COVID Amnesty? How About Unconditional Surrender? thumbnail

COVID Amnesty? How About Unconditional Surrender?

By Selwyn Duke

Brown University professor Emily Oster has created quite a stir with her recent article asking for a “pandemic amnesty.” In it, she calls for “both sides” in the COVID debate to forgive each other so we can focus on solving current problems. If Oster wanted exposure, she certainly got it, with commentators far and wide responding to her plea. If she wanted to heal wounds and close chasms, however, she failed miserably. Many have told her to go pound sand.

Genuine calls for forgiveness are noble, but, Professor Oster, you (and your critics) miss a significant point here: Forgiveness does not obviate punishment. Were it otherwise, following Jesus’s “70×7” prescription would mean emptying the prisons and hurting our beloved children by never holding them accountable for misbehavior.

So I’ll do my best to forgive, Professor Oster, but forgetting? No! I speak for many in saying that your plea is rejected — and offensive. And for there to be even the beginning of a rapprochement, there are two requirements (I’ll speak in this piece of “two sides” even though, of course, there’s much variation within each):

  1. You must hand over your “leaders” for judgment and justice.
  2. You must issue a genuine mea culpa and demonstrate that you’ve learned from your mistakes.

This matters immensely. Many on my side are angry, but I’ll nonetheless do what I and others did during the pandemic — not what you did, professor. I’ll react based on reason and not emotion and say that I’m not seeking retribution, viscerally pleasurable though it may be. And reason’s application informs that, as Herbert Spencer put it, “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.” Thus must the foolish and often fiendish pandemic puppeteers be in the dock — and thus must their erstwhile puppets demonstrate that they’ve learned from the past.

Unfortunately, though, professor, you appear to have learned virtually nothing. You speak as if the COVID battles were some kind of mutual misunderstanding that degenerated into an ugly rift. This is yet another slap in the face. There was nothing mutual about it, not in terms of misunderstandings or malevolence or power or persecution.

Though many of us counseled against COVIDian madness, my side was content to let you and your fellow travelers wear a mask, or three masks; take a genetic-therapy agent (GTA) shot, or five; social distance by six feet, or 60; shut down your businesses and lock yourselves indoors for one month, or six; and generally behave like mysophobic Chicken Littles. But that wasn’t good enough.

Not only did you impose your mask empire and distancing fancies on us, but you shut down our businesses as part of a COVID regulation regime; destroyed livelihoods; impoverished people; caused untold numbers of lockdown-induced, secondary-effect deaths; and tried coercing us into taking the GTAs under pain of career destruction, firing tens of thousands of Americans who resisted your will. Why, CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen, cheered on by millions of you and speaking for many more, actually said that people such as me, GTA realists, should be prohibited from participating in society and banished to our homes. You also censored us when we dared explain our dissent, said we were killing people and impugned our character and patriotism.

By the way, Wen more recently renounced much COVIDian theology and wrote an article about how she no longer believes in masking children because her young son suffered mask-induced developmental problems. Yet as with you, professor, she issues no apology for her ill-informed, life-rending prescriptions.

Speaking of which, Professor Oster, you wrote of our correct prescriptions that in “the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing.” “We didn’t know,” you protested. Well, speak for yourself, professor.

Of course, some did oppose COVID regulations based purely on a desire for liberty or relied on instinct. Yet a twist on a famous saying comes to mind here: The more I research, the “luckier” I get.

Was it luck, professor, when I cited Dr. Knut Wittkowski — former longtime head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at the Rockefeller University in New York City — as warning in an April 1st and 2nd, 2020 interview that lockdowns were counterproductive? He also provided sage but unheeded prescriptions for managing the disease.

Was it luck, professor, when I cited experts as saying in February 2020 that the vast majority of us will contract the coronavirus, that most cases are mild and that “vaccines” wouldn’t save us? This information, by the by, was printed in the liberal Atlantic, the very magazine that published your piece! Did you miss it?

Was it luck, professor, when I cited early data out of Italy showing that the COVID mortality victims were aged 79.5 on average and more than 99 percent had comorbidities, again indicating that it wasn’t a disease imperiling the majority? Was it luck when I, presenting research, warned in 2020-’21 of masks’ lack of efficacy and the perils they pose, especially to the young? I could mention additional data, studies and experts I and others drew upon, but the point is this:

You could have known, professor. But you didn’t show due diligence. You had your head buried in establishment media and wouldn’t pay any mind to those who dared contradict it. Hey, only Ivy League input need apply, right, professor?

This matters because the problem isn’t that you fell victim to COVID propaganda; it’s that you’re the kind of person who could fall victim to COVID propaganda. And unless this changes — unless you learn from past mistakes — you’ll just make similar ones again during a future crisis. In fact, we see the same phenomena even now with climate change.

You also say, professor, that we should be willing to move on because most of those adopting bad policy had good intentions. Yet even if this were true, it’s irrelevant. A doctor can have the absolute best intentions but still be sued into oblivion for malpractice.

What of your claim, however? Does it reflect good intentions

  • when politicians, such as Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), imposed onerous COVID restrictions on us but then arrogantly violated those rules themselves?
  • when officials said we knew little about a “novel” virus but then made continual cocksure pronouncements and, colluding with Big Tech, censored anyone contradicting them (including the aforementioned Dr. Wittkowski)?
  • when an effort was launched to turn COVID “heretics” into second-class citizens?
  • when even today some schools have GTA mandates for young people, despite the well-known health risks?
  • when Dr. Anthony Fauci and other officials continually lied to America while accusing dissenters of peddling “misinformation”?

Of course, it’s true that man is complex and people rationalize — aka, lie to themselves — perhaps more than they lie to others. But if the above is the result of good intentions, professor, who needs bad ones?

The point, however, is that these COVIDian “leaders,” such as Fauci and Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.), must be held to account and not survive, in power, to tyrannize another day. Yet our pseudo-elites instead continue to fail upwards, with your support, professor. But, then, you enjoy the same benefits, don’t you? Why, you say you’re now actually co-teaching a college class on COVID. Talk about an idiocracy!

In conclusion, Professor Oster, you opened your article mentioning that in “April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes.” This brings us to my response to your amnesty proposal: You can go take another one.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on MeWe, Gettr or Parler, or log on to SelwynDuke.com

©Selwyn Duke. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: No chance of pandemic amnesty for enforcers of false COVID narrative

UN Climate Conference Does Not Value Our Freedom But Loves Our Cash thumbnail

UN Climate Conference Does Not Value Our Freedom But Loves Our Cash

By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

CFACT is at the big UN climate conference in Egypt where we are engaging in climate diplomacy with a far different perspective than most.

CFACT questions fearlessly, informs diligently, and communicates relentlessly.  Underlying our approach is our bedrock confidence that individual freedom is both the most efficient way to order human society and an “unalienable right.”

At the UN climate conference a freedom-oriented approach can be a lonely endeavor.  Freedom creates prosperity.  One thing the ideologues and profiteers here assembled do value, however, is our cash.

CFACT’s Marc Morano told Mark Steyn on GB TV that, “Al Gore went beyond billions, tens of billions, he’s now talking four trillion dollars annually and he doesn’t even want it from governments. He wants some kind of corporate spending on climate. Al Gore has upped the money game like I’ve never seen in the history of all these climate summits.”

CFACT’s Peter Murphy engaged a COP 27 energy panel and reports that, “when I questioned her about the concern that many people do not want to live in cities and enjoy having their own car, and that such government mandates are at variance with democracy, she retorted that “we are not against democracy…we are about showing people that it benefits them.”

Murphy saw the climate command and control mindset was on full display when urban planner Kathleen Cameron told the panel “if we make roads narrower so people can’t speed through them, people feel inconvenienced, and they’ll want to go to alternative forms of transit. If you make it less fun to drive, you will soon discover that riding a bike is incredibly free and empowering.”

There are some signs that government officials are waking up to our continued need for fossil fuels, but sadly they would rather import them than produce them at home.  Real Clear Energy published an article I submitted where I write, “European and other countries are finally realizing that they still need fossil fuel energy – that wind and solar are too expensive and unreliable to power modern economies, preserve jobs, and keep people warm during frigid winters. Russia’s war on Ukraine has driven this home dramatically.

So Europe wants to switch from Russia to Africa for oil, gas and maybe coal – while still refusing to finance fossil fuel projects for Africa’s own needs, and telling Africa to rely on wind and solar.”

While Europe and America definitely need to wake up and unleash domestic energy production, Duggan Flanakin points out at CFACT.org that one positive note being repeated at COP 27 is that Africa has vast energy resources that can lift up that continent and the world.  “The message that.. countless African entrepreneurs and growth-oriented officials have for COP 27 is to get out of the way and let us “Drill, Baby, Drill.” The world, they argue, will benefit from a prosperous, energized African continent.”

The UN climate folks are intent on wrecking our energy economy and are making a concerted push for vast power as they seek unimaginable riches.

Too many people are unaware of what the UN is up to in Egypt and just how dangerous climate extremism has become.  That needs to change.

RELATED ARTICLES:

UN demands $2 trillion per year for climate!

COP 27: Watch CFACT’s Morano on GB news — “Gore has upped the money game”

CFACT’s Murphy confronts UN over its central planning strategies at COP 27

COP 27: UN climateers hoisted by their own alarmist petards

The real promise of COP 27: African energy can build Africa and save Europe

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Congress needs to investigate the criminal snooping of the FBI and HHS thumbnail

Congress needs to investigate the criminal snooping of the FBI and HHS

By Martin Mawyer

Federal law enforcement agencies are violating the 1974 Privacy Act by gathering, storing, and demanding social media posts be throttled or censored.

The sensible ambition of every human is to feel secure. To feel safe. To be worry-free from random or intentional attacks.

We desire it so much, that most are willing to sacrifice a little less freedom to obtain it.

Normally, those precious freedoms are gobbled-up by some government agency promising to snatch only a small portion of our personal sovereignty if we allow them to act as an iron shield against organized mobsters, gangs, criminal syndicates, and terrorists.

So, track us. We don’t care. Monitor us. Listen to what we say. Put a camera on every corner. Review what we write. Frisk us. Scan us. Snoop all you want. We have nothing to hide. We know the difference between right and wrong.  After all, it’s not about us.

Heck, we hardly notice those freedoms being scarfed up. The invasion of our privacy rights is ghostly, invisible, and ethereal.

All is fine and dandy‚ until…

…the government redefines what’s right and wrong.

Then we see it.

