that broad access will not be a possibility until summer 2021.
Shutting down businesses and paying people for lost wages for four to six weeks could help keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and get the economy on track until a vaccine is approved and distributed, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a coronavirus advisor to President-elect Joe Biden.
Osterholm, who serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said earlier this week that the country is headed toward “Covid hell.” Cases are rising as more people grow tired of wearing masks and social distancing, suffering from so-called “pandemic fatigue,” he said Wednesday. Colder weather is also driving people indoors, where the virus can spread more easily. A nationwide lockdown would drive the number of new cases and hospitalizations down to manageable levels while the world awaits a vaccine, he told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.
“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”
In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Osterholm clarified his comments, saying “it was not a recommendation. I have never made this recommendation to Biden’s group. We’ve never talked about it.”
“My only point was if we are going to keep making restrictions state-by-state, there is no compensation for the businesses that are being impacted,”he added. “What we’re doing right now is not working.”
A Biden transition official told NBC News that a shutdown “is not in line with the president-elect’s thinking.”
Osterholm was appointed to Biden’s 12-member Covid “advisory board” on Monday. The panel of advisors is co-chaired by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale University. Other task force members include Dr. Atul Gawande, a professor of surgery and health policy at Harvard, and Dr. Rick Bright, the vaccine expert and whistleblower who resigned his post with the Trump administration last month.
A representative for Biden did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Osterholm on Wednesday referenced an August op-ed he wrote with Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari in which the two argued for more restrictive and uniform lockdowns across the nation.
“The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential,”they wrote in The New York Times. “To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”
On Wednesday, Osterholm said such a lockdown would help the country bring the virus under control, “like they did in New Zealand and Australia.” Epidemiologists have repeatedly pointed to New Zealand, Australia and parts of Asia that have brought the number of daily new cases to under 10 as an example of how to contain the virus.
“We could really watch ourselves cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year while bringing back the economy long before that,”he said Wednesday.
On the current trajectory, Osterholm said the U.S. is headed for dark days before a vaccine becomes available. He said health-care systems across the country are already overwhelmed in places such as El Paso, Texas, where local officials have already closed businesses and the federal government is sending resources to handle a surge in deaths caused by Covid-19.
Osterholm said the country needs leadership. The president-elect is up to the task of providing that leadership, Osterholm said, adding that it could also come from local and state officials or those in the medical community. He referenced the fireside chats broadcast over radio during former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s terms, through which Roosevelt addressed the country on issues ranging from the Great Depression to World War II.
“People don’t want to hear that El Paso isn’t an isolated event. El Paso, in many instances, will become the norm,” he said. “I think that the message is: How do we get through this? We need FDR moments right now. We need fireside chats. We need somebody to tell America, ‘This is what in the hell is going to happen.’”
I can’t tell you how many texts I’ve received this week from friends and acquaintances across the country asking—usually in all-caps and peppered with profanity—what is going on in Pennsylvania? As a native Philadelphian, and from my current vantage in politically coveted Bucks County, I can see why Americans are demanding answers.
Ballots can be counted up to three days after Election Day? Mailed ballots with no postmark still qualify? Unsupervised drop boxes scattered across cities are entrusted to secure tens of thousands of votes?
Sadly, it’s all true. None of these practices inspires confidence that the standard of “one person, one vote” is being upheld. Nor were these practices valid in any prior general election in Pennsylvania.
Scratching your head as to why we chose the most consequential election in our lifetimes to run an experiment? Here’s what I’ve told my friends: the experiment was a wild success—once you understand that the chaos we’re witnessing was the plan all along, carefully orchestrated by Pennsylvania Democrats, including the governor, party activists, and the state Supreme Court.Here’s how it happened.
In Pennsylvania, Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf used the COVID-19 pandemic as cover for hurrying through new voting rules that bypassed reasonable deadlines or restrictions. The result? Many voters now have deep suspicion about wide-scale voter fraud in Philadelphia.
Republicans and Democrats have long understood the problems with mass mail-in ballots. The usual stages of ballot security are lost: unlike absentee ballots, some people are claiming they received unsolicited mail-in ballots, a practice Pennsylvania does not allow. Could it be ballots are being illegally sent or is it simply that voters forgot they signed up to get them?
