Data released Tuesday shows that egg prices dropped 12.7 percent last month — the “biggest monthly decline since 1984.” The report follows weeks of President Donald Trump telling Americans that egg prices were falling — welcome news after the cost of eggs rose for 17 out of the past 19 months, according to CNN. But the left-wing legacy outlet is scrambling to process the eggcellent news.
CNN’s David Goldman wrote Tuesday that “For months, President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that egg prices are tumbling. It wasn’t true then, but it’s true now.”
Goldman continues:
“Despite Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ far more conservative estimate that egg prices would normalize in the summer, Trump last month said, ‘as you know, the cost of eggs has come down like 93, 94% since we took office.’ Those percentage declines Trump stated are not close to accurate – but we now know that consumer egg prices were, indeed, falling sharply when Trump made those remarks (the Consumer Price Index data wasn’t out yet to confirm or deny Trump’s claims).”
CNN admits egg prices “were, indeed, falling sharply when Trump made those remarks,” but a few sentences later bizarrely still claims the “timing of his claim” was wrong.
Translation: Trump said something that turned out to be true (egg prices fell), but because we didn’t have the same data at the exact moment Trump said it, he was wrong.
That’s one of the propaganda press’ favorite things to do: dismiss or discredit the truth but then claim credit for discovering it themselves later and grant permission to everyone else to acknowledge it. Goldman’s piece is hardly an outlier. It’s the norm. Take the propaganda press’ coverage of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson are awaiting the release of their new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which details Biden’s decline over four years. The excerpts released thus far read more like a confessional of sins long known to anyone with a set of eyes and ears.
But the book and discussions amongst the left are all happening well after Tapper and the legacy media themselves engaged in the cover-up. The media decided that Biden wasn’t cognitively declining and essentially painted anyone who questioned the narrative as a far-right “conspiracy theorist” not acting “in good faith.”
The examples are endless. But now that Tapper, Thompson, and the rest of them can make a few bucks off telling the truth, they’re willing to do it.
Or take the coverage of masks during Covid. The New York Times’ Zach Montague said in September 2020 it was a “dangerous assertion” to state that wearing masks during the pandemic had “little to no medical value.” Fast forward just over two years when Bret Stephens, writing for The Times, declared, “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” Stephens highlighted a report that found there was “no evidence” masks made “any difference.”
To be clear, it was a “dangerous assertion” to say masks did nothing until the propaganda press decided it was okay to make that same assertion. As the Federalist’s Elle Purnell wrote, outlets like the New York Times “played a significant role in defending the officially sanctioned [Covid] narrative” and “chok[ed] dissent.”
And then, of course, there’s the alternative — where something is true until the media says it no longer is, like the case of the propaganda press running cover for Kamala Harris’ devastating management of the border as vice president.
As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd wrote last year, “Years after acknowledging and even praising President Joe Biden for naming Vice President Kamala Harris ‘border czar,’ corporate media claimed the presumptive 2024 Democrat nominee was never charged with overseeing the logistics of the record-breaking invasion.”
In each case, one pattern remains the same: The truth never changed, only the media’s willingness to acknowledge it. Whether it’s egg prices, Biden’s cognitive decline, mask mandates, or who was in charge of the southern border, the facts don’t seem to matter to the propaganda press.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
When Donald Trump first sailed into the Oval Office, his detractors shrieked that his blunt rhetoric was dividing the country. His supporters pointed out that Trump wasn’t so much creating division as he was revealing divisions that had been growing in America for a long time.
The reaction to the novel Wuhan coronavirus did the country a similar service, by revealing a new fault line: two sets of rules, which were applied differently to Americans depending on their membership in certain political cliques. For the average American who assumed his political leaders still shared the belief that all men are created equal, it was a cruel betrayal.
Coronavirus lockdowns alerted Americans to an uncomfortable reality: the institutions to which they’d entrusted their liberties were no longer trustworthy. If the 2024 election is any indication, they got the message.
In the Covid times, hardworking people were deemed “nonessential” and lost their jobs while watching Tony Fauci’s net worth climb. They were banished from church while thousands gathered in the street to worship George Floyd. They watched their kids fall behind in school while Nancy Pelosi and Lori Lightfoot broke the rules to get their split ends trimmed. Their dying loved ones left this world alone, while Obama danced with Hollywood stars at his 60th birthday bash. To add further insult, those loved ones were denied proper funerals, while 10,000 people gathered to eulogize a drug-addicted criminal in a gold casket on television. Only some Americans were authorized to print their opinions online, while others were punished and censored.
The delusion that we were “all in this together” didn’t survive for long. A certain set of rules applied to the BLM protesters, the Democrat politicians, and the Hollywood elites, and another set of rules applied to everyone else. Americans started to realize they were being had.
When Covid vaccine mandates rolled out, the dichotomy was even clearer. For the vaccinated class, there were jobs, service academy appointments, college acceptances, and social acceptance. For the unvaccinated, there was talk of denying them entry to airplanes, restaurants, and stores, or even putting them into camps.
Once the double standard was exposed, it became visible everywhere. The Bidens got away with selling White House access because of their last name, while Trump was relentlessly prosecuted for made-up crimes because of his. Peaceful pro-life protesters were dragged to prison while abortion supporters got away with firebombing pregnancy clinics. Ukrainian oligarchs got billions while we watched the buying power of each paycheck shrink. Our government seemed more interested in caring for citizens of other countries who broke our laws than in looking after its own. Our president was more interested in apologizing for using the term “illegal” to describe Laken Riley’s murderer than he was in apologizing to Riley’s family for inviting her killer across the border. Our speech was muzzled as a “threat to democracy” while partisans gleefully dismantled our republic.
Nearly 8 in 10 Americans told Trafalgar Group pollsters in 2022 that they felt they were living under a two-tiered justice system.
If Covid brought the double standard into focus, the racial turmoil of 2020 confirmed leftists’ belief that it was a good thing. Americans were given different rules to live by, depending on the color of their skin. White Americans were expected to engage in public spectacles of guilt and self-hatred for their own inherent racism, examine their white fragility, pay “reparations” to their black friends, and accept fault for all of society’s ills. Black Americans were encouraged to celebrate their “black pride” and demand preferential treatment. The Smithsonian released an infographic saying traits like being “polite” or on time were hallmarks of “whiteness,” with the overly racist implication that black Americans should not be expected to do either. Hiring quotas were installed to reflect the principle that black and white people should be treated differently.
The ideology represented by the shorthand “DEI” turned this discrimination into a $9 billion industry. DEI didn’t just institutionalize racial discrimination, it also implemented discrimination based on sexual preferences. While white guys got blamed for society’s faults, white guys who dressed up as women got special victim status and Bud Light brand deals!
Americans who still believed God created each man and woman with equally valuable souls were offended at the creation of artificial hierarchies that turned true equality on its head, doling out special privileges based on a person’s race, politics, or sexuality. As institutions — from media to academia to government — led the way in imposing those hierarchies, Americans stopped trusting them.
Like Trump’s uncovering of deep-rooted political divisions in 2016, that loss of trust was as necessary as it was uncomfortable. It almost certainly played a role in Gen Z’s rightward swing. It was a huge step in shrinking the power of the leftist-dominated corporate press, which beclowned itself by uncritically repeating the government’s talking points about masks, vaccines, lockdowns, and Covid’s origins. And it laid the foundations for Americans, after four years of the Biden regime, to embrace Trump’s swamp-draining attitude more enthusiastically than ever.
The years of Covid paranoia and power-grabbing were an experiment in trusting The System, and whether Americans accepted or rejected it revealed as much about them as the 2016 election did. But it also revealed a lot about The System — and all the institutions of power that comprise it — to Americans.
They realized the system wasn’t going to save them. They were going to have to do it themselves.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
Free speech may have taken a beating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling giving Big Government and Big Tech free rein over the First Amendment, but an attorney for the private plaintiffs in the case says the battle is far from over.
NCLA represents the private plaintiffs in the ruling that saw a 6-3 majority in Murthy v. Missouri reverse a lower court’s injunction that blocked the federal government from partnering with social media giants to silence posts it doesn’t like. As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood wrote, the decision — based on an absurd standing argument — effectively frees the Biden administration to continue its censoring operations during the 2024 election.
“The Supreme Court majority has practically erased the First Amendment and permitted government to co-opt private entities, like social media platforms, to accomplish its censorship aims,” NCLA said in a press release following the ruling.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the plaintiffs failed to establish standing because they did not “demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek.”
“Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction,” the decision opines.
‘Truth Can Get You Fired’
But if the past is truly an indicator of the future, it’s difficult to reconcile the standing argument with the speech suppression that occurred, particularly against those who rightly questioned the government’s Covid policies and voiced legitimate concerns over Covid vaccines.
NCLA’s clients, Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, and Jill Hines, were all censored for daring to challenge the government’s “disinformation” campaign on the pandemic. It cost Kulldorff his job as a respected professor at Harvard.
“I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story — a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic,” he wrote earlier this year in a column for City Journal. Kulldorff had questioned the lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
"Scientific institutions have enjoyed enormous prestige among the public. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the dreadful performance of the experts and institutions, ended this idyll. – @mgurrihttps://t.co/3KcnfTq0Gj
No one was hurt by the government? The majority opinion asserts that while the Big Tech speech suppressors did have content moderation policies and may have been censoring users, the plaintiffs provided no documentation showing the government coerced the social media giants to do so. As censor-in-chief Joe Biden would say, that’s malarkey.
Younes said the ruling is rooted in some “factual errors” by the majority. The Louisiana District Court Judge who on July 4, 2023, issued the injunction against the government said the executive branch“seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty conducted a thorough review of voluminous records showing dozens of agencies communicating with Big Tech companies, according to Younes.
“[There were] probably close to 100 federal officials that we know of who were colluding with, coercing, pressuring, influencing the companies to effectuate their censorship desires,” the attorney said, adding that the justices in the majority appear to have “read the government’s brief and just believed everything they said.”
In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito warned that the government’s conduct was “blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.”
“Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.”
Difficult but Not Impossible
While the high court remanded the case to the lower court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” Younes said expanded discovery might just stop the overreaching government yet. NCLA plans to go after government and Big Tech communications involving its clients to show the direct harm caused, as demanded in the majority’s standing argument.
“The district court has shown that it believes in our case and … said this is arguably the most massive attack on free speech in the history of the United States, which I agree with,” Younes said. “The federal government was censoring entire narratives, entire lines of thought. If you questioned the efficacy of the vaccines in 2021, even if you were a vaccine expert like our client, Martin Kulldorff, you would be censored on social media, as he was.”
The case may also get an assist from a presidential candidate. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now running as an independent, had sought to intervene in the Supreme Court case but was turned back by the majority. If anyone knows censorship, it’s RFK Jr., who was blocked from social media as part of what the government and corporate media have described as the “Disinformation Dozen” for challenging the government’s faulty narrative on Covid vaccines. Kennedy has lots of emails showing the Biden administration trying to silence his speech.
As government water carrier USA Today reported, one email shows the Biden administration pouncing after Kennedy suggested baseball legend Hank Aaron’s death may have been caused by his Covid-19 vaccine.
“Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP,” the digital director for the White House’s Covid response team wrote in an email to an official at Twitter, the publication reported.
Alito also dissented in the court’s rejection of Kennedy’s motion to join the lawsuit, suggesting standing could be a problem and RFK Jr. could help take away that argument.
“[The Supreme Court is] making it very difficult to bring the case, but they’re not making it impossible,” Younes said.
If the Supreme Court won’t stand up to assaults on the First Amendment, Congress must, said plaintiff Jill Hines, NCLA client and co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana.
“After reviewing the shocking and incriminating evidence indicating a massive government censorship scheme, the Justices erroneously determined to allow the government access to social media companies for the purpose of undermining free speech,” she said in the press release. “Congress must act immediately to defund agencies and third parties actively involved in this broadly pervasive and unconstitutional censorship scheme.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
President Trump is on trial in New York for allegedly falsifying business records because the bookkeepers in his organization recorded certain legal expenses — specifically, a legal settlement — as “legal expenses.” According to Democrat prosecutors, the bookkeepers should have recorded these payments as campaign contributions and expenditures because, they say, the payments were “intended” to “influence” the 2016 election “unlawfully” by concealing a purported sexual encounter with a pornographer.
Convoluted and bizarre enough for you yet? It should be. Because there is absolutely nothing “unlawful” about concealing a purported sexual encounter with a pornographer.
There is, nevertheless, a good deal of crooked record-keeping going on these days. But Democrats are the ones doing it.
False Characterization of Record-Keeping Requirements
Federal campaign finance law actually prohibits candidates from characterizing the payments at issue in the Trump case as campaign contributions and expenditures.
Brad Smith, a leading expert on campaign finance law and former member of the Federal Election Commission, was set to testify to that very thing in open court in the Trump case. Except Juan Merchan, the partisan Democrat Biden-donor judge presiding over the case, barred him from doing so.
To accept the prosecution’s case, one must conclude that New York law requires candidates to make business records that violate federal law. The supremacy clause of the Constitution does not allow that. So, it is Democrat prosecutors, not the Trump organization, that conspired to falsely characterize the record-keeping issues in the case.
Judge Merchan’s Manipulation of the Trial Record
Judge Merchan’s rationale for excluding Smith’s testimony is that judges traditionally instruct the jury on the law. The problem is that Merchan already allowed prosecution witnesses, and prosecutors themselves, to opine on their understanding of campaign finance laws. Once he allowed that, Merchan was constitutionally required to allow Trump to mount a defense on the same point.
Merchan also overlooked the fact that how people align their behavior with the law is based as much on the policies of the administrators who enforce the law as on the words of the statute itself. Smith, a former member of the regulatory body that enforces federal campaign law, was prepared to testify that the agency’s policy precludes candidates from treating payments like these as campaign contributions and expenditures.
This leads to the obvious conclusion that the Trump organization booked the payments in the manner that they did, not to “unlawfully” influence the 2016 election, but because they were (or at least thought they were) required to do so in that manner by federal law, completely negating the factual element of unlawful intent.
In fact, had Trump “intended” to “influence” the 2016 election by covering up the Stormy Daniels’ NDA payments, the easiest way to do so would have been to characterize the late October 2016 payments as campaign contributions and expenditures. This is because, under federal campaign finance law, contributions and expenditures made in late October of an election year do not need to be reported until after the election.
Unfortunately (and unjustly), the jurors in the New York case will not hear any of this exculpatory information because the partisan Democrat judge has excluded it from the record. Like I said, it’s the Democrats who have the record-keeping problem.
Talk About Falsifying Business Records to Influence an Election
Joe Biden is old. As Bill Maher puts it, Joe Biden is “cadaver-like” old. Polls show that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe Biden does not possess the mental fitness to serve another term as president. Do you think that might incentivize the White House to alter records to mitigate the political effects of Biden’s mental deterioration?
The White House is doing just that. It recently released the official transcript of Biden’s May 19 speech to the NAACP in Detroit. It was official. Except it wasn’t a transcript. It was a politicalcircular designed to clean up the incoherent mess left by a mentally diminished man selfishly trying to hold onto the most difficult, demanding, and consequential job in the world.
The so-called “transcript” substantively corrected numerous significant instances of mental lapses or gibberish uttered by Biden, including the claim that he was vice president during the Covid “pandemic,” and that President Obama told him to go to Detroit and “fix it.”
Records? We Don’t Have to Show You Any Stinking Records!
There’s no need to falsify records if you improperly refuse to let the public see them at all. That’s what the White House did last week by claiming “executive privilege” over the audio recordings of Biden’s interviews with the special counsel investigating Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
That’s the case where Biden took highly classified documents from the government while he was a senator and vice president, “willfully” retained them openly in dilapidated boxes in his garage, and then “willfully” disclosed the classified information to his ghostwriter as part of a lucrative $8 million book deal. Biden’s Justice Department declined to prosecute Biden, concluding that he would present himself to a jury like he did in his interviews — “as a sympathetic elderly man with a poor memory” — making it difficult to prove a felony “that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
In an effort to control the damage from the special counsel’s report, the White House and its allies released redacted transcripts of Biden’s interviews with investigators, apparently hoping that presenting the cold, written version of Biden’s testimony might minimize public fears about his declining mental state. It did not. Yet, it did open the door for Congress to subpoena the audio tapes of the interviews.
Last week, the White House barred the Justice Department from releasing those audio tapes to Congress on the grounds of “executive privilege.” However, the White House has already voluntarily released the transcripts of the interviews, so any privilege that may have existed has been waived. It is a basic principle of law that a party waives confidentiality privileges once the party voluntarily discloses any significant portion of the information. In fact, in these circumstances, the White House’s claim of executive privilege is not merely wrong, it is ludicrous.