Now, we’re the bad actor. And good luck trying to reclaim those freedoms that could have protected us in the past.

Last week, Intercept (a leftwing, online news publication) shook America with the astounding revelation that the FBI and Homeland Security are working with Big Tech to scrub the internet of information they label “inaccurate.”

“Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the US government has used its power to try to shape online discourse,” the article reveals.

The goal of the Government is to scrub the internet of social media posts that “drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”

To that end, agencies inside the FBI and Homeland Security – that previously focused on international terrorists, such as ISIS – are using their snooping tools to go after Americans who post “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.”

If any of these law-enforcement employees determine a social media post will lower the nation’s “trust in government,” the content is flagged, stored, and then sent back to the originating social media platform with the expectation the message will be suppressed, throttled, or eliminated.

The snooping tools of the FBI: Babel X, Dataminr, ZeroFox

As much as I would like to reveal more about the findings in the Intercept story, that’s not the intent of this article.

I aim to broaden the discussion on a few things the Intercept article briefly mentioned.

Intercept reports that government officials have a unique portal to Facebook to request takedowns or throttling of postings they don’t like, which means anything that harms the “cognitive infrastructure” of the United States.

(The “cognitive infrastructure” would mean everything would be game)

But one of the most puzzling questions I wanted to be answered was how the FBI has the manpower to review virtually every social media message posted on the World Wide Web.

One of the answers is Babel X.

In April of this year, the FBI spent $27 million to purchase 5,000 licenses from Babel X.

In its purchase request, the FBI notified Babel X:

“The tool shall be able to gather information from the following mandatory online and social media data sources: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Deep/Dark Web, VK, and Telegram,” the bureau said.

But they’re hoping for a far greater reach.

The FBI also asked Babel X to give them the ability to search Snapchat, TikTok, Reddit, Gab, Parler, Discord, and others.

Bable X aside, the FBI also uses Dataminr to scour the data highway.

The FBI has 200 agents plugged into Dataminr (with its “advanced alerting tool”) to review Twitter posts that meet the bureau’s interest.

Of course, the FBI claims they need these tools to combat “terrorists and other criminals” that “communicate, recruit, and raise funds for illegal activity.”

But thanks to FBI official Laura Dehmlow [quoted in the Intercept story] we know the FBI also wants to eliminate the threat of “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”

That “subversive” information, according to Intercept and a lawsuit filed by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, includes “malinformation” or “disinformation” of Joe Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, Covid vaccines, the Hunter Biden laptop story, racial justice, the Ukraine war, and the 2020 election fraud claims.

The answer to how the FBI can monitor and takedown posts believed to harm “trust in government” is also found in a program called ZeroFox.

In court records, the FBI said they also monitor the Internet with ZeroFox (a $14 million contract) that surveils organizations across social media, including web domains, online news sites, blogs, forums, deep/dark web, and even email.

The “great” feature of ZeroFox is that it provides its customers with a “takedown service,” which allows the FBI to hide, delete and block posts they don’t like.

Read this from ZeroFox:

“Although ZeroFox will initiate a takedown request on behalf of a customer [such as the FBI], the social network or other online provider assesses the request against its own terms, rules and policies and decides whether to act on, or reject, the request. In other words, the third-party provider controls whether the material is removed.”

Of course, big corporations may fail to convince Facebook, for instance, to remove an unflattering post. But a request coming from the FBI?

Who wants to get on the wrong side of the FBI?

The 1974 Privacy Act protects American citizens

At one time, the FBI and Homeland Security focused their surveillance efforts on ISIS and other international, radicalized terrorist organizations and cartels.

For the most part, Americans applauded these law enforcement agencies and their zeal to protect America from another 9/11 attack. We weren’t ignorant, though. We knew it meant the FBI and DHS would resort to monitoring every crevice of the virtual world in all its forms, styles, and behaviors.

But we convinced ourselves we would never become the target of the US Government and their massive and invasive snooping tools that can collect, store, suppress or eliminate what we post.

Now, we know better.

But we can fight back.

The 1974 Privacy Act makes it illegal for the Federal Government to engage in any activity that gathers, maintains, keeps secret files, or releases to non-government parties the identity of citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.

Here are two important sections found under 5 US 552a of the 1974 Privacy Act that we can reasonably believe are currently being violated by many federal law-enforcement agencies:

“Each agency that maintains a system of records shall maintain no record describing how any individual exercises rights guaranteed by the First Amendment unless expressly authorized by statue or by the individual about whom the record is maintained or unless pertinent to and within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity.” (emphasis added)

“Any officer or employee of an agency…who knowing that disclosure of the specific material is so prohibited, willfully discloses the material in any manner to any person or agency not entitled to receive it, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and fined not more than $5,000.” (emphasis added)

The takeaway is:

  1. It is illegal for the Federal Government to maintain, collect, or use any social media post that falls under the protection of the First Amendment.
  2. It is illegal for any federal employee to release that social media post to any person or agency (think Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) that is not entitled to receive it.

In addition, the 1974 Privacy Act requires the Federal Government to explain when the information is being gathered, why it is needed, and how it will be used. They must also ensure that those records are handled only for the reasons given.

Who believes the feds, when gathering up posts on Joe Biden’s failed withdrawal from Afghanistan, for example, are completing the process of explaining why that collection was needed and how it will be used?

America needs answers.

The way to get those answers is for Congress to immediately launch a full-scale investigation using its sledgehammer power of subpoenas to determine the numerous violations of the 1974 Privacy Act, including criminal offenses.

©Marin Mawyer. All rights reserved.

Italy’s Conservative New Prime Minister Stands Up to Migrant Smugglers thumbnail

Italy’s Conservative New Prime Minister Stands Up to Migrant Smugglers

By Jihad Watch

The new Italian government refused to let male migrants leave the smuggling ships and enter Italy.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni vowed to resist mass migration. The low bar at stake here is the migrant smuggling operation in which NGOs pick up mostly Muslim migrants and “rescue them” by transporting them to Italy.

The new Italian government lightly put its foot down and refused to let the male migrants leave the smuggling ships and enter Italy.

Cue Das Outrage.

Charities have branded the actions of the Italian government “illegal” after it prevented 250 people disembarking two migrant rescue ships.

They’re not “rescue ships”. That’s a legal fiction, they’re human smuggling ships. And Italy has said that they’re welcome to take their “rescuees” who are no longer in any danger, anywhere they please.

So long as it isn’t Italy.

Migrants set sail in small, overcrowded boats from North Africa – often they get into distress and are rescued by charity vessels.

Correction, they get into the boats as a starting point for a feigned rescue and transportation to Europe where they can rob, rape and bomb to their hearts’ content.

In total 144 people were allowed to disembark the Humanity 1, which sails under a German flag, on Sunday morning. In the afternoon, 357 people were allowed off the Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF)-run Geo Barents, which sails under a Norwegian flag.

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said those who did not qualify as vulnerable would have to leave Italian waters and should be taken care of by the “flag state”.

Why can’t Germany, the home of Wir Schaffen Das, take them? Or Norway?

The charity, known in English as Doctors Without Borders, added that “a rescue operation is considered complete only when all of the survivors have been disembarked in a safe place”.

Both charities said everyone on board their ships was vulnerable as they had been rescued from the sea.

That’s how this legal fiction works. The migrants pretend to be in distress. The smugglers pretend to rescue them. And now suddenly the illegal migrants are entitled to invade Italy because all the men are “vulnerable”.

“Free all the people, free them,″ Italian lawmaker Aboubakar Soumahoro said, calling the government’s new policy “inhuman”.

“Italian lawmaker”.

Soumahoro, 40, arrived in Italy from Ivory Coast at age 19 and went to work in the fields picking crops. But he aimed higher. He enrolled in the University of Naples and earned a degree in sociology.

Just think of all the sociologists and politicians on board those boats.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

MILITARIZING ELECTIONS: Florida Bans Biden’s DOJ Federal ‘Election Monitors’ From Polling Places thumbnail

MILITARIZING ELECTIONS: Florida Bans Biden’s DOJ Federal ‘Election Monitors’ From Polling Places

By The Geller Report

National Guard Cybersecurity Units Activated in 14 States Ahead of Midterm Elections: Reports

pic.twitter.com/LGnEmbDjzs

— 1970Brat (@1970Brat) November 8, 2022

Florida Department of State to DOJ:

“federal election ‘monitors’ are not permitted inside polling places as it would be counterproductive and could potentially undermine confidence in the election.” pic.twitter.com/I3TdaozUxG

— Jason Delgado (@byJasonDelgado) November 8, 2022

BREAKING REPORT: Biden’s Department of Justice Announces List of 64 JURISDICTIONS WHERE THEY WILL MONITOR POLLING PLACES ‘For Compliance’…

— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) November 8, 2022

Florida Department of State hits back at The Department of Justice –

“FEDERAL ELECTION ‘monitors’ ARE NOT PERMITTED INSIDE POLLING PLACES as it would be counterproductive and could potentially undermine confidence in the election.”

The Democratic Party is militarizing our elections.

233 years of American elections and this is unprecedented. Only a party that wants to steal elections engages in such behavior.

THIS is ‘voter intimidation.’ 👇 pic.twitter.com/UazvKOQBQ7

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) November 8, 2022

The National Guard doesn’t “oversee” our elections. The American people, independent poll watchers who are non-partisan or from each party, and the state legislatures “oversee” our elections.

Enough of this anti-democratic behavior from this lawless, authoritarian Biden regime.

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) November 8, 2022

pic.twitter.com/LGnEmbDjzs

— 1970Brat (@1970Brat) November 8, 2022

BREAKING: Florida Department of State sent a letter to Biden’s DOJ telling them their federal election monitors are banned from going inside polling places

The Dept says it would be counter productive and undermine confidence in the election

— Brendon Leslie (@BrendonLeslie) November 8, 2022

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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I just received this text message: A friend from Indiana, please pray for them also Dr. Swier. No results at all. But all electric was shut off in the city from 12-1:00. We have a Democrat mayor….a lot of people vote at noon 😡 #TheDemElectonStealIsOn

— Dr. Rich Swier (@drrichswier) November 8, 2022

KJP: “We may not know all the winners of elections for a few days. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner. That’s how this is supposed to work, and it’s important for us to all be patient…” pic.twitter.com/7u4YeaT4yO

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 7, 2022

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Who Authorized the Department of Homeland Security to Police Online Speech? Not Congress thumbnail

Who Authorized the Department of Homeland Security to Police Online Speech? Not Congress

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Newly published documents obtained by the Intercept show the US government is actively shaping online discourse and policing speech. This invites a question: who gave them this authority?

