The idea that bloggers criticizing a politician should register with the government is insane. it is an embarrassment that it is a Republican state legislator in Florida who introduced a bill to that effect. He should withdraw it immediately.
This is stupid because every reporter, blogger, and editor would need to register with the govt to write articles on politicians simply because they’re paid to do it. Let free speech reign.
ICYMI former British Health Secretary Matt Hancock wrote a book about his pandemic "heroics". Unfortunately for him his coauthor thought the public ought to know the truth and leaked his texts. That is how we now know what was really going on: "When do we deploy the new variant?" pic.twitter.com/N4x3tkX2fo
“A Maryland mayor who was recently arrested on 56 child pornography related-charges has visited the Biden White House at least six times since June 2021, according to a new report.
Democrat Patrick Wojahn resigned from his role as the mayor of College Park, Md., on Wednesday, shortly before he was arrested on 40 counts of possession of child pornography and 16 counts of distributing child pornography.
Law enforcement began investigating Wojahn after the National Center for Missing and Exploited children notified Prince George’s County police of a suspicious social-media account that was ultimately attributed to the mayor. Police searched his home in late February and seized multiple cell phones, a storage device, a tablet, and a computer.
Wojahn, who had overseen the city of 35,000 people since 2015, first visited the White House on June 25, 2021 for an event “Commemorating LGBTQ+ Pride Month,” Fox News reported. He posted pictures to Instagram posing alongside Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Buttigieg’s husband with the caption, “Always great to see these guys at the White House.”
The mayor described Buttigieg as his political mentor during an interview with the Washington Blade in November 2019. He said he met Buttigieg, who was then the mayor of South Bend, Ind., when he was assigned to be Wojahn’s “buddy” at the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Winter Meeting in January 2015. The pair then began speaking on the phone regularly with Buttigieg offering Wojahn tips on what to expect of the mayoral conference. The pair bonded over the challenges of being openly gay mayors, according to the report.
A Department of Transportation called the allegations against Wojahn “extremely disturbing” in a statement to Fox News, adding “we’re thankful local law enforcement has intervened.”
“The Secretary did not know the former Mayor well, but did meet him a number of times through participation in U.S. Conference of Mayors programming, conferences and political events,” the spokesperson added.
Meanwhile, Wojahn visited the White House again on June 15, 2022 for a “Pride Month Reception,” in which Biden signed an “Executive Order on Advancing LGBTQI+ Individuals.” Another visit on September 12, 2022 was for a ceremony celebrating the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Wojahn also visited three more times between December 2022 and January 2023, according to the report.
On December 11 he posted pictures of the Christmas decorations inside the White House and wrote, “Happy holidays! Enjoyed the opportunity tonight to see the stunning ‘We the People’ holiday decorations and celebrate the season!” Two days later he was tagged in another post from Biden’s December 13 signing ceremony for the Respect for Marriage Act.
Wojahn visited again on January 20 for an event involving the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
The White House said it “cannot comment on an active criminal matter” in a statement to Fox News but said, “of course, such behavior is abhorrent.”
The disgraced former mayor, who donated thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates and committees, has also posted pictures with a number of Democratic lawmakers, including then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Represenative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and former DNC chair Tom Perez.”
“Medical censorship was about much more than doctors’ and scientists’ speech rights—it was also about the public’s fundamental right to informed consent.”
“In 1922, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann coined the term “manufacturing consent.” In Lippmann’s view, the best solutions to complex problems in a democracy could not be determined by the masses; rather, democracy should be managed by a “specialized class” and a “bureau of experts” that could best understand common interests and shape public opinion through the tools of propaganda. Edward Bernays, sometimes called “the father of public relations” expanded upon Lippmann’s thesis in his 1947 essay “The Engineering of Consent.” According to Bernays, the right to free speech and a free press is accompanied by a “right of persuasion,” which is facilitated by mass media.
“All these media provide open doors to the public mind,” Bernays wrote. “Any one of us through these media may influence the attitudes and actions of our fellow citizens.” For much of the 20th century, Lipmann’s specialized class could dominate media and communications in order to guide public opinion for commercial and political purposes. With the advent of social media, however, this dominance was upended and the “doors to the public mind” became more accessible to the average person.
On Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, the conclusions and assumptions of experts could be challenged both by their credentialed rivals and by uncredentialed laypeople. The election of Donald Trump, a figure who was broadly despised by the specialized class and whose social media presence was critical to his campaign, indicated that the soft, noncoercive style of engineering consent had been outpaced by technology. In response, the FBI and State Department transitioned toward hard censorship, with full support of the legacy media, using Russiagate as a pretext to influence and infiltrate Facebook and Twitter, thus transforming these supposed “private companies” into arms of the state.
The initial justification for much of the COVID censorship that began in 2020 was that social media users could “cause harm” by discouraging others from taking proper precautions. Even though this censorship was a clear infringement on civil liberties, liberals readily accepted it because they had been primed through the false narrative that open expression on social media allowed Russian bots to rig the 2016 election. By this time, Democrats had also normalized the notion that free speech was intrinsically dangerous and that words literally cause violence.
While mainstream media outlets pushed a propagandistic narrative to build popular acceptance of radical and unprecedented measures, government agencies pressured social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to suppress analysis from skeptics. From the lab leak hypothesis, to natural immunity, to mask mandates, much of this analysis has turned out to be entirely legitimate. By skewing the scientific debate, social media “content moderators” allowed state-sponsored misinformation to proliferate unchecked. Three years later, the alarming trend of non-COVID excess mortality in Western countries is an indictment of the COVID response and the censorship that accompanied it. If the job of public health officials was to minimize harm, ongoing excess mortality after the peak of COVID is evidence of failure.
As this failure becomes undeniable, we are witnessing the collapse of much of the censorship campaign that helped shield authorities from criticism. Under Elon Musk, Twitter ended its COVID “misinformation” policy and reinstated many banned accounts. The “Twitter files” and the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit have revealed that the White House, the CDC, and even Pfizer were all involved in a coordinated, systematic silencing of dissent around COVID policies and vaccines.
Against this backdrop, one of the country’s most draconian censorship efforts is facing a major challenge. On Jan. 25, U.S. District Judge William Shubb granted a motion for a preliminary injunction in the Hoeg, et al. v. Newsom lawsuit, temporarily blocking California’s Assembly Bill 2098 (AB 2098). If AB 2098 is eventually implemented, the law will allow the California Medical Board to disbar doctors who disseminate COVID-related “misinformation” to patients. Judge Shubb called the state’s definition of misinformation (“false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus”) “nonsense” and ruled in favor of the injunction on the grounds that the vagueness of the law would violate doctors’ 14th Amendment right to due process.
The state has decided not to appeal Shubb’s decision, but the ultimate fate of the law is still in limbo, in part due to an ongoing separate lawsuit (McDonald v. Lawson). Nevertheless, the initial victory of the plaintiffs in Hoeg, et al. v. Newsom has highlighted the pernicious nature of speech restrictions and represents a major blow against the far-reaching censorship machine that shaped the COVID era.
“The corollary to the First Amendment right to speak is a First Amendment right to receive information,” Jenin Younes, an attorney from the New Civil Liberties Alliance who is representing the plaintiffs, said. The battle over AB 2098 illustrates why medical censorship was about much more than doctors’ and scientists’ speech rights—it was also about the public’s fundamental right to informed consent for lockdowns, masks, and vaccines. As the COVID censorship campaign is increasingly questioned, it becomes clear that suppressing scientific dialogue was not just a free speech issue, but was a catastrophic violation of bioethics that harmed, injured, and killed people.
The doctors challenging AB 2098 in court are primarily concerned about how this law would impact patients. Doctors’ ability to speak frankly is essential to medical care and medical ethics. As doctors have an obligation to act as fiduciaries for their individual patients, a law forcing them to push a one-size-fits-all approach would undermine this obligation.