The White House’s assertion of “executive privilege” is not really a legal one — it knows it has no chance of prevailing in court. Rather, the assertion of privilege is purely political. The White House believes it can conceal the audio tapes until after the election while the issue is litigated.
The audio tapes must be really, really bad for Biden. How do we know this? Because not releasing the tapes is really bad for Biden. The special counsel essentially reported that Biden appeared mentally diminished in his interviews. By refusing to release the audio tapes, Biden just confirms that perception.
There were no good options for the White House on the audio tape issue. Because the White House chose a bad option (withholding the tapes), one can only assume that the other option (releasing the tapes) was substantially worse.
Why Withhold Records if You Can Just Hide or Destroy Them Instead?
That, apparently, was the credo of one of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s top advisers — and possibly Fauci as well — during the Covid panic in relation to their dealings with EcoHealth Alliance and the now-admitted use of federal funding to perform gain-of-function research at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This month, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released shocking emails sent from the private Gmail account of David Morens, an adviser to Fauci, detailing an apparent effort by administrators to evade public open records laws — commonly referred to as “FOIA” — by improperly performing government work through private Gmail accounts or by deleting records altogether.
In one such email, Morens tells Peter Daszak, president of EchoHealth Alliance, that “there is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his home. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
In another email, Morens confesses, “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d, but before the search starts, so i think we’re all safe. Plus, i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
Wow, that’s bad. But you have to understand, to Democrats, booking legal expenses as “legal expenses” is the real threat to democracy.
Joseph LoBue is a retired Naval officer and attorney.
Two groups are running a “misleading, unsolicited mass mailing of pre-filled voter registration forms targeting Alabama mailboxes,” according to an alert from Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen. In his warning, Allen says his office has “officially discouraged” the mailer, which is in no way affiliated with the state.
“On two occasions, this Office was contacted on behalf of Voter Participation Center and Center for Voter Information regarding a mailer they planned to send to Alabama citizens,” Allen said in the alert. “In response, I strongly discouraged the group’s plan to mass mail our citizens.”
According to activist tracker InfluenceWatch, the Voter Participation Center (VPC) was launched in 2003 as Women’s Voices Women Vote, before expanding its mission and changing its name nearly a decade later.
“The group initially focused on registering the strongly Democratic-leaning voting bloc of single women to vote; today, the group organizes registration of numerous Democratic-leaning voting populations,” InfluenceWatch reports.
Founded with help from former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff John Podesta, the leftist nonprofit has been heavily scrutinized for trying to “register animals, dead people, infants and felons to vote,” according to a 2012 Judicial Watch probe. The center has ties to Big Labor, including the AFL-CIO.
The VPC’s “questionable tactics to undermine the electoral process have caused concerns in several states, including New Mexico, Florida, Wisconsin and Virginia,” the Judicial Watch investigative report states. “VPC forms are deceiving and appear to be official when they are not, according to a news report that links a picture of the mailer. The VPC has also defended the famously corrupt Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) during its various scandals.”
The Voter Participation Center and its partner nonprofit, the Center for Voter Information, were at it again in the 2020 presidential election, to the concern of election officials in several states. As left-leaning Propublica reported at the time, the Democrat-tied groups conducted a “massive campaign to register voters and promote mail-in voting.”
“The nonprofits aim to send 340 million pieces of mail this election cycle, with a focus on two dozen key states. The groups describe themselves as nonpartisan, but they were founded by a former Democratic operative, and the organization has spent at least $47,142 this cycle to promote former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential bid and $40,065 supporting other Democrats, according to public filings,” Propublica reported on Oct. 23, 2020, just 11 days before the election.
Propublica’s figures were a drop in the bucket. Tax filings subsequently reviewed by the Hill found the Voter Participation Center spent more than $100 million, a sevenfold increase from what the organization spent on the 2016 presidential election.
Like other leftist groups, the center used the cover of Covid to defend its get-out-the-vote efforts targeting Democrats.
“At a time when in-person voter contact was sidelined for health and safety reasons, the Voter Participation Center really stood up and did the work that was needed to help register voters, to help voters learn about and sign up to vote by mail, and to educate voters on early voting in person, voting by mail and how to vote safely on election day,” Tom Lopach, the group’s CEO, told the Hill at the time. Lopach, as the publication noted, is a longtime Democrat operative who previously served as “executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and a former chief of staff” to Democrat Sen. Jon Tester.
Allen said his office has in previous elections cycles received complaints from Alabama residents about “incorrect pre-filled voter registration forms” much like the ones from the Voter Participation Center.
“This type of targeted, partisan interference by out-of-state, third-party organizations is unnecessary, confusing, and counterproductive,” the secretary of state said.
“Alabama citizens can rest assured that the Alabama Secretary of State’s office and local election officials are well-equipped to handle voter registration in Alabama,” Allen added. “Trusted voter registration and election information can be found on the Secretary of State’s official website.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
If you didn’t see Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Benz, you need to take an hour and watch the whole thing. In a mind-bending narrative about the emergence of what Benz calls “military rule” through an online censorship industry in the U.S., he lays out in startling detail just how corrupt and tyrannical the U.S. defense and foreign policy establishment has become.
Most importantly, Benz, the executive director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, explains how a constellation of federal agencies and publicly funded institutions, under the pretext of countering “misinformation,” rigged the 2020 election and are right now smothering the First Amendment and rigging the 2024 election through massive state-sponsored censorship online. The 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic, says Benz, were the “two most censored events in human history.” And 2024 is shaping up to be the same, thanks to the emergence of a federal censorship-industrial complex.
The problem here is profound, with deep historical roots that go back to the aftermath of World War II and the creation of the CIA along with a host of U.S.-funded international institutions. But for our purposes, it suffices to understand the problem in its two most recent stages: the period from 1991 to 2014, and from 2014 to the present.
At the outset of internet privatization in 1991, free speech online was seen as an instrument of statecraft. At that time, says Benz, internet free speech was championed by the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments as a way to support dissident groups around the world in their efforts to overthrow authoritarian or disfavored regimes. It allowed the U.S. to conduct what Benz calls “insta-regime change operations,” in service of the State Department’s foreign policy agenda.
The plan worked really well. Among other things, free speech on the internet allowed U.S.-backed groups to assert control over state-run media in foreign countries, making it much easier to overthrow governments. The high-water mark of this way of deploying free speech online, Benz explains, was the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012, when governments the Obama administration considered problematic — Egypt, Tunisia, Libya — all began falling in so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions. During that time, the State Department worked closely with these social media companies to keep them up and running in those countries, to be used as tools for protesters and dissident groups that were trying to circumvent state censorship.
But all of that changed in 2014 after the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine toppled the government of Viktor Yanukovych and there was an unexpected pro-Russia counter-coup in Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. Later that same year, says Benz, when the people of Crimea voted to be annexed into the Russian Federation, “that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO.”
Thereafter, NATO, the CIA, and the State Department, together with the intelligence agencies of our European allies, did an about-face on internet free speech. They began instead to engage in what amounted to hybrid or information warfare to censor what they saw as Russian propaganda online. These efforts quickly spread beyond Ukraine and Eastern Europe to include the censorship of populist groups on the right that were emerging across the EU as a response to the Syrian migrant crisis.
By the time Brexit emerged in the summer of 2016, explains Benz, NATO and the foreign policy establishment felt there was a real crisis afoot; the problem was spreading west from Central and Eastern Europe, and it had to be stopped. If it wasn’t, then Brexit might trigger the collapse of the entire EU, along with NATO and the entire constellation of supranational institutions that relied on NATO. The entire postwar architecture of institutions might come crashing down, all because the hearts and minds of the people were being swayed. So went the thinking, anyway. As far as the national security establishment was concerned, citizens were being swayed by Russian and far-right propaganda, and we can’t have that.
Ep. 75 The national security state is the main driver of censorship and election interference in the United States. "What I’m describing is military rule," says Mike Benz. "It’s the inversion of democracy." pic.twitter.com/hDTEjAf89T
Under these circumstances, free speech was the last thing that could be allowed to flourish online. Censorship became the order of the day. As Carlson put it, these NATO and EU leaders identified their new enemy as democracy within their own countries — their own voters, in other words: “They feared that their people, the citizens of their own countries, would get their way. And they went to war against that.”
And then Trump was elected. From that moment — and indeed, as we know from the Russia-collusion hoax, even before Trump was elected in November 2016 — the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments, which had done so much to censor and weaponize the internet overseas, turned their attention to American citizens.
Initially, their predicate for domestic surveillance was Crossfire Hurricane, the fatuous notion that Russia had infiltrated the Trump campaign and that Trump was a Russian asset. Once that collapsed, they needed another excuse to spy on and censor Americans who held disfavored opinions or who spread “misinformation,” to put it in the parlance of the censorship-industrial complex. To do that, they had to get around the prohibition against the CIA operating on American soil.
Since they couldn’t very well get away with openly spying on and censoring American citizens, they decided to house the bulk of their censorship operations inside the Department of Homeland Security, specifically in a part of DHS tasked with reducing and eliminating threats to U.S. critical physical and cyber infrastructure. Hence “domestic misinformation” — which is really just a term for opinions and information that the national security state doesn’t like or that run counter to State Department policy — was classified as an attack on “critical cognitive infrastructure,” and could therefore be censored. What it amounted to was an end-run around the First Amendment.
But even DHS couldn’t do this directly, so it outsourced online censorship operations to third parties like the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, which consisted of four separate organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and a firm called Graphika. These private-sector “partners” did the nitty-gritty work of mapping out entire online networks of people who helped spread certain disfavored opinions, or what the censors called “false narratives.” Essentially they were deputized to censor Americans on behalf of the government.
It should come as no surprise that the people behind the EIP censorship network are leftists who hate Donald Trump, despise his supporters, and love censorship. For example, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos is the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. He has compared “over half of the Republicans in Congress” to ISIS, called for Newsmax and OANN to be kicked off the air, and said, “We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences.” His views are typical among the managers of the censorship industry.
These managers and their partners inside the U.S. government went about their task with gusto, including a seven-month pre-censorship campaign ahead of the 2020 election. Any content challenging public faith in mail-in ballots, early voting, and ballot drop boxes was flagged for violating new rules about “delegitimizing elections.” The censors, along with the government, had strong-armed the social media companies into adopting these rules, as documented in great detail last year with the release of the “Twitter Files.”
Indeed, the “Twitter Files” exposed a massive effort by the federal government to deputize Twitter and other social media companies to do what it could not, at least not legally. But in some ways, the “Twitter Files” just revealed the tip of the censorship iceberg.
We at The Federalist were caught up in all this during the 2020 election. As detailed in a recent lawsuit filed in December by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas, the State Department illegally used a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” to censor Americans.
The State Department, through grants and product development assistance to private entities like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, was “actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” according to the lawsuit.
In our case, it meant the federal government was using cutouts like NewsGuard to throttle our reporting and commentary on the 2020 election and its chaotic aftermath. Both the GDI and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) developed censorship tools that included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says. The State Department then gave these tools to companies like Facebook and LinkedIn to target disfavored media outlets, including The Federalist.
Through these and other methods, during the 2020 election cycle and the Covid pandemic, the government-backed censorship-industrial complex throttled millions of online posts, suppressing traffic to news sites, and undermined revenue streams for a host of outlets and influencers with disfavored or dissident views.
But this isn’t a thing of the past. All of the censorship infrastructure described above is still intact, still functioning, and is firing on all cylinders right now ahead of the 2024 election. If anything, the censorship-industrial complex is more robust than it was four years ago. Just last week, Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg boasted on CNBC that he currently has some 40,000 employees, which is nearly 60 percent of Meta’s entire workforce, tasked with censoring speech on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Clegg also claimed Meta has spent about $20 billion, including $5 billion in the last year, on its censorship efforts — or what he euphemistically called “election integrity.”
What does that mean in practice? We don’t have to guess. Remember that Facebook infamously censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 at the behest of the FBI. With 40,000 employees now charged with censoring “hate speech” and ensuring “election integrity,” we can be fairly certain that if another Hunter Biden laptop story comes along this election cycle, it too will be quashed by the censors.
Why exactly is our government doing this? It’s not merely a partisan preference for ensuring Democrats stay in power, but something deeper and more insidious. To circle back to Carlson’s interview with Benz, it’s because the national security state has come to regard “democracy” not as the will of the people expressed through elections, but as the constellation of government agencies, government-backed institutions, corporations, media outlets, and nonprofit groups. Protecting democracy, in this view, means protecting these institutions from the people they were putatively meant to serve.
As Benz says at one point in the interview, “The relationship between the managers of the American empire and the citizens of the American homeland has broken down, and that has played itself out in the story of the censorship industry.”
All of this seems rather complex and dense, at least in the details of how it works. But at root it’s very simple: Those who have power don’t want to be held accountable by the unwashed masses, by “populism,” and certainly not by the results of free and fair elections. They will not tolerate anyone, not even a duly elected president, going against the “interagency consensus” — that famous phrase of Alexander Vindman’s from the first Trump impeachment. They don’t think the people have that right, and they intend to use every tool they have to protect their power and privilege.
The stark truth is that if we don’t defeat and dismantle this censorship-industrial complex, it means the end of our republic and the rise of tyrannical military rule in the United States.
If you think that’s an overstatement, go watch the entire Benz interview and consider it in the context of what we have all seen play out in America over the past half-decade or so. There is no language alarmist enough to convey the gravity of what’s happening here. This is a hybrid war being fought mostly online but with real-world consequences that are every day becoming more obvious. We have to win the war to save our country, but we can’t even fight if we don’t know what’s happening, or how, or why.
About 15 minutes into the interview, I was again reminded of something I once heard the late, great Angelo Codevilla say in a lecture. He said our response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it took a “law enforcement” approach to terrorism that required the creation of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus to detect and stop terrorist attacks. Once the terrorist threat subsided, Codevilla explained, this surveillance apparatus would be turned on the American people and destroy the republic it was supposedly designed to protect.
That lecture was in 2013. Codevilla was right. It’s all happened exactly as he said it would. What happens next is up to us.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
In response to reports that Putin critic Alexei Navalny has died in a Russian prison, your rulers in Washington want you to be angry.
Your corrupt government, which is at this very moment working to put your Christian neighbors in prison for protesting abortion, wants you to be very angry at a foreign leader nearly 6,000 miles away so you won’t pay attention to what your leaders are doing to you in your own backyard.
Your government, which wants to disarm you and prevent you from defending yourself, wants you angry at a leader who has no power over you whatsoever. The government that censors you and lies to you about viruses it helped create wants your focus elsewhere. The government that sold your economy off to China and then destroyed the value of your currency wants you mad at someone else.
The government that banned you from going to church and then tried to fire you for not taking its worthless “vaccine” wants to whip you into a frenzy over literally anything else other than what it’s doing to you right now.
The government that opened your borders to invasion and looked the other way as violent crime enveloped your cities wants you to believe that crime on another continent is the only crime you should care about. And that the borders of a country half a world away are the only borders worth protecting.
America’s government would never treat its citizens like foreign tyrants do, you’re supposed to keep comfortably believing. It would never imprison an individual whose life and knowledge suddenly became a huge liability to the regime. And it would definitely never kill him in prison, wipe the video cameras that recorded his death, then claim he committed suicide.
And the American government would certainly never try to ban its chief political opponent from the ballot, try to bankrupt him with frivolous lawsuits, or attempt to imprison him to prevent him from winning an election. The American government would never tap attorneys appointed by the president’s hand-picked lawyers to absolve the president of a whole host of crimes committed by the president and his family.
On top of that, the American government would never imprison thousands of political dissidents for protesting against the regime’s history of rigging elections or refer to them as a bunch of filthy kulak wrecker insurrectionists. And you better believe the American government would never ally with corrupt oligarchs who owe their fortunes to monopolies protected by the government to censor the government’s political opponents to prevent them from talking about the corruption of the family running the government.
They’re manipulating you, gaslighting you, and trying to emotionally blackmail you into going along with their nonsense because those things are only supposed to happen in other countries. Stop letting them get away with it.
Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.
A teacher on the outskirts of Cincinnati is recovering from brain surgery after a student violently attacked her earlier this month. The 60-year-old teacher was harmed so severely by a teenager that doctors had to remove part of her skull to help manage swelling in her brain.
Last spring, a Tennessee teenager pepper-sprayed a teacher for confiscating her phone. Also last year, a Texas administrator was beaten to the ground by a group of students.
As school choice expands across the country, millions more parents have the chance to send their children to schools that best meet their needs. They are eager to flee schools that foster poor behavior. Parents know their children best, and they know a child’s best educational fit is based on more than only test scores and graduation rates. Academic performance is critically important, but so too are intangible factors that shape a child’s educational experience. It is no surprise that school culture is one of the top factors parents consider in choosing where to send their kids to school.