When George W. Bush signed the Homeland Security Act in 2002, the goal was to improve national security by strengthening government at various levels and helping them identify and respond to threats, particularly terrorism.

”The continuing threat of terrorism, the threat of mass murder on our own soil, will be met with a unified, effective response,” said Bush. ”Dozens of agencies charged with homeland security will now be located within one cabinet department with the mandate and legal authority to protect our people.”

The law contained “severe privacy and civil liberties problems,” the ACLU argued, but the legislation enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Only nine Senators voted against it (eight Democrats and one Independent).

Bush tapped Tom Ridge as the first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, but public policy experts admitted it was unclear precisely what the new department would do.

”The first challenge is to lower expectations,” Paul C. Light of the Brookings Institution told The New York Times. ”People should think they will be safer, but remember we have a long way to go.”

One thing not mentioned in the Homeland Security Act is free speech. The word “speech” does not appear on even one of the law’s 187 pages.

Nevertheless, newly-published documents published by The Intercept show the extent to which the DHS is now actively involved in using the power of the US government to shape online discourse and police speech by pressuring private platforms behind closed doors.

“In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government,” The Intercept wrote of one message. “Dehmlow, according to notes of the discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase, stressed that ‘we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.’”

According to a copy of the DHS’s capstone report outlining top priorities in the coming years, the department intends to hold media accountable by targeting “inaccurate information” on a range of controversial topics such as “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

That DHS was seeking to police speech and shape online discourse was not in itself a revelation. In April 2022, the Biden administration announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board, but the initiative was paused after just three weeks over widespread public outcry after the board was dubbed “the Ministry of Truth” by critics.

What the Intercept’s story reveals is the overt pressure the government was exerting on private companies to censor speech. For example, the Intercept described a “formalized process” government officials used to flag content on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook to throttle or remove problematic content.

The story also shows how the revolving door between government and the corporate world created enthusiasm for DHS initiatives.

“Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain,” Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official said to DHS official Jen Easterly in a February text message, according to the Intercept.

Though the most overt government attempts to shape and censor online discourse began under the Biden administration, the road to DHS’s “Ministry of Truth” project began under the Trump administration.

In November 2018, following a series of high-profile cyber attacks, Trump signed into law legislation known as the CISA Act, which created the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a standalone federal agency dedicated to fighting cyberterrorism.

Like the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the word “speech” doesn’t appear anywhere in the legislation. Nor do the words “misinformation” or “disinformation.” However, one line in the sprawling law (Section 318) contains these four words: “Social media working group.” It is presumably this line that led CISA to boast of its “evolved mission” to, in the words of the Intercept, “monitor social media discussions while ‘routing disinformation concerns’ to private sector platforms.”

In 2018, to respond to election disinformation, DHS created the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force and began flagging voting-related “disinformation” that appeared on social media platforms—even though the words “election” and “vote” appear nowhere in the CISA Act. By the following year, DHS was employing fifteen full- and part-time staff tasked with “disinformation analysis,” and in 2020 the department’s disinformation focus had expanded to include Covid-19.

In 2021, CISA created a “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation” team—replacing the Countering Foreign Influence Task force—and disinformation agents were now focused on domestic transgressions as well foreign.

A law that had been passed to protect critical infrastructure in the US from cyber attacks was now being used to censor Americans on social media.

The mission creep of DHS is breathtaking. Nowhere in the Homeland Security Act or the CISA Act is the department authorized to police speech, yet since 2018 it has led the broadest and most dangerous assault on free expression in modern American history.

The newly published documents vindicate those who’ve argued the true threat to speech and online discourse is not “misinformation”—as many progressives contend—or woke tech companies—as many on the right have argued—but the government itself.

The reality is, the government is not uniquely benevolent, knowledgeable, or honest. In fact, governments are arguably the most dishonest organizations in history, and the US government is no exception, as some have noted.

“Our government produces lies and disinformation at industrial scale and always has,” journalist Jack Shafer wrote in Politico after the White House unveiled its disinformation board in April. “It overclassifies vital information to block its own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with facts.”

To find evidence that government is not in the truth business, one need look no further than the DHS, who for the better part of a year targeted online “disinformation” that explored the possibility that the virus may have originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

While the origins of Covid-19 remain uncertain, government officials, media, and social media administrators treated the lab leak theory as a crackpot conspiracy unfit for discussion. For the better part of a year, people who speculated about the lab leak theory on platforms such as Facebook faced censorship and suspension, because of the DHS’s active role.

That the federal government—which had been funding the Wuhan lab and gain-of-function research—might have motives beyond altruism to suppress this narrative was conveniently ignored, as were pertinent facts. This included a US intelligence assessment in early 2020 that acknowledged the virus may have been released accidentally from an infectious diseases lab, as well as reports that State Department officials had previously acknowledged concerns about safety protocols in Wuhan.

By mid 2021 the White House itself had acknowledged the credibility of the lab leak theory, but only after DHS had waged a prolonged disinformation campaign against it.

Twenty years ago when the Department of Homeland Security was created, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold was one of the few Senators to vote against the Homeland Security Act.

“We have to protect both the people and their freedoms,” said Feingold while speaking of his broader opposition to the Bush administration’s War on Terror policies.

It’s now clear that Feingold was right when he said the laws failed to strike “the right balance between law enforcement and civil liberties.” In their effort to make people more safe, federal lawmakers created a bureaucracy that is now trampling the very rights it was created to protect, a fact that would not have surprised the 19th Century economist Frédéric Bastiat, who noted the state’s tendency to grow and become an oppressor of rights.

“Instead of checking crime, the law itself [has become] guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!” wrote the author of The Law.

The American Founders, in their quest to create a limited government to prevent this evil, created the First Amendment. It plainly states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…”

We now know the DHS has now been working quietly for years to abridge free speech, and it has done so with no explicit legal authority; the laws Congress passed speak not a whisper about regulating speech.

The Department of Homeland Security needs to be put in check, and it reminds us of an ancient question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guardians)?

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Country Is In The Middle Of A Diesel Crisis — And The Biden Admin Is Making It Worse, Experts Say thumbnail

The Country Is In The Middle Of A Diesel Crisis — And The Biden Admin Is Making It Worse, Experts Say

By The Daily Caller

  • The Biden administration’s policies reduced diesel production and caused stockpiles to fall to dangerously low levels, experts told the DCNF.
  • “There’s an enormous tax and regulatory burden that the Biden administration has put on refining along with other industries,” Josh Young, chief investment officer and founder of energy investment firm Bison Interests, told the DCNF.
  • “At the moment refining capacity cannot meet demand, even when we have enough oil,” Institute For Energy Research Senior Vice President Dan Kish told the DCNF. 

The Biden administration has implemented policies that have hurt diesel production and caused stockpiles to hit their lowest levels since 2008, experts told the DCNF.

The U.S. is facing a diesel shortage which is causing the Biden administration to consider taking action to shore up supplies as fuel refiners struggle to produce enough fuel to meet heavy demand. Diesel supplies have become dangerously low due to recent refinery closures that have been exacerbated by the Biden administration’s regulations as well as increased fuel demand following the coronavirus pandemic, experts told the DCNF.

“There’s an enormous tax and regulatory burden that the Biden administration has put on refining along with other industries,” Josh Young, chief investment officer and founder of energy investment firm Bison Interests, told the DCNF. “Emissions rules and general regulations have increased tremendously under the Biden administration, raising operating costs and causing some refineries to either shut down or not expand operations.”

“There’s an enormous tax and regulatory burden that the Biden administration has put on refining along with other industries,” Josh Young, chief investment officer and founder of energy investment firm Bison Interests, told the DCNF. “Emissions rules and general regulations have increased tremendously under the Biden administration, raising operating costs and causing some refineries to either shut down or not expand operations.”

Crude oil, which is pumped in the U.S. or imported, must be processed at refineries to produce distillate fuels like diesel and gasoline. The Biden administration has continuously imposed environmental policies to cut carbon emissions and achieve “environmental justice” which have damaged refiners’ output.

Limetree Bay Energy in June closed down its U.S. Virgin Islands refinery, a facility that could process 210,000 oil barrels per day, as it could not afford to install special emission monitors that were mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to Reuters. The refinery reopened in February; however, in May the EPA forced the plant to temporarily close and ordered the plant to install 18 sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide monitors before it restarted operations.

The EPA in April rescinded exemptions that would have allowed over 30 refiners to avoid blending renewable biofuels into diesel even though refiners claimed that this would hike costs and decrease output, according to an agency docket. Companies in the U.S. have also not built a major oil refinery in 50 years due to regulatory concerns and anticipation that the green transition will kill demand for fossil fuels.

The coronavirus pandemic, which shut down economic activity, has also contributed to diesel shortages, according to Patrick De Haan head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.

“COVID caused demand to suddenly plummet to the point where refineries started to idle and companies shut down their facilities back in 2020,” De Haan told the DCNF. “As we recovered from COVID there was a surge in demand that we saw for not only diesel but other products as well and that’s put us in a situation where we have only 25 days of distillate supply remaining.”

Diesel demand recovered much faster than refiners anticipated, meaning that production has to catch up to meet demand, Institute For Energy Research Senior Vice President Dan Kish told the DCNF. The U.S. has lost more than one million barrels per day of refining capacity since 2020, according to the Energy Information Administration.

“At the moment refining capacity cannot meet demand, even when we have enough oil,” Kish said.

White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese said on Oct. 19 that the administration is “very concerned” about diesel shortages, particularly in the northeast of the country, and indicated that the White House may limit or ban exports of refined petroleum products. The American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, two industry groups, sent a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Oct. 4 claiming that an export ban would exacerbate shortages.

“An export ban would distort the market and essentially force refineries out of business which is the opposite of what is needed right now,” Young said.

The administration could also deploy the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve’s one million barrels of diesel to address shortages in New England. However, because diesel demand is so high, the reserve’s supply would last less than six hours, according to The Washington Post.

Diesel inventories are in good shape when there are around 35 to 40 days of supply available; however, when there are just 30 days of supply left or fewer, problems can start to arise, according to Mansfield Energy. When there are only 25 days left of diesel supply, there is not enough fuel to keep industries operating if supplies are significantly disrupted, as fuel must be delivered via pipelines, meaning that vast quantities of fuel are days or weeks away from getting to where they need to be.

Diesel demand will further increase as cold weather approaches since 82% of households use diesel to heat their homes during the winter, according to the EIA.

