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.
Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images)
Did you know that four months before the world had ever heard of COVID-19—on Sept. 3, 2019—authorities in the Veneto region of Italy discovered COVID-19 antibodies in local blood samples. Of course, you didn’t. The deadly and mysterious COVID-19 was around much longer than anyone had previously suspected.
We now know that fact, and indeed much more, because of the investigative diligence of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
On June 18, the committee focused on the crucial question of the pandemic’s origins—whether the pandemic originated from a viral transmission from an animal in nature to humans or somehow leaked from a laboratory in Communist China. Dr. Gregory Koblenz of George Mason University told the committee that there could be a “definitive conclusion” on COVID-19’s origin without an “independent” and fully transparent international investigation.
Short of a full confession from China or a Western intelligence breakthrough, that’s unlikely.
However, there is a mountain of accumulating evidence, both biological and circumstantial, that points to a laboratory origin. And the prime candidate for such a leakage remains the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had long been engaged in the genetic manipulation of coronaviruses and which had also been a secondary recipient of American research grant funding.
The Senate committee heard sworn testimony from several prominent virologists on both sides of this vexing question in an attempt to get a better idea of where and how one of the world’s most dangerous and deadly pathogens emerged. However, the most powerful testimony was delivered by Dr. Steven Quay, an independent virologist and president of Atossa Therapeutics, and by Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University.
Based on mounting evidence, Quay and Ebright provided detailed scientific assessments of the origins of COVID-19, and their combined contributions on this crucial topic constitute the most impressive account to date on the topic. Both provided the Senate with a detailed description of the critical timeline and the circumstances of the contagion, while Quay offered compelling data and impressive statistical analyses.
Weight of Evidence
True, certain facts are already well-known. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, barred from U.S. grant funding by the Trump administration at the inception of the pandemic, was a center of risky coronavirus gain of function research; that is, research using “humanized mice” deliberately designed to make coronaviruses more transmissible and pathogenic.
Worse, the experiments were conducted under substandard safety conditions. Altogether, the weight of the available evidence, provided by both scientists, points straight to a Chinese laboratory leak.
Among the scientists’ many impressive arguments, three stand out:
The Hunan seafood market is a weak candidate for COVID-19 Origins. While cited by Communist Chinese officials and some Western virologists as the most likely location of viral spillover from some animal to a human, Quay told the Senate: “First, the virus was spreading in Wuhan in the early fall of 2019, two to four months before the first case in the Hunan seafood market. This is supported by 14 observations or evidence. This should be sufficient to dismiss the Hunan market as the source of the outbreak.” Likewise, Ebright stated, “Human cases at the Hunan seafood market in mid- to late-December 2019 cannot—even in principle—shed light on spillover into humans that occurred one to five months earlier in July-November 2019.” Both scientists emphasized that no infected animal host has yet been identified that would justify the natural origin of COVID-19 at the market or anywhere else. Ebright added,“No—zero—sound evidence has been presented that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin.”
The genomic features of the novel coronavirus are incompatible with a natural origin. Among the many reasons pointing to a lab origin, Dr. Quay noted, “ … the genome of SARS-CoV-2 has seven features that would be expected to be found in a virus constructed in a laboratory and which are not found in viruses from nature. The statistical probability of finding each feature in nature can be determined and the combined probability that SARS2 came from nature is less than one in a billion.”
Among the genetic features of the novel coronavirus is a peculiar feature of its capacity to infect organisms on its surface. SARS-CoV-2 is called a coronavirus because its surface is literally covered with protein spikes, giving it a crown-like appearance. It is the spikes that enable the virus to bind and infect the cells of its victims. But this particular coronavirus has what virologists call a “furin cleavage site” among its spikes, a unique feature that makes humans especially vulnerable to this viral infection.
As Ebright told the senators, “SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of more than 800 known SARS-related coronaviruses (sarbecoviruses) that possesses [a furin cleavage site]. Mathematically, this finding—by itself—implies that the probability of encountering a natural SARS-related coronavirus possessing [a furin cleavage site] is less than 1 in 800, P<0.005.”
Note well: In his testimony, Quay cites a revealing email from none other than Dr. Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute to his colleagues that “[t]he furin link keeps bugging me … .” Likewise, in a Feb. 2, 2020, email, virologist Robert Garry of Tulane University outlined his detailed observations to his colleagues: “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotides that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function—that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level—it’s stunning.”
Andersen was the lead author of “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” published on March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine, and Garry was one of his co-authors. Despite their private assessments, they publicly concluded: “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
Their paper quickly became one of the most influential papers in academic history. When Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, strongly endorsed the paper, he solidified the then-dominant government and media narrative that COVID-19 had a “natural” origin.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases “prompted” the authors to write the paper, though he claimed he did not steer them toward any specific conclusion and maintained an “open mind” on the origins issue, recently reaffirming that claim under oath in recent congressional testimony. Nonetheless, despite Andersen’s initial misgivings, as well as Garry’s own stated incredulity of the “natural” origin of the novel coronavirus, they plowed ahead with their publication anyway. Their rapid reversal from their initial assessments remains one of the most remarkable events in the history of the global pandemic.
The circumstantial evidence is most compatible with a lab leak. As Quay told the Senate, “There is complete agreement that the closest viruses to SARS 2 are coronaviruses found only in bats from Southern China or across the southern border in Laos. This is 1,500 [kilometers] from Wuhan. The distance from Washington, D.C. to the Florida Everglades. Imagine you are having dinner at a restaurant in North Bethesda [in Maryland] next to NIAID labs. You get sick and are told that the virus you caught is only found in bats from the Everglades, but it is also being studies at those laboratories you see out the restaurant window.”
Quay and Ebright also recited the well-known efforts of the Chinese communist officials in January 2020 to shut down crucial scientific information and cover up the research being conducted in Wuhan. Even though China locked down Wuhan in January 2020, as Ebright noted, three Wuhan Institute researchers were infected and hospitalized with COVID-19 as early as November 2019.
Fading Natural Origin Theory
During the pandemic’s early stages in America, federal officials and a team of top virologists worked diligently to promote the narrative that COVID-19 had a natural origin and had jumped from an animal—an “intermediate host”—to humans. The problem, however, is that the proponents of the “natural origins” hypothesis have failed to produce the evidence of any such a host before the first human infections.
It was not for lack of a herculean effort. In attempting to prove that the pandemic had a “natural origin,” Chinese officials and scientists took hundreds of specimens of animals and market suppliers from the Hunan market, plus thousands of animal specimens from three provinces in southern China, and many more thousands of specimens from wildlife, including pangolins and bats, as well as from domestic animals.
All were found “negative” for SARS-CoV-2. In detailing China’s extraordinary research effort, Quay observed, “… the largest effort to find a virus host in the history of the world came up empty.”
In his June 18 Senate testimony, Garry reaffirmed his conviction that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin and remains the most rational explanation for the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the hearing, however, Ebright directly challenged his fellow witness and took aim at the validity of the famous March 2020 Nature Medicine article.
As Ebright told the senators, “It presents no new data and presents no new data analyses.” As he further noted, analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency also criticized the paper because, in their language, it was not based on “scientific analysis, but on unwarranted assumptions.”
In questioning Garry, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., exclaimed, “Multiple intelligence community agents and components have concluded it was likely a lab leak, and they concluded that at the same time that you and your people were propagandizing the American public and using the channels and influence of the American government to censor ordinary Americans.”
Underscoring Hawley’s point, neither Garry nor his co-authors could have even begun to make a strong, data-driven, scientific argument for a “natural origin” of COVID-19. China had shut down release of any such information in January 2020, hiding samples, deleting the genetic sequences of the virus, and crushing internal scientific dissent. Moreover, even if the novel coronavirus emerged naturally from an animal, that does not mean that it did not come from a Chinese laboratory. As Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., noted, “Dr. Garry has told us that this couldn’t have come from bats. It had to go through an intermediate host. That may well be true … but what he also doesn’t tell you is the animal host could be a laboratory animal.”
More to Come
The Senate probe came on the heels of a staff report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic revealing email communications from Fauci, Collins, and Jeremy Farrar, a British scientist who participated in the early 2020 deliberations among top virologists, as well as the authors of the Nature Medicine article. There is, however, more to come. During the Senate hearing, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., for the second year in a row, highlighted the continuing failure of Xavier Becerra, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to release 50 unredacted emails, including internal communications between Fauci, Collins, and Farrar, and any discussions they may have had concerning the origins of the pandemic. While Becerra told Johnson last year he would get back to him, Johnson has still not gotten the vital information he requested.
Washington “cover-ups” are invariably self-destructive. House and Senate investigators are enriching a large and growing public record, while detailing the well-documented federal weaknesses in responding to the global pandemic that killed more than a million Americans.
Such a strong record can provide a basis not only for major institutional reforms at our federal public health agencies, but also the long overdue accountability for those who have deliberately misled Congress and the American people.
Project 2025, a suggested roadmap for a second Trump Administration pulled together by the Heritage Foundation, is a nearly 1,000-page document written by a bunch of think tankers and right-wing policy experts running the gamut of conservatism.
President Joe Biden says the document “should scare every single American.” Democrats, one strategist told the Washington Post, need to “instill fear in the American people.” Donald Trump and his surrogates are already distancing the candidate from the effort.
So, I decided to read it. Listen, it wasn’t easy. But the chances that Biden, or any other person fearmongering about it, understands what’s in it, is highly doubtful.
For starters, most of the Project 2025 “mandate” is just a compendium of long-held conservative wishes for government.
The Associated Press warns the effort champions a “dramatic expansion of presidential power.” Yet, nothing in Project 2025 is even on par with Biden’s unconstitutional loan “forgiveness” plan. The alleged presidential abuses the media lays out are well within the president’s power. They’re just policies Democrats happen to dislike.
Project 2025, we are warned, suggests the firing of as many as 50,000 federal workers — which is well within the purview of the president. It will never happen, unfortunately.
Project 2025 suggests eliminating the Department of Education and its “woke-dominated system of public schools.” Conservatives have been promising to get rid of the Department of Education since Ronald Reagan first ran for the presidency. It will never happen.
Project 2025 suggests prohibiting the FBI from “fighting misinformation and disinformation.” Great! The state shouldn’t be in the business of dictating speech. Not only do bureaucrats have no monopoly on truth; they are highly prone to abusing power. This would not have been controversial even a decade ago.
Moreover, curbing the DOJ’s efforts is limiting executive power.
Project 2025 also suggests deactivating FBI investigations that are “contrary to the national interest.” The Department of Justice — now engaged in lawfare against Democrats’ main political rivals, parents, and pro-life protesters among others — exists within the executive branch. It should always presumably act in the national interest.
Project 2025 also proposes ending the “war on fossil fuels.” This, too, has been a mainstream GOP position since Democrats began openly promising to dismantle our energy economy. If voters don’t like it, they can vote of the party that promises “carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.”
“Project 2025 is not a game, it’s white Christian nationalism,” the star of “The Avengers” and budding Christian theologian Mark Ruffalo warns. “It is the Sharia Law of the ‘Christian’ crazy people who aren’t Christian at all but want to control every aspect of your life through their narrow and exclusionary interpretation of Christ’s egalitarian, inclusive, and kindly teachings.”
Project 2025, you may be surprised to learn, does not feature a single mention of “Jesus” or “Christ.” It does champion long-held social conservative positions on religious freedom, abortion, marriage, and so on.
The policy guide features eight mentions of “God” in the entire document, most of those noting our “God-given individual rights to live freely.” Though this might be offensive to Politico writers or “New Right” intellectuals who’ve abandoned “liberalism,” it is one of the foundational ideas of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
“Christian” is mentioned seven times in the Project 2025 mandate. One, a warning about the left’s threats to tax-exemptions on churches and religious schools. Another mention suggests doing more to protect minority “Middle Eastern Christians” in foreign policy. Another reference reminds us about the COVID-era authoritarians who shut down “churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar.”
Faith is also touched on in a section about attacks on religious freedom that “compel a Christian website designer to imagine, create, and publish a custom website celebrating same-sex marriage but cannot compel an LGBT person to design a similar website celebrating opposite-sex marriage.” There is nothing extreme about that statement.
Now, obviously there are numerous other nods to socially conservative policy that comports largely with orthodox Christian positions. Not everyone in the right-center coalition might agree them–especially on abortion. Trump doesn’t even embrace them. So much for MAGA extremism. You’re free to agree or disagree with the suggestions, but there is nothing weird or unique or new about faith informing politics. Moreover, none of these policies undermine the rights of other citizens.
And though I strongly disagree with plenty of the economic and trade ideas found in Project 2025, that’s not what the left is taking issue with, of course. They’re feigning horror at decades-old social conservative positions and warning us about authoritarian policies that aren’t actually found anywhere in Project 2025.
President Joe Biden walks from the White House to Marine One on March 19, 2021, on his way to visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Newly released documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal early evidence and analysis four years ago in which U.S. government officials indicated that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China. These findings in the CDC documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, dating from about six months after the disease’s initial outbreak, are coming to light only now because of the government’s repeated delays in releasing relevant documents through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
In addition, federal employees’ use of encrypted private messaging applications such as Signal or WhatsApp to evade records-retention requirements under the Federal Records Act has become commonplace in the federal workplace, despite clear violations (as we will see below).
To date, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines, in that post since January 2021, has released minimal documentation under the COVID-19 Origin Act, which President Joe Biden, who appointed her, signed into law in March 2023. The new law requires Haines as director of national intelligence to declassify information about links between COVID-19 and China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology within 90 days of its enactment.
But Haines apparently didn’t make sure such documents were provided to Congress.
Avril Haines is sworn in Jan. 19, 2021, at the beginning of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee as Joe Biden’s pick for national intelligence director. Biden took office the next day. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Heritage’s Oversight Project obtained 1,066 pages of related documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, through the Freedom of Information Act. The intelligence community’s official assessment of the origin of COVID-19, as of June 2023, states that it can’t be determined: “The IC [intelligence community] continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19.”
However, the documents released to Heritage’s Oversight Project include a presentation labeled “Overview of COVID-19 Disease” by Dr. John T. Brooks, who was chief medical officer for the CDC’s emergency COVID-19 response, according to his LinkedIn profile. In his presentation, Brooks repeatedly emphasizes the early analysis that the disease originated in Wuhan. According to the documents (page 386), as of May 8, 2020, Brooks was chief of science under the principal deputy incident manager for the government’s COVID-19 Response Organizational Chart.
A slide excerpt from a June 2020 presentation by the CDC’s John T. Brooks entitled “Overview on COVID-19 Disease.” Note the word “Wuhan” in red to the left of the notation SARS-CoV-2.
One document released under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, includes the above slide presentation. It shows that in data files for a COVID-19 sample analysis, staff used the word “Wuhan” in red letters (in the so-called file paths of a phylogenetic analysis depicting patterns and similarities of DNA sequences).
One source in a position to know, who asked to remain anonymous, told Heritage’s Oversight Project that a sole-sourced, unevaluated intelligence report (meaning one without other sources and intelligence collaboration) floated around the intelligence community in late summer 2020. That report specified that the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, site of the Chinese research lab called the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There is no evidence that the U.S. government’s underlying raw intelligence on the origin of the coronavirus was shared with congressional committees or declassified under the COVID-19 Origin Act.
Recent releases of documents to Heritage’s Oversight Project—through the State Department and under the Freedom of Information Act—highlight the tenuous timeline of what email traffic in 2020 labeled as an “Updated timeline of PRC coverup (April 28).” (The acronym PRC refers to the People’s Republic of China, the full name of the communist nation.) This email traffic, primarily sent to State Department principals along with several inspectors general and White House officials, detailed what it called the suppression and destruction of evidence: E.g. virus samples destroyed at genomics labs, wildlife market stalls bleached, genome sequence not shared publicly, Shanghai lab closed for ‘rectification’ after sharing genome on its own, academic articles subjected to prior review by the [Chinese] Ministry of Science and Technology, data on asymptomatic ‘silent carriers’ kept secret …
An excerpt from a State Department document details China’s suppression of data on COVID-19.
This situation, in which Congress is falling behind in gaining timely access to information from the Biden administration, highlights the inherent imbalance between the two branches of government. A significant lag of years occurred before the executive branch provided relevant information to the legislative branch.
Jamie Metzl, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, testified March 8, 2023, about China’s record on COVID-19 before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
“Since the early days of the pandemic,” Metzl told lawmakers, “China’s government has destroyed samples, hidden records, imprisoned brave Chinese journalists, prevented Chinese scientists from saying or writing anything on pandemic origins without prior government approval, actively spread misinformation, and done pretty much everything possible to prevent the kind of unfettered, evidence-based investigation that is so urgently required.”
A slide excerpt from Brooks’ CDC presentation in June 2020 entitled “Overview on COVID-19 Disease.”
Slides released under the Oversight Project’s FOIA request detail strong links to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan in early January of 2020, as well as the concentration of COVID-19 cases in early January 2020. Four months into his presidency, on May 26, 2021, Biden announced further investigation into the origins of COVID-19, instructing Haines and the rest of the intelligence community to “bring us closer to a definitive conclusion.”
The Biden administration previously had sought to avoid directly linking COVID-19 to China or other geographic locations. The administration labeled terms such as “Wuhan Flu” as “inflammatory and xenophobic rhetoric” in presidential actions during the government’s continuing response to the disease.
The COVID-19 Origin Act, the bipartisan bill signed by Biden in March 2023, tasked Haines’ Office of the Director of National Intelligence with declassifying information on the origins of the deadly disease.
This slide excerpt specifies COVID-19 cases in China, as of Jan. 20, 2020, from Brooks’ CDC presentation about six months later.
However, with Democrats in control, it took over three years for Congress to conduct oversight investigations into the origins of COVID-19 by establishing the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The panel was created in early 2023, after the new Republican majority in the House took over from Democrats.
It also took over three years for Congress to resume its oversight of gain-of-function research conducted on coronaviruses in China through grants made by the National Institutes of Health, a U.S. government agency, to EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit. Such research produces a stronger version of a virus.
This slide excerpt, also from the CDC presentation in June 2020, depicts COVID-19 cases in and outside China.
The revelation that documents on COVID-19 weren’t provided to Congress comes on the heels of disclosures that David Morens, a senior adviser to Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, intentionally sought to avoid disclosure of government records under the Freedom of Information Act. (Morens also was a senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the public face of the government’s response to COVID-19.)
In letters to the National Archives and NIH regarding records retention guidelines and adherence to the Federal Records Act, the House pandemic subcommittee disclosed that Morens deleted emails and used special characters and misspellings to avoid text matches in records requests. Fauci’s adviser also used private emails to facilitate the destruction and withholding of federal records from oversight through records retention or FOIA requests.
To date, Congress has taken little to no action to curb Morens and other federal employees in the programmatic evasion of federal guidelines on retaining records.
In the information age, with an exponential increase each year in records created by the U.S. government’s executive branch coupled with intentional destruction of records, oversight by Congress consistently has failed to obtain documents from the executive branch in a timely and meaningful manner. Blatant violations of the Federal Records Act have become so extreme that some federal employees openly have included Signal and other encrypted messaging applications in parentheses in their email signature blocks, next to cell phone numbers, without fear of penalty or congressional oversight.
Congress should reaffirm its right to quickly access data and information, including classified information, from the executive branch via congressional inquiries and subpoenas. Without this ability, we risk that oversight by Congress will be delayed for years, undermining the purpose of oversight and potentially rendering it ineffective.
In December 2021, the FDA cautioned the public against using animal-intended Ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.
At the time, this statement sparked controversy as the FDA promoted the drug to African migrants in 2015, despite receiving praise in numerous scientific journals. There have been more than 101 scientific studies on Ivermectin confirming its significant efficacy in treating COVID-19 in the early stages. The scientific evidence is indisputable. However, the US government has criticized the use of Ivermectin for COVID-19 treatment, leading to unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.
Fast forward to today, a recent study has shown that individuals who took Ivermectin fared significantly better than those who did not. The Epoch Times and ZeroHedge reported on a new study that found individuals who tested positive for COVID-19 and used ivermectin as a treatment experienced faster recovery compared to a control group.
According to the study conducted in the UK, those who took ivermectin reported recovering a median of two days sooner than the comparison group. The difference in recovery time was deemed statistically significant. Furthermore, the study revealed that individuals who received ivermectin were less likely to require hospitalization or face mortality, with only 1.6 percent of ivermectin recipients needing hospital care or succumbing to the virus compared to 4 percent in the control group who received standard care focused on symptom management. In addition to quicker recovery, those who took ivermectin also showed a reduction in severe symptoms and sustained recovery.
The research was published by the Journal of Infection on Feb. 29 following an open-label trial involving 2,157 individuals treated with ivermectin and 3,256 participants receiving standard care from June 23, 2021, to July 1, 2022.
Participants were randomly assigned and monitored for symptoms and recovery progress throughout the study period.
“For the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone would take a COVID positive patient and put them in a nursing home where, you know, that’s medical malpractice in my mind, and that is a decision I can’t understand…I’m not a lawyer. It’s not necessarily about criminal liability, etc., but if we don’t actually know the truth, we can’t actually help you find closure.” – Representative Ami Bera, M.D. (D-Ca.), former Chief Medical Officer of Sacramento County May 17, 2023, hearing for the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Last year, I appeared before Congress at a hearing in Washington, D.C., to talk about how my family and thousands of others in New York lost loved ones to COVID-19 after they contracted the disease in nursing homes.
Tuesday, June 11, will be the most important moment we have had when it comes to our fight for answers and accountability. It will be the first time that our former disgraced governor will sit down and be questioned under oath about his deadly decisions that we believe led to their preventable deaths. That will occur when former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo appears in front of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Many of you know how personal this story is for me. My husband lost both of his parents in separate facilities during the spring of 2020 after an executive order was issued, which stood for 46 days, admitting over 9,000 COVID-positive patients into a place where our most vulnerable reside.
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will have to answer to Congress about how COVID-19 patients were pushed into nursing homes with deadly consequences. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
We were never warned of this decision, and there has never been a thorough investigation into why nursing homes were the first and only option to send in COVID-19 positive patients. Because if there is one thing we knew at the very beginning of the pandemic, it was that this virus would be the most dangerous for the elderly. And despite having other options, like the Javits Center, the USNS Comfort and other makeshift provisional hospitals with thousands of empty beds, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo decided instead to unleash COVID-19 into nursing homes and put the most vulnerable lives in danger.
There have been a few government reports and hearings over the years that have never amounted to much in the way of justice. In 2022, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul hired a consulting firm based in Alexandria, Virginia, to look back at the policies and decisions made in New York during the pandemic, but it didn’t have subpoenas, and the contract will expire in just a few days. According to a recent report, the Olsen Group has billed the state for less than half of its allotted $4.3 million. My guess is that document will never see the light of day.
More recently, there has been a proposed bill in Albany that promises hearings and investigations into state records and (most importantly) subpoenas to compel testimony from Cuomo and his former associates. It would seem that the work of the subcommittee in D.C. has finally shamed some of our elected representatives in New York to look like they care about a much-needed after-action review.
One of our biggest questions as the virus ravaged nursing homes is who came up with the March 25 directive that was in place for over six weeks, and then suddenly reversed while magically disappearing from the Health Department’s website.
It doesn’t take a virologist to figure out that putting a highly contagious airborne virus into nursing homes would be a death trap. Interestingly, on June 3, there was a Harvard research paper released (the first of its kind) that studied the “Clinical Outcomes After Admission of Patients With COVID-19 to Skilled Nursing Facilities.” Its conclusion stated:
The Andrew Cuomo book on the New York COVID-19 outbreak. (Getty Images/AP )
“That admission of COVID-19–positive patients into SNFs early in the pandemic was associated with preventable COVID-19 cases and mortality among residents.”
Even Cuomo knew that allowing COVID patients into a nursing home would be a recipe for disaster. One of his most memorable quotes in the early stages of the pandemic was when he addressed the importance of protecting nursing home residents, and said the virus, if allowed into their facilities, would spread like “fire through dry grass.”
We have our suspicions about who was behind the March 25 directive (and we’re confident it wasn’t written by doctors), but the truth won’t come out unless there is a full investigation with access to all state documents, electronic messages and most importantly subpoena power which has never happened until now.
And the other major point that needs to be addressed is why Cuomo and his staff went to such great lengths to cover up the death toll (by the thousands) and (still) continue to lie about it? Did it have anything to do with his $5.2-million book deal that was auctioned off to the highest bidder?
The timeline is very curious, because after a Cuomo commissioned report was released, whitewashing his involvement in the nursing home tragedy, and drastically undercounted the deaths (which to this day has never been corrected on the DOH website), Cuomo then signed his multi-million-dollar book contract. And if we find out that his administration purposely hid information and lied to the public to make money, wouldn’t that be a crime?
The governor, who was elected to serve and protect the people of New York through a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, instead acted recklessly with deliberate indifference, causing thousands of avoidable nursing home deaths.
One of our biggest questions as the virus ravaged nursing homes is who came up with the March 25 directive that was in place for over six weeks, and then suddenly reversed while magically disappearing from the Health Department’s website.
This man needs to finally answer questions under oath. While we were all locked away and told to avoid the virus at all costs, his administration decided to unleash the lethal illness into senior care residences without warning or protection.
I look forward to hearing Andrew Cuomo finally swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But if he continues to lie, obstruct and blame others, then so help him God. He’s going to need support from a much higher power than the person who believed had all the control in the world during the pandemic: himself.
Janice Dean joined FOX News Channel (FNC) in January 2004 where she currently serves as senior meteorologist for the network. In addition, she is the morning meteorologist for FNC’s signature morning show, FOX & Friends (weekdays 6-9AM/ET) as well as contributes to FOX Weather, FOX News Media’s free ad-supported streaming television (“FAST”) weather service. Click here to listen to “The Janice Dean Podcast.“
It’s no accident that The Wall Street Journal ran an “exclusive” hagiographic piece on Merrick Garland’s “by-the-book, play-no-favorites approach” the day the attorney general is set to be grilled by Congress. The administration wants to paint the AG as a fair-minded dispenser of justice.
In truth, while Garland might occasionally — only when faced with no real options — put the Biden administration in an uncomfortable political position, he has regularly weaponized the agency to target the president’s political enemies, from pro-life protesters to concerned parents to presidential candidates.
Even as I write this, Garland is refusing to hand over audio recordings of Joe Biden’s interviews with former Special Counsel Robert Hur, despite a congressional subpoena. Even as the DOJ stonewalls Congress, it is prosecuting the Republican Party’s presidential candidate for crimes for which the Hur tape supposedly “exonerates” Biden.
Garland’s claims of executive privilege are risible. If Biden’s audio can be withheld from the public simply because someone somewhere might manipulate the tape using AI, then any audio of any president can be denied the public.
Also, why is this DOJ’s concern? Considering the Hur transcript has already been released — and we know that Biden lied about it — there is even less justification for withholding the audio. And considering the DOJ has apparently cleaned up all the “uhs” and “ohs” and garbled words in the transcript, the tape would likely further cement the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
So, the real problem here isn’t the deep fake; it’s the unedited tape. Withholding the audio is obviously politically motivated. Which is unsurprising, since Garland has been one of the most partisan AGs in memory.
While Garland was raiding the home of the former president over a classified document dispute, he was letting the statute of limitations on the foreign influence-peddling by the president’s family run out.
While left-wing pro-Hamas protesters were rioting and targeting Jews, Garland was still fearmongering over the coming MAGA extremist revolution, inflating the threat with bogus statistics.
While Garland did nothing about those (likely) illegally picketing the homes of federal judges and attempting to intimidate them and influence cases — even after an assassin tried to kill Brett Kavanaugh — the DOJ was deploying armed teams to raid the homes of pro-life families and prosecuting elderly anti-abortion protesters for praying in front of “clinics.”
Even as Democrats are yammering about saving democracy, the DOJ has been working to undermine the electoral choices of voters in red states like Texas. Abortion is not a (pretend) constitutional right anymore. The DOJ does not care.
The DOJ is restarting censorship efforts under the guise of stopping foreign interference, and also targeting X owner Elon Musk, who has opened his platform to more neutral speech. It’s quite the happenstance, right?
Not only did Garland form a “task force” to investigate local parents who were protesting authoritarian Covid restrictions and racist curriculums, but he refused to dissolve the effort even after the National School Boards Association apologized for the letter that sparked it.
Of course, it was the Biden administration that prompted the organization to use the term “domestic terrorism” to give the DOJ justification to get involved in the first place. Even The New York Times acknowledged that “Garland did not detail any specific threats of violence or offer reasons for the increase in harassment and threats.” The only reason to get involved was to chill speech and intimidate parents.
No matter.
Even the case against Hunter Biden, used most often by the left to brandish Garland’s alleged Solomonic credentials, is a farce.
