Yesterday, Joe Biden stupidly said a 9mm bullet is a high-caliber weapon that “blows the lungs out of the body.” He’s an ignorant fool. 9mm rounds are typically used in handguns, not high-powered rifles. He called for more gun control after Uvalde, but Democrats always do after a tragedy, because their motto is ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’.
Biden and his fellow Democrats would rather be authoritarian and talk about how the Second Amendment is “not absolute” than do something that might actually solve the problem. They’d rather take guns away from law-abiding citizens and pass more gun control laws that haven’t worked in places like Chicago. Red flag laws didn’t stop the grocery store shootings in Boulder or Buffalo. Gun control is a complete failure, but Democrats keep pushing it at every turn. You have to ask yourself why, when they can’t point to any success. I would wager it has something to do with where the Democrats’ bread is buttered. When’s the last time you heard of a billionaire like Michael Bloomberg giving away millions of dollars to promote armed guards in schools? It doesn’t happen. But Bloomberg and others like him give away millions to Democrats and left-wing activist groups to push gun control. So Democrats get to indulge their authoritarian fantasies and get paid for doing it. Life is good, if you’re in the gun control racket.
Back in the real world, a whole menu of common-sense solutions have been put forth and ignored in recent days on the subject of school shootings, so let’s take a look at some of them:
A father who lost his daughter in the Parkland shooting recommends a single point of entry that is locked down, armed guards, and teacher training. It’s not likely anyone dressed in black carrying a rifle would be allowed in. That would go a long way toward solving the problem, wouldn’t it? That’s just the beginning of what’s possible.
Comb social media and develop algorithms to identify troubled students in advance to get them the help they need – profiling. Recruit volunteer armed guards from retired military and law enforcement personnel. Arm the teachers like they do in Israel and conduct active shooter drills until they become as routine as fire drills. When’s the last time you heard of a school shooting in Israel – maybe 1956 and 2002? Missouri allows teachers and school staff to be armed, and two school districts in St. Louis are moving ahead with teacher firearms training and annual retraining.
Israel uses a multi-layered approach: profiling, armed guards, outside patrols, cameras, metal detectors, and a single point of entry. Visitors must have a reason for being at the school and must sign the visitor log.
Take immunity away from social workers and counselors, and hold them liable for letting disturbed people slip through the cracks. They should be specifically trained to profile students most likely to erupt. Evacuation and safety plans should be drawn up locally and reviewed on a regular basis. This is what security professionals advise and have seen make a difference in emergency situations.
The Democrats won’t even consider ideas from the Right side of the ledger. They’re too busy lining their own pockets with big bucks from the gun control lobby. They have a financial conflict of interest on this issue and their demands for gun control should just be ignored. If they won’t let the adults in the room solve the problem, then, the next time there’s a story about murdered school kids being laid to rest in tiny coffins, blame the Democrats.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-01 06:52:052022-06-01 06:52:05Gun Control Pays Too Well
If you’ve ever been stuck behind a transport truck on a highway, you know how annoying it can be. The worst part is when trucks are trying to pass each other. A line of cars builds up behind them as they drive side-by-side for what seems like an eternity.
That problem may be about to get a whole lot worse in the coming years. On April 27, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) issued a Notice of Intent stating they are planning to pursue new rules that would require the use of speed limiters for trucks. The limiters would be set up on a truck’s internal computer and would make it impossible for the driver to exceed a certain maximum speed.
“The National Roadway Safety Strategy identified speed as a significant factor in fatal crashes and speed management as a primary tool to reduce serious injuries and fatalities,” the FMCSA said in the Notice. “FMCSA is moving forward with this rulemaking because of concerns about the number of CMV [Carrier Motor Vehicle] crashes and fatalities traveling at high speeds…The rule will help reduce crashes and save lives on our nation’s roadways.”
The Notice of Intent does not propose what the maximum speed should be. It’s still early in the process, and at this point the FMCSA is mostly looking for public comments on the idea.
There is one hint about what it might be, however. April’s Notice of Intent is a follow-up on a similar proposal made back in 2016, and that proposal sought comments on maximum speeds of 60, 65, and 68 miles per hour, so it’s likely the FMCSA is thinking of something in that ballpark.
The reaction to the Notice has been mixed. Some industry groups are applauding the agency for taking action, but others are raising concerns.
“Studies and research have already proven what we were all taught long ago in driver’s ed classes, that traffic is safest when vehicles all travel at the same relative speed,” said Todd Spencer, president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA). “Limiting trucks to speeds below the flow of traffic increases interactions between vehicles which can lead to more crashes.”
Spencer also noted that traffic congestion caused by slow trucks could become a much bigger problem under the new rule.
There are also other concerns with the proposed rule beyond safety and congestion. As trucker Jaxon Allen explains in an Instagram video, mandated speed limiters would likely have a negative impact on supply chains, because trucks would take longer to reach their destination. Of course, having to go a few miles per hour slower doesn’t sound like much, but the extra time for trips would add up. Truckers’ wages may also take a hit, since they wouldn’t be able to cover as many miles.
So, are speed limiters a good idea? Is 60 or 65 or 68 mph the right limit? It’s tempting to take a side on these questions, but there’s a more fundamental question here that needs to be asked first. Namely, who should get to decide?
The current decision mechanism, where the bureaucrats at the FMCSA make the call, has a serious problem. Since bureaucrats look good when roads are safer and get blamed when there are more accidents, they have an incentive to be cautious (we’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that imposing speed limiters would in fact make roads safer). The problem is, they have no counterbalancing incentive to consider opposing concerns like efficiency or congestion. They lose nothing if traffic congestion becomes intolerable or if supply chains get strained, but they stand to lose a lot in terms of reputation if traffic accidents increase. As a result, they have an incentive to be overcautious, making rules far more stringent than what’s appropriate for the circumstances (this parallels the incentive problem with the FDA).
So, how can we create a better incentive structure? One way would be to privatize roads, and let each individual road owner make the rules for their road.
Unlike government bureaucrats, private road owners have an incentive to make rules that strike the best balance between safety and other factors, as determined by their customers, drivers. Rules that are too loose would lead to more accidents, which would tarnish the reputation of the road, causing fewer people to drive on it and leading to lower profits for the owner. On the flip side, rules that are too stringent would also turn away drivers, perhaps because there’s too much congestion.
Thus, with private roads, the rules that are created would gravitate toward the rules that drivers think are best. Road owners would have a strong financial incentive to avoid rules that are too dangerous and rules that are too safe. In other words, while bureaucrats are constantly veering into the ditch of being too cautious, private roads would keep their rules in the middle, away from the ditch of extreme caution on the one side and the ditch of extreme danger on the other side.
Contrary to popular belief, libertarianism is not about having no rules on the road. Rather, it’s about reimagining the way that these rules are formed. By privatizing roads, we can create an incentive structure that rewards the best rules and weeds out the ones that don’t make sense. Since road owners have to be responsive to drivers to make profits, the rules that emerge will reflect the values and concerns of drivers, rather than the values and concerns of bureaucrats.
In fact, for all we know, roads may actually get safer under private management, because entrepreneurs will be experimenting with various rules and design features to this end. It’s counterintuitive, but moving away from safety regulations might just be the best way to save lives.
Perhaps it’s at least worth an experiment?
This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.
Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-26 12:51:152022-05-26 12:51:15Truckers Speak Out over Proposed Rule That Could Impose Speed Limits as Low as 60 MPH on Rigs
Elon Musk tore into the Democratic Party in a Wednesday tweet calling them the party of “division and hate.”
“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk said. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.”
In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party.
But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.
Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold … 🍿
The multibillionaire said he will vote Republican for likely the first time in his life in the 2022 midterm election after overwhelmingly voting Democrat in the past. He said the Democratic Party is controlled by unions and trial lawyers.
“I might never have voted for a Republican, just to be clear,” Musk said during a Tuesday “All-In” podcast. “Now this election, I will.”
“It definitely feels like this is not right,” Musk added. “The issue here is that the Democratic Party is overly controlled by the unions and by trial lawyers, particularly class-action lawyers. … In the case of Biden, he is simply too much captured by the unions, which was not the case with Obama.”
Liberal media pundits and Democratic lawmakers have warned of the supposed dangers of Musk’s vow to foster free speech on Twitter in the midst of his $44.3 billion takeover. MSNBC host Joy Reid previously accused the Tesla CEO in a April 26 segment of “The ReidOut” of wanting the “old South Africa of the ’80s” back, in reference to the Apartheid.
“There was a time when people had the double hashtags around their names because they were Jewish and right-wingers were saying ‘get in the oven’ anytime you made any benign comment on Twitter,” Reid said. “They attacked women, the misogyny was crazy on Twitter for a while. Elon Musk, I guess he misses the old South Africa in the ’80s, he wants that back.”
Musk trolled Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after claiming she has to “collectively stress” about an increase in hate crimes due to his takeover. Musk responded, “stop hitting on me, I’m really shy.”
Liberals have not taken kindly to Musk vowing to allow former President Donald Trump return to the platform when he officially takes over the social media company. Then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration is determined to prevent platforms from spreading disinformation at a May 10 briefing.
Musk has been highly critical of the left, recently stating “the far left hates everyone, themselves included,” noting that he does not support the far-right either.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said Musk’s Twitter takeover will lead him to seek “freedom from accountability” in an April 24 tweet.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-19 18:52:272022-05-19 18:52:27Elon Musk Calls Democrats ‘The Party Of Division And Hate’
The globalist takeover is coming at us from every possible angle. Whether we’re talking about biosecurity, finance, housing, health care, energy, transportation or food, all the changes we’re now seeing have one goal, and that is to force compliance with a totalitarian slave system
The global food system, and protein sources in particular, are currently under coordinated and intentional attacks to manufacture food shortages and famine
The globalist elite intend to eliminate traditional farming and livestock and replace it with indoor-grown produce and lab-created protein alternatives that they own and control
While the presence of hundreds of food brands gives the appearance of market competition, the reality is that the food industry is monopolized by fewer than a dozen companies, and all of them, in turn, are largely owned by BlackRock and Vanguard
Eventually, your ability to buy food will be tied to your digital identity and social credit score
The globalist takeover agenda is nothing if not comprehensive. They’re coming at us from every possible angle, and whether we’re talking about biosecurity, finance, housing,1 health care, energy, transportation or food, all the changes we’re now seeing have one goal, and that is to force compliance with a totalitarian slave system.
In an April 27, 2022, blog post,2 investigative journalist Corey Lynn takes a deep dive into the new food system being put into place, and how it is geared to control you.
“‘Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.’ This famous quote by Henry Kissinger is ringing more and more true by the week,” Lynn writes.3
“The globalists already control the majority of the money, are moving ever so swiftly to convert the energy system over into systems they are all invested in, and have been taking drastic measures to control the food industry while running much of it under the radar. If they control the seeds they control the food, and if they control the food they can use the digital ID to control consumer access to the food.
While a rash of fires suddenly destroy food processing, meat, and fertilizer plants, during a time where farmers are hurting and supply chain issues are kicking in, an entire traceable food infrastructure system has already been built in multiple cities and is making its way across the globe …
The USDA and FDA have already approved lab grown meat, genetically modified cattle, and are funding the globalists to research and develop cellular agriculture as well as indoor growers and genetics companies …
Union Pacific is mandating railroad shipping reductions by 20% impacting CF Industries Holdings, the world’s largest fertilizer company. Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street happen to be the top shareholders of Union Pacific, and BlackRock and Vanguard are in the top three shareholders of CF Industries Holdings.
By mapping some of the largest vertical farms, it reveals the crops, grocery stores involved, locations and billions pouring in by globalist investors and shareholders. It quickly becomes evident that this is the global plan to control all produce — ingredients that go into all food products.”
The Secret Monopoly
As noted by Lynn, this monopoly has been locked into place over the course of many years. Slowly but surely, the monopoly has grown, under the radar of public consciousness, which in turn has resulted in food getting simultaneously more expensive and less accessible.4
Now, as the final pieces are being put into place, many are waking up to the realization that we’ve been massively fooled and are now at the mercy of a figurative “handful” of unelected people whose megalomania is unsurpassed in human history.