“As NOAA’s forecasts warmer-than-average temperatures in the Southeastern U.S. and along the Atlantic coast this winter, DOE remains fully engaged and partnered with state, industry, and interagency partners as the country prepares with the winter season,” an Energy spokesperson told the DCNF.

The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

JACK MCEVOY

Energy & environmental reporter.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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Dem Pollster Claims Party Doesn’t Acknowledge People’s ‘Legitimate Concerns’

McCarthy, GOP Poised To Pounce In ’23. Here’s Their ‘Number One Promise’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Will Elon Musk ‘free the bird’? I certainly hope so. thumbnail

Will Elon Musk ‘free the bird’? I certainly hope so.

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

European regulation of online speech will be a speed bump for the new owner of Twitter.

After a complicated, winding, and tense standoff between Musk and the Twitter board, as well as a pending legal trial at a Delaware Chancery Court, the eccentric billionaire finally agreed to abide by his original agreement and purchase Twitter in its entirety. Elon Musk is now the sole owner and CEO of Twitter. In typical Musk style, he wandered into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink, to “let that sink in.”

Musk has repeatedly expressed his disapproval of Twitter’s heavy-handed and politically inflected moderation policies, and has insisted on various occasions that Twitter ought to become an open and inclusive “digital town square,” where citizens of diverse political persuasions can exchange opinions freely. In a recent tweet aimed at advertisers, Musk said:

The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.

The notion of a “common digital square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner,” is the very opposite of Twitter today. Right now, Twitter is essentially a “safe space” to express Woke, leftist, pro-lockdown, and pro-Big Pharma opinions, and a very dangerous place for anyone who wanders from the fold of left progressivism or says something that could potentially endanger Big Pharma’s profits.

Twitter has been shamelessly suppressing inconvenient truths, if they happen to run against Twitter’s version of reality, in which Covid vaccines are about as safe as paracetamol, male and female biology are an assault on citizens’ rights to “gender identity,” and Big Pharma CEOs are altruistic saviours of humanity.

If this were just a silly game, the suppression of one side of the debate would be annoying, but no big deal. However, it is a game in which the stakes are extremely high. As things stand, Twitter is arguably the most important digital forum in the world, so suppressing important medical information concerning issues like vaccine harms and potential Covid treatments may literally be a matter of life and death.

The question is, can and will Elon really “free the bird,” as he so colourfully put it himself? Recently, in a query from Jordan Peterson’s daughter, Mikhaila concerning whether he can get her Dad back on Twitter, he has indicated that “anyone suspended for minor & dubious reasons will be freed from Twitter jail.” In a separate tweet, Musk has indicated that “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”

@elonmusk can you bring my dad @jordanbpeterson back on here but also somehow make sure he doesn’t spend all his time on Twitter? 🙃

— Mikhaila Peterson (@MikhailaFuller) October 28, 2022

It is true that Musk has, in the past, backtracked on important statements, including his original offer to purchase Twitter. But his stance in favour of free speech has been quite consistent, so I see no reason to doubt that he sincerely intends to “free the bird” from the heavily biased, politicised, and frankly Orwellian censorship policies it has been weighed down by for the past few years. Not to mention that it may be very good business to welcome non-lefties and non-Covideans back onto the platform.

If Musk manages to follow through on his free speech dream, then we could see the release of thousands of people from permanent Twitter “jail” over the coming months, including yours truly (Twitter handle @davidjthunder), as well as a radical revamping of Twitter’s anti-scientific and politically partisan moderation policies, which have served, principally, to protect certain scientists, politicians, and corporations from serious public scrutiny and challenge.

But dreaming is one thing, implementing another. Even if Musk manages to pull off the Solomonic task of keeping advertisers, investors, and customers more or less happy with his new moderation policies, he will also have to contend with governments that are increasingly enthusiastic about using their legislative and regulatory powers to shut down speech they object to.

I wish I could say that it only private actors like Microsoft and Google that suppress free speech. But it turns out that many of the people who currently stand at the helm of our governments, most notably in the European Union, seem to be determined to “protect” the public from what they happen to deem “dangerous or harmful” speech.

The aggressive regulation of speech by governments may come in the shape of notoriously malleable “hate speech” laws, which inevitably end up criminalising speech that is disagreeable to this or that political tribe, or “misinformation” laws that require people to only express opinions on matters of medicine and science that certain powerful actors in the political, pharmaceutical, and scientific establishment approve of.

It is worth noting that as soon as Musk announced that the “bird is freed,” Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, replied, “in Europe, the bird will fly by our rules.” He was referring to increasing efforts by the European Commission to clamp down on what they perceive as “misinformation” and to potentially impose enormous fines on Big Tech platforms that do not live up to the EU’s expectations concerning the regulation of “misinformation.”

👋 @elonmusk

In Europe, the bird will fly by our 🇪🇺 rules.#DSA https://t.co/95W3qzYsal

— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) October 28, 2022

Twitter is one of the 37 signatories of the 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation promoted by the European Commission, which includes a set of commitments which appear from the official website to rely heavily on self-regulation, even though the Commission monitors compliance with the code. Even if this code of practice is difficult to police in practice, it provides a political tool to pressure Big Tech companies into doing the Commission’s bidding.

What is especially worrying is the Digital Services Act, which was passed into law by the European Parliament on 5th July 2022. The Digital Services Act, as reported by Ecommerce Europe,

aims to set an ambitious framework to guarantee a safe and trustworthy online environment for consumers, mainly by introducing new obligations for digital service providers. Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), designated as ‘online platforms which reach a number of average monthly active recipients of the service in the Union equal to or higher than 45 million’, will have to comply with stricter rules, enforced by the Commission.

According to Thierry Breton, one of the Act’s most fervent advocates, one of the features of the Digital Services Act is that it introduces “a harmonised system to fight ALL forms of #illegal content – from counterfeit or dangerous products to hate speech. Any national authority will be able to request that illegal content is removed, regardless of where the platform is established in Europe.”

1️⃣ With great power comes great responsibility 🕷

 

The DSA is setting clear, harmonised #obligations for platforms – proportionate to size, impact & risk.#DSA

— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) April 22, 2022

Breton goes so far as to suggest that the European Union could impose steep financial and regulatory sanctions for non-compliance: “The DSA imposes effective and dissuasive #sanctions. From #fines for breaches of obligations of up to 6% of global turnover to a #ban on operating in the EU single market in case of repeated serious breaches.” Don’t ask me if any of this would withstand judicial scrutiny. But the threat of massive fines and bans for non-compliance is coming from the highest level of the European Union, so I imagine Mr Breton has thought through the legal ramifications of these threats, and is not just bluffing.

🔟 A possible mechanism of #emergency response in the event of a crisis⚡️

 

We cannot rely solely on platforms’ goodwill when facing crises, pandemics or wars.

 

Europe needs a legal tool to require large digital players to react quickly in case of emergency.#DSA

— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) April 22, 2022

To cut a long story short, if the laws of any given jurisdiction become an instrument of tyranny and Groupthink, Mr Musk will be put in a tough spot, and might find himself under enormous pressure to back away from his free speech commitments. That would feel like a terrible betrayal of his declared mission of creating an inclusive “digital town square.”

On the other hand, if Elon Musk is willing to fight the Eurocrats, he might be able to win some legal battles for free speech. Undoubtedly, the European Commission is flexing its muscles in the hopes of intimidating Musk into compliance. But if Musk cares about free speech as much as he says he does, he might just dig in and put the legality of the Commission’s threats to the test in a court of law.

All of this assumes, of course, that we can take Musk at face value in his fighting words on behalf of free speech. Only time will tell if that is true. But there aren’t too many glimmers of hope in the world of Big Tech and free speech these days, so I’ll take whatever breadcrumbs of hope I can pick up along the way.

This article has been republished from David Thunder’s Substack, The Freedom Blog.

AUTHOR

David Thunder

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society. More by David Thunder

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

EXCLUSIVE: Migrants Are Given ‘Literal Roadmaps’ To Reach The U.S. Border. And Big Tech Is Funding It! thumbnail

EXCLUSIVE: Migrants Are Given ‘Literal Roadmaps’ To Reach The U.S. Border. And Big Tech Is Funding It!

By The Daily Caller

  • Doctors Without Borders is handing out maps to migrants that show several different routes to the U.S. border, according to a map seen by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
  • “As a medical humanitarian organization providing medical and mental health care to people on this migration route, MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] prints and distributes these maps to ensure that people know where to find shelter and humanitarian assistance and how to access mental health services along the migration route,” Doctors Without Borders spokeswoman Jessica Brown told the DCNF.
  • The Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) labels the documents “literal roadmaps to guide migrants from Central America to our southern border,” in a statement to the DCNF.

GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala — Doctors Without Borders, a medical aid nonprofit which is funded by a number of prominent tech companies, is publishing and distributing maps to migrants showing routes through Central America that reach the U.S., according to a copy of the map seen by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The map is labeled “shelters for people on the move” in Spanish and lists a number of clinics and other areas where aid can be found along the journey to the U.S., according to the document. While Doctors Without Borders hasn’t received U.S. government funding since 2002, the group still receives sizable donations from American companies, including from tech giants Microsoft, Google.org and Amazon.

The group has also gotten millions in donations from the foundations of billionaires Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg, according to its website.

“As a medical humanitarian organization providing medical and mental health care to people on this migration route, MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] prints and distributes these maps to ensure that people know where to find shelter and humanitarian assistance and how to access mental health services along the migration route,” Doctors Without Borders spokeswoman Jessica Brown told the DCNF.

Click here to view the Daily Caller News Foundation map.

The map shows paths starting in Guatemala that lead up to the U.S.-Mexico border. Each path is marked with locations for shelter and aid along several different routes through Central America that end in the U.S.

The map also lists the locations of clinics and shelters along the Mexican border across from major U.S. cities, such as El Paso, Texas and San Diego, California.

“The fact that an international medical NGO with billions in the bank is making literal roadmaps to guide migrants from Central America to our southern border is not only an affront to its core mission, but a globalist attack on our sovereignty,” Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) Director of Government Relations and Communications RJ Hauman told the DCNF.

The map is labeled “Medicos Sin Fronteras,” which is the name used by the organization’s offices in Argentina and Spain, which have separate finances in addition to a combined international account with the U.S. office.

Doctors Without Border has previously highlighted its work “assisting migrants on their dangerous journeys.”