The most recent Parent Involvement in Education survey, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2019, found that 71 percent of parents who considered sending their children to a school other than their government-assigned one rated “safety, including school discipline” as “very important.” Only 53 percent ranked “academic performance of students (e.g. test scores, dropout rates)” the same way.
This concern for discipline and safety is not surprising. No parents want to send their children somewhere unsafe. Sadly, many schools tolerate bad behavior and thus foster more of it, creating an environment where teachers can hardly teach, and students can hardly learn.
School violence is on the rise for several reasons, two of which can be tied directly to policies pushed by teachers’ unions and fringe civil rights groups and accepted as gospel by many in the public education establishment. The first is prolonged school closures resulting in a steep decline in good behavior by students.
The Student Pulse Panel, a study conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences, found that 38 percent of public schools saw an increase in physical altercations between students following the pandemic. (Less than 10 percent saw a decrease.) More than half of public schools saw an increase in threats of physical altercations between students. The damage is not just physical. More than half of public schools reported an increase in “student acts of disrespect [towards staff] other than verbal abuse.”
The study says, “More than 8 in 10 public schools have seen stunted behavioral and socioemotional development in their students because of the COVID-19 pandemic.” But Covid did not cause student behavior to circle the drain. Prolonged school closures, driven by teachers’ unions and their political allies, meant that students forgot how to behave at school.
The second culprit is “restorative justice,” a so-called “disciplinary” model embraced by teachers unions and administered by school systems across the country. This harmful practice is by no means restricted to blue states, nor is it a post-Covid phenomenon. Leading into the pandemic, 21 states and D.C. had laws on the books supporting the use of restorative justice in schools. Among those states are Texas, Florida, and Utah, far from the usual suspects when it comes to educational malpractice.
Under restorative justice, suspending and expelling a student is to be avoided at all costs. Real consequences are replaced by “healing circles.” School resource officers are sidelined, and teachers lose control of their classrooms.
Every single one of the violent incidents noted above happened in a school or school district that has embraced restorative justice policies. The teacher near Cincinnati taught at a school that advised a “verbal warning using restorative practices and affective language” when students are disruptive. The school district in Tennessee is the home of a “restorative practice program,” and the Texas school had moved to adopt more restorative practices in its Campus Improvement Plan.
Education freedom can help solve this problem. Several studies have demonstrated that school choice leads to safer schools.
But a school culture need not be violent to be rotten. There is a reason “Mean Girls” resonates across generations. Bullying is real, it can be severe, and parents deserve the right to decide if and when their child needs a fresh start at a new school. No children should have to risk their mental health and emotional development because they can’t choose another school and get a fresh start.
A good school, the kind of school parents seek out for their kids when they have school choice, is one that not only excels academically but maintains high standards of behavior. Such schools excel academically in no small part because they maintain high standards of behavior. Test scores are only one piece of the education freedom puzzle. Parents see the full picture, and education leaders would do well to follow suit.
Angela Morabito is the spokesperson at the Defense of Freedom Institute, a former U.S. Department of Education press secretary, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
A leaked document coauthored by American and Chinese scientists provides fresh and disturbing evidence supporting the Covid origin lab-leak theory.
Emily Kopp, an investigative journalist at U.S. Right to Know, an online publication about “Pursuing truth and transparency for public health,” reported recently that her organization has obtained a 2018 grant proposal called Project DEFUSE, coauthored by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and their counterparts in the United States, including EcoHealth Alliance.
According to Kopp, Project DEFUSE “proposed engineering high-risk coronaviruses of the same species as SARS and SARS-CoV-2.” The content of this proposal is concerning for several reasons. First, the proposal “involved synthesizing spike proteins with furin cleavage sites — the same feature that supercharged SARS-CoV-2 into the most infectious pandemic pathogen in a century.”
Second, the proposal publicly stated that such risky research would be done at American scientist Ralph Baric’s high-containment BSL-3 lab at the University of North Carolina. But Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth, revealed in his private comments that once the project is funded, he would let the WIV conduct some of the risky research, despite knowing the WIV is only a BSL-2 lab and has “fewer safety precautions than required in the U.S.” Baric responded that “U.S. researchers would ‘freak out’ if they knew the novel coronavirus engineering and testing work would be conducted in a BSL-2 lab.”
According to Kopp of U.S. Right to Know, “Biosafety levels range from one (BSL-1) to four (BSL-4), with BSL-4 being the most stringent. … Many scientists say viruses that may be transmitted through the air should at minimum be studied in BSL-3.”
Daszak and other Americans on the project team omitted to disclose the WIV’s involvement to Project DEFUSE’s intended funder, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “in order to evade any national security concerns about doing high-level biosecurity work in China.” Daszak didn’t provide Chinese scientists’ resumes to DARPA “to downplay the non-US focus of this proposal so that DARPA doesn’t see this as a negative.”
What’s even scarier is that these documents “also show the researchers intended to use less regulated SARS-related coronavirus research as proof of concept in order to extend their high-risk methods to more deadly viruses like Ebola, Marburg, Hendra and Nipah,” according to Kopp. Some scientists’ ongoing interest in experimenting with those contagious and lethal viruses is one of the many reasons why we must understand the origin of Covid-19 because such knowledge may help prevent the next pandemic.
Matt Ridley, a British member of Parliament and coauthor of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, writes at Spiked:
It was shocking enough that he [Peter Daszak] failed to tell the world about this proposal, which was leaked instead. It was still more shocking to find that it contained a specific proposal for inserting ‘human-specific cleavage sites’ into sarbecoviruses for the first time, because exactly such a feature is found in the virus that causes Covid, and in none of the other 1,500 known sarbecoviruses. That cleavage site is the reason we had a pandemic because it makes the virus more infectious in human airways and it seems uniquely suited to the human system.
Although DARPA eventually declined to fund Project DEFUSE, Daszak, who has a reputation for not taking no for an answer, likely completed the proposed work with the WIV anyway with other funding sources. Daszak’s EcoHealth has received at least $8 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 2014 and 2021. In 2021, after congressional Republicans’ repeated requests, the NIH finally admitted that it had funded the WIV “to study the risk to humans of coronaviruses circulating in bats in China” through EcoHealth.
NIH’s admission came after the Intercept made public two grant proposals submitted by EcoHealth Alliance to the NIH on gain-of-function research on coronavirus and a progress report covering June 2018 to May 2019.
These documents revealed that EcoHealth’s experiments “involv[ed] infectious clones of MERS-CoV, the virus that caused a deadly outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012.” EcoHealth’s data also demonstrates that “chimeric SARS-like viruses caused more severe disease in a humanized animal model than the original virus,” according to Alina Chan, a Boston-based molecular biologist and coauthor of the book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. All this information contradicts EcoHealth’s previous repeated denials that no such high-risk experiment ever took place.
Given what we know now, a coronavirus pandemic that emerged out of Wuhan more than three years ago seems less like a coincidence. Yet Daszak of EcoHealth has been the most vocal lab-leak theory denier. Among his efforts to shut down any public discussion of the lab-leak theory, the most infamous one was that he organized a group of scientists to co-sign a letter published by Lancet, denouncing the lab-leak theory without disclosing his conflict of interest (his intimate collaboration with the WIV).
Last week, The Wall Street Journal dropped another bombshell, that Daszak’s EcoHealth is under federal investigation (civil, not criminal) about whether it double-billed U.S. taxpayers for hundreds of thousands of dollars for the dangerous gain-of-function coronavirus research in China. Daszak denied any wrongdoing.
The leaked Project DEFUSE documents are a reminder, according to Chan, who commented on X, “This is a pattern of dishonesty. Clearly, we cannot take the word of conflicted parties. It is urgently important that the public and investigators gain full access to all EcoHealth documents relating to WIV research.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that at least 3 million people worldwide died of Covid in 2020. Not to mention that millions more people’s lives, mental health, and economic well-being have been negatively affected by government policies. Many of us still feel the effects of those policies today. The pandemic was a life-changing event for many. Therefore, we all deserve to know how the pandemic started and be better prepared for the next one.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has suppressed any discussion of the lab-leak theory for one apparent reason — to avoid accountability. Yet it is disappointing that the Biden administration, congressional Democrats, and their corporate media allies have shown little interest in uncovering Covid’s origin. They have suppressed the lab-leak theory as shamelessly as the CCP has done, despite that “the evidence that this virus probably came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is now voluminous, detailed and strong,” said Matt Ridley, and their collective silence “speaks volumes.”
Democrats and corporate media’s collective silence and the lack of curiosity about the virus’s origin are likely driven by two reasons. First, they cannot blame the origin of Covid on Trump because the NIH funding occurred under former President Obama. Any investigation of Covid’s origin will inevitably lead to the questionable conduct of Anthony Fauci, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, and his allies at the NIH, from underwriting the WIV’s gain-of-function research to suppressing the lab-leak theory since the beginning of the pandemic.
Second, the Democrats and corporate media’ conduct during the pandemic has shown that they were only interested in taking advantage of a crisis to grab more power and expand their control over the country and the American people. Public health prevention is their last concern. Therefore, it is up to concerned citizens and independent media to keep searching for truth and demanding accountability.
“The federal government, disinformation ‘experts’ at universities, Big Tech, and others worked together through the Election Integrity Partnership to monitor & censor Americans’ speech,” Rep. Jim Jordan, pictured Oct. 20, posted on X. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The federal government coordinated with an array of entities to censor Americans’ speech online, a newly released report from the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government shows. In particular, the report shows that the Department of Homeland Security worked with Stanford University and the Global Engagement Center, which works across agencies but sits under the State Department, to create a streamlined process for identifying and censoring posts.
These groups formed the Election Integrity Partnership, which the report shows worked to censor and limit certain posts going into the 2020 presidential election. The report argues the federal government was “heavy handed” with universities and social media companies and censored conservative viewpoints far more often than liberal points of view under the guise of combating disinformation.
“Created in the summer of 2020 ‘at the request’ of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the EIP provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny,” the report said.
The report lays out how EIP analysts searched social media sites for undesirable content.
From the report:
The EIP’s misinformation ‘analysts’ next scoured the internet for additional examples for censorship. If the submitted report flagged a Facebook post, for example, the EIP analysts searched for similar content on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and other major social media platforms. Once all of the offending links were compiled, the EIP sent the most significant ones directly to Big Tech with specific recommendations on how the social media platforms should censor the posts, such as reducing the posts’ ‘discoverability,’ ‘suspending [an account’s] ability to continue tweeting for 12 hours,’ ‘monitoring if any of the tagged influencer accounts retweet’ a particular user, and, of course, removing thousands of Americans’ posts.
This report is the latest in a series of reports, including the “Twitter Files,” which show the federal government pressured private and nonprofit organizations to quiet certain viewpoints. Much of this push for censorship was fueled by concerns that former President Donald Trump was propelled to the White House by misleading news and content on social media sites.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., sparked headlines last month when he said that Twitter was an “FBI subsidiary” before billionaire Elon Musk took over. Johnson raised concerns again after this latest report.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., pointed to the report as well, pushing for his legislation, the Free Speech Protection Act. Paul said that under this legislation, which he co-wrote with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the government “will be stripped of its ability to shroud its actions in secrecy and infringe upon the First Amendment rights of the American people.”
This latest report includes documents obtained from Standard that show examples of the censorship and the coordination between federal and private entities.
“The American people deserve to know if they were targeted by their own government and so-called ‘disinformation’ experts,” Jordan, who leads the weaponization committee, wrote on X.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
The CIA offered hush money to six CIA analysts who concluded that Covid-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan, China, a “multi-decade, senior-level, current” CIA officer alleged to Congress.
The news of the suspected payoff broke in two letters penned by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to CIA Director William J. Burns and former CIA Chief Operating Officer Andrew Makridis.
In the letter to Burns, SSCP Chairman Brad Wenstrup and HPSCI Chairman Mike Turner detail the testimony of “a highly credible senior-level CIA officer” who alleged the CIA used a “significant monetary incentive” in an attempt to discredit Covid lab leak evidence analyzed by its officers. The unnamed whistleblower told the committees that six of the seven CIA analysts charged with uncovering the origins of Covid “believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low-confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”
The chairmen noted that these Covid Discovery Team members were “multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise” who were well-qualified to give that kind of assessment. Yet, the CIA, unsatisfied with its analysts’ conclusion, allegedly dangled “financial incentives” in front of the officers in an attempt to “change their conclusion in favor of a zoonotic origin.”
“The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis,” the committee chairmen noted.
The whistleblower indicated that a financially motivated flip-flop may have occurred, which led to “the eventual public determination of uncertainty.”
The CIA is one of two intelligence agencies that still claims it is “unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting,” according to a 10-page declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published in June.
The committee chairmen demanded the CIA hand over all documents, communication, and financial transaction information involving the agency’s virus origins investigation team by Sept. 26. They also requested that the CIA give up the Covid discovery team’s communications with other government agencies.
“Any improper influence exerted by the CIA will be investigated to ensure accountability from the intelligence community,” the committee chairmen warned.
In their letter to Makridis, the Republican chairs asked for a voluntary transcribed interview that would grant them an understanding of the “central role” he played in creating the Covid discovery team and failing to determine the virus’ origins.
The HPSCI determined in 2022 that intelligence agencies, including the CIA, “downplayed the possibility that SARS-CoV2 was connected to China’s bioweapons program based in part on input from outside experts.” Those same agencies, along with bureaucrats, corporate media, and Big Tech, scrambled in 2020 to censor suggestions that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab specializing in gain-of-function coronavirus research.
Documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in June later linked U.S. taxpayer dollars to the research conducted by the WIV lab staff, who were the first to fall ill at the onset of the pandemic.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
The Gateway Pundit is broadcasting the LIVE telethon to help fund the legal fees of the MI GOP electors who’ve been wrongfully charged with EIGHT felonies each for the crime of casting an ALTERNATE slate of electoral votes for President Trump in 2020.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
President Joe Biden’s White House demanded an increase of censorship from Facebook in 2021, new emails reveal — confirming once again that the administration believes Americans are stupid.
In part three of what he deemed the “Facebook Files,” Republican Rep. Jim Jordan released more communications obtained from Facebook detailing the immense pressure the Big Tech company received from the executive branch to limit what Americans saw online. Emails show Courtney Rowe, then-White House director of strategic communications and engagement for Covid-19 response, praising Facebook in April 2021 for offering the White House suppression data “broken down by region and demographics.” One sentence later, she petitioned the Big Tech company to answer, “how do we work with you all to push back on it[?]” because she believed that “if someone in rural Arkansas sees something on FB, it’s the truth.”
Jordan said Rowe “mocked Real America’s ability to determine what’s true and what isn’t” because the Biden administration “didn’t think you were smart enough to decide for yourself.”
In April 2021, Biden’s then-Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty also sent Facebook several suppression demands to censor right-wing commentators and publications. According to Flaherty, outlets like the Daily Wire are “polarizing” and not “authoritative news source[s].”
“You wouldn’t have a mechanism to check the material impact?” Flaherty questioned.
On behalf of the White House, Flaherty even asked Facebook to reduce visibility for the New York Post, which debuted reporting about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” and Biden family corruption six months earlier.
“I’m curious – NY Post churning out articles every day… What is supposed to happen to that from Policy perspective. Does that article get a reduction, labels?” Flaherty asked the censors.
Flaherty eventually concluded that his preference for controlling online speech was to convince Facebook to “kick people off” of the social media platform.
“We’re keen on what platforms are doing to reduce the spread of bad information, that platforms are not funneling people towards bad content,” Flaherty wrote. “That’s our primary concern.”
The censors at the Silicon Valley giant explained that they couldn’t “remove” every user or post deemed problematic by the White House but eventually agreed to demote certain posts even when the posts did not explicitly violate Facebook’s terms and conditions.
Facebook claimed that posts complaining about the “government overreach” of the Biden administration’s Covid jab mandates were reduced because they fed a “vaccine negative environment.”
“The company ADMITTED to the White House that it reduced content of certain posts – even if the posts didn’t violate the company’s terms and contained TRUE information,” Jordan explained.
Weaponizing the censorship industrial complex against Americans isn’t the only time Biden and his Democrat cronies have revealed their belief that Americans are stupid and can’t think for themselves. As early as 1988, Biden was telling voters to their faces that they were not credentialed enough to criticize him.
“I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” then-Sen. Biden infamously proclaimed to a voter who asked him to explain his lies about his academic track record.
The ruling regime’s contempt for Americans was made even more abundantly clear during the pandemic. While Democrats demonstrated their disdain for their voters with hypocritical visits to hair salons and fancy restaurants during the height of lockdowns, Biden tried to force Covid shots on hardworking Americans who he apparently thought were not educated well enough to thoughtfully reject the jab.