While the presence of hundreds of food brands gives the appearance of market competition, the reality is that the food industry is monopolized by fewer than a dozen companies,5 and all of them, in turn, are largely owned by BlackRock and Vanguard. The growing fake meat market is similarly dominated by a very small number of large food giants6 which, again, are owned by BlackRock and Vanguard.
BlackRock alone holds $10 trillion in assets,7 up from $6 trillion in 2017.8 Combined, the three largest investment firms in the world, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, have ownership in nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.9
Through their investment holdings they secretly wield monopoly control over ALL industries, so the idea that there is competition anywhere in the marketplace is really just an illusion. You never learned about their ever-expanding monopoly because they also own the centralized media.
It’s hard to tell which of the two is more influential. Vanguard owns a large share of Blackrock. Owners and stockholders of Vanguard include Rothschild Investment Corp,10 Edmond De Rothschild Holding,11 the Italian Orsini family, the American Bush family, the British Royal family, the du Pont family, and the Morgan, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller families.12,13
Blackrock, meanwhile, has been called the “fourth branch of government,” as they are the only private firm that has financial agreements to lend money to the central banking system.14
Food Security Is Undermined by Patentable Food
In 2014, the U.S. Congress established the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research Act (FFAR) through the Farm Bill. After siphoning off $200 million in taxpayer funds to get the foundation started, FFAR became a nongovernmental not-for-profit organization. Bill Gates is one of its funders, and its first board of directors included deputy director Dr. Robert Horsch of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.15
The mission of FFAR is to “connect funders, researchers and farmers through public-private partnerships to support audacious research addressing the biggest food and agriculture challenges.”16 In reality, it’s been used to undermine food security by increasing reliance on gene-edited and patentable foods.
In April 2019, FFAR launched the Precision Indoor Plants (PIP) Consortium, a public-private partnership of indoor growers, breeders and genetics companies with the shared goal of advancing speed-breeding and altering plant chemicals responsible for flavor, nutrition and medicinal value. Five key crops being worked on are lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, cilantro and blueberries.
In August 2020, Monsanto/Bayer helped found a startup called Unfold, which develops new vegetable seed varieties specifically geared for vertical farms. According to Lynn, “GMOs already account for 75 to 80% of food Americans consume,”17 and once fresh produce is under patent, that percentage will inch closer to 100%.
The University of California is also working on plant-based mRNA vaccines. The idea there is to disseminate vaccines through the conventional food supply,18 which puts a whole new spin on the old adage to “Let thy food be thy medicine.”
“Bill Gates insists that droughts and climate change is destroying our ability to farm and that the future will consist of populations moving into metropolitan cities where indoor vertical farming is necessary to feed people.
If this is the case, why has he acquired 242,000 acres of farmland over the past decade while simultaneously investing in indoor vertical farming? Who gets to sit at the table with healthy produce served up by Gates while the rest of the population eats gene-edited produce from locked-down facilities, delivered to their local grocery store, and accessed only through a digital ID?” Lynn asks.19
“Meanwhile, the Consultative Group of International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) holds the world’s largest private seed banks consisting of 10% of the worldwide germplasm across the globe, which is controlled by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and World Bank, managing 768,576 accessions of hijacked farmers seeds …
[W]hat’s going to happen to the farmers when these astronomically enormous indoor vertical farm facilities have taken over every major city, locked in contracts with all major grocery store chains, and are funded by some of the same billionaire globalists who are seeking to control human beings through every industry for their fourth industrial revolution?
It’s a legitimate concern. Add ‘gene-editing,’ ‘smart,’ ‘traceable,’ and ‘net zero’ to the production of these facilities, and the fact that they are still moving full speed ahead on digital IDs and currency, and it becomes even more concerning …
Whereas this provides a lot of explanation on the absolute intentional demolition to all of our farmers on the seed, vegetable, and produce front, people should also be aware of what’s been taking place with cattle ranchers and the globalists’ plan to take over the meat industry as well.”
Controlled Demolition of the Protein Supply Is Underway
As I explained in yesterday’s weaponized bird flu article, alleged outbreaks of bird flu and COVID-19 in food animals, along with drought and fertilizer shortages, have led to the mass culling of flocks20 and cattle herds21 around the world. So much so, we’re now told to expect egg,22 poultry and meat shortages.23
Add to that a global fertilizer shortage that is limiting the amount of animal feed that can be produced this year, and the curious decision to limit U.S. fertilizer shipments on trains, which restricts distribution and raises the cost of what little remains. Experts predict it may take up to three years to replenish global grain stocks,24 and in the meantime, farmers won’t have a readily available supply to feed their livestock.
Canada-based Nutrien Ltd., the world’s largest fertilizer company, recently warned the shortage is likely to extend into 2023. The price of fertilizer has also “skyrocketed to absurd heights that have never been seen before,” The Economic Collapse Blog reports.25
The U.S. and U.K. are also paying farmers to not farm all their available land, California is paying farmers to grow less, ostensibly to save water, and the U.K. is encouraging farmers to retire by offering them a lump sum of £100,000 — all while publicly predicting looming food shortages.26 On top of that, the two largest water reservoirs in California have also fallen to “critically low levels” and wildfires are devastating agricultural land across the western half of the U.S.27
Food production is being blatantly attacked and irrationally restricted on so many fronts, it’s clearly an intentional demolition of primary protein sources28 — meat, egg and dairy.
“February 1, 2016 the Good Food Institute was launched … with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Philanthropy Project, and Y Combinator, with the goal to ‘reimagine meat production,’” Lynn writes.29
“In October 2021, the Good Food Institute celebrated the USDA’s $10 million grant for the creation of the first-ever National Institute for Cellular Agriculture at Tufts University so they can back researchers in manufactured meat.
To be certain all of these goals are locked into place and the UN 2030 agenda is achieved, disrupting the fertilizer industry, food supply chain, and a rash of coincidental fires to food processing plants sure would help to seal the deal, wouldn’t it?”
The Emperor Has No Clothes
In a blatantly self-serving gesture, Gates has publicly called for the West to quit eating beef and transition to lab-grown meats, ostensibly to address climate change. He’s also railed against legislative attempts to make sure fake meats are properly labeled, since labeling would slow down public acceptance.30
Not surprisingly, Gates is financially invested in several faux meat companies.31,32,33 As luck or godlike foresight would have it, he’s also invested in genetically engineered fertilizer alternatives.34 Lynn writes:35
“Bill Gates explained his love for fertilizer in 2018 while in Tanzania.36 Coincidentally, Gates-led and Rockefeller-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has been an epic fail, with a first ever evaluation report37 that came out on February 28, 2022 after a 15-year effort with bold claims to rescue Africa’s small farmers.
Their false promise to ‘double yields and incomes for 30 million farming households by 2020’ was removed from their website in June 2020 after an assessment by Tufts University revealed little evidence of progress, and in fact showed a 31% increase in hunger.
Evaluators stated there were many deficiencies and AGRA’s reporting and monitoring data was weak. Even the German government is considering pulling funding from AGRA over their pesticide use, which is ironic because Gates claims we need to remove pesticides in the U.S. and move to indoor vertical farming …
One of AGRA’s biggest achievements was their participation in 72 agricultural policy reforms in 11 African countries, pertaining to seed, fertilizer and market access. Laws were created to protect intellectual property rights for ‘certified’ seeds, as penalties were created for open-source seed sharing.
Imagine being a farmer, homesteader or gardener and having to share and trade seeds on the black market so you don’t get penalized. Anyone who believes they won’t try this in the U.S. is kidding themselves, especially since the globalists hold the largest private seeds banks, and invest in the largest commercial seed companies …
On March 17, 2022, a notice was published38to the U.S. Federal Register seeking comments by May 16, 2022 on Competition and Intellectual Property System: Seeds and Other Agricultural Inputs. Remember to read through the proper lens when reviewing this notice that derived from an executive order signed by Biden in July, 2021 on promoting competition in the American economy.
Their ultimate goal — every human being, every piece of food, resource, and product on this planet will be tracked and traced via blockchain. This isn’t a theory — it is their goal. In July, 2021, the FDA released their ‘New Era of Smarter Food Safety’ which consists of using tech-enabled traceability for a digital, traceable food system, from farm to plate using blockchain.
A digital identity to grant access to establishments, control financial spending, and trace everyone’s moves has been rolling out on multiple fronts, including the vaccine ID passport. Eventually they will try to move toward a chip, as it will be easier with biometrics being installed everywhere …
There is no way to sugarcoat this system they are implementing. Whereas vertical farming is brilliant in many ways, and could be beneficial on a smaller scale in communities, the fact that this is the global agenda to remove farms and control all produce by the globalists themselves, makes is incredibly concerning …
We must work together to find a way forward and continue to say no to the digital ID they are creating to control our access and spending, while building self sufficiency and security together.”
For solutions to this rapidly approaching dystopian future, review my previous article, “Why Food Prices Are Expected to Skyrocket,” and Lynn’s article “Finding Sources of Fresh Food.”39
Part of the answer is to grow your own food, to the best of your ability. Another part is to support local growers by buying their produce, or else they’ll get pushed out. Starting local co-ops and community gardens can also go a long way toward creating food security in the long term.
At the same time, we also have to reject globalist solutions like fake meat, gene-edited beef, GMO foods and all the rest of it. It’s time to recognize that none of their solutions are for our benefit. They’re for our detriment. The World Economic Forum has declared that by 2030, you will own nothing. They mean it. They will take everything from us, including the right to grow our own food, if we let them.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-19 06:51:492022-05-19 06:51:49Meat Shortage Alert: Are You Prepared?
President Joe Biden’s administration is planning to roll back current Title IX regulations, which experts argue will revoke protections for both the accuser and the accused in sexual assault cases and threaten freedom of speech at federally funded schools.
“It ultimately returns Title IX back to a guilty until proven innocent standard,” Sarah Perry, a senior legal fellow for the Heritage Foundation said.
“Any changes could put students’ free speech rights at risk and will only exacerbate the problem of self-censorship that has been plaguing our campuses,” Speech First executive director Cherise Trump said.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education (DOE) is planning to roll back Title IX due process regulations implemented by former President Donald Trump’s administration, which experts argue will revoke protections for both the accuser and the accused in sexual assault cases and threaten freedom of speech.
The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) is planning to rewrite the rules outlined in Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments that set sexual harassment standards at federally funded schools. The Biden administration’s changes would reverse 2020 due process protections that require federal K-12 and higher education schools to investigate Title IX violations in a fair and unbiased manner, which includes the right to be represented by counsel, the presumption of innocence, the ability to cross examine and to introduce witnesses, experts told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Proponents of the current standards argue they fixed problems created by former President Barack Obama’s Education Department; before the 2020 changes, instances of sexual assault and harassment were only recognized as instances of unlawful sex discrimination through regulations that were not legally binding. However, under the current standards, school districts, colleges and universities have a legal obligation to respond to such cases in a fair and unbiased manner.
Under the Trump administration’s standards, instances of sexual assault at federal schools are handled more like “quasi-judicial proceedings,” Sarah Perry, a senior legal fellow for the Heritage Foundation, told TheDCNF.
“It ultimately returns Title IX back to a guilty until proven innocent standard … as opposed to leaving it to one Title IX investigator to determine who was right and who was wrong, in a ‘he said, she said’ proceeding,” Perry said.
Speech First executive director Cherise Trump told TheDCNF that the rules changes will likely be weaponized against constitutionally protected speech, which could make students subject to “harassment” for their personal or political stances.
The current Title IX regulations that were implemented in 2020 are consistent with a Supreme Court precedent known as the Davis Standard, which concluded that “student-on-student harassment must be so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it can be said to deprive its victims of access to a school’s educational programs or activities,” Trump explained.
“This is a pretty high threshold that protects students from being accused of harassment for simply voicing their opinions and possibly offending someone with their ideas,” Trump said. In response, universities frequently manipulate Title IX language to fit a more “broad-sweeping definition” such as “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive…” to “severe, pervasive, or objectively offensive,” she explained.