Worse, it’s impossible to ensure the ballot is filled out by the voter or with her approval. And when the ballot is submitted, the chain of custody observing that ballot is broken. It’s a recipe for contested election results.
The seeds of public distrust were sowed in June, when Wolf decreed by executive order that mail-in ballots in the primary election could trickle in from certain counties for an extra week. The state Democratic Party followed up in July by suing to similarly extend the general election deadline for mail-in ballots. Their suit also sought to allow unprecedented “drop boxes” to collect mail-ins and to limit the number of election observers.
In addition, the court removed the Green Party presidential candidate’s name from the state ballot over a technicality, a move that may have shifted Green Party votes to Joe Biden’s camp. In their decision, the justices acknowledged that the new deadline violated state law but claimed that “in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic” such laws could be dismissed.
It got worse. Sensing an opportunity, the Wolf administration pronounced that county officials “are prohibited from rejecting absentee or mail-in ballots based on signature comparison.”On Oct. 23, not long before Election Day, the court approved this last nail in the coffin of election integrity.
On Thursday, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey expressed concern about these unprecedented rule changes that fueled this week’s chaos, making clear that free and fair elections aren’t a partisan issue. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court will have to rule.
But on Oct. 28, the Supreme Court postponed any decision with a 4-4 ruling—excluding newly appointed justice Amy Coney Barrett—that returned the case to its court of origin. At the time, Justice Samuel Alito noted that it is likely “that the state Supreme Court decision violates the Federal Constitution,” opening a possibility that the justices will review the case post-election, with the potential outcome of eliminating thousands of illegal ballots.
On Friday, GOP state House Speaker Bryan Cutler, who noted that the election “confusion is a direct result of the court decisions,” called for a full audit before any certification of the results. Cutler also cited Pennsylvania’s 100,000 provisional ballots—cast when a voter’s eligibility is in question—that further indicated problems with the mail-in system.
Elections decided by the courts is a nightmare scenario for either political party. But Wolf refused to reform the state’s election procedures in concert with the legislature. In October, GOP lawmakers proposed compromise legislation, House Bill 2626, that included several, but not all, of the governor’s proposed changes to Pennsylvania voting laws. Wolf threatened to veto their bill in an all-or-nothing negotiation standoff.
To prevent a future election debacle in Pennsylvania, we need election integrity reform through the normal legislative process. Only legal votes should be counted, and controls should be put in place—like polling place verification and absentee ballot chain-of-custody at every stage.
But Democrats have resisted these reforms for years, creating the present chaos. The U.S. Supreme Court must respond accordingly and assure Pennsylvanians that their election was fair—regardless of the presidential outcome.
Jennifer Stefano is chief innovation officer and vice president at the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free market think tank.
Why is the press and officialdom suddenly shrieking about “herd immunity”? On Oct. 12, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said pursuing herd immunity is “unethical.” Within hours, most of the media broadcast the same message. It’s as though someone sent out a list of talking points.
“Sweden’s experiment with herd immunity is unethical and undemocratic,” Australia’s ABC intoned, “and reveals an underlying political pathology.” According to Fortune, herd immunity against SARS-CoV2 is a “myth.”
Time called Sweden’s coronavirus response a “disaster.” “From early on,” the magazine claimed, “the Swedish government seemed to treat it as a foregone conclusion that many people would die.” The Washington Post is claiming that herd immunity is now the White House’s “strategy,” supposedly on advice from White House advisor Scott Atlas.
“Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus,” claimed the head of WHO, “not by exposing them to it.” According to him, “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic.”
This is misleading. First, herd immunity is all about exposure. A study of nearly 6,000 individuals out Oc. 13 finds that, outside one outlier, the COVID-positive patients sampled retained their immunity to the disease for at least five to seven months, the duration of the study. After enough people get and recover from an infection, the virus loses most of its routes for new infections. Indeed, the main purpose of the annual flu vaccine is to speed up herd immunity by reducing the number of susceptible people. Just as huddling inside in the winter helps spread flu, and thereby pneumonia, so herd immunity helps bring down death rates in the summer.
Second, herd immunity isn’t so much a strategy as a fact of life when dealing with infectious agents like the coronavirus. Even the Time article that lambasted Sweden admits that it’s not quite fair to say the Nordic country pursued a herd immunity “strategy.” Rather, it had an anti-lockdown policy. Still, any strategy that ignores herd immunity is foolish, since that is precisely how infection rates fall in pandemics.