“We provided treatment for people emerging from the Panama side of the jungle, who are mainly from Cuba or Haiti, although our teams have seen people from West Africa. Regardless of origin, everyone passing through the Gap is heading north, where they still face the dangerous route through Mexico, in search of a better life in the United States,” the group noted in a 2021 report.

Between October 2021 and September 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered roughly 2.3 million migrants at the U.S. border with Mexico. Many of the migrants made the trek through South and Central America, where some are receiving the map, which Hauman compared to the smuggling operations of cartels.

“No American citizen, company, or foundation should give a dime to Doctors Without Borders until they quit working hand in glove with cartels and smugglers to enhance mass migration in the region While the federal government hasn’t funded Doctors Without Borders since 2002, there are plenty of other NGOs with similar missions that do quietly receive taxpayer dollars. Republicans must examine this immediately next Congress,” Hauman said.

Bloomberg, Google, Amazon and Microsoft also didn’t respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

The Musk Foundation couldn’t be reached for comment.

AUTHOR

JENNIE TAER

Investigative reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Biden Gives Divisive Speech: We Will Steal It and You Will Like It [Or Else]! thumbnail

Biden Gives Divisive Speech: We Will Steal It and You Will Like It [Or Else]!

By The Geller Report

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” – Edward Bernays, American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda – 1928

Questioning that is “unlawful.” Biden sounds like Stalin who said, “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

The Democrat media axis has it marching orders, prepare the American people for delayed election results so they can rejigger the numbers.

And while Elon is a pip, Twitter has joined the latest election putsch. Sign on and you get this:

Twitter: It takes time to count the votes

And yes, Pamela Geller and Geller Report am still banned from Twitter.

Joe Biden: Democracy Itself at Stake if You Vote for Republicans in the Midterms

By: Charlie Spiering, Breitbart News, 2 Nov 202281

President Joe Biden again warned on Wednesday of Republicans taking power in the midterm elections, arguing the “very soul of America itself” was in danger.

“We the people must decide whether the rule of law will prevail or whether we will allow the dark forces and … thirst for power put ahead of the principles that have long guided us,” Biden said during a speech delivered inside Union Station.

Biden began his speech by recalling a deranged individual’s attack on Paul Pelosi on Friday after the assailant could not find Speaker Nancy Pelosi in their home in San Francisco.

The president again tried to connect the attack against Pelosi to January 6, when Trump supporters stormed Capitol Hill to protest the 2020 presidential election.

Biden blamed former President Donald Trump for challenging the results of the 2020 election, which he argued only increased the number of incidents of political violence.

“We don’t settle our differences in America with a riot, a mob, or a bullet or a hammer, we settle them peacefully at the battle box — ballot box,” he said.

Biden’s speech was sharply partisan, ignoring Democrats who protested the results of the 2016 election falsely declaring Trump an illegitimate president elected because of Russian influence. He also ignored incidents of Democrat political violence and political figures who refused to acknowledge legitimate elections.

Instead, he blamed “extreme MAGA” Republicans.

“In this moment, we have to confront those lies with the truth. The very future of our nation depends on it,” he said, calling it a “defining moment” in American history.

He warned that over 300 Republicans running for office had questioned the 2020 presidential election, which symbolized the “appetites of autocracy” versus American democracy.

“We must with one overwhelming unified voice speak as a country and say there is no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America,” he added. “No place period, no place ever.”

Biden repeated many of the talking points about democracy he has pursued since his inauguration, again blaming Republicans for endangering the future of democracy in the United States.

The president argued that the future of democracy was more important than all other issues, implicitly calling for Americans to vote Democrat in order to save the future of the country.

“We must vote, knowing what’s at stake, and not just the policy of the moment,” he said.

Joe Biden’s speech tonight was one of the most divisive speeches ever given by a sitting President.

— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) November 3, 2022

Fixing our fraudulent elections is easy. Paper ballots:

As Geller Report reader SR explains, “France has a good system – voters show up in person on election day, the voter roll is checked and if they are on it they are given sets of cards of candidates for each party. In a curtained compartment they put a pre-printed card with just their own candidate’s name on it into a paper envelope, show their photo ID to an official who reads the person’s name aloud and validates that they just have one envelope, then the voter inserts it into a locked transparent box called an “urn”. At the end of election day, both locks on the urns are unlocked and under supervision the envelopes are put into batches of 100, and then the batches are distributed to several on-site teams who count the votes for each candidate with a lot of supervision and unambiguous “chain of custody”. The same thing is done the prior day by French citizens in foreign territories and living abroad, so that despite the time zone being later, their vote too will be counted and included on election day in France, instead of the final results having to wait until the next day due to the time zone.

On the other hand, electronic systems, provided by sketchy corporations some with links to Venezuela, where piles of ballot batches can optionally be fed in multiple times, or unofficial pre-filled ballots can be shipped in and introduced by partisan operatives, are prone to manipulation. Plus the voting software in some of these systems can “count” in an unconventional way that is hard to track and in theory accessed from outside or have their thumb drive controller swapped out. In addition, the mail-in ballots, unmonitored drop boxes, voter rolls padded with deceased and out-of-state relocated people who miraculously “vote”, and of course the lack of voter ID in many states. Even India has had a mandatory national voter ID card (the Electors Photo Identy Card – EPIC) since 1993. The “icing on the cake” is the scam of having nursing home personnel who routinely collect their residents’ ballots and vote for them.”

Biden says it’s “Unlawful” and “Unamerican” to not commit to blindly accepting the results of an election pic.twitter.com/5lKQ0pV2B7

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 2, 2022

BIDEN: “In some cases we won’t know the winner of the election for a few days, until after a few days after the election.” pic.twitter.com/oaRPAo3XZI

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 2, 2022

Joe Biden’s speech tonight was ugly and cruel and goblin-like to Americans suffering REAL WORLD problems.

Our civilization is on the brink of collapse and Biden used a primetime address from the Union Station DC slum to fear monger in a venal attempt to cling to power.

Demonic

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 3, 2022

LOL – @JesseBWatters nukes Biden: “That was the President of the United States confessing that he’s about to get wiped out a week from now” pic.twitter.com/KVp2uPUCDS

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 2, 2022

BIden calls for unity, hehe.

“We must stand against political violence. We don’t settle our differences with a mob, a riot, or a hammer.”

More about voter intimidation. “It has to stop now.”

Something about not giving in to political violence. pic.twitter.com/ekL4bVu6NZ

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) November 2, 2022

He’s slurring as usual.

“America is under attack,” because of Trump denying outcome of 2020 election. “He abused his power. He made a Big Lie an article of faith in the MAGA Republican Party.”

Biden says 2020 election was the most secure in history. “More than 300 election…

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) November 2, 2022

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

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Biden Regime Openly Interfered With Brazil Presidential Election As Millions of Brazilians Protest Rigged Results

LESSONS IN HISTORY….

As COVID Hit, Leftist and RINO Elites Traded Stocks ‘With Exquisite Timing’

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan Brings On Jew-Hater Ilhan Omar to Discuss…Anti-Semitism

Democrat WI Senate Candidate Mandela Barnes Praises Iran’s Supreme Leader For His ‘Black Lives Matter’ Tweet

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Biden Administration’s Proxy War on Free Speech thumbnail

The Biden Administration’s Proxy War on Free Speech

By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

Hold on to your hats.  We’re going to be learning a lot more about the Biden administration’s efforts to silence free expression through its proxy stooges in Big Tech.

A federal judge just rejected the Biden administration’s attempt to stop depositions of government officials in a lawsuit alleging a wide-ranging conspiracy by the administration and Big Tech to censor free speech.  Anthony Fauci’s deposition is set for November 23rd.  House Republicans sent a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas calling him out for his agency’s role in censoring free speech.

More details about that role have come to light.  You might remember the agency’s Disinformation Governance Board that got shut down pretty quickly.  But DHS continues its efforts to curb free speech to this day.  Records from the conspiracy lawsuit, leaked emails and memos, and public documents show DHS pivoted to monitoring social media for the purpose of suppressing ‘misinformation’ the government doesn’t like about a wide range of topics, including the origins of COVID-19, COVID vaccine safety, and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Facebook created a portal for DHS and other government agencies to flag posts they don’t like, for quick action.  The portal is still in operation.  Facebook and the FBI won’t comment.  A previous report showed social media companies remove or post warnings on over a third of posts government agencies flag as objectionable.

Other agencies are also involved.  The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on its own motion formed a misinformation team and expanded the agency’s mission beyond infrastructure to ‘building resilience to misinformation’.  The agency wants social media platforms to be more responsive to its directives.  An FBI official was criticized last year after falsely telling Congress the FBI does not monitor Americans’ social media posts.  The fact of the matter is the FBI has spent millions on social media tracking software.

Hunter Biden’s laptop shows you clearly why we do not want the government in the business of deciding what is true and what is false.  According to polls, many people would not have voted for Joe Biden if they had known the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop.  But government officials called it ‘Russian disinformation’ and social media companies at the FBI’s urging dutifully suppressed the story before the 2020 election, a decision they now say they regret.  Thanks a bunch.

There’s really no difference between the government suppressing free speech and government officials getting private actors to violate the First Amendment for them.  That’s called the state actor theory and it’s at the heart of the Missouri Attorney General’s ongoing conspiracy case against the Biden administration and Big Tech where depositions are going forward and will soon give us a lot more information about all these bad actors violating your rights.

But there’s more.  The federal government paid four private companies to flag so-called ‘misinformation’ on social media during the 2020 election, resulting in the censorship of election coverage from conservative news outlets.  The CDC told Facebook COVID vaccines for young children are safe and effective when there was no evidence of that, all so the CDC could suppress contrary information through Facebook in a campaign to overcome ‘vaccine hesitancy’.  Twitter has a portal for CDC officials to flag COVID-related posts it deems ‘misinformation’.  Documents from inside Twitter show the White House pressured Twitter to ban a New York Times writer who was raising questions about phony government COVID narratives.  Facebook spies on private messages and reports users to the FBI for expressing ‘anti-government sentiments’, whatever that means.

The Biden administration is waging a proxy war on our free speech.  The social media giants are only too happy to play along.   But with 47 more government defendants recently added to the conspiracy lawsuit, the day of reckoning is drawing closer and I, for one, can’t wait to see these overbearing authoritarian government officials and their fascist buddies in Big Tech get hammered for messing with the First Amendment.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

RELATED TWEET:

LOVING THE NEW DNC AD!!!🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/0P8xl0mK0a

— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) November 2, 2022

Why Do Big Cities Tend to Have Bigger Government? thumbnail

Why Do Big Cities Tend to Have Bigger Government?