Let’s not forget if the Justice Department had its way, the case would have disappeared. To begin with, Garland ignored the law and appointed a counsel from within the government. David Weiss, whose office was filled with Biden allies, was prepared to give Hunter an astonishing immunity deal, not only on felony gun and tax charges, but for a slew of unrelated serious potential offenses, including failure to register as a foreign agent, bribery, and corruption.
It was only because of the whistleblower testimony of Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler that Weiss was forced to ask Hunter to plead guilty to two piddling misdemeanor counts. And the immunity deal was only quashed because Judge Maryellen Noreika, who pointed out there was not a single precedent in which immunity was offered for “crimes in a different case,” rejected it.
In his remarks to Congress today, Garland promised that he “will not back down from defending our democracy,” despite the “repeated attacks” and “conspiracy theor[ies]” regarding the DOJ. Some conspiracy theories exist, no doubt, but most criticisms of Garland’s work are legitimate. Treating criticism of his corrupt tenure as an attack on the “judicial process itself” has it backward. Demanding no one question the actions of state institutions is authoritarian. If the system were working properly, Garland would be impeached.
But in their efforts to save “democracy” — a concept that’s been stripped of any meaning — Democrats have justified deploying the state to punish and destroy political enemies. For many progressives, the legal system isn’t merely a tool for criminal justice but a way to exact political justice.
Garland is one of the leaders in this fight. Whether it’s because he is a weak man willing to do what’s expected of him or because he is corrupt makes little difference.
Forty years ago, a KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, revealed the systematic plan Soviet communists used to take down countries and establish a communist-type society and regime. More recently, a Chinese defector immigrant, Xi Van Fleet, has been on a crusade to warn Americans about the parallels between what is happening in America today and what Mao did in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The systematic plan Bezmenov revealed involves four fluid stages of communist subversion: 1) demoralization, 2) disorientation, 3) crisis, and 4) normalization. In Mao’s America, Xi Van Fleet explains how Mao’s destruction of the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) is being replicated by today’s leftist cancel culture, which will end what is left of freedom in America if not stopped.
Demoralization
The first stage in the Bezmenov analysis, demoralization, lasts a generation or more. One of its main thrusts is to undermine the Judeo-Christian beliefs, customs, habits, and traditions that have been foundational to America — these parallel the Four Olds that Mao destroyed in China.
Another target for demoralization is the family, which communists want to replace with the state. Xi Van Fleet points out that just as the Chinese Cultural Revolution turned children against their parents, American families are under increasing attack. Government schools, the medical establishment, and popular culture — which now support the transgender movement — are increasingly turning children against their parents.
A third demoralization strategy is breaking the people’s loyalty and love for their country by rewriting history, denigrating the founders and national heroes, and destroying historic monuments — again, the Four Olds. In summary, the goal of demoralization is to disconnect people from the virtue of the past and render them unable to assess what is true.
Disorientation
The second stage of the communist strategy, according to Bezmenov, builds on demoralization to advance society’s disorientation, a condition wherein the masses feel bewildered and helpless. While it’s impossible to prove intentionality at this time, the China-originated Covid-19 pandemic caused massive disorientation in the U.S. when the government mandated masks, social distancing, quarantines, lockdowns, and the abandonment of tried-and-true medical practices of preventive and therapeutic treatments.
Another important part of disorientation happened early in the Covid crisis after the death of George Floyd. Assertions of systemic racism in law enforcement triggered rioting, looting, and the destruction of several billion dollars’ worth of property, along with the tearing down of historic statues and memorials in many cities across the United States.
Americans became further disoriented when they realized government authorities were unable or unwilling to do anything about the destruction in big cities across America. There were few arrests while more than 2,000 police officers were injured. Disorientation may have reached its peak when cities with the most lawlessness, such as Minneapolis, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, initiated efforts to defund local law enforcement.
Crisis
Following disorientation is the crisis stage. An unprecedented crisis stage for America came in November 2020 with election rigging. Democrat operatives exploited the fear factor of Covid-19 in the summer months of 2020. They visited almost every swing state to change voting rules to accommodate expanded mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and extended vote-tally deadlines — all of which facilitate vote fraud.
The crisis that ensued from election irregularity was deepened by the massive media and social media censorship and cancellation campaigns that began well before the Nov. 3, 2020, election. The Department of Homeland Security division called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, better known as CISA, collaborated with the Stanford University-based NGO Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to suppress information that would help Trump.
EIP launched a campaign to prevent the public from challenging the anticipated voting irregularities by getting agreements from all the social media companies — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest — to modify their customer terms-of-service policies to incorporate language about “delegitimization.” Once that was accomplished, according to Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department communications policymaker and an expert on propaganda, the door was opened to algorithmic mass censorship and cancellation.
EIP exerted pressure on all the social media companies to adhere to their customer service policies and censor, cancel, or deplatform any content that contained “delegitimized” narratives about new election protocols and “processes,” election “issues and outcomes,” “mail-in ballots,” “early voting,” “drop boxes,” “Dominion Voting Systems,” and “Antifa.”
The media treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke in mid-October 2020 in the New York Post illustrates just how quickly the channels of propaganda and media manipulation fall into place. The laptop story (which contained massive incriminating evidence revealing a compromised Joe Biden family), was immediately delegitimized and taken down from every social media site. At the same time, 51 former top intelligence officials signed a letter, published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, stating that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
After the 2020 election, social media effectively thwarted discussion about election fraud. Again EIP insisted that social media companies uphold the terms-of-service contracts that required censoring social media content containing newly delegitimized terms, such as “Stop the Steal,” “dead voter rolls,” “Sharpiegate,” “stolen election,” “ballot harvesting,” and “Postal Service,” to name a few. Additionally, people questioning the integrity of the 2020 election were marginalized by the media and discredited as “election deniers.”
Bemenov’s four stages are fluid, so demoralization and disorientation continue in the crisis stage. We see this with lawfare against Donald Trump, his aides, and some 1,200 Jan. 6 participants arrested by the FBI.
The target is not just Trump and his supporters, but the American people, who are now seeing that large parts of the justice system in America resemble that of a banana republic. With equal justice under the law and respect for the Constitution being mocked, the subliminal message is, “This is not the America you know; it’s a new world that you have entered, so get used to it.”
Normalization
While America is still in the crisis stage, some subversion experts argue that the lawfare, censorship, and cancellation regimes that now exist are really part of the last stage of communist takeover known as normalization — Bezmenov’s fourth and final stage. If America’s borders remain open and the American people are denied access to information, become accustomed to rigged elections, accept limitations on free speech, and acquiesce to the rewriting of history, the constitutional republic that was the United States will be gone, and the new world of communist global elite control will be normalized.
John Adams, the second president, unequivocally warned, “Liberty once lost is lost forever.” It is no longer enough just to man the ramparts. It’s time for the people to turn the tables on the elite destroyers of our constitutional republic.
Scott Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His recent book, “Rediscovering America,” was the No. 1 Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org.
How vast was the Great COVID Cover-up? Well, my investigation has recently discovered government officials from 15 federal agencies knew in 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was trying to create a coronavirus like COVID-19. These officials knew that the Chinese lab was proposing to create a COVID 19-like virus and not one of these officials revealed this scheme to the public. In fact, 15 agencies with knowledge of this project have continuously refused to release any information concerning this alarming and dangerous research.
Government officials representing at least 15 federal agencies were briefed on a project proposed by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Dr. Anthony Fauci adjusts his face mask during a Senate hearing on the federal response to the coronavirus on Capitol Hill, March 18, 2021. (Susan Walsh-Pool/Getty Images)
This project, the DEFUSE project, proposed to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus to create a novel chimeric virus that would have been shockingly similar to the COVID-19 virus.
For years, I have been fighting to obtain records from dozens of federal agencies relating to the origins of COVID-19 and the DEFUSE project. Under duress, the administration finally released documents that show that the DEFUSE project was pitched to at least 15 agencies in January 2018.
It means that at least 15 federal agencies knew from the beginning of the pandemic that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were seeking federal funding in 2018 to create a virus genetically very similar if not identical to COVID-19. Disturbingly, not one of these 15 agencies spoke up to warn us that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been pitching this research. Not one of these agencies warned anyone that this Chinese lab had already put together plans to create such a virus. Peter Daszak concealed this proposal. University of North Carolina scientist Ralph Baric, a named collaborator on the DEFUSE project, failed to reveal that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had already proposed to create a virus similar to COVID-19.
And now we know that 15 agencies heard the proposal and when each agency discovered that COVID-19 was strangely similar to DEFUSE’s proposed virus creation, not one agency head stepped forward to warn the public that the virus might be man-made and therefore already adapted to transmit freely among humans.
Not surprising to some of us, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was not only briefed on Wuhan’s desire to create this virus, NIAID was actually listed as a participant in the initial DEFUSE pitch. Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab was named as a partner alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the proposal.
These documents also reveal that a scientist whose lab has received millions of dollars from EcoHealth was also part of the original plan to create these chimeric coronaviruses. This researcher, Ian Lipkin, also later became one of the authors of “Proximal Origins,” a journal paper commissioned by Fauci and National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins to throw shade on anyone arguing that the virus might have come from the lab. Yet, Ian Lipkin never revealed to the public the DEFUSE proposal.
Did NIAID warn us? Did Anthony Fauci warn us? No! All lips remained sealed.
Millions of people died from COVID-19. We now know that over 15 government agencies, as well as the investigators Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin and scientists at NIAID’s Rocky Mountain Lab, all knew of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s desire to create a coronavirus with a furin cleavage site, a virus pre-adapted for human transmission. And no one spoke up. We only know of this DEFUSE proposal because a whistleblower, one brave Marine, Lt. Col. Joseph Murphy, came forward with the truth.
Likely, hundreds of people in the government knew of this proposal to create a COVID-19-like virus and virtually every one of these people chose to keep quiet, to obscure, and ultimately to conceal information that might have saved lives by letting the world know this was no sleepy animal virus with poor transmission. No, all evidence suggests COVID-19 was a laboratory-enhanced virus purposefully adapted for human transmission.
Shame on all those who covered up the DEFUSE project! Of course, they all should be punished but likely won’t. At the very least, though, the perpetrators should be made to admit the truth and Congress should finally put in place sufficient oversight to make sure dangerous gain of function experiments are sufficiently vetted and, if necessary, prevented.
Republican Rand Paul represents Kentucky in the United States Senate. He is the author of “The Case Against Socialism” (Broadside Books, October 15, 2019).
A healthy little Dutch girl without a proper name died 52 years ago. Scientists keep her kidney’s cells multiplying in a process similar to cancer. They perform increasing numbers of experiments on derivatives of this baby girl’s kidney cells to develop technologies that include taste-testing experiments for PepsiCo. Her vivisection forms “the backbone of the global gene therapy market.”
Scientists call the baby girl HEK 293. HEK stands for “human embryonic kidney,” and 293 means she was the 293rd experiment in a set.
She likely died from an elective abortion, not a miscarriage, concludes a 2006 journal article and many other scientific publications. An older gestational age and harvesting her kidney while still alive would have made her more useful for experimentation, as Planned Parenthood officials affirmed of their baby harvesting operations in 2015.
Like many medications, Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics were tested on cells made from HEK 293’s kidney. Some of the vaccines have HEK 293 cells inside them. That’s one of several reasons Capt. Rob Nelson, an Air Force chaplain, couldn’t in good conscience accept those treatments despite massive pressure from the military, he told The Federalist in a phone interview.
“I have five [children], and it breaks my heart to think of this. This girl continues to be violated as her cells are replicated over and over again,” he said.
Nelson is one of 38 military chaplains whose petition is now before U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in the case Alvarado v. Austin. The chaplains say the Department of Defense continues to defy the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act rescinding its Covid vaccine mandate, which the petition says has allowed statistically zero exceptions.
Eliminating People with Strong Ethical Boundaries from the Military
The DOD continues to violate the law by failing to rescind its punishments of conscientious objectors such as denied training and deployments required for promotions, the petition says. In addition, of course, denying soldiers’ religious exercise violates the First Amendment’s guarantee that all Americans can freely exercise their faith in their everyday lives.
That is precisely why the military has chaplains, several told The Federalist. All soldiers, their families, and civilians working for the U.S. military “have a right to believe what they believe and no one can say otherwise. It’s the same reason we can’t have a religious test for federal positions. As a chaplain, my job is to make sure the free exercise of religion is allowed, that nobody infringes upon that inalienable right,” said Army Col. Brad Lewis, a chaplain also party to the suit.
Chaplains usually help determine whether soldiers receive religious accommodations for all sorts of things, from Norse pagans wearing beards to Sikhs wearing turbans and Jews eating kosher. While the military routinely approves such waivers, it told Congress it had denied essentially all religious vaccine waiver requests from soldiers who weren’t almost retired, say the plaintiffs.
“I got in with an age waiver,” Nelson noted of his military service. “They can supposedly give wavers for all kinds of things but not a religious accommodation.”
In its Supreme Court response filed March 27, the DOD claims it has removed all punishments from soldiers imposed “solely” for conscientious objections to vaccines. It claims removing career penalties that arise from banning conscientious objectors from career-promoting training and duties has no “lawful basis.” The DOD also says that because the vaccination requirement has ended, the case is moot.
“By denying religious exemptions, what the military has done is set about the removal of people who are willing to stand on conviction,” Lewis said. He and Nelson noted this dynamic is especially dangerous if cultivated among soldiers, whose job is to kill.
Four Years Deployed to Defend Freedoms the Military Denies Him
Lewis has dedicated more than 30 years of his life to the U.S. military, including 47 months of deployment. He’s taken seven deployments to Afghanistan, six to Iraq, and an entire year away from his wife and four children in South Korea. He’s a fourth-generation Assemblies of God pastor whose father also served in the U.S. military during the Cold War.
Lewis was the senior chaplain on Hawaii’s island of Oahu when the Army recommended him as one of two chaplains in 2020 to receive instruction at the U.S. Army War College.
Image of Col. Brad Lewis by U.S. Army / public domain
War College training is the height of an Army career. It’s preparation for high-level officer assignments. While he studied there, Lewis was ordered to take a Covid vaccine. But his conscience wouldn’t let him.
The immense global pressure for an untested medical treatment alarmed Lewis’ long-developed spiritual spidey senses: “The fact that commerce and travel and careers were hinging on receipt of this vaccine, that bothered me.” It seemed to violate biblical injunctions against total obedience to any state.
Lewis and his wife spent months talking about what to do. They knew objecting could kill his career right as he hit its peak, after decades of personal and family sacrifices.
In the end, he couldn’t violate his duty to obey the still, small voice inside, Lewis says. So he filed for a religious exemption. Like almost every other solely religious exemption of the 37,000 DOD told Congress soldiers filed, it was delayed. Then it was denied. So were Lewis’ appeals. He says his superiors told him he could get vaccinated or get drummed out of the military, but while Lewis was willing to sacrifice his body for his country, he would not sacrifice his soul.
So the Army punished him, first by leaving him with no orders upon graduation from War College. That left Lewis and his wife to sit for 11 months in student housing with no assignment for Lewis while another class of students came and went.
“My career was ended by those 11 months of unrated time,” Lewis said. The inaction the Army forced him into destroyed his ratings in the military’s evaluating system. When Congress ended the vaccine mandate, the military assigned Lewis to a rural post in Maryland, where he mostly oversees civilian contractors across the world who have local pastors to tend their spiritual needs.
He says he’s asked superiors whether he will have any opportunities to use his high-level, taxpayer-provided War College training. Lewis says they repeatedly ignored the question. So he’s filed to retire and will leave the Army for good in early 2025.
“I took real strength in the idea that my faith is more important than some bureaucrat’s opinion of my faith. It sustained me, it got me through,” Lewis said.
After asking The Federalist to provide Lewis’ birth date and Social Security Number and to delay this article’s publication, U.S. Army spokeswoman Heather Hagan, who according to her email signature works in the Pentagon, finally provided this in response to a request for comment: “As a matter of policy, the Army does not comment on ongoing litigation.”
Not Just about Harvesting Killed Babies
Each conscientious objector’s reasoning is in some way unlike all the others’. There are commonalities, but they blend in individual ways, like fingerprints. That’s why religious objections to vaccines are not erased by a European Covid shot called Novavax, which its owner claims was developed and produced with no human embryo brutalization.
Army Chief of Chaplains Thomas Solhjem, who is now retired, highlighted Novavax when it came out in 2022. He ignored many soldiers’ religious objections not based on the vaccines’ use of murdered babies. They include concerns about damaging human health and reproductive capacity, ignoring natural immunity, the ethics of allegedly emergency decrees, the lack of informed consent, and heavy-handed manipulation tactics that include refusing to acknowledge any potentially legitimate conscience objections to the shots whatsoever.
It’s also unlikely any medical intervention today lacks a connection with the discarded little girl. Research done on cells descended from HEK 293’s tiny body is so “ubiquitous” now, wrote Dr. Melissa Moschella in 2020, that “Anyone who wants to completely avoid benefiting from the use of HEK 293 would effectively have to eschew the use of any medical treatments or biological knowledge developed or updated within the past forty years.” Even Tylenol was developed using cells her body generated.
Lewis said Solhjem’s video “blew my mind” because the job of a chaplain is not to negotiate people’s religious beliefs, it’s to support their exercise: “He didn’t say, ‘I stand with you. No matter what your reasons are, you have a right to believe them, and I will stand and die here defending your right.’ … It’s antithetical to what chaplains are supposed to do.”
‘The Department of Defense Is Hostile to Religion’
Several chaplains provided The Federalist “scripts” that military branches sent chaplains to pressure conscientious objectors into compliance rather than ascertain whether their objections were sincere. They include quotes from figures such as imams and preacher Russell Moore supporting vaccination.
But, for example, the Bible doesn’t say Russell Moore is its chief prophet and interpreter. While theologians and church tradition are helpful guides that Christians should take seriously, the final authority over Christianity is the Bible itself, and it says every individual is responsible before God for how he understands and applies it.
“The Department of Defense is hostile to religion,” said the chaplains’ lawyer, Art Schulcz, who is also a veteran. He said the way the DOD handled the vaccine mandate has contributed to the military’s recruiting crisis by repelling recruits and current soldiers with serious faith convictions. In response to ongoing shortfalls, U.S. military branches are lowering enlistment standards and issuing waivers of risk factors such as marijuana use.
The U.S. military’s chaplains “recruiting deficit is extreme,” wrote Rear Adm. Gregory Todd, the Navy’s chief of chaplains, last year.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested in oral arguments Monday that the First Amendment should not be allowed to “hamstring” the government amid a crisis. Pictured: Jackson arrives for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address at the Capitol on March 7. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government strong-armed Big Tech companies into censoring as “disinformation” Americans’ true experiences while effectively mandating government propaganda, which itself turned out to be misinformation. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether that strategy violated the First Amendment.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested during oral arguments Monday that the First Amendment should not be allowed to “hamstring” the government amid a crisis.
Jackson asked J. Benjamin Aguiñaga, the solicitor general of Louisiana, a rather revealing question about the issue.
“So, my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods,” Jackson said.
The Supreme Court justice presented an extremely unlikely hypothetical that most American young people would find very insulting. She presented a scenario in which young people took cellphone video of their peers jumping out of windows, and that trend went viral on social media (preposterous), Big Tech companies failed to take action on their own (very unlikely), and the government wanted to stop it.
She asked Aguiñaga, “What would you have the government do? I’ve heard you say a couple times that the government can post its own speech, but in my hypothetical, ‘Kids, this is not safe, don’t do it,’ is not going to get it done.”
“So, I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information,” Jackson said. “I’m really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the source of those problems.”
“I understand that instinct,” Aguiñaga replied. “Our position is not that the government can’t interact with the platforms there … but the way they do that has to be in compliance with the First Amendment.”
🚨REVEALING: Justice Jackson says "your view has the First Amendment📄 hamstringing the federal government in significant ways."😲 Some of us might think THAT'S THE ENTIRE POINT. https://t.co/kFD1yerSwxpic.twitter.com/exa2Wxezha
Jackson suggested it would be unjust for the First Amendment to limit the government’s actions in addressing a hypothetical crisis, but the First Amendment expressly exists in order to hamstring the federal government.
As Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said in response to Jackson’s concern about the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government, “that’s what it’s supposed to do, for goodness’ sake.”
The amendment states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The amendment does not include a “crisis-exemption clause” allowing the government to trample on free speech if the president declares a national emergency. If it did, President Joe Biden might declare a national emergency on climate and strong-arm Big Tech into censoring opposition to the climate alarmist narrative. He might declare a national emergency on the nonexistent “epidemic” of violence against transgender people, and pressure social media to ban any disagreement with gender ideology.
Big Tech platforms already censor conservative speech on those issues, but it could become far worse.
Missouri v. Murthy presents an excellent illustration.
The plaintiffs in the case—Missouri and Louisiana, represented by state Attorneys General Andrew Bailey and Liz Murrill, respectively; doctors who spoke out against the COVID-19 mandates, such as Martin Kulldorff, Jayanta Bhattacharya, and Aaron Kheriaty; Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft; and anti-lockdown advocate and Health Freedom Louisiana Co-Director Jill Hines—allege that the Biden administration “suppressed conservative-leaning free speech” on the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election; on COVID-19 issues, including its origin, masks, lockdowns, and vaccines; on election integrity in the 2020 presidential election; on the security of voting by mail; on the economy; and on Joe Biden himself.
On July 4, federal Judge Terry Doughty in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued an injunction barring the Biden administration from pressuring Big Tech to censor Americans. Doughty’s injunction named various federal agencies—including the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (the agency Dr. Anthony Fauci formerly directed), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the State Department—and officials, including HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit narrowed the extent of Doughty’s injunction, and the Supreme Court stayed the 5th Circuit’s order before taking up the case.
“The Twitter Files” revealed how the process worked: Federal agencies would have frequent meetings with Big Tech companies, warning about “misinformation” and repeatedly pressuring them to remove or suppress content. Federal agents and politicians occasionally threatened that if the companies did not act, the government would reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, removing legal protections the companies enjoyed.
As Justice Samuel Alito noted, federal officials treated Facebook, Twitter (now X),and other social media companies “like their subordinates.”
🚨Justice Alito: "I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media. … The only reason why this is taking place is because the federal government has Section 230 and antitrust in its pocket." They're "treating Facebook… like their subordinates."😲 pic.twitter.com/QKRchwXlJF
As part of this lawsuit, Bailey unearthed documents in which Facebook told the White House that it suppressed “often-true content” that might discourage Americans from taking COVID-19 vaccines. In that context, Jackson’s question about the First Amendment “hamstringing the government” seems particularly alarming. The federal government did not act to suppress speech amid an existential crisis like a world war or a civil war. It acted after good data became available showing that COVID-19 poses a deadly threat to the elderly and those with co-morbidities, and while the government was advocating vaccines for all populations, not just the most vulnerable.
Jackson’s question suggests that she wants the government to have more control over speech on social media, even after the abuses this case uncovered. If the First Amendment is good for anything, it should “hamstring” the government from silencing Americans in order to push its own propaganda. Jackson, as a sitting Supreme Court justice, should know that.
Then again, if she can’t define the word “woman,” perhaps Americans shouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t grasp the fundamental purpose of the First Amendment.
Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board — the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored “Ministry of Truth.”
In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he said, must give up “some of your freedoms that you need and deserve so that you get security back.”
The legal problems and public backlash to the Disinformation Governance Board also demonstrated to him that “the government has a major role to play, but they cannot be out in front.”
Murphy, who made headlines late in the Trump administration for improperly building dossiers on journalists, has spent the last few years trying to help the government find ways to suppress and censor speech it doesn’t like without being so “out in front” that it runs afoul of the Constitution. He has proposed that law enforcement and intelligence agencies formalize the process of sharing tips with private sector actors — a “hybrid constellation” including the press, academia, researchers, nonpartisan organizations, and social media companies — to dismantle “misinformation” campaigns before they take hold.
More recently, Murphy has worked to make his vision of countering misinformation a reality by joining a United Kingdom-based tech firm, Logically.AI, whose eponymous product identifies and removes content from social media. Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.
Logically says it uses artificial intelligence to keep tabs on over 1 million conversations. It also maintains a public-facing editorial team that produces viral content and liaisons with the traditional news media. It differs from other players in this industry by actively deploying what they call “countermeasures” to dispute or remove problematic content from social media platforms.
The business is even experimenting with natural language models, according to one corporate disclosure, “to generate effective counter speech outputs that can be leveraged to deliver novel solutions for content moderation and fact-checking.” In other words, artificial intelligence-powered bots that produce, in real-time, original arguments to dispute content labeled as misinformation.
In many respects, Logically is fulfilling the role Murphy has articulated for a vast public-private partnership to shape social media content decisions. Its technology has already become a key player in a much larger movement that seeks to clamp down on what the government and others deem misinformation or disinformation. A raft of developing evidence — including the “Twitter Files,” the Moderna Reports, the proposed Government Disinformation Panel, and other reports — has shown how governments and industry are determined to monitor, delegitimize, and sometimes censor protected speech. The story of Logically.AI illustrates how sophisticated this effort has become and its global reach. The use of its technology in Britain and Canada raises red flags as it seeks a stronger foothold in the United States.
Logically was founded in 2017 by a then-22-year-old British entrepreneur named Lyric Jain, who was inspired to form the company to combat what he believed were the lies that pushed the U.K. into voting in favor of Brexit, or leaving the European Union. The once-minor startup now has broad contracts across Europe and India, and has worked closely with Microsoft, Google, PwC, TikTok, and other major firms. Meta contracts with Logically to help the company fact-check content on all of its platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.
The close ties to Silicon Valley provide unusual reach. “When Logically rates a piece of content as false, Facebook will significantly reduce its distribution so that fewer people see it, apply a warning label to let people know that the content has been rated false, and notify people who try to share it,” Meta and Logically announced in a 2021 press release on the partnership.
Meta and Logically did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
During the 2021 local elections in the U.K., Logically monitored up to “one million pieces of harmful content,” some of which they relayed to government officials, according to a document reviewed by RealClearInvestigations. The firm claimed to spot coordinated activity to manipulate narratives around the election, information they reported to tech giants for takedowns.
The following year, the state of Oregon negotiated with Logically for a wide-ranging effort to monitor campaign-related content during the 2022 midterm elections. In a redacted proposal for the project, Logically noted that it would check claims against its “single source of truth database,” which relied on government data, and would also crack down on “malinformation” — a term of art that refers to accurate information that fuels dangerous narratives. The firm similarly sold Oregon on its ability to pressure social media platforms for content removal.
Oregon state Rep. Ed Diehl has a led push against the state from renewing its work with Logically for the election this year. The company, he said in an interview, violates “our constitutional rights to free speech and privacy” by “flagging true information as false, claiming legitimate dissent is a threat, and then promoting “counter-narratives” against valid forms of public debate.
In response, the Oregon secretary of state’s office, which initiated the contract with Logically, claimed “no authority, ability, or desire to censor speech.” Diehl disputes this. He pointed out that the original proposal with Logically clearly states that its service “enables the opportunity for unlimited takedown attempts” of alleged misinformation content and the ability for the Oregon secretary of state’s office to “flag for removal” any “problematic narratives and content.” The contract document touts Logically as a “trusted entity within the social media community” that gives it “preferred status that enables us to support our client’s needs at a moment’s notice.”
Diehl, who shared a copy of the Logically contract with RCI, called the issue a vital “civil rights” fight, and noted that in an ironic twist, the state’s anti-misinformation speech suppression work further inflames distrust in “election systems and government institutions in general.”
Logically’s reach into the U.S. market is quickly growing. The company has piloted programs for the Chicago Police Department to use artificial intelligence to analyze local rap music and deploy predictions on violence in the community, according to a confidential proposal obtained by RCI. Pentagon records show that the firm is a subcontractor to a program run by the U.S. Army’s elite Special Operations Command for work conducted in 2022 and 2023. Via funding from DHS, Logically also conducts research on gamer culture and radicalization.
The company has claimed in its ethics statements that it will not employ any person who holds “a salaried or prominent position” in government. But records show closely entrenched state influence. For instance, Kevin Gross, a director of the U.S. Navy NAVAIR division, was previously embedded within Logically’s team during a 2022 fellowship program. The exchange program supported Logically’s efforts to assist NATO on the analysis of Russian social media.
Other contracts in the U.S. may be shrouded in secrecy. Logically partners with ThunderCat Technologies, a contracting firm that assists tech companies when competing for government work. Such arrangements have helped tech giants conceal secretive work in the past. Google previously attempted to hide its artificial intelligence drone-targeting contracts with the Defense Department through a similar third-party contracting vendor.
But questions swirl over the methods and reach of the firm as it entrenches itself into American life, especially as Logically angles to play a prominent role in the 2024 presidential election.
Pandemic Policing
In March 2020, as Britain confronted the spread of Covid-19, the government convened a new task force, the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU). The secretive task force was created with little fanfare but was advertised as a public health measure to protect against dangerous misinformation. Caroline Dinenage, the member of Parliament overseeing media issues, later explained that the unit’s purpose was to provide authoritative sources of information and to “take action to remove misinformation” relating to “misleading narratives related to COVID-19.”