The small change in wording allows school administrators to restrict and punish speech they believe is “offensive,” “unwanted” or “problematic,” but would not be considered harassment under current Title IX rules, she said.
“Previously, the process for adjudicating serious harassment allegations on campus had been plagued by bias, vagueness, and overreach,” Trump added. “Any changes could put students’ free speech rights at risk and will only exacerbate the problem of self-censorship that has been plaguing our campuses.”
A Republican coalition of 15 state attorneys general have expressed legal concern about the DOE’s plans to roll back the “historic” move that codified sexual harassment regulations under Title IX into law, arguing the previous standards were unworkable and unfair.
“Hundreds of successful lawsuits against schools for denying basic due process and widespread criticism from across the ideological spectrum arose from the Obama-era rules“ the statement said. “The rules also resulted in a disproportionate number of expulsions and scholarship losses for Black male students.”
The Department of Education did not respond to The DCNF’s request for comment.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-18 05:51:152022-05-18 05:51:15Biden Admin Plans To Roll Back Trump-Era Free Speech Protections In Education
As we approach the 2022 mid-term elections on November 8th, 2022 it is important for citizens to understand the specific federal and recently revised Florida laws, and accompanying criminal penalties, for voter and election fraud.
Why? Because voter fraud has now become a “multi-dimensional interference” in elections.
Every illegal ballot or ballot cast by an illegal voter is a clear and present danger and a threat to our national security.
This information is provided for those who many witness voter fraud and what are your responsibilities to report it to either or to both the Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security and federal authorities, i.e. the FBI.
(1)knowingly and willfully intimidates, threatens, or coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any person for—
(A) registering to vote, or voting, or attempting to register or vote; (B) urging or aiding any person to register to vote, to vote, or to attempt to register or vote; or (C) exercising any right under this chapter; or
(2) knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by—
(A) the procurement or submission of voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held; or (B) the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held, shall be fined in accordance with title 18 (which fines shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury, miscellaneous receipts (pursuant to section 3302 of title 31), notwithstanding any other law), or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both. (Pub. L. 103–31, § 12, May 20, 1993, 107 Stat. 88.)
On April 25th, 2022 Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill (SB) 524 which created a police force dedicated to pursuing voter fraud and other election crimes.
Senate Bill (SB) 524, Election Administration, was passed and signed into law in order to ensure that the State of Florida continues to have secure and accurate elections. This legislation strengthens election security measures by requiring voter rolls to be annually reviewed and updated, strengthens ID requirements, establishes the Office of Election Crimes and Security to investigate election law violations, and increases penalties for violations of election laws.
Florida Secretary of State, Laurel M. Lee at the signing ceremony said,
“Governor DeSantis has made elections integrity a top priority from the very beginning of his administration, taking steps to ensure we invested in our elections systems, strengthened our cyber defenses, modernized equipment, updated voter rolls, and improved transparency, and we’ve seen results. As Florida’s Chief Elections Official, I share Governor DeSantis’ strong commitment to elections integrity. We want to ensure that every Floridian can have confidence that in Florida, we do elections right.”
It is incumbent on all citizens to be on the look out for election fraud.
The film 2000 Mules shows how election fraud has now become a threat to our national security and our free and fail election process. Lyle J. Rapacki, Ph.D. wrote,
Both The Epoch Times and D’Souza have investigated and followed the many aspects, conflicting arguments, waves of evidence, people directly involved, and more…associated with the very sophisticated, multi-dimensional interference of the last national election in November of 2020. Without a doubt the compilation of evidence substantiates the reason for the initial Joint Public Arizona Legislative Hearing in Phoenix on November 30, 2020. Arizona State Rep. Mark Finchem and Arizona State Senator Sonny Borrelli co-chaired the day-long hearing, and testimony along with cyber-evidence presented by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a team of professionals. Epoch Times, One America News, and seven other fair and balanced news organizations provided national coverage for the ten hour hearing. I was privileged to coordinate all aspects leading up to the legislative hearing, and then thereafter. This hearing launched investigations and hearings in 16 other states.
Stealing the vote is now the greatest threat to our Constitutional Republican form of government.
Remember, every illegal vote cancels out one legal vote. Cast enough illegal votes and you can win a presidential election.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-18 05:51:122022-05-18 05:51:12What are the Federal and Florida Laws and Criminal Penalties for Election Fraud?
The studies, data, and examination of the available evidence by scholars suggest that assault weapon bans or buybacks will have little if any effect on rates of violent crime and gun violence.
Mass shootings are unconscionable acts of violence and are the most acutely disturbing form of gun violence. In the wake of such tragedies, many gun control advocates lambast gun rights supporters for allowing “weapons of war” onto the streets of America and not supporting “responsible gun reform.”
The measures put forth are usually either a ban and/or mandatory buyback of “assault weapons,” most of which are more accurately known as semi-automatic rifles. (“Assault weapon” is a vague term that varies state to state and can include common pistols and shotguns depending out other attachable accessories.)
While these initiatives are “common sense” to advocates, if one takes the time to examine the data and evidence, it becomes abundantly clear that gun control in this form will do little to reduce gun violence.
1. Mass shootings with assault weapons constitute a fraction of a percent of gun violence
Mother Jones’s database of mass shootings, defined as shootings involving three or more fatalities, shows that between 2007 and 2017, there were 495 people murdered in such events. When breaking down those shootings by the weapons involved, it is revealed that around half of those victims (253) were murdered by a perpetrator with an assault weapon (AW), such as an AR-15.
Over the same timeframe, FBI annual crime reports show that there were 150,352 homicides in total, of which 103,901 involved firearms. This means that mass shootings involving AWs constitute 0.17 percent and 0.24 percent of all homicides and firearm homicides, respectively.
To further illuminate the relative infrequency of mass shootings with “assault weapons,” consider the fact that in 2017, some 1,590 people were murdered using knives or sharp instruments.
Over the last five years, 261 people were murdered with AWs in mass shootings (an average rate of 52 murders annually.) At such a rate, it would take over 30 years of mass shootings with AWs to produce the same number of deaths as one year’s worth of knife murders. (It would take 135 years’ worth of mass shootings with AWs to produce the 7,032 deaths that handgun homicides did in 2017.)
Consequently, even a completely effective ban/buyback of AWs would have an incredibly small impact on rates of homicide and gun violence, and then there is always the probability that people intent on committing mass violence will substitute AWs with other available firearms or methods of destruction (such as homemade explosives.)
There are theoretical reasons to doubt the effectiveness of a ban or buyback of assault weapons, but it also doesn’t help that real-world evidence suggests these measures fail to produce reductions in gun violence.
Between 1994 and 2004, the federal government banned the manufacture, sale, or transfer of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. A subsequent Department of Justice study found no evidence that the ban had had any effect on gun violence and stated that “should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
A recent study published this year in the Journal of General Internal Medicine examined state gun control policies and found no statistically significant relationship between assault weapon or large-capacity magazine bans and homicide rates. A Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study came to the same conclusion.
3. Australia doesn’t prove gun control works
In 1996, Australia experienced a horrific mass shooting. In response, the government implemented a mandatory buyback scheme that banned and confiscated certain types of firearms, including assault weapons.
A 2016 JAMAstudy on the matter found no statistically significant change in the trend of the country’s firearm homicide rate following the law’s passage. The authors also noted that the decline in firearm suicides post-ban could not clearly be attributed to gun control since non-firearm suicides fell by an even greater magnitude.
4. There is inconclusive evidence of assault weapons bans on mass shootings
Last year, the RAND Corporation released an extensive scientific analysis of available evidence on gun control measures and how they relate to various crime outcomes. Regarding the effect of assault weapons bans on mass shootings, they determined the evidence was “inconclusive.”
When former President Bill Clinton claimed the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban was associated with reduced mass shootings, Politifactrated that claim as “half-true,” noting that “the ban’s impact remains unclear.”
Using Mother Jones’s data on mass shootings, I constructed the graph you see above. Prior to the ban, on average five people were killed with assault weapons in mass shootings per year. During the ban, that number went slightly down to four. Post-ban, it rose to 22.
But mass shootings with assault weapons didn’t rise until 2012—eight years after the ban ended. In the seven years after the ban, there was only an average of four people killed in mass shootings with assault weapons per year.
Given the fact that the pre-ban period and the seven years after the ban had essentially the same rate of mass shooting deaths with assault weapons, it is hard to prove that the ban had any effect on mass shootings.
In Conclusion
The studies, data, and examination of the available evidence by scholars suggest that assault weapons bans or buybacks will have little if any effect on rates of violent crime and gun violence. There seems to be no relationship between these gun control measures and reductions in firearm homicide or suicide, and there doesn’t appear to be any clear evidence they reduce mass shootings.
In November 2021, Brook Jackson, a whistleblower who worked on Pfizer’s Phase 3 COVID jab trial in the fall of 2020, warned she’d seen evidence of fraud in the trial
With the release of Pfizer trial data — which they tried to withhold for 75 years — additional problems suggestive of fraud and data manipulation are coming to light
Trial site 1231, located in Argentina, somehow managed to recruit 10% of the total trial participants, 4,501 in all, and they did so in just three weeks, and without a contract research organization — a feat that has many questioning whether fraud was committed
The lead investigator for trial site 1231 is Dr. Fernando Polack, who also happens to be a consultant for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (RBPAC), a current adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, an investigator for Fundación Infant, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, and the first author of Pfizer’s paper, “Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine,” published at the end of December 2021
Site 1231 held a second enrollment session, given the designation of “site 4444.” The 4444 trial site data raise another red flag. It supposedly enrolled 1,275 patients in a single week, from September 22 through 27, 2020 — the last week that recruitment could take place to meet the data cutoff for the FDA meeting in December 2020. Was “site 4444” fabricating data to create the appearance that the jab was having an effect?
In November 2021, Brook Jackson, a whistleblower who worked on Pfizer’s Phase 3 COVID jab trial in the fall of 2020, warned she’d seen evidence of fraud in the trial.
Data were falsified, patients were unblinded, the company hired poorly trained people to administer the injections, and follow-up on reported side effects lagged way behind. The revelation was published in The British Medical Journal. In his November 2, 2021, report, investigative journalist Paul Thacker wrote:1
“Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal COVID-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight …
[F]or researchers who were testing Pfizer’s vaccine at several sites in Texas during that autumn, speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety … Staff who conducted quality control checks were overwhelmed by the volume of problems they were finding.”
Jackson, a former regional director of Ventavia Research Group, a research organization charged with testing Pfizer’s COVID jab at several sites in Texas, repeatedly “informed her superiors of poor laboratory management, patient safety concerns and data integrity issues,” Thacker wrote.
When her concerns were ignored, she finally called the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and filed a complaint via email. Jackson was fired later that day after just two weeks on the job. According to her separation letter, management decided she was “not a good fit” for the company after all.
She provided The BMJ with “dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings and emails” proving her concerns were valid, and according to Jackson, this was the first time she’d ever been fired in her 20-year career as a clinical research coordinator.
BMJ Report Censored
Disturbingly, social media actually censored this BMJ article and published pure falsehoods in an effort to “debunk” it. Mind you, the BMJ is one of the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world! The Facebook “fact check” was done by Lead Stories, a Facebook contractor, which claimed the BMJ “did NOT reveal disqualifying and ignored reports of flaws in Pfizer’s” trials.2
In response, The BMJ slammed the fact check, calling it “inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.”3,4,5 In an open letter6 addressed to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, The BMJ urged Zuckerberg to “act swiftly” to correct the erroneous fact check, review the processes that allowed it to occur in the first place, and “generally to reconsider your investment in and approach to fact checking overall.” As noted by The BMJ in its letter, the Lead Stories’ fact check:7
Inaccurately referred to The BMJ as a “news blog”
Failed to specify any assertions of fact that The BMJ article got wrong
Published the fact check on the Lead Stories’ website under a URL that contains the phrase “hoax-alert”
Pfizer Trial Data Raises Suspicions of Fraud
Now, with the release of Pfizer trial data8 — which they tried to withhold for 75 years — internet sleuths are finding additional problems suggestive of fraud and data manipulation. May 9, 2022, a Twitter user named Jikkyleaks posted a series of tweets questioning data from Pfizer trial sites 1231 and 4444.9
Trial site 1231, located in Argentina, somehow managed to recruit 10% of the total trial participants, 4,501 in all, and they did so in just three weeks, and without a contract research organization (CRO). CROs like the Ventavia Research Group, which Jackson worked for, provide clinical trial management services. The lead investigator for trial site 1231 is Dr. Fernando Polack,10 who also happens to be:11
A consultant for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (RBPAC) since 2017
A current adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee
An investigator for Fundación Infant,12 which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation13
The first author of Pfizer’s paper,14 “Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine,” published at the end of December 2021
As noted by Jikkyleaks, Polack “is literally the busiest doctor on the planet,” because in addition to all those roles, he also managed to single-handedly enroll 4,500 patients in three weeks, which entails filling out some 250 pages of case report forms (CRFs) for each patient. That’s about 1,125,000 pages total. (CRFs are documents used in clinical research to record standardized data from each patient, including adverse events.)