“When you are no longer telling the patient what you really think, you are no longer acting in the patient’s best interest,” Dr. Azadeh Khatibi, a plaintiff in Hoeg, et al. v. Newsom said. “So you are then, by definition, acting unethically.”
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, another plaintiff and former director of medical ethics at the University of California, Irvine, echoed this sentiment. “Clinical care needs to be individualized to the particular needs of each specific patient,” he said. “AB 2098 is a law that says doctors’ primary duty is not to the sick patient in front of them, but to a social program that’s been basically determined by the California Department of Public Health.” This turns physicians into agents of a broad political agenda, but patients need to be able to trust that physicians are acting in their individual interests. “Without that, medicine collapses,” Kheriaty explained.
The law’s intent to use doctors for a larger social and political purpose is characteristic of the entire COVID censorship crusade, which often prevented scientists and medical professionals from engaging in open inquiry or offering the public a “second opinion” on COVID prevention and treatment. This did not just penalize those who were prevented from speaking; it caused a societywide inversion of medical ethics in which every member of the public was instrumentalized for a “greater good” that could not be questioned. This inversion—the idea that your health as an individual only matters in service of collective ends—is the logic behind eugenics, organ harvesting, and nonconsensual medical experiments.
The advocacy group that pushed for AB 2098, No License for Disinformation, was originally focused on California doctors’ social media posts (since this would not be legally defensible, the group shifted its focus to doctor-patient interactions). “I think this shows what the real intent of the bill was, which was to silence political opponents,” Younes said. This effort was often personal. Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, for instance, has received dozens of messages from one of the members of No License for Disinformation threatening that the law would be used to attack her license. Dr. Hoeg’s scientific work was crucial in reopening schools, unmasking children, and raising awareness about vaccine-associated myocarditis in young men.
“It’s the patients who pay the biggest price when their doctors can’t give them accurate information,” Hoeg said. The attempt to target her has been disconcerting. “The really sad part is that there are doctors from all over who read this. Most will stay quiet, even about issues they really care about, because they don’t want to risk losing their job or medical license,” she explained. “That’s also how it stifles the scientific debate.””
“The Telegraph has published revelations based on more than 100,000 leaked WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, and other ministers and officials.
The Lockdown Files show the nature of government during the Covid pandemic and how, despite public claims to always “follow the science”, key decisions were made on the fly for political reasons.
They call into question much of the reasoning for months of national lockdowns and other restrictions on daily life in Britain, including social distancing, face masks and the closure of schools.
Here are ten things The Lockdown Files have revealed so far:
Matt Hancock was advised to test all care home residents
The Telegraph’s first revelation from the files was that Mr Hancock was advised early in the pandemic that he should test all people admitted to care homes, regardless of whether they had been discharged from hospital or brought in from the community.
Care homes bore the brunt of Britain’s death toll, with more than 40,000 people catching and dying of the virus.
The WhatsApp messages show that in April 2020, Mr Hancock was advised by Sir Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, that ministers should mandate testing for “all going into care homes”.
But Mr Hancock did not follow that guidance, telling his advisers that it “muddies the waters”. The former health secretary denies rejecting Sir Chris’s advice and says the testing capacity was not available at that time.
Sir Gavin Williamson said teachers ‘really do just hate work’
Sir Gavin Williamson said education unions “really do just hate work” as he discussed reopening schools with Mr Hancock.
The former education secretary first made critical comments in a discussion with the then health secretary as school staff prepared for the reopening of classes in May 2020.
By this point, schools had been effectively shut for two months, with only vulnerable children and those whose parents were key workers allowed to attend in person. Ministers and teachers were planning for lessons to begin returning in June.
Writing about his disputes with Mr Hancock on reopening schools, Mr Williamson said that “getting people’s attention seemed to have been prioritised over putting children’s interests first”.
Simon Case mocked travellers forced to isolate in quarantine hotels
Britain’s most senior civil servant mocked members of the public who were forced to isolate in quarantine hotels.
Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said it was “hilarious” that 149 people had been told to stay in government-approved hotels on their return from Red List countries in 2021.
He also joked about passengers being “locked up” in “shoe box” rooms. Those on the receiving end of the quarantine policy at the time said it was like being “in Guantanamo Bay”.”
“American society is facing three existential crises not unlike those that overcame the late Roman, and a millennium later, terminal Byzantine, empires.
Premodern Barbarism
We are suffering an epidemic of premodern barbarism. The signs unfortunately appear everywhere. Over half a million homeless people crowd our big-city downtowns.
Most know the result of such Medieval street living is unhealthy, violent, and lethal for all concerned. Yet no one knows—or even seems to worry about—how to stop it.
So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection continue unabated. Progressive urban pedestrians pass by holding their noses, averting their gazes, and accelerating the pace of their walking. The greenest generation in history allows its sidewalks to become pre-civilizational sewers. In a very brief time, we all but have destroyed the downtowns of our major cities—which will increasingly become vacant in a manner like the 6th-century A.D. Roman forum.
All accept that defunding the police, no-cash bail, Soros-funded district attorneys, and radical changes in jurisprudence have destroyed deterrence. The only dividend is the unleashing of a criminal class to smash-and-grab, carjack, steal, burglarize, execute, and assault—with de facto immunity. Instead we are sometimes lectured that looting is not a crime, but lengthy incarceration is criminally immoral.
We have redefined felonies as misdemeanors warranting no punishment. Misdemeanors are now infractions that are not criminal. Infractions we treat as lifestyle choices. Normality, not criminality, is deemed criminal. We all know this will not work, but still wonder why it continues.
Many among the middle classes of our cities who can flee or move, do so—like 5th-century equestrians who left Rome for rural fortified farms before the onslaught of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. For most of our lives we were lectured that the old southern states—Florida, Tennessee, Texas—were backward and uninviting. Now even liberals often flee to them, leaving behind supposedly cosmopolitan Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and New York. The more people leave the blue states, the more those states praise themselves as utopian.
The less well-off, without the means to leave, hope that their environs have hit bottom so things can only improve. The elite who caused this premodern catastrophe assumes they will always have the money and wherewithal to ensure that themselves and their own can navigate around or even profit from the barbarism they unleashed. For them the critic, not the target of criticism, is the greater threat.
The hard urban work of the 1990s and early 2000s—cleaner, safer subways, secure nightlife downtown, clean sidewalks, low vacancy rates, little vagrancy, and litter-free streets—so often has been undone, deliberately so. We are descending to the late 1960s and 1970s wild streets—if we are lucky the mayhem does not devolve even further.
A mere 10 years ago, if an American learned that a man was arrested for clubbing, robbing, or shooting innocents, and yet would be released from custody that day of his crime, he would have thought it an obscenity. Now he fears that often the criminal will not even be arrested.
A once secure border no longer exists. Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas simply demolished it and allowed 6-7 million foreign nationals to cross illegally into the United States without audits—to the delight of their apparent constituent, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
What would shame a Biden or Mayorkas? What would change their minds? Billions of dollars spent on social services for the lawbreaking at the expense of the American poor?
Would 100,000 annual lethal overdoses—12 times more than those who died over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined—from drugs that flow across the open border sway them? Or would it take 200,000, or 300,000 deaths before Joe Biden relented and ceased his chuckling?
What does a people do when its highest officials simply renounce their oaths of office and refuse to enforce laws they don’t like? Everyone knows the border will eventually have to become secure, but none have any idea whether it will take another 20, 30, or 50 million illegal entrants and 1 million more fentanyl deaths to close it.
Polls show race relations have hit historic lows. Much of the ecumenicalism of the post-Civil Rights movement seems squandered—almost deliberately so.
The Left now rarely mentions Martin Luther King, Jr. or even the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Perhaps it knows it has violated the spirit and legacy of both.
Today, our identity politics leaders believe that the color of our skin, not the content of our character, certainly matters more. The practitioners of the new tribalism in some sense fear outlawing segregation and discrimination by race. They know to do so would end racially restricted houses and safe spaces, racially exclusive graduations, and race-based admissions, hiring, and promotion on campus.”