The CDU, it later emerged, had largely outsourced its work to private contractors such as Logically. In January 2021, the company received its first contract from the agency overseeing the CDU, for £400,000, to monitor “potentially harmful disinformation online.” The contracts later swelled, with the U.K. agency that pertains to media issues eventually providing contracts with a combined value of £1.2 million and the Department of Health providing another £1.3 million, for a total of roughly $3.2 million.
That money went into far-reaching surveillance that monitored journalists, activists, and lawmakers who criticized pandemic policies. Logically, according to an investigation last year in the Telegraph, recorded comments from activist Silkie Carlo criticizing vaccine passports in its “Mis/Disinformation” reports.
Logically’s reports similarly collected information on Dr. Alexandre de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Figueiredo had published reports on the negative ways in which vaccine passports could undermine vaccine confidence and had publicly criticized policies aimed at the mass vaccination of children. Despite his expertise, Logically filed his tweet in a disinformation report to the government. While some of the reports were categorized as evidence of terms of service violations, many were, in fact, routine forms of dissent aired by prominent voices in the U.K. on policies hotly contested by expert opinion.
The documents showing Logically’s role were later uncovered by Carlo’s watchdog group, Big Brother Watch, which produced a detailed report on the surveillance effort. The CDU reports targeted a former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies.
Carlo was surprised to even find her name on posts closely monitored and flagged by Logically. “We found that the company exploits millions of online posts to monitor, record and flag online political dissent to the central government under the banner of countering ‘disinformation,’” she noted in a statement to RCI.
Marketing materials published by Logically suggest its view of Covid-19 went well beyond fact-checking and veered into suppressing dissenting opinions. A case study published by the firm claimed that the #KBF hashtag, referring to Keep Britain Free, an activist group against school and business shutdowns, was a dangerous “anti-vax” narrative. The case study also claimed the suggestion that “the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory” was one of the “conspiracy theories’’ that “have received government support” in the U.S. — despite the fact that a preponderance of evidence now points to a likely lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the origin of the pandemic.
Logically was also involved in pandemic work that blurred the line with traditional fact-checking operations. In India, the firm helped actively persuade patients to take the vaccine. In 2021, Jain, the founder and CEO of the company, said in an interview with an Indian news outlet that his company worked “closely with communities that are today vaccine hesitant.” The company, he said, recruited “advocates and evangelists” to shape local opinion.
Questionable Fact-Checking
In 2022, Logically used its technology on behalf of Canadian law enforcement to target the trucker-led “Freedom Convoy” against Covid-19 mandates, according to government records. Logically’s team floated theories that the truckers were “likely influenced by foreign adversaries,” a widely repeated claim used to denigrate the protests as inauthentic.
The push to discredit the Canadian protests showed the overlapping power of Logically’s multiple arms. While its social media surveillance wing fed reports to the Canadian government, its editorial team worked to influence opinion through the news media. When the Financial Times reported on the protest phenomenon, the outlet quoted Murphy, the former FBI man who now works for Logically, who asserted that the truckers were influenced by coordinated “conspiracy theorist groups” in the U.S. and Canada. Vicesimilarly quoted Joe Ondrak, Logically’s head of investigations, to report that the “Freedom Convoy” had generated excitement among global conspiracy theorists. Neither outlet disclosed Logically’s work for Canadian law enforcement at the time.
Other targets of Logically are quick to point out that the firm has taken liberties with what it classifies as misinformation.
Will Jones, the editor of the Daily Sceptic, a British news outlet with a libertarian bent, has detailed an unusual fact-check from Logically Facts, the company’s editorial site. Jones said the site targeted him for pointing out that data in 2022 showed 71 percent of patients hospitalized for Covid-19 were vaccinated. Logically’s fact-check acknowledged Jones had accurately used statistics from the U.K. Health Security Agency, but tried to undermine him by asserting that he was still misleading by suggesting that “vaccines are ineffective.”
But Jones, in a reply, noted that he never made that argument and that Logically was batting away at a straw man. In fact, his original piece plainly took issue with a Guardian article that incorrectly claimed that “COVID-19 has largely become a disease of the unvaccinated.”
Other Logically fact-checks have bizarrely targeted the Daily Sceptic for reporting on news in January 2022 that vaccine mandates might soon be lifted. The site dinged the Daily Sceptic for challenging the evidence behind the vaccine policy and declared, “COVID-19 vaccines have been proven effective in fighting the pandemic.” And yet, at the end of that month, the mandate was lifted for health care workers, and the following month, all other pandemic restrictions were revoked, just as the Daily Sceptic had reported.
“As far as I can work out, it’s a grift,” said Daily Sceptic founder Toby Young, of Logically. “A group of shysters offer to help the government censor any criticism of its policies under the pretense that they’re not silencing dissent — God forbid! — but merely ‘cleansing’ social media of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”
Jones was similarly dismissive of the company, which he said disputes anything that runs contrary to popular consensus. “The consensus of course is that set by the people who pay Logically for their services,” Jones added. “The company claims to protect democratic debate by providing access to ‘reliable information,’ but in reality, it is paid to bark and savage on command whenever genuine free speech makes an inconvenient appearance.”
In some cases, Logically has piled on to news stories to help discredit voices of dissent. Last September, the anti-misinformation site leaped into action after British news outlets published reports about sexual misconduct allegations surrounding comedian and online broadcaster Russell Brand — one of the outspoken critics of government policy in Britain, who has been compared to Joe Rogan for his heterodox views and large audience.
Brand, a vocal opponent of pandemic policies, had been targeted by Logically in the past for airing opinions critical of the U.S. and U.K. response to the virus outbreak, and in other moments for criticizing new laws in the European Union that compel social media platforms to take down content.
But the site took dramatic action when the sexual allegations, none of which have been proved in court, were published in the media. Ondrak, Logically’s investigations head, provided different quotes to nearly half a dozen news outlets — including Vice, Wired, the BBC, and two separate articles in The Times — that depicted Brand as a dangerous purveyor of misinformation who had finally been held to account.
“He follows a lot of the ostensibly health yoga retreat, kind of left-leaning, anti-capitalist figures, who got really suckered into Covid skepticism, Covid denialism, and anti-vax, and then spat out of the Great Reset at the other end,” Ondrak told Wired. In one of the articles published by The Times, Ondrak aired frustration on the obstacles of demonetizing Brand from the Rumble streaming network. In an interview with the BBC, Ondrak gave a curious condemnation, noting Brand stops short of airing any actual conspiracy theories or falsehoods but is guilty of giving audiences “the ingredients to make the disinformation themselves.”
Dinenage, the member of Parliament who spearheaded the CDU anti-misinformation push with Logically during the pandemic, also leapt into action. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, she sent nearly identical letters to Rumble, TikTok, and Meta to demand that the platforms follow YouTube’s lead in demonetizing Brand. Dinenage couched her official request to censor Brand as a part of a public interest inquiry, to protect the “welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour.”
Logically’s editorial team went a step further. In its report on the Brand allegations published on Logically Facts, it claimed that social media accounts “trotting out the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ refrain” for the comedian were among those perpetuating “common myths about sexual assault.” The site published a follow-up video reiterating the claim that those seeking the presumption of innocence for Brand, a principle dating back to the Magna Carta, were spreading a dangerous “myth.”
The unusual advocacy campaign against Brand represented a typical approach for a company that has long touted itself as a hammer against spreaders of misinformation. The opportunity to remove Brand from the media ecosystem meant throwing as much at him as possible, despite any clear misinformation or disinformation angle in the sexual assault allegations. Rather, he was a leading critic of government censorship and pandemic policy, so the scandal represented a weakness to be exploited.
Such heavy-handed tactics may be on the horizon for American voters. The firm is now a member of the U.S. Election Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, the group managed by the Center for Internet Security that helps facilitate misinformation reports on behalf of election officials across the country. Logically has been in talks with Oregon and other states, as well as DHS, to expand its social media surveillance role for the presidential election later this year.
Previous targets of the company, though, are issuing a warning.
“It appears that Logically’s lucrative and frankly sinister business effectively produced multi-million pound misinformation for the government that may have played a role in the censorship of citizens’ lawful speech,” said Carlo of Big Brother Watch.
“Politicians and senior officials happily pay these grifters millions of pounds to wield the red pen, telling themselves that they’re ‘protecting’ democracy rather than undermining it,” said Young of the Daily Sceptic. “It’s a boondoggle and it should be against the law.”
Even as social media addiction accelerated under Covid lockdowns, Meta jettisoned internal alarms about mental health dangers. Following Frances Haugen’s 2021 whistleblower testimony, attorneys general from 42 states filed consumer protection lawsuits against Meta.
The “Facebook Files,” a Wall Street Journal investigation based on Meta’s internal documents, showed that the social media company “ignored their own studies revealing Instagram’s photo-sharing and editing app harms girls.” Capitalizing on the need to connect during lockdown, Meta helped propel young women into gender facilities.
When you set up a social media profile, you begin a process of virtualized identity that makes you a target for ad campaigns. Bots track people exploring “gender issues.” As Michelle Santiago Cortés’ observed, “Our algorithmically orchestrated encounters with people … on social media start to feel preordained, as if the fact that the algorithm put something on our path Means Something™.” Meta hid the many adverse effects — including anxiety and body-image dysmorphia — tied to compulsive online behavior such as infinite scrolling.
The “Facebook Files” disclosed built-in Instagram features that made it more harmful than similar youth-targeting apps. In particular, according to internal documents, “Social comparison is worse on Instagram.” Social comparisons on visual platforms, such as Instagram, resemble past research on body image. That research showed that young girls’ body image worsened when they compared themselves to images of cover girls.
The Self as an Object to Edit
What’s worse now is that, according to JAMA Plastic Facial Surgery, selfies and photo editing detach users from their own bodies, “making us lose touch with reality.” A dangerous object orientation toward the body occurs.
Creativity and intelligence cannot withstand making comparisons and spiraling into envy. Even a sophisticated awareness of the objectifying effect of social media will not protect young people from it. A study of youth reactions to their own untouched versus filtered photos showed that their resulting critical awareness is insufficient to avoid social comparisons: “Although the majority of the teens said they actually preferred their original, unretouched photos, every single one chose to digitally alter their image for social media.”
Cell phone users occasionally walk into traffic. Why wouldn’t preoccupation with an unfolding digital presentation lend to disembodied living in your head and ensuing self-estrangement?
The face app visually re-aligns the facial contour, such as the jawline, to achieve a more masculine appearance. While the initial experience is euphoric, the emotional high is not lasting. One Reddit thread makes this clear: “So I just got face app to see what the hype was all about. And let me just say its [sic] pretty awesome, but as soon as I finished one picture I was washed over with so much dysphoria and just felt sad that that wasn’t me.”
Depersonalization Through Photo Editing
Meta relies on AI to filter content. This includes machine learning and rule-based character pattern-matching algorithms, including liking and contextual cues to identify and capitalize on curiosity about gender issues. The best AI in the world cannot filter out image comparisons that undermine an individual’s mood and self-esteem. This is especially true with face apps, which invite the user to dwell in a detached way on her own physical appearance. Moreover, these apps allow users to swap in a dramatically altered appearance of themselves as the opposite sex.
It’s easy to recognize the excessive focus on body image in those who begin to experience appearance incongruence — the feeling that one’s actual appearance does not match one’s true appearance. If it overshadows real life, the “trans alter,” as Eliza Mondegreen calls the virtual performance of self, becomes discordant with embodied existence. In this context, photo editing can take on outsized significance. Psychologists note that “photo-editing may exacerbate disordered body image in vulnerable individuals.” According to its own science, Meta knew its Instagram photo-sharing app “was addictive and worsened body image issues for some teen girls.”
The use of social media, especially Instagram, is as addictive as drug use. Instagram incorporates short, exciting videos to trigger infinite scrolling. “Meta did not disclose that its algorithms were designed to capitalize on young users’ dopamine responses and create an addictive cycle of engagement,” according to a report. The more preoccupied a person becomes, the more likely she is to experience mental health issues such as dissociation.
Transgenderism, the New Aspiration
Even a brief amount of time spent filtering photos leads to an increase in girls’ anxiety, according to researchers. This is because Instagram and other platforms introduce an emotional feedback loop, in which waves of dysphoria are punctuated by spikes of euphoria. In the online world, where bots are ubiquitous, every female who doesn’t accept her sex has access to a virtual trans surgeon. Social media feeds a dynamic of nonstop clicking for more hits of dopamine.
Although they are aware of digital distortion online, teens looking at face apps see plastic surgery results and aspire to physically embody their own retouched images. Dr. Helen Egger, a child psychiatrist, notes that “it’s a dopamine hit, it’s like ‘woah I’m popular, I like this feeling, I want to do it again,’ it can feed on itself.” Social affirmation of face swaps, within a cycle of addictive feedback loops, validates the urgent demand for medical intervention.
The trouble for social media users involves its capacity not only to reflect reality but to project a desired or imagined reality. Sociologist Charles Cooley coined a theory of the looking-glass self to explain how we develop our self-concept through interaction, especially when noticing how we’re perceived by others. In this way, social media is particularly addictive in promising to show us to ourselves in more complete ways than even a mirror can.
At the same time, social media is not a mirror held up to reality at all. It’s an unreal screen for public consumption that spreads acceptance of transgender surgeries. Social media in this sense is not the playful leisure activity it appears to be. Staring into the mirror-like cell phone screen can deepen an out-of-body experience and a preoccupation with one’s sex.
A Trans ‘Rite of Passage’
For girls who deny their sex, Instagram’s face-swapping filters have been attributed to “finally ‘cracking their egg’ — a rite of passage” when a trans identity is apparently firmly established in the mind as a visually concrete identity: “The Snapchat girl filter was the final straw in dropping a decade’s worth of repression,” said Josie, an early-30s man from Cincinnati who claims to be a woman. “[I] saw something that looked more ‘me’ than anything in a mirror, and I couldn’t go back.”
In the past, the young were tricked into altering their aspirational goals by mimicking airbrushed models. Today, teens fixate on their own filtered image and dream about cosmetic surgery.
In May, an advisory from the U.S. surgeon general warned of social media’s negative effect on anxiety and body-image disorders. In this Meta face-changing ecology, every confused girl on Instagram can instantly see a tougher image of herself, able to withstand the worries that assail her. Something, she feels, has suddenly jelled.
Dr. Faith Kuzma is a retired Assistant Professor of English. Kuzma has written for Salvo, The Canadian Patriot, American Spectator, Psych Reg, and Mercator Net, among others.
In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” — beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser — “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as Covid-19, NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centers for Disease Control. Other content-moderation allies, Crovitz’s pitch noted, include “intelligence and national security officials,” “reputation management providers,” and “government agencies,” which contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Instead of only fact-checking individual forms of incorrect information, NewsGuard, in its proposal, touted the ability to rate the “overall reliability of websites” and “’prebunk’ COVID-19 misinformation from hundreds of popular websites.”
NewsGuard’s ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives. In the United States, as the “Twitter Files” revealed, the effort often takes the form of direct government appeals to social media platforms and news outlets. More commonly the government works through seemingly benign non-governmental organizations — such as the Stanford Internet Observatory — to quell speech it disapproves of.
Or it pays to coerce speech through government contracts with outfits such as NewsGuard, a for-profit company of especially wide influence. Founded in 2018 by Crovitz and his co-CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist, and entrepreneur, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the internet. The potential market for such speech policing, NewsGuard’s pitch to Twitter noted, was $1.74 billion, an industry it hoped to capture.
Instead of merely suggesting rebuttals to untrustworthy information, as many other existing anti-misinformation groups provide, NewsGuard has built a business model out of broad labels that classify entire news sites as safe or untrustworthy, using an individual grading system producing what it calls “nutrition labels.” The ratings — which appear next to a website’s name on the Microsoft Edge browser and other systems that deploy the plug-in — use a scale of zero to 100 based on what NewsGuard calls “nine apolitical criteria,” including “gathers and presents information responsibly” (worth 18 points), “avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points), and “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points), etc.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
Critics note that such ratings are entirely subjective — The New York Times, for example, which repeatedly carried false and partisan information from anonymous sources during the Russiagate hoax, gets a 100 percent rating. RealClearInvestigations, which took heat in 2019 for unmasking the “whistleblower” of the first Trump impeachment (while many other outlets including the Times still have not), has an 80 percent rating. (Verbatim: the NewsGuard-RCI exchange over the whistleblower.) Independent news outlets with an anti-establishment bent receive particularly low ratings from NewsGuard, such as the libertarian news site Antiwar.com, with a 49.5 percent rating, and conservative site The Federalist, with a 12.5 percent rating.
As it stakes a claim to being the internet’s arbiter of trust, the company’s site says it has conducted reviews of some 95 percent of news sources across the English, French, German, and Italian web. It has also published reports about disinformation involving China and the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars. The model has received glowing profiles in CNN and The New York Times, among other outlets, as a viable solution for fighting fake news.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
NewsGuard is pushing to apply its browser screening process to libraries, academic centers, news aggregation portals, and internet service providers. Its reach, however, is far greater because of other products it aims to sell to social media and other content moderation firms and advertisers. “An advertiser’s worst nightmare is having an ad placement damage even one customer’s trust in a brand,” said Crovitz in a press release touting NewsGuard’s “BrandGuard” service for advertisers. “We’re asking them to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem,” Crovitz told reporters.
How NewsGuard Starves Disfavored Sites Of Ad Clients
NewsGuard’s BrandGuard tool provides an “exclusion list” that deters advertisers from buying space on sites NewsGuard deems problematic. But that warning service creates inherent conflicts of interest with NewsGuard’s financial model: The buyers of the service can be problematic entities too, with an interest in protecting and buffing their image.
A case in point: Publicis Groupe, NewsGuard’s largest investor and the biggest conglomerate of marketing agencies in the world, which has integrated NewsGuard’s technology into its fleet of subsidiaries that place online advertising. The question of conflicts arises because Publicis represents a range of corporate and government clients, including Pfizer — whose Covid vaccine has been questioned by some news outlets that have received low scores. Other investors include Bruce Mehlman, a D.C. lobbyist with a lengthy list of clients, including United Airlines and ByteDance, the parent company of much-criticized Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.
NewsGuard has faced mounting criticism that rather than serving as a neutral public service against online propaganda, it instead acts as an opaque proxy for its government and corporate clients to stifle views that simply run counter to their own interests. The criticism finds support in internal documents, such as the NewsGuard proposal to Twitter, which this reporter obtained during “Twitter Files” reporting last year, as well as in government records and discussions with independent media sites targeted by the startup.
Beginning last year, users scanning the headlines on certain browsers that include NewsGuard were warned against visiting Consortium News. A scarlet-red NewsGuard warning pop-up said, “Proceed With Caution” and claimed that the investigative news site “has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war.” The warning also notifies a network of advertisers, news aggregation portals, and social media platforms that Consortium News cannot be trusted.
But Consortium News, founded by late Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Robert Parry and known for its strident criticism of U.S. foreign policy, is far from a fake news publisher. And NewsGuard, the entity attempting to suppress it, Consortium claims, is hardly a disinterested fact-checker because of federal influence over it. NewsGuard attached the label after pressing Consortium for retractions or corrections to six articles published on the site. Those news articles dealt with widely reported claims about neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and U.S. influence over the country — issues substantiated by other credible media outlets. After Consortium editors refused to remove the reporting and offered a detailed rebuttal, the entire site received a misinformation label, encompassing over 20,000 articles and videos published by the outlet since it was founded in 1995.
The left-wing news site believes the label was part of a pay-for-censorship scheme. It notes that Consortium News was targeted after NewsGuard received a $749,387 Defense Department contract in 2021 to identify “false narratives” relating to the war between Ukraine and Russia, as well as other forms of foreign influence.
Bruce Afran, an attorney for Consortium News, disagrees. “What’s really happening here is that NewsGuard is trying to target those who take a different view from the government line,” said Afran. He filed an amended complaint last month claiming that NewsGuard not only defamed his client, but also acts as a front for the military to suppress critical reporting.
“There’s a great danger in being maligned this way,” Afran continued. “The government cannot evade the Constitution by hiring a private party.”
Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, observed that in previous years, anonymous social media accounts had also targeted his site, falsely claiming a connection to the Russian government in a bid to discredit his outlet.
“NewsGuard has got to be the worst,” said Lauria. “They’re labeling us in a way that stays with us. Every news article we publish is defamed with that label of misinformation.”
Both Lauria and Afran said that they worry that NewsGuard is continuing to collaborate with the government or with intelligence services. In previous years, NewsGuard had worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. It’s not clear to what extent NewsGuard is still working with the Pentagon. But earlier this year, Crovitz wrote an email to journalist Matt Taibbi, defending its work with the government, describing it in the present tense, suggesting that it is ongoing:
For example, as is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the U.S. and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China. Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies.
The company has not yet responded to the Consortium News lawsuit, filed in the New York federal court. In May of this year, the Air Force Research Lab responded to a records request from journalist Erin Marie Miller about the NewsGuard contract. The contents of the work proposal were entirely redacted.
Asked about the company’s continued work with the intelligence sector, Skibinski replied, “We license our data about false claims made by state media sources and state-sponsored disinformation efforts from China, Russia and Iran to the defense and intelligence sector, as we describe on our website.”
Punishing An Outlet That Criticized A NewsGuard Backer’s Pharma Clients
Other websites that have sought to challenge their NewsGuard rating say it has shown little interest in a back-and-forth exchange regarding unsettled matters. Take the case of The Daily Sceptic, a small publication founded and edited by conservative English commentator Toby Young. As a forum for journalists and academics to challenge a variety of strongly held public-policy orthodoxies, even those on Covid-19 vaccines and climate change, The Daily Sceptic is a genuine dissenter. Last year, Young reached out to NewsGuard, hoping to improve his site’s 74.5 rating.
In a series of emails from 2022 and 2023 that were later forwarded to RealClearInvestigations, NewsGuard responded to Young by listing articles that it claimed represent forms of misinformation, such as reports that Pfizer’s vaccine carried potential side effects. The site, notably, has been a strident critic of Covid-19 policies, such as coercive mandates. Anicka Slachta, an analyst with NewsGuard, highlighted articles that questioned the efficacy of the vaccines and lockdowns. The Daily Sceptic, for example, reported a piece casting Covid-19 lockdowns as “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful,” citing academic literature from Johns Hopkins University.
Rather than refute this claim, Slachta simply offered an opposing view from another academic, who criticized the arguments put forth by lockdown critics. And the Hopkins study, Slachta noted, was not peer-reviewed. The topic is still, of course, under serious debate. Sweden rejected the draconian lockdowns on schools and businesses implemented by most countries in North American and Europe, yet had one of the lowest “all-cause excess mortality” rates in either region.
Young and others said that the issue highlighted by NewsGuard is not an instance of misinformation, but rather an ongoing debate, with scientists and public health experts continuing to explore the moral, economic, and health-related questions raised by such policies. In its response to NewsGuard’s questions about the lockdown piece, Young further added that his site made no claim that the Hopkins paper was peer-reviewed and added that its findings had been backed up by a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Yet to NewsGuard, Young’s site evidently posed a misinformation danger by simply reporting on the subject and refusing to back down. Emails between NewsGuard and the Daily Sceptic show Young patiently responding to the company’s questions; he also added postscripts to the articles flagged by NewsGuard with a link to the fact checks of them and rebuttals of those fact checks. Young also took the extra step of adding updates to other articles challenged by fact-checking non-governmental organizations. “I have also added postscripts to other articles not flagged by you but which have been fact checked by other organisations, such as Full Fact and Reuters,” Young wrote to Slachta.
That wasn’t enough. After a series of back-and-forth emails, NewsGuard said it would be satisfied only with a retraction of the articles, many of which, like the lockdown piece, contained no falsehoods. After the interaction, NewsGuard lowered The Daily Sceptic’s rating to 37.5/100.
“I’m afraid you left me no choice but to conclude that NewsGuard is a partisan site that is trying to demonetise news publishing sites whose politics it disapproves of under the guise of supposedly protecting potential advertisers from being associated with ‘mis-’ and ‘disinformation,’” wrote Young in response. “Why bother to keep up the pretence of fair-mindedness John? Just half my rating again, which you’re going to do whatever I say.”
NewsGuard’s Skibinski, in a response to a query about The Daily Sceptic’s downgrade, denied that his company makes any “demands” of publishers. “We simply call them for comment and ask questions about their editorial practices,” he wrote. “This is known as journalism.”
The experience mirrored that of Consortium. Afran, the attorney for the site, noted that NewsGuard uses an arbitrary process to punish opponents, citing the recent study from the company on misinformation on the Israel-Hamas war. “They cherry-picked 250 posts among tweets they knew were incorrect, and they attempt to create the impression that all of X is unreliable,” the lawyer noted. “And so, what they’re doing, and this is picked up by mainstream media, that’s actually causing X, formerly Twitter, to now lose ad revenue, based literally on 250 posts out of the billions of posts on Twitter.”
The push to demonize and delist The Daily Sceptic, a journalist critic of pharmaceutical products and policies, reflects an inherent conflict with the biggest backer of NewsGuard: Publicis Groupe.
Publicis client Pfizer awarded Publicis a major deal to help manage its global media and advertising operations, a small reflection of which is the $2.3 billion the pharmaceutical giant spent on advertising last year.
The NewsGuard-Publicis relationship extends to the Paris-based marketing conglomerate’s full client list, including LVHM, PepsiCo, Glaxo Smith Kline, Burger King, ConAgra, Kellogg Company, General Mills, and McDonalds. “NewsGuard will be able to publish and license ‘white lists’ of news sites our clients can use to support legitimate publishers while still protecting their brand reputations,” said Maurice Lévy, chairman of the Publicis Groupe, upon its launch of NewsGuard.
Put another way, when corporate watchdogs like The Daily Sceptic or Consortium News are penalized by NewsGuard, the ranking system amounts to a blacklist to guide advertisers where not to spend their money.
“NewsGuard is clearly in the business of censoring the truth,” noted Dr. Joseph Mercola, a gadfly voice whose website was ranked as misinformation by NewsGuard after it published reports about Covid-19’s potential origin from a lab in Wuhan, China.
“Seeing how Publicis represents most of the major pharmaceutical companies in the world and funded the creation of NewsGuard, it’s not far-fetched to assume Publicis might influence NewsGuard’s ratings of drug industry competitors,” Mercola added, in a statement online.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.
Lee Fang is an investigative reporter. Find his Substack here.
Scientists at a Pentagon medical intelligence unit wrote in a research report that evidence indicates that SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, may have been “developed in a laboratory,” The Washington Times reports. Scientists from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence determined, in an unclassified research paper published in 2020 and recently uncovered by The Australian, that COVID-19 was engineered. The report also rebuffed a previous research paper written by Kristian G. Andersen and four other scientists which concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
The NCMI report, written by Robert Greg Cutlip and Navy Cmdr. Jean-Paul Chretien, states: “We consider the evidence they present and find that it does not prove that the virus arose naturally. In fact, the features of SARS-CoV-2 noted by Anderson et al. are consistent with another scenario: that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a laboratory, by methods that leading coronavirus researchers commonly use to investigate how the viruses infect cells and cause disease, assess the potential for animal coronaviruses to jump to humans, and develop drugs and vaccines.”
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee who is leading the investigation, told the Australian, “We never trusted the Chinese Communist Party to come clean about the origins of COVID-19, but a potential cover-up by our own government and Defense agencies tasked with securing our nation should concern every American and must be fully investigated immediately.”
He added, “The intelligence community’s official inconclusive position about the origins of COVID-19 has never accurately reflected the classified intelligence we reviewed. Now we are learning insider censorship of US expert scientists may have influenced the report.”
The First Amendment’s mandate that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” is a guarantee that, no matter how inconvenient to those temporarily holding high office, the people have an absolute right to express their thoughts and opinions. Despite this constitutional requirement, over 200 years ago, President John Adams and the Federalists in Congress used the threat of war with France as a pretext to enact into law the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime for Americans to “print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.
The debate surrounding the Sedition Act was about the nature of freedom of speech. One supporter of the law, Alexander Addison, believed that some opinions were so dangerous that it was in the public interest to suppress them, stating, “Truth has but one side: and listening to error and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth.”
An opponent, Thomas Cooper, presciently argued that the purpose of the Sedition Act was to empower one party to “suppress the opinions of those who differ from them.” Unsurprisingly, all the defendants prosecuted under the Sedition Act would be Republicans.
Sound familiar?
On Independence Day this year, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction restricting the Biden Administration from collaborating with social media companies to censor and suppress constitutionally protected speech. In his opinion, Judge Terry Doughty stated that the Biden Administration’s efforts to suppress opinions it opposes “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in the United States’ history.” It is difficult to disagree with Judge Doughty’s description.