This recruitment also took place seven days a week, which is another red flag. “Weekend recruitment for a clinical trial would be odd. Staff are needed to fill out that many record forms (CRFs) and there are potential risks to the trial, so you need medical staff. It would be highly unusual,” Jikkyleaks notes.
Is Polack just a super-humanly efficient trial investigator, or could this be evidence of fraud? As noted by Steve Kirsch in the featured video and an accompanying Substack article,15 Polack is the coordinator for a network of 26 hospitals in Argentina, so perhaps it’s possible he could have recruited 57 patients per week per hospital, but it seems highly unlikely.
Questions Surround Site 4444 Data
Now, “site 4444” does not exist. It’s actually the same as site 1231. It appears site 1231 held a second enrollment session, and these were for some reason given the designation of 4444. The 4444 trial site data raise another red flag.
Site 4444 (the second enrollment session for site 1231) supposedly enrolled 1,275 patients in a single week, from September 22 through 27, 2020, and the suspicious thing about that — aside from the speed — is the fact that this was the last week that recruitment could take place to meet the data cutoff for the FDA meeting in December 2020. Jikkyleads writes:16
“My guess: they needed enough numbers of ‘positive PCR tests’ in the placebo group to show a difference between groups for that VRBPAC meeting on the 10th Dec, and they didn’t have them. So, site 4444 appeared and gave them their ‘perfect’ result. Bravo.”
“Was there fraud in the Pfizer trial? Without a doubt. The story of Maddie de Garay is a clear case of that. Brook Jackson has evidence of fraud; she has 17 lawyers working for her. If there wasn’t fraud, these lawyers wouldn’t be wasting their time.
This new data on Site 1231/4444 looks suspicious to me. It looks too good to be true. But we can’t make the call without more information. Undoubtedly, the mainstream media will not look into this, Pfizer will remain silent, and Polack will be unreachable for comment. The lack of transparency should be troubling to everyone. That is the one thing we can say for sure.”
Pfizer Documents Reveal COVID Jab Dangers
Among the tens of thousands of Pfizer documents released by the FDA so far, we now also have clear evidence of harm. For nurse educator John Campbell, featured in the video above, these documents appear to have served as a “red pill,”18 waking him up to the possibility that the jabs may indeed be far more dangerous than anyone expected, including himself.
In the video, Campbell reviews the documents listed as “5.3.6. Postmarketing Experience,” which were originally marked “confidential.” They reveal that, cumulatively, through February 28, 2021, Pfizer received 42,086 adverse event reports, including 1,223 deaths.
To have 1,223 fatalities and 42,086 reports of injury in the first three months is a significant safety signal, especially when you consider that the 1976 swine flu vaccine was pulled after only 25 deaths.
As noted by Campbell, “It would have been good to know about this at the time, wouldn’t it?” referring to the rollout of the jabs. Campbell has been fairly consistent in his support of the “safe and effective” vaccine narrative, but “This has just destroyed trust in authority,” he said.
158,000 Recorded Side Effects — A World Record?
The first really large tranche of more than 10,000 Pfizer documents was released March 1, 2022. (You can find them all on PHMPT.org.19) In this batch were no less than nine single-space pages of “adverse events of special interest,” listed in alphabetical order20 — 158,000 in all!
To see the first page, click the link below. The first side effect on this shockingly exhaustive list is a rare condition known as 1p36 deletion syndrome. This condition, caused by the deletion of DNA in chromosome 1p36, results in developmental delays, severe intellectual disability, seizures, vision problems, hearing loss, breathing problems, brain anomalies, congenital heart defects, cardiomyopathy, renal anomalies, genital malformation, metabolic problems and more.21,22
Life expectancy depends on the amount of DNA that has been deleted. This, at bare minimum, sounds like something a pregnant woman might want to know before she gets the shot.
After reviewing some of the released CRFs in the March 1 tranche, investigative journalist Sonia Elijah also discovered several problems, including the following:23
Patients entered into the “healthy population” group who were far from healthy — For example, one such “healthy” participant was a Type 2 diabetic with angina, a cardiac stent and a history of heart attack.
Serious adverse event (SAE) numbers were left blank — Ventavia site No. 1085 has a particularly large number of missing SAE numbers.
Missing barcodes for samples collected — Without those barcodes, you can’t match the sample to the participant.
Suspicious-looking SAE start and end dates — For example, the so-called “healthy” diabetic suffered a “serious” heart attack October 27, 2020. The “end” date is listed as October 28, the next day, which is odd because it was recorded as serious enough to require hospitalization.
Also, on that same day, October 28, the patient was diagnosed with pneumonia, so likely remained hospitalized. “This anomaly raises doubt as to the accuracy of these recorded dates, potentially violating ALOCA-C clinical site documentation guidelines for clinical trials,” Elijah writes.
Unblinded teams were responsible for reviewing adverse event reports for signs of COVID cases, and to review severe COVID cases — Yet in some cases they appear to have dismissed the possibility of an event being COVID-related, such as pneumonia. This despite the fact that Pfizer’s protocol (section 8.2.4) lists “enhanced COVID-19” (i.e., antibody dependent enhancement) as a potential side effect to be on the lookout for. As noted by Elijah:
“Inadvertently, this could have led to bias, as the unblinded teams would have been aware which participants were assigned the placebo and those who received the vaccine. They might have been under pressure by the sponsor for the trial to go a certain way and for events like ‘COVID Pneumonia’ to be classified simply as pneumonia.”
Impossible dating — The diabetic who suffered a heart attack followed by pneumonia (which may have been unacknowledged COVID pneumonia) died, and the date of death is listed as the day before the patient supposedly went for a “COVID ill” visit.
Clearly, it’s impossible for a dead person to attend a medical visit, so something is wrong here. The clinical investigator note states: “There cannot be a date later than date of death. Please remove data from the COVID illness visit and add cough and shortness of breath as AEs (adverse events).” “What kind of pressure was being exerted here?” Elijah asks.
Second dose administered outside the three-week protocol window.
Observation period appears to have been an automatic entry — According to the protocol, each participant was to be observed by staff for a minimum of 30 minutes.
A majority of the CRFs state 30 minutes, which raises the question: Were participants observed for adequate amounts of time, or did they simply put down “30 minutes” as an automatic entry? Why is there so little variety in the observation times? If participants were not adequately observed, their safety was put at risk, which was one of Jackson’s concerns.
Adverse events listed as “not serious” despite extended hospital stay — In one case, the participant fell and suffered facial lacerations the day after the second dose and was hospitalized for 26 days, yet the fall was not reported as serious.
Other anomalies in this particular case include listing the fall as being caused by a “fall” unrelated to the study treatment, and the facial laceration being the result of “hypotension” (low blood pressure). The SAE number is also missing for the facial lacerations.
Elijah writes, “Doubts can be raised over the credibility of this information given the fall and facial lacerations were intrinsically related. So, if facial lacerations were due to ‘hypotension’ then the fall should be due to that too.” Might low blood pressure be an effect of the experimental shot? Possibly. Especially when you consider the patient fell the day after being given the second dose.
Even more suspicious: the causality for the fall was recorded as “related” (to the treatment) on the serious adverse event form, but listed as “not related” on the adverse event CRF. A note states, “Please confirm correct causality.”
Dismissing brand new health problems as unrelated to the treatment — For example, in one case, a female participant with no medical history of impaired kidney function was diagnosed with kidney stones and severe hypokalemia, requiring hospitalization, one month after her second dose. Yet despite her having no history of kidney problems, both events were dismissed as “not related” to the study treatment and no further investigation was done.
In closing, Elijah wrote:24
“All the evidence gleaned over a limited time appears to back up whistleblower Jackson’s claims of poor trial site data management and raises questions as to how Ventavia conducted the Pfizer clinical trials.
The errors and anomalies in the CRFs also allude to her claims that the clinical research associates were not trained adequately, with many having had no prior clinical experience history. If such egregious findings are true at these sites, could they manifest at other trial sites around North America and beyond?”
Can You Trust Pfizer?
Pfizer, which was quickly given emergency use authorization (EUA) for its COVID-19 mRNA gene therapy shot, has a long list of criminal verdicts against it:
In 2002, Pfizer and two subsidiaries paid $49 million to settle civil claims that it had failed to report best prices for its drug Lipitor, as is required under the Medicaid Drug Rebate Statute.25
In 2004, a Pfizer subsidiary Warner-Lambert pleaded guilty and paid more than $430 million to settle criminal charges and civil liability from fraudulent marketing practices.26
In 2007, another subsidiary was found guilty of paying out kickbacks for formulary placement of its drugs and had to pay a fine of $34 million.27
Two years later, in 2009, Pfizer was found guilty of health care fraud and ordered to pay the largest penalty ever for this kind of offense.28 When announcing the record penalty of $2.3 billion against the drug giant, the U.S. Department of Justice said one of the charges was a felony. The other charges stemmed from false actions and false claims submitted to federal health care programs.
In 2010, the company was again ordered to pay $142 million in damages for fraudulent marketing and promoting the drug Neurontin for unapproved uses.29
Less than 10 years later, in 2018, Pfizer was again caught in an illegal kickback scheme and agreed to pay $23.8 million to resolve claims that it used a foundation as a conduit to pay the copays of Medicare patients taking three of its drugs.30
As noted in the journal Healthcare Policy in 2010,31 “Pfizer has been a ‘habitual offender,’ persistently engaging in illegal and corrupt marketing practices, bribing physicians and suppressing adverse trial results.” The article also highlights the crimes of Johnson & Johnson, another COVID jab maker.
Despite its tarnished history, we’re now expected to trust that everything Pfizer does is above-board. I don’t think so. A company that continues getting caught committing the same crimes over and over again clearly has a deeply established ethical rot within its corporate structure that fines simply have no effect over.
Has Pfizer committed fraud in its COVID jab trials as well? It sure looks that way. Time will tell whether attorneys will have enough for a conviction in the future. If fraud did take place, Pfizer can (and likely will) be held liable for the more than one million injuries its injection has caused in the U.S. alone, and we all look forward to that reckoning.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-17 03:51:422022-05-17 03:51:42Is This Why Pfizer Wanted Trial Data Buried for 75 Years?
Over the past two years of social and economic disruption, U.S. education has experienced an extraordinary transformation that can best be defined by 3 “Es”: Empowerment, Exit and Entrepreneurship.
Empowerment
Beginning in the spring of 2020, and prompted by widespread school closures and remote schooling, parents began to reclaim control of their children’s education. For some, getting a close-up look at their children’s classrooms and curriculum over Zoom was the prompt they needed to make a change. For others, they may have long pondered a different learning environment for their children but lacked the catalyst to take the leap. The education upheaval of 2020 provided that catalyst.
By summer 2020, “pandemic pods” emerged, as parents began taking their children’s education into their own hands to confront the uncertainty of fall schooling plans. These spontaneous, parent-driven learning communities brought together small groups of local children in someone’s home, often with a hired teacher or with parents taking turns facilitating a curriculum.