The queen of January 6 jurisprudence, Judge Berry Howell is a shameless partisan willing to twist the law, and the U.S. Constitution, to advance her own political agenda.”
“Defense lawyers call it “January 6 jurisprudence”—a unique set of rules and laws that only apply to those ensnared in the Justice Department’s unstoppable push to punish individuals who do not believe Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president of the United States. So far, nearly 1,000 Americans have been arrested and charged, mostly on low-level misdemeanors, for their involvement in the Capitol protest as the regime circles its ultimate prize: Donald Trump.
The fundamental “crime” that acts as the basis of January 6 jurisprudence is not necessarily the four-hour disturbance that temporarily delayed the certification process that day. No, the real crime—to hear regime apparatchiks, the media (but I repeat myself), and Democratic Party politicians (including Biden himself) tell it—is promoting the “Big Lie,” the notion that the 2020 presidential election was rigged or stolen.
Efforts to uncover election irregularities or lawfully object to the outcome are under criminal investigation resulting in the unprecedented weaponization of legal and judicial authority conducted by unaccountable prosecutors and judges.
Enabling this farce in the nation’s capital is Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the D.C. District Court. A former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill, Howell was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama in 2010 and elevated to chief judge in 2016. Since then, Howell has steered the government’s yearslong effort to put Trump in handcuffs. She managed the grand jury proceedings for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and is currently overseeing the Justice Department’s latest iteration of its “Get Trump” campaign—a sweeping investigation into alleged attempts to “overturn” the 2020 election.
Her latest broadside is aimed at Representative Scott Perry (R-Pa.). FBI agents, acting at the direction of the rogue Washington Field Office, stole Perry’s cell phone on August 9, 2022, the day after the same office executed an armed raid at Mar-a-Lago. Perry was traveling with his family in New Jersey at the time when agents seized his phone, copied its contents, and returned the device.
Perry’s lawyers immediately attempted to keep the contents of the phone out of the hands of a leak-happy Justice Department, citing privacy and privilege factors, including the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which basically protects the legislative branch from retaliatory actions by the executive branch. When Perry initially refused to waive that protection at the request of the Justice Department, the government successfully sought a second warrant a few days later to review what investigators collected from the phone.
And that’s when Judge Howell stepped in.”
—
“On that point, Howell unintentionally tipped the government’s hand. Why would the Justice Department need those communications for a criminal investigation? It’s not illegal to have any of those discussions, even for the imaginary crime of attempting to overturn an election. Clearly, prosecutors want Perry’s texts and emails to leak to regime media cut-outs in an effort to embarrass him, its modus operandi since January 6.
In one particularly sneering line, Howell mocked Perry’s “wide-ranging interest in bolstering his belief that the results of the 2020 election were somehow incorrect—even in the face of his own reelection.” (Howell routinely condemns January 6 defendants in her courtroom for believing the “Big Lie.” Last April, Howell asked a man pleading guilty to trespassing whether he still believed that Biden did not legitimately win the presidency. He answered no.)
In a follow-up order filed on January 4, Howell raised “the public’s interest in an expedient investigation” as to why she would not halt her demand for Perry to turn over the records in question to the Justice Department. She gave Perry two days to file an appeal with the D.C. Circuit Court.
And the very next day, the appellate court issued an emergency order to put Howell’s ruling on hold.
A three-judge appellate court panel heard arguments in the case last week. According to Politico, at least two judges were skeptical of Howell’s—and the Justice Department’s —thinking. “‘Why wouldn’t an individual member’s fact-finding be covered?’ Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, asked a Justice Department lawyer.
It could be a few months before the appellate court issues a ruling. In the meantime, investigators don’t have access to Perry’s cell phone records. (Or at least that is how it’s supposed to be.)
By then, the D.C. District court will have a new chief judge; Howell’s stint ends soon. Which is one reason the Justice Department is accelerating the pace of its investigation, including subpoenaing former Vice President Mike Pence a few weeks ago.
“The frenzy of subpoenas comes as Judge Beryl Howell’s seven-year term as chief judge of the D.C. district court enters its last month,” the Wall Street Journal recently observed. “In that post, she has presided over all grand-jury matters in Washington and repeatedly ruled for the Justice Department in closed-door disputes with Mr. Trump over executive privilege.”
Prosecutors undoubtedly will miss Howell’s machinations on behalf of the government. As her rulings in Perry’s case once again show, Howell is a shameless partisan willing to twist the law, and the U.S. Constitution, to advance her own political agenda. She is the queen of January 6 jurisprudence.”
As we recently learned, most political conspiracy theories appear to be true. But I observe a pattern in what types of untruths the Left and Right believe.
The Right's untruths tend to organically spring from true believers in their ranks.
Sure, it’s long Covid and not the useless and deadly vaccine…..
Which they keep pushing you to take more of.
Narrative Collapsing, Unexplained Deaths: A Shift in the Story Is Coming Soon – @DowdEdward
"One of my sources in the government told me that … the White House is potentially preparing to declare an epidemic of sudden death and that they might blame long COVID and… pic.twitter.com/MQq0eSbMd1
Pfizer was also aware of 1223 deaths within the first 90 days. What they knew, and as such, what the FDA knew, is all thoroughly documented here:https://t.co/dDy7dlFUfT
President Trump Lays Out His Mass Deportation Plan
"Under my leadership, we will use all necessary state, local, federal and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history."
This is exactly the kind of stuff Trump was exposing, corruption reigns in Ukraine, and the Vindman and the Biden family are dirty. That’s why they had to impeach him, to stop him from digging further. The corruption Trump wanted exposed would expose them too.
Get on board, or just change to the Dem party. It’s where their loyalty lies anyway, so just be honest RINO’s.
The Republican Party is the party of soldiers, sailors, nurses, construction workers and of people who go to work & pay their taxes, raise their children, and just want to live in safe communities!https://t.co/Dg5FDIHEuP
But in his feeble, old mind it’s true, so that’s what really matters, right media?
What makes this lie particularly revolting is that he was actually best buds with a bunch of segregationists. During his first campaign he bragged about getting an award for best young legislator from George Wallace. (which was also a lie) https://t.co/kI572qy1T7
And what does MSNBC and The Atlantic think should happen to the tens of millions of Americans who vote Republican?
We're just a few steps away from the liberal media calling for the mass imprisonment for millions for the crime of simply not being a Democrat. https://t.co/SS1RVU7Alt
The victims are once again victimized by Dems and their trial lawyer buddies.
Democrats rigged a legislative payoff for trial lawyers by turning a bipartisan effort to aid sick Marines into a new taxpayer-funded bounty. https://t.co/43k9K5vJF3 via @WSJopinion
The only surprising thing here is that anyone is surprised. 🤡
Wow. I did not realize the extent of the issues here.
AOC apparently not only lied about her Met Gala invite to try to circumvent Congressional ethics rules, but also tried to stiff a bunch of small businesses that helped her attend.https://t.co/fuq3YnIDIjpic.twitter.com/o1yAVGgatE
Imagine how excited some of these people must’ve been to do her hair, make up, etc., only to have her disrespect their work and expect it to be comped. She’s been a poser from the beginning so I’m not surprised, but I bet THEY were.
Late stage Trump Derangement Syndrome is such an ugly disease.
Even more so when the majority of the media is infected with it.
NEW – CNN ex-boss Jeff Zucker reportedly "ordered" staff not to probe COVID lab leak theory because it was a Trump talking point.https://t.co/J7dVVHGVgH
“The New York Post’s Miranda Devine reported that Tucker Carlson will air five clips from the thousands of hours of Jan. 6 surveillance footage the Democrats don’t want us to see.
According to Devine:
The Fox News host will air five stories culled from the footage Monday and Tuesday nights, countering the overblown ‘insurrection’ narrative the Democrats and their media toadies have been pushing since Day One.
…
[T]hey are hyperbolically accusing McCarthy of endangering the security of the House and handing the tools for ‘the next insurrection’ to Carlson who, it won’t surprise you to learn, they fantasize is a Russian sleeper agent.