For years, the Biden Administration demanded social media suppress and censor conservatives who dared question the origins of Covid, the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns, and election integrity, among other issues. The Biden Administration was so zealous in its enforcement of censorship, even parody content did not escape its anti-free speech campaign.
And the Biden administration didn’t ask nicely. When then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki publicly called on social media companies to censor speech relating to Covid, she mentioned Biden’s support for a “robust anti-trust program,” all but threatening to break up tech giants if they failed to adopt the administration’s censorship policies. Later, the White House announced that it was reviewing policies relating to whether social media should be held legally liable for spreading so-called misinformation. In other words, the Biden administration effectively told social media “Do our bidding, or else.”
The White House was so aggressive that a Twitter representative stated the site was “bombarded” with censorship requests from the executive branch. But that bombardment was not really directed at Twitter — it was a monstrous attack on the free speech rights guaranteed to every American by the First Amendment.
In addition to countless numbers of Americans, I was targeted by the censorship regime. When I posted a video on YouTube to educate the public on the potentially harmful consequences of relying on ineffective cloth masks to prevent transmission of Covid, YouTube took my video down and suspended me for a week.
Americans are a free people and we do not take infringements upon our liberties lightly. The time has come for resistance and to reclaim our God-given right to free expression. Permit me, as a member of the resistance, to present a solution that that restores and protects the First Amendment.
I introduced legislation called the Free Speech Protection Act, which will prohibit federal employees and contractors from using their positions to censor and otherwise attack speech protected by the First Amendment. My legislation will impose penalties for those that violate this rule, as well as empower private citizens to sue the government and executive branch officials for violating their First Amendment rights. Additionally, the bill will mandate frequent publicly accessible reports detailing the communications between an executive branch agency and media organizations, ensure that federal grant money is not used to label media organizations as sources of misinformation or disinformation, and terminates authorities that threaten free speech.
Under my Free Speech Protection Act, the government will no longer be able to cloak itself in secrecy to undermine the First Amendment rights of conservatives, libertarians, liberals, socialists, and all others who wish to exercise their right to free speech and engage in public discourse.
My legislation will make it difficult to hide efforts to censor constitutionally protected speech. Those officials who censor Americans are on notice: if you infringe upon First Amendment rights, under my bill, you will face severe penalties, such as potential debarment from employment by the United States, a civil penalty of no less than $10,000, and revocation of a security clearance. Any administration employee who prizes his livelihood would not dare threaten free speech after my bill becomes law.
Looking back upon his defeat of John Adams for the presidency, Thomas Jefferson wrote, the “revolution of 1800 . . . was a real revolution in the principles of our government as that of [17]76.” Jefferson’s victory was a vindication of the First Amendment as he allowed the Sedition Act to expire and pardoned those convicted for expressing their views.
Once again, the American people are called upon to defend the founding principles over which our forebears fought a revolution. To protect free speech, Congress must prohibit the government’s collusion with Big Tech and other media organizations. Congress must pass the Free Speech Protection Act.
“If you want to know what really, really matters, to [the regime], and to you, and to the future of the country, consider the things that you are not allowed to say,” Tucker Carlson told his audience of young people during a Turning Point USA speech on the heels of his interviews with Republican primary candidates in Iowa.
These unsayable things, Carlson said, are easy to pinpoint because wrong-think seems to be the only “crime” that’s consistently and seriously penalized in contemporary America. Rapists and murderers go unprosecuted in American blue cities. “[B]urning down buildings, impoverishing people, starting totally counterproductive wars we can’t win that kill a lot of our citizens, [and] leaving the border open so 7 million people can walk across” are “never punished.”
So what are the three topics Carlson says have been deemed forbidden speech by the media, White House, and virtually every member of the American gentry class? “One of them’s the war in Ukraine, another’s Covid, and, of course, the third is Jan. 6.”
War in Ukraine
Every uniparty politician, corporate media outlet, and mega-corporation insists that if you don’t “hate” Russia and support America funneling billions of dollars to defend a nation ruled by a corrupt, oligarchical government, you must love Vladimir Putin and oppose “democracy.”
“It’s not a criminal act not to hate somebody,” Carlson said. He pointed out that the number of Americans murdered by Russians is in the “range” of “zero.” Meanwhile, more than 100,000 Americans die every year at the hands of Mexican cartels and the drugs they smuggle into our country. Yet the media and our government want us to be more preoccupied with a foreign war than the deaths of American citizens here at home.
Carlson explained that so far, America has utterly failed to be a leader in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, encouraging the war instead of facilitating peace. “If you’re the leader, the last thing you do is sow more chaos,” Carlson said. Yet the White House “with the full participation of the Republican Party” has fueled and prolonged a bloody war — and you had better not question it.
“Foreign policy is the one big thing” that’s not subject to “voter control,” Carlson said. Americans have a right to weigh in on things like the war in Ukraine and tell the federal government: “This is my country and you’re doing this in my name, with my money, and potentially my children.”
Washington, however, doesn’t believe in “the public [signing] off on wars … and that’s exactly why they like it,” Carlson added. If you try to question Washington’s lucrative wars, you’re told to “shut up.” And you, “an American citizen who loves your country [and] whose ancestors fought to defend it,” are accused of disloyalty by people who don’t care about America at all.
Covid
During and following the years of Covid tyranny, Big Tech companies (often at the behest of the federal government) censored anyone, including doctors and sitting members of Congress, who discussed the numerous civil liberties violations, the highly plausible lab-leak theory, the devastation of lockdowns, failed vaccines, the inefficacy of cloth masks, and vaccine injuries.
“Every organization in American life … from your government, to the entire media, [and] in some cases, your church,” told Americans that if you want to be a “good person” you’ll follow the Covid rules, Carlson said. In the case of the Covid shots, you had to pipe down and take it — without really knowing what was in it or what the long-term outlook would be.
Now we know the staggering number of people who appear to be vaccine injured, as Carlson pointed out. Yet the powers that be continue to gaslight the public anytime someone tries to discuss adverse reactions to any of the Covid shots.
“This [was] a moral test, and if you want[ed] to pass, you obey[ed],” said Carlson, adding that those who stood against Covid authoritarianism were persecuted and labeled societal “outlaws.”
Jan. 6
Carlson recalled how shortly after Jan. 6, 2021 people began claiming the demonstration was a “racist insurrection.” At the time, Carlson pointed out it neither had anything to do with race nor involved “armed people try[ing] to overthrow the government,” but he was told, yet again, to “shut up.” He even found himself labeled a “racist insurrectionist.”
The people who protested on Jan. 6, were, in Carlson’s words, “grandmas with diabetes and a lot of debt.” Why were these everyday Americans so angry? Well, the American gentry class refused to allow the country to talk honestly about why a massive swath of the populace was so enraged that they took a “bus from Tennessee to go jump up and down in front of the Capitol.”
We were never allowed to consider how “Biden won by 81 million votes — 15 million more than Barack Obama, which seems like a lot considering [Biden] didn’t campaign and he can’t talk.” We also weren’t allowed to consider whether electronic voting machines or unmonitored ballot drop boxes were compromised, Carlson added. Those who tried to raise concerns about the 2020 election, which sparked Jan. 6, were “deplatformed,” “debanked,” “bankrupted,” “fired,” and essentially “hounded out of public life in America.”
Thought Criminals Are Our ‘North Star’
Carlson warned of distractions in the news cycle. While we must push back against things like radical transgender theory, stories related to that and other hot-topic issues can also be used by the left to manipulate our priorities, he said. “I don’t think there’s a single Democratic member of Congress who cares at all about trans rights,” Carlson explained, theorizing that many of these daily news stories are “designed to take people like me and send us off into a screaming fit.”
Instead, “look around and ask … what are the topics that no one’s even pushing back on?” If you are really interested in truth-seeking and you want to locate “the North Star” in confusing, disordered, post-industrial America, then you need to look for the “thought criminals.”
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
A preliminary injunction issued Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty explicitly prohibits the White House and several federal agencies from violating the First Amendment by directing social media companies to censor Americans.
Up to and even after the injunction’s release, Democrats have insisted that any suggestion the federal government is colluding with Big Tech to censor conservatives (or pretty much any information inconvenient to the current administration) is a “conspiracy” theory. However, in his injunction, Judge Doughty cited shocking evidence that the deep state’s collusion with Big Tech is very much real. Here are 12 of the dozens of damning instances cited by the judge that demonstrate the severity of our government’s illegal partnership with Big Tech.
1. White House Orders RFK Tweet Removal ‘ASAP’
On Jan. 23, 2021, the White House requested Twitter remove a tweet by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that was critical of Covid-19 vaccines. “Hey folks-Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP,” wrote a Biden official. The White House also expressed a desire to “keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre.”
2. White House Requests ‘Immediate’ Ban On Biden Family Member Parody Account
On Feb. 6, 2021, the White House asked Twitter to ban a “parody account linked to Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter and President Biden’s granddaughter.”
“Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately,” the official wrote to Twitter. “Please remove this account immediately.” The account was banned within 45 minutes, Doughty noted.
3. Twitter Streamlines White House Censorship Requests
On Feb. 7, 2021, Twitter provided the White House with a “Twitter’s Partner Support Portal” that, according to the injunction, “expedited review of flagging content for censorship.” The portal was created because Twitter felt overwhelmed by the large volume of censorship requests coming from the White House and wanted to both prioritize and expedite the administration’s requests.
4. Twitter Promises White House It Will Boost Censorship
On March 1, 2021, after a meeting with White House officials about “misinformation,” Twitter sent a follow-up email promising that it would do more to suppress “misleading information.”
“Thanks again for meeting with us today. As we discussed, we are building on ‘our’ continued efforts to remove the most harmful COVID-19 ‘misleading information’ from the service,” Twitter wrote.
5. Facebook Fulfills White House’s Covid Censorship Requests
Sometime between May and July, a “senior Meta executive” sent emails to White House officials, letting them know that Meta was fulfilling White House “requests” to censor alleged Covid-19 misinformation. The email also said Meta was “expand[ing] penalties” for “Facebook accounts that share misinformation.”
“We think there is considerably more we can do in ‘partnership’ with you and your team to drive behavior,” Meta wrote.
6. Facebook Agrees to More Sweeping White House Covid Vaccine Censorship Demands
On March 21, 2021, Facebook sent an email to the White House recapping a March 19 in-person meeting during which the Biden administration apparently “demanded a consistent point of contact with Facebook, additional data from Facebook, ‘Levers for Tackling Vaccine Hesitancy Content,’ and censorship policies for Meta’s platform WhatsApp.” In response, according to Doughty, Facebook said it was “censoring, removing, and reducing the virality of” anti-vaccine content “that does not contain actionable misinformation.”
7. Facebook Shadowbans Vaccine Content on WhatsApp at Behest of White House
In the same aforementioned email, Facebook also agreed to shadowban anti-Covid vaccine content on Meta-owned WhatsApp. “As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that do not contain actionable misinformation,” the Big Tech company explained.
8. Facebook Boosts White House’s Vaccine Propaganda
On April 13, 2021, the White House asked Facebook multiple times to “amplify” pro-vaccine messaging in the wake of a “temporary halt” of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “Re the J & J news, we’re keen to amplify any messaging you want us to project about what this means for people,” Facebook wrote back.
9. White House Demands Censorship of Tucker Carlson Post
On April 14, 2021, a White House official emailed a Facebook executive inquiring into why a Tucker Carlson post with an “anti-vax message” had not been censored. Facebook responded, stating that while the post did not violate community guidelines, it was being “demoted.” Another White House official, unsatisfied with the shadowbanning since Carlson’s post had garnered 40,000 shares, wrote an email demanding an explanation from Facebook. The official also apparently directly called a Facebook executive. Facebook subsequently assured the White House that the video was given a “50% demotion for seven days and stated that it would continue to demote the video.”
10. Twitter Deplatforms Alex Berenson After White House Calls Him ‘Epicenter of Disinfo’
On April 21, officials from the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services met with Twitter for a “Twitter Vaccine Misinfo Briefing.” During the meeting, White House officials “wanted to know” why journalist Alex Berenson had not been “kicked off” Twitter, calling him “the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.” Berenson was later suspended and eventually deplatformed.
11. Facebook Appeases White House Censorship Demands to Get Back in Biden’s ‘Good Graces’
In July 2021, after intense public and internal pressure from White House officials, including Press Secretary Jen Psaki and President Joe Biden himself, Facebook waged a mass censorship campaign against the “Disinformation Dozen” and anyone connected to them. The “Disinformation Dozen” are 12 users (one of whom is RFK Jr.) who were apparently responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine content. Around that same time, a Facebook official asked one of Biden’s senior advisers for ways to “get back into the White House’s good graces,” adding that Facebook and the White House were “100% on the same team here in fighting this.”
12. White House Successfully Pressures Twitter to Remove Jill Biden Parody Video
On Nov. 30, 2021, the White House emailed Twitter to flag an edited video of First Lady Jill Biden “profanely heckling children while reading to them,” according to the injunction. In response, Twitter slapped a label on the video, warning that it had been “edited for comedic effect.” However, that wasn’t enough for the White House. After several back and forths that included the first lady’s press secretary, Twitter removed the video in December 2021.
The above list is only the tip of the iceberg. The Biden administration’s colossal war on the First Amendment includes an even wider range of targets, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, the lab-leak theory, anyone who questions the integrity of the 2020 election, anyone who questions the security of voting by mail, anyone who questions climate change, pro-lifers, people who believe in the sex binary, negative posts about the economy, and general criticism of the president. “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” wrote Judge Doughty.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
A federal judge is being applauded for a surprise July 4 ruling stating the Biden administration likely violated the First Amendment during the COVID-19 pandemic. U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty ordered an injunction on Independence Day to prevent White House officials and federal agencies from meeting with tech companies about social media censorship, arguing past actions likely violated the Constitution.
“I think that language reflects that this was a stunning rebuke, but also an appropriate one,” former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told “America’s Newsroom” Wednesday.
The holiday injunction was in response to recent lawsuits from Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general. The suits allege that the White House coerced or “significantly encourage[d]” tech companies to suppress free speech during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Former WH press secretary Jen Psaki was named by a judge in a ruling on the Biden administration and efforts to combat COVID-19 misinformation. ((Left:REUTERS/Leah Millis, Right:REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo))
Several federal officials and agencies – including some of Biden’s Cabinet members and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre – have been barred from contacting social media companies in efforts to suppress speech. The injunction, which was obtained by Fox News, states that the government’s actions “likely violate the Free Speech Clause” and that the court “is not persuaded by Defendants’ arguments,” dealing a significant blow to the White House.
“I read this opinion yesterday, I couldn’t stop saying thank you. Finally,” OutKick founder Travis said on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday. “This is going to be incredibly difficult for the Biden administration to overturn.”
“It’s unbelievable the amount of information, and the discovery that we were able to obtain through this particular case should concern all Americans, irrespective of their political ideology, their party affiliation,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry remarked earlier on the show.
“The judge basically spells it out. He does it in this great 120-page opinion. He takes things step by step. He says, look, the government went out there and censored America’s speech on COVID-19, on vaccine policies, on mask mandates, on election questions, in the Hunter Biden laptop.”
“This is a completely direct violation of the First Amendment.”
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” Doughty wrote.
“If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the injunction adds. “In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”
The injunction also claims that “the censorship alleged in this case almost exclusively targeted conservative speech,” but that issues the case raises are “beyond party lines.”
“Viewpoint discrimination is an especially egregious form of content discrimination,” Doughty argued. “The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.”
The cases could mean that interactions between tech companies and government officials may be significantly limited in the future. Exceptions might include national security threats or criminal matters on social media.
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House, Google, Meta and Twitter for statements, but has not heard back. The Department of Justice declined to comment.
Some critics have challenged the ruling, with a Washington Post article warning the judge’s decision could “upend years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies.”
Ratcliffe agreed with the sentiment but argued the judge is not the one to blame.
“The problem is in this case that the years of good work have been upended by social media executives and government officials who have abused that and the examples that we’ve just talked about. It’s ironic because The Washington Post is actually a coconspirator in that. It was the mainstream media, ironically, that was complicit in this abuse of the First Amendment and suppressing Americans’ free speech. So they did it to themselves that that’s the problem.”
“My take is that this is going to hold up on appeal, because everything that the plaintiffs in this case allege has been proven largely to be true,” Ratcliffe argued. “When you think about, with respect to COVID-19, everything from the origins of the lab leak, the efficacy of certain treatments, the transmissibility. You just heard President Biden talking about pandemic of the unvaccinated. All of that was frankly, wrong, and yet Americans ability to engage in honest debate about it was suppressed. And so you have these agencies with social media working to suppress the truth and amplify lies.”
“As the judge says, I truly do believe this is the greatest infringement on our First Amendment rights that any of us have seen occur in any of our lives. It cannot be allowed. And we’re finally getting judges pushing back,” Travis said.
Fox News’ Andrea Vacchiano contributed to this report.
Madeline Coggins is a Digital Production Assistant on the Fox News flash team with Fox News Digital.
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.
Elon Musk shared a Federalist article on Twitter this week that detailed how “Zuckbucks” were used to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, and leftists are livid.
On Tuesday, the Twitter CEO linked to an October 2021 article, written by Federalist contributor William Doyle, that examines how Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave hundreds of millions of dollars to nonprofits such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) leading up to the 2020 presidential contest. CTCL and CEIR then poured these “Zuckbucks” into local election offices in battleground states around the country to change how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsupervised election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes.
Notably, Doyle’s article examines how these grants were heavily skewed toward Democrat-majority counties, essentially making it a massive, privately funded Democrat get-out-the-vote operation. Organizations such as the Capital Research Center have also released detailedanalyses on the partisan distribution of these funds.
While Musk simply referred to the article as “interesting,” that was apparently too much for Washington Post columnist Philip Bump to handle. In response, Bump penned an article titled, “Musk shares baseless election claim with millions of Twitter users,” in which he attempted to smear the Twitter CEO and discredit The Federalist’s article.
“This is a common way in which Musk elevates right-wing rhetoric. He’ll often engage with fringe voices by declaring their commentary to be “concerning” — suggesting it’s just something worth mulling over,” complained Bump in melodramatic fashion.
But then Bump openly admits the purpose of “Zuckbucks” wasn’t to help election offices “promote safe and reliable voting” during the Covid outbreak, as CTCL and CEIR originally claimed, but to increase voter turnout in Democrat-majority areas.
Much of the analysis in the Federalist article centers on the idea that these investments were larger in more-Democratic counties, using that as a peg for the argument that the investments were partisan and critical to Biden’s success.
But that argument is easily countered. CTCL’s investments were often in heavily Democratic areas — because those areas often have lower turnout rates. If you want to increase turnout, the smartest place to try to do so is places where turnout is lowest. In the United States, that’s often lower-income communities and communities that have high populations of Black and Hispanic residents, two groups that often vote heavily Democratic.
In trying to explain away the disparities in “Zuckbucks” distribution, Bump instead admits a Democrat get-out-the-vote effort is exactly what happened. While Zuckerberg’s donations to CTCL and CEIR were marketed as just a good-faith initiative to ensure Covid didn’t disrupt local election administration, House Republicans later discovered that less than 1 percent of CTCL’s 2020 funds were spent on personal protective equipment.
“The argument has gone from: Private funding from CTCL for election administration offices was only meant to help the elections run smoothly,” to “CTCL poured money into Democratic strongholds to boost turnout and that’s a good thing,”tweeted Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project.
Whether they realize it or not, Bump and the Post are admitting the main purpose of “Zuckbucks” was to boost turnout among voters in Democrat strongholds. It’s a remarkable fact that, for once, the Post got right.
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
The members of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project conspired with state, local, and federal government officials to violate the First Amendment rights of social media users, a class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday in a Louisiana federal court alleged.
Over the course of the 88-page complaint, the named plaintiffs, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft and Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana Jill Hines, detailed extensive direct and indirect government involvement with the defendants’ censorship activities, allegedly making the private entities and individuals “state actors” for purposes of the Constitution.
Here are the highlights of the government’s alleged connection to the defendants’ censorship activities.
A Bit About the Defendants
Formed in 2020, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) describes itself as a partnership “between four of the nation’s leading institutions focused on understanding misinformation and disinformation in the social media landscape: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.” In early 2021, the same four entities expanded their focus to address supposed Covid-19 “misinformation” on social media, calling the effort the “Virality Project.”
In both the run-up to the 2020 election and since then, EIP and the Virality Project pushed Big Tech companies to censor speech. Excepting the University of Washington, which was not named in the class-action lawsuit, the institutions involved in the EIP and Virality Project are private entities, and the individuals running those institutions are non-governmental actors. Thus, without more, the censorship efforts would not implicate the First Amendment.
The Alleged Conspiracy
But there was more — much more — a conspiracy between the defendants, according to the complaint. Those defendants include the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Leland Stanford Junior University and its board of trustees, the latter two of which are allegedly legally responsible for the observatory’s conduct; Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory; Renée DiResta, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s research manager; the Atlantic Council; the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab; and Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab.
In support of the alleged conspiracy, the plaintiffs quoted at length the defendants’ own words, much of it culled from the EIP’s post-election report, but also pulled from interviews and its webpage. Here we see the EIP boast of its “coalition” that exchanged information with “election officials, government agencies,” and “social media platforms.” “The work carried out by the EIP and its partners during the 2020 U.S. election,” the defendants stressed, “united government, academia, civil society, and industry, analyzing across platforms, to address misinformation in real time.”
The united goal, according to the complaint, was censorship. This is clear from Stamos’ Aug. 26, 2020, comment to The New York Times, when the Stanford Observatory director explained that the EIP sought to collaborate with Big Tech to remove “disinformation.” The EIP further explained that it saw itself filling the “critical gap” of monitoring supposed election “misinformation” inside the United States — a gap the EIP recognized existed because the First Amendment prevents the government from censoring speech.
But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created “in consultation” with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students. The CISA then assisted Stanford as it sought to “figure out what the gap was” the EIP needed to address. Two weeks before EIP officially launched, Stanford also met “with CISA to present EIP concept.”
Government Collaboration with EIP
The government continued to work with EIP after its formation. Both federal and state-level government officials submitted “tickets” or reports of supposed misinformation to EIP, which would then submit them to the social media companies for censorship. EIP’s post-election report identified government partners who submitted tips of misinformation, including CISA, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), and the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the last of which received reports of disinformation from state and local government officials. EIP would then forward the complaints to the social media companies for censorship.
CISA also helped EIP by connecting it with election-official groups, such as the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors, both of which represent state and local government officials. CISA facilitated meetings between EIP and those groups as well, leading to censorship requests fed to the EIP and then forwarded to social media companies.
The government’s entanglement with the censorship efforts of EIP was more pronounced when it came to the Center for Internet Security because CISA both funded the Center for Internet Security and directed state and local election officials to report supposed misinformation to it. CISA further connected the Center for Internet Security to EIP, resulting in the former feeding the latter a substantial number of misinformation tickets. EIP then pushed those censorship requests to social media companies.
Later, as the 2020 election neared, CISA coordinated with the Center for Internet Security and EIP “to establish a joint reporting process,” with the three organizations agreeing to “let each other know what they were reporting to platforms like Twitter.”
Overlapping Personnel
The individuals responsible for EIP, including Stamos, DiResta, and Kate Starbird, all “have or had formal roles in CISA.” Both Stamos and Starbird are members of CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, while DiResta is a “Subject Matter Expert” for a CISA subcommittee.
Additionally, two of the six CISA members who “took shifts” in reporting supposed misinformation to Big Tech companies apparently worked simultaneously as interns for CISA and at the Stanford Internet Observatory and EIP, reporting “misinformation” to the social media companies on behalf of both CISA and EIP. In fact, the two interns reported “misinformation” to platforms on behalf of CISA by using “EIP ticket numbers.” One of the CISA interns also forwarded a detailed report of supposed “misinformation” from the Election Integrity Partnership to social media companies using CISA’s reporting system.
Coordination with Virality Project
As noted above, after the 2020 election, the Election Integrity Project replicated its censorship efforts to combat so-called Covid “misinformation” through the Virality Project. The Virality Project used the foundations established with the government’s assistance for the EIP and continued to collaborate with government officials and Big Tech.
The Virality Project boasted of its “strong ties with several federal government agencies, most notably the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC.” The Virality Project also identified “federal health agencies” and “state and local public health officials” as “stakeholders” who “provided tips, feedback and requests to assess specific incidents and narratives.” And as was the case with the Election Integrity Project, the Virality Project flagged content for censorship by social media companies, including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, through a ticket system.
While it was those private platforms that censored Hoft, Hines, and an untold number of other Americans, the class-action complaint establishes it was the government that initiated and pushed for that censorship, while hiding behind EIP and other organizations. And because EIP allegedly conspired with the government to silence the plaintiffs’ speech, the class-action lawsuit seeks to hold it liable too.
The defendants have some time before responding. When they do, they’ll likely seek to have the lawsuit tossed, arguing they aren’t the government and thus could not violate the First Amendment. The detailed allegations of collaboration with the government make it unlikely they will succeed on a motion to dismiss, however, which will mean the plaintiffs will be entitled to discovery — and that’s where we’ll likely see the real evidence of a conspiracy.
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.
One of the biggest challenges presented by China as compared to the USSR is the depth of the Chinese penetration of America’s economy, politics, culture, and society.
“It is time to acknowledge reality: The United States is in a New Cold War with the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” Heritage President Kevin Roberts wrote, expressing a sentiment espoused throughout the report.
For decades, America has followed a bipartisan and naïve policy of unfettered engagement with China, which has allowed the Chinese Communist Party to entrench and enrich itself within the international system while facing no consequences for its aggression abroad or totalitarianism at home. China now uses its wealth and technology to supercharge a policy of civil-military fusion, linking economics and military strategy.
One of the biggest challenges presented by China as compared to the USSR is the depth of the Chinese penetration of America’s economy, politics, culture, and society. The Heritage plan leaves no stone unturned when discussing these malign activities, advocating a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society effort” to counter them.
1. Ban Dangerous Chinese Apps
TikTok and other CCP-linked apps are incredibly popular, especially among American youth. These apps threaten personal privacy and national security. Heritage recommends an outright ban of TikTok and a more aggressive, risk-oriented approach to assessing foreign-owned information technologies in the U.S.
This would take very little in terms of new law, and the federal government has processes in place to monitor or ban these apps. Congress is already debating this issue, so the prognosis looks good.
2. Ban the Import and Sale of Chinese Drones
Although a lesser-known issue, CCP-linked drone manufacturers, specifically Da-Jiang Innovations (DJI), dominate the commercial and recreational markets. As with TikTok, all information collected by those drones is stored on CCP-accessible servers.
Local, state, and federal agencies have used DJI drones — some given as free “gifts” during the pandemic — to “monitor every aspect of life in these cities,” including “the precise location of critical infrastructure and other sensitive information.”
Bans on these drones can be included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) or implemented via executive order. Educating non-federal officials about the drones could reduce the threat at the state and local levels.
3. Risk-Manage Inbound Investment
China’s direct investment in American firms peaked in 2015, but its national security implications remain. Often funneled through middlemen who camouflage Chinese involvement, CCP-linked investment still reaches into the billions annually.
The federal government has the tools to properly manage and review this. The 2018 Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA) enabled the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to scrutinize these investments more.
Expanding definitions in FIRRMA can empower CFIUS to address all forms of Chinese investment, even through intermediaries, while direct legislative language can force reviews when agencies decline to use the power granted by law.
4. Reject Damaging ESG Policies
So-called environmental, social, and governance policies have been a debacle for investors and a sop to Chinese-linked firms, which control the supply chains for ESG-mandated renewable energy. ESG weakens the U.S. while strengthening its greatest foe.
Congress can end this damaging strategy through legislation, which it indeed did before President Biden vetoed it. Congress should continue pushing to end ESG through law and work to advance the understanding of ESG’s danger in the corporate sector.
5. Increase Munition Production and Arm Taiwan
This issue is paramount to countering China, particularly as the CCP has advanced its aggression toward Taiwan. The Heritage report acknowledges the trade-offs inherent in the decisions about arms sales and transfers and proposes an augmentation of our defense-industrial base to overcome these scarcity issues going forward.
Today, we can prioritize Taiwan by sending critical munitions, ensuring that capabilities sent elsewhere do not overly affect the defense of Taiwan, drawing down our own stocks in accordance with the law, and facilitating arms purchases from other nations.
6. Foster Innovation in the U.S. Maritime and Shipping Sectors
America’s “uncompetitive and outdated shipbuilding and shipping sector diminishes U.S. competitiveness, undermines the resilience of the economy, constrains the nation’s ability to mobilize and sustain a wartime economy, and meet the U.S. Navy’s global responsibilities,” according to the report.
The major stumbling block to reform is the restrictive Jones Act, which should be repealed and replaced with a law focused on promoting innovation in the maritime sector. The Jones Act, or the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, mandates that U.S.-made and U.S.-owned vessels transport goods between American ports, and that U.S. citizens operate the vessels.