BIDEN: The choice to be unvaccinated "has been fueled by dangerous misinformation on cable tv… I call on the purveyors of these lies and misinformation to stop it. Stop it now." pic.twitter.com/gVKxunkrjK
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
As they worked tirelessly to oust Donald Trump from the White House in 2020, a chorus of corporate media, Never Trumpers, establishment Democrats, and Joe Biden himself promised Americans a Biden presidency would usher in a “return to normalcy.”
Two and a half years later, normalcy has yet to appear. Biden’s tenure has cemented a new “normal” of men pretending to be women, a march toward global conflict, and synthetic drugs in the White House. Decency and decorum? Not exactly. As the 2024 election season heats up, now is as good a time as ever to take stock of our cultural and political status quo and remind ourselves that the self-proclaimed unifier-in-chief and his administration’s lackeys have done everything in their power to upend our norms, not return to them. Here are 10 examples.
1. Obscene LGBT Activism
In exchange for Trump’s mean tweets, Biden’s normal includes men showing off their prosthetic breasts on the White House lawn. As LGBT extremists enforced pride month on the rest of the country, the Biden family saw fit to host a pride party at the symbolic residence. Three of their guests proudly stripped off their tops to flaunt their mutilated “true” selves.
After immediate backlash, the Biden administration noted the behavior was “inappropriate” and disinvited the three people involved — but there was nothing “normal” about nude White House party guests.
Speaking of indecent exposure, LGBT activism under the Biden administration has taken an obscene turn and not just during “pride month.” The White House’s gay and trans agenda has no limiting principle, with the president going out of his way to promote irreversible medical interventions for confused youths. This radicalism trickles down into defending pornographic books for children, explicit “education,” public nudity, and graphic sexual depictions in family-friendly public environments.
2. Corruption
When Biden talked about normalcy, did he mean multimillion-dollar bribery schemes? Thanks to astute lawmakers like Sen. Chuck Grassley and brave whistleblowers within the Internal Revenue Service and FBI, Americans are finally seeing past the Biden-protection racket to the corrupt family business.
Biden and his DOJ will pretend the sins are littler misdemeanor tax crimes limited to his poor addict son Hunter, but whistleblower testimony about a damning FBI document suggests “the big guy’s” hands are dirty — and the Justice Department has been covering it up.
3. Cocaine at the White House
The same administration that tracked down grandmas who happened to be in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, claims it won’t be able to figure out who brought cocaine into the high-security White House, complete with Secret Service agents, cameras, and records of every guest’s name, date of birth, and social security number, among other things.
Whether the synthetic drug belongs to Hunter Biden, an obvious suspect who is believed to be living in the White House right now, or someone else, Colombian bam-bam turning up at the president’s house isn’t normal.
4. Federal Weaponization and Censorship
To suppress its ideological and political opponents, the Biden administration found convenient ways to silence social media users. As recent House reports have shown, Biden’s agencies regularly engaged in collusion with the largest Big Tech companies to suppress free speech. Not only did they push for the censorship of speech that was factually wrong — speech that is still protected by the First Amendment — but they labeled information critical of the Democrat regime as “disinformation” and “misinformation” to justify stripping it from the public square. Worse, the Biden administration devised a category of speech that’s true but inconvenient, called “malinformation” — and worked to silence that too.
5. Bidenomics
Despite recovering some of the jobs the government forced workers out of during Covid lockdowns, Biden’s economy overall has been disastrous for the American people. Inflation in particular has been a steady theme, with prices for essentials from groceries to gasoline soaring throughout the early years of Biden’s term. Prices are still high and many Americans are still suffering in 2023, but in January the president had the audacity to claim a high inflation rate was a good thing because it had “cooled” from the 40-year record Biden broke the previous year.
6. The Edge of World War
Aggressive support for Ukraine in its war with Russia has been a constant theme of the Biden administration. Unfortunately, this support edges us closer to a global war. With escalation as the apparent goal of this conflict, depleted stockpiles put the U.S. at increased risk of war with insufficient supplies to fight it. NATO’s recent shortening of Ukraine’s membership application process could threaten to drag NATO member countries, and America in particular, into a great power conflict once again.
Of course, this is in addition to rising threats from China and at America’s southern border, with foreign threats growing under the noses of a distracted national security apparatus.
7. Science-Denying HHS Assistant Secretary
How’s this for normal? Biden appointed a science-denying man as the first “female” four-star
admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The president selected Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender-identifying person and motivated LGBT ideologue, as the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Levine previously promoted the most extreme policies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during Covid and was responsible for thousands of excess deaths in Pennsylvania during his tenure as the head of the Pennsylvania Health Department. In his position as Assistant Secretary, Levine has consistently fought to deny biological realities and promote the sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children.
8. Pop Star as a Medical Expert
In keeping with Biden’s elevation of the unqualified, his administration turned to celebrities such as Olivia Rodrigo to persuade Americans to fawn over a flailing Anthony Fauci. In 2021, Rodrigo partnered with Fauci and Biden to produce videos encouraging youth vaccination. Her fans, along with the rest of the world, realized her expertise in healing hearts through music did not extend to medicine; her vaccination video remains one of her least-liked social media posts.
9. Senility and Lying
Probably the easiest return to normal would have been the election of a younger, coherent president who maintained some semblance of accountability to Americans. Instead, Biden offers regular doses of verbal incoherence, sleepiness, gaffes, uncomfortable whispers and shouts, and tumbles. These are all bad looks, but not as bad as the lies that spill out of the president on the daily, which The Federalist has tracked since his first day in office. Lying may be normal for Biden, but it shouldn’t be normal for the presidency, and neither should perceived physical and cognitive weakness on the world stage.
10. War on SCOTUS
It’s no surprise attacks on the Supreme Court have ramped up under the Biden administration. After all, this president evidently believes he’s above the law, and the court has disagreed, smacking down his administration on everything from student loans to Covid jab mandates. Not to mention other blows to the left during Biden’s tenure, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 303 Creative decision, and a university affirmative action takedown.
With the help of the media, the Biden administration has gotten bold about its plans to undercut and circumvent the court wherever it can. And the president is not alone; private universities will also be doing their best to dodge the law to keep supporting racial discrimination.
Samuel Boehlke is a rising senior in Mass Communication/Law and Policy at Concordia University Wisconsin and a current intern at The Federalist. He is Web Editor for CUW’s The Beacon and External Affairs Editor for Quaestus Journal. Reach him at sboehlkefdrlst@gmail.com or by DMs @vaguelymayo.
Viewers lost trust in CNN due to its left-wing bias and histrionic Covid reporting, according to a 2022 survey commissioned by the network. Despite collecting bogus awards for “fact-checking,” and “special achievements” for “placing a premium” on investigative reporting, the network failed to maintain the trust of the American people — to the point where its own internal survey exposed its epic shortcomings.
A partial copy of CNN’s survey was cited by Semafor’s Max Tani, who noted that the three highest causes of mistrust were “liberal bias,” the “Chris Cuomo situation,” and the network’s Covid coverage. According to Tani, the report showed respondents “across the ideological spectrum” lambasting CNN’s “dire” and “overly dramatic and sensational” reporting.
In utter detachment from the real world, legacy media toadies rewarded the untrustworthy network. CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who was central to the network’s Covid sensationalism and fake fact-checking, received an award for “excellence in political journalism” and was praised for “accurate information.” Meanwhile, the CNN team that reported from Chinese quarantine received an award named after a reporter murdered in the Greek Civil War.
News of the report comes as network CEO Chris Licht faces significant criticism for his response to CNN’s Covid coverage, which was aired in a feature by The Atlantic. In it, Licht — who reportedly “felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism” — admitted CNN’s coverage began with a desire to help people in a confusing pandemic era but was ultimately driven by “ratings.” He has since apologized for his remarks, but CNN’s own survey results suggest his statements were based on public sentiment and statistics known to the company.
Outside sources confirm trust in CNN is declining. A Statista survey released a few months before Licht’s hiring last year showed only 20 percent of Americans placed “a lot” of trust in CNN — and it hasn’t improved under the new CEO. In April, YouGov found that only 13 percent of U.S. adults consider CNN “very trustworthy.”
Samuel Boehlke is a rising senior in Mass Communication/Law and Policy at Concordia University Wisconsin and a current intern at The Federalist. He is Web Editor for CUW’s The Beacon and External Affairs Editor for Quaestus Journal. Reach him at sboehlkefdrlst@gmail.com or by DMs @vaguelymayo.
Nobody disagrees at this point that there is a plethora of excess deaths and a dearth of births, a trend that should be the number-one alarming public policy issue. Yet when any of us suggest that the gene therapy ubiquitously given to the world right around the time of the jump in these numbers might be responsible, people look at us like we are from Mars. However, it turns out, based on newly released FOIA documents from the CDC, that our government knew about and even anticipated massive reports of injuries from these shots from day one.
Throughout the past two years, the government and media have concocted a conspiracy theory that somehow the CDC’s own VAERS reporting is scammed with fraud by people who have nothing better to do with their lives but spend hours filling out fraudulent vaccine injury reports. They pretend it’s a sort of ex post facto anomaly that nobody expected and that has no credibility in their eyes. Except, as Hebrew University Professor Josh Guetzkow reveals, not only did the CDC know about the vaccine injuries blowing up VAERS at record levels (even before the general public had access to them), the agency contracted with defense contractor General Dynamics to handle the database in anticipation of record use. Then, when the vaccines were released, the CDC had to up the contract to account for even more entries, yet showed no moral qualms about continuing with the campaign without disclosing these revelations to the public.
Guetzkow, who has secured numerous FOIA’ed documents both in the U.S. and Israel throughout COVID, posted 69 pages of FOIA’ed documents and contracts from General Dynamics Information Technology to the CDC’s immunization safety office. Thanks to his work, we already know from the previous FOIA’ed documents that the CDC’s $9.45 million contract with General Dynamics in August 2020 stated that officials anticipated 1,000 adverse event reports a day, with 40% of them being serious. Yet, like a cold serial killer soullessly counting his casualty list, the CDC was completely fine with going through with this campaign, as if it were the price that had to be paid to worship the spirit of the age – the modern-day Moloch. However, this document shows that as early as Jan. 15 – when most people still could have avoided these shots – the CDC was aware of record-setting reports that crushed even the agency’s initial cold-hearted, morbid expectations.
As you can see from page 8 of the pdf, General Dynamics warned the CDC that VAERS had blown through the expected 1,000 cases per day and even reached a level above 4,500 – to the point that GD couldn’t process the data. Mind you, they were never concerned with the human toll, just the logistics of the contract labor. They predicted a need for “reforecasting of staffing needs” to process all these reports.
Already in December 2020, when the shots were only available for select people like doctors, there were over 19,000 reports and close to 344,000 website visits. It’s hard to see how this wasn’t organic from people genuinely in pain because there was no organized campaign in the United States to inform people of VAERS at the time. I myself (who obsessively focused on this) hadn’t heard of it until two months later.
By Feb. 15, General Dynamics reported a continued record-setting pace of reports and website visits, to the point that workers had to expand their VAERS ID reports to allow for seven digits instead of six. In April, officials reported that they had to hire an additional 200 staffers to deal with the backlog and continue to process 25,000 reports per week, well beyond the threshold they originally contracted for. As eligibility for the shots expanded for all age groups, they continued to process over 30,000 injury reports a week, yet the CDC never said a word about it. Not only did officials not take the products off the market, they began mandating them over late summer 2021, with some mandates that remain in place to this very day.
It’s nearly impossible to astroturf these sorts of injury reports. Clearly, our government saw how organic they were and how they coincided perfectly with the uptake of the vaccine. Indeed, the FDA had access to the infamous Pfizer document in Feb. 2021 – before almost any younger adult was vaccinated – showing that the shot killed over 1,200 people and was associated with over 1,400 categories of serious maladies that were chronicled in a list eight pages long.
Now, keep in mind that after the government observed all these adverse events, and after officials knew about the 7.7% clinical injury rate from the CDC’s own V-SAFE program, perfectly corroborating the VAERS data, they accelerated the approval of these shots for children and then the mandates for everyone. Emails released via FOIA show that in July 2021, when the shots should have been canceled, Peter Marks, head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, pressured Marion Gruber, then head of the office of vaccines research and review, to truncate the already accelerated timeline to fully approve the Comirnaty shot (which is still not commercially available 2.5 years later).
A copy of the July 19 email response from Marion Gruber is below:
A week after the infamous Aug. 23 approval, which triggered the mandates, Gruber resigned from the agency in protest. But notice how even Gruber couched her reticence to approve this thing in terms of not undermining “confidence in the vaccine,” rather than expressing actual concern this was already killing and maiming people in droves.
We’re at the point where at a minimum, the government doesn’t care how many people die from this experimentation. Dr. Tom Merritt, who was part of the Oxford University team who developed the AstraZeneca vaccine, best summed up the sentiment of the biomedical state toward the people when he admitted that those injured by the gene therapy were “collateral damage to the bigger scheme.” He added: “Some tragically died, a number had their lives changed forever. They believed in vaccines; now they don’t.”It’s all a matter of what the bigger scheme really is.
“It may be possible — if we can take off the tinfoil hat — that there is not a vast conspiracy,” Democrat Colin Allred of Texas scoffed at independent journalist Matt Taibbi during Thursday’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. But while Allred was busy deriding Taibbi and fellow witness, journalist Michael Shellenberger, the public was digesting the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” — which contained yet further proof that the government funds and leads a sprawling Censorship Complex.
Taibbi dropped the Twitter thread about an hour before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing began. And notwithstanding the breadth and depth of the players revealed in the 17-or-so earlier installments of the “Twitter Files,” Thursday’s reporting exposed even more government-funded organizations pushing Twitter to censor speech.
But yesterday’s thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” did more than merely expand the knowledge base of the various actors: It revealed that government-funded organizations sought the censorship of truthful speech by ordinary Americans.
In his prepared testimony for the subcommittee, Shellenberger spoke of the censorship slide he saw in reviewing the internal Twitter communications. “The bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from ‘countering terrorism’ to ‘countering extremism’ to ‘countering simple misinformation.’ Otherwise known as being wrong on the internet,” Shellenberger testified.
“The government no longer needs the predicate of calling you a terrorist or an extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity,” Shellenberger continued. “The only predicate it needs is the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”
Being “wrong” isn’t even a prerequisite for censorship requests, however, with the Virality Project headed out of the Stanford Internet Observatory reportedly pushing “multiple platforms” to censor “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.”
An excerpt showed this verboten category included “viral posts of individuals expressing vaccine hesitancy, or stories of true vaccine side effects,” which the so-called disinformation experts acknowledged might “not clearly” be “mis or disinformation, but it may be malinformation (exaggerated or misleading).”
Silencing such speech is bad enough, but the Virality Project “added to this bucket” of “true content” worthy of censorship: “true posts which could fuel hesitancy, such as individual countries banning certain vaccines.”
Let that sink in for a minute. The Virality Project — more on that shortly — pushed “multiple platforms” to take action against individuals posting true news reports of countries banning certain vaccines. And why? Because it might make individuals “hesitant” to receive a Covid shot.
So who is this overlord of information, the Virality Project?
The Stanford Internet Observatory reports that it launched the Virality Project in response to the coronavirus, to conduct “a global study aimed at understanding the disinformation dynamics specific to the COVID-19 crisis.” Stanford expanded the project in January 2020, “with colleagues at New York University, the University of Washington, the National Council on Citizenship, and Graphika.”
Beyond collaboration with state-funded universities, the Virality Project, in its own words, “built strong ties with several federal government agencies, most notably the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC, to facilitate bidirectional situational awareness around emerging narratives.” According to the Virality Project’s 2022 report, “Memes, Magnets, and Microchips Narrative Dynamics Around COVID-19 Vaccines,” “the CDC’s biweekly ‘COVID-19 State of Vaccine Confidence Insights’ reports provided visibility into widespread anti-vaccine and vaccine hesitancy narratives observed by other research efforts.”
The Virality Project’s report also championed its success in engaging six Big Tech platforms — Facebook (including Instagram), Twitter, Google (including YouTube), TikTok, Medium, and Pinterest — using a “ticket” system. The social media platforms would “review and act on” reports from the Virality Project, “in accordance with their policies.”
With the Virality Project working closely with the surgeon general and the CDC, which provided “vaccine hesitancy narratives” to the Stanford team, and the Stanford team then providing censorship requests to the tech giants, the government censorship loop was closed.
Censorship requests were not limited to Covid-19, however, with the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Election Integrity Partnership playing a similar role in providing Twitter — and presumably other Big Tech companies — requests to remove supposed election disinformation.
Earlier “Twitter Files” established that the Election Integrity Partnership was a conduit for censorship requests to Twitter for other government-funded entities, such as the Center for Internet Security. And in addition to receiving millions in government grants, during the 2020 election, the Center for Internet Security partnered with the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security — again completing the circle of government censorship we saw at play during the 2020 election cycle.