You will recall the sheer panic among party leader’s over House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to allow Carlson’s team “unfettered access” to government security footage from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Fearing it would contradict their carefully constructed narrative that the riot had been “an insurrection” and “terrorist attack,” Democrats, citing “security concerns,” have managed to withhold this critical footage from the public for over two years.
Democrats are especially peeved with whom McCarthy chose to provide the material to. They consider it an attempt to curry favor with Carlson, who has been openly critical of the GOP leader in the past. And while that may very well be true, there’s no question that Democrats’ main problem with Carlson is that he has repeatedly questioned the decisions, actions, and motives of the Department of Justice, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, and the House Jan. 6 committee.”
“See if you can spot the dog that can barely be heard in the first four paragraphs of Bierschbach’s story:
The voting rights of more than 55,000 formerly incarcerated Minnesotans were restored on Friday, as Gov. Tim Walz signed into law one of the largest voter expansion measures in the state in the last half century.
The new law comes after two decades of advocacy from a coalition of groups that argued prohibiting felons on probation from voting excluded them from being full participants in society, sometimes even decades after they were released from jail or prison.
“Today is a good day for democracy, today is a good day for justice and today is a good day for Minnesota,” the DFL governor said on Friday, surrounded by supporters of the proposal as he signed it into law.
“We’re a country of second chances, and we’re a country of welcoming people back in, and the idea of not allowing those voices to have a say in the very governing of the communities they live in is simply unacceptable.”
Let us bask in the euphemism of “formerly incarcerated Minnesotans.” Not men and women or even person, but “Minnesotans.” (I’d love to get a breakdown on the male-female distribution of the benefit.)
“Formerly incarcerated” is something of a masterpiece. It should take its place with “the undocumented,” “the unhoused,” and “those suffering from a shortage of brainpower.” (Okay, the last was my contribution.)”
“An FBI whistleblower told congressional investigators that the D.C. field office pushed local offices to open criminal investigations into Americans based solely on financial transactions Bank of America tracked and voluntarily provided to the bureau, according to testimony reviewed by The Federalist.
“Bank of America, with no directive from the FBI, datamined its customer base,” whistleblower and recently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst George Hill told investigators for the House Judiciary Committee, according to Hill’s testimony.
Hill had identified himself last month as one of the whistleblowers cooperating with congressional investigators when speaking with Just the News’ John Solomon about the disclosures he made to the House Judiciary Committee during a transcribed deposition. A review of Hill’s testimony confirms the details the military veteran and former longtime FBI and NSA analyst told Solomon. It also reveals more troubling details.
According to the material reviewed, Hill testified that on either Jan. 7 or 8, 2021, Bank of America provided the FBI’s D.C. field office a “huge list” of individuals who used Bank of America credit or debit cards in D.C., or the surrounding Maryland and Virginia areas, on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021. Bank of America then elevated to the top of the list anyone who had ever (through Jan. 6, 2021) used a Bank of America product to purchase a firearm.
There was no geographic or date-range limit to the search for firearm purchases, Hill stressed, meaning the individual would be flagged at the top of the list had he “purchased a shotgun in 1999” in Iowa, and used a Bank of America credit card to check out of a hotel on Jan. 5, 2021, in the Northern Virginia area, following a trip that could be completely unrelated to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
The D.C. field office, which oversaw the Jan. 6 investigation, distributed the Bank of America list internally to field offices throughout the country, Hill testified in his deposition. Hill further explained that his supervisor at the Boston field office refused to open an investigation on the individuals flagged on the list because there was “no predication.” “There’s no crime that was committed by using a [Bank of America] product in the District or around the District,” Hill testified, explaining his supervisor’s reasoning for why no “further action” was required.
But the D.C. field office pushed back, according to Hill. The D.C. field office told Boston’s supervisory special agent, or SSA, he needed to open up the cases. When the local office’s SSA refused, the D.C. field office threatened to call the assistant special agent in charge, or ASAC, of the local office, Hill told the congressional committee. The SSA stood firm in his refusal, as did the local ASAC, Hill said, even though the D.C. field office then threatened the ASAC that it would escalate the matter to the office’s special agent in charge, or SAC.
The D.C. field office then pushed the office’s SAC to open investigations into the targeted Americans. But to the SAC’s credit, he refused, Hill noted, saying the Boston SAC countered, “No, we’re not going to open up cases based on credit card or debit card activity that took place.”
While Boston’s FBI office refused to open the requested cases, Hill stressed that “what I don’t know and could not give accurate testimony to,” was whether the D.C. field office “took it upon themselves to open cases.”
Hill’s deposition testimony raises another troubling possibility: that one or more of the other 54 local FBI field offices either complied with the D.C. field office’s initial request to open investigations into innocent Americans, or later capitulated when the D.C. office escalated the request up the chain of command to the ASAC and then the SAC. “
So much meaning is wrapped up in those 7 words, written in a WhatsApp message by Matt Hancock, who at the time was the Health Minister in the United Kingdom.
“When do we deploy the new variant?” By this, I assume they do not mean actually releasing a new strain of the virus into the wild, an act which I hope is beyond even the most depraved politician or bureaucrat to contemplate.
Rather, they are talking about how to “frighten the pants of [sic] everyone with the new strain.”
Clearly, the new strain itself was not what worried them–they after all are contemplating the timing of when to “deploy” it for maximum fear value–but rather the public’s waning fear of COVID. When, they are wondering, would it be strategically in their best interest to ramp up the fear value for maximum political benefit?
Saving lives wasn’t the point: enforcing compliance with diktats was.
COVID the virus may not have been deployed by any government, but COVID the “emergency” was clearly deployed as a massive plot to strip people of their freedoms and manipulate the public into compliance with absurd demands.
A vast trove of WhatsApp messages was leaked to the British press, and The Telegraph is combing through the 100,000 messages that were never meant to see the light of day. If you think they will confirm some of your worst fears about how the public has been manipulated over the past several years, you are dead right.
Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “frighten the pants off” the public and ensure they complied with lockdown, leaked messages seen by The Telegraph have revealed.
The Lockdown Files – more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between ministers, officials and others – show how the Government used scare tactics to force compliance and push through lockdowns.
In another message Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said that “the fear/ guilt factor” was “vital” in “ramping up the messaging” during the third national lockdown in Jan 2021.
The previous month, Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, appeared to suggest in one message that a new strain of Covid that had recently emerged would be helpful in preparing the ground for the looming lockdown, by scaring people into compliance.
In a WhatsApp conversation on Dec 13, obtained by The Telegraph, Damon Poole – one of Mr Hancock’s media advisers – informed his boss that Tory MPs were “furious already about the prospect” of stricter Covid measures and suggested “we can roll pitch with the new strain”.
The comment suggested that they believed the strain could be helpful in preparing the ground for a future lockdown and tougher restrictions in the run-up to Christmas 2020.
Mr Hancock then replied: “We frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain.”
Mr Poole agreed, saying: “Yep that’s what will get proper bahviour [sic] change.””
@10:37 The southern border is wide open and millions of the unjabbed are walking across; meanwhile, the world’s best tennis player (also unjabbed) is banned from entering. Djokovic should be in the running for the Medal of Freedom for his courage in standing up for his convictions.
To refuse the best in the world at his craft to enter the country – evidence of a once-great Republic that is now in freefall and characterized by corruption and arrogance.
BREAKING: @TuckerCarlson Tonight begins releasing Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 protests showing that most of protesters were very peaceful, were even helped by the police. WATCH pic.twitter.com/nliIcVgOO7
Wandering Views 
Newt’s right, it’s stupid, and unconstitutional.
This is stupid because every reporter, blogger, and editor would need to register with the govt to write articles on politicians simply because they’re paid to do it. Let free speech reign.
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Uhhhhhhh…..
This is interesting….