Exit
With most American children beginning the 2020/2021 academic year remotely, many parents exercised their newfound empowerment through exit. Some shifted their children into private schools that were more likely to reopen for in-person learning than district schools in certain locations. Others delayed early school entry for their preschoolers and kindergarteners. Many parents left schooling altogether, pulling their children out of school for independent homeschooling. The U.S. Census Bureau found that the homeschooling rate doubled from the spring of 2020 to the fall of 2020, with more than 11 percent of the U.S. school-age population being homeschooled at that time. The largest increase occurred among Black homeschooling families, who experienced a five-fold increase in homeschooling rates between the spring and fall of 2020. Black children were overrepresented in the homeschooling population in the fall of 2020 compared to the overall K-12 public school population.
Even though most district schools reopened for full-time, in-person learning in the fall of 2021, many parents stayed away. This was particularly true if they lived in a school district that adopted remote learning the previous academic year. Those districts continued to lose students, though not by quite as high a rate as the previous year, according to new data analyzed by the American Enterprise Institute.
A similar pattern was true for homeschooling. “Homeschooling numbers this year dipped from last year’s all-time high, but are still significantly above pre-pandemic levels,” the Associated Press reported last month after evaluating data provided by 18 states. It concluded that homeschooling numbers rose 63 percent in the 2020/2021 academic year, then dropped by 17 percent this school year, remaining significantly elevated.
Entrepreneurship
Recognizing mounting parent demand for a variety of learning options and schooling alternatives, education entrepreneurs began to create solutions. Some of these entrepreneurs were parents or teachers themselves who were frustrated by school closures and ongoing virus-related policies. New Jersey mother of four, Jill Perez, began teaching in public schools 20 years ago and then shifted into a student-teacher advisory role at a local university until Covid hit. She started a “pandemic pod” with several other families in 2020/2021, but demand grew for something bigger and more formal.
In the fall of 2021, Perez opened Tranquil Teachings Learning Center that allows children to attend part-time or full-time. She hired teachers, especially public school teachers who wanted more freedom and flexibility. “These teachers are loving what they’re doing in a way that they hadn’t in years,” she told me in a recent podcast interview. Her program has grown to over 50 children, and she recently purchased a building for her learning center with plans for continued expansion.
Education entrepreneurs who introduced new learning models, such as microschools, prior to 2020 found their growth hasten over the past two years. As I wrote at Forbes.com last fall, the fast-growing microschool networks, Acton Academy and Prenda Learning, saw interest in their programs soar.
Microschools are typically small, multi-age classrooms led by a facilitator or guide that often meet in family homes, re-creating a one-room schoolhouse feel with personalized learning as a top priority.
Other microschools meet in small, storefront locations in local communities, offering convenience and customization. KaiPod Learning, for example, launched its pilot microschool model in Newton, Massachusetts last year, bringing together a small groups of students into a public, commercial space with an experienced educator. Each student comes to KaiPod with whatever virtual learning curriculum the family has chosen, ranging from a tuition-free public virtual school option, to private, online options such as Sora Schools or the Socratic Experience, to a faith-based curriculum if a family chooses. This allows for maximum family autonomy in terms of curriculum decisions, while gathering groups of children together for social and enrichment activities facilitated by the KaiPod educator. Students can attend a couple of days a week or full-time.
KaiPod is expanding into more states this year, including Arizona where a child could participate in KaiPod part-time for $25/day. If the child was eligible for one of Arizona’s education savings accounts and scholarship programs, or enrolled in a virtual public school, the total cost to attend KaiPod would be minimal.
KaiPod participated in the prestigious Y Combinator startup accelerator program in Silicon Valley last year, and has already raised $1.5 million in venture capital funding. Amar Kumar, KaiPod’s founder and CEO, has found that many of the families who are joining his program are doing so because their children thrive with the personalization of online learning, while also wanting daily access to a consistent peer group and adult mentors.
Kumar thinks learning models similar to KaiPod, that bring together the best features of online learning platforms with crucial in-person, human-to-human interaction, is the future of education. “It all starts with students getting a very mastery-based content delivery, something that’s personal to them, with another human, and something that’s flexibly delivered,” Kumar told me in a recent interview. “If we can keep those touchstones or pillars in our mind, then all the innovations that come out of that are almost certainly going to be net-positive for kids.”
Over the past two years, parents have been empowered to regain control of their children’s education and explore, or create, new learning models. Many parents exited district schools in 2020 for a variety of private education options, including homeschooling, and a lot of them have decided not to return. Entrepreneurs continue to invent and innovate, building fresh K-12 education solutions that work better for families than old models of schooling. This dynamic cycle of empowerment, exit and entrepreneurship is poised to continue and accelerate, expanding education options for more families. It’s a great time to be a learner, a parent, an educator and an entrepreneur.
This article has been reprinted with permission from Forbes.com.
Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at FEE and host of the weekly LiberatED podcast. She is also the author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press, 2019), an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a regular Forbes contributor. Kerry has a B.A. in economics from Bowdoin College and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. You can sign up for her weekly newsletter on parenting and education here.
RELATED TWEET:
This is unreal. A Wisconsin school district filed a Title IX complaint against 3 middle school students, accusing them of sexual harassment for using incorrect pronouns when addressing another student. pic.twitter.com/GEEjXoEnxW
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DR. RICH SWIER, ED.D., LTC, U.S. ARMY (RET) @40:18 minute mark
Dr. Rich Swier is a “conservative with a conscience.” Rich is a 23 year Army veteran who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his years of service. Additionally, he was awarded two Bronze Stars with “V” for Valor and Heroism in ground combat, the Presidential Unit Citation, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry while serving with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. Dr. Rich now publishes the the “DrRichSwer.com report“. A daily review of news, issues and commentary!
TOPIC: OPERATION OVERLORD JUNE 7, 2022: MEGA MAGA Invades the Disinformation Governance Board
FRANK VERNUCCIO
Frank Vernuccio serves as editor-in-chief of the New York Analysis of Policy & Government, providing objective coverage of key issues facing the United States today. Frank is the co-host of the Vernuccio/Novak Report, nationally both on broadcast radio and the web at amfm247.com. FRANK also co-hosts of the “The American Political Zone,” Broadcast on the AUN-TV Network and on cable in eastern Connecticut.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-12 09:52:002022-05-12 09:52:00PODCAST: MEGA MAGA Invasion of the Disinformation Governance Board and Biden’s Stealth Disarmament
“[W]hen it comes to what we in the West have inherited all around us, this must count as one of the greatest gifts, if not the greatest gift, that any civilisation has left for those who came after. A gift not just in liberal order and beautiful cities and landscapes but in artistic achievement, cultural inheritance, and a wealth of examples of how to live.” – Douglas Murray, The War on the West.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. established the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) as part of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on April 27, 2022.
On May 4th, 2022 Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. stated “The MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that has existed in American history.” Watch:
NOW – Biden: “This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that has existed in American history.”pic.twitter.com/XX4ehVHpTb
On May 10th, 2022 White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said opposing the Supreme Court precedent set in Roe v. Wade was an example of an “ultra MAGA” position. Watch:
We have seen those who disagree with the way this country is currently governed, from parents to the 79 million make America great again (MAGA) voters, labeled as extremists. It is time that we the people, a.k.a. “super MAGA” extremists, band together and use the DHS’ Disinformation Governance Board to expose the real lies, myths, mis, dis and mal-information pushed from the school house to the White House.
It is time to tell the truth and contest the uncontested absurdities that are being taught in classrooms nationwide, by political leaders from school boards, to city and county commissions to state legislators to members of Congress, to the Executive Branch and even in the federal Judiciary.
History is repeating itself. America faced the dual threats of National Socialism and Fascism during WWII. To end the tyranny that overran Europe General Dwight David Eisenhower executed his Operation Overlord plan to defeat the Nazis and Fascists. Today, we the MAGAs must create our own Operation Overlord plan to defeat those Fascisti in America who are determined to take away our Constitutional Republican form of government.
We must launch another Operation Overlord plan on June 7th, 2022 to take America back again. To keep America great. To make America great again.
United and together we band of brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, men and women must save America.
Across the country, in our communities, we share everyday moments with our neighbors, family, coworkers, and friends. We go to work or school, the grocery store, or the gas station.
It’s easy to overlook these routine moments, but as you’re going about your day, if you see somethingthat doesn’t seem quite right,say something.
By being alert and reporting suspicious activity to your local law enforcement, you can protect your family, neighbors, and community.
It is time, if you see somethingthat doesn’t seem quite right,say something!
It is incumbent upon we the people to report suspicious activity to the DHS Disinformation Governance Board (DHS-DGB). At the moment that the DHS-DGB launches its website and establishes a reporting procedure, we the people are compelled to report on those we suspect are spread mis, dis and mal-information. Not to do so will only allow mis, dis and mal-information to continue.
We the people must flood the website with documented examples of mis, dis and mal-information being spread by teachers, government officials, elected officials, other citizens, public and private organizations, corporations, the legacy media, social media and members of all political parties.
Mis, dis and mal-information cannot survive when telling the truth is the national standard.
Here is a short list of mis, dis and mal-information that citizens must report to the DHS-DGB:
The U.S. Constitution is and the Founding Fathers were racists as outline in Critical Race Theory (CRT). Any use of CRT from the public school classroom to the halls of Congress must be reported as a lie and myth.
Those who promote, teach, spread to neighbors, family, coworkers, and friends the myth that there are more than two genders (male XX and female XY).
Those that further the myth that the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is the “most extreme political organization that has existed in American history.”
That more government control of our lives (Fascism/Communism) is better than a free market system where one’s labors are rewarded.
Public schools teaching students what to think rather than giving them the skills to think for themselves.
This who said that the 2020 election was the “most secure in American history.”
Government at the local, state and federal level that pass laws to reward failure (welfare), rather than reward individual success (less regulation and taxation).
Those that write, state, promote or pass a law promoting abortion and those who say or report that abortion is a Constitutional right.
Those scientists, politicians, teachers, organizations and corporations that say, promote, advance the idea that mankind can control the climate and the weather, a.k.a. anthropogenic climate change.
Those who corporations, doctors, media and social media personalities who promoted taking the Covid vaccine and supporting government mandates to get vaxxed.
Those corporations, individuals, doctors, government officials and media and social media outlets that hid the truth about the negative affects of getting vaxxed.
Those who via nebulous and ill defined “community standards” censor free speech, which is guaranteed under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Those who believe in government and not God.
Every American who loves liberty will join this effort to report mis, dis and mal-information to the DHS-DGB. If they respond then share their reply on social media and with friends. If they fail to respond then tell everyone you know that they aren’t doing their job. If you find that the DHS-DGB is a source of mis, dis or mal-information it may be time to take legal action and have the courts weigh in on the Constitutionality of the DHS-DGB.
The Bottom Line
President John F. Kennedy said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”
Ayn Rand warned, “The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.”
Today in America and globally we are facing uncontested absurdities (myths) that are no public policy.
It is time to fight back. It is time to send the truth to the DHS-DGB.
This is war. They have started it, just like the Nazis and Fascisti did in 1933. It is time for a full frontal attack on mis, dis and mal-information. It is time for Operation Overlord 2022 to tell the truth and take back our nation.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-11 07:51:392022-05-11 07:51:39OPERATION OVERLORD JUNE 7, 2022: MAGA Invades the Disinformation Governance Board
The average price of gasoline in the U.S. shot up to a new all-time record Tuesday, less than two months after President Joe Biden guaranteed lower prices.
The average pump price nationwide surged to $4.37 per gallon early Tuesday, the highest since March, according to AAA data. In February, Biden said he would “work like the devil” to bring prices down and in March, he promised gasoline would decline between 10-35 cents per gallon after he announced a historic release of U.S. emergency oil stocks.
President Joe Biden ordered a 50-million-barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve release in November, a 30-million-barrel release on March 1 and a 180-million-barrel release on March 31 to combat rising gasoline prices. Energy prices worldwide have skyrocketed in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“There’s little, if any, good news about fuel prices heading into summer, and the problem could become worse should we see an above average hurricane season, which could knock out refinery capacity at a time we badly need it as refined product inventories continue to plummet,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at research firm GasBuddy, said in a statement Tuesday.