So why the renewed furor over herd immunity? We suspect it’s really aimed at the thousands of scientists and medical practitioners who have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which invokes the term favorably.
For lockdown partisans in the press and Big Tech, the declaration is a clear and present danger. They’re working hard to suppress it. After all, it refutes the narrative that all scientists agree with the lockdowns. Its three principal authors hail from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford universities. They have as many scientific chops as any of the lockdown partisans.
So the media have done everything they can, first to ignore, and then to tar, feather, and misrepresent the scientists who organized this effort. The campaign against a supposed “herd immunity strategy,” or what some call the “let people die” approach, is really a proxy war against the declaration.
Other, pro-lockdown scientists have now responded to the Great Barrington Declaration with the “John Snow Memorandum,” published in The Lancet on Oct. 14. Predictably, Dr. Anthony Fauci, when asked about the declaration, called it“dangerous” and “nonsense.”
This looks like a smear campaign designed to prevent Americans, including the president, from hearing the scientific case against the lockdowns. That’s much easier to do if the public thinks the only alternative is letting people die. But the scientists behind the Great Barrington advocate nothing like that. They call for focused protection, a strategy that confers the greatest benefits with the fewest costs. These scientists argue that population-wide lockdowns are all pain and little gain. They also know that we’re going to reach herd immunity at some point whatever our approach. How much damage we cause in the meantime is the question.
Finally, they know that the elderly are about 1,000 times more at risk of death from COVID-19 than the young. Therefore, they argue, we should end the disastrous lockdowns, focus on protecting the most vulnerable, treat those who get sick with all the tools in our arsenal — including those President Trump received — and let immunity build up among those with very little risk.
This wasn’t the initial Swedish approach. That country failed to protect and sequester nursing homes, which were the source of most Swedish deaths.
The alternative is to keep pressing lockdowns, no matter the cost in lives and wellbeing, until a vaccine is available for all. That should be a non-starter. In our new book“The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe,” we show that the forced lockdowns had no discernable effect on the spread of the coronavirus. Worse, they will kill more people than the virus itself.
The Great Barrington Declaration has it right. And so does President Trump. But he has not yet clearly embraced the science and the many scientists who can provide the scientific heft behind this policy. That policy is focused protection. It is the most ethical and rational choice. The media campaign against “herd immunity” is a cynical effort to keep this approach from gaining traction.
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.
Hundreds of members of the Borough Park Orthodox community took to the streets Tuesday night defying orders to disperse and lighting a fire in protest of new state mandated restrictions imposed on area synagogues, schools and non-essential businesses over a COVID-19 surge.
One large crowd huddled closely together at the corner of 50th Street and 15th avenue at about 9 p.m. as community activist Heshy Tischler ripped Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio over the order that shuts down schools completely and limits houses of worship to 10 people in certain COVID-19 hot spots.
Much of Borough Park is subject to those measures — the most restrictive — which also shutters non-essential businesses. The level of restrictions, broken down into three color-coded categories, are guided by coronavirus diagnosis data.
“It’s called civil disobedience, we can fight back,” Tischler told the crowd after tearing up his face mask. “Do not allow them to torture you or scare you,” he said, referring to the elected officials.
The closures must be made no later than Friday — though a spokesman for de Blasio tweeted that they would likely begin Thursday — and run for at least two weeks.
Councilman Kalman Yeger later showed up at another protest on 13th Avenue, according to Boro Park News. here, the lawmaker told the crowd: “We are not going to be deprived of the right that we have in America, like everybody else in America, the right to observe our religion.”
The protests swarmed in numbers later in the night with demonstrators shutting down 13th Avenue to vehicular traffic. Things also turned unruly when the crowd lit a rubbish fire after midnight at the intersection of 46th Street and 13th Avenue and chased away two city sheriff’s deputies who responded.
The defiant crowd chanted “Jewish lives matter,” as they held their ground.
At about 1:30 a.m. FDNY firefighters and cops put out the flames to the dismay of the protesters.
Earlier in the night, Yeger was among four local Jewish lawmakers who released a joint statement slamming Gov. Cuomo over the edict.