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Of course….
https://twitter.com/lysscordova/status/1632172699861565440?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1632172699861565440%7Ctwgr%5E2a7629493ae836c76fdb8204e069468c6283d6ce%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Ffuzzychimp-313137%2F2023%2F03%2F05%2Fmichael-knowles-hits-back-at-the-lying-liars-attempting-to-smear-him%2F
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Of course he did.
“Maryland Mayor Arrested on Child-Porn Charges Visited White House at Least Six Times”
https://news.yahoo.com/maryland-mayor-arrested-child-porn-211434942.html
“A Maryland mayor who was recently arrested on 56 child pornography related-charges has visited the Biden White House at least six times since June 2021, according to a new report.
Democrat Patrick Wojahn resigned from his role as the mayor of College Park, Md., on Wednesday, shortly before he was arrested on 40 counts of possession of child pornography and 16 counts of distributing child pornography.
Law enforcement began investigating Wojahn after the National Center for Missing and Exploited children notified Prince George’s County police of a suspicious social-media account that was ultimately attributed to the mayor. Police searched his home in late February and seized multiple cell phones, a storage device, a tablet, and a computer.
Wojahn, who had overseen the city of 35,000 people since 2015, first visited the White House on June 25, 2021 for an event “Commemorating LGBTQ+ Pride Month,” Fox News reported. He posted pictures to Instagram posing alongside Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Buttigieg’s husband with the caption, “Always great to see these guys at the White House.”
The mayor described Buttigieg as his political mentor during an interview with the Washington Blade in November 2019. He said he met Buttigieg, who was then the mayor of South Bend, Ind., when he was assigned to be Wojahn’s “buddy” at the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Winter Meeting in January 2015. The pair then began speaking on the phone regularly with Buttigieg offering Wojahn tips on what to expect of the mayoral conference. The pair bonded over the challenges of being openly gay mayors, according to the report.
A Department of Transportation called the allegations against Wojahn “extremely disturbing” in a statement to Fox News, adding “we’re thankful local law enforcement has intervened.”
“The Secretary did not know the former Mayor well, but did meet him a number of times through participation in U.S. Conference of Mayors programming, conferences and political events,” the spokesperson added.
Meanwhile, Wojahn visited the White House again on June 15, 2022 for a “Pride Month Reception,” in which Biden signed an “Executive Order on Advancing LGBTQI+ Individuals.” Another visit on September 12, 2022 was for a ceremony celebrating the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Wojahn also visited three more times between December 2022 and January 2023, according to the report.
On December 11 he posted pictures of the Christmas decorations inside the White House and wrote, “Happy holidays! Enjoyed the opportunity tonight to see the stunning ‘We the People’ holiday decorations and celebrate the season!” Two days later he was tagged in another post from Biden’s December 13 signing ceremony for the Respect for Marriage Act.
Wojahn visited again on January 20 for an event involving the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
The White House said it “cannot comment on an active criminal matter” in a statement to Fox News but said, “of course, such behavior is abhorrent.”
The disgraced former mayor, who donated thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates and committees, has also posted pictures with a number of Democratic lawmakers, including then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Represenative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and former DNC chair Tom Perez.”
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Indeed.
“Medical censorship was about much more than doctors’ and scientists’ speech rights—it was also about the public’s fundamental right to informed consent.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/collapse-covid-truth-regime
“In 1922, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann coined the term “manufacturing consent.” In Lippmann’s view, the best solutions to complex problems in a democracy could not be determined by the masses; rather, democracy should be managed by a “specialized class” and a “bureau of experts” that could best understand common interests and shape public opinion through the tools of propaganda. Edward Bernays, sometimes called “the father of public relations” expanded upon Lippmann’s thesis in his 1947 essay “The Engineering of Consent.” According to Bernays, the right to free speech and a free press is accompanied by a “right of persuasion,” which is facilitated by mass media.
“All these media provide open doors to the public mind,” Bernays wrote. “Any one of us through these media may influence the attitudes and actions of our fellow citizens.” For much of the 20th century, Lipmann’s specialized class could dominate media and communications in order to guide public opinion for commercial and political purposes. With the advent of social media, however, this dominance was upended and the “doors to the public mind” became more accessible to the average person.
On Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, the conclusions and assumptions of experts could be challenged both by their credentialed rivals and by uncredentialed laypeople. The election of Donald Trump, a figure who was broadly despised by the specialized class and whose social media presence was critical to his campaign, indicated that the soft, noncoercive style of engineering consent had been outpaced by technology. In response, the FBI and State Department transitioned toward hard censorship, with full support of the legacy media, using Russiagate as a pretext to influence and infiltrate Facebook and Twitter, thus transforming these supposed “private companies” into arms of the state.
The initial justification for much of the COVID censorship that began in 2020 was that social media users could “cause harm” by discouraging others from taking proper precautions. Even though this censorship was a clear infringement on civil liberties, liberals readily accepted it because they had been primed through the false narrative that open expression on social media allowed Russian bots to rig the 2016 election. By this time, Democrats had also normalized the notion that free speech was intrinsically dangerous and that words literally cause violence.
While mainstream media outlets pushed a propagandistic narrative to build popular acceptance of radical and unprecedented measures, government agencies pressured social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to suppress analysis from skeptics. From the lab leak hypothesis, to natural immunity, to mask mandates, much of this analysis has turned out to be entirely legitimate. By skewing the scientific debate, social media “content moderators” allowed state-sponsored misinformation to proliferate unchecked. Three years later, the alarming trend of non-COVID excess mortality in Western countries is an indictment of the COVID response and the censorship that accompanied it. If the job of public health officials was to minimize harm, ongoing excess mortality after the peak of COVID is evidence of failure.
As this failure becomes undeniable, we are witnessing the collapse of much of the censorship campaign that helped shield authorities from criticism. Under Elon Musk, Twitter ended its COVID “misinformation” policy and reinstated many banned accounts. The “Twitter files” and the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit have revealed that the White House, the CDC, and even Pfizer were all involved in a coordinated, systematic silencing of dissent around COVID policies and vaccines.
Against this backdrop, one of the country’s most draconian censorship efforts is facing a major challenge. On Jan. 25, U.S. District Judge William Shubb granted a motion for a preliminary injunction in the Hoeg, et al. v. Newsom lawsuit, temporarily blocking California’s Assembly Bill 2098 (AB 2098). If AB 2098 is eventually implemented, the law will allow the California Medical Board to disbar doctors who disseminate COVID-related “misinformation” to patients. Judge Shubb called the state’s definition of misinformation (“false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus”) “nonsense” and ruled in favor of the injunction on the grounds that the vagueness of the law would violate doctors’ 14th Amendment right to due process.
The state has decided not to appeal Shubb’s decision, but the ultimate fate of the law is still in limbo, in part due to an ongoing separate lawsuit (McDonald v. Lawson). Nevertheless, the initial victory of the plaintiffs in Hoeg, et al. v. Newsom has highlighted the pernicious nature of speech restrictions and represents a major blow against the far-reaching censorship machine that shaped the COVID era.
“The corollary to the First Amendment right to speak is a First Amendment right to receive information,” Jenin Younes, an attorney from the New Civil Liberties Alliance who is representing the plaintiffs, said. The battle over AB 2098 illustrates why medical censorship was about much more than doctors’ and scientists’ speech rights—it was also about the public’s fundamental right to informed consent for lockdowns, masks, and vaccines. As the COVID censorship campaign is increasingly questioned, it becomes clear that suppressing scientific dialogue was not just a free speech issue, but was a catastrophic violation of bioethics that harmed, injured, and killed people.
The doctors challenging AB 2098 in court are primarily concerned about how this law would impact patients. Doctors’ ability to speak frankly is essential to medical care and medical ethics. As doctors have an obligation to act as fiduciaries for their individual patients, a law forcing them to push a one-size-fits-all approach would undermine this obligation.
“When you are no longer telling the patient what you really think, you are no longer acting in the patient’s best interest,” Dr. Azadeh Khatibi, a plaintiff in Hoeg, et al. v. Newsom said. “So you are then, by definition, acting unethically.”