The groups involved in both the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project are also connected by government funding. The Election Integrity Partnership boasted that it “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Both Graphika and the University of Washington also partnered with Stanford for the Virality Project, along with individuals from New York University and the National Council on Citizenship.
Beyond the taxpayer-funded state universities involved in the projects, Graphika received numerous Department of Defense contracts and a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.” Graphika also received a nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping and had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.
The Atlantic Council likewise receives federal funding, including a grant from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center awarded to its Digital Forensics Research Lab. And Stanford rakes in millions in federal grants as well.
The government funding of these censorship conduits is not the only scandal exposed by the “Twitter Files.” Rather, the internal communications of the social media giant also revealed that several censorship requests rested on bogus research.
But really, that is nothing compared to what Thursday’s “Twitter Files” revealed: a request for the censorship of truthful information, including news that certain Covid shots had been banned in some countries. And that censorship request came from a group of so-called disinformation experts closely coordinating with the government and with several partners funded with government grants — just as was the case during the 2020 election.
This all goes to show that sometimes there is a vast conspiracy at play and that the problem is not that someone is donning a tinfoil hat, but that he’s buried his head in the sand.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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Dr. Robert Redfield testified before Congress Wednesday, noting three suspicious events at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that strengthened his long-held conviction that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab — a belief, he says, that got him boxed out of transformative conversations.
Whereas there is now growing recognition that COVID-19 “most likely” originated in the Chinese Communist Party-controlled Wuhan Institute of Virology, where dangerous gain-of-function experiments were routinely performed on coronaviruses, saying so in recent years prompted derision and censorship.
Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reportedly received death threats from his fellow scientists for noting that human error and meddling may have resulted in the spread of a virus that claimed tens of millions of lives worldwide.
“I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” he told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
When addressing the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on March 8, he did not hold back.
Redfield noted there were three things in particular that took place early in the pandemic that bolstered his suspicion that COVID-19 came from a lab.
First, “they deleted the sequences. Highly irregular. Researchers don’t like to do that.”
The New York Times reported that early in the pandemic, over 200 data entries from the genetic sequencing of early cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan were erased from an online scientific database. The early suspicion was that these sequences were deleted because they revealed that the virus that ravaged the world may have predated the alleged outbreak at the wet marked in December 2019.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, was able to track down 13 of the sequences online and determined that it “seems likely that the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence.”
Chinese researchers had requested that the National Institutes of Health delete the sequences, and the NIH complied, reported the Washington Examiner.
Redfield appeared to suggest that the deletion of sequences took place as early as September 2019.
Second, Redfield said, “they changed the command and control at the lab from civilian control to military control. Highly unusual.”
In 2021, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) noted during a meeting of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, “New testimony now received by my committee reveals the Chinese military potentially took over this lab, not in January 2020 as was reported, but earlier in 2019. … The Chinese military were actually in the facility at the time of 2017. That signals the CCP was worried about something at the lab before the world even knew what COVID-19 was. Why else would they put the Chinese military in charge?”
The State Department noted in early 2021 that “the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
Major General Chen Wei, China’s top biowarfare expert, formally took over the BSL-4 lab from a local communist party committee president on Jan. 31, 2020, sparking concerns that the virus not only originated in the lab but was linked to a biowarfare program.
Third, “which is very telling, they let a contractor redo the ventilation system in that laboratory. So I think, clearly, there was strong evidence that a significant event that happened in that laboratory in September.”
Redfield ruffled feathers in March 2021 when he went on CNN and said, “I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory — escaped. … Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out.”
Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC Director, talks about three suspicious events that took place at the Wuhan lab in September 2019:
"In Sept. 2019, three things happened in that lab. One is they deleted the sequences. Highly irregular, researchers don't like to do that. The… pic.twitter.com/nIT5b96AbE
Redfield told the subcommittee that retired National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins both sought to push a “single narrative” about the virus’ origins.
Redfield noted that he “made it very clear in January [2020] to all of them why we had to aggressively pursue this and I let them know, as a virologist, that I didn’t see that this was anything like SARS or MERS because they never learned how to transmit human to human.”
“I felt that this virus was too infectious for humans,” said Redfield. “There was a lot of evidence that lab actually published in 2014 that they put the ACE2 receptor into humanized mice so it could infect human tissue. I think, you know, we had to really seriously go after the fact it came from the lab and they knew that that was how I was thinking, although I thought we had to go after both hypotheses.”
Even though Redfield helmed the CDC at the time, Redfield intimated that Fauci elected not to involve him in the controversial Feb. 1, 2020, conference call with top virologists on account of his insistence on a possible lab origin.
TheBlaze previously reported that Fauci appeared keen to push the zoonotic origins theory, both on the conference call and in the correspondence that followed.
According to congressional investigators, just days after the call, Fauci commissioned an influential 2020 study suggesting COVID-19 was not the result of a Chinese lab leak. The former NIAID director also reportedly edited and provided final approval for the document, which he later cited on the national stage without noting his involvement.
Redfield revealed he was not made aware of his exclusion from the conference call or the call itself until the correspondences was released following a FOIA request.
When asked why Fauci and others excluded him, Redfield answered, “Because I had a different point of view and I was told they made a decision that they would keep this confidential until they came up with a single narrative, which I will argue is antithetical to science.”
“This was an a priori decision that there’s one point of view that we’re going to put out there, and anyone who doesn’t agree with it is going to be sidelined,” Redfield told Congress. “And as I say, I was only the CDC director, and I was sidelined.”
Former CDC Director: Coming Up With a Single Narrative Is Antithetical to Science
Dr. Redfield, who was the CDC director at the time, was excluded from a February 2020 call with doctors Fauci, Collins, and others discussing the origins of COVID.
Imagine not only having injected 5.5 billion people with multiple doses of the failed COVID shots, but destroying lives and denying humane treatment on account of them. Now imagine knowing everything we know about the efficacy and safety of these novel therapies and still forging ahead with more doses and now RSV and flu shots built upon the same platform. Bad enough, right? Well, it gets even worse. Fauci now concedes that all respiratory viral vaccines are garbage, including those for flu, coronavirus, and RSV. Yet the policies never match the new admissions, as they race to accelerate the new flu and RSV shots within months.
In probably the most impactful story ignored by the media in recent weeks, Fauci co-authored an academic paper in Cell last month, along with the senior scientific adviser of NIAID, absolutely dumping on not just coronavirus vaccines, but all respiratory vaccines. It was a paper that could have been written by censored doctors like Ryan Cole, Peter McCullough, and Pierre Kory, and it reveals that Fauci indeed had a deep knowledge all along of the shortcomings of suboptimal antibody responses generated by this genre of vaccine.
First, the authors concede that flu vaccines are often only 14% effective and have never improved over the years. “After more than 60 years of experience with influenza vaccines, very little improvement in vaccine prevention of infection has been noted.”
Then they go on to admit that the vaunted COVID shots are in the same boat. “Deficiencies in these vaccines reminiscent of influenza vaccines have become apparent. The vaccines for these two very different viruses have common characteristics: they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection.”
Remember, to this very day, we still have children being kicked out of day-cares, people being denied organ transplants, and hospital workers losing their jobs on account of a premise that Fauci quite blatantly admits was false all along.
Fauci and company demonstrate the common thread between the failures of coronavirus, flu, and RSV vaccines in that respiratory viruses do not lend themselves to a blood-based antibody response, as so many of the doctors on my podcast have been saying for two years.
In stark contrast, the non-systemic respiratory viruses such as influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV tend to have significantly shorter incubation periods and rapid courses of viral replication. They replicate predominantly in local mucosal tissue, without causing viremia, and do not significantly encounter the systemic immune system or the full force of adaptive immune responses, which take at least 5–7 days to mature, usually well after the peak of viral replication and onward transmission to others. … As a result, the non-systemically replicating respiratory viruses, apparently including SARS-CoV-2, tend to repeatedly re-infect people over their lifetimes without ever eliciting complete and durable protection.
Fauci et al. ask the question: “If natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection, how can we expect vaccines, especially systemically administered non-replicating vaccines, to do so?”
Say what?!!! This got me banned from Twitter for six months! Fauci is acknowledging that this genre of vaccine – before we even explore the dangers with spike protein, mRNA, and lipid nano particles – simply does not target the virus in the respiratory tract and in fact never achieves immunity! You can keep getting the virus again and again, as we now see. But nothing that he is positing is new. This is not some new revelation. From reading the piece, it’s clear Fauci understood this principle of immunology all along. Yet to this day, there are still COVID shot (and even flu shot) mandates looming over the military, medical settings, schools, and other important places.
It’s not just a lack of efficacy on transmission. As we’ve been warning for two years based on doctors who got this right from day one, whenever you have a leaky, waning vaccine built upon suboptimal antibodies with a rapidly mutating virus, it creates immune tolerance and imprinting so that the misfiring of the immune response actually generates negative efficacy. While this paper does not officially acknowledge negative efficacy, it does acknowledge the concern of “disease tolerance” and “immune tolerance,” which stem from “immune defense mechanisms that allow hosts to ‘accept’ infection and other antigenic stimuli to optimize survival.”
Given that we now see endless negative efficacy associated with the COVID shots and numerous studies showing a misfiring of antibody classes, why is there no concern that this shot and other respiratory viral shots are causing immune tolerance leading to negative efficacy? Numerous flu shot studies warn about the shots tamping down T cell responses and making people more vulnerable to infection. Moderna’s clinical trial of COVID shots for babies seemed to be associated with a dramatic increase in RSV cases, which seemed to play out globally during the off-season surge of RSV in the summer of 2021 and the early fall of 2022.
So this is not just about failure to stop transmission, but also about clinical outcomes as well as negative efficacy. A Canadian study of vaccine efficacy during the 2018-2019 flu season found negative efficacy for some age groups because “vaccine mismatch [a form of original antigenic sin] may have negatively interacted with imprinted immunity.”
Despite all the fanfare around the flu shot, a 2005 study published in JAMA soberingly found that there was no correlation between “increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group.” The only mortality decline researchers discovered was against H3N2 in those born before the 1968 pandemic because of natural immunity, not the vaccines.
Despite everything we now know (and people like Fauci clearly knew for years), you can’t go into a pharmacy for half the year without being harassed to get a flu shot, and many schools and places of work strongly encourage if not mandate it. But do any of these fake medical practitioners even understand the issues with suboptimal antibodies, negative efficacy of the flu shots, and immune suppression of T cells?
Fauci and company conclude the paper with a shocking concession about these long-standing respiratory vaccines and the ones currently being studied, including RSV vaccines:
Challenges to developing next-generation respiratory vaccines are many and complex (Table 2). We must better understand why multiple sequential mucosal infections with the same circulating respiratory viruses, spread out over decades of life, fail to elicit natural protective immunity, especially with viruses that lack significant antigenic drift (e.g., RSV and parainfluenzaviruses), if we are to rationally develop vaccines that prevent them. We must think outside the box to make next-generation vaccines that elicit immune protection against viruses that survive in human populations because of their ability to remain significantly outside of the full protective reach of human innate and adaptive immunity.
Any sane person reading these statements does not get the impression that Fauci believes we are just weeks away from cracking the code on RSV shots. He believes the challenges are “many and complex,” are prone to mutation with “antigenic drift,” and require “outside the box” thinking to “make next-generation vaccines.”
With remarks like this from the undisputed champion of the vaccine movement, how are we to accept an RSV and flu shot – not just on the traditional platform but on the dangerous mRNA platform – being forced upon us within months through expedited review? How do we not have legal safeguards in place to subject Moderna, essentially created and funded originally by DARPA, to liability and to prevent all mandates, coercion, and pressure to take it? How do we not have a better pharmacovigilance system in place? How do we not fix what went wrong with the trials for COVID? Then again, the FDA plans to keep producing and administering the same COVID shots that are for variants that don’t exist, which Fauci acknowledges in this piece is a function of the problematic antigenic drift.
Do facts no longer matter? Do human lives no longer matter? And for what? For the flu and RSV that we’ve lived with for decades?
Despite everything we are seeing about respiratory viral vaccines failing and mRNA not staying in the shoulder muscle, the FDA has granted Moderna “breakthrough therapy” designation for its RSV mRNA shot. This is a status usually granted for targeted treatment for deadly ailments that allows the FDA to speed up approval process, yet it is now being used for a virus that’s been around for decades and with a biological platform that everyone agrees has just failed. Pfizer and GSK also have RSV shots in the pipeline, and both Moderna and Pfizer have mRNA flu shots likely to be released later this year.It’s quite evident at this point that all of the safety nets protecting the public from Joseph Mengele-like experimentation have been breached. Our will to fight back is all we have left.
The Washington Post admitted Monday that “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters” — years after the Post and other corporate media water-carriers pushed the false story that former President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate, due in part to Russian interference via bots on Twitter targeting U.S. social media users. The admission cites a New York University study that found “there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
Media treatment of the non-story followed a predictable, three-step process that’s become the propaganda press’s MO: Spread a false claim, control the narrative while crushing dissent with bogus “fact checks,” and then admit the truth only after the news cycle has achieved its intended purpose.
How the Russian Bots Story Followed the Playbook
In 2016, then-Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook launched the conspiracy theory that then-candidate Trump was in cahoots with Russia and colluding together to steal the 2016 election. One dossier full of bunk allegations commissioned by the Clinton campaign later, the entire media establishment, in tandem with a politicized intelligence community, was running with the Russia collusion hoax.
One of the many conspiracy theories thrown at the wall was that Russia was influencing U.S. voters via social media, including through armies of “bot” accounts. As my colleague Joy Pullmann has noted, U.S. intelligence agencies propelled that claim with an “intelligence community assessment” on Jan. 6, 2017, “signed off publicly by the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA concluding that Trump’s election was boosted by Russian social media content farms.”
Regime media ran with it the same narrative before and after that assessment that turned out to be false:
The Washington Post: “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” November 2016.
Politico Magazine: “How Russia Wins an Election” (spoiler: “the Kremlin’s troll army swarmed the web to spread disinformation and undermine trust in the electoral system,” the piece says), December 2016.
NPR: “How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election,” April 2017.
New York Times: “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” September 2017.
Mother Jones: “Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election — Including Many Likely From Russia,” October 2017.
The “Twitter Files” revealed just weeks ago that media pressure on this story, combined with threats from elected Democrats, were successful in getting Twitter to obey U.S. intelligence agency requests for information suppression, even though Twitter executives couldn’t find any evidence of coordinated Russian disinformation campaigns on their platform.
31.Twitter soon settled on its future posture.
In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.”
Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” pic.twitter.com/Jc94kEg2KR
Hilariously, Tim Starks, the same writer who wrote WaPo’s admission this week that Russian bots had “little influence” on the election, had written a 2019 piece for Politico titled “Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was far vaster than believed.”
While media outlets were running cover for the story, they slapped “fact” “checks” on those who challenged the narrative, including the U.S. president. And (you guessed it) they cited the intel community’s Jan. 6, 2017 report as evidence — the same one now called into question by The Washington Post’s latest admission.
Those allegations, along with several other now-debunked claims about Trump-Russia collusion, were the basis for a special counsel investigation and a presidential impeachment, all part of a narrative aimed at kneecapping Trump’s time in office. The Mueller investigation even indicted a Russian bot farm for election interference.
Only now — after Trump has been successfully hounded out of the White House, now that almost half of likely voters have been convinced that Russia probably “changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” and everyone else has forgotten about the story — does The Washington Post come around to admitting that those troublesome Russian bots didn’t really do much after all.
5 Other Times Corporate Media Followed the Same Strategy
The Twitter bots story was just one of many instances of regime media running with the same strategy. They do it almost daily, but here are just five of the most egregious examples in recent memory.
Covid: From masks to lockdowns to vaccines, we were hounded by media bullhorns for years about the untouchable efficacy of every recommendation the “experts” tossed our way. Those who resisted, in person or on social media, were vilified and censored. Workers lost jobs, kids fell behind in school, non-Covid medical patients were denied potentially life-saving treatments and surgeries, neighbors shunned each other, and people were forced to get experimental injections they didn’t want.
Only after the reigning narrative had been used to quash its intended targets for two years did its messengers admit the truths the rest of us had been saying from the beginning.
Inflation: Despite the obvious pitfalls of Covid-era decisions to shut down the entire nation’s economy and then hand out free money to everyone screwed over by government lockdowns, regime media insisted that inflation wasn’t happening under the newly minted Biden administration. CNBC told us to “Ignore ‘hysterical people’ — inflation is not here to stay, economist says.”
“Inflation isn’t a real danger,” insisted WaPo. “The Inflation Scare Doesn’t Match Reality,” said Forbes. The New York Times offered “179 Reasons You Probably Don’t Need to Panic About Inflation.”