“We are appalled by Governor Cuomo’s words and actions today. He has chosen to pursue a scientifically and constitutionally questionable shutdown of our communities,” said the statement from Yeger, State Sen. Simcha Felder, Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein and Councilman Chaim Deutsch.
“His administration’s utter lack of coordination and communication with local officials has been an ongoing issue since the start of the pandemic, and particularly recently as we face this uptick.”
The lawmakers said that even though they represent COVID-19 hot-spot neighborhoods, the Cuomo administration has left in the dark leading up to Tuesday’s decision. Also brought up by the legislators, was Cuomo’s choice to display PowerPoint images of New York’s Jewish community gathering en masse during his Monday press briefing.
“Governor Cuomo’s choice to single out a particular religious group, complete with a slideshow of photos to highlight his point, was outrageous.
“His language was dangerous and divisive, and left the implication that Orthodox Jews alone are responsible for rising COVID cases in New York State,” the elected officials said.
One of the latest mask mania mandates from the office of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom is proving a hard pill for many to swallow. Last week, Newsom’s office chided anyone eating in public to wear a mask in between bites.
“Going out to eat with members of your household this weekend?” Newsom’s office tweeted Friday. “Don’t forget to keep your mask on in between bites. Do your part to keep those around you healthy.”
Advertisement – story continues below
The image that accompanied the text included the words: “Minimize the number of times you take your mask off.”
The tweet had critics aplenty.
Advertisement – story continues below
“Did you get all that? Spot the contradiction?” Nick Kangadis wrote for the Media Research Center.
“In one sentence, Newsom’s office want[s] you to be masked ‘in between bites’ of your food should you go out to dinner with your family. Then in the graphic, just two sentences later, they tell people to ‘Minimize the number of times you take your mask off,’” he wrote.
“Now, I’m no mathematician, but wouldn’t you be taking off your mask a ton if you had to put it back on ‘in between bites?’
“Of course these edicts don’t make sense, but then again, it is California. Just saying.”
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
The number of job openings dipped by 100,000 to 6.5 million in August, the Labor Department reported on Tuesday. Total vacancies are well off pre-pandemic levels despite a strong rebound earlier in the summer, indicating that the economic recovery is still underway but not as strong as needed to return to normal.
“After a few months of being surprisingly strong, job openings have slowed down,” said Nick Bunker, the director of research for the Indeed Hiring Lab. “This is a sign that while labor demand held up more than we may have expected early in the recovery, that pace is not guaranteed to continue.”
Job openings decreased in a number of industries in August, with the largest decreases in accommodation and food services and in transportation, warehousing, and utilities.
In March, the month that the economy shut down to slow the spread of the virus, there were just over 6 million job openings. As the economy suffered through the shutdown, openings dropped to 4.9 million in April but started to increase as businesses began to reopen. In May, openings totaled 5.3 million, and in June, they were just above 6 million.
The Labor Department defines a job opening as a position that is available but not filled on the last business day of the month. Tuesday’s report, called the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, also showed that the economy continues to suffer from a net employment loss on the year. Over the 12 months ending in August, hires totaled 70.4 million, and separations totaled 77.4 million, yielding a net employment loss of 7.0 million.
The food services sector decreased its hiring by over 170,000 in August. Meanwhile, the federal government added 246,000 jobs, largely because of temporary census hiring. Total separations, including quits, layoffs, discharges, and other separations, were 4.6 million in August, which since July is lower by 394,000.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a “stupid governor” and is violating the First Amendment for his threat to close down religious services during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Carlson asked if Cuomo believed he was “God” during “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and demanded to know the “science behind” the threat.
“The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, decided to approve the closure of many nonessential businesses. That’s not because he’s opposed to lockdowns, he thinks the real problem is religious services.”
Carlson showed a clip of Cuomo saying, “If the religious leaders do not agree to abide by these rules then we will close the religious institutions — period.”
“Really?” Carlson asked. “Because in the country that we lived in in January, we had a First Amendment that said government will not get in the way of your exercise of your religion. People would have laughed at that. ‘We will close the religious institutions — period?’ Who do you think you are: God? You’re not: you’re some stupid governor of a declining state.”
Carlson noted that Cuomo is targeting services in Orthodox Jewish communities. They haven’t been playing along, to their great credit. Putting aside whether any of that is legal, what is the science behind it — the reported ‘science’ behind it?