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Like any place that generates significant wealth, cities also generate significant incentives to capture the wealth.

Last week I answered a question from a FEE reader on how the Federal Reserve creates money. This week, Aaron, a FEE Daily reader, asks a very different question:

“Why is it that more populous cities seem more inclined to adopt laws and regulations that restrict individual autonomy, and attract residents more likely to vote for representatives who advocate such policies?

What can residents in growing cities do to avert this tendency?”

This question is a little less straightforward than a typical economics question. As we learned last week, there’s a clear relationship between interest on reserves and the supply for money. But there’s no clear direct channel which explains why cities skew anti-autonomy.

Nonetheless, economics is a valuable tool we can use to explain all kinds of behavior. We’ll begin by considering Nobel prize-winning economist James Buchanan’s dichotomy of the romantic view of politics versus politics as exchange.

There are two potential views of politics. The first is a romantic view. In this view, politicians are altruistic, sacrificial public servants. Voters are well-informed and always choose those candidates who have the best interest of the public at heart.

In other words, politicians are angels. If the romantic view of politics is true, there’s a simple explanation to why cities seem more inclined to adopt laws that restrict individual autonomy. People who live in cities believe that is what’s best, and politicians cater to that desire.

There are clear problems with the romantic view of politics, but the biggest is that it is inconsistent with how we analyze most institutions.

Take businesses, for example. If businesses have the opportunity to increase profits by polluting, what will they do? Generally, economists will assume they will choose to pollute. Firms are assumed to be interested in making the most profits and will pollute if they don’t bear the costs of doing so.

So we assume business owners are selfish. This begs the question, why would we assume politicians are selfless?

It would be arbitrary and unconvincing to take a sober view of business but a romantic view of politics. Nothing about existing in government confers angel wings on individuals. If anything, we should expect the opposite.

It would be more symmetric to assume politicians, like business-owners, are pursuing their own ends which will not necessarily align with the ends of the public as a whole (though there is good reason to believe businesses will align with the public more often).

For example, it will sometimes be in the best interest of politicians to restrict liberty. They could do this by passing higher taxes to increase their budgets, doing favors for special-interest groups, or lobbying political actors to increase their influence.

In this alternative view, politics involves self-interested exchanges between politicians and, for example, interest groups.

But this still leaves us the question, why do big cities tend to have more of this seemingly selfish political exchange, assuming that’s often what’s going on with big-government policies?

Wealth is a dangerous thing to flaunt. When I have to run into a store quickly, and I have my laptop bag with me, I’m always careful to place it out of sight in the car. Sometimes I put it under a seat cover, sometimes I move it into the trunk, and, on occasion, I decide to take it with me.

It’s not difficult to understand why. I hide my laptop when I leave it for the same reason people store their valuables out of sight. When you have more wealth, and people know it, you are a bigger target for extortion and theft.

It’s no secret that cities tend to have a lot of wealth concentrated in a small area. This isn’t to say everyone in the city is rich, but all the production and exchange in cities make them hubs of wealth.

And, like any place that generates significant wealth, cities also generate significant incentives to capture the wealth.

Consider, for instance, that a group of taxi cab drivers is seeking to keep its would-be competitors out of the market. In order to do this, the company might lobby for regulations (like a limited number of permits) that would restrict competition.

What sorts of cities would be the best places to create this kind of monopoly? Big cities with a lot of customers would seem like a good target. The return to cutting out competition by lobbying the government is pretty low when your potential customer base is in the hundreds rather than the thousands.

So, the group of cab drivers could form an association which donates to the mayor’s campaign and lobbies for a permit system.

But if politicians did something so egregious as this, couldn’t citizens vote them out? They could, but it’s unlikely that they will. Let’s say the city has one million people and there are one hundred drivers in the cab driver association. If the regulation adds $10 of cost to the one million people, that generates $10 million to be divided among the one hundred cab drivers. That’s $100,000 per cab driver.

So the cab drivers can earn a lot more money by getting the regulation passed. The citizens only lose $10 each. They don’t like this, but it’s hardly worth the time to organize against the regulation (or even learn about it in the first place). This is known by economists as the logic of special interest groups.

Smaller cities are different. First, there are less people to take money from. Second, the average income is probably lower. Lastly, it’s easier for a small number of people to organize and oppose regulations like this than a large number.

Admittedly, this increased lobbying of big municipal governments would increase competition for lobbying, but as long as there’s some fixed cost of lobbying that exists without regard to city size, I’d expect this problem would be bigger in large cities.

Another group that has more ability to capture wealth in big cities is bureaucrats. If we assume bureaucrats are only interested in the welfare of citizens, they would keep the size of their bureaucracy down. But if bureaucrats care about power and prestige, they may seek to grow in size beyond what makes sense.

It seems obvious that bigger cities will need more workers than smaller towns. Services like road maintenance, utilities, sewage management, courts, fire departments, and administrative workers will grow as the population grows.

If the number of bureaucrats merely kept up with the growing population then there’s no problem. But if each of the new bureaucrats lobbies for larger budgets, bigger office buildings, and more coworkers, we can imagine bureaucratic growth feeding on itself.

Each new government worker brings with them demands for an even larger government (and the taxes necessary to fund it).

In big cities, this sort of growth can be hard to track. How many bureaucrats are needed to successfully manage the budgets of the municipal water provision in New York City? I haven’t the foggiest.

In my town, I know exactly where the office for that manager is. There is one employee there and I know her by name. If they added another employee it wouldn’t be a big deal. But if I walked in and there were five new people working there, I’d probably be a little suspicious about why that was necessary.

It’s much easier for voters to gauge bureaucratic bloat when they live in small towns.

If my above thinking is right, then government overreach is to some extent a function of what makes a city, a city. A very dense, large number of people seems to result in this sort of overreach.

The fact that this question was asked in the first place is a good indication that big cities and big governments go somewhat hand-in-hand (at least in the US).

But not all is hopeless. I’m not keen on political solutions, but I’m very optimistic about bottom-up entrepreneurial solutions.

For example, the taxi medallion cartel in New York City wasn’t broken up by regulatory change. Uber, Lyft, and rideshare apps juked regulators and their special-interest cronies.

This seems to me to be a model of the best way forward. Rather than spending resources trying to overcome bad political incentives, I trust entrepreneurs’ profit incentive to keep innovation one step ahead.

AUTHOR

Peter Jacobsen

Peter Jacobsen teaches economics and holds the position of Gwartney Professor of Economics. He received his graduate education George Mason University. His research interest is at the intersection of political economy, development economics, and population economics.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Biden ENOUGH Regulations! thumbnail

TAKE ACTION: Tell Biden ENOUGH Regulations!

By Heritage Action

Between these two regulations, millions of franchise owners and workers will be in jeopardy of losing their jobs as the franchise business model would be destroyed.

Furthermore, independent workers such as truck drivers, freelancers, Lyft and Uber drivers, and more will be forced into an employer-employee relationship that strips away the advantage and appeal of being an independent worker. They will lose the ability to choose their hours or choose their clients.

Biden’s plans have all failed to help our economy, but as President Reagan also said “The more the plans fail, the more the planners plan.”

In the middle of an economic downturn restrictive regulations are the absolute last thing we need.

Help your fellow Americans—take two minutes to submit two comments to oppose these two rules!

Use our action center—Submit your comments now!

Janae Stracke

Director of Grassroots

Heritage Action

©Heritage Action. All rights reserved.

Covid Vaccines Injure the Heart of ALL Vaccine Recipients and Cause Myocarditis in Up to 1 in 27, Study Finds thumbnail

Covid Vaccines Injure the Heart of ALL Vaccine Recipients and Cause Myocarditis in Up to 1 in 27, Study Finds

By The Geller Report

And still the Democrats are mandating this poison for our children.

mRNA Vaccines Injure the Heart of ALL Vaccine Recipients and Cause Myocarditis in Up to 1 in 27, Study Finds

By: Daily Sceptic, October 27, 2022:

New evidence has emerged that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are routinely injuring the heart of all vaccine recipients, raising further questions about their safety and their role in the recent elevated levels of heart-related deaths.

The latest evidence comes in a study from Switzerland, which found elevated troponin levels – indicating heart injury – across all vaccinated people, with 2.8% showing levels associated with subclinical myocarditis.

The official line on elevated heart injuries and deaths, where they are acknowledged, is that they are most likely caused by the virus as a post-Covid condition rather than the vaccines.

However, expert group HART (Health Advisory and Recovery Team) has pointed to Australia as a “control group” on this question. HART notes that even though Australia had not had significant Covid (only 30,000 reported infections and 910 deaths) prior to mid-2021, it still saw a trend in excess non-Covid deaths beginning in June 2021 (see below). HART notes that Australia “did not have prior Covid as a reason for seeing this rise in mortality and hospital pressure from spring 2021”. Instead, “the results from this control group indicate that the cause of this rise in deaths, particularly in young people, must be something in common with Australia, Europe and the USA”.

Click here to view All deaths, COVID-19 infections, Australia, 31 May – 29 May 2022 vs baseline benchmarks.

In New Zealand, economist John Gibson found a temporal association between boosters and excess deaths, estimating “16 excess deaths per 100,000 booster doses” (see below). He noted that the age distribution of the deaths corroborated the hypothesis: “The age groups most likely to use boosters show large rises in excess mortality after boosters are rolled out.”

Click here to view B) Cumulative Excess Deaths and COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout: April 2021 to March 2022

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

VIDEO: COVID Jab Deadlier Than COVID for Anyone Under 80

Fourth Country Stops All Covid Vaccinations

Science Tests Positive For COVID

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Oregon Prepared To Institute ‘One Of The Most Extreme’ Gun Restrictions In The Country thumbnail

Oregon Prepared To Institute ‘One Of The Most Extreme’ Gun Restrictions In The Country

By The Daily Caller

Oregon voters are considering passing one of the most restrictive gun control measures in the country that would raise the barriers to purchase a firearm and place gun owners on a searchable database.

Measure 114, often referred to as the Reduction of Gun Violence Act, is a ballot measure that will require background checks, firearm training, fingerprint collection and a permit to purchase any firearm, according to the legislation. Oregon already requires background checks for gun owners, and the new legislation will cost the state $49 million annually while also placing an expected 300,000 residents on a gun owner database, according to Fox News.

“This is the most extreme gun control measure in the country, or at least one of the most extreme. It will virtually eliminate firearm sales in Oregon as written,” Oregon State Shooting Association President Kerry Spurgin told Fox News.