Now that we’re undoubtedly experiencing the worst inflation in four decades, the talking point has changed to “actually, inflation is good.”
The Steele dossier: After British agent Christopher Steele was hired by the Clinton campaign’s opposition research firm to write now-debunked rumors about Trump in what became known as the Steele dossier, Steele shopped the story out to media outlets, which ran with the hoax. The New York Times even got a Pulitzer for it. The information in the dossier, which corporate media coverage helped legitimize, was used by the Obama FBI to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Journalists who questioned the concocted narrative were called conspiracy theorists.
After the damage to the Trump campaign (and eventually, the Trump administration) was done, corporate media admitted, in a laughable understatement, that the “Arrest of Steele dossier source forces some news outlets to reexamine their coverage.”
Irreversible surgeries for gender dysphoria: Corporate media helped fuel the epidemic of sexual confusion giving rise to disfiguring surgeries and hormone “treatments” for people, including children, with gender dysphoria. Outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post pounced on anyone who challenged the dogma that pumping teenagers with off-label hormones and dicing up their genitalia was a totally safe and normal thing to be celebrated. People like The Federalist’s own John Daniel Davidson are still locked out of their social media accounts for telling the truth about the transgender craze.
Sandwiched between op-eds decrying critics of transgenderism, The Times allows no one but itself to wonder, belatedly: “Is There a Cost?“
Hunter Biden laptop: When the New York Post published damning revelations about the Biden family’s overseas business dealings shortly before the 2020 presidential election, legacy outlets smeared the story as “disinformation” and a Russian info op.
“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” parroted Politico. CBS’s Lesley Stahl called the laptop “discredited.” NPR told readers, “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.” The Post and others who shared the story had their social media accounts frozen or their posts taken down.
A year and a half later, The New York Times quietly admitted — in the 24th paragraph of an article about Hunter Biden’s taxes — that “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop … [was] authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” By then, the 2020 election was safely in Joe Biden’s hands.
Don’t think those six instances are the only times regime media have run the same playbook. By now, it’s their standard practice.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
The Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson for criticizing the Covid shots, according to newly released White House emails.
President Joe Biden’s administration actively pressured Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson for criticizing the Covid shots, according to internal White House communication records obtained by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.
In an email dated April 14, 2021, then-senior adviser to the president’s Covid response team, Andrew Slavitt, voiced dissatisfaction to a Facebook official that a video of Carlson questioning the left’s universal demand that people get the Covid jab was “Number one” on the platform, to which said official responded that they’d look into the matter. Later that same day, the Facebook representative informed the White House that while the “Tucker Carlson video does not qualify for removal under [Facebook’s] policies,” the company would label the clip with “a pointer to more authoritative COVID information” and work to limit its reach on the platform.
Facebook’s efforts did not meet the administration’s demands for greater censorship, however. In response to the representative, White House Director of Digital Strategy Robert Flaherty questioned how Carlson’s video didn’t violate Facebook’s existing policies and pressured the company to turn over information on the efficacy of its censorship practices.
“How was this not violative? The second half of the segment is raising conspiracy theories about the government hiding that all vaccines aren’t effective,” Flaherty claimed. “Moreover, you say reduced and demoted. What does that mean? There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many? How effective is that?”
“Not for nothing but last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection,” Flaherty added in an apparent reference to the platform’s handling of claims pertaining to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and subsequent riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the Biden White House’s habit of using Big Tech to silence dissenting voices on Covid-related information didn’t just stop at Carlson. A separate batch of emails released by the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general reveals a concentrated endeavor between the administration and Facebook to reduce the “virality of vaccine hesitancy content,” even if such posts contained factually accurate information.
“As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation,” a Facebook representative told Slavitt in a March 21, 2021, email. “This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level … but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking. We’ll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content.”
In addition to Facebook, Twitter was also a major player in the collusion efforts between the federal government and Big Tech to further squash free speech online. In an email dated August 11, 2022, Flaherty admonished Twitter for allowing posts contradicting White House claims to circulate on the platform, writing that “if your product is appending misinformation to our tweets[,] that seems like a pretty fundamental issue.”
Flaherty separately accused Twitter in a December 2021 email of “Total Calvinball” and “bending over backwards” to tolerate disfavored speech after the company refused to comply with demands from the administration to censor a video.
“This case is about the Biden Administration’s blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its collusion with social media companies [to] suppress speech it disagrees with,” said Missouri AG Andrew Bailey in a statement. “I will always fight back against unelected bureaucrats who seek to indoctrinate the people of this state by violating our constitutional right to free and open debate.”
The bombshell emails come as a result of an investigation launched last year by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and then-Missouri AG and now-U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt to uncover collusion efforts between the federal government and Big Tech companies to censor Covid-related posts they deemed misinformation. In addition to obtaining communication records unveiling such corruption, the investigation has scored numerous legal wins allowing Louisiana and Missouri to depose high-ranking administration officials such as Anthony Fauci under oath about their role in these efforts.
According to a transcript of Fauci’s November testimony, the man claiming to “represent science” somehow couldn’t recall relevant information about his role in the federal government’s disastrous Covid response “at least 174 times.” The deposition ranged from topics such as Fauci’s bid to smear authors of “The Great Barrington Declaration,” to his role in attempting to “discredit any theory” that Covid resulted from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
A Loudoun County father, whose arrest at a June 2021 school board meeting was used by the Biden administration to justify a politicized attack on concerned parents, was found not guilty of trespassing on Wednesday.
Law enforcement arrested Jon Tigges at a Loudoun school board meeting on June 22, 2021, after he tried expressing concerns about the school district’s “moral decay.” A Virginia district judge found Tigges guilty in October of 2021. Loudoun Circuit Judge Douglas Fleming Jr., however, cleared Tigges of any wrongdoing. Fleming determined that Tigges not only had a First Amendment right to attend the heated meeting but also that the superintendent who shut down the official gathering last summer had no right to declare it an “unlawful assembly.”
“My thanks to God for justice,” Tigges wrote on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon.
Tigges was one of the more than 250 people who had signed up to speak during the public comment section of the Loudoun County School Board meeting that summer night. He intended to voice opposition to the board’s new transgender policy proposal, which mandated that employees use students’ so-called “preferred pronouns” and preferred restrooms regardless of their sex. Before Tigges could speak, School Board Chairwoman Brenda Sheridan called off the meeting, and the now-recently fired Superintendent Scott Ziegler declared the gathering an “unlawful assembly.” Ziegler ordered the hundreds of people waiting to express their outrage at the government school district to vacate the premises or risk arrest.
Tigges refused to leave.
“I just felt led to realize that we could still speak,” Tigges told The Federalist last year. “It’s a public forum, a public room. It had been scheduled until seven o’clock for people to speak. I stood up to encourage folks to stay and if they had something to say whether they were on the left or the right, didn’t matter. They’d be heard and we’d respect one another and do so and so people started doing that without any amplification at all and you could hear them fine because it was a peaceful assembly.”
Despite Tigges’ claim on the First Amendment, police officers handcuffed, arrested, and charged him with trespassing.
Two arrests made at the Loudoun County, Virginia school board meeting after it was declared an unlawful assembly and some parents here to protest against critical race theory and a transgender policy refused to leave right away #CriticalRaceTheorypic.twitter.com/dsZDrqJ0Gp
Tigges’ arrest in June of 2021 was used by the National School Boards Association (NSBA), in collusion with the Biden White House, to justify the smearing of concerned parents as “domestic terrorists” who required punishment from federal law enforcement. In September of 2021, the NSBA sent its infamous complaint letter, secretly solicited by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, to the Department of Justice, which sparked a politicized attack on parents who wanted to speak out against corrupt school boards.
“Despite this victory, I have serious concerns about where we are as a country. We’ve been subverted by a darkness that is spilling out in rot at all levels and in both political parties,” Tigges tweeted after the decision. “Nothing will change until We the People value conviction over comfort.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Nearly three years after bureaucrats shuttered businesses, forced people to stay home, and threatened fines for those who didn’t comply, all in the name of preventing the spread of a respiratory virus, the Covid regime is quietly reviving the “forever pandemic.”
Ahead of the midterms, the Biden administration, Democrats, and corporate media championed the end of years of pandemic panic.
“The pandemic is over,” President Joe Biden declared during a “60 Minutes” interview in September.
The Covid regime’s grip on the country may have loosened during the heat of the 2022 election cycle, which gave Americans the false hope that everything was finally returning to normal. Shortly after the election, however, when Democrats realized the Republican Party isn’t as big of a threat as expected, fearmongering about a “surge” in the nearly three-year-old pandemic thanks to a new variant resumed.
“Should Everyone Be Masking Again?” one Atlantic writer inquired in December. His article is littered with comments from “experts” who eagerly and unanimously answered “yes.”
“You really should mask up again, says infectious disease expert: The tripledemic is hitting ‘too fast and too furious,’” one CNBC headline blared a few days before Christmas.
“The ‘Tripledemic’ Holiday: How to Fly More Safely (Hint: Wear a Mask),” The New York Times wrote.
When corporate media mouthpieces aren’t virtue signaling about staying home on New Year’s Eve, alleging that emergency rooms are “packed and doctors are rationing care,” they are offering favorable coverage of communist China’s forced lockdowns and wondering aloud why certain counties aren’t heeding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations to mask communities with “high” levels of virus transmission.
Despite the legitimate scrutiny the CDC has received for its bureaucratic malfeasance, its Director Rochelle Walensky all but confirmed the agency’s commitment to reintroducing protocols that, according to the science, don’t stop infection from spreading.
“We wanted you to put your masks away, not to throw your masks out,” Walensky said in an interview with NPR in early December.
Public schools all around the nation, similarly, are backsliding. Evidence indicates that forced masking takes a toll on children’s ability to learn and speak. That hasn’t stopped some of the largest school districts in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Boston from reintroducing forced masking for the beginning of the spring semester.
“We don’t think that learning will stop or that students will be inherently prohibited from learning,” Philadelphia School District Superintendent Tony Watlington Sr. told NBC.
Some cities such as Oakland have decided to reinstate mask mandates for government buildings. Others are contemplating a return to masks at the behest of so-called “infectious disease experts.”
Bureaucrats justify these useless and harmful mandates under the claim that the rise of RSV, the flu, and Covid cases could, combined, overwhelm local hospitals. Sound familiar? That’s the same excuse bureaucrats used to extend “two weeks to flatten the curve” to keep the U.S. locked down for most of 2020.
Mask mandates aren’t the only indicator that the Covid regime is trying to claw its way back into the driver’s seat. Biden, who smeared former President Donald Trump as xenophobic for introducing a similar policy in 2020, quietly enacted testing restrictions on travelers from Covid-plagued China last week.
Furthermore, Anthony Fauci, the now-retired former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was mostly absent from TV screens for months leading up to the midterms, was back on corporate media shows shortly after Election Day telling Americans what to do with their lives.
Republicans have threatened to hold Fauci and other “forever pandemic” spokesmen accountable for the havoc they wreaked on the economy and Americans’ health and education. But while the GOP, which only holds a razor-thin majority in the House, is distracted by infighting, the Covid regime is emboldened to further encroach on Americans’ lives once more.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
The White House press corps exploded Tuesday after press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre berated the Daily Caller’s White House correspondent Diana Glebova.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was partaking in a press briefing when he went to step away from the podium. Glebova said she had asked several times what Fauci had done to investigate the origins of the virus, prompting Jean-Pierre to step back to the podium and snap at Glebova.
“Hold on one second, we have a process here. I’m not calling on people who yell. You’re being disrespectful to your colleagues and you’re being disrespectful to our guest. I will not call on you if you yell, and also you’re taking time off the clock,” she said.
The Grio reporter April Ryan also told her she was “being disrespectful.”
Glebova tried to respond but Jean-Pierre immediately silenced her, saying she would not get into a “back and forth with you.” Glebova then said to Jean-Pierre that she “calls on the same people all the time.” As Jean-Pierre then tried to step away, the New York Post’s Steven Nelson tried to defend Glebova, as did Simon Ateba from Africa News Today.
“She’s asking a good question, she’s asking a very good question,” Ateba said.
“You need to call on people across the room, she has a valid question, she’s asking about the origins of COVID,” Ateba said, prompting Jean-Pierre to head back to the podium and nastily say she heard the question but would not respond.
Daily Caller's @DianaGlebova tries to ask Dr. Fauci about what he did to investigate the origins of covid and Jean-Pierre shuts her down.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into 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 President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into 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 President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
Vincent Zhou, the world-class figure skater forced to pull out of the Olympics because of COVID, can thank Anthony Fauci and our COVID-crazed media for his withdrawal.
In an agonizing Instagram post, Zhou expressed shock at the positive test, saying:
“It seems pretty unreal that of all the people, it would happen to myself. … I have been doing everything in my power to stay free of COVID since the start of the pandemic. I’ve taken all the precautions I can. I’ve isolated myself so much that the loneliness I felt in the last month or two has been crushing at times.”
His story is heart-wrenching not only because of his compelled withdrawal from the individual competition — and the loneliness he endured — but because our “public health authorities” lied to Zhou, leading him to do exactly the opposite of what he should have been doing to build up his immune system before the Winter Games.
Maybe nothing could have protected him — he was, of course, fully vaccinated — but the safest course would have been to expose himself to everything in 2021, not be the Boy in the Bubble. If only he’d gotten omicron back in December, like everybody else, his immune system wouldn’t have been a sitting duck for the tiniest whiff of COVID once he got to Beijing.
As Dylan H. Morris, a postdoctoral RNA virus researcher at UCLA, put it: “If you want to stay out of the hospital, giving your immune system a preview of the virus is valuable, even if that preview isn’t perfectly accurate.”
A few months into the pandemic, two basic models emerged for responding to COVID:
1) Make it endemic. Also known as “herd immunity” or, pejoratively, “Let ‘er rip!” Georgia and Florida, among other states, cautiously followed that path, as did the nation of Sweden.
2) Lock down the populace in order to prevent a single COVID molecule from ever drifting within 10 yards of a human being. Remember “Fifteen days to stop the spread!”? In the blue states, two weeks became two years — finally being abandoned this week only because Democrats fear the coming elections.
RESULT: Places that pursued the endemic route did no worse, and often quite a bit better, than the fascistlockdown states. Apart from preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed when the virus first hit New York, no benefit was derived from strict COVID policies.
The reason the virus hit so hard in 2020 was that our immune systems had never encountered anything like COVID before. “[T]he population was immunologically naive,” explained statistician Philippe Lemoine, “which means that nobody had immunity against it.” It’s the same reason Native Americans were annihilated by viruses that Europeans had lived with for centuries. Now their immune systems recognize those viruses, too.
Training your immune system to recognize the virus, through vaccination or the real thing, reduces the severity and duration of future infections. Additional exposures give the body practice dealing with the various twists and turns of each new variant. Avoiding contact with viruses to protect your immune system is like avoiding weight-lifting to protect your muscles.
The Scientist magazine, among others, has pointed out that there’s little reason to believe that omicron is actually less dangerous than delta; it just seems so because our immune systems now recognize COVID and are able to quickly kill it.
Zhou might have known all this, but whenever epidemiologists tried to tell us that, our “public health authorities” and doomsday media buried the dissenters in scorn and calumny. Back on Oct. 4, 2020, Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University produced The Great Barrington Declaration, pushing the endemic solution. Soon, thousands of scientists had signed the paper. Today, nearly 1 million have.
Four days later, on Oct. 8, 2020, Francis Collins, President Trump’s director of the NIH, emailed “The Science” Fauci, frantically warning that the declaration was getting too much attention! He urged a rapid response to discredit the signatories — one a Nobel Prize-winner in chemistry — and “take down” the paper’s ideas.
“The Science” permits no debate! (Though I suppose we’re lucky Collins merely called the renowned epidemiologists “fringe,” and not “white supremacists.”)
Governors, like Ron DeSantis in Florida, who listened to the epidemiologists rather than “public health authorities” were reviled by our media, amid florid predictions of disaster.
In April 2020, when Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia began lifting COVID restrictions, the Atlantic magazine blasted him with the headline: “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.” Longtime reporter Ron Fournier wrote: “Mark this day. Because two and three weeks from now, the Georgia death toll is blood on his hands.” (Take note, deplorables: Trump jumped on the bandwagon and publicly criticized Gov. Kemp for opening up, too.)
RESULTS: A month later, COVID cases in both states had declined, while cases continued to rise in the majority of other states.
Maybe that was a fluke. What’s the final score, two years later?
As of a week ago, among all 50 states, Georgia was ranked 15th in age-adjusted COVID deaths, well below communist-controlled New York and New Jersey. Florida was in the bottom half of all states, coming in at No. 31. Only 19 states did better.