Biden has also attempted to lower prices at the pump by temporarily scrapping an environmental regulation prohibiting the sale of gasoline with 15% ethanol. Experts and meat industry groups slammed the rule change, saying it would drive already-high food costs up.
But the Biden administration has dragged its feet on opening up domestic oil and gas drilling in light of surging consumer prices. The Department of the Interior has yet to hold a single onshore lease sale and chose not to appeal a federal judge’s ruling that a 2021 offshore lease sale was illegal.
“There is no doubt the White House is hoping that Americans simply become numb to yet another disastrous result of their energy failures, but the pain at the pump is too real and everyone intrinsically understands that Joe Biden is to blame,” Power the Future executive director Daniel Turner said in a statement.
“President Biden is now a two-time record holder for the highest gas prices, the most oil drained from the strategic reserve and re-injecting the term ‘inflation’ back into the national lexicon for the first time since the 1970s. This type of failure doesn’t happen by accident,” he continued. “The President’s green ideology is a man-made disaster and we’re all paying the price.”
Meanwhile, total oil production in the U.S. has declined for three consecutive months even as administration officials have argued it is at historic highs.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-10 18:52:572022-05-10 18:52:57Fuel Prices Hit Record Highs After Biden Promised To Lower Costs
“Teachers retain their rights as citizens in a public school environment, but those rights are altered. Public school teachers enjoy, for example, the right to freedom of expression, but they cannot promote a personal political agenda in the classroom. Teachers also enjoy freedom of association, privacy, and a limited right to academic freedom. Finally, teachers not only need to be aware of how the law affects them, they also need to know how the law impacts their students.” – Center for the Advancement of Digital Scholarship
There has been growing concern about what is happening in public school classrooms nationwide. Parents are beginning to take note of what subjects are being taught in public schools, what books are being used by classroom teachers, what books are in school libraries and media centers and what clubs are being promoted by school administrators.
There is also a growing concern that there is a lot of mis, dis and mal-information being promoted in public schools. The most recent examples include:
A transgender teacher in Massachusetts told kindergartners and first- and second graders that doctors only guess whether new-born babies are boys or girls and, sometimes, they’re wrong.
The Maryland Department of Education is telling schools to teach alternative LGBT family structures and gender fluidity to preschoolers.
A suburban school official in Kansas City claimed kindergartners are identifying as transgender and should be taught all about it.
Schools in Evanston, Illinois are teaching preschoolers to break the ‘gender binary’ established by ‘white colonizers’, to celebrate the transgender flag, and to experiment with made-up pronouns like ‘ze’ and ‘zir’.
There is a growing concern that dis, mis and mal-information has creeped into public school classrooms. So much so that the Florida legislature passed a bill preventing mis, dis and mal-information in elementary schools.
Parents, grandparents and interested organizations are now focused on having children in public schools be taught only the critical personal skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. Only a solid foundation in reading, writing and cyphering will make our next generation successful citizens. However, Florida’s Department of Education recently removed 41% of mathematics books because they contained mis, dis and mal-information.
It would seem obvious that it is not the role of school teachers, or librarians, to:
Lie to students by teaching dis, mis or mal-information.
Use textbooks that promote an ideology versus the truth.
Have books in libraries and media centers that are pornographic, not age appropriate or promote homosexuality.
Push a particular political position in the classroom.
Reject science in favor of global warming disinformation in the classroom.
Fail to teach a child to read, write and cypher.
We decided to look at what the rules are for teachers to not teach dis, mis or mal-information in the classroom because Amber Mercier a gay teacher in Florida said she is willing to break the law and keep hiding sexual information about students from their parents even if she loses her job and gets thrown in jail for it.
We are concerned because PJMedia reported, “There is a disturbing trend of public schools actively keeping secrets from parents, which has led to suicide attempts and harm to children.”
The only thing we found was in Chapter II – Being a School Employee of the handbook:
Political Activities
Florida Statute 104.31 and School Board policies 2.51 and 6.34 govern political activities of school public employees. Some things to remember are:
(1) Political posters shall not be displayed in schools (2) Political literature shall not be distributed in schools or on school property (3) Solicitations for votes or contributions shall not be conducted in schools or on school property (4) Students shall not be required to distribute campaign literature (5) Employees shall refrain from participation in partisan politics on school property during the hours school is in session
School Board employees shall not solicit support of any political candidate, partisan or nonpartisan, during regular work hours. A School Board employee who offers him/herself as a candidate for public office shall notify the Superintendent immediately upon qualifying for election. He/she shall conduct his/her campaign so as not to interfere with his/her responsibilities. Personal leave without pay may be taken during the campaign period.
We noted that the Sarasota County School Board uses the word “refrain.” The word refrain is defined as “stop oneself from doing something.” It implies that teachers, librarians and school administrators self-govern themselves when it comes to promoting mis, dis and mal-information.
The following questions came to mind:
Who is ensuring teachers, school staff and administrations are refraining?
Equity Procedures for Employees/Applicants/Students
The Sarasota County School Board prohibits discrimination in its educational programs, services or activities, or employment conditions or practices on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnic or national origin, genetic information, marital status, qualified disability defined under the ADAAA, or on the basis of the use of a language other than English, except as provided by law. The Sarasota County School Board also ensures equal access to school facilities for the Boy Scouts of America and other patriotic youth groups. Any person who believes he or she has experienced any such prohibited discrimination may file a complaint with the district Equity Coordinator Al Harayda by calling (941) 927-9000, ext. 31217, or writing him at 1960 Landings Blvd., Sarasota, Florida 34231.
Equity coordinator? Really? When we asked Craig Maniglia, Director Communications and Community Relations, how many non-binary, cis-gender, gender-queer, lesbian, gay or bisexual teachers and staff in the district he wrote, “Dr. Swier, We do not track that information.” Hmmmmm.
Contacting the Superintendent of Sarasota County Schools
We decided to contact Dr. Brennan Asplen the Superintendent of Sarasota County Public Schools. His office referred us to Craig Maniglia, Director Communications and Community Relations. We both called and emailed Mr. Maniglia our questions.
Here are the questions we asked the Sarasota County School District to answer:
What action is taken if these individuals don’t refrain?
What is the policy on teachers lying to their students?
What is the policy on teachers teaching a political agenda in the classroom?
What is the policy on librarians and teachers obtaining recommending or using pornographic materials or age inappropriate material in libraries and the classroom?
What is the policy on librarians ordering pornographic or age inappropriate materials?
What is the policy on suspending or firing teachers for doing any of the above?
What is the policy of suspending or firing librarians for doing any of the above?
What is the role of the school principal and superintendent in supervising these activities and where can I find them in School policies?
Who specifically is responsible for policing the use of age inappropriate or pornographic materials in schools and libraries?
Has the School Board or any school hosted an “Anti-Racism Fight Club” presentation by Doyin Richards? Does the district have in its classrooms or libraries the “Fist Book“?
What after school clubs approved by staff, are promoting political agendas?
We also asked Mr. Maniglia to provide references to School Board policies and documents to address each of these questions.
We are waiting for Mr. Maniglia’s replies and when we have them we will update this column.
Parents are challenging books in school libraries and classrooms in record numbers. They’re objecting to sexually explicit content, profanity, anti-police messaging, and other left-wing indoctrination found in schoolbooks. The most-challenged books are “Gender Queer” and “Lawn Boy”, the latter a gay story normalizing sex acts between 4th-graders which has been criticized for encouraging pedophilia.
Understand that mis, dis and mal-information is propaganda writ large. Those teaching, promoting or ignoring this do so at the risk of harming children. It is child abuse!
We hope that the Sarasota County School Board, the Superintendent, principals, assistant principals, district staff all take notice.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-07 16:53:002022-05-07 16:53:00Can the Sarasota County School Board fire staff for teaching students dis/mis/mal-information?
California Bill Seeks to Muzzle Doctors Who Tell the Truth About COVID
California bill is now threatening to strip doctors of their medical licenses if they express medical views that the state does not agree with. California Assembly Bill 2098 designates “the dissemination or promotion of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or ‘COVID-19,’ as unprofessional conduct” warranting “disciplinary action” that could result in the loss of their medical license
Misinformation related to SARS-CoV-2 includes “false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.” But as far as what might constitute “misinformation” or “disinformation” is unclear and basically left open for interpretation by the state
Doctors have an ethical obligation to treat each patient as an individual, and to ensure each patient receives the safest and best care. Bill 2098 will turn doctors into government agents, leaving no one to advocate for patients’ health
California has also introduced six other bills seeking to enshrine tyranny into law, including bills to criminalize “amplification of harmful content,” create a centralized vaccination registry, strip funding from law enforcement that refuses to follow public health orders, mandate COVID jabs for school children, authorize minors to consent to vaccination, and require school districts to conduct routine COVID testing
If you live in California, please review these bills and VOTE NO
One of the most stunning parts of this pandemic has been the denial of basic science, and one of the most shocking developments from that has been the attack on medical doctors who try to set the record straight.
As reported by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — professor of health policy at Stanford, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for focused protection of the most vulnerable1 — a California bill is now threatening to strip doctors of their medical licenses if they express medical views that the state does not agree with.2
Bhattacharya’s Personal Battle
Bhattacharya has first-hand experience with this kind of witch hunt. He was one of the first to investigate the prevalence of COVID-19 in 2020, and found that by April, the infection was already too prevalent for lockdowns to have any possibility of stopping the spread.
Bhattacharya has called the COVID-19 lockdowns the “biggest public health mistake ever made,”3 stressing that the harms caused have been “absolutely catastrophically devastating,” especially for children and the working class, worldwide.4
After Bhattacharya co-sponsored the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and his former boss, now retired National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, colluded behind the scenes to quash the declaration from day 1.5
To that end, they set out to smear and destroy the reputations of Bhattacharya and the other coauthors of the declaration. In one email, Collins referred to the three highly credentialed and respected scientists as “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a press “takedown” of the trio.6,7,8,9 I detailed this treachery in “Authors of Barrington Declaration Speak Out.”
“Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google followed suit, suppressing our ideas, falsely deeming them ‘misinformation,’” Bhattacharya writes.10“I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to ‘let the virus rip,’ when I had proposed nothing of the sort. I was the target of racist attacks and death threats.
Despite the false, defamatory and sometimes frightening attacks, we stood firm. And today many of our positions have been amply vindicated. Yet the soul searching this episode should have caused among public health officials has largely failed to occur. Instead, the lesson seems to be: Dissent at your own risk.
I do not practice medicine — I am a professor specializing in epidemiology and health policy at Stanford Medical School. But many friends who do practice have told me how they have censored their thoughts about COVID lockdowns, vaccines, and recommended treatment to avoid the mob …
This forced scientific groupthink — and the fear and self-censorship they produce — are bad enough. So far, though, the risk has been social and reputational. Now it could become literally career-ending.”
Do You Want Your Doctor To Be Muzzled by the State?
California Assembly Bill 209811 — introduced by Assemblyman Evan Low, a Silicon Valley Democrat, and coauthored by Assembly members Aguiar-Curry, Akilah Weber and Wicks, and Sens. Pan and Wiener — designates “the dissemination or promotion of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or ‘COVID-19,’ as unprofessional conduct” warranting “disciplinary action” that could result in the loss of their medical license.
Misinformation or disinformation related to SARS-CoV-2 includes “false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.” But as far as what might constitute “misinformation” or “disinformation” is unclear and basically left open for interpretation — by the state. As noted by Bhattacharya:12
“Doctors, fearing loss of their livelihoods, will need to hew closely to the government line on COVID science and policy, even if that line does not track the scientific evidence.
After all, until recently, top government science bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci claimed that the idea that COVID came from a Wuhan laboratory was a conspiracy theory, rather than a valid hypothesis that should be open to discussion. The government’s track record on discerning COVID truths is poor.
The bill claims that the spread of misinformation by physicians about the COVID vaccines ‘has weakened public confidence and placed lives at serious risk.’ But how significant is this problem in reality? Over 83% of Californians over the age of 50 are fully vaccinated (including the booster) …
What is abundantly clear is that this bill represents a chilling interference with the practice of medicine. The bill itself is full of misinformation and a demonstration of what a disaster it would be to have the legislature dictate the practice of medicine.”
