CNN

Trump, Tougher On Putin Than Obama (CNN/NPR Admits)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(An Older post Updated)

JUMP TO:

  1. NPR admits Trump “much tougher on Russia than any in the post-Cold War era”
  2. CNN admits “the Trump Administration was pretty tough on the Russians”
  3. Sebastian Gorka’s quick list (Audio)
  4. Religio-Political Talk’s list from Facebook “wars” linked
  5. Hugh Hewitt’s devastating Tweet responding to the Leftist media narrative of Trump being a Russian asset
  6. Religio-Political Talk’s quick take using Hewitt’s point and my bullet points
  7. CHRIS WALLACE makes the point that Trump was tough on Russia with CHRIS COONS
  8. Sec. of State Pompeo schools Dem. Senator on Trump’s tough Russia policy
  9. The FEDERALIST’S excellent article noting that “Trump’s Russia Policy Speaks Louder Than His Words”
  10. A more recent FEDERALIST article discussing Trump/Biden approaches
  11. Miscellaneous stuff that didn’t age well
  12. Religio-Political Talk’s “clipping” of a Facebook response
  13. And finally, the BROOKING’S INSTITUTE has a list of over 50 sanctions and moves against Russia the Trump admin took… I excerpt 2018. (Hat-Tip: TOWNHALL)

NPR ADMITS IT:

…“There’s never been a president as tough on Russia as I have been,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

That might sound like hyperbole, but in this case, there’s actually some basis for the president’s boast.

“When you actually look at the substance of what this administration has done, not the rhetoric but the substance, this administration has been much tougher on Russia than any in the post-Cold War era,” said Daniel Vajdich, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council….

(NPR | see more at real clear politics: Meet the Heretics: Not Every Liberal Has Trump Derangement Syndrome)

CNN ADMITS IT… FINALLY:

(RED STATE) For five years, CNN has fed us a non-stop string of stories claiming, without — and contrary to — evidence, that President Trump was a tool of Vladimir Putin and that just about every foreign policy move by the US, from confronting North Korea to disarticulating the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Quds Force to slaughtering Russian mercenaries in Syria, was actually designed to give Russia some huge but unspecified advantage over the United States.

Now that President Trump seems destined to leave the White House later this month, CNN has openly violated their own editorial policy and decided to take a stab at telling the truth. This is CNN foreign policy wonk and noted plagiarist (yes, plagiarists can still find employment on CNN if nowhere else) Fareed Zakaria on CNN’s New Day on January 1:

See also Byron York’s piece: “Now They Tell Us: Trump Was Tough on Russia“

…Trump had, the lawmaker noted: 1) Bombed Syria, Russia’s main client, and unleashed the U.S. military in Syria, including against Russians; 2) Armed Ukraine; 3) Weakened the Iran nuclear deal, and would likely soon end it [which Trump later did]; 4) Browbeat NATO allies to increase defense spending; 5) Approved $130 billion in new defense spending; 6) Added low-yield nukes to the U.S. arsenal; 7) Started research and development on a new missile after Russia deployed a missile that did not comply with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty; 8) Shut down Russia’s consulate in San Francisco; and 9) Pumped more U.S. oil and gas, making the U.S. more energy independent.

Those were just the reasons at the time, in 2018. As time went on, Trump continued and expanded on all those Russia-limiting moves. Plus, he not only kept in place earlier sanctions against Russia, but he added new ones.

The short version of the story: Trump was right, and the media consensus was wrong….

(I added a Facebook conversational response by myself at the bottom — JUMP)

SEBASTIAN GORKA goes through a few items that is evidence against the idea that Trump is a Russian asset.

If you think Russia spent money to get Trump in office, that was the biggest waste of money in history.  Alternatively, if you think Putin has something on Trump, it has failed to dissuade Trump to act in Putin’s favor at all… Putin, then, would be the worse con-artist in history then.