As for Sweden, MSNBC and President Trump spoke as one in denouncing that country’s refusal to shut down. On April 20, 2020, Trump tweeted that Sweden was “paying heavily for its decision not to lock down.” A week ago, Sweden ranked 20th out of 31 nations in Europe in COVID deaths. Only 11 countries did better.
Even a tie score should go to the free states because their citizens didn’t have to stop living, learning, eating in restaurants, going to concerts, athletic events and on and on.
Not only did Armageddon not ensue in the free states, but their populations’ immune systems aren’t at risk of collapsing the next time a germ wafts their way. You know all those weird allergies to things like peanuts that didn’t exist 20 years ago? Wait until the kids who’ve spent their childhoods in masks encounter the Earth’s atmosphere again!
Naturally, there will be no consequences for our “public health authorities” who imposed cruel mandates and squelched opposing views: You can’t sue the government.
The rule should be that whenever our rulers claim emergency powers to impose draconian measures on the populace, they forfeit sovereign immunity. I know some epidemiologists who would be good expert witnesses for the lawsuits.
Joe Biden has been in the Oval Office (or that weird set in the Eisenhower building’s South Court auditorium with the greenscreen windows) for a year now, and he’s already managed to make his short presidency known for a long line-up of scandals, botches, and slip-ups.
It’s too hard to narrow the list down to one top failure, although his disgracefully handled Afghanistan withdrawal may be the most sobering and inflation may be the one that played the biggest role in Biden’s tanking approval ratings. Even though Biden’s mess-ups tally up to far more than 12, it’s not hard to remember a Biden-enabled disaster for every month of the septuagenarian’s first year at the stern … or in the basement.
January: Biden’s Radical First Week
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed a list of radically left-wing executive orders, including an order requiring that schools must ignore the biological differences between male and female students from the athletic field to the bathroom if they wish to continue receiving federal funding. In Biden’s first week, Press Secretary Jen Psaki also signaled the administration’s plans to reinstate federal funding for abortions around the world with the reversal of the Mexico City policy, and the new president canceled the Keystone XL pipeline.
As Tristan Justice reported at the time, “Biden’s first 48 hours in office have launched the new administration with 17 executive orders, more than were issued in the first month of their presidencies by Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton combined.”
February: Biden’s CDC Worked to Keep Schools Closed
In February, Biden’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced strict reopening guidelines that would keep many schools around the country shut down. “Only K-12 schools in cities and areas with low or moderate virus transmission can fully reopen for in-person learning, as long as physical distancing and mask-wearing is enforced,” Jordan Boyd reported on Feb. 12. “Any transmission rate beyond what is designated as moderate requires hybrid learning or ‘reduced attendance,’ limiting which children are allowed in the classroom at the same time.”
On the same day, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted that far-left teachers unions that have worked to keep students out of school buildings over the course of the Covid pandemic had influence when the CDC created its school reopening guidelines.
March: Working With Corporations to Create Vax Passports
As The Washington Post first reported, the Biden White House spent the month of March plotting with corporations to develop a “vaccine passport” system to force Americans to show their Covid papers in order to participate fully in society. “The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass,” the Post noted.
April: Biden Debuts Radical Social Spending Plan
At the end of April, Biden announced his “American Families Plan,” a list of far-left spending priorities, many of which would become hallmarks of his struggling Build Back Bankrupt agenda. The goals of the proposed $1.8 trillion spending spree included extending government schooling fully into preschool and two years of taxpayer-provided community college.
May: More Unsavory Hunter Exploits Emerge
Scandal follows President Biden’s troubled son Hunter around, as the country learned when the New York Post published damning information recovered from a laptop the younger Biden allegedly left at a repair store in late 2020. But further revelations about Hunter’s exploits emerged in May of last year, adding to the pile of unsavory behavior that may implicate the president himself.
New emails from Hunter Biden’s suspected laptop published on May 26 by the Post show that Joe Biden “met with Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani business associates of his son’s at a dinner in Washington, DC, while he was vice president” in April 2015.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together,” wrote executive Vadym Pozharskyi of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where Hunter sat on the board.
Other emails published by The Daily Mail in May revealed that Hunter Biden bragged he “smoked crack with [former D.C. Mayor] Marion Barry” when he was a student at Georgetown University.
June: Record-Setting Crisis at the Southern Border
Biden’s crisis at the Southern border has been setting records all year, but it was in June that apprehensions surged past 1 million for fiscal year 2021 and border crossings were at the highest levels since 2006. In May alone, “170,000 people were captured, marking a 20-year high,” Gabe Kaminsky reported at the time. June also saw the border state of Texas declare an emergency over Biden’s border crisis, which the president helped cause by reversing Trump-era stances like the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
As the crisis raged, Biden’s border czar Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t be bothered to visit the actual U.S.-Mexico line, snapping “I haven’t been to Europe” when reporters pressed her on the topic. She finally caved and scheduled a trip, but only after former President Donald Trump announced his plans to visit.
July: Bragging about Working with Big Tech to Silence Dissent
In July, the Biden administration bragged about colluding with Big Tech to shut down perspectives with which the regime disagreed. In a press briefing on July 15, Psaki touted the administration’s policy of “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” A few days later, Psaki admitted there was nothing “off the table” in the effort to smear dissent as “misinformation” and have it removed from social media.
August: Bungled Afghanistan Withdrawal
August saw the largest-scale disaster on Biden’s watch so far, when the administration’s disorganized withdrawal from Afghanistan left 13 American service members dead and thousands of American citizens and allies stranded under Taliban control.
From the administration’s decision to vacate Bagram Air Base before evacuating Americans from the country, to leaving weapons and equipment to fall into the hands of the Taliban, to Biden taking an out-of-touch, hollow victory lap after the service members’ deaths and while Americans remained stranded, to the administration’s ongoing decision to ignore the allies still behind enemy lines, every action taken by the Biden team was a disaster. In the same month, the administration carried out a drone strike targeted at ISIS operatives that actually killed at least 10 civilians, seven of whom were children.
Americans won’t soon forget the harrowing images of desperate people trampling each other in the chaotic race to the Kabul airport, of people clinging to aircraft landing gear and falling helpless from the sky, or of a lone helicopter leaving the roof of the American embassy. There is blood on Biden’s hands, and our allies won’t soon forget it either.
September: Biden Lies to Undermine His Own Border Patrol Agents
After a photo of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback was misconstrued by Democrats and their media allies to falsely accuse agents of “whipping” criminals, Biden promised to make his own CBP employees “pay” and the White House banned agents in Del Rio, Texas from using horses going forward.
“It was horrible to see. To see people treated like they did. Horses running them over people being strapped. It’s outrageous,” Biden claimed, even though the photographer who took the viral photo insisted he’d “never seen them whip anyone.”
October: Biden’s Ed Secretary, DOJ Collude with NSBA to Smear Parents as Domestic Terrorists
On Sept. 29, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to the White House asking Biden to use the FBI and other federal law enforcement to target parents using terrorism laws. A few days later on Oct. 4, in response to the letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI and federal attorneys to investigate and address “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
As it turns out, however, Biden’s own Education Secretary Miguel Cardona appears to have secretly requested the letter from NSBA, presumably to use as a pretense for the administration’s push to target parents unhappy with public schools’ closures, mask mandates, and extremist LGBT and critical race theory curricula.
November: That Tyrannical, Unconstitutional OSHA Vax Mandate
After issuing a September press release threatening a vaccine mandate for private businesses with 100 or more employees, Biden’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) released an emergency temporary standard on Nov. 4 that would require businesses to comply by Jan. 4 or incur fines of up to $14,000 per violation.
The Supreme Court struck this down in January, of course, and the Biden administration knew it was flagrantly unconstitutional all along — but exploiting the delays of the judicial system allowed the administration to bully many corporations into compliance anyway. Never mind the fact that the Biden administration had promised during the campaign that it wouldn’t mandate the Covid vaccine.
December: Supply Chain and Inflation Nightmare
December saw the climax (so far) of Biden’s joint inflation and supply chain crisis, dually caused by the administration’s radical spending and Democrats’ Covid lockdowns. As Americans faced shortages and shipping delays during their Christmas shopping, the Department of Labor released its November figures revealing 6.8 percent year-to-year inflation, or “the largest 12-month increase since the period ending June 1982.”
December’s inflation numbers were even higher, clocking in at 7 percent.
Bonus: January 2022: Compared Filibuster Defenders to George Wallace, Jefferson Davis
In a Jan. 11 speech urging the U.S. Senate to ditch filibuster rules in order to pass his radical and unconstitutional federalization of election laws, President Biden compared his agenda’s critics — which include Democrat Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Confederate leader Jefferson Davis.
“Do you want to be the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” Biden said. Comparing his critics to notorious segregationists isn’t a good way to start year two of the Biden era.
Who knows what new scandals and embarrassments await the Biden administration in 2022? For the sake of the country, we can hope for fewer than in 2021, but it’s clear the administration has a failed track record only one year in.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
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One of the most durable public health trajectories over the past 50 years has been the consistent decline in infant mortality in countries with first-world health care. Yet in September, Scotland experienced such a spike at least in neonatal deaths that it rivaled levels not seen since the 1980s. What on earth would cause such a sudden bizarre spike? Nobody seems to have the answer — nor do they want to study all of the potential culprits.
In September, Public Health Scotland announced that 21 newborns had died that month, triggering an investigation because the numbers rose above an upper control limit for the first time in four years. According to the Herald Scotland, “the figure for September – at 4.9 per 1000 live births – is on a par with levels that were last typically seen in the late 1980s.”
As you can see from the Public Health Scotland (PHS) data, the upper control limit was breached in September, which PHS believes “indicates there is a higher likelihood that there are factors beyond random variation that may have contributed to the number of deaths that occurred.” After all, the five-year average appears to be about 2.2 per 1,000 live births, so September’s numbers are more than double the average.
Although the incidents of neonatal death tend to fluctuate every other month, the levels appear to be elevated, on average, without the usual intermittent dips below the baseline throughout the entire year of 2021. This is astounding given how much the general trend of infant mortality has declined since the 1980s.
Based on media reports, it appears that the entirety of the public health investigation revolved around whether COVID itself was the culprit of the unusual number of neonatal deaths. The problem is that we didn’t see any of this death in the first year of the pandemic. Also, it was only infants who seemed to experience a sharp increase in death, the least likely cohort to be affected by the pandemic.
In December, PHS announced that based on preliminary findings, it has no evidence that COVID was the culprit. “There is no information at this stage to suggest that any of the neonatal deaths in September 2021 were due to Covid-19 infection of the baby,” said PHS, according to the BBC. “Likewise, preliminary review does not indicate that maternal Covid-19 infection played a role in these events.”
Well, that’s pretty obvious, but what is the culprit for such an unusual trend?
“Preliminary information on prematurity suggests that the number of babies born at less than 32 weeks gestation in September 2021 was at the upper end of monthly numbers seen in 2021 to date. This may contribute to the neonatal mortality rate, as prematurity is associated with an increased risk of neonatal death.”
But why would that cause neonatal deaths not seen since the 1980s, and why would there be more prematurely born babies?
With so many other vaccine safety signals being seen, there is no desire to even look at the possibility that an experimental shot that was not studied in pregnant women – yet was widely distributed to them – had something to do with it. We have no idea what caused this spike, but here’s why any logical person would commence an inquiry around the shots.
The shots were not studied in pregnant women, and it’s not like we haven’t seen other problems. There are over 21,000 deaths in VAERS and over 1 million adverse events, including tens of thousands of reproductive-related incidents.
We know that this shot has caused menstrual irregularities like we’ve never seen before. A University of Chicago survey sought to recruit 500 women with menstrual irregularities in order to study the cause and effect, and instead, researchers got 140,000 submissions. One study found that 42% of women experienced heavier bleeding, while only 44% reported no changes to their menstrual cycles. A whopping 66% of post-menopausal women experienced breakthrough bleeding. This all goes to show how the 20,000 menstrual irregularities reported in VAERS are a joke because the system only captures a fraction of the adverse events.
As of Dec. 31, there were 3,511 miscarriages reported to VAERS. Remember, this is something that is extremely hard to pin on the vaccine, so the fact that so many felt they could report it demonstrates there is likely a woeful underreporting rate. Here is the presentation from Open VAERS, which shows the number of reported miscarriages peaking around August/September in the United States.
Does any of this mean we can conclusively say the shots are causing reproductive issues? No. But there certainly are a lot of safety signals that should be followed up on rather than dismissed. I asked Dr. James Thorp, a Florida-based OB/GYN and maternal-fetal medicine specialist with over 42 years of experience, if he was concerned about these signals. “To the extent of a broad statement that menstrual irregularities are usually minor issues is a true statement,” he said. “However, in the context of the massive increase in menstrual irregularities associated with the vaccine, there are very serious potential implications. It supports the cumulative evidence that the jabs’ lipid nanoparticles concentrate in the ovaries and affect/infect/expose ALL ovum to the LNP and cargo mRNA [and] is extremely serious.”
Thorp notes that the LNPs can be inflammatory and they likely penetrate every area of the body and, by extension, the fetus. “The lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) easily pass through all the natural barriers that God created in the human body. LNPs are extremely small spherical particles with an outer lipophilic (fat-soluble) membrane containing the mRNA cargo. There may be billions of LNPs in the COVID-19 jab that do not remain in the deltoid muscle; they are readily dispersed throughout ALL bodily tissues, easily pass through the maternal blood-brain barrier, the placental barrier, and the fetal blood-brain barrier.”
Thorp observes that whereas men continuously make more sperm throughout their lives, women have a finite number of eggs, which means that “every single one is exposed to the LNPs for life.”
Previous studies have shown nanoparticles to be a source of fetal inflammation. “Nobody knows the potentially catastrophic results of this,” warns Thorp. “In my area of expertise of maternal-fetal medicine, we have researched for decades on the catastrophic effect of inflammatory processes that may occur in the fetus and may result in miscarriage, fetal malformation, fetal death, neonatal death, infant death, permanent major newborn damage, permanent major autoimmune damage, permanent cognitive damage, permanent impairment of the immune health, and unleashing of infections and cancers.”
Just how concerning is the VAERS data so far? Dr. Thorp created a chart to compare the rate of miscarriages and fetal deaths (defined together as “pregnancy loss”) per month reported to the system for the COVID shots as compared to all other shots.
As you can see, we have seen 50 times the rate of reporting per month of miscarriages for this vaccine than the other vaccines put together. Thorp mentioned on my show that lest people think he opposes vaccines, he particularly recommends the flu and pertussis vaccines to his pregnant patients. You can see the rate of reporting for pregnancy loss among those shots is very low.
Now look at the rate of fetal malformations that have been reported to VAERS for COVID vaccines as compared to others.
Thorp requested that anyone who had the jab pushed on her in her pregnancy and believes she has suffered adverse effects in herself, her pregnancy, or her newborn to please contact him at jathorp@bellsouth.net.
Given that Scotland seemed to have experienced the most obvious safety alarm signal, why aren’t they looking into any of this? Well, in the richest of ironies, Glasgow Royal Fertility Clinic, one of the top fertility clinics in Scotland, has announced it will not serve any women without the shot. Why do they so badly not want a control group from which to study?
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.
Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial win in Virginia sent a clear message to government bureaucrats: treat parents with more respect. Parents are paramount to their kids’ welfare and education, and they have a right to be angry when treated otherwise. Yet parents should also reflect on how we got here and consider how they share at least some of the blame.
For decades, public schools have encroached on some basic parental responsibilities — from feeding kids to health care to helping with homework. Is it any wonder school officials view themselves as the leading authorities on your children?
Consider that, today, a huge number of kids are dropped off at schools before the classes even begin, as early as 6:30 a.m. Kids are watched and fed a simple breakfast. This program, known as “before care,” allows parents to head to work early, which may be necessary for parents who work an early shift. Yet it’s also used by parents who want an early start to the day and a hassle- and kid-free morning.
Many parents also seem happy to let schools feed their kids. The school lunch program, originally designed to help low-income families, is now feeding any child, regardless of need. In fact, according to the School Lunch Association, 7.7 million students paid full price for a school lunch in 2019, meaning the child’s family did not qualify for a reduced or free school lunch.
The full price for a school lunch varies but it averages at about $2.48 for elementary school and $2.74 for high school. Even with rising inflation, that’s enough to make a simple meal for a child. Yet so many parents who could easily do this themselves instead opt to let the school feed their kids because it’s convenient.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture also funds weekend, holiday, and summer meal programs. This is on top of the generous food assistance that’s already provided to needy families through various programs. During the COVID shutdown of schools, even wealthy moms partook of these free food giveaways, since the USDA waived all requirements to show enrollment in the school meal program.