The Shanghai Model
We don’t have to guess at what life might look like if this and other bills like it are implemented, Bhattacharya warns. The drama currently playing out in Shanghai offers a clear look into what can happen when public health is dictated by the state rather than by qualified medical professionals rooted in sound science.
“Shanghai is the model for the terrifying dangers of giving dictatorial powers to public health officials,” Bhattacharya writes.13“The harrowing situation unfolding there is a testament to the folly of a virus containment strategy that relies on lockdown.
For two weeks, the Chinese government has locked nearly 25 million people in their homes, forcibly separated children from their parents, killed family pets, and limited access to food and life-saving medical care — all to no avail. COVID cases are still rising, yet the delusion of suppressing COVID persists.
In America, many of our officials still have not abandoned their delusions about COVID and the exercise of power this crisis has allowed. As the Shanghai debacle demonstrates, of all the many terrible consequences of our public health response to COVID, the stifling of dissenting scientific viewpoints by the state might be the most dangerous.”
The Science Deniers Are in Power
As stressed by Bhattacharya, the California bill includes a number falsehoods and fails to acknowledge basic science, starting with natural immunity. High-quality studies have repeatedly shown that natural immunity is equivalent or superior to the COVID shots. Were this bill to pass, a California doctor could lose his license for taking a patient’s COVID history into account when recommending the shot.
It also negates doctors’ ability to prescribe off-label drugs for the treatment of COVID, even though this has been a common and uncontroversial medical practice for many decades. It’s not uncommon for a drug intended for one condition to be used off-label for another. But for some reason, when it comes to COVID, this practice is now deemed hazardous and unprofessional.
The bill also falsely asserts that the “safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines have been confirmed through evaluation by the federal Food and Drug Administration.” Anyone who has followed this circus over the past year realizes that the FDA has completely ignored loud and clear warning bells showing the shots are far from safe and nowhere near as effective as initially claimed.
The bill also ignores the fact that the safety depends on the individual patient’s medical history and current state of health. “For example, there is an elevated risk of myocarditis in young men taking the vaccine, especially with the booster,” Bhattacharya notes.14
Doctors have an ethical obligation to treat each patient as an individual, and to ensure each patient receives the safest and best care. Bill 2098 will turn doctors into government agents, leaving no one to advocate for patients’ health.
“The false medical consensus enforced by AB 2098 will lead doctors to censor themselves to avoid government sanction. And it will be their patients, above all, who will be harmed by their silence,” Bhattacharya warns.
Californians, Vote NO on COVID Tyranny Bills
California Bill 2098 isn’t the only bill seeking to enshrine tyranny into law. Other pending California bills include:15
Senate Bill 1390,16 introduced by Sen. Pan, which seeks to criminalize “amplification of harmful content” on social media platforms.
Assembly Bill 1797,17 introduced by Assembly member Weber, which calls for the creation of a centralized vaccination registry.
Senate Bill 1464,18 introduced by Pan, which would strip state funding from any law enforcement agency that “publicly announces that they will not follow, or adopts a policy stating that they will not follow, a public health order.”
Those funds would instead be reallocated to the county public health department. Essentially, this bill would coerce sheriffs and police officers to violate their conscience or the law, or both, in the name of “public health policy.”
Senate Bill 871,19 introduced by Pan, which would mandate all school children, ages 5 and older, be “fully vaccinated” against COVID-19. The bill would also repeal exceptions to mandatory hepatitis B vaccination to attend school, and would remove the personal belief exemption against vaccination.
Senate Bill 866,20 introduced by Wiener and Pan, which would authorize minors, 12 years and older, to consent to vaccines without the consent of a parent or guardian.
Senate Bill 1479,21 introduced by Pan, which would expand “contagious, infectious, or communicable disease testing and other public health mitigation efforts to include prekindergarten, onsite after school programs, and child care centers,” and require each school district, county office of education, and charter school to create a COVID-19 testing plan, and report testing data to State Department of Public Health.
If you live in California, please review these bills and VOTE NO. In a Substack article, Margaret Anna Alice, offers the following guidance to Californians:22
“If you are a resident of California, please consider taking the additional step of contacting your respective senators and assembly members in addition to filling out the online portal. See Californians for Medical Freedom for step-by-step instructions on how to contact your local legislators as well as what to say if you decide to call (which is recommended).
The PERK website is also a very helpful way to track the hearing dates and status of these bills. In the comments, Donald Tipon has provided additional links for opposing AB2098 and AB1797 from A Voice for Choice Advocacy.”
Front Groups Marshal the Ignorant
Regulating the medical views a doctor can and cannot have is dangerous in the extreme, and hopefully the Californians who are left to vote in that state will quash such efforts. On the national level, we must also stay vigilant against similar legislative proposals, and push back against phony front groups that promote this kind of medical tyranny.
This includes the No License for Disinformation23 (NLFD) group, which promotes the false information disseminated by the dark-money group known as the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
As most now know, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a medical doctor in his own right, has been the primary challenger of Fauci’s lies, and the NLFD has been instructing individuals to report him to the Kentucky Medical Board, with the aim of getting his medical license revoked.24
Just who are the NLFD?25 In November 2021, I wrote about the NLFD, pointing out that the bottom of their website declared, “Created & Developed by EverydayAmericanJoe.”26 At the time, I took a screenshot of it, in case they’d wise up and change it. Good thing, because that notice has since been deleted.
And, no wonder, because it leads right back to the Biden White House. EverydayAmericanJoe, created by a marketing strategist named Chris Gilroy, was a website dedicated to supporting Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. (That website has since been disabled.27)
According to his LinkedIn profile,28 Gilroy created EverydayAmericanJoe.com — “the largest Biden-Harris grassroots website online” — as a freelance senior marketing consultant and designer for the Biden campaign. Since 2007, he’s been the president of The Microtechs LLC, an online marketing, web development and digital advertising firm that produces custom websites and apps “that our clients can manage themselves.”
Aside from the EverydayAmericanJoe clue, there’s no indication of who is actually running the NLFD. It simply claims to be a “nonpartisan grassroots coalition of Americans” whose goal it is to get state medical boards to “protect the public” from medical professionals “who spread medical disinformation.” In all likelihood, the NLFD is run by a coalition of one — Gilroy himself — who is far from nonpartisan.
Not surprisingly, the NLFD has promoted and relied on the CCDH’s fabricated “Disinformation Dozen” report, which has even been denounced as biased and flawed in the extreme by Facebook.29
It’s quite clear that the CCDH exists to fabricate “evidence” that is then used to destroy the opposition in order to control the information, and the NLFD uses the CCDH’s fabrications as justification to suppress First Amendment rights.30 Indeed, Biden himself has publicly promoted and relied on this dark money CCDH report.31
The point of all this is that the censorship is being authorized and directed from the very highest level of our government, and there’s only one reason for that. Democracy flourishes under free speech and dies under censorship, and anyone who claims differently has an ulterior motive for trying to confuse these simple truths.
In my view, the war against “misinformation” and “disinformation” is nothing less than a covert war against the citizens of planet Earth. It’s an attempt to seize power by controlling what people can know, and a number of high-profile world leaders, past and present, have shown their true colors.
Among them, former president Obama, who in April 2022 gave lectures at the University of Chicago and Stanford, arguing for the regulation of information — what people can and cannot view on social media and elsewhere — “to protect democracy.”32
However, as noted by nonresident senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), Mark Jamison, “Such controls have done the opposite throughout history and would this time too.”33
An Open War on the Public
We find ourselves in a situation where asking valid questions about public health measures are equated to acts of domestic terrorism. It’s unbelievable, yet here we are. Over the past two years, the rhetoric used against those who question the sanity of using unscientific pandemic countermeasures, such as face masks and lockdowns, or share data showing that COVID-19 gene therapies are really bad public health policy, has become increasingly violent.
Dr. Peter Hotez, a virologist who for years has been at the forefront of promoting vaccines of all kinds, for example, has publicly called for cyberwarfare assaults on American citizens who disagree with official COVID narratives, and this vile rhetoric was published in the prestigious science journal Nature, of all places.34
Doctors and nurses are now facing the untenable position of having to choose between doing right by their patients and toeing the line of totalitarianism. This simply cannot go on. It’s profoundly unhealthy and dangerous in a multitude of ways.
While frustrating and intimidating, we must all be relentless in our pursuit and sharing of the truth, and we must relentlessly demand our elected representatives stand up for freedom of speech and other Constitutional rights, including, and especially, the rights of medical doctors to express their medical opinions.
Sources and References
EDITORS NOTE: This MERCOLA column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-05 16:52:412022-05-05 16:52:41CALIFORNIA: New Witch Hunt to Strip Honest Doctors of Their Licenses
Congressman Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7th District in the House of Representatives from 1995-2003. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and is Chairman of Liberty Guard a non-profit, pro-liberty organization. He also heads the Law Enforcement Education Foundation and a consulting firm, Liberty Strategies.
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ELLE REYNOLDS
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. Elle has reported on topics ranging from churches responding to the coronavirus pandemic to college athletes’ legal battles with transgender competitors, Writing breaking news stories covering the 2020 campaign, China, the Trump administration, Big Tech, the George Floyd protests, Hollywood, and the media. Elle also handled the verified Federalist Instagram account, which has nearly doubled in followers from less than 9,000 to 14,000. And while Elle Interned for the Office of Politics Affairs at The White House she briefed Special Assistants to the President on national and statewide topics which affected policy and the Administration’s platform.
TOPIC: The SCOTUS Abortion Decision Leak Is What Actual Treasonous Insurrection Looks Like!
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-04 14:51:352022-05-04 14:51:35PODCAST: The SCOTUS Abortion Decision Leak Is What Actual Treasonous Insurrection Looks Like!
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told congressional staffers that the agency’s Disinformation Governance Board lacks a charter and has yet to hold its first meeting.
The board has come under scrutiny, with members of Congress fearing that it could infringe on the rights of American citizens.
Conservatives, including Republican lawmakers, are also concerned with DHS’ pick to lead the board, Nina Jankowicz, who has spread misinformation herself.
One congressional staffer described the board as “half-baked,” adding that DHS seemed to have gotten “ahead of themselves when they mentioned this in the secretary’s testimony.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told congressional staffers Friday that its Disinformation Governance Board had yet to hold its first meeting, according to two congressional staffers familiar with the discussion, who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
One congressional staffer told the DCNF that the board appeared “half-baked” and said DHS seemed to have gotten “ahead of themselves when they mentioned it in the secretary’s testimony.” DHS also admitted the board lacks a charter during Friday’s call, the two congressional staffers told the DCNF.
The congressional staffers elected to speak on background, with one telling us they don’t want to compromise their ability to work with DHS, and the other telling us their office only confirms details of this nature on background.
The board is new under the Biden administration, according to the aforementioned staffer who said DHS doesn’t “really have direction for this board.” The staffer also said Nina Jankowicz, the head of the board, kept referring to the board as “visionary,” adding that it appeared that there’s “no concrete structure to it yet.”
Jankowicz has recently come under scrutiny for having a history of promoting misinformation, such as discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop story
The staffer said they requested a copy of the charter and that DHS agreed to share it when it’s ready. The board is also looking to add two co-chairs to work under Jankowicz, according to the staffer.
The other staffer told the DCNF that they were told the board hasn’t met yet and hasn’t approved a charter.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told lawmakers on April 27 that the agency had formed the board to tackle misinformation and disinformation targeting minority communities.
Cat’s out of the bag: here’s what I’ve been up to the past two months, and why I’ve been a bit quiet on here.
Mayorkas said Sunday that Jankowicz is “eminently qualified,” adding that the board will only monitor foreign misinformation and disinformation and not American citizens.
On Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the board is “a continuation of work that began at the Department of Homeland Security in 2020, under former President Trump,” adding, “For anyone who’s critical of it, I didn’t hear them being critical of the work under the former president, which is interesting to note contextually.”
A DHS spokesperson didn’t address whether the board was newly formed or what was discussed on the call, telling the DCNF that DHS agencies have long worked to tackle “disinformation.”