Free-market solutions will allow the creativity of American industry to excel, developing novel methods of transportation, growing our shipbuilding and shipping capacities, and backstopping American naval power.
7. Expand Export Controls
The U.S. policy of engagement with China had allowed the chronic export of technologies used to advance China’s military aims. Legislation has since limited certain “foundational technology” exports, but the federal bureaucracy has failed to implement controls by refusing to label these technologies.
Congress must exercise its oversight power and force executive branch agencies to make these determinations in line with the law, so as to cease the transfer of critical security technology to the CCP.
8. Hold China Accountable for Covid-19
Regardless of the pandemic’s specific origin, a great deal of evidence has shown the CCP deliberately covered up the virus, allowing it to spread unchecked. Since then, the CCP has stonewalled investigations into its behavior, using its leverage at the World Health Organization to avoid accountability.
The U.S. government should cease funding the WHO until it conducts a thorough investigation of China’s involvement in the pandemic, end all financing of Chinese biomedical research, and propose unbiased international standards by which pandemics can be detected and limited without interfering with national sovereignty.
9. Prioritize the Pacific Islands
The Pacific Islands are often overlooked in the geopolitical competition with China. Many small island nations comprise the region, but it is strategically important to maintain a U.S. presence in the Pacific, especially through its links to Asia and Australia.
China has focused on this region, seeking to cut off the U.S. from its Indo-Pacific allies.
“Winning the New Cold War” suggests the U.S. compete on the same turf by renewing existing diplomatic and security agreements, exploring the expansion of those accords to other nations, and engaging diplomatically through high-level visits and summits.
10. Establish a Quad Select Initiative
The Quad — the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan — is one of America’s most important initiatives to counter China. It links the key players in the Indo-Pacific and builds bridges for future cooperation.
Expanding this multilateral format by selectively inviting other nations to join for military, economic, or planning purposes would allow the U.S. to enhance regional alliances and foster broader anti-CCP cooperation.
This would not require any legislation but merely a change in the executive posture. Creating a more open architecture for the Quad would serve as a significant counter to Chinese regional aggression.
These 10 points are the plan’s low-hanging fruit, and the federal government could adopt these policies tomorrow if it had the will. Heritage’s “Winning the New Cold War” aims to bolster that resolve. Time will tell if it succeeds, but the plan is an excellent start.
Mike Coté is a writer and podcaster focusing on history, Great Power rivalry, and geopolitics. He has also written for National Review and The National Interest, blogs at rationalpolicy.com, and can be found on Twitter @ratlpolicy.
“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.
Most committee hearings flounder because politicians waste time grandstanding, but lawmakers shouldn’t squander the chance to ask insightful questions of the ‘Twitter Files’ witnesses.
Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testify on Thursday before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Little they say will be new, yet because corporate media have refused to cover the story, many Americans remain ignorant about the massive scandals Taibbi, Shellenberger, and the other independent journalists have revealed over the last three months in the “Twitter Files.”
Here’s what the House committee must do to break the cone of silence.
Introduce Taibbi and Shellenberger to Americans
Most Americans know little about Taibbi and Shellenberger, allowing the left to execute its go-to play when faced with inconvenient facts: call the messengers members of a right-wing conspiracy. The House’s weaponization committee should thus ensure the public knows neither Taibbi nor Shellenberger can be written off as conservative conspirators, much less “ultra MAGA.”
Hopefully, the two witnesses for the majority party will ensure their opening statements detail their non-conservative “credentials” — something Taibbi has attempted to do on Twitter, writing: “I’m pro-choice and didn’t vote for Trump,” and noting he is an independent.
Taibbi’s work covering politics for Rolling Stone and his “incisive, bilious takedowns of Wall Street,” as well as past appearances on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, and his work with Keith Olbermann, are the non-conservative credentials Americans need to hear.
Shellenberger’s biography likewise confirms he is no right-winger or Trump surrogate. Time Magazine named him “Hero of the Environment.” “In the 1990s, Shellenberger helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, inspire Nike to improve factory conditions, and advocate for decriminalization and harm reduction policies,” his webpage reads — details helpful to highlight for the listening public.
If Taibbi and Shellenberger’s prepared testimony omits these and other details, Chair Jim Jordan should open the hearing by asking the witnesses to share with the country their political and policy perspectives and then push them on why all Americans should care about the “Twitter Files.”
Here, the committee and its witnesses need to remind Americans of the importance of free speech and that the silencing of speech harms the country, even when it is not the government acting as the censor. (In fact, I would argue it is precisely because our country has lost a sense of the importance of free speech that the government successfully outsourced censorship to Twitter.)
Guide Them So They Tell a Coherent Story
Next, the questioning will begin. Unfortunately, here’s where most committee hearings flounder because politicians prefer to pontificate than pose insightful questions to their witnesses. But in the case of the “Twitter Files,” Republicans can do both because the witnesses have already provided detailed answers to much of what the country needs to know in the nearly 20 installments they published over the last several months.
Thus the goal of the committee should be to provide a platform that allows the witnesses to tell the story of the scandals uncovered. Ideally, then, committee members will lead the witnesses through their testimony as if each question represents the opening paragraph of a chapter, with Taibbi and Shellenberger given the floor to provide the details.
Start at the Beginning, the Best Place to Start
Committee members will all want to focus on the most shocking discoveries, such as the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the government’s demands to silence unapproved Covid messages. But those events merely represent symptoms of the diseased state of free speech Taibbi and Shellenberger uncovered, and the latter represents the real threat to our country.
Democrats, independents, and apolitical Americans will also be inclined to immediately write off the hearings as political theater if Republicans immediately flip to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Covid messaging. Both are important parts of the story, but Americans first need to understand the context.
Begin there: After Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he provided Taibbi, Shellenberger, and other independent journalists access to internal communications. What communications were accessible? What types of emails did the journalists review? How many? What else remains to explore?
Buckets of Scandals
The story will quickly progress from there, but how?
While the committee could walk Taibbi and Shellenberger through each of their individual “Twitter Files” reports, the better approach would be to bucket the scandals because each thread the journalists wrote included details that overlapped with earlier (and later) revelations.
Remember: The scandals are not merely the “events,” such as the blocking of the New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rather, they go back to first principles — in this case, the value of free speech.
Twitter’s Huge Censorship Toolbox
Moving next to what Taibbi called Twitter’s “huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user,” the House committee should ask the witnesses to expand on those tools, which include “Search Blacklist,” “Trends Blacklist,” “Do Not Amplify” settings, limits on hashtag searches, and more.
What were those tools? How often were they used and why? Did complaints from the government or other organizations ever prompt Twitter to use those visibility filters? Were official government accounts ever subjected to the filters? If so, why?
Twitter-Government Coordination
The natural next chapter will focus on any coordination between Twitter and the government. Again, the “Twitter Files” exposed the breadth and depth of government interaction with the tech giant — from FBI offices all over the country contacting Twitter about problematic accounts to, as Taibbi wrote, Twitter “taking requests from every conceivable government agency, from state officials in Wyoming, Georgia, Minnesota, Connecticut, California, and others to the NSA, FBI, DHS, DOD, DOJ, and many others.”
Internal communications also showed the CIA — referred to under the euphemism “Other Government Agencies” in the emails — working closely with Twitter as well. Other emails showed Twitter allowed the Department of Defense to run covert propaganda operations, “whitelisting” Pentagon accounts to prevent the covert accounts from being banned. The multi-agency Global Engagement Center, housed in the Department of State, also played a large part in the government’s efforts to prompt the censorship of speech.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations reached out to Twitter as well, seeking the removal of various posts, as did other individual politicians, such as Rep. Adam Schiff and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
To keep the conversation coherent, the committee should catalog the various government agencies, centers, and individuals revealed in the “Twitter Files” and ask the witnesses how these government-connected individuals or organizations communicated with Twitter, how they pressured Twitter, the types of requests they made, and their success.
The “Twitter Files” detailed censorship requests numbering in the tens of thousands from the government. Asking the witnesses to expand on those requests and how individual Americans responded when they learned they were supposedly Russian bots or Indian trolls will make the scandal more personal.
Non-Governmental Organizations
Questioning should then proceed to the non-governmental organizations connected to Twitter’s censorship efforts. Again, the committee should first provide a quick synopsis of the revelations from the “Twitter Files,” highlighting the involvement of various nonprofits and academic institutions in the “disinformation” project, including the Election Integrity Partnership, Alliance Securing Democracy (which hosted the Hamilton 68 platform), the Atlantic Council’s Center for Internet Security, and Clemson University.
What role did these organizations play? Have you reviewed all of the communications related to these groups? Were there other non-governmental organizations communicating with Twitter? How much influence did these groups have?
Disinformation About Disinformation
The story should continue next with testimony about the validity of the various disinformation claims peddled to Twitter. Internal communications showed Twitter insiders knew the Hamilton 68 dashboard’s methodology was flawed. Other emails indicated Twitter experts found the claims of Russian disinformation coming from Clemson, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and the Global Engagement Center questionable.
Highlighting these facts and then asking the witnesses to elaborate on the revelations, organization by organization, will advance the story for the public.
Funding Sources
Next up should be the funding of those organizations, which came from government grants and often the same few private organizations. Here the Committee should ask Taibbi the status of his research on the financing of these organizations — something the journalist indicated last month he is delving into.
Taibbi also suggested the Global Engagement Center’s funding should be looked at in the next budget. Why? What should the House know before it makes future budget decisions?
Connecting the Censorship Complex Dots
After these details have been discussed, the committee should connect the dots as Taibbi did when he wrote: “What most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”
Read that quote — and other powerful ones from either the emails or the journalists covering the story — to the witnesses. Hopefully, staffers already have the best quotes blown up and ready for tomorrow.
Can you explain what you mean, here, Mr. Taibbi? What “state agencies”? What NGOs? Mr. Shellenberger, do you agree? What governmental or non-governmental players did you see involved?
What Was the Media’s Role?
Asking the witnesses about the media’s involvement will then close the circle on the big picture, which is ironic given the press’s role in circular reporting — something even Twitter recognized. Hamilton 68 or the Global Engagement Center would announce Russian disinformation and peddle it to the press, Twitter, and politicians. Then when Twitter’s review found the accounts not concerning, politicians would rely on the press’s coverage to bolster the claims of disinformation and pressure Twitter to respond. And even when Twitter told the reporters (and politicians) the disinformation methodologies were lacking, the media persisted in regurgitating claims of Russian disinformation.
Can you explain how the press responded when Twitter told reporters to be cautious of the Hamilton 68 database? What precisely did Twitter say? Did you find similar warnings to the media about the Global Engagement Center’s data?
Specific Instances of Censorship
Then the committee should focus on specific instances of censorship, with the Hunter Biden laptop story and Covid debates deserving top billing.
While Republicans care most about the censorship of the laptop story, this committee hearing is not the place to put the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandals on trial. Rather, Americans need to understand four key takeaways: The laptop was real, the FBI knew it was real, the FBI’s warnings to Twitter and other tech giants prompted censorship of the Post’s reporting, and the legacy media were complicit in silencing the story. Having the witnesses explain why Twitter censored the story with the goal of conveying those points will be key.
However, highlighting the censorship of Covid debates offers a better opportunity to cross the political divide of the country and to convince Americans that the hand-in-glove relationship between media and government threatens everyone’s speech. Stressing that both the Trump and Biden administrations pushed Twitter to censor Covid-related speech will also bolster that point.
The committee should start by summarizing the various Covid topics considered verboten — the virus’ origins, vaccines, natural immunity, masking, school closings — and then stress that the science now indicates the speech silenced was correct. Highlighting specific tweets that were blocked and medical professionals who were axed from the platform, while asking the witnesses to explain how this happened, will show the public the real-world implications of a Censorship Complex governing debate in America.
Where Do We Go from Here?
The committee should close by giving Taibbi and Shellenberger the floor, asking: “Where do we go from here?”
The “Twitter Files” revealed that the government and its allies did not limit their efforts to Twitter but pushed censorship at other platforms, and also that a new “cottage industry” in disinformation has already launched. How do Americans know they are hearing the truth? How do we know the government is not manipulating or censoring the truth?
Furthermore, if the same Censorship Complex that limits speech on social media succeeds in canceling alternative news outlets, and if the legacy media won’t provide a check on the government, how do we preserve our constitutional republic?
That last question is not for tomorrow’s witnesses, however. It is for every American.
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.
Those conservatives who want to shape the nascent pro-family movement emerging on the right must be willing to embrace a controversial — and countercultural — reality: Healthy families require strong, stable, and secure men. That means Republicans interested in crafting pro-family policy must focus on the well-being of America’s boys and men.
Democrats have spent decades supporting policies that make men and fathers economically and socially obsolete. They’ve promoted the notion that families and societies flourish when women are empowered, even to the detriment of men. For instance, they see the fact that women outnumber men in the college-educated labor force as a win for gender equality.
It’s not all progress, however, from the perspective of modern feminists. So-called access to abortion, a major plank in the women’s empowerment agenda, was dealt a serious blow when the Supreme Court’s Dobbsv. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision struck down Roe v. Wade and returned the issue of abortion to the states.
This seismic shift, combined with the economic challenges brought on by Covid-19 shutdowns and parental discontent with public schools, has opened the door for some conservatives to seek to rebrand Republicans as the party of families.
The initial push for this political pivot came from Republicans in the U.S. Senate. The most recent iteration of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s proposed Family Security Act would provide between $250 and $350 a month per child, based on age. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s Provide for Life Act would expand the child tax credit, enable parental leave, expand support for pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, and fund mentoring services for low-income mothers. Conservative social commentators have also made the case that limited government and support for families are compatible policy goals.
Whatever the merits of these efforts, the success of pro-family policies will depend on more than bipartisan support in Congress. The social and economic outcomes conservatives want to see must start with the understanding that men and women are not generic, interchangeable parts in the machinery of family life.
Recognizing Roles
Men have played the role of provider throughout human history, though in recent decades that role has been shared. Still, no culture teaches that it’s a woman’s responsibility to take care of an adult male and the children they have together. This is why women generally seek men who earn more than they do. One analysis of U.S. Census data found that female physicians married men in the same field. Male doctors, however, often married nurses and teachers.
This is not an argument against women in the workplace. It’s an appeal for conservatives to recognize that disregarding the natural order in the name of “women’s empowerment,” whether through public policy or cultural norms, will make it harder for Americans to form strong, stable families.
Conservative politicians and pundits need to become comfortable talking about what boys and men need in terms of education, economic opportunity, religion, social norms, and relationships.
Their political speeches, op-eds, and podcast appearances need a renewed emphasis on vocational education that is aspirational, not framed in terms of a fallback option for young men who are unable — or unwilling — to attend college. Conservatives need to speak with a similar sense of clarity and concern when it comes to men, sex, and family formation.
Every conservative bill, statute, policy, or regulation that directly affects families should include some version of the following statements:
Children have a right to the love and support of the man and woman who created them.
The ideal family structure for every child is to be raised by his or her married biological parents in a stable and loving home.
Men, not the state, are ultimately responsible for the children they father.
These self-evident truths should function as the “iron triangle” of social conservatism. Men need something they are willing to both live and die for. The responsibilities that come with a family give them both.
Critics on the left — as well as some on the right — will undoubtedly accuse conservatives focusing on men of promoting a regressive return to the rigid sex roles of the 1950s. What they fail to realize is that the sexual revolution and 60 years of liberal social policy did not destroy patriarchy — they distorted it by minimizing the importance of men while maximizing the influence male-dominated institutions have in every area of American family life.
Different Forms of Patriarchy
“Bureaucratic patriarchy” was introduced through the war on poverty’s expansion of the welfare state and policy incentives that provided aid and basic necessities for unmarried mothers. It has grown because of the symbiotic relationship between elected officials seeking votes, social service administrators overseeing the poverty economy, and single mothers who need financial support.
Conservatives have a hard time criticizing “corporate patriarchy,” by contrast, because it promotes financial independence for women and exploits conservative deference to the private sector. A recent video from the pro-life organization Live Action satirizes an unfortunate reality brought about by the right’s allegiance to corporations: Many businesses would rather fund abortions than paid maternity leave for their female employees. Perhaps business executives are simply taking cues from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who said, “eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.”
The advent of “trans patriarchy” further complicates the pro-life, pro-family movement because men who believe they are women are committed to erasing biological sex altogether. In addition to attacking the foundation of human existence itself, this deformed version of patriarchy also seeks to usurp the family’s role as the primary shaper of children’s values.
Many conservatives fail to see how the daycare-to-demisexual pipeline was built over time by politicians increasing funding for childcare and schools, corporations offering generous benefits in exchange for employee loyalty, and gender ideologues who want access to shape the next generation of children.
The actors involved in all three deformed patriarchies are cruel taskmasters because they take a utilitarian view of women and children. A man who accepts his God-given responsibilities has a completely different orientation toward his family. His relationship with his wife is a covenant, not a contract. His children are the fruit of that union and the linchpin to multi-generational prosperity. They’re not mere “consequences” of sex and burdens to be overcome for the sake of economic productivity.
In a sense, some form of patriarchy is inevitable. The question conservative policymakers need to answer is which form they believe produces the best outcomes for men, women, and children. This is why clear thinking about families must be preceded by honest reflection on the different natures of men and women and how they can be harnessed to fortify American households. That is why now is the perfect time for conservatives to lean into the connection between strong men and stable families.
Delano Squires is a research fellow in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @DelanoSquires.
‘Sunday Night in America’ panelists discuss the looming threat that China poses and how America should respond.
FIRST ON FOX: Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee are alleging in a newly released report that there are “indications” that COVID-19 could be tied to China’s biological weapons research program and “spilled over” to the general human population during an incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The information was released in a minority staff report by members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday night.
“Contrary to the implication of the [Intelligence Community’s] declassified report, based on our investigation involving a variety of public and non-public information, we conclude that there are indications that SARS-CoV-2 may have been tied to China’s biological weapons research program and spilled over to the human population during a lab-related incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” a summary of the report states. “The IC failed to adequately address this information in its classified Updated Assessment. When we attempted to raise the issues with the IC, it failed to respond.”
In a declassified assessment on the origins of COVID-19 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in October 2021, the report states that SARS-CoV-2 was “probably not a biological weapon,” adding, “We remain skeptical of allegations that SARS-CoV-2 was a biological weapon because they are supported by scientifically invalid claims.”
Members of the World Health Organization team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus disease are seen. (Reuters/Thomas Peter)
Wednesday’s report released by House Republicans also alleges that its investigation “revealed serious shortcomings with both the classified and declassified versions of the Intelligence Community’s,” and states that the omissions “likely skewed the public’s understanding of key issues and deepened mistrust.”
“The Committee believes the IC downplayed important information relating to the possible links between COVID-19 and China’s bioweapons research based in part on input from outside experts,” the report states, adding that the intelligence community “refuses to be transparent with the Committee regarding which experts it relied on.”
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, speaks during a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 15, 2021. (Al Drago/Pool via AP) (AP)
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, told Fox News Digital that Americans deserve answers regarding the origins of COVID-19
“The American people are owed answers about the origins of COVID-19. Our report states that COVID-19 may have been tied to China’s bioweapons research program and that the Intelligence Community (IC) withheld key information from the American public’s authorized elected officials, deepening public mistrust,” Wenstrup said. “Our findings also show that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bears more responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic than what has been publicly known or transparently communicated to the American people.”
“As a physician and Army veteran, I believe it is vitally important that we understand the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and strive to do everything within our power to pursue policies that will help prevent our country from being vulnerable like this in the future.”
A security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)
While alleging that COVID’s origins were likely tied to China’s biological weapons research program, the report states, “We have not seen any credible indication that the virus was intentionally, rather than accidentally, released.”
Security personnel gather near the entrance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province on Feb. 3, 2021. (AP)
“Nor do we claim the information we have found is a smoking gun that definitively resolves the question of the origins of COVID-19 beyond all doubt. However, the information is important to furthering the public’s understanding, and we will seek to declassify the classified version of our report in the next Congress to further the conversation,” the report states.
Adam Sabes is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Adam.Sabes@fox.com and on Twitter @asabes10.
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President Joe Biden last December warned of a “winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated.” But new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlighted a trend that would suggest that the greater share of COVID-19 deaths this winter will be among the vaccinated and boosted.
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a nonprofit that focuses on health care issues affecting the nation, issued a report Wednesday analyzing recent CDC data — data that excludes the partially vaccinated. According to the KFF report, the “share of COVID-19 deaths among those who are vaccinated has risen.”
“In fall 2021, about 3 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted. But by January 2022, as we showed in an analysis posted on the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, about 4 in 10 deaths were vaccinated or boosted. By April 2022, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show that about 6 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted,” said the report.
This decrease in the share of deaths from the unvaccinated crowd and the increase in the share of deaths from the vaccinated continued into the summer. In August, the CDC found that the unvaccinated accounted for 42% of COVID-19 deaths. Alternatively, individuals who had received the primary series of vaccines accounted for 22% of deaths, and those who received the primary series plus one or more booster accounted for 36% of deaths. Taken together, the vaccinated and boosted represented a 58% share of COVID-19 virus deaths in August.
On Nov. 23, Cynthia Cox, vice president at the KFF, told the Washington Post that this trend has been driven in particular by three factors: high-risk individuals being more likely to have received the shots; vaccines losing their potency over time; and more Americans having received the vaccines.
The KFF reported that another factor at play is “changes in immunity among the unvaccinated.”
The U.K. Health Security Agency noted in a March vaccine surveillance report that “people who have never been vaccinated are more likely to have caught COVID-19” previously. “This gives them some natural immunity to the virus which may have contributed to a lower case rate in the past few weeks.” In addition, the report also suggested that new variants coupled with a drop in masking might lead to more deaths among vaccinated people.
Notwithstanding the reasons behind the trend, Cox concluded, “We can no longer say this a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Fox News Digital underscored how outgoing White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other medical experts had previously admitted that COVID-19 vaccines do not protect “overly well” against infection. Fauci, who is vaccinated and boosted but nevertheless caught COVID-19, stated in July that vaccines “don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection” but “protect quite well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death.”
On Nov. 22, Fauci once again implored people in what might have been his last address from the White House podium to “get your updated COVID 19 shot as soon as you’re eligible to protect yourself, your family, and your community.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed a crisis of confidence in our so-called elites and technocrats, who are supposed to serve the public but instead appear to have been serving themselves. So, what do we do to restore sanity and medical freedom and make sure a public health disaster never happens again? Some suggest “amnesty” for those who went to extremes during the pandemic. Absolutely not. What we need is to recognize what contributed to the insane pandemic response and implement solutions to make sure nothing like it ever happens again.
Now that the GOP has a majority in the House and some members want to hold Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), and others accountable, here are 12 steps Congress can take to curb future pharma corruption and malfeasance.
None of these should be considered partisan since both parties should share the objective of avoiding another pandemic disaster. However, the pharmaceutical and health industry makes substantial contributions to elected officials on both sides of the aisle, with more than $361 million spent on lobbying in 2021 and an all-time high of $92 million in political contributions in 2020 (62 percent to Democrats and 38 percent to Republicans), so implementing reforms will be a challenge no matter who controls the House or the Senate.
Early in 2022, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., published a 12-point plan to rescue America. Curiously, not a single point of his plan addressed the pandemic even though it was the worst health catastrophe in a century that also triggered authoritarian medical mandates and censorship never before seen in this country.
What is the common denominator between the pharmaceutical companies, the public health bureaucracy, medical associations, the corporate media, and Big Tech companies when it comes to censorship and medical misinformation? Money, of course.
According to Statista, the pharmaceutical and medical industry spent $5.6 billion on U.S. television advertising in 2021, second only behind the life and entertainment industry at $10.1 billion. For reference, total U.S. TV ad spending is expected to exceed $68 billion in 2022. According to eMarketer, pharmaceutical and health care companies combined spent an estimated $9.5 billion on digital media in 2020, with 56 percent going toward search advertising, dominated by Google and Facebook, which have aggressively censored medical information that deviated from the official public health narrative. This accounted for about 7.1 percent of all U.S. digital ad spending.
The pharma industry pays, in the form of user fees, for 75 percent of the FDA’s drug review budget, according to Forbes, and 45 percent of its overall budget. One investigation showed that 40 of 107 physician advisers on the FDA committees examined “received more than $10,000 in post hoc earnings or research support from the makers of drugs that the panels voted to approve, or from competing firms.”
According to an analysis by the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has numerous conflicts of interest, including openly accepting private gifts through the CDC Foundation, accepting supposedly “prohibited” donations, and “automatic” conflict of interest waivers for advisory committee members. In 2010, the CDC inspector general noted a “systemic lack of oversight” of its ethics program. The CDC uses taxpayer money to develop patents and then receives money from pharma companies in the form of licenses and royalties.
Individual public health officials and scientists, including Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins, receive royalties on patents used by the industry, teaching hospitals accept industry donations, and doctors accept “consulting fees,” and other travel and meals payments from pharma companies when they promote their products. Medical associations, such as the American Medical Association, accept pharma money while promoting drug-based medicine and discrediting alternative medicine and other competitors. Some professional societies that are involved with the development of clinical practice guidelines also have financial conflicts of interest.
Is it any wonder why the public health authorities, medical associations and hospitals, the news media, and Big Tech have attempted to censor any information that contradicted the pro-pharma narratives?
Congress could pass one comprehensive law to effectively undercut the corruption behind the censorious Big Tech companies, the corporate media, and the corrupt public health establishment. Such a law would consist of several simple common-sense reforms to combat financial incentives that promote corruption and tyrannical behavior.
Re-impose the ban on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on advertising, which has made both Big Tech and corporate media companies vulnerable to influence, leading to censorship and search engine result manipulation.
Prohibit pharmaceutical companies from contributing to the campaigns of any political candidate or any political action committee for a period of 25 years if they have been fined or agreed to settlements of more than $100 million for violations of the False Claims Act, Medicare fraud, kickbacks, failure to disclose safety data, making misleading statements about drug safety, poor manufacturing practices, or off-label promotion. Since most pharma companies have been fined from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, this would effectively prohibit them from making political contributions to suppress government oversight and regulation.
Prohibit state medical boards and associations that accept state or federal funds from accepting funds from pharmaceutical companies. Those donations are a corrupting influence on the entire medical establishment, which has backed medical discrimination and tyrannical mandates. Instead, allocate public funds, paid for by higher taxes on pharma products, to support reputable medical boards and professional associations and enforce strict conflict-of-interest policies.
Prohibit medical journals that accept state or federal funds from accepting funds from pharmaceutical companies. Such funding is a corrupting influence on the journals, some of which have censored truthful medical studies or published fraudulent studies designed to suppress alternative treatments or challenge pharmaceutical company safety and efficacy claims. Instead, allocate public funds, paid for by higher taxes on pharma products, to support reputable journals that publish federally funded medical research and enforce strict conflict of interest policies.
Revoke laws granting pharmaceutical companies’ immunity from liability for vaccines or other products that cause death or harm. Pharmaceutical companies will no longer have an incentive to offer products that are improperly tested or do not meet reasonable safety standards and will need to pay more attention to safety. People who are harmed will be able to file lawsuits for financial restitution and bring public attention to the harm that is being done. Also prohibit the government National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program from requiring victims to agree to a non-disclosure (gag) agreement when they settle an injury claim, thus providing public transparency to vaccine injuries.
Require pharmaceutical companies that supply products to deal with a declared public health emergency, or produce products developed with federal research and development funding, to sell at a limited profit margin of, for instance, 5 percent. Pharmaceutical companies should not be allowed to use public funds in a public health emergency to make billions of dollars in profits. This should mitigate any incentive to exaggerate the threat of future pandemics, engage in unsafe gain-of-function research, or push for medical mandates to force the use of pharmaceutical products.
Pass a medical professional bill of rights that prohibits discrimination against medical professionals who do not agree with public health authorities on treatments. This includes threats of firing or decertification and attempts by public officials and medical associations to prevent doctors from lawfully treating patients using off-label medications or questioning the safety, efficacy, and need for pharmaceutical products. Impose civil or criminal penalties for public officials, private organizations, or medical professionals that engage in such discrimination.
Pass a medical consumer bill of rights that prohibits medical coercion and discrimination, including medical mandates that abrogate the doctor-patient relationship without consent or a complete disclosure of risks. Impose civil or criminal penalties for public officials, private organizations, or medical professionals that engage in such discrimination.
Limit corruption in the federal public health establishment by creating independent medical and scientific advisory commissions appointed by state legislatures that can override decisions made by the FDA, CDC, NIAID, and other federal public health bureaucracies. Doctors and scientists appointed to such commissions must be free of financial conflicts of interest with medical industries over which they provide oversight.
Create an independent, publicly funded drug safety monitoring organization that accepts no funding or royalties from pharmaceutical companies and has no role in the promotion or approval of pharmaceutical products. Oversight of this organization will also be provided by scientific advisory commissions appointed by state legislatures, whose members must be free of financial conflicts of interest with the medical industries over which they provide oversight.