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, another plaintiff and former director of medical ethics at the University of California, Irvine, echoed this sentiment. “Clinical care needs to be individualized to the particular needs of each specific patient,” he said. “AB 2098 is a law that says doctors’ primary duty is not to the sick patient in front of them, but to a social program that’s been basically determined by the California Department of Public Health.” This turns physicians into agents of a broad political agenda, but patients need to be able to trust that physicians are acting in their individual interests. “Without that, medicine collapses,” Kheriaty explained.
The law’s intent to use doctors for a larger social and political purpose is characteristic of the entire COVID censorship crusade, which often prevented scientists and medical professionals from engaging in open inquiry or offering the public a “second opinion” on COVID prevention and treatment. This did not just penalize those who were prevented from speaking; it caused a societywide inversion of medical ethics in which every member of the public was instrumentalized for a “greater good” that could not be questioned. This inversion—the idea that your health as an individual only matters in service of collective ends—is the logic behind eugenics, organ harvesting, and nonconsensual medical experiments.
The advocacy group that pushed for AB 2098, No License for Disinformation, was originally focused on California doctors’ social media posts (since this would not be legally defensible, the group shifted its focus to doctor-patient interactions). “I think this shows what the real intent of the bill was, which was to silence political opponents,” Younes said. This effort was often personal. Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, for instance, has received dozens of messages from one of the members of No License for Disinformation threatening that the law would be used to attack her license. Dr. Hoeg’s scientific work was crucial in reopening schools, unmasking children, and raising awareness about vaccine-associated myocarditis in young men.
“It’s the patients who pay the biggest price when their doctors can’t give them accurate information,” Hoeg said. The attempt to target her has been disconcerting. “The really sad part is that there are doctors from all over who read this. Most will stay quiet, even about issues they really care about, because they don’t want to risk losing their job or medical license,” she explained. “That’s also how it stifles the scientific debate.””
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This pairs nicely with the post above…
“The Lockdown Files: 10 things we’ve learned so far
Leaked WhatsApp messages call into question much of the reasoning for months of national lockdowns and other restrictions on daily life”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/04/matt-hancock-lockdown-files-covid-10-things-learnt/
“The Telegraph has published revelations based on more than 100,000 leaked WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, and other ministers and officials.
The Lockdown Files show the nature of government during the Covid pandemic and how, despite public claims to always “follow the science”, key decisions were made on the fly for political reasons.
They call into question much of the reasoning for months of national lockdowns and other restrictions on daily life in Britain, including social distancing, face masks and the closure of schools.
Here are ten things The Lockdown Files have revealed so far:
Matt Hancock was advised to test all care home residents
The Telegraph’s first revelation from the files was that Mr Hancock was advised early in the pandemic that he should test all people admitted to care homes, regardless of whether they had been discharged from hospital or brought in from the community.
Care homes bore the brunt of Britain’s death toll, with more than 40,000 people catching and dying of the virus.
The WhatsApp messages show that in April 2020, Mr Hancock was advised by Sir Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, that ministers should mandate testing for “all going into care homes”.
But Mr Hancock did not follow that guidance, telling his advisers that it “muddies the waters”. The former health secretary denies rejecting Sir Chris’s advice and says the testing capacity was not available at that time.
Sir Gavin Williamson said teachers ‘really do just hate work’
Sir Gavin Williamson said education unions “really do just hate work” as he discussed reopening schools with Mr Hancock.
The former education secretary first made critical comments in a discussion with the then health secretary as school staff prepared for the reopening of classes in May 2020.
By this point, schools had been effectively shut for two months, with only vulnerable children and those whose parents were key workers allowed to attend in person. Ministers and teachers were planning for lessons to begin returning in June.
Writing about his disputes with Mr Hancock on reopening schools, Mr Williamson said that “getting people’s attention seemed to have been prioritised over putting children’s interests first”.
Simon Case mocked travellers forced to isolate in quarantine hotels
Britain’s most senior civil servant mocked members of the public who were forced to isolate in quarantine hotels.
Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said it was “hilarious” that 149 people had been told to stay in government-approved hotels on their return from Red List countries in 2021.
He also joked about passengers being “locked up” in “shoe box” rooms. Those on the receiving end of the quarantine policy at the time said it was like being “in Guantanamo Bay”.”
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“Life Among the Ruins
The few sowed the wind, and the many reaped their whirlwind.
By Victor Davis Hanson”
https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/05/life-among-the-ruins/
“American society is facing three existential crises not unlike those that overcame the late Roman, and a millennium later, terminal Byzantine, empires.
Premodern Barbarism
We are suffering an epidemic of premodern barbarism. The signs unfortunately appear everywhere. Over half a million homeless people crowd our big-city downtowns.
Most know the result of such Medieval street living is unhealthy, violent, and lethal for all concerned. Yet no one knows—or even seems to worry about—how to stop it.
So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection continue unabated. Progressive urban pedestrians pass by holding their noses, averting their gazes, and accelerating the pace of their walking. The greenest generation in history allows its sidewalks to become pre-civilizational sewers. In a very brief time, we all but have destroyed the downtowns of our major cities—which will increasingly become vacant in a manner like the 6th-century A.D. Roman forum.
All accept that defunding the police, no-cash bail, Soros-funded district attorneys, and radical changes in jurisprudence have destroyed deterrence. The only dividend is the unleashing of a criminal class to smash-and-grab, carjack, steal, burglarize, execute, and assault—with de facto immunity. Instead we are sometimes lectured that looting is not a crime, but lengthy incarceration is criminally immoral.
We have redefined felonies as misdemeanors warranting no punishment. Misdemeanors are now infractions that are not criminal. Infractions we treat as lifestyle choices. Normality, not criminality, is deemed criminal. We all know this will not work, but still wonder why it continues.
Many among the middle classes of our cities who can flee or move, do so—like 5th-century equestrians who left Rome for rural fortified farms before the onslaught of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. For most of our lives we were lectured that the old southern states—Florida, Tennessee, Texas—were backward and uninviting. Now even liberals often flee to them, leaving behind supposedly cosmopolitan Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and New York. The more people leave the blue states, the more those states praise themselves as utopian.
The less well-off, without the means to leave, hope that their environs have hit bottom so things can only improve. The elite who caused this premodern catastrophe assumes they will always have the money and wherewithal to ensure that themselves and their own can navigate around or even profit from the barbarism they unleashed. For them the critic, not the target of criticism, is the greater threat.
The hard urban work of the 1990s and early 2000s—cleaner, safer subways, secure nightlife downtown, clean sidewalks, low vacancy rates, little vagrancy, and litter-free streets—so often has been undone, deliberately so. We are descending to the late 1960s and 1970s wild streets—if we are lucky the mayhem does not devolve even further.
A mere 10 years ago, if an American learned that a man was arrested for clubbing, robbing, or shooting innocents, and yet would be released from custody that day of his crime, he would have thought it an obscenity. Now he fears that often the criminal will not even be arrested.
A once secure border no longer exists. Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas simply demolished it and allowed 6-7 million foreign nationals to cross illegally into the United States without audits—to the delight of their apparent constituent, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
What would shame a Biden or Mayorkas? What would change their minds? Billions of dollars spent on social services for the lawbreaking at the expense of the American poor?
Would 100,000 annual lethal overdoses—12 times more than those who died over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined—from drugs that flow across the open border sway them? Or would it take 200,000, or 300,000 deaths before Joe Biden relented and ceased his chuckling?
What does a people do when its highest officials simply renounce their oaths of office and refuse to enforce laws they don’t like? Everyone knows the border will eventually have to become secure, but none have any idea whether it will take another 20, 30, or 50 million illegal entrants and 1 million more fentanyl deaths to close it.
Polls show race relations have hit historic lows. Much of the ecumenicalism of the post-Civil Rights movement seems squandered—almost deliberately so.
The Left now rarely mentions Martin Luther King, Jr. or even the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Perhaps it knows it has violated the spirit and legacy of both.