The legislation would require those who wish to own a firearm to complete a gun safety course regulated by the police. The measure also would restrict magazine capacity to ten rounds, an issue gun control groups have prioritized for many years.

“This measure will not make our community safer. It will put our communities at greater risk for violence because it requires that every sheriff’s office and police agency divert scarce public safety resources to background systems that already exist,” Deschutes County Sheriff Shane Nelson said in a video statement, according to Fox News.

Canada’s Prime Minister Just Banned All Handguns

I always say there is no such thing as common sense gun measures. Every time you hear that phrase from a politician, it means they want to ban all guns.

Canada Proved it!

Full Videohttps://t.co/72Egzk24xK pic.twitter.com/Ccxp3RVBVz

— Colion Noir (@MrColionNoir) October 24, 2022

California maintains a similar database for owners of concealed carry permits, yet the Reduction of Gun Violence Act aims to place all gun owners on a database, according to the legislation. Data on gun owners from the California database was leaked in June, and gun rights advocates have argued that a centralized gun database will lead to an abuse of power.

The legislation was pushed on to the Nov. 8 midterm ballot by Lift Every Voice Oregon, which obtained over 130,000 signatures, Fox News reported. A Oct. 4 poll by The Oregonian shows that 51% of likely voters will support the measure in November.

Lift Every Voice Oregon did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

BRONSON WINSLOW

Contributor.

RELATED VIDEO: Stop the Looting, Vandalizing and Crime in America Now!

RELATED ARTICLE: California DOJ Breaks Silence After Massive Leak Of Gun Owners’ Private Info

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Survey: Health of Democracy and Rising Costs Are Leading Midterm Voter Concerns thumbnail

Survey: Health of Democracy and Rising Costs Are Leading Midterm Voter Concerns

By Dr. Rich Swier

WASHINGTON, D.C. /PRNewswire/ — As the midterm elections near, a new national survey released today by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows a society divided between moving toward a more inclusive democracy and turning back the clock to the 1950s, as well as grave concerns about the health of our democracy.

PRRI’s 13th annual American Values Survey, released in partnership with the Brookings Institution, examines the dissatisfied state of American public opinion regarding the direction of the country and illuminates the partisan and cultural divides on midterm election priorities, abortion, immigration, education, gender identity, and LGBTQ rights.

“On questions related to American identity, the parties today are worlds apart—not just politically, but culturally. They increasingly defend different histories, live in different realities, and promote two essentially incompatible views of America’s future,” says Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI. “The survey shows a hardening rightward stance among Republicans, anchored by a white evangelical base, which is increasingly out of step with the values of most other Americans.”

The following are highlights from the 2022 American Values Survey:

  • Consensus that America is headed in the wrong direction, but large partisan and religious divides about the future: Nearly three-quarters of Americans (74%) feel the country is going in the wrong direction, including almost all Republicans (93%) and a majority of Democrats (53%). Americans are divided, however, about whether the country’s culture and way of life has changed for the better (49%) or worse (49%) since the 1950s. Additionally, nearly a third of Americans (31%) say that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians, including approximately half of Republicans (49%) and white evangelical Protestants (50%).
  • Health of democracy and economy top voter priorities in the midterm elections: Among Americans who plan to vote in this year’s midterm elections, the issues most critical to them are the health of our democracy (57%) and the increasing costs of housing (57%) and everyday expenses (57%). However, the parties have very different ideas of what safeguarding our democracy means. Partisans hold mirror-opposite opinions, with 85% of Republicans saying voter fraud is the bigger problem and 83% of Democrats saying voter disenfranchisement is the bigger problem. One especially troubling finding is that one third of Republicans who say they are most concerned with the health of our democracy (33%) say true American patriots might have to resort to violence to set things right; among Democrats most concerned with the health of democracy, only 7% agree.
  • Americans oppose the Dobbs decision, Republican support for abortion bans drops by half: In June 2022, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organiza­tion, which overturned Roe v. Wade. Six in ten Americans (61%) oppose overturning Roe, while 35% favor it. More than eight in ten Democrats (82%) oppose the court decision, including 71% who strongly oppose it. Only 40% of Republicans oppose the decision, compared to 58% who favor it. Majorities of all major religious groups except white evangelical Protestants (37%) oppose the decision to overturn Roe. Nearly four in ten Republicans (37%) say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared to 86% of Democrats and 62% of all Americans.
  • Republicans are outliers on immigration and educational curriculum: More than three quarters of Democrats (77%) support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, up six percentage points since 2013. By contrast, only four in ten Republicans (40%) support a path to citizenship, a 13-point drop since 2013. On education, two thirds of Americans (66%) say public school teachers and librarians provide students with appropriate curricula and books that teach the good and bad of American history. A majority of Americans who most trust Fox News (60%), Republicans (54%) and white evangelical Protestants (51%) believe public school teachers and librarians are indoctrinating children with inappropriate material. Conversely, only 7% of Democrats believe this.

To view the full report, including survey methodology, visit prri.org

PRRI is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy.

©PRRI. All rights reserved.

U.S. Has ONLY 25 DAYS OF DIESEL SUPPLY—Shortage Could Cripple Economy thumbnail

U.S. Has ONLY 25 DAYS OF DIESEL SUPPLY—Shortage Could Cripple Economy

By The Geller Report

This is intentional. The Democrats are on a rampage to destroy America.

Diesel fuel shortages will disrupt the entire US transportation supply chain. Not only do the trucks run on diesel but so do trains. Airports get their jet fuel by trucks. Think about that. That means gasoline, food, Thanksgiving and Christmas supplies all will get disrupted. Delivery of home fuel oil supplies by truck will be impacted. Think supply chain shortages were bad before, you ain’t see nuthin yet. And it will hit after the election.

Our only hope is to stop the treasonous Democrats from routing the will of the people through election fraud….. again.

Get out and vote. Overwhelm the system. This is the last election before the final assault of the left destroyers.

RELATED: If you think the price of energy and food has reached the limit, I have bad news for you: All signs are it’s going to be much worse

US Has Only 25 Days of Diesel Supply; Shortage Could Cripple Economy

By: Jack Phillips, Epoch Times, October 24, 2022:

The United States is down to 25 days of diesel supply as a top White House official declared the stockpile levels to be “unacceptably low.”

Data provided by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that diesel stockpiles are at their lowest level for October in records that date back to 1993, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. EIA data show that the United States, as of Oct. 14, has 25.4 days of supply—down from 34.2 days of supply four weeks prior.

National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, a top adviser to President Joe Biden, told Bloomberg News last week that current diesel levels are “unacceptably” low and that “all options are on the table” to increase supplies.

The diesel crunch comes just over two weeks before the November 2022 midterm elections and will likely drive up prices even more. Diesel is the fuel used by freight trains and commonly used by long-haul truckers to transport goods and food.

“Most of the products we use are transported by trucks and trains with diesel engines, and most construction, farming, and military vehicles and equipment also have diesel engines,” the EIA’s website states. “As a transportation fuel, diesel fuel offers a wide range of performance, efficiency, and safety features. Diesel fuel also has a greater energy density than other liquid fuels, so it provides more useful energy per unit of volume.”

Prices, meanwhile, remain relatively elevated, according to AAA data. The average price for a gallon of diesel stands at around $5.33 nationwide, or up nearly $2 since the same time in 2021, the data shows.

Wholesale diesel prices at the New York spot market spiked last week to more than $200 per barrel.

It comes as the Biden administration recently announced it would release another 15 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, part of the 180 million Biden authorized in March, that Republicans say is a bid to keep Democrats politically afloat ahead of the midterms. But Biden and his allies say that it’s not a political tactic, and the administration says it will refill the reserve when prices drop to $67–$72 per barrel.

“The United States government is going to purchase oil to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when prices fall to $70 a barrel,” Biden said on Oct. 19. “And that means oil companies can invest to ramp up production now, with confidence they’ll be able to sell their oil to us at that price in the future: $70.”

The move came after the International Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Plus (OPEC+) announced that it would cut oil production.

“Now, after draining our emergency reserves to a 40-year low, Democrats want billions more of taxpayer dollars to refill the [Strategic Petroleum Reserve] at more than double the price,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told the New York Post last week. “This is a direct attack on every single American struggling to fill their tanks and heat their homes.”

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: Pelosi Crows: “When People Talk About Inflation…Change That Subject!”

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

US Has ONLY 25 DAYS OF DIESEL SUPPLY; Shortage Could Cripple Economy thumbnail

US Has ONLY 25 DAYS OF DIESEL SUPPLY; Shortage Could Cripple Economy

By The Geller Report

This is intentional. The Democrats are on a rampage to destroy America.

Diesel fuel shortages will disrupt the entire US transportation supply chain. Not only do the trucks run on diesel but so do trains. Airports get their jet fuel by trucks. Think about that. That means gasoline, food, Thanksgiving and Christmas supplies all will get disrupted. Delivery of home fuel oil supplies by truck will be impacted. Think supply chain shortages were bad before, you ain’t see nuthin yet. And it will hit after the election.

Our only hope is to stop the treasonous Democrats from routing the will of the people through election fraud….. again.

Get out and vote. Overwhelm the system. This is the last election before the final assault of the left destroyers.

RELATED: If you think the price of energy and food has reached the limit, I have bad news for you: All signs are it’s going to be much worse

US Has Only 25 Days of Diesel Supply; Shortage Could Cripple Economy

By: Jack Phillips, Epoch Times, October 24, 2022:

The United States is down to 25 days of diesel supply as a top White House official declared the stockpile levels to be “unacceptably low.”

Data provided by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that diesel stockpiles are at their lowest level for October in records that date back to 1993, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. EIA data show that the United States, as of Oct. 14, has 25.4 days of supply—down from 34.2 days of supply four weeks prior.

National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, a top adviser to President Joe Biden, told Bloomberg News last week that current diesel levels are “unacceptably” low and that “all options are on the table” to increase supplies.

The diesel crunch comes just over two weeks before the November 2022 midterm elections and will likely drive up prices even more. Diesel is the fuel used by freight trains and commonly used by long-haul truckers to transport goods and food.

“Most of the products we use are transported by trucks and trains with diesel engines, and most construction, farming, and military vehicles and equipment also have diesel engines,” the EIA’s website states. “As a transportation fuel, diesel fuel offers a wide range of performance, efficiency, and safety features. Diesel fuel also has a greater energy density than other liquid fuels, so it provides more useful energy per unit of volume.”