Working late? No sweat! Like the “before care” program, most schools now offer “after care” programs so that parents can work late. Participating students are typically assisted with their homework and fed. Not having to do homework with your kid sounds nice, but it also robs parents of knowing what is being taught and how their kid is doing with his or her schoolwork.
Students are even able to seek medical treatment without their parents’ consent. In Alexandria, Virginia, the high school’s “Teen Wellness Center” will alert parents if a child is seen for a cold, acne, or a few other minor illnesses. But parents are not informed if their child is there for a pregnancy test, diagnosis, and treatment of a sexually transmitted disease (including HIV), a prescription for birth control, “behavior change counseling,” mental health counseling, or substance abuse counseling. These services are all offered free of charge, so at no point would a student need to inform a parent.
Those who advocate for keeping children’s medical care private from parents often cite concerns about abuse arising from a parent finding out about their child’s sexual activity or its consequences. Yet school officials seem less concerned about the harms that could result from letting a child navigate these traumatic and potentially life-altering health conditions without assistance from their parents.
As for discipline, parents rarely have a place at the table. While schools used to be willing to contact parents, share information, and work as partners in setting kids on a better path, today, restorative justice programs cut out parents (and law enforcement), and reduce discipline to a performative joke.
If parents want to be respected by school officials, they need to stop ceding parenting basics to others. By placing these duties in the hands of teachers and school officials, parents have weakened their case that they are the primary caregivers for their children. I’m glad parents are fighting for their rights, but they should never have given up so much authority over their children’s upbringing in the first place.
Julie Gunlock directs the Independent Women’s Network and its Center for Progress and Innovation. She is the author of “From Cupcakes to Chemicals: How the Culture of Alarmism Makes Us Afraid of Everything and How to Fight Back.”
The Biden Regime is targeting political opponents and using the might of the federal government to abolish the First Amendment by classifying dissent as “domestic terrorism.”
US Attorney General Merrick Garland has instructed the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Covid mandates, citing ‘threats.’
Merrick Garland’s letter to the FBI follows the National School Board Association’s request to classify protests as “domestic terrorism.” Curiously, Garland’s letter didn’t actually specify any credible threats.
“Citing an increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s public schools, today Attorney General Merrick B. Garland directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to meet in the next 30 days with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend. These sessions will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment and response by law enforcement.” the DOJ’s press release read.
The DOJ will be creating a task force “consisting of representatives from the department’s Criminal Division, National Security Division, Civil Rights Division, the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the FBI, the Community Relations Service and the Office of Justice Programs, to determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes…”
Meanwhile, the Epsilon variant that was initially discovered in California in 2020 is spreading in Pakistan and is proving to be resistant to vaccines, according to researchers.
Despite these early studies, previous studies have shown vaccines, including those available in the United States, work against “variants of concern,” such as the Delta variant. The vaccines also prevent serious illness, hospitalization and death in most breakthrough cases where a fully vaccinated person tests positive for the coronavirus.
For example, a U.K. study published in May showed two doses of the Pfizer vaccine were 88% effective at preventing against symptomatic infection of the Delta variant and 96% effective against preventing hospitalization.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows spoke with Sean Hannity Wednesday night on the current crisis along the US-Mexico border, labeling Joe Biden a hypocrite for supporting vaccine passports while dispersing illegal migrants across the USA.
“Obviously there is no explanation. Joe Biden is missing in action. He’s ignoring what’s happening in our cities. He would rather support mandates and passports in New York and give people coming across our southern border a free pass,” said Meadows. “He’s providing buses, jobs, but he’s not providing any protection to American citizens.”
“It’s really very hypocritical, but why should we be surprised?” he added.
Meadows’ remarks echo those from Ted Cruz, who said the people of Texas “are pissed.”
“This is the biggest super-spreader in the country,” said Hannity. “Any American that’s infected because Joe’s not enforcing the laws of this country, you can blame Joe Biden.”
“You’re exactly right. People across the state of Texas are pissed. People are dying, and Joe Biden doesn’t care. Kids are getting assaulted; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don’t care… We’ve had over a million illegal immigrants in the last six months, and they don’t care,” said Cruz.
“They released 7,000 migrants into McAllen, Texas all of whom were positive with COVID. That’s 5% of the population of the city,” concluded the Senator.
The Biden administration was raked over the coals Sunday after a top State Department official claimed historic protests in Cuba were related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite the overwhelming evidence pointing to freedom as the motive behind the demonstrations, Julie Chung, acting assistant secretary for U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, claimed that — actually — Cubans are angry about COVID and medicine shortages.
“Peaceful protests are growing in #Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising COVID cases/deaths & medicine shortages. We commend the numerous efforts of the Cuban people mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need,” Chung tweeted.
Watching any video from Sunday’s demonstrations, of course, quickly dispelled the claim. The Cuban people are heavily oppressed by Cuba’s communist regime, which has resulted in generations of impoverished living. In fact, videos showed mass crowds Cuban demonstrators shouting “libertad” and “patria y vida” (homeland and life, opposite of the regime’s “patria o muerte,” which means “homeland or death”) while waving American flags, an international symbol of freedom embraced by oppressed peoples outside America.
Chung’s clearly dubious claims triggered an eruption of backlash from, most importantly, Cuban Americans angry that the Biden administration would callously ignore the obvious motive for the Cuban people’s freedom demonstrations. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), whose parents immigrated from Cuba, rebuked President Joe Biden for not publicly supporting the Cuban people and condemned Chung, whom he praised for her work at the State Department, for her ridiculous assertion.
“COVID is the icing on the cake here because you have a socialist regime that says to people, ‘You have no freedom. You have no independence. You have no ability to speak freely, but you have a really good health care system.’ They don’t!” Rubio began.
“Of course COVID has a role to play, but this began well before COVID. These people are frustrated. They want to live in a normal country,” Rubio continued. “Why can’t the State Department, why can’t the White House just say it clearly: This is not about COVID, this is not about anything else! This is about freedom — say it!”
Alberto Miguel Fernandez, a retired U.S. diplomat who was born in Cuba, said, “What a dull, lifeless, dumb tweet by #Biden @StateDept official. People in Cuba aren’t calling for COVID shots or medicine. They are calling for Freedom.”
Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.), who was born in Cuba, said, “The Biden Admin is totally deranged on #Cuba policy. This isn’t some pesky protest over COVID vaccines. This is about opposing a brutal communist regime, freeing political prisoners, and demanding free elections. If you can’t make that distinction, you are very bad at your job.”
While she did not respond to the criticism directly, she later followed up, “We stand by the Cuban people’s right for peaceful assembly. We call for calm and condemn any violence.”
The Cuban people, of course, do not have a right to “peacefully assemble” in their homeland.
A.F. Branco coffee table book “Keep America Laughing (at the left)” ORDER HERE
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The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org
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Source: AP Photo/Gerald HerbertTrending
Last week, we discussed Rebekah Jones, the crazy lady who wrote a 342-page telenovela about her ex-lover, Garrett Sweeterman, then went on to fame and fortune by claiming Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was faking his state’s spectacularly low COVID numbers.
These infractions are contained not only in police reports and court filings, but in her prolix manifesto about her ex-lover that she herself posted all over the internet. Jones seems to think it’s a point in her favor that during Florida State University’s investigation of her obsessive behavior toward her former student, “Garrett didn’t even bother bringing any evidence — no copies of texts or calls … I brought more than 200 pages worth.”
That sounds normal.
Even after multiple demands that she stay away from Sweeterman, the still-married Jones writes:
Did you know that I would have given anything, truly anything to make things right between us?
Did it matter to you at all that I loved you?
Did it, Garrett?
If the genders were reversed, Jones’ obsession with a former student would be a movie on “Lifetime: TV for Women.”
No TV personality lavished more attention on Jones than MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, featuring her on his show on Dec. 8, Dec. 9, Dec. 16 and Dec. 22, 2020. As is common at MSNBC, O’Donnell jumped on the horse and rode off into the sunset without a map, directions or a compass.
In the first of his blockbuster reports, O’Donnell used a law enforcement raid on Jones’ home for one of his anti-police screeds, informing viewers that they were about to see a video of “outrageous conduct by American police officers” — and I have this hot MILF on my show to talk about it. If she wants, I’ll take her on my sailboat.
The MSNBC host scoffed at the basis for the raid, saying: “They were going after the person who sent what they considered, I suppose, some criminally dangerous text.” Ho ho ho. Jones — or at least her lawyer — knows damn well that the charge is serious, which is why, to this day, she stoutly denies sending the text.
According to the search warrant affidavit, six months after Jones was fired by the Florida Department of Health, she hacked into the state’s medical emergency notification system from her home computer, obtained the private information of thousands of people, and sent out a mass text, pleading: “it’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong,” and so on. She signed the deranged missive as if it were an official communique from Florida Department of Health.
Comcast determined that the text came from Jones’ Tallahassee home. Perhaps in addition to cuckolding him, she plans to pin the hacking felony on her husband. (Then she could run off with Garrett!)
On the day of the raid, as infinitely patient law enforcement officers banged on Jones’ front door for 22 minutes, she was inside, setting up a video camera. Donations to her GoFundMe page must have been flagging.
O’Donnell introduced her video, saying: “What you’re about to see is almost as bad as American policing gets.”
What we see is Jones (finally) opening the door and exiting the house. An officer enters, unholsters his gun, and calls out for anyone else in the house to come downstairs. In other words, standard operating procedure for executing a search warrant.
Although no one is pointing a gun at anyone, Jones can be heard in the background screaming, “He just pointed a gun at my children!”
This is classic hysterical woman behavior.
YOU’RE HURTING ME! STOP HITTING ME!
I’m not touching you. I’m 7 feet away.
But O’Donnell and the rest of the media repeatedly played Jones’ video while informing viewers that it showed something it plainly did not: officers “pointing” guns at Jones and her children.
“The only thing that could have made this worse,” O’Donnell said, “is if one of those recklessly aimed guns killed someone in that house. If one of those guns aimed at Rebekah Jones’ children fired.”
O’Donnell on the Zapruder film: As you can see in frame 187, President Kennedy is firing at Lee Harvey Oswald from the convertible.
Jones is like the white woman captured on video in Central Park, calling 911 on a black male birdwatcher. As he calmly speaks to her from 20 yards away, she shrieks to the dispatcher, “An African American man… [is] threatening myself and my dog.”
O’Donnell voiceover: The only thing that could have made this worse is if the birdwatcher had killed the woman.
My voiceover for the entire American media: As you can see, they are liars.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
In a startling interview with the New York Times, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the government’s coronavirus taskforce, admitted that he did not level with the American people about how many people would need to be vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity because he didn’t think the public was ready to hear his true thoughts, which he feared might discourage people from getting vaccinated.
The Times article catalogued Dr. Fauci’s changing position on how many Americans would need to be vaccinated, which he initially stated would be 60-70 percent. As noted by the Times, about a month ago, Fauci’s tune began to change and he suggested that the figure was actually 70-75 percent. Last week, in an interview with CNBC, he upped that figure (again) to “75 to 80-plus percent.” In the interview with the Times, he changed his estimate yet again and suggested that the figure actually may be “close to 90 percent.”
According to the Times, in the telephone interview, “Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.”
In other words, Fauci’s advice to the American public on one of the most critical aspects of the coronavirus pandemic, has not consisted entirely of his honest opinion, formulated by the best science, but rather on what he thinks the country is ready to hear.
Dr. Fauci went on to even more expressly admit that he had fudged his public pronouncements in order to encourage people to take the vaccine. According to the Times, Dr. Fauci was ready to raise his estimates “weeks ago” but refused because “many Americans seemed hesitant about vaccines, which they would need to accept almost universally in order for the country to achieve herd immunity.”
Blithely continuing to explain how polling, rather than science, informed his public pronouncements, Fauci went on: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so Iwent to 80, 85.“
Moreover, Fauci went on to explicitly state that his future pronouncements might still be based on his feeling of what the public thinks, not what the science says: “We need to have some humility here. We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
Why won’t he say 90 percent? According to the Times, the answer is that “Doing so might be discouraging to Americans, he said, because he is not sure there will be enough voluntary acceptance of vaccines to reach that goal,”in light of the fact that “sentiments about vaccines in polls have bounced up and down this year.”
Fauci doubles down after being confronted over startling admission that he deceived the public about herd immunity
Dr. Anthony Fauci is defending startling comments he made last week in which he admitted he was not completely honest about the number of Americans who needed to get the coronavirus vaccine before the American population can achieve so-called herd immunity.
Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
What’s the background?
Fauci admitted in an interview with the New York Times that he moved the goal posts on herd immunity percentages partly based on public polling data to covertly encourage more Americans to get vaccinated.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Fauci stated publicly that 60-70% of the American public would need to be inoculated with a vaccine to achieve herd immunity. But Fauci slightly increased his percentages as the pandemic raged on, suggesting in his interview with the Times that achieving herd immunity would require 90% of the American public to receive the vaccine.
The Times reported:
In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci told the Times. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ʻI can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
“We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
What did Fauci say on Sunday?
Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Fauci denied that he was not being straight with the American people.
“The reason I first started saying 70, 75, I brought it up to 85 — that’s not a big leap to go from 75 to 85 — it was really based on calculations and pure extrapolations from measles,”Fauci said. “Measles is about 98 percent effective vaccine. The COVID-19 vaccine is about 94, 95 percent.”
“When you get below 90 percent of the population vaccinated with measles, you start seeing a breakthrough against the herd immunity,” he continued. “So, I made a calculation that COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, is not as nearly as transmissible as measles. Measles is the most transmissible infection you can imagine. So, I would imagine that you would need something a little bit less than the 90 percent. That’s where I got to the 85.”
When show host Dana Bash confronted Fauci over his admission that public polling played into his public statements, he initially denied that — then admitted that polling did contribute “a bit.”
“I want to encourage the people of the United States and globally to get vaccinated, because, as many as we possibly get vaccinated, we will get closer to herd immunity. So, the bottom line is, it’s a guesstimate,” Fauci said.
In an interview last week with The New York Times, Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted something that many of us have suspected for some time: The media-anointed, all-knowing guru of COVID has been fudging the truth in order to encourage what he views as better behavior from the American people. Put simply, Fauci has been acting less like a public official and more like a parent keeping certain truths from his children.
This quote, which has been rightfully making the rounds, really tells the whole tale. Asked why he changed his mind about how much vaccination would result in herd immunity, Fauci said, “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent … Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here …. We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
This is a problem. Fauci is clearly admitting that he was not simply telling the American people what he believed to be true, he was instead trying to manipulate us into behaving how he wants.And it’s not the first time. Back in March, Fauci told Americans not to wear masks. He now claims he did so largely because he feared a shortage. So, once again, instead of just giving us the unvarnished scientific truth, as he understood it, he told us only what he thought it was good for us to know.
Sen. Marco Rubio was quick to point out how obvious it has become that Fauci has been operating more as a public relations flack than a scientist for some time now, tweeting:
Rubio is correct that it is not just Fauci who has failed to be straight with us. For months it was clear that in-school learning was not only safe, but hugely advantageous for children compared to remote learning. But teachers unions, politicians on the left, and the media refused to acknowledge it. They refused to listen to science because it wasn’t about science, it was about power.
It was also about power when social media giants like Twitter and Facebook censored posts that contained accurate scientific information that questioned the efficacy of lockdowns. This happened when Dr. Scott Atlas was banned from Twitter literally for posting scientific studies. Twitter thought that we were not prepared for that information, that it might make us less vigilant, or something. Meanwhile, the very big tech sector that is silencing lockdown doubt is also the lockdown’s biggest financial beneficiary.
The bottom line is that we are not being told the truth by our public officials or the media; they are trying to manipulate us, not inform us. How a society chooses to deal with and respond to a pandemic that lasts months on end is inherently a political choice. It is not a matter for experts to simply decide and then lie about the science to compel adherence to their plan.
Enough is enough. The American people are not children to be guided with half-truths to the decisions that their betters deem best for them.
If you have the sense that you are not getting the whole story, and that you have not been getting the whole story for some time now, it is because you aren’t. It was only under pressure from Republican elected officials that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo released the contact tracing data that showed restaurants only caused 1.4 percent of the virus spread in his state. Even so, he closed the restaurants anyway, because this isn’t about science, it’s about power.
It needs to be made completely clear to Fauci and every one of our public officials that the American people expect to be told the accurate truth, not whatever unelected officials think is best for us to know. With more officials moving the goalposts to suggest that even after the vaccinations we might not get back to normal, we need the real science, right now.
We need, not what Fauci thinks is best for us, not what Joe Biden thinks is best for us, not what Andrew Cuomo thinks is best for us, just the truth. Then, and only then, can we decide how to proceed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Marcus is the Federalist’s New York Correspondent. Follow him on Twitter, @BlueBoxDave.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
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.
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