Prohibit public health officials from holding investments in medical companies and receiving income from patents related to work conducted while in government service.
Limit terms of office for senior officials in public health to four years and impose a lifetime ban on employment by or representation of a medical company that they previously regulated.
These comprehensive reforms would help to remove corrupting financial incentives and decentralize federal public health oversight. The current environment rewards corruption and tyrannical behavior, which must be fought by eliminating bad incentives and replacing them with higher standards of personal integrity and transparency. There should be no amnesty for bad decisions that resulted in violations of human rights — only accountability and solutions designed to prevent them from ever being made again. As we have long been told, “those who fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.”
David Thalheimer is a graduate of George Washington University, Harvard University, the Air War College, and the National Intelligence University. He retired from the U.S. Air Force as a colonel and now works as an engineer in the field of cybersecurity.
A devout Christian, father, and African-American, Michael Anderson didn’t feel represented by either party and until Jan. 31 of this year, remained politically unaffiliated. But a series of events has led him to align with and campaign alongside conservatives in one of North Carolina’s most liberal counties.
Anderson is an attorney for a Big Tech company in Charlotte. Headquartered just a few miles across the border in South Carolina, his company claims the fifth largest internet footprint in the United States. Higher-ups have a stated goal of widespread “influence.” They are making good on that goal.
On Nov 18, 2021, the CEO stood before an all-employee meeting at the Charlotte location and declared for the “greater good of humanity” it was no longer enough to segregate the workers who had not received a Covid-19 vaccine. They had to be removed entirely. The entire company had been working remotely for nearly two years at that point, Anderson said. The announcement came just before the holidays.
“Hundreds of people found out that day they would be fired unless they submitted to the mandate without an approved medical or religious exemption,” Anderson said.
Anderson reached out to co-workers via an internal Slack channel sharing his concerns and received a flood of responses expressing stress and fear.
“I’ve worked in some difficult places with some difficult people and that was the most difficult week of my career,” Anderson said. “I grew up in a single-parent family below the poverty level. Single mothers [were contacting me]. Pregnant women were contacting me to see whether they could receive a medical exemption. There were so many inequities and unjust consequences to this poorly thought out, draconian mandate.”
About 60 employees linked up. “All these people [losing their jobs] are super high-performing, hardworking people, some who have been in the company for 15-16 years,” Anderson said. “I asked the CEO to change the policy, the director of diversity, the General Counsel; I couldn’t change their minds.”
Anderson began using his legal expertise to assist exemption-seekers. Alongside like-minded freedom fighters, he developed a coalition, ByManyOrByFew, to inform, educate and connect voters.
“I thought we ought to do something to fight against these policies and funnel people toward politicians who were freedom-minded,” he said.
But Anderson didn’t stop there. Within weeks of the company announcement, he decided to run for a North Carolina House seat in Mecklenburg, one of the most Democratic counties in the state. Choosing a party affiliation by now was a no-brainer.
In preparation to testify before the South Carolina House and Ways subcommittee on December 7, 2021, for a workplace vaccination bill that could eventually impact the North Carolina arm of the company he works for, Anderson reached out to both political parties. Not one Democrat would respond, but many Republicans fighting for individual rights did. “Forty-four Caucasians were fighting to protect my rights,” he said.
Vaccines historically have a disparate impact on minorities. Anderson references the Tuskegee Experiment, as one horrific example. He saw history repeating itself with the Covid-19 vaccine, led by a Democratic president.
“When you had these vaccine mandates come out, I placed the blame at the feet of President Biden,” Anderson said. “Although his mandates were ultimately unsuccessful, a lot of companies were encouraged and enabled to have their own vaccine mandates and a private company has a lot more flexibility compared to the government. As a result, by their terms, that caused systemic, institutional racism because it has a disparate impact on minorities.”
That is who Anderson specifically wants to champion; and who Democrats continuously fail to support or outright harm with disastrous policies. Even with the CDC’s recently updated vaccine guidelines, Democratic leaders like Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser are pursuing policies that hurt miniorities disproportionately, like a vaccine mandate that would bar 40 percent of D.C. black teenagers from in-person learning.
“My district is 60 percent African American, 20 percent Latino,” Anderson said. “The reason why I like that and that’s where I want to be is not only because I am African American, there’s no demographic flipping faster from Democrat to Republican than Latino. And if you look at the vaccine mandates, there is no race that was hurt worse than African Americans.”
Minority voters have been impacted by other far-left policies, and are expressing their discontent at the polls. A recent interview by NPR with political scientist Ruy Teixeira revealed how Democrats are driving minority voters to flip partisanship, especially in the Latino population.
“…[T]he ultra-progressive wing of the Democratic Party privileging criminal justice reform over public safety,” has become a major concern of minority voters, Teixeira said. “People want to be safe from crime, and that includes a lot of nonwhite voters. It is not a matter for them of choosing between the two, but rather above all, you’ve got to keep our community safe.”
Anderson’s opponent for NC House District 99, Democratic Rep. Nasif Majeed, supported the “ultra-progressive” defunding of the Charlotte police in his previous campaign. Charlotte now has only 1,600 police officers for a city of 1 million people. Three hundred defections or retirements are expected in the near term and salaries start as low as $40,000. A lack of manpower has resulted in unanswered 911 calls and crimes below a felony going entirely unaddressed. “Social justice warriors” are crippling police response, according to local law enforcement.
Democrats’ leftist ideologies ruin cities and Anderson wants to get his town back on track, but he knows reform isn’t possible alongside current Democrats in North Carolina’s House, who hold a majority in the legislature.
A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Anderson grew up below the poverty level in a biracial, single-parent home. Progressive policies pressed during the pandemic are driving inequity that entrap and eliminate those the far-left claim to champion, he said. He feels there is no place for him in the Democratic Party right now.
Through door-to-door campaigning, he’s found that many registered Democrats in Charlotte agree.
“I ask people what issues they need represented and how the system is failing them,” Anderson said. “You have to have conversations with people to know.”
Empowered by a Democrat president, Democrat House, and a coalition of Democrat governors, Covid-19 tyranny has driven a new type of minority leader like Anderson to represent an increasingly diverse Republican party — one that engages in the political battle and fights for the now tenuous freedoms once taken for granted.
Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband who lives in Virginia.
They did this under the guise of science and saving lives. We now have a generation of children who are delayed in language, social skills, and educational attainment, while overburdened with mental, emotional, and behavioral ailments. And yet it was all done for absolutely nothing – no gain, all pain. This has been appallingly obvious since schools were shut down and then children masked in 2020, but a new study from Sweden – the global control group – demonstrates the scope of this crime with unmistakable clarity.
A study by Swedish researchers published in the International Journal of Educational Research found that in this Nordic country, “word decoding and reading comprehension scores were not lower during the pandemic compared to before the pandemic.” This is simply astounding, given what we have witnessed in almost every other country. The researchers analyzed 97,000 Swedish primary school children from 248 different municipalities, 1,277 schools, and 5,250 classrooms.
Just contrast this to a McKinsey study that analyzed more than 1.6 million K-12 students in over 40 U.S. states that found that students were, on average, five months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading. An investigation by WBFF’s Project Baltimore from the local Fox affiliate found that 62% of middle schoolers in Baltimore County had one or more failing grades by the third quarter of the 2021 school year, up a whopping from 35% from before the shutdowns. Investigators also found that 41% of Baltimore high schoolers had a grade-point average of 1.0 or below, an increase of 24% since before the school closures in March 2020. The education situation in a state like Maryland is so dire that 81 percent of all Maryland students tested last year in grades three through five were not proficient in math, and 76 percent were not proficient in English language arts.
It makes you wonder if Swedish kids might outshine American children one day in English in addition to their native language! What was the secret to their success? They simply followed science and morality and kept schools open without dystopian plexiglass and masks. There was no fearmongering, social isolation, learning impediments, or learning stoppages. And of course, there is no evidence that a single child died from COVID as a result of schools being open. All gain and no pain.
In the light of international studies on reading skills in younger students during the pandemic, we conclude that the decision to keep schools open benefitted Swedish primary school students. This decision might also have mitigated other potentially negative effects of school closures, especially for students from more disadvantaged backgrounds.
Never before in our history has there been such a grave policy promulgated by government that was known up front to have no benefit but induced cataclysmic damage. It’s not just the learning disorders that are plaguing a generation of kids. A 2021 paper in the Lancet found, based on data from 204 countries, a 27.4% increase in major depressive disorders globally, accounting for an additional 53 million cases. Additionally, researchers found a 25.6% increase in cases of anxiety disorders, accounting for another 76 million cases globally.
One cannot possibly quantify the long-term effects to society of driving such a ubiquitous mental and emotional health crisis. According to the CDC, a third of high school students reported poor mental health during the pandemic, and 44% said they “persistently felt sad or hopeless.”
What is going to become of those kids? Many of them will live unproductive and sad lives, but many others will die young. A paper published recently in JAMA found that the rate of drug overdose deaths doubled among adolescents during the pandemic. In 2019, the overdose fatality rate among adolescents was 2.36 per 100,000, very consistent with the previous decade. In 2020, it shot up to 4.57 per 100,000, and for the first six months of 2021, the rate increased another 20%, to 5.49 per 100,000.
Kids should never have been made to feel anxious about the virus or about the response to it because it should never have affected them. It was known early on that not a single one of Sweden’s nearly 2 million children died of COVID during the initial wave in the spring of 2020 when Sweden kept its schools open (without mask requirements) and the rest of the world shut their schools.
Rather than admitting their mistake and committing to never shutting down schools again, governments are once again foisting a policy with all pain and no gain on the youngest of children. Later this week, the FDA will likely approve Moderna’s and Pfizer’s outdated shots on babies and toddlers, for a virus that never harmed them. We have never pushed novel therapies on children, especially those who already have numerous documented problems, for something that poses such a low risk, especially when the vaccine is outdated and doesn’t work for the variants circulating today.
As of June 3, there were already 49,878 children (ages 0 to 17) reported in VAERS who have experienced an adverse event from one of the COVID jabs. 7,547 of the childrenwere hospitalized, and 125 died. Remember, this is for a virus that no longer exists in that original form and from which there was a near-zero risk to children.
Between March 2020 and December 2021, according to researchers from the U.K. Health Security Agency, even among the rare documented pediatric COVID deaths, 56% of those under age 20 “were due to unnatural causes or due to causes unrelated to COVID-19.” Even among the remaining 81 deaths in the entire country under age 20, 75% had significant co-morbidities. Yet we are giving them a novel therapy Pfizer itself admitted is associated with hundreds of adverse maladies based on de facto zero risk, just like we shut down their classes, socially isolated them, and mummified their faces for the same nonexistent risk. What will it take to suspend these immoral experiments on our children?
Next week, the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will meet to likely offer emergency use authorization for Moderna and Pfizer’s biological products to be injected into babies as young as six months old. No amount of evidence demonstrating negative efficacy and enormous side effects will factor into its decision. Never mind the fact that there never was an emergency for young children to begin with, and there certainly isn’t one now.
Yet the FDA will undoubtedly approve a shot that has failed and is outdated – so much so that two weeks later, it will meet about updating the formula for new variants, of course, after having injected the outdated formula into the arms of babies and toddlers. One data point that certainly will be missing from the meeting is the observation about Portugal.
According to Statista, Portugal has the highest vaccination rate of any country in Europe aside from the tiny island of Malta. Nearly every adult is vaccinated in this nation of 10.3 million, 94% of all people (including young children) have received at least 1 dose, and 70% have received boosters. In fact, the New York Times ran an article about Portugal last year, noting that “there is no one left to vaccinate” there.
Yet, Portugal now has the highest case rate and COVID death rate per capita in Europe and the second highest COVID fatality rate in the world behind Taiwan, according to Our World in Data.
Here is the case rate map of Europe:
And here is the death rate map:
At 2,293 cases per 1 million individuals, as of June 7, Portugal’s 7-day rolling average case rate is seven times greater than that of the United States and is now higher than the worst peak of cases in America. Moreover, it’s not that Portugal never had a big wave – it has already experienced a peak in the winter that was three times as great as the worst days in the U.S. So even after many people already had the virus, officials keep testing positive for the virus despite – or perhaps, because of – the near universal vaccination rate.
It is true that Portugal has a high rate of testing, but not that much higher to account for exponentially higher case rates. As of June 1, Portugal’s positivity rate was nearly four times that of the U.S.
Then there are the COVID deaths. At 4.1 deaths per million, Portugal is now far outpacing all the other European countries with high case rates by over 60%. Its current death rate is more than four times that of the U.S. This simply should not be happening now that everyone is vaccinated and everyone who is vulnerable is boosted if the shots are anywhere near as effective as we are told.
The Portugal News reported that between May 24 and May 30, the southern European nation “recorded 175,766 infections, 220 deaths associated with COVID-19, and an increase in hospitalizations and intensive care.” Health Minister Marta Temido said last week that “Portugal is probably the European country with the highest prevalence of this sub-lineage and this partly explains the high number (of cases) we are seeing.”
But that really doesn’t explain it. Why would Portugal have a much worse problem with these variants than the country in which they were first detected — namely South Africa? Is this not a fulfillment of Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche’s warning that the sub-optimal evolutionary pressure of these shots, originally designed for the Wuhan strain, would work against the body for future variants?
Let’s a take a look at South Africa’s BA.4/BA.5 wave from late May as compared to Portugal’s? Can you even detect it?
South Africa’s recent peak, which is now over with, was one-twentieth the size of Portugal’s – and this is after Portugal already had exponentially more cases from the previous wave. However, even as it relates to death rates, the afflicted country is outpacing South Africa.
Keep in mind that Portugal is still experiencing higher death rates even after having already incurred a lot of deaths from the original pool of vulnerable people during the first winter. It simply makes no sense for Portugal to be experiencing this many deaths with Omicron, which does not replicate well in the lungs. Remember, while Portugal has run out of people to vaccinate, according to the New York Times, less than a third of South Africans are vaccinated with very few having had boosters. Also, South Africa’s life expectancy is 18 years lower, and 20% of the population has AIDS.
For how much longer is the FDA going to be allowed to ignore a year’s worth of signals not just indicating cataclysmic safety concerns but negative efficacy – and downright perpetuation – of the virus? Just look at this week’s Walgreens COVID-19 testing index, and you can once again see that higher positivity rates are associated with those with more shots, especially as time goes on.
The mendacity of obfuscating the truth about these shots has gotten so ludicrous that the media and medical associations are now chalking up the rash of sudden cardiac deaths among young people as an unexplained “sudden adult death syndrome.” And now they want to inject these products into the final group of unvarnished children. What does that say about who we are as a people if we let it happen?
In the New York Times article from October crowing about “no one left to vaccinate” in Portugal, Laura Sanches, a Portuguese clinical psychologist, is quoted as bemoaning the fact that Portugal doesn’t “really have a culture of questioning authorities.” Well, here in America, we once did have such a culture. Reagan once said that “freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things,” an understanding “that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions … to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people.” Will we finally exercise that freedom?
Now that a judge has stayed the federal mask mandate on public transportation, it’s important to have an honest accounting of what this entire mask situation was truly all about. A lot of people will make a lot of claims. A tiny sliver will continue to claim mask mandates actually helped mitigate the spread of Covid-19. They will be the outliers because, in terms of stopping the spread of Covid or any other virus, wearing a mask is the equivalent of doing a rain dance: it might make you feel better, and some quacks will tell you it works, but ultimately it does nothing except make you look foolish and give you a false sense of security. (Vaccine mandates were the modern equivalent of burning witches at the stake.)
It was all so stupid and foisted on us by people we’re supposed to trust, which is why we need this honest accounting of what it was really all about. A lot of people will claim the masks were about establishing and maintaining control. That’s fair, but it wasn’t their primary purpose. The primary purpose of the mask mandates was to make every person who wore one a walking advertisement for fear. If you were wearing a mask, then you were doing your job, because you had given up your right to free expression and replaced it with one, constant sentiment: “I’m afraid, and you should be too.”
That was the main purpose of the masks. That’s why they wanted everyone to keep wearing them. It was about control, yes, but far more than that, it was about promoting fear. That’s why they lied about the threat Covid poses. That’s why they inflated the number of deaths, counting so often all who died with as having died from. That’s why they convinced so many Americans that the threat of hospitalization or death is exponentially higher than it actually is. (For the record, the survival rate for Covid is 99.7 percent for unvaccinated adults, 99.9 percent for vaccinated adults, and 100 percent for unvaccinated children.)
All they did the entire time was work as hard as they could to promote as much fear as possible, and masks were an excellent weapon they could force on you to help spread their message of constant fear, division, and dehumanization. The mask stripped you of your right to free expression and replaced whatever you wanted to communicate with one single piece of speech: “Be afraid.”
That was the primary purpose. That’s why they were all so fired up about it. That’s why they were all so desperate for you and everybody else to wear them.
It’s important we have our heads around that because it will help us avoid letting them do it again in the future. It wasn’t just about control. It wasn’t just about dividing and dehumanizing us. It wasn’t just about turning us against each other and forcing us to deny science so we could devastate each other’s social, psychological, and emotional health.
All of those were welcome byproducts to the “public health experts” and other elites who to this day claim masking provides value. But the primary purpose was to promote fear, and to stifle your speech and expression so you perpetually signaled that fear to everyone else.
You were obedient, yes. But more than that, you were afraid. That was the message, whether you wanted to send it or not. It was the primary reason they made everyone wear them, and it’s important we never let them do that to us again.
Hrand Tookman is a Cleveland, Ohio native with a background in interpersonal communications. He writes with an objective of exposing media bias, and inspiring unity in defiance of so many forces today that thrive off of division.
The nation’s public-health establishment lost all credibility during the Covid era by either ignoring or politicizing scientific data. But health bureaucrats seem to have learned nothing. With respect to the highly charged issue of gender dysphoria, they continue to substitute politics for science when necessary to advance the leftist narrative.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently released an official document designed to enshrine experimental medical interventions as the standard treatment for transgender-identifying children. Prepared by HHS’s Office of Population Affairs (OPA), the document is a political statement unmoored from actual medical research.
According to “Gender-Affirming Care and Young People,” medical interventions such as puberty-blocking drugs, wrong-sex hormones, and surgical mutilation are “crucial to overall health” of young people confused about their sex. (For what it’s worth, OPA falls under the supervision of Dr. Rachel Levine, a man who identifies as a woman.) The document complements a proposed rule announced by HHS in March, mandating insurance coverage for such “gender-affirming care.”
But the claims made in HHS’s new release have been deftly dismantled by an organization of physicians and scientists who still care about reality, and about ethical medical practice. The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) — which exists “to promote safe, compassionate, ethical and evidence-informed healthcare for children, adolescents, and young adults with gender dysphoria”—points out that HHS’s discussion is deeply misleading and indeed dangerous. SEGM identifies seven serious misrepresentations of fact crammed into the two-page HHS document. Most of these involve cherry-picking, distorting, or simply ignoring the results of studies on the many facets of so-called gender-affirming treatment.
HHS Mischaracterizes Studies
For example, HHS flatly mischaracterizes a study that failed to find any benefits of “social transition” (presenting oneself as the opposite sex, with a new name, hairstyle, dress, etc.). As SEGM notes, the HHS document cites that study for the opposite conclusion, “wrongly assert[ing] that social transition improves functioning.” HHS presumably assumes readers won’t read the actual study and thus will accept the agency’s false claims about its findings.
SEGM identifies other falsifications of the supposed mental-health benefits of wrong-sex hormones and surgeries. HHS’s “claims of benefits coming from cherry-picked studies do not hold up when the entire body of evidence is properly evaluated in a systematic and reproducible way,” according to SEGM.
The design of the studies cited by HHS made it impossible to link medical interventions and improved mental health, SEGM observes. By contrast, multiple European studies “concluded that there is a lack of convincing evidence for the mental health benefit for children and adolescents of either puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.”
SEGM notes, in fact, that the Swedish health authority warned that “the risks of puberty suppressing treatment . . . and gender-affirming hormonal treatment currently outweigh the possible benefits, and that the treatments should be offered only in exceptional cases.”
HHS ignored all this research, which would have led honest medical professionals to at least acknowledge the scholarly debate about the wisdom of these interventions. But HHS isn’t run by honest medical professionals. It’s in the grip of ideologues determined to drive troubled children and their families into the clutches of the trans industry.
Dishonest Use of Data on Suicide
SEGM also criticizes the HHS document for dishonesty about the related issue of suicide among trans-identifying youth. In claiming alarmingly high rates of suicidal ideation in this population — a claim routinely used to pressure desperate parents into consenting to dangerous medical interventions — HHS relies only on “a low quality, non-probability online survey.”
In fact, SEGM reports, “recent research from one of the world’s largest pediatric gender clinics estimated the rate of suicide in trans-identified youth as 0.03% over a 10-year period, which is comparable to youth presenting for care with mental health problems.”
Even more critically, despite HHS’s strong implication that drugs, hormones, and surgeries reduce suicide rates, SEGM clarifies that “no study to date has demonstrated that transition reduces the rate of serious suicide attempts.” Is HHS afraid that telling the truth about suicide will make parents less likely to place their troubled children on the trans-industry conveyor belt?
Puberty Blockers Are Not Fully Reversible
The mendacity of HHS extends beyond misrepresenting or ignoring studies. For example, the document states, without supporting citation, that puberty blockers are fully reversible (i.e., natural puberty will resume once the drugs are discontinued). But SEGM warns about the utter dearth of research supporting this claim. In fact,
concerns have been raised that puberty blockers are psychologically irreversible (since over 95% of all treated youth proceed to cross-sex hormones), that they may harm bone development, may permanently alter the brain, that it is not yet known how they affect other vital organs, all of which undergo significant structural changes during uninterrupted puberty.
Once again, public-health agencies in Europe are more honest. As SEGM reports, Britain’s National Health Service says that “[l]ittle is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria.”
But ignoring the risks of these interventions is HHS’s modus operandi. SEGM calls out the HHS ideologues for mentioning only the supposed (in some cases imaginary) benefits of interventions while failing to mention documented risks to bone development, cardiovascular health, and the mental health of patients who later regret their transition decisions.
Sterility Expected After Trans Treatments
SEGM particularly targets HHS’s failure to mention the effect on reproductive health, which is supposed to be the focus of Levine’s Office of Population Affairs. “When puberty blockers are administered in early puberty and followed by cross-sex hormones,” SEGM notes, “sterility is expected.”
HHS is silent about this potentially devastating consequence. Nor does it acknowledge the “serious ethical questions about whether adolescents can be considered competent to waive their future reproductive rights at an age when they are unlikely to be able to appreciate or predict the importance of fertility to their adult selves.”
Ethics, it appears, is not HHS’s strong suit.
HHS also misleads in stating that mutilating surgeries are “typically used in adulthood or case-by-case in adolescence.” In fact, as SEGM notes, draft recommendations from the influential (though highly politicized) World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) urge broad availability of mastectomies to patients at age 16.
Even worse, patients as young as 13 had their healthy breasts removed as part of a study funded by the National Institutes of Health – i.e., by you and me through our tax dollars. The HHS bureaucrats who prepared this report surely knew this, but distort the facts.
This HHS document, then, is a farce. As SEGM summarizes, HHS inadequately reviewed the scientific literature, issued “biased recommendations that do not acknowledge the low quality of evidence,” failed to solicit input from professionals and patients whose experiences contradict the government narrative, and utterly ignored possible alternatives to medical interventions, such as psychotherapy. The result:
This incomplete representation of the relevant issues is likely to mislead the public to believe that this is the best and only alternative, particularly when no other alternatives are mentioned. The public is also likely to erroneously assume that the risks of affirmative care are low. Patients and families are not capable of providing valid informed consent when the information they receive is inaccurate and incomplete
If the public-health establishment wants to rehabilitate its tattered reputation after the Covid debacle, this isn’t the way to do it. Health policy is too important to be entrusted to political hacks.
Jane Robbins is an attorney and a retired senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington DC. In that position she crafted federal and state legislation designed to restore the constitutional autonomy of states and parents in education policy, and to protect the rights of religious freedom and conscience. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.
The Canadian pharmaceutical company SaNOtize Research & Development Corp., (SaNOtize), and Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Limited (Glenmark), announced earlier this month the successful outcomes of a nasal spray in its Phase 3 clinical trials and now approved by India’s drug regulator as a treatment for adult patients with COVID-19 who have a risk of progression of the disease. TrialSite is the first to report on this.
“The study confirmed that SaNOtize’s Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray (NONS) represents a safe and effective antiviral treatment that shortens the course of COVID-19, and could prevent the transmission of COVID-19,” according to their news release.
The SaNOtize Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray (NONS) is designed to kill the Covid-19 virus in the upper airways, preventing it from incubating and spreading to the lungs. It contained anti-microbial properties with a direct virucidal effect on Covid-19.
Read their news release published at Business Wire and below:
In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-arm study at 20 clinical sites across India that evaluated 306 patients, NONS reduced the SARS-CoV-2log viral load in COVID-19 patients by more than 94% within 24 hours of treatment, and by more than 99% in 48 hours as compared to saline control.
Treatment also demonstrated, in the high-risk group (n=218), a statistically significant greater proportion of patients who achieved a combination of clinical and virological cure, based on the World Health Organization (WHO) Progression Scale. Moreover, the median time to negative PCR, in this group, was 4 days in the treatment group compared with 8 days in the control. Test subjects included patients infected with different variants, likely including Delta and Omicron. There were no significant adverse health events recorded in the Phase 3 trial, or in over 500 subjects treated so far with NONS in clinical trials.
The reduction in log viral load corroborates the reduction of viral load in the UK Phase 2 trials (a reduction of 95% in 24 hours and 99% in 72 hours), conducted in March 2021 by Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and Berkshire and Surrey Pathology Services, and published in the Journal of Infection in August 2021.
“These results definitively substantiate the safety and efficacy of NONS in the fight against COVID-19,” said Dr. Gilly Regev, SaNOtize Co-Founder and CEO. “We are thrilled to be able to provide COVID patients with an affordable product that has been shown to deliver a faster cure. And with the proven safety profile of NONS, we look forward to this becoming the first line of treatment and potentially defense for COVID infection worldwide.”
The SaNOtize treatment is designed to kill the virus in the upper airways, preventing it from incubating and spreading to the lungs. It is based on nitric oxide (NO), a natural nanomolecule produced by the human body with proven anti-microbial properties shown to have a direct effect on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The pharmacology, toxicity, and safety data for NO use in humans has been well-established for decades. The NO molecule released from NONS is identical to the one delivered in its gaseous form to treat persistent pulmonary hypertension, or Blue Baby Syndrome, in newborn babies.
With the receipt of manufacturing and marketing approval from India’s drug regulator, SaNOtize’s strategic partner, Glenmark, will launch NONS commercially in India under the brand name FabiSpray®. The approval is for the treatment of adult patients with COVID-19 who have a risk of progression of the disease, which includes either persons over the age of 45, non-vaccinated people and/or those with comorbidities. Glenmark entered into an exclusive long-term strategic partnership with SaNOtize in August 2021 to manufacture, market and distribute NONS for COVID-19 treatment in India and other Asian markets including Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Nepal, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam.
NONS has a marketing authorization as a Class I Medical Device in the EU. NONS is also approved and being sold in Israel, Thailand, Indonesia, and Bahrain, under the name enovid™ or VirX™.
“As viral load is an important determinant of disease severity and transmission of COVID-19 infection, demonstration of reduction in the viral load is expected to have significant clinical consequences from a patient and community perspective,” said Dr. Monika Tandon, Senior Vice President and Head – Clinical Development, Global Specialty/Branded Portfolio for Glenmark. “In the current scenario, with new emerging variants exhibiting high transmissibility, this novel product provides a useful option in the world’s fight against COVID-19.”
Glenmark will submit the clinical trial data for publication in a peer-reviewed journal in order to share its findings.
Patients in the Glenmark Phase 3 clinical trial in India self-administered a dose of 2 sprays per nostril, six times a day for a seven-day treatment period, along with standard supportive care.
The primary and secondary outcome measures demonstrated the efficacy and safety of the NONS treatment arm over the control arm, which was administered normal saline nasal spray as placebo in double-blind manner.
The trial also included a subgroup analysis for patients with a high risk of disease progression, including either non-vaccinated patients, patients in middle- and older-age groups, and/or patients with co-morbidities.
Reduction in log viral load in the NONS group was statistically significant and superior to the control group in the full population and high-risk population (p < 0.05). Similar results were seen in the un-vaccinated group. The primary endpoint was achieved and confirmed in all analyses.
Significantly higher proportion of patients became negative on the RT-PCR test in the NONS group as compared to the placebo group. The time to virological cure was four days in the NONS group and eight days in the placebo group (p < 0.05).