Today, our identity politics leaders believe that the color of our skin, not the content of our character, certainly matters more. The practitioners of the new tribalism in some sense fear outlawing segregation and discrimination by race. They know to do so would end racially restricted houses and safe spaces, racially exclusive graduations, and race-based admissions, hiring, and promotion on campus.”
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She should have been impeached long ago.
“A Partisan Judge’s Parting Rampage
The queen of January 6 jurisprudence, Judge Berry Howell is a shameless partisan willing to twist the law, and the U.S. Constitution, to advance her own political agenda.”
“Defense lawyers call it “January 6 jurisprudence”—a unique set of rules and laws that only apply to those ensnared in the Justice Department’s unstoppable push to punish individuals who do not believe Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president of the United States. So far, nearly 1,000 Americans have been arrested and charged, mostly on low-level misdemeanors, for their involvement in the Capitol protest as the regime circles its ultimate prize: Donald Trump.
The fundamental “crime” that acts as the basis of January 6 jurisprudence is not necessarily the four-hour disturbance that temporarily delayed the certification process that day. No, the real crime—to hear regime apparatchiks, the media (but I repeat myself), and Democratic Party politicians (including Biden himself) tell it—is promoting the “Big Lie,” the notion that the 2020 presidential election was rigged or stolen.
Efforts to uncover election irregularities or lawfully object to the outcome are under criminal investigation resulting in the unprecedented weaponization of legal and judicial authority conducted by unaccountable prosecutors and judges.
Enabling this farce in the nation’s capital is Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the D.C. District Court. A former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill, Howell was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama in 2010 and elevated to chief judge in 2016. Since then, Howell has steered the government’s yearslong effort to put Trump in handcuffs. She managed the grand jury proceedings for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and is currently overseeing the Justice Department’s latest iteration of its “Get Trump” campaign—a sweeping investigation into alleged attempts to “overturn” the 2020 election.
Her latest broadside is aimed at Representative Scott Perry (R-Pa.). FBI agents, acting at the direction of the rogue Washington Field Office, stole Perry’s cell phone on August 9, 2022, the day after the same office executed an armed raid at Mar-a-Lago. Perry was traveling with his family in New Jersey at the time when agents seized his phone, copied its contents, and returned the device.
Perry’s lawyers immediately attempted to keep the contents of the phone out of the hands of a leak-happy Justice Department, citing privacy and privilege factors, including the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which basically protects the legislative branch from retaliatory actions by the executive branch. When Perry initially refused to waive that protection at the request of the Justice Department, the government successfully sought a second warrant a few days later to review what investigators collected from the phone.
And that’s when Judge Howell stepped in.”
—
“On that point, Howell unintentionally tipped the government’s hand. Why would the Justice Department need those communications for a criminal investigation? It’s not illegal to have any of those discussions, even for the imaginary crime of attempting to overturn an election. Clearly, prosecutors want Perry’s texts and emails to leak to regime media cut-outs in an effort to embarrass him, its modus operandi since January 6.
In one particularly sneering line, Howell mocked Perry’s “wide-ranging interest in bolstering his belief that the results of the 2020 election were somehow incorrect—even in the face of his own reelection.” (Howell routinely condemns January 6 defendants in her courtroom for believing the “Big Lie.” Last April, Howell asked a man pleading guilty to trespassing whether he still believed that Biden did not legitimately win the presidency. He answered no.)
In a follow-up order filed on January 4, Howell raised “the public’s interest in an expedient investigation” as to why she would not halt her demand for Perry to turn over the records in question to the Justice Department. She gave Perry two days to file an appeal with the D.C. Circuit Court.
And the very next day, the appellate court issued an emergency order to put Howell’s ruling on hold.
A three-judge appellate court panel heard arguments in the case last week. According to Politico, at least two judges were skeptical of Howell’s—and the Justice Department’s —thinking. “‘Why wouldn’t an individual member’s fact-finding be covered?’ Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, asked a Justice Department lawyer.
It could be a few months before the appellate court issues a ruling. In the meantime, investigators don’t have access to Perry’s cell phone records. (Or at least that is how it’s supposed to be.)
By then, the D.C. District court will have a new chief judge; Howell’s stint ends soon. Which is one reason the Justice Department is accelerating the pace of its investigation, including subpoenaing former Vice President Mike Pence a few weeks ago.
“The frenzy of subpoenas comes as Judge Beryl Howell’s seven-year term as chief judge of the D.C. district court enters its last month,” the Wall Street Journal recently observed. “In that post, she has presided over all grand-jury matters in Washington and repeatedly ruled for the Justice Department in closed-door disputes with Mr. Trump over executive privilege.”
Prosecutors undoubtedly will miss Howell’s machinations on behalf of the government. As her rulings in Perry’s case once again show, Howell is a shameless partisan willing to twist the law, and the U.S. Constitution, to advance her own political agenda. She is the queen of January 6 jurisprudence.”
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Sure, it’s long Covid and not the useless and deadly vaccine…..
Which they keep pushing you to take more of.
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Sounds like a great idea.
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Can’t wait to see how the establishment types deal with this. 🙂
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He’s another dishonest charlatan you say…?
I’m shocked. 🙄
https://twitter.com/AllenJa90708626/with_replies
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This is exactly the kind of stuff Trump was exposing, corruption reigns in Ukraine, and the Vindman and the Biden family are dirty. That’s why they had to impeach him, to stop him from digging further. The corruption Trump wanted exposed would expose them too.
Corruption like this.
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Tonight at 8PM, it begins…..
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Get on board, or just change to the Dem party. It’s where their loyalty lies anyway, so just be honest RINO’s.
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BINGO!
We have a winner…
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But in his feeble, old mind it’s true, so that’s what really matters, right media?
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What the lying clowns say….
——-
What reality says….
https://twitter.com/officer_Lew/status/1632530128218517504
Antifa is not right wing.
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The victims are once again victimized by Dems and their trial lawyer buddies.
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Enjoy peasants.
Dr. Frankenstein burned us.
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Of course she did.
The only surprising thing here is that anyone is surprised. 🤡
In a just world, sure….
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Late stage Trump Derangement Syndrome is such an ugly disease.
Even more so when the majority of the media is infected with it.
And it was a correct one too.
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First, let me cue up some Rod Stewart….. the old 1976 version….
“TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT DEMS: TUCKER CARLSON WILL BEGIN AIRING UNSEEN JAN 6 FOOTAGE”
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/03/tonights-the-night-dems-tucker-carlson-will-begin-airing-unseen-jan-6-footage.php
“The New York Post’s Miranda Devine reported that Tucker Carlson will air five clips from the thousands of hours of Jan. 6 surveillance footage the Democrats don’t want us to see.
According to Devine:
The Fox News host will air five stories culled from the footage Monday and Tuesday nights, countering the overblown ‘insurrection’ narrative the Democrats and their media toadies have been pushing since Day One.
…
[T]hey are hyperbolically accusing McCarthy of endangering the security of the House and handing the tools for ‘the next insurrection’ to Carlson who, it won’t surprise you to learn, they fantasize is a Russian sleeper agent.
You will recall the sheer panic among party leader’s over House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to allow Carlson’s team “unfettered access” to government security footage from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Fearing it would contradict their carefully constructed narrative that the riot had been “an insurrection” and “terrorist attack,” Democrats, citing “security concerns,” have managed to withhold this critical footage from the public for over two years.
Democrats are especially peeved with whom McCarthy chose to provide the material to. They consider it an attempt to curry favor with Carlson, who has been openly critical of the GOP leader in the past. And while that may very well be true, there’s no question that Democrats’ main problem with Carlson is that he has repeatedly questioned the decisions, actions, and motives of the Department of Justice, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, and the House Jan. 6 committee.”
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Powerline is just nailing it with the old song titles as post headlines thing today. 🙂
Or someone at Powerline is allowing their playlist to subconsciously influence their headlines today. 🙂
Next up, some old stuff from the artist formerly known as Prince, and some crazy Minnesota politics.