Prices, meanwhile, remain relatively elevated, according to AAA data. The average price for a gallon of diesel stands at around $5.33 nationwide, or up nearly $2 since the same time in 2021, the data shows.

Wholesale diesel prices at the New York spot market spiked last week to more than $200 per barrel.

It comes as the Biden administration recently announced it would release another 15 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, part of the 180 million Biden authorized in March, that Republicans say is a bid to keep Democrats politically afloat ahead of the midterms. But Biden and his allies say that it’s not a political tactic, and the administration says it will refill the reserve when prices drop to $67–$72 per barrel.

“The United States government is going to purchase oil to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when prices fall to $70 a barrel,” Biden said on Oct. 19. “And that means oil companies can invest to ramp up production now, with confidence they’ll be able to sell their oil to us at that price in the future: $70.”

The move came after the International Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Plus (OPEC+) announced that it would cut oil production.

“Now, after draining our emergency reserves to a 40-year low, Democrats want billions more of taxpayer dollars to refill the [Strategic Petroleum Reserve] at more than double the price,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told the New York Post last week. “This is a direct attack on every single American struggling to fill their tanks and heat their homes.”

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: Pelosi Crows: “When People Talk About Inflation…Change That Subject!”

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

2023 Federal Tax Brackets Are Out. See Which Bracket You Fall in—and Why Tax Rates Are so High thumbnail

2023 Federal Tax Brackets Are Out. See Which Bracket You Fall in—and Why Tax Rates Are so High

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

The sad truth is, the average American works four months a year just to cover tax bills. How did we get here?

The Internal Revenue Service released new federal income tax brackets last week. Though marginal tax rates did not change, under federal law the brackets are adjusted for inflation, and they shake out like this.

Marginal rate Individual income Married couples filing jointly
10% $11,000 or less $22,000 or less
12% $11,000 to $44,725 $22,001 to $89,450
22% $44,726 to $95,375 $89,451 to $190,750
24% $95,376 to $182,100 $190,751 to $364,200
32% $182,101 to $231,250 $364,201 to $462,500
35% $231,251 to $578,125 $462,501 to $693,750
37% $578,126 or more $693,751 or more

The adjustments are designed to avoid “bracket creep”—a merciful measure that came out of the Reagan administration—and some media celebrated that many Americans may see a slightly lower tax bill as a result.

“The new brackets for 2023 mean paychecks for many Americans could see a boost, which will help consumers who are being hit hard by inflation and aren’t seeing raises that keep pace with price increases,” Herb Scribner reported in Axios.

While it’s nice to see Axios recognize that a lower tax bill is actually a good thing, the elephant in the room went unnoticed. The tax rates are eye-popping. Why are working families shelling out so much of their money— a fifth of their income, a quarter of their income, a third of their income or more—to the government? The sad truth is, the average American works four months a year just to cover their tax bills.

This invites a few important questions. Who authorized the pillaging of our paychecks and what exactly are we getting in return? And why do we pay taxes in the first place?

Most Americans probably don’t ask themselves these questions. The truth is, most of us pay taxes not because we want to, but because we’ll go to prison if we don’t. (And because our wages are garnished, which is another story.) Some will say they pay taxes because it’s their civic duty, but a funny thing happens when you ask these same people to pay more than they have to. They don’t.

Right answer. pic.twitter.com/67PUC7xjTO

— Jon Miltimore (@miltimore79) October 21, 2022

Others will argue taxes are necessary to fund all the programs and departments of the federal government, and they’ll have a point. The Pentagon’s budget is $767 billion alone. The Department of Treasury is not far behind with a $704 billion budget, and the Department of Transportation’s is $128 billion. The Department of Agriculture has a $208 billion budget. It goes on and on. Indeed, the list is so long that few Amerians could name all the federal departments and agencies, and even fewer could explain what these agencies actually do.

This invites an important question: what is the purpose of government?

Again, it’s probably a question few people ask, and answers will vary because it’s a subjective question. The question is easy to answer, however, if we look back to John Locke (1632-1704). In the eyes of Locke, whose ideas influenced the founding fathers and underpin the American system, the role of government is clear: it exists to protect life, liberty, and private property.

“…every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his,” wrote Locke in his Second Treatise on Civil Government. “The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.”

Locke argued the purpose of government is to secure the individual rights of people and nothing else. Its purpose is not to redistribute wealth, provide services to the people, or educate children. Government should be limited to its sole purpose, which is why the framers of the Constitution enumerated specific powers to the federal government spelling out exactly what it was permitted to do and stating in the Bill of Rights everything the federal government could not do to citizens.

When one looks at what the Constitution authorizes the federal government to do and compares it to the alphabet soup of federal agencies, it’s clear that both the Constitution and the principle of limited government have been largely abandoned.

In the absence of these restraining mechanisms, the size, scope, and expense of government have exploded. The federal government is now $31.2 trillion in debt. The institution created to protect our rights has become the greatest violator of our rights, an irony that would not have surprised the French economist Frédéric Bastiat.

“Instead of checking crime, the law itself [becomes] guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!” Bastiat wrote in The Law.

All of this explains why those marginal tax rates are so high. It stems directly from the size of government.

Instead of being excited that the inflation eating away their wealth might have a small silver lining—a slightly lower tax bill than last year—Americans should be asking why they’re paying so much in the first place. It might help them rediscover the lost principle of limited government.

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.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

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.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The case for nuclear power thumbnail

The case for nuclear power

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Despite its lethal past, nuclear energy is the clean and cost-effective power source we need.

In the fall 2022 issue of the technology-and-society journal The New Atlantis, authors Thomas and Nate Hochman examine the pros and cons of building new nuclear power plants in the United States.  The case of nuclear power is fraught with political issues that are inextricably tied up with technical issues, but the Hochmans do a good job of laying out the problems facing nuclear power and some possible solutions.

If nuclear power had not been invented until 2010, say, it would probably be welcomed as the keystone in our society’s answer to climate change.  Imagine a source of the most fungible type of energy — electricity — that takes teaspoons of nuclear fuel compared to carloads or pipelines full of fossil fuels, emits zero greenhouse gases, and when properly engineered runs more reliably than wind, solar, hydro, or sometimes even natural gas, as the misadventure of Texas’s Great Freeze of February 2021 showed.  What’s to oppose?  Well, a lot, as the Hochmans admit.

Deadly history

It is perhaps unfortunate that the first major use of nuclear technology was in the closing days of World War II, when the US became the only nation so far to employ nuclear weapons in wartime, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese with bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The long shadow of nuclear war has cast a darkness over the technology of nuclear power ever since, despite optimistic but misguided attempts to promote peaceful uses in the 1950s.

The Hochmans describe the golden era of US nuclear power plant construction, which ran roughly from 1967 to 1987, as a period in which the two major US manufacturers — General Electric and Westinghouse — offered “turn-key” plants that were priced competitively with coal-fired units.  The utilities snapped them up, and the vast majority of existing plants were built in those two decades.

The turn-key pricing turned out to be a big mistake, however.  Manufacturers expected the cost per plant to decline as economies of scale kicked in, but for a variety of reasons both technical and regulatory, the hoped-for economies never materialised.  The particular pressurised-water technology that was used was adapted from early nuclear submarines, and in retrospect may not have been the best choice for domestic power plants.  By the time the companies realised their mistake and switched to cost-plus contracts, they had lost a billion dollars, and utilities became much less enthusiastic when they had to pay the true costs of building the plants.

In the meantime, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed in 1970, making it much harder to obtain permits to build complicated things like nuclear plants.  In the pre-Act days, permitting a plant sometimes took less than a year, but once NEPA passed, such speediness (and the resulting economies of fast construction) was a thing of the past.

Then came the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl plant fire and disaster in 1986, further blackening the reputation of nuclear power in the public mind.  Add to that the not-in-my-back-yard problems faced by attempts to find permanent storage locations for nuclear waste, and by 1990 the US nuclear industry was in a kind of coma from which it has not yet recovered.

The Hochmans point to France as a counterexample of a nation that made a conscious decision to go primarily nuclear for its electric power, and even today about 70% of France’s power is nuclear.  But even France is having problems maintaining their aging plants, and French nuclear promoters face the same sorts of political headwinds that prevail in the US.

Viable option

Now that climate change is an urgent priority for millions of people and dozens of governments, the strictly technical appeal of nuclear power is still valid. It really does make zero greenhouse gases in operation, and when properly engineered, it can be the most reliable form of power, providing the essential base-load capacity that is needed to stabilise grids that will draw an increasing amount of energy from highly intermittent solar and wind sources in the future. Eventually, energy-storage technology may make it possible to store enough energy to smooth out the fluctuations of renewables, but we simply don’t have that now, and it may not come for years or decades.

In the meantime, there are plans on drawing boards for so-called “modular” plants.  If every single automobile was a custom design from the ground up, including a from-scratch engine and body, only the likes of Elon Musk could afford to drive.  But that was how nuclear plants were made back in the day:  each design was customised to the particular site and customer specifications.

If manufacturers had the prospects of sales and freedom to develop a modular one-size-fits-all design, they could turn the process into something similar to the way mobile homes are made today:  in factories, and then shipped out in pieces to be simply assembled on site.  And newer designs favouring gravity feeds over powered pumps can be made much safer so that if anything goes wrong, the operators simply walk away and the plant safely shuts itself down.

Standing in the way of these innovations are (1) the prevailing negative political winds against nuclear power, enforced with more emotion than logic by environmental groups and major political parties, and (2) the need to change regulations to allow such technical innovations, which currently are all but blocked by existing laws and rules.

In the Hochmans’ best-case scenario, the US begins importing modular plants from countries where an existing base of nuclear know-how allows efficient manufacturing, which these days means places like China.  Even if the US nuclear industry turned on full-speed today, it would take a decade or more to recover the expertise base that was lost a generation ago when the industry collapsed.  Regulations and regulatory agencies would change from merely obstructing progress to reasoned cooperation with nuclear-plant manufacturing and installation.  And we would derive an increasing proportion of our energy from a source that has always made a lot of technical sense.

On the other hand, things may just go on as they are now, with old plants closing and no new ones to take their place. That would be bad for a number of reasons, but reason hasn’t been the only consideration in the history of nuclear energy up to now.

This article has been republished from the author’s blog, Engineering Ethics, with permission.

AUTHOR

Karl D. Stephan received the B. S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1976. Following a year of graduate study at Cornell, he received the Master of Engineering degree in 1977… More by Karl D. Stephan

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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