A significantly higher proportion of patients demonstrated a 2-point clinical status improvement on the WHO Progression Scale, the most clinically validated point system used in clinical trials, in the NONS group as compared to the placebo group in the high-risk group (p < 0.05).
Data suggests role of NONS in prevention of COVID-19, which is consistent with a faster viral reduction.
NONS was safe and well tolerated by all patients who were part of the clinical trial. There were no reports of moderate or severe or serious adverse events or death in the study. An independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) concluded that NONS was safe in COVID-19 patients.
“NONS destroys the virus, blocks entry into the nasal cavity and halts replication of the virus, which rapidly reduces viral load. This is important because viral load has been linked to infectivity, poor health outcomes and complications from Long COVID,” said Dr. Chris Miller, Chief Science Officer and co-founder of SaNOtize. “Amid evidence of waning efficacy for some vaccines and higher breakthrough rates, there is currently a lack of an antiviral therapy that is effective against COVID-19 and its variants that can be made widely and affordably available to the public. This is what makes NONS a critical weapon in ending the pandemic and preventing future outbreaks.”
Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
On August 6, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control released a report that the agency claimed showed “Vaccination Offers Higher Protection than Previous COVID-19 Infection.” This assertion came amidst a public battle with Sen. Rand Paul, as the CDC released this data from Kentucky, Paul’s home state.
Yet after indisputable scientific evidence continued to pile up in favor of natural immunity, the CDC finally capitulated on January 19, 2022, recognizing the superiority of natural immunity over vaccination alone: “Between May and November 2021, people who were unvaccinated and did not have a prior COVID-19 infection remained at the highest risk of infection and hospitalization, while those who were previously infected, both with, or without prior vaccination, had the greatest protection.”
The CDC’s reversal came after its previous discounting of natural immunity caused mass layoffs, nursing home resident isolation, and hospital staffing shortages. It must not be forgotten or overlooked, and the CDC must be held accountable.
Last summer, guided by the CDC, President Biden claimed, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die.” Biden also spread misinformation about vaccinations preventing the spread of Covid-19 by stating, “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.”
Who is harmed the most by health misinformation produced by our president and his agencies? Those with low health literacy. Our rich-poor gap is growing in this country and lying about health issues only exacerbates it.
A Positive Test Doesn’t Always Mean Infectiousness
A deeper dive into the August natural immunity study reveals methodology that can be recognized as illogical, even to those without medical experience. The CDC researchers created two groups. The case group included people who tested positive in 2020 and then tested positive again during a two-month window in 2021. The control group included people who had a positive test in 2020 without another positive test during this artificial two-month window.
The study observed that non-vaccinated group registered a positive test 34.4 percent of the time, compared to 20.3 percent of fully vaccinated individuals. The CDC falsely defined the case group’s second positive test as a “reinfection.” This is the central lie of the study. This data conveniently omitted data on people actually becoming symptomatic or what a common person would call “reinfected.”
To illustrate this point, consider if a Covid-recovered person comes into contact with Sars-Cov-2 in their community. They might test positive on a PCR test. Their body can remember the virus, fight it off, and the person never becomes ill. However, shortly after the exposure, a PCR swab can detect bits of genetic material (even if it’s unviable virus). Therefore, this study could be more of a reflection of people’s likelihood of re-exposure to Sars-Cov-2, not reinfection, as the CDC claimed.
By conflating exposure and reinfection, the CDC misled the public. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stated, “This study shows you were twice as likely to get infected again if you are unvaccinated. Getting the vaccine is the best way to protect yourself and others around you, especially as the more contagious Delta variant spreads around the country.”
This guidance came when mounting evidence indicated Covid vaccines quickly lose their effectiveness against infection and transmission, which the CDC loathed to admit. Unfortunately, Walensky’s guidance undermined the credibility of the CDC for generations to come.
As a physician, it’s frightening that a public health official made a policy recommendation based on such a flawed study. We should encourage critical thinking and scientific skepticism, but such a blatantly flawed study design should not be tolerated in our leading health institutions.
Not an Isolated Incident for the CDC
This isn’t the only time the CDC has been caught misleading the public. Drawing ire from the medical community, the was an uncontrolled study of students in Arizona that Walensky referred to in discussing the CDC’s mask guidance for schools. This study defined a “covid outbreak” as “two or more” positive lab tests among students or staff. So, if your school had two asymptomatic third graders, you’ve got a “covid outbreak” on your hands. Even worse, the study weighted such an “outbreak” equally to a school with dozens of symptomatic teachers or students. According to the CDC, two equals 50—at least for “covid outbreaks.”
In a Georgia study that actually had a sufficient control arm, the CDC minimized the fact that there was no statistically significant difference between masked and unmasked student groups. They’ve also minimized the importance of diet and exercise during the pandemic. They failed to effectively communicate evidence-based, life-saving outpatient treatment protocols. The list goes on.
Why This Matters So Much
How does minimizing natural immunity cause harm in the real world? There are at least three deadly repercussions.
First, many hospitals following the CDC’s guidance mandated that only vaccinated health-care workers be allowed to work at their facilities. This means naturally immune health-care workers were wrongly excluded from the workforce. Based on a toxic lie fabricated by the CDC, hospitals continue to experience staffing shortages, contributing to the hospitalization overcapacity narrative they’ve used to demonize the unvaccinated.
Second, the same problem arose for nursing homes, where seniors were denied visitation rights from unvaccinated, naturally immune family and friends, even though less protected vaccinated people were allowed in. Lack of care workers also prevents patients from being discharged from hospitals to care facilities.
Third, the natural immunity lie also stripped countless Americans of their health coverage and livelihoods. During the delta wave, for example, a worker at Los Alamos National Laboratories was fired from his job for religiously objecting to vaccination, despite working entirely from home and having recovered from a previous Covid infection. The CDC now admits this worker’s immunity provides protection superior to that of his co-workers who had merely vaccine-induced immunity at that time. He lost his job while the less protected did not. By denying natural immunity’s superiority to vaccine-induced immunity, how many others have been fired and lost health-care access the moment we need our population to be at its healthiest?
Punishing People We Should Have Praised
Naturally immune people should have been identified early in the pandemic as the most protected, ushered into hospitals and nursing homes to serve our vulnerable, and certainly should have been allowed to keep their jobs. By refusing to acknowledge the harms of lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination, the CDC has brought everlasting shame to itself. There is clear evidence these types of interventions carry measurable risk. A better approach would have been to honestly discuss the risks and benefits with the public, much like I discuss surgical risks and benefits with my patients. This is the very tenet of informed consent, and better communication always results in a better relationship.
Americans need an unbiased, incorruptible, and credible CDC that provides reliable and scientifically sound public health guidance. These lies have de-legitimized and undermined public confidence in the institution of the CDC itself.
The consequences of lying about Covid-19 will spill into other areas of health care. Millions of Americans have lost trust in our hospitals and institutions and are now resorting to “under the table” health care. In health care, loss of trust equals lack of access. The CDC must return to the basics of evidence-based medicine to overcome its crisis of legitimacy.
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.
President Joe Biden hosted his second solo press conference ever on Wednesday but his attempts to clearly communicate how he plans to fix a country plagued with COVID-19, crime, rising prices, empty shelves, and more were nothing less of a disaster. Not only did Biden, who was once heralded as the chief unifier of the country, use the presser to repeat rhetoric trashing Republicans, he also did his absolute best to put lipstick on the pig that is the struggling U.S. economy. Unfortunately, no amount of lipstick or whoppers can cover Biden’s terrible and devastating approval rating.
Biden concluded his initial speech by claiming that “the best days of this country are still ahead of us not behind us,” but his optimism is unfounded. Recent polling suggests that only 26 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction. The majority, however, are left wondering whether Biden will work to fix the myriad of crises he created.
Here are the 10 lies Biden told during his Wednesday press conference.
1. The Nation’s Problem Is COVID
“I know there’s a lot of frustration and fatigue in this country. And we know why: COVID-19, Omicron it has now been challenging us in a way that, it’s the new enemy,” Biden said.
Not only is COVID-19 a virus that’s been around for years now, therefore not making it a “new enemy,” but it’s also not the only thing plaguing voters’ lives or minds. As a matter of fact, while Biden parades around the Capitol encouraging Democrats to abolish the filibuster and legalize illegal voting practices, he’s failing to address the ongoing Southern border crisis, empty shelves, and rising urban crime.
2. Wages Are Up
Early in his speech, Biden claimed that American wages are up. What he failed to address is that real wages have decreased most of the months he’s been in office. Even in months when wages were up, Americans were forced to dig deeper in their pockets to cover their climbing gas, energy, and grocery bills.
3. Biden Created Jobs
Biden tried to circumvent the nation’s economic turmoil by claiming that he created more jobs to stimulate the economy. He ignored, however, the role the government played in creating the recession that caused job loss in the first place. And on the role his own administration played in lining the pockets of Americans with federal cash, Biden was mum.
4. The Supply Chain Crisis Isn’t That Bad
Biden hardly addressed the ongoing supply chain crisis, leading to the often popular #bareshelvesBiden hashtag, and the nation’s rising inflation which continues to plague voters’ lives as they begin considering who to vote for in the 2022 midterms.
The president hinted that the “empty shelves being shown on television” were misleading but even he admitted that they are “a few [percentage] points below what it was before the pandemic.”
5. Inflation Was Already A Thing Before I Took Office
Biden claimed that inflation was increasing long before he assumed office, but as recent reports indicate, inflation in the U.S. surged to 7 percent in December 2021, the highest level since 1982.
6. Republicans Want To Steal Minorities’ Right To Vote
In an effort to promote his campaign to initiate a federal takeover of elections, Biden claimed that Republicans want to take away minorities’ rights to vote.
“No matter how hard they make it for minorities to vote, I think you’re going to see them willing to stand in line and … keep them from being able to vote,” Biden said. “I think you’re gonna see the people they’re trying to keep from being able to show up, showing up and making the sacrifice that needs to make in order to change the law back to what it should be.”
Biden continues to parrot the blatant lie that Republicans are trying to prevent minorities from voting. pic.twitter.com/vWMjmBVoV3
REPORTER: "Do you still believe the upcoming election will be fairly conducted and the results will be legitimate?"
BIDEN: "It all depends depends on whether or not we're able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to alter the outcome…" pic.twitter.com/COdhiTEYhh
“You say we’re not going to go back to closing schools. You said that just moments ago, yet they’re closing in some areas. What do you say to those teachers and principals and parents about school closings?” one reporter asked. “And what can your administration do to help make up for learning loss for students?”
“First of all, I put in perspective the question you asked, very few schools are closing,” Biden claimed. “Over 95 percent are still open.”
Yet, since the rise of Omicron in the U.S., reports of schools closing across the country have also risen leaving working parents desperate for in-person learning once more. Thousands of schools that were scheduled to reopen following Christmas break opted for virtual learning until well into January due to panic over COVID-19 spread.
8. Build Back Better Will Save Americans Money
During the conference, Biden repeated the lie that his Build Back Better legislative package “would actually lower or reduce inflation.”
This falsehood has been debunked numerous times but that didn’t stop the president from claiming that his legislation, which actually costs trillions of dollars, won’t cost taxpayers a dime.
9. White House Reporters Are The Most Informed Americans Of All Time
Biden told the White House press pool that they are “more informed than any group of people in America.”
While the statement will probably score him points with openly partisan press pool members, it’s far from the truth.
For more than a year, corporate media reporters who covered Biden’s rise to the presidency and his subsequent time in the White House have overlooked the administration’s failures to laud the Democrat for being a “moral, decent man.”They’ve wasted their precious Q+As with the president on softball questions framed in a positive light, while also failing to ask key ones. They let Biden ramble and frequently fail to point out the obvious lies lacing his winding answers.
10. I Didn’t Compare My Democrat Colleagues To Racists
Biden denied that he compared Democrat filibuster holdouts Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to confederate leaders.
“I did not say that they were going to be George Wallace or Bull Connor,” Biden claimed. “I said we’re gonna have a decision in history.”
Just last week, however, Biden asked “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?”
“This is the moment to decide, to defend our elections, to defend our democracy. If you do that you will not be alone,” Biden said.
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 @jordangdavidson.
Were the cloth masks just for psychological training purposes to get us to the main course of obsequious servitude to the gods of Fauci?
It took nearly two years, but the “public health experts” are finally admitting what industrial hygienists knew from day one: Masks do not work against airborne viruses. Yet rather than immediately remove these draconian restrictions – including masking 2-year-olds on airplanes and schoolchildren for hours on end in many states – they are seamlessly gliding into the new position of promoting N95 respirators. Following the inveterate patterns of the past two years, they use the failure of their first position to their advantage to further panic people into blindly following their next recommendation … until that becomes a mandate as well.
On Jan. 2, former FDA administrator Scott Gottlieb, the media’s go-to “expert” on all things pandemic, admitted what we all knew since 2020 but that got us banned from social media for saying so. “Cloth masks aren’t going to provide a lot of protection, that’s the bottom line,” said Gottlieb on Meet the Press. “This is an airborne illness. We now understand that, and a cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission.”
Two days later, the New York Times ran an article telling people where to get N95s, states began mailing out N95 variations, and the CDC put out a new message, which between the lines, gives the impression that if you are not wearing an N95, you don’t really have protection. The Biden administration plans to distribute millions of them to local pharmacies. But is there really any evidence that the same people who were wrong about masks are now suddenly connected to God’s word when it comes to respirators? And who says it is safe for people to wear something like that for long periods of time, which until now required rigorous testing, medical exams, and training?
Yes, N95s, unlike masks, actually meet the standard for PPE in hazardous environments. But for which sort of hazard? Not an airborne respiratory virus. Stephen Petty, a certified industrial hygienist and hazardous exposure expert, sent me a copy of an N95 usage label made by 3M that he enlarged into an infographic. It turns out the company’s own disclosure blows up the myth of using an N95 for viral protection.
The label confirms what everyone understood prior to the mask mania of COVID: Neither masks nor N95 respirators can stop aerosols, certainly not viral ones, which are much smaller than bacteria. What’s truly revealing is that the label recommends against relying on them for source protection even against asbestos particles, which are on average 5 microns – 50 times larger than SARS-CoV-2 virions.
A large randomized controlled trial published just months before the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 — before masking became a political and social control tool — showed no benefit to N95s over surgical masks in terms of protection against the flu. “Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza,” concluded the authors of the large trial, published in JAMA on Sept. 3, 2019.
Also, remember, that most people are not wearing sealed N95s. They wear the respirators loosely on their faces as they do surgical masks. Also, many of them are the Chinese version KN95s. Even the CDC admits, “About 60% of KN95 respirators NIOSH evaluated during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 did not meet the requirements that they intended to meet.”
The same study (Shah et.al.) that found just 10% and 12% reduction in aerosols for cloth and blue surgical masks respectively, actually found that KN95s worn improperly with 3mm gaps between the face and the respirator, as most people wear them, only offer 3.4% filtration efficiency – less than the cloth masks.
And remember, these studies are all conducted in labs, not in the real world, where no study has shown a statistically significant benefit to masks, and the basic epidemiological data has disproven the efficacy for two years.
Take Austria, for example, where they have been mandating N95 respirators in stores. Can you spot the efficacy?
The notion that children can properly wear a form-fitted N95 that effectively seals is both absurd and dangerous. And anything else will absolutely not work. There’s clearly an inverse relationship between safety and efficacy. The only thing that might possibly work will cause danger, which is why the federal government has long mandated very specific criteria for wearing respirators.
“While some misrepresent N95s as masks, they are actually respirators and will require one to follow the OSHA requirements for respirators under the Respiratory Protection Standard (RPS) 29 CFR 1910.134 (e.g., written program, medical clearance, initial fit testing, annual fit testing, no facial hair, worker training),” said Petty in an interview with TheBlaze. Stephen Petty has served as an expert witness in hundreds of industrial hazardous exposure court cases and now serves as a witness for those bringing lawsuits against irresponsible mask mandates. Here is a list of OSHA requirements, per Petty’s presentation, that would have to be met for usage of N95 respirators:
There’s a good reason why these requirements were put in place by OSHA. To the extent one actually properly seals an N95 respirator to the face (which few will do), it causes significant medical concerns. Here are some findings from an extremely exhaustive qualitative and substantive evaluation of 65 mask studies by German researchers:
In nine of the 11 scientific papers (82%), we found a combined onset of N95 respiratory protection and carbon dioxide rise when wearing a mask. We found a similar result for the decrease in oxygen saturation and respiratory impairment with synchronous evidence in six of the nine relevant studies (67%). N95 masks were associated with headaches in six of the 10 studies (60%). For oxygen deprivation under N95 respiratory protectors, we found a common occurrence in eight of 11 primary studies (72%).
Thus, to the extent anyone could achieve a meaningful degree of efficacy against virus particles with a respirator – something yet to be proven – it will come at a terrible cost. Even with regular masks, before our public health officials lost their minds (and hearts), it was understood that they are not harm-free. Here is a write-up from the Missoula, Montana, city health department recommending against the use of masks during wildfire season in Montana:
Masks are uncomfortable (they are more comfortable when they are leaky – but then they do not provide protection). They increase resistance to airflow. This may make breathing more difficult and lead to physiological stress, such as increased respiratory and heart rates. Masks can also contribute to heat stress. Because of this, mask use by those with cardiac and respiratory diseases can be dangerous, and should only be done under a doctor’s supervision. Even healthy adults may find that the increased effort required for breathing makes it uncomfortable to wear a mask for more than short periods of time. Breathing resistance increases with respirator efficiency.
The Montana Department of Health emphatically writes in bolded letters that N95s that seal are the only things that might help against smoke particles (which are around 1 micron, 10 times larger than most viral virions), but warns of health risks. “Note that respirator masks should be a last resort, as they are difficult to fit correctly, decrease oxygen intake, are hot, and can easily leak when worn improperly.” They go on to add, “People who are not physically fit may experience difficulty going about daily tasks due to reduced oxygen intake. It is more important to have enough oxygen than to have clean air – if you are using a respirator and feel faint, nauseous, or have trouble breathing, take the mask off.”
On the Washington Department of Health’s website guidance for wildfires, it is made clear that “masks are not approved for children” and that “it is harder to breathe through a mask, so take breaks often if you work outside.” The Sacramento County Department of Health Services states, “N95 respirator can make it more difficult for the wearer to breathe due to carbon dioxide buildup, which reduces the intake of oxygen, increased breathing rates, and heart rates.”
Just a year ago, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky swatted down the idea of wearing N95s. “They’re very hard to breathe in when you wear them properly,” Walensky said. “They’re very hard to tolerate when you wear them for long periods of time.”
Thus, whether we are talking about masks or N95s, it’s quite evident that they are either unsafe or ineffective. They can often be both unsafe and ineffective, but they can never be effective without being unsafe, unless worn by the right person with the right training in limited environments for short periods of time.
And this is just the scope of physical harm. One speech therapist in Palm Beach County is seeing a 364% increase in referrals from pediatricians for babies and toddlers with speech delays. “It’s very important that kids do see your face to learn, so they’re watching your mouth,” said a clinic director and speech-language pathologist at the Speech and Learning Institute in North Palm Beach.
How our governments can mandate something this immoral and illogical on our bodies indefinitely without due process, evidentiary standards, or a constitutional interest balancing test is astounding. Every state needs a constitutional amendment explicitly banning this from ever happening again. Biden promised 100 days of mask-wearing, but we are now approaching a full year without any end in sight.Just remember, if a government can criminalize our breathing without due process, what can it not do to us without recourse?
Sen. Ron Johnson is not planning his Senate retirement anytime soon. The Wisconsin lawmaker is running for reelection, he announced this week, at which the corrupt media predictably came out, guns blazing.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza, for instance, announced that the “Senate’s leading conspiracy theorist is running for another term,” and The Nation ran an article calling him an “off-the-deep-end” senator.
But while attention-seeking pundits attack Johnson for opinions that don’t conform to the left-wing narrative (opinions held among many Americans outside the Beltway, by the way), his opinions are often proved to be exactly right. There’s quite a long list of “Ron John” statements and actions that, after sending the media into a tizzy and Big Tech giants into a censorship spree, have held up quite well over time. Here are some of them.
Jan. 6
During a February 2021 hearing to examine the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Johnson condemned the violence then went on to read an eyewitness account of the day’s events. Originally published in The Federalist, it detailed the presence of provocateurs in the crowd and confusion among many of the pro-police “MAGA” protesters who didn’t attend the rally to perpetrate violence.
Yet the account Johnson read was entered into the record without objection from lawmakers of either party. And since then, instead of learning more information about Jan. 6 that refutes eyewitness accounts of “provocateurs,” Americans have been treated to political playacting (including literal musical theater) from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sham commission, more hyperventilating from the media, and repeated stonewalling from the FBI on questions about potential provocateurs caught on video, such as Ray Epps.
Johnson was also ahead of the game on the Capitol Police component of Jan. 6, including pushing to correct the media and Capitol Police’s lies about what happened to the late Officer Brian Sicknick.
COVID Shots
Johnson has been a consistent voice for those who don’t feel they have one on Covid shots and the mandates that accompany them. He’s given Americans a forum to discuss their firsthand adverse shot reactions, for which he’s been smeared in the corrupt media as “fundamentally dangerous” and as a peddler of “misinformation.”
In November 2021, YouTube suspended Johnson’s channel for the fifth time for seven days for a video of a panel on vaccine-related injuries, labeling it “Covid misinformation.” Yet we know adverse reactions do occur.
In April 2021, when Johnson questioned forcing every American to get vaccinated and slammed the idea of pushing vaccine mandates on citizens, Anthony Fauci came after him on MSNBC — which other outlets amplified, calling the senator an “idiot anti-vaxxer.”
Fast-forward to 2022, and Johnson has been vindicated: Even with a federal vaccine mandate in place, case numbers are up higher than ever; and even the triple-vaccinated are still contracting and spreading the virus.
Early COVID Treatment
Big Tech has twice censored the sitting U.S. senator by nuking videos discussing early Covid treatments. In February 2021, YouTube removed videos of sworn testimony from Dr. Pierre Kory about early treatments. Then in June, YouTube suspended Johnson’s account for one week for remarks he made about early Covid treatments in Milwaukee.
Shutting down scientific inquiry and debate is inherently anti-science, however, as scientists who dissent from some of the questionable Covid conventional wisdom have pointed out.
“For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, has said of this type of censorship. “If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, ‘Oh, it’s misinformation’ without actually giving a reason. And saying, ‘Look it disagrees with the CDC’ is not enough of a reason. Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate.”
We didn’t have to wait for ground-breaking scientific discovery on this one; we’ve known since the beginning of the pandemic that children are at almost zero risk of dying from coronavirus, and now we know that Covid shots don’t prevent people from contracting nor spreading the virus. Johnson was scientifically spot-on to oppose vaxx mandates for children, given children’s near-zero risk from a bout with Covid versus the potential risks of shot complications.
Hunter Biden
Corporate media ginned up all types of attacks when Johnson, as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, dug into the Biden family corruption linked to Hunter Biden.
The New York Times described it using the “Russian disinformation” moniker. Time Magazine smeared him as the Senate’s “one-man Biden prosecutor.” And the Washington Post described Johnson’s investigation as a nakedly partisan ploy to get Donald Trump re-elected.
This was all a distraction from the fact that Johnson and Sen. Chuck Grassley successfully revealed millions of dollars in questionable financial transactions between Hunter Biden and his associates and foreign individuals, including the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and people with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Johnson triggered the media in July when he mouthed to a Republican group that climate change is “bullsh-t.” The corporate media went berserk, with CNN and Chris Cuomo calling Johnson a climate change “denier.”
The senator has reinforced repeatedly that he doesn’t deny that the climate is changing, but rather that he isn’t an “alarmist” and doesn’t buy Democrats’ apocalyptic predictions.
Big surprise, plenty of data backs this up. The American Enterprise Institute has documented 50 years of failed doomsday predictions by so-called “experts” in the corrupt media and Democrat Party. For instance, ABC claimed in 2008 that Manhattan would be underwater by 2015. In 2011, The Washington Post claimed that cherry blossoms would bloom in winter.
Climate genius Al Gore also predicted in 2008 that five years later the North Pole would be free of ice. And in 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., predicted that Miami would be underwater in a few years. Yet in 2022, Miami is still very much above ground.
Mouthwash
Last month, Johnson noted a number of simple things Americans can do to keep themselves heathy, such as taking Vitamin D, Vitamin C, and zinc, and gargling mouthwash to reduce viral load if they get COVID.
Johnson’s mouthwash claim about viral load is supported by scientific research, however, such as this study. Additionally, Dr. Bruce Davidson, a faculty member of the Georgetown Department of Otolaryngology, conducted a study on the use of antiseptic mouthwash to control coronavirus, published in the American Journal of Medicine, and found that mouthwash can help protect people from Covid-19 pneumonia.
JUST NOW: Ron Johnson, on a Wisconsin tele-town hall, pushes mouthwash as a COVID treatment.
"By the way, standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus. If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?" pic.twitter.com/V0cdxPYc7K
Even FackCheck.org had to admit, “Johnson is right that mouthwashes ‘may’ reduce the virus’ ability to replicate in people.”
Natural Immunity
On July 14, Johnson claimed natural immunity is “as strong if not stronger than vaccinated immunity,” against which WaPo deployed its fake fact-checkers.
Johnson’s claims, however, come straight out of a pair of studies that confirmed natural immunity is stronger than COVID vaccine-acquired immunity. The pre-print Israeli study found that people with natural immunity could be 13 times less likely to contract the virus than those who were solely vaccinated, contradicting CDC findings.
Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician who was a professor at Harvard Medical School for a decade, dissected and compared the CDC study and the Israeli pre-print and explained why the latter is more reliable.
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.
The Omicron variant of COVID-19 is far milder than Delta, according to a new study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The eye-opening data revealed that those infected with the Omicron variant are 91% less likely to die than those who are infected than the Delta strain.
The clinical study was conducted by Kaiser Permanente Southern California health care system – which operates 138 medical offices and 13 medical centers, plus has an affiliation with 37 community hospitals in Southern California. The study analyzed 52,297 Omicron cases and 16,982 Delta cases in Southern California between Nov. 30, 2021, and Jan. 1, 2022.
The study found that those infected with the Omicron variant were 53% less likely to have symptomatic hospitalization, had 74% less chance of being administered to the intensive care unit, and had a 91% lower risk of death compared to individuals with the Delta variant. Only one person of the more than 52,000 people with Omicron died, versus 14 deaths in the 16,982 with Delta. In addition, there were zero patients with Omicron who required mechanical ventilation, according to the research.
“Hospital admissions occurred among 235 (0.5%) and 222 (1.3%) of cases with Omicron and Delta variant infections, respectively,” the authors of the study said.
Patients infected with Omicron had a median duration of hospital stay of three fewer days than those with Delta.
“During a period with mixed Delta and Omicron variant circulation, SARS-CoV-2 infections with presumed Omicron variant infection were associated with substantially reduced risk of severe clinical endpoints and shorter durations of hospital stay,” the authors of the study concluded.
The CDC-funded study – which has not yet been peer-reviewed – did not reveal the ages of those who died or their vaccination status. On Wednesday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky shared the study on Twitter.
Despite the promising news, Walensky tempered the optimism by saying, “While less severe, #Omicron is much more transmissible & we are seeing the unprecedented impact. Over 1M cases in a day, 99% of counties with high transmission & strained healthcare systems. Protect against #COVID19: get vaccinated + boosted, wear a mask & stay home if sick.”
While speaking at a White House Covid-19 Response Team briefing on Wednesday, Walensky said public health officials will monitor “deaths over the next several weeks to see the impact of Omicron on mortality.”
“Given the sheer number of cases, we may see deaths from Omicron, but I suspect the deaths we’re seeing now are still from Delta,” the CDC head revealed.
The Omicron strain became the dominant variant in mid-December and now accounts for an estimated 98.3% of all new cases, according to CDC data. There were 829,209 cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. on Jan. 12 compared to 90,024 cases on Dec. 12.
On Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged how transmissible the Omicron variant is and said nearly everyone will contract it.
“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Fauci told J. Stephen Morrison – senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Those who have been vaccinated … and boosted would get exposed. Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected but will very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death.”
Also on Tuesday, U.S. Food and Drug Administration acting commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said that “most people are going to get COVID.”
“I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is: Most people are going to get COVID,” Woodcock said at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing. “And what we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens.”
WAUKESHA, Wis. — The banquet hall buzzed with impassioned chatter as parents, friends, first-time school board candidates, and other locals congregated for a Saturday morning town hall that felt more like a strategy session. After two major public school districts, Milwaukee and Madison, shut down yet again and blamed COVID, parents were fired up. Talk of critical race theory, leftist administrators, mask mandates, and school shutdowns hummed through conversations with the kind of first-hand animation that could propel once-complacent Wisconsin parents into a movement of activists capable of unleashing an unquenchable red wave in the Dairy State. They saw what happened in Virginia, and now they want to bring it home.
Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who’s now running to unseat Democrat Gov. Tony Evers in November, organized the event. Although Kleefisch is in campaign mode, the overarching energy of the gathering wasn’t as much, “Help get me elected,” as it was, “How can we get more of you elected?”
Calling All Parents
“We need more parent activists. This is that important,” Kleefisch said while moderating a panel of concerned moms-turned-activists.
One of those moms was Scarlett Johnson, a mother of five who, after discovering the apathy in the Mequon-Thiensville School Board, decided she needed to run for a seat.
“We just started paying closer attention,” Johnson said to the room of eager fellow parents. “I hadn’t attended school board meetings. I vote, but I never voted for a school board candidate.”
But that all changed this last year. Johnson said she and a group of other moms started getting together and doing their research. When they did, they found toxic racial propaganda in their kids’ classrooms, such as teachers assigning books like Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.” The moms started making phone calls and sending emails to school officials. “It started a movement,” Johnson said.
In the course of her run for school board, Johnson said she’s been called a white supremacist and received death threats, but noted, “I’m still here, I’m still fighting.”
Kylee Zempel/The Federalist
No Room for Apathy
Parents aren’t just fired up about nefarious actors in the school systems, however. They’re also on the lookout for complacent school board members and district officials. Another mom on the panel, Alyssa Pallow, is getting involved simply because her school board doesn’t seem to really know anything about dangerous ideologies such as critical race theory. Kleefisch agreed, stressing to parents that they don’t have to wait to get involved until one of their kids cracks a textbook or assignment that makes their jaw drop open. “It can be that you’re horrified by the apathy,” Kleefisch said.
“It snowballs,” said another mom, Amber Schroeder, regarding parent activism. “You will inspire people to get involved.” Schroeder and Johnson worked together in the Mequon-Thiensville district to organize a recall election of four school board members.
“People are afraid to do it alone,” Schroeder continued. “Once you realize you’re not alone, a lot more people get involved. … If you build it, they will come.”
A Time for Choosing
Other parents have been shocked to watch their children become casualties in the left’s Covid crackdowns. Mattie Allen stressed the importance of school choice after her kids had a horrible academic year due to lockdowns. Allen’s son spent his first year in school doing it virtually, “which was horrendous,” she said. Her daughter spent one year at Milwaukee Public Schools, where her GPA plummeted, and it was “one of the worst years.” Thanks to school choice, they’re now in a charter school with just one grade per class. “Their school is so open, and I love it,” Allen said, noting that her daughter’s GPA is back up, she’s on the honor roll, and she’s playing volleyball.
But some families aren’t so fortunate. One of Allen’s friends who is stuck with her kids in Milwaukee Public Schools is watching the district once again shut down. This single mom has a first-grader and a third-grader, meaning she had to switch to third shift just so she could fulfill the roles of both teacher and provider. She’s “up all day, up all night,” Allen said, getting choked up. “How do we give all moms that [school choice] option?”
Maggie Vinopal, a mom in the Eau Claire school district, has also had enough with the COVID madness, saying school officials are weaponizing Statute 252, a state quarantine law, to punish and quarantine unvaccinated kids. Her healthy seventh-grade daughter has been quarantined four different times for a total of 14 schools days, despite coronavirus posing almost zero risk of severity to healthy children. Anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 is required to “isolate,” Vinopal told The Federalist. But when students come into contact with a positive case, only the unvaccinated have to “quarantine,” despite the ability of the vaccinated to contract and spread COVID.
On the very first day of school, Vinopal’s daughter was seated at the same lunch table as a vaccinated student who later tested positive and had to isolate. While the vaccinated students at the table were allowed to proceed as normal, Vinopal’s daughter was required to quarantine and provide proof of a negative test.
Jumping in the Ring
Covid nonsense like this is what inspired people like first-time Waukesha School Board member Kelly Piacsek to run. When a number of people decided to “abuse our children in the name of science, I got really mad,” said Piacsek, who is now known for holding firm on a decision to end a harmful federally-funded school lunch program in the face of vicious and dishonest attacks. “That’s what motivated me.” Running for school board is “absolutely worth it,” she told parents. “We’ve got to take this on because we have a front-row seat to the consequences.”
Piacsek inspired people like Slinger parent Bill Brewer to run for his school board. Brewer, a veteran, has lived in Slinger for approximately 18 years. He coaches youth football there and is now involved in the league’s leadership. But the school board’s apathy and lack of urgency against dangerous ideologies have prompted him to get involved.
“Marxism doesn’t come and punch you in the face in round one. It creeps in,” Brewer said. “I just can’t have that, not for my community, not for these kids. They deserve better.”
Rebecca Kleefisch Campaign
Brewer said his strategy isn’t so much a campaign “as a giant, three-month listening tour.”
“Once I get elected, that’s not going to stop,” Brewer said.
That seems to be the Kleefisch campaign strategy too. Rather than spending two hours rattling off campaign promises, the gubernatorial candidate opened the floor on Saturday for parents to voice their concerns and asked attendees to fill out cards with the top three issues that matter to them to help guide her policy. That’s more than these weary parents have gotten from Evers, who has worked to keep parents in the dark. In December, the governor — who was the state superintendent of public instruction for a decade — vetoed education transparency legislation that would have required districts to publish classroom materials online. This anti-parent action from Evers followed his school-closing impulse that kept kids home and tanked their academic advancement.
“We need you to be successful and aggressive,” Kleefisch rallied, encouraging the parents fighting in local races. If the energy in the Waukesha banquet hall was any indication, these parents won’t have any problem with that.
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.
Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.
This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expert—or, like me, just someone who reads and has common sense—predicted this false “cure” would hurt worse than the disease.
Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a “limited hangout.” That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.
Why are they all of the sudden simultaneously changing the narrative, and effectively admitting that they have been over-counting Covid hospitalizations? Why is it so coordinated and simultaneous? pic.twitter.com/CXpqY2G0nT
So we have outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, which have throughout the Covid era worked as government butt-coverers, now publishing articles admitting that lockdowns and continued rolling blackouts of school instruction is irrevocably damaging Americans, especially children and even more especially the poorest. The kids, as I pointed out in April 2020 and numerous times thereafter, will never as a generation recover.
Now that the damage is done, major corporate media organizations have decided to pivot to acknowledge just enough of the truth to cover their complicity. The Atlantic, for example, last week published an article titled “America’s Covid Rules Are A Dumpster Fire” (It took you two years to figure out what was apparent within the first month?).
CNN’s Brian Stelter recently did a segment acknowledging the foreseeable “mental health crisis” from lockdowns that is causing suicides, ruining marriages, putting formerly perfectly normal kids into rocking fetal positions, and erasing the credibility of formerly mostly ignored “public health experts” at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stelter made multiple statements that have gotten numerous conservatives punished by and erased from social media, such as that “Covid zero is…an impossibility” and “the CDC has turned into a punchline.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter: “It’s so sad, but it’s true, the CDC has turned into a punchline.”
Where was Stelter a year and a half ago, when data reflecting the exact same outcomes were also plentiful? Heck, Stelter was still legitimizing Covid panic one month ago, when CNN and other news organizations reinstituted lockdown measures amid omicron panic they helped inflame. Six months ago, Stelter was indicating Fox News had “blood on its hands” for reporting less hysterically than all the other major media organizations about Covid.
Clearly, Democrats are becoming ensnared by their own trap, and they’re trying to get out with this public reversal of their messaging. The limited hangout is afoot.
Brave NYT truth-teller David Leonhardt also recently published an article and an accompanying tweetstorm on the topic.
“The number of E.R. visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 percent from early 2019 to early 2021, according to the CDC,” he tweeted.
“Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit,” he noted in the article.
No sh-t, Sherlock. So why did The New York Times run hit pieces on Trump medical advisor Scott Atlas for being one of the few scientists courageous enough to point this long-ago known data out more than a year ago, when the damage could have been mitigated? Why did Stanford University colleagues and formerly respected medical journals, boosted by corporate media attack campaigns, try to discredit Atlas and colleagues such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things The New York Times, Atlantic, and CNN are admitting now?
Why did the CDC punish world-renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Martin Kulldorff for publicly disagreeing with them on vaccine safety? Why does Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shadowban nearly every Federalist article on anything touching Covid-19, and why did they spend two years on massive information suppression campaigns against scientists, politicians, podcasters, and just ordinary citizens who had some questions, contrary data, and objections to elites’ demanded Covid response?
Because it was politically expedient to sacrifice science, Americans’ civil rights, human lives, and the world’s future then, and it is not politically expedient to face the consequences for that choice now. And they think nobody can or will hold them accountable for their deadly and despicable lies.
All the misery these too-late admittals underscore appears to be true, but it also could have been prevented. CNN and The New York Times not only did nothing to help prevent this kind of irreversible damage, they willingly, even gleefully, participated in this completely unwarranted mass abuse of Americans. The left lied, children committed suicide.
The corporate left’s morally abominable Covid propaganda operation demands justice. The people who could and should have known, and in fact likely did know, that lockdowns would harm millions of innocents while not protecting the vulnerable can never be trusted again.
Did any of these people tell the truth back when it could have saved the generation that comprises the world’s future? Nope. They not only watched it happen, they cheered it on and viciously ostracized all who told the truth.
All these people have erased all their moral authority and their claims to expertise. The same goes for all the education “experts” and “leaders” who didn’t spend the last two years screaming at the top of their lungs that school shutdowns are a stupid, scientifically unwarranted, and evil idea. Yes, that’s basically all of them.
Experts who knowingly allow mass child abuse because they don’t want to harm their careers are not experts, they are cowards. They deserve not one ounce of public trust or even to retain their jobs. They certainly should have no public funds nor authority over any portion of the upbringing of American children.
Not one parent or elected official should give these education and public health “experts” the time of day. In a time of dire need, these keepers of the nation’s children and controllers of billions in public funds piled American children on a funeral pyre, lit it on fire, and cheered as it burned. Requiring that they find a more honest line of work would be an act of mercy.
These “experts” and “leaders” have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent at discharging their crucial public trust and duties. They should be relieved of those duties as soon as possible. If state lawmakers will not do it, citizens must. If they do not, they are also complicit cowards and also deserve to be sanctioned and socially shamed for their willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable for their personal comfort.
For a long time now, American parents have registered deep dissatisfaction with the public schools they feel forced to stick their kids in. Even before lockdowns, unscientific and education-damaging forced masking in schools, ridiculous repeated quarantines of healthy kids, and rolling “brownouts” of in-person schooling, polling shows most American parents wish they didn’t feel like the public schools in their ZIP code were their only option.
After all this incompetence-imposed life chaos, the current surge of parent outrage at local school board meetings is only the tip of the spear. As more evidence emerges of the unnecessary harms we knew beforehand would result from lockdowns, public anger will only grow. It won’t be limited to schools, either.
If more exciting school board meetings, primaries for craven politicians, and parents yanking funding from schools that don’t serve them are what it takes to run every one of these moral cretins out of every position of power they’ve abused throughout their careers, then go, Americans, go. Do it for the kids. Our future will remember who stood up for the truth, lives, and liberties, and who made billions of precious humans needlessly suffer.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
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.
“When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health, that of the family, but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community. And in other words, you become a dead end to the virus.”~Dr. Fauci, Face the Nation, May 16, 2021
“Negative efficacy.” Get used to that term, because every day more data suggests we are already in the vaccination twilight zone of all pain and no gain – just as with the lockdowns.
It is tearing humanity apart. COVID fascism is the most serious human rights threat we’ve faced in our lifetimes, and the latest science and data demonstrate that it’s all built upon a false premise. While people tuned out the news over the holiday week, many have missed the growing incontrovertible evidence that not only is there risk and zero benefit to taking any of the COVID shots, but there is actually negative efficacy against the virus. In other words, not only does it put you on the hook for known and unknown short-term and long-term injury without stopping COVID, it now, actually, makes you more vulnerable to COVID.
As you read these latest points, just remember that this is the injection for which police in Europe are now using dogs and batons against those protesting it. All these human rights abuses for a shot that, especially with the new variant, has become moot.
1) 96% of all Omicron cases in Germany among vaccinated: The respected Robert Koch Institute reported last week that among the 4,206 Germans infected with Omicron for whom their vaccination status was known, 95.58% were fully vaccinated. More than a quarter of them had booster shots. Given that the overall background rate for vaccination in Germany is 70%, this means that the shots now have a -87% effectiveness rate against Omicron.
2) Omicron among vaccinated outpacing unvaccinated by 28% in Ontario: The government in Ontario posts continuous data on case rates by vaccination status. The fact that the vaccinated have rapidly overtaken the unvaccinated in new infections demonstrates a clear negative effect of the shots against Omicron.
3) In Denmark, 89.7% of all Omicron cases were among fully vaccinated: As of Dec. 31, just 8.5% of all cases in Denmark were unvaccinated, according to the Statens Serum Institut. Overall, 77.9% of Denmark is fully vaccinated, and Omicron seems to hit younger people for whom there is a greater unvaccinated pool, which indicates clear negative efficacy. Even for non-Omicron variants, the un-injected composed only 23.7% of the cases.
4) Just 25% of the Omicron hospitalizations in the U.K. are unvaccinated: Not only are the vaccinated more likely to contract Omicron, but they are likely more at risk to be hospitalized. While American hospitals put out unverifiable information about “nearly everyone seriously ill with COVID being unvaccinated,” the U.K. continues to put out quality continuous data that shows the opposite. According to the U.K.’s Health Security Agency’s latest “Omicron daily overview,” just 25% of those in the hospital with suspected Omicron cases are unvaccinated.
Although that is roughly in line with the percentage of unvaccinated overall in the U.K., we know that Omicron cases are overwhelmingly among younger people who have a greater share of the unvaccinated. Dr. Abdi Mahamud, the WHO’s incident manager for COVID, said last week that Omicron has not hit most of the elderly yet.
According to the latest U.K. vaccine surveillance report (p. 21), between 32% and 40% of the age groups under 40 are unvaccinated. Which means that, with a 25% hospitalization rate, the unvaccinated are very possibly underrepresented in the Omicron hospitalized population, which again indicates negative efficacy to the shots.
5) 33 of 34 hospitalizations in Delhi hospital were vaccinated: The Indian Express reported that 33 of the 34 people hospitalized for Omicron in Delhi’s Lok Nayak hospital were fully vaccinated. Two of them received the booster shot. While some of them were international travelers, it’s important to remember that India has a much lower vaccination rate than the West. This is another small indication that not only might one be more likely to get Omicron after having gotten the shots, but possibly could be more vulnerable to hospitalizations, very likely due to some form of antibody dependent disease enhancement (ADE).
6) Vaccinated exponentially more likely to get re-infected with COVID: A new preprint study from Bangladesh found that among 404 people re-infected with COVID, having been vaccinated made someone 2.45 times more likely to get re-infected with a mild infection, 16.1 times more likely to get a moderate infection, and 3.9 times more likely to be re-infected severely, relative to someone with prior infection who was not vaccinated. Although overall re-infections were rare, vaccination was a greater risk factor of re-infection that co-morbidities!
Hence, the findings of this first-in-its-kind study harmonize with what a Public Health England survey found in October; namely, that the vaccines seem to erase a degree of N (nucleocapsid) antibodies generated by prior infection in favor of narrower S (spike) antibodies. “Recent observations from UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) surveillance data that N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following 2 doses of vaccination,” stated the week 42 report from the U.K. (p. 23).
This finding also correlates with what researchers from Mount Sinai in New York and Hospital La Paz in Madrid found last year – that the second dose of the vaccine “determines a contraction of the spike-specific T cell response.” In that report, researchers already observed that other research has shown “the second vaccination dose appears to exert a detrimental effect in the overall magnitude of the spike-specific humoral response in COVID-19 recovered individuals.”
At this point, how is there any benefit, much less a net benefit, from the shots? There are currently 21,000 deaths reported to VAERS, along with 110,000 hospitalizations and over 1 million total adverse events. Most deaths and injuries are never reported to VAERS. Now that the efficacy is, at best, a wash and at worst negative, why are we not discussing the short-term and long-term liabilities of the shots?
Remember, the VAERS numbers don’t even begin to quantify the long-term concerns, such as cancer and auto-immune diseases. A heavily redacted analysis of the Pfizer shot (p. 16) from the Australian Therapeutic Goods Agency (TGA) flatly conceded, “Neither genotoxicity nor carcinogenicity studies were performed.”
Consider the fact that the CEO of Indiana-based life insurance company OneAmerica, which has been around since 1877, revealed last week that the death rate among 18- to 64-year-old Hoosiers is up 40% from pre-pandemic levels. That is four times above what risk assessors consider catastrophic. Yes, some of this has been due to the virus, but given the age group, OneAmerica CEO Scott Davidson said that most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths. Brian Tabor, the president of the Indiana Hospital Association, who spoke at the same news conference as Davidson, said that Indiana hospitals are flooded with patients “with many different conditions.” Any wonder what those ailments are if not COVID itself? Indeed, those who say the injections are a “medical miracle” are correct, just not in the way they meant it.
Preliminary findings from a study suggest that infection with the Omicron variant of coronavirus could boost a person’s immunity against the more severe Delta variant.
South African scientists at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban examined 33 unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals who had contracted the Omicron variant, Reuters reported. They found that people who were infected with Omicron developed enhanced immunity to the Delta variant. Their immunity was even stronger if they had previously been vaccinated against COVID-19. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, also finds that Omicron could displace Delta as the dominant coronavirus variant.
“The increase in Delta variant neutralization in individuals infected with Omicron may result in decreased ability of Delta to re-infect those individuals,” the study’s authors said.
Researchers found that neutralization of Omicron increased 14-fold over 14 days after participants were enrolled in the study. They also found there was a 4.4-fold increase in neutralization of the Delta variant. The study’s authors explained the results are “consistent with Omicron displacing the Delta variant, since it can elicit immunity which neutralizes Delta making re-infection with Delta less likely.”
Scientists are optimistic that if Omicron proves to cause less severe disease than Delta, the pandemic may finally end. The ultimate question is whether Omicron is less pathogenic compared to Delta. “If so, then the incidence of COVID-19 severe disease would be reduced and the infection may shift to become less disruptive to individuals and society,” the authors wrote.
There is reason for hope. The wave of Omicron cases experienced in South Africa quickly subsided within weeks after it was first reported, even though only 48.3% of the population is fully vaccinated, according to Our World in Data. Alex Sigal, a professor at the Africa Health Research Institute in South Africa, explained on Twitter Monday that if Omicron behaves as observed in South Africa, it will “help push Delta out” and possibly lead to the end of COVID-19 disrupting our lives.
Previous studies from South Africa have indicated there is reduced risk of hospitalization and severe disease in people infected with the Omicron variant compared with Delta, though the authors caution that some of this is likely due to high population immunity, Reuters reported.
COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. have risen in recent weeks as Omicron variant cases have surged, causing new daily average case records in several states. As of Monday morning, more than 71,000 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized across the U.S., according to the Department of Health and Human Services. At the height of the Delta variant surge this year, more than 100,000 people were hospitalized with COVID-19, according to UPI.
Ventura County nurses from different sectors and specialties are coming forward to blow the whistle on what they deem serious lapses in local health care practices, mostly related to COVID-related protocols, “vaccine” mandates and politically and financially motivated bullying of medical staff, which these health care workers say is seriously compromising the general quality of local care.
The Guardian spoke with multiple nurses of various ages and at different stages in their careers, all of whom work in medical care settings or hospitals in Ventura County. Each preferred to speak under a pseudonym for now. Each described seriously declining standards of care, atmospheres of intimidation and fear in hospitals, and distrust and disillusionment among medical professionals.
“Before COVID, nurses, staff and the community were confident in treatment modalities and in doctors’ competencies,” says one nurse. But now, “People are confused.”
“They’re very confused,” agrees a veteran Ventura County nurse. “I think doctors are confused.… I don’t think the community’s confident. I’m not.… Because where’s the truth?”
Most shocking, perhaps, is how doctors and administrators refuse to report the rising number of unexplained medical problems in otherwise healthy people as potential adverse reactions to COVID-19 experimental vaccine shots. To suggest that these shots are the cause of any medical problem — or that they are contributing to the alarming rise in non-COVID-related hospital populations — invites professional ridicule.
The report continues:
Angela, a nurse for more than 25 years, confirms that in her hospital’s emergency room, they say they are seeing more heart problems in young adults, which are never reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) as potential adverse reactions to COVID “vaccinations.”
Another nurse, Jennifer, says ER nurses privately say they are seeing “all the clotting, bleeding and things you would expect from the vaccine six months later — brain bleeds, heart attacks in younger 50-year-olds. No doctor will admit this is from the vaccine. They won’t make the VAERS report.”
When Daniel asked fellow nurses and practitioners if they report to VAERS, they looked at him like, “What’s that?”
“I’ve seen people in their thirties [with these problems], and the doctor’s just like, ‘Oh, you have s—y genes,’” he says. “I’m like, are you kidding me?”
After the Conejo Guardian’s report on alarming trends in Ventura County hospitals, more nurses have come forward to affirm the rise in unexplained heart problems, strokes and blood clotting in local vaccinated patient populations. They also say doctors refuse to consider that these could be adverse reactions to Covid shots.
Sam, a critical care nurse at an ICU in a Ventura County hospital, came forward because, “I’m tired of all the B.S. that’s going on,” he told the Guardian. “It’s crazy how nobody questions anything anymore.”
Americans in the medical community are beginning to speak up. It is insane that the status of patients does not include whether the patient was vaccinated for COVID or not. This is common sense and should be the law.
Joe Hoft is the twin brother of TGP’s founder, Jim Hoft, and a contributing editor at TGP. Joe’s reporting is often months ahead of the Mainstream media as was observed in his reporting on the Mueller sham investigation, the origins of the China coronavirus, and 2020 Election fraud. Joe was a corporate executive in Hong Kong for a decade and has years of experience in finance, IT, operations and auditing around the world. The knowledge gained in his career provide him with a unique perspective of current events in the US and globally. He has ten degrees or designations and is the author of three books. Joe is currently co-host of the morning radio show in St. Louis at 93.3 “Tomorrow’s News Today”. His new book: ‘In God We Trust: Not in Lying Liberal Lunatics’ is out now – please take a look and buy a copy. @joehoft
Last week, the world glimpsed a future in which vaccine passports are implanted under the skin. A viral video from South China Morning Post profiled a Swedish start-up hub, Epicenter, that injects its employees with microchips.
“Right now it is very convenient to have a COVID passport always accessible on your implant,” its chief disruption officer, Hannes Sjöblad, told the interviewer. Oddly enough, he repeatedly spoke of chipping “arms” when we clearly see a woman opening doors with her hand.
Two years earlier, Sjöblad told ITV, “I want us humans to open up and improve our sensory universe, our cognitive functions. … I want to merge humans with technology and I think it will be awesome.”
Naturally, some Christians see the Mark of the Beast. In a sane world, the idea of having your hand chipped to access public goods or private property—to receive a mark in order to “buy, sell, or trade”—should alarm anyone, regardless of religious persuasion. The same goes for using an implanted brain-computer interface to access the digital realm, as Elon Musk plans to do with Neuralink.
Yet for a growing fringe, this invasive tech isn’t just desirable. It’s already normal. Presently, some 5,000 Swedes use implanted radio frequency identification (RFID) chips to open doors, pay cashless, present medical records, access concert venues, and ride public transportation. According to Ars Technica, as of 2018 an estimated 50,000-100,000 people worldwide have microchip implants, primarily in their hands.
A 2019 analysis in Nature reported about 160,000 people have deep brain stimulation devices implanted in their heads. Currently, this is only done out of necessity to treat disorders like epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease, or even addiction and depression. Of these devices, only 34 are true brain-computer interfaces. However, with current advances in technology, enormous injections of capital, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) recent approval, that number will rapidly climb.
Since the first human-grade RFID implant was patented in 1997, followed by FDA approval in 2004, subdermal microchips have become just another device in a growing cyborg toolkit. Drawing on that cache, the Internet of Bodies paradigm has gained enormous traction among the medical establishment. At the extreme end, the concept of natural-born humanity is to be abolished.
For more than six decades, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funded Human 2.0 projects, with particular interest in brain-computer interfaces. Citing these and many other human-machine hybrids, the World Economic Forum’s chairman Klaus Schwab recently spelled out his vision of civilizational transformation. His widely read books—“The Fourth Industrial Revolution” (2016) and “The Great Reset” (2020)—both describe inexorable progress toward total technocracy. The same idea emerges in a 2019 government analysis by Policy Horizons Canada, entitled “Exploring Biodigital Convergence.” According to the authors, “Digital technology can be embedded in organisms [and today] biotechnology may be at the cusp of a period of rapid expansion—possibly analogous to digital computing circa 1985.” Its success will hinge on sweeping surveillance. The document goes on to describe tracking chips, wearable bio-sensors, internal organ sensors, Web-connected neurotech, swallowable digital pills—merging body and brain with the digital beehive.
Last spring, the UK’s Ministry of Defense published the jarring study, “Human Augmentation: The Dawn of a New Paradigm.” The authors promise this “will become increasingly relevant, partly because it can directly enhance human capability and behaviour, and partly because it is the binding agent between people and machines.” Surveying today’s cyborgs, they write, “Once inserted, these ‘chips’ can…replace many of our keys and passwords, allowing us to unlock doors, start vehicles, and even log onto computers and smartphones.”
All the above authors fret over ethics in a perfunctory fashion, but most accept the “inevitable” fusion of man with machine. If military strategists, corporate elites, and government officials are taking this prospect seriously, so should we.
The New Normal Is Total Digitalization
For people with any sense at all, the notion of having a microchip jabbed into your hand (or your head) triggers animal revulsion. Disturbing as it may be, a more immediate concern is the widespread use of non-invasive biometric systems.
Wherever the New Normal takes hold, access to society is granted or denied on the basis of arbitrary “health and safety” concerns. Today, it’s masks or vaccine status. Tomorrow, it could be ideology. Authorities don’t have to chip you if they can simply scan your smartphone and tell you to get lost, or lock you in your dwelling pod whenever “the numbers” rise.
To cite one common example among many, the biometric company Clear rode the Patriot Act to prominence. Today, Clear is contracting to provide biometric and QR code-based vaxxports to fully jabbed citizens on the go. It won’t stop there. Not without a fight. As Clear’s CEO Caryn Seidman-Becker told CNBC last year, “Just like screening was forever changed post-9/11, in a post-Covid environment you’re going to see screening and public safety significantly shift. But this time it’s beyond airports. It’s sports stadiums, it’s retail, its office buildings, its restaurants.”
Taking a more cerebral angle, tech mogul Bryan Johnson founded Kernel to develop non-invasive brain-scanning helmets to enhance your health and happiness. The devices can also gather users’ neurological data. Last summer, Johnson told Bloomberg Businessweek that by 2030 he’d like to put his BCI helmets in every American household. These people want to completely transform our mental and physical spaces. It isn’t even a secret. They want some form of transhumanism, whether they use the term or not. It’s past time to smash their devices.
America Cannot Let This Happen
One by one across the globe, canaries are falling dead in the digital coal mine. We see implanted vaxxports in Sweden, lockdowns for the unvaccinated in Austria and Germany, and yes, quarantine camps in Australia. The Untact program in South Korea is specifically designed to replace human interaction with social robots and the Metaverse. At the pandemic’s outset, American writers at The Atlantic and CNN urged U.S. leaders to adopt Chinese authoritarianism. Their wish is beginning to come true.
While I doubt any population will be forcibly chipped like wayward housecats—at least not in the near future—no nightmarish policy is truly off the table. In the past 21 months, the United States has seen mandated mRNA gene therapies, QR code-based vaccine passports, mass deletion of supposed “misinformation,” and even drone surveillance to monitor social distancing. Meanwhile, more young adults died from fentanyl overdoses than from any transmissible disease.
If the biosecurity state can force you to wear an obedience mask to buy groceries, what can’t they do? Resist their measures at every turn. Drag these people down from the seats of power. Dismantle the structures they’ve already put in place.
I’m no absolutist. Tools are tools, and every naked ape needs one. For the most part, I couldn’t care less if techno-fetishists chip themselves or refashion their appendages. Had their subculture remained on the fringe, I’d still find such people fascinating. But that’s not what’s happening. Riding waves of germaphobia—the ultimate organic disruption—tech titans and their think tank ministers are establishing a secular religion. The world’s wealthiest men, wielding the most powerful tools on earth, are erecting inescapable systems of control. We can’t combat them if we don’t acknowledge what they are.
Scientism is their faith. Technology is their sacrament. Their cult is a cyborg theocracy. Even if they rain fire from the sky with the press of a button, never bend the knee to their silicon gods.
Joe Allen is a fellow primate who wonders why we ever came down from the trees. For years, he worked as a rigger on various concert tours. Between gigs, he studied religion and science at UTK and Boston University. Find him at www.joebot.xyz or @JOEBOTxyz.
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