—
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/03/lets-go-crazy-star-tribune-edition-2.php
“See if you can spot the dog that can barely be heard in the first four paragraphs of Bierschbach’s story:
The voting rights of more than 55,000 formerly incarcerated Minnesotans were restored on Friday, as Gov. Tim Walz signed into law one of the largest voter expansion measures in the state in the last half century.
The new law comes after two decades of advocacy from a coalition of groups that argued prohibiting felons on probation from voting excluded them from being full participants in society, sometimes even decades after they were released from jail or prison.
“Today is a good day for democracy, today is a good day for justice and today is a good day for Minnesota,” the DFL governor said on Friday, surrounded by supporters of the proposal as he signed it into law.
“We’re a country of second chances, and we’re a country of welcoming people back in, and the idea of not allowing those voices to have a say in the very governing of the communities they live in is simply unacceptable.”
Let us bask in the euphemism of “formerly incarcerated Minnesotans.” Not men and women or even person, but “Minnesotans.” (I’d love to get a breakdown on the male-female distribution of the benefit.)
“Formerly incarcerated” is something of a masterpiece. It should take its place with “the undocumented,” “the unhoused,” and “those suffering from a shortage of brainpower.” (Okay, the last was my contribution.)”
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Best to keep an eye on ’em…. 🙂
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It’s time for a class action suit against the FBI and Bank of America for violating the constitutional rights of their customers.
That is exactly what this is.
“Whistleblower: FBI’s D.C. Office Tried To Sic Local Agents On Innocents After Bank Of America Volunteered Gun Records”
https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/06/whistleblower-fbis-d-c-office-tried-to-sic-local-agents-on-innocents-after-bank-of-america-volunteered-gun-records/
“An FBI whistleblower told congressional investigators that the D.C. field office pushed local offices to open criminal investigations into Americans based solely on financial transactions Bank of America tracked and voluntarily provided to the bureau, according to testimony reviewed by The Federalist.
“Bank of America, with no directive from the FBI, datamined its customer base,” whistleblower and recently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst George Hill told investigators for the House Judiciary Committee, according to Hill’s testimony.
Hill had identified himself last month as one of the whistleblowers cooperating with congressional investigators when speaking with Just the News’ John Solomon about the disclosures he made to the House Judiciary Committee during a transcribed deposition. A review of Hill’s testimony confirms the details the military veteran and former longtime FBI and NSA analyst told Solomon. It also reveals more troubling details.
According to the material reviewed, Hill testified that on either Jan. 7 or 8, 2021, Bank of America provided the FBI’s D.C. field office a “huge list” of individuals who used Bank of America credit or debit cards in D.C., or the surrounding Maryland and Virginia areas, on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021. Bank of America then elevated to the top of the list anyone who had ever (through Jan. 6, 2021) used a Bank of America product to purchase a firearm.
There was no geographic or date-range limit to the search for firearm purchases, Hill stressed, meaning the individual would be flagged at the top of the list had he “purchased a shotgun in 1999” in Iowa, and used a Bank of America credit card to check out of a hotel on Jan. 5, 2021, in the Northern Virginia area, following a trip that could be completely unrelated to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
The D.C. field office, which oversaw the Jan. 6 investigation, distributed the Bank of America list internally to field offices throughout the country, Hill testified in his deposition. Hill further explained that his supervisor at the Boston field office refused to open an investigation on the individuals flagged on the list because there was “no predication.” “There’s no crime that was committed by using a [Bank of America] product in the District or around the District,” Hill testified, explaining his supervisor’s reasoning for why no “further action” was required.
But the D.C. field office pushed back, according to Hill. The D.C. field office told Boston’s supervisory special agent, or SSA, he needed to open up the cases. When the local office’s SSA refused, the D.C. field office threatened to call the assistant special agent in charge, or ASAC, of the local office, Hill told the congressional committee. The SSA stood firm in his refusal, as did the local ASAC, Hill said, even though the D.C. field office then threatened the ASAC that it would escalate the matter to the office’s special agent in charge, or SAC.
The D.C. field office then pushed the office’s SAC to open investigations into the targeted Americans. But to the SAC’s credit, he refused, Hill noted, saying the Boston SAC countered, “No, we’re not going to open up cases based on credit card or debit card activity that took place.”
While Boston’s FBI office refused to open the requested cases, Hill stressed that “what I don’t know and could not give accurate testimony to,” was whether the D.C. field office “took it upon themselves to open cases.”
Hill’s deposition testimony raises another troubling possibility: that one or more of the other 54 local FBI field offices either complied with the D.C. field office’s initial request to open investigations into innocent Americans, or later capitulated when the D.C. office escalated the request up the chain of command to the ASAC and then the SAC. “
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Exactly. It’s about controlling the narrative.
“Project Fear: COVID hysteria was engineered”
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/03/06/project-fear-covid-hysteria-was-engineered-n535049
“When do we deploy the new variant?”
So much meaning is wrapped up in those 7 words, written in a WhatsApp message by Matt Hancock, who at the time was the Health Minister in the United Kingdom.
“When do we deploy the new variant?” By this, I assume they do not mean actually releasing a new strain of the virus into the wild, an act which I hope is beyond even the most depraved politician or bureaucrat to contemplate.
Rather, they are talking about how to “frighten the pants of [sic] everyone with the new strain.”
Clearly, the new strain itself was not what worried them–they after all are contemplating the timing of when to “deploy” it for maximum fear value–but rather the public’s waning fear of COVID. When, they are wondering, would it be strategically in their best interest to ramp up the fear value for maximum political benefit?
Saving lives wasn’t the point: enforcing compliance with diktats was.
COVID the virus may not have been deployed by any government, but COVID the “emergency” was clearly deployed as a massive plot to strip people of their freedoms and manipulate the public into compliance with absurd demands.
A vast trove of WhatsApp messages was leaked to the British press, and The Telegraph is combing through the 100,000 messages that were never meant to see the light of day. If you think they will confirm some of your worst fears about how the public has been manipulated over the past several years, you are dead right.
Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “frighten the pants off” the public and ensure they complied with lockdown, leaked messages seen by The Telegraph have revealed.
The Lockdown Files – more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between ministers, officials and others – show how the Government used scare tactics to force compliance and push through lockdowns.
In another message Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said that “the fear/ guilt factor” was “vital” in “ramping up the messaging” during the third national lockdown in Jan 2021.
The previous month, Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, appeared to suggest in one message that a new strain of Covid that had recently emerged would be helpful in preparing the ground for the looming lockdown, by scaring people into compliance.
In a WhatsApp conversation on Dec 13, obtained by The Telegraph, Damon Poole – one of Mr Hancock’s media advisers – informed his boss that Tory MPs were “furious already about the prospect” of stricter Covid measures and suggested “we can roll pitch with the new strain”.
The comment suggested that they believed the strain could be helpful in preparing the ground for a future lockdown and tougher restrictions in the run-up to Christmas 2020.
Mr Hancock then replied: “We frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain.”
Mr Poole agreed, saying: “Yep that’s what will get proper bahviour [sic] change.””
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Birds of a feather and all….
https://twitter.com/JamesEdwardsTPC/status/1632807002505113601?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1632807002505113601%7Ctwgr%5E232184ba70587b52cd7dd8cfb8190f9a9ff39fd2%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Fheadlines%2F2023%2F03%2F06%2Ftoo-fun-to-check-did-police-arrest-an-splc-attorney-for-domestic-terrorism-n535185
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@10:37 The southern border is wide open and millions of the unjabbed are walking across; meanwhile, the world’s best tennis player (also unjabbed) is banned from entering. Djokovic should be in the running for the Medal of Freedom for his courage in standing up for his convictions.
To refuse the best in the world at his craft to enter the country – evidence of a once-great Republic that is now in freefall and characterized by corruption and arrogance.
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Everything the Jan6 Committee told you was a lie.
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