Critics of Cuomo say that he should not have forced state nursing homes to take in 4,500 patients with COVID-19 earlier in the pandemic, as the Associated Press reported.
Cuomo issued the order to nursing homes and other assisted living centers March 25, according to the AP. He reversed that policy May 11. A Daily Caller News Foundation investigation also discovered that New York undercounted the number of deaths in nursing homes.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 29: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio stands at P.S 188 as he welcomes elementary school students back to the city’s public schools for in-person learning on September 29, 2020 in New York City. Middle and high schoolers will start on Oct. 1 while Pre-K students and students with disabilities could return to school starting on Sept. 21. On Sunday, the executive board of the union representing more than 6,400 of New York City’s school leaders passed a unanimous vote of no confidence against Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza for what they called a failure to lead New York City through the safe and successful reopening of its schools. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Carlson also criticized Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio for “shutting down schools and nonessential businesses, whatever that is,” saying “he’s never worked in a business in his life.”
The Fox News host said that de Blasio is not always so concerned about social distancing and lockdowns.
“What’s interesting is that just the other day, practically, Bill de Blasio said he wasn’t against mask gatherings as long as he agreed with the politics people were expressing,” Carlson continued.
Tia Dufour / The White House via Getty ImagesPresident Donald Trump participates in a phone call with Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley in his conference room at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, on Oct. 4, 2020. (Tia Dufour / The White House via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump rocked the Twittersphere on Monday with a string of messages announcing that the First Tweeter is back.
Except for a brief drive Sunday to wave to supporters who are praying for him outside of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, Trump has been confined in the presidential suite of the hospital since Friday. The president and first lady Melania Trump announced Friday that they had tested positive for the coronavirus.
On Sunday, Trump’s doctors indicated that the president could return to the White House on Monday.
Advertisement – story continues below
Trump, who in video messages from the hospital has vowed to finish his presidential campaign and complete his work over the next four years, began a Trump-sized tweetstorm by quoting a voter interviewed on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”
“‘I’m voting for Donald Trump. My father is a Union Worker and his 401K has tripled under President Trump.’ USA Voter. @foxandfriends Thank you, and remember that the Stock Market is getting ready to break its all time high. NEXT YEAR WILL BE THE BEST EVER. VOTE, VOTE, VOTE!!!!!” the president tweeted.
And then it was off to the races.
“IF YOU WANT A MASSIVE TAX INCREASE, THE BIGGEST IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY (AND ONE THAT WILL SHUT OUR ECONOMY AND JOBS DOWN), VOTE DEMOCRAT!!!” he said.
Trump singled out Virginia residents who are facing challenges from Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam over the right to bear arms.
Advertisement – story continues below
“Virginia Voters! Your Governor wants to obliterate your Second Amendment. I have stopped him. I am the only thing between you and your Second Amendment. Working hard in Virginia. It’s IN PLAY. Better Vote for your favorite President, or wave goodbye to low taxes and gun rights!” he tweeted.
Then in separate all-caps tweets, the president noted the accomplishments of his administration that are on the line on Election Day.
Advertisement – story continues below
Trump’s tweets noted that his administration has produced “STOCK MARKET HIGHS; STRONGEST EVER MILITARY; LAW & ORDER; RELIGIOUS LIBERTY; BIGGEST TAX CUT EVER, AND ANOTHER ONE COMING; 401(K); BEST V.A. EVER. 91% APPROVAL RATING; SPACE FORCE; MASSIVE REGULATION CUTS;……
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Two House Republicans are accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of blocking COVID testing in the House. Calls for Pelosi to act come as Senate Democrats are invoking the potential spread of the coronavirus on Capitol Hill as a reason to delay the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, during a Saturday appearance on “Fox & Friends,” said the ability to test has been in existence — and ignored — for too long.
Advertisement – story continues below
“I mean these protocols have been out there and the testing capabilities have been out there for a long time. They were offered to the speaker and she turned it down,” Scalise said.
“I think it’s something that should have been in Congress for a few weeks now. But ultimately that’s what the speaker decided to do,” he said.
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
Demonstrators rally outside the Pennsylvania Capitol Building to protest the continued closure of businesses due to the coronavirus pandemic on May 15, 2020, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Mark Makela / Getty Images)
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
What Did You Say? 
You must be logged in to post a comment.