DHS has been working for years to address disinformation, the spokesperson said, pledging DHS’ commitment to upholding “Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy.”
The board doesn’t have any operational authority or capability, the spokesperson added.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-04 14:51:322022-05-04 14:51:32‘Half-Baked’: DHS Admitted Some Stunning Details About Its ‘Disinformation’ Board To Congress
“One point two million people are undetained, free, roaming about the country,” Gaetz began. “They’ve gone before a judge. A judge has issued a final order of removal. How many ICE agents do you need to deport them?”
Mayorkas responded, “Congressman, I think what we need is legislation to fix a broken immigration system—”
ICE, however, does not rely on Congress to carry out deportations of those who have gone before a judge and received final orders of removal, Gaetz noted, asking again if Mayorkas planned to remove the 1.2 million.
Mayorkas dodged the question and instead indicated “resources” were impeding his ability to carry out deportations.
Gaetz then asked, “How much money do you need to deport all of them? How much money? How many agents to deport the 1.2 million who a judge has said have no right to be here?”
Mayorkas replied, “Congressman, there are a number of questions that your question raises with respect to whether all of those individuals actually have been given due process—”
Gaetz interrupted the border chief to correct him, saying, “No, no, no, they have. These are the people who have had their due process, ok? And here’s the point. You have no plan to remove them. You don’t know how many ICE agents it would take and you don’t know how much money it would take because you actually don’t want to remove them.”
Read more of the exchange below:
GAETZ: So, do you think that it just might be the case that one reason that we will encounter the highest number of illegal immigrations in our nation’s history this month and next month is because everybody knows that even if they come here, even if they go through the removal procedures, even if a judge issues a final order, you [Mayorkas] still think that there might be more due process? And you have no plan to remove them, and when I ask you what the plan is, you say, “Oh, well, resources.”
GAETZ: I go back to my first question, how many ICE agents to remove the 1.2 million?
MAYORKAS: I’d be pleased to provide you with the resourcing data subsequent to this hearing, if I may—”
GAETZ: I think it’s telling that you’ve got plans for pronouns and you’ve got plans for misinformation, but when it comes to the plan to remove the people that have had due process, you don’t have one at all.
[ … ]
MAYORKAS: So if I could return to data because I want to make sure that you have accurate information—
GAETZ: Everyone knows that you have more people coming in than ever and you’re removing fewer people than ever and it’s because you have no plan and because it’s on purpose. See, I don’t buy the theory that you don’t know how to do this. I think you’re actually a highly competent dude. But the reality is your plan is to bring these people in and to send the message to the smugglers and the criminals that they will never have to leave.
Gaetz concluded, “I think we ought to use the best tools in the country to find these folks, round them up like they were at the Capitol on January 6, and deport every last one of them.”
Addressing the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C. in January 2022, Mayorkas proudly boasted that the Biden Administration had issued orders preventing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency from arresting and deporting most illegal aliens residing in the United States: “On September 30 of this past year … I issued new immigration enforcement guidelines. And in those guidelines, I articulated what I think is a very important principle. That we will not dedicate our limited enforcement resources to apprehend individuals who have been here in this country for many years who have been contributing members of our communities. Unlawful presence in the United States, alone, will not be a basis for immigration enforcement action … it is a matter of justice and equity as well.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz confronted Biden DHS chief Mayorkas about the 1.2 million illegal aliens living freely in America who have been ordered deported. “You actually don’t want to remove them.” https://t.co/bWkwepf7kr
The revelation that the government had created a new board to fight “disinformation” prompted a slew of Nineteen Eighty-Four comparisons.
On Wednesday news broke that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—a department that didn’t exist 20 years ago but today spends $52 billion annually—had created a new “Disinformation Governance Board.”
The news comes just days after Twitter accepted Tesla-founder Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, a move that critics of the deal claimed could unleash disinformation. (Musk has been vocal in his support for free speech.)
DHS declined to be interviewed by the Associated Press, but issued a statement after news broke of the development.
“The spread of disinformation can affect border security, Americans’ safety during disasters, and public trust in our democratic institutions,” DHS said.
A Ministry of Truth?
Perhaps naturally, the revelation that the government had created a new board to fight “disinformation” prompted a slew of Nineteen Eighty-Four comparisons, especially since it came so soon after Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
“Elon Musk buys Twitter to save free speech and days later President Biden announces a Ministry of Truth,” one observer quipped. “It’s like we’re living through an Ayn Rand/George Orwell novel mash-up.”
I know the “1984” references are a little stale but the government creating an actual Ministry of Truth is a little too on the nose for me.
Biden’s new Disinformation Governance Board is a telling replacement for the corporate censorship system. https://t.co/enjVzUqirS Now Clinton is looking to the Europeans to censor social media while Biden is turning to a type of Ministry of Truth. https://t.co/oxcOiJes3U
For those unfamiliar with George Orwell’s masterpiece, the Ministry of Truth is the propaganda and censorship department of Oceania, the fictional setting for Orwell’s dystopia.
Known as Minitrue in Newspeak, the name Ministry of Truth is a misnomer. Like all the departments in 1984, the name reflects the opposite of what the government actually does.
The book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, learns this in the second half of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.
Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth, realizes the Ministry of Truth is not the least bit interested in truth. Its use of propaganda is overt, as is its use of banal slogans designed to confuse and humiliate the people of Oceania.
On the exterior of the Ministry of Truth building are three party slogans: “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” Inside the structure, problematic documents are incinerated, dropped down a Memory Hole where they are conveniently forgotten.
1984: ‘Based Chiefly on Communism’
One might be tempted to laugh off comparisons between a “Disinformation Governance Board” and the propaganda department in Orwell’s classic work. After all, we’re talking about a novel.
This would be mistaken, however.
For starters, Nineteen Eighty-Four is indeed a fictional work. But it was inspired by the authoritarian regimes and ideologies Orwell witnessed firsthand. A one-time socialist who observed the fighting in the Spanish Civil War—a conflict between fascists and communists—Orwell became a budding libertarian who became disillusioned with collectivism.
In fact, Orwell makes it clear that Nineteen Eighty-Four was inspired by communism.
“[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism,” he told Sidney Sheldon, who purchased the stage rights to the book; “but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.”
Stalin’s regime was not the only totalitarian regime to utilize propaganda and censorship, of course. Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, is perhaps the single most infamous wielder of propaganda in human history. And of course the Nazis were infamous for their book burning.
The Chinese Communist Party uses propaganda and censorship to such great effect today that scholars say it’s difficult to even know what’s actually happened in the country over the last century.
“At a time when censorship is a part of everyday experience of the Chinese people, even few historians actually know all the history of the party,” historian Sun Peidong recently toldThe Guardian. “It’s hard to get hold of party history materials as a history researcher nowadays. It’s even harder to know what the past 100 years has really been about.”
This is why Americans should be concerned that the US government—nearly two and a half centuries after it was founded—is suddenly in the business of rooting out “disinformation.”
Humans will always disagree over what is true. Descartes’ first principle—”cogito, ergo sum” posited that the only thing we can know with total certainty is “I think, therefore I am.”
It doesn’t take a philosopher to see that a lot of stuff one finds online is drek, so it shouldn’t surprise us that “misinformation”—in various forms and to various degrees—is rampant online.
But history shows that no one wields misinformation and propaganda with greater effectiveness—or at greatest cost—than government.
Orwell understood this. Americans would do well to heed his warning.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
RELATED TWEET:
Will Joe Biden’s “disinformation” czar investigate Secretary Mayorkas’s claim that the border is secure?
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-29 18:52:212022-04-29 18:52:21“Ministry of Truth” Trends on Twitter After Government Unveils New “Disinformation Governance Board”
Self-directed education, grounded in play, is most beneficial for youth learning and development.
More families may be flocking to homeschooling and other schooling alternatives over the past two years, but Peter Gray has been urging families to flee coercive schooling since long before the pandemic began. The Boston College psychology professor wrote in his 2013 book Free To Learn: “The more oppressive the school system becomes, the more it is driving people away, and that is good.”
Gray joins me on this week’s episode of the LiberatED Podcast to talk about the harms of forced schooling and why self-directed education, grounded in play, is most beneficial for youth learning and development.
In our conversation, Gray explains that standard schooling today is a key factor in the continuous rise in rates of childhood and adolescent anxiety, depression, and suicide. Its imposed, one-size-fits all curriculum, reliance on reward and punishment as external motivators, and dismissal of natural childhood curiosity and creativity erode learners’ powerful drives for learning and discovery. Stripped of these drives, and increasingly deprived of opportunities to play, explore, and pursue individual interests outside of school without the constant hovering of adults, children and adolescents become more melancholic and morose.
“We adults are constraining children’s lives, in school and out of school,” says Gray in our podcast discussion. “School has become a toxic place for children, and we refuse to say that publicly. The research can show it but it almost never gets picked up in the popular press,” he adds.
Our discussion digs deeper into Gray’s research on the link between standard schooling and skyrocketing rates of diagnoses of ADHD, which Gray asserts is essentially “a failure to adapt to the conditions of standard schooling.” He talks about the disappearance of childhood play and the corresponding rise in childhood mental health disorders, as well as why parents shouldn’t be too concerned about their children’s screen time use.
Gray believes that parents should remove their children from standard schooling and embrace schooling alternatives that are centered on self-directed education. “I’m cheered by the ever-growing stream of people who are leaving coercive schooling for relaxed homeschooling, unschooling, Sudbury schooling, and other forms of education that allow children to control their own learning,” he wrote in Free To Learn.
The current exodus of families away from standard schooling and toward other, often freer, learning models, may have positive, long-term effects on young people’s intellectual development and emotional well-being.
Listen to the weekly LiberatED Podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, and Stitcher, and sign up for Kerry’s weekly LiberatED email newsletter to stay up-to-date on educational news and trends from a free-market perspective.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-23 12:51:362022-04-23 12:51:36Boston College Psychology Professor: “School Has Become a Toxic Place for Children”
Today (Sunday, April 22) is Earth Day 2018 and time for my annual Earth Day post…..
In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 48th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 18 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey.
Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
MP: Let’s keep those spectacularly wrong predictions from the first Earth Day 1970 in mind when we’re bombarded in the next few days with media hype, and claims like this from the Earth Day website:
Global sea levels are rising at an alarmingly fast rate — 6.7 inches in the last century alone and going higher. Surface temperatures are setting new heat records about each year. The ice sheets continue to decline, glaciers are in retreat globally, and our oceans are more acidic than ever. We could go on…which is a whole other problem.
The majority of scientists are in agreement that human contributions to the greenhouse effect are the root cause. Essentially, gases in the atmosphere – such as methane and CO2 – trap heat and block it from escaping our planet.
So what happens next? More droughts and heat waves, which can have devastating effects on the poorest countries and communities. Hurricanes will intensify and occur more frequently. Sea levels could rise up to four feet by 2100 – and that’s a conservative estimate among experts.
Reality Check/Inconvenient Fact:
What you probably won’t hear about from the Earth Day supporters is the amazing “decarbonization” of the United States over the last decade or so, as the falling CO2 emissions in the chart above illustrate, even as CO2 emissions from energy consumption have been rising throughout most of the rest of the world. Energy-related carbon emissions in the US have been falling since the 2007 peak, and were at their lowest level last year in a quarter century, going back to 1992. And the environmentalists and the “Earth Day” movement really had very little to do with this amazing “greening” of America. Rather, it’s mostly because of hydraulic fracturing and the increasing substitution of natural gas for coal as a fuel source for electric power, see related CD post here.
Finally, think about this question, posed by Ronald Bailey in 2000: What will Earth look like when Earth Day 60 rolls around in 2030? Bailey predicts a much cleaner, and much richer future world, with less hunger and malnutrition, less poverty, and longer life expectancy, and with lower mineral and metal prices. But he makes one final prediction about Earth Day 2030: “There will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future–and the present–never looked so bleak.” In other words, the hype, hysteria and spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions will continue, promoted by the virtue signalling ”environmental grievance hustlers.”
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-04-23 12:51:352022-04-23 12:51:3518 Spectacularly Wrong Predictions Made Around the Time of the First Earth Day In 1970. Expect More This Year.