RPT’S FACEBOOK POINTS, LINKED

Bullet Points

  • This admin reversed the policy of the Obama administration, which stood silently when Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea and attacked Ukraine. The Trump admin has sold the Ukrainians lethal defensive weaponry, including anti-tank missiles designed to destroy Putin’s Russian tanks in the hands of separatist rebels. (THE HILL)
  • The Trump administration has expelled 60 Russians, labeling them “spies” pretending to be diplomats. (DAILY WIRE)
  • About 300 men working for a Kremlin-linked Russian private military firm (many were Russian special operatives) were either killed (about 200) or injured in Syria on orders from the Trump administration (WASHINGTON TIMES)
  • Now, President Donald Trump approved sanctions on 38 different Russian companies and entities in response to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, its presence in Ukraine, and support for the Assad regime in Syria. These entities include 7 Russian oligarchs, 12 companies they own and control, 17 Russian senior government officials, and a state owned Russian weapons trading company…. even sanctioning a member of Putin’s family. (DAILY CALLER)
  • President Trump is pressuring Germany to stop paying Russia BILLIONS of dollars a year via the gas-pipeline deal (YOUTUBE).
  • Donald Trump employed jawboning to persuade, arm-twist, and threaten NATO member-states if they didn’t raise the level of their spending on defense…. “by the end of next year, NATO allies will add hundred – 100 billion extra U.S. dollars toward defense.” (FOX)
  • The Obama Administration worked unsuccessfully to persuade the Kremlin to stand down the program through diplomatic talks. The Trump Administration, in contrast, directly confronted the violation by funding development of its own missile. The research is allowed under the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty), and only breaches the deal if that missile is ever tested or deployed (TIME). “We’ll have to develop those weapons, unless Russia comes to us and China comes to us and they all come to us and say let’s really get smart and let’s none of us develop those weapons, but if Russia’s doing it and if China’s doing it, and we’re adhering to the agreement, that’s unacceptable,” Trump told reporters (DAILYWIRE).
  • After Sergei Skripal’s poisoning, US exports to Russia that could have military uses — so-called dual use technologies, are cut off completely (CNN)
  • President Trump signed an executive order to improve America’s critical infrastructure against electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks. (EPOCH TIMES)
  • President Donald Trump called on Russia to pull its troops out of Venezuela on March 27, following reports that two Russian military planes touched down in Caracas over the weekend with about 100 soldiers aboard. “Russia has to get out,”…. President Donald Trump’s national security adviser warned Russia on Friday about its military presence in Venezuela, saying any move to establish or expand operations there would be considered a “direct threat” to international peace.(EPOCH TIMES | REUTERS)
  • …when oil prices rise above $60-$65 a barrel… fracking increases supply, serving as an effective cap on energy prices. (Broadly speaking, the same principle is true of natural gas prices.) Putin’s government revenue and foreign policy are dependent on high crude prices and foreign nations buying their crude from Russia. Lower prices due to U.S. or other nations’ competition cost him a lot of money, and put the Russian economy and his public support at risk. Even more importantly, it deprives him of the tool of energy blackmail, which he has used to extort other countries into adopting Kremlin-friendly foreign policy choices. This is why Russian intelligence services have been so active in supporting western environmental groups and other interests opposed to fracking. (WASHINGTON EXAMINER — in other words, our energy policy, under Trump, is anti-Putin. By contrast, ALL of the Democratic 2020 candidates energy policies will enrich Putin.)
    • …the truth remains: Democrats are Russian President Vladimir Putin’s best allies. The anti-fossil fuel energy policy promoted by Democrats aligns perfectly with Russia’s economic needs. Russia is highly dependent on fossil fuel exports for revenue, and competition from the U.S.’s vast energy natural resources poses a direct threat to Putin. Restrictions on the development and use of coal, oil, and natural gas resources through heavy-handed federal regulations are the ideal U.S. policy for Putin. Limits on fossil fuel development and regulation were the foundation of Obama’s energy policy, and Clinton did not deviate far from her prior boss’ platform. As with Obama, climate change was the cornerstone of Clinton’s proposed energy policy, and she supported Obama’s war on coal and also sought to replace fossil fuels with so-called “clean energy.” To the dismay of Democrats and Putin, President Trump wants the U.S. to be an energy superpower, and his policies are unleashing our energy natural resources by reducing regulations and opening up areas for development. When President Trump decided to pull the U.S. out of the United Nations’ Paris climate accord, he was blasted by a choir of left-wing politicians, environmental activists, and the agenda driven liberal media. [….] Climate change, blocking pipeline construction, and stopping development of natural gas through fracking were the top priorities of the social media effort under accounts created by the Internet Research Agency in Russia, the same company special counsel Robert Mueller indicted for interfering with the 2016 presidential election. Previously, news reports discussed the possibility that environmental activist groups are being funneled Russian funds to promote government adoption of anti-fossil fuel policies. Clinton and Obama are by far not the only Democrats acting as Putin’s energy useful idiots. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo banned fracking in the state, and his Department of Environmental Conservation has so far blocked the construction of the Constitution Pipeline by denying a water permit to allow the project to move forward. The Constitution Pipeline would transport natural gas from Pennsylvania to upstate New York. New England is running an extreme anti-fossil fuel energy policy that is starving the region of cheap and reliable energy. During last winter’s cold snap, New England’s inadequate natural gas pipeline infrastructure reached its limit, and the region’s power was supplemented by liquefied natural gas from Russia. The pro-fossil fuel energy policy advanced by President Trump is being used to challenge Russia. President Trump is confronting Russia’s energy dominance in eastern Europe by exporting liquefied natural gas to Poland and the Baltic states. In addition, the U.S. is actively trying to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany. When it comes to energy policy, Putin and Democrats are on the same team…. (NEWSMAX)
    • …The strategic implications if the Russian lock on those markets is broken are lost on no one, least of all Putin. His economy is dependent on gas and oil exports, and 76 percent of the gas he pipes out of Russia goes to Germany, Turkey, Italy, France, Britain and other European countries. Already, the fracking revolution in the United States threatens Russian dominance on several fronts. In the last six years, the Americans have become the world’s biggest producer of natural gas, which costs in the United States a small fraction of what it costs in Europe or Asia. The result has been a massive conversion of electrical power generation from coal to gas in the United States; strong economic incentives for manufacturers to bring their factories back onshore; and newly revived American power in the international energy marketplace. Facilities that, ten years ago, were being built to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the United States are now being converted to export it. Moscow tried hard to downplay the challenge. Just a year ago, Alexei Miller, chairman of the Russian energy behemoth Gazprom, said he thought the American shale gas production was “unprofitable” and the boom in the United States would prove to be a “bubble.” But others in his company admitted that after Gazprom had spent hundreds of billions of dollars to develop fields in the Arctic around the Barents Sea, with the idea the gas there would be sold to North America, that market just dried up: the Americans didn’t need the Russian supply anymore…. (THE DAILY BEAST)
    • …The fact that Kremlin opposition to European fracking has nothing to do with environmental concerns should be clear even to the dullest among us, because Russia has massive fracking projects of its own underway in Siberia. The real goal is to keep Europe dependent upon Russia for its fuel supply. Natural-gas prices in Europe are quadruple those prevailing in the United States, and by maintaining a near-monopoly on overpriced European natural-gas imports, the Putin regime assures itself of a vast source of revenue. This allows it to rule and rearm Russia without permitting the freedom necessary to develop the country’s human potential. Furthermore, so long as Europe is kept critically dependent upon Russia for fuel, Moscow can paralyze and render ineffective any Western response to its plans for conquest, whose initial steps are currently being demonstrated in Ukraine. More, and much worse, is certain to follow so long as Europe remains helpless. In a recent four-hour television appearance in Moscow, Putin explicitly embraced Kremlin fascist ideologue Alexander Dugin’s grand design of creating a united totalitarian Eurasia, “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” If he can maintain control of Europe’s critical fuel supplies, he just might be able to pull it off. So it should come as no surprise that the Putin regime is pulling out all the stops in fomenting the global anti-fracking movement, with Europe as its central target. Leading the propaganda campaign has been RT News, Russia’s state-owned television network, which broadcasts around the world in English and other languages…. (NATIONAL REVIEW)
  • The United States is flexing its military muscles as a powerful warning to Russia. CNN’s Frederik Pleitgen got exclusive access as US warships started their own show of force in the Mediterranean Sea (YOUTUBE).
  • The Trump administration is taking dramatic steps to revamp the nation’s arsenal and prepare for a theoretical nuclear war with Russia in Eastern Europe…. The Pentagon last week took a major step forward by fielding its first new nuclear warhead in decades…. Analysts say that is just the first move in a grand long-term nuclear strategy to counter Russia and contend with an ambitious China… (WASHINGTON TIMES)

    • The End

    Here is HUGH HEWITT noting some of the above and more in a response to Wa-Po’s and others assertion Trump is a Russian agent or mole:

    The @realDonaldTrump-as-Russian-mole theory also must include that he has successfully fooled fmr SecDef Mattis, @SecPompeo @AmbJohnBolton.

    Helluva spy.

    EDITOR’S NOTE:

    If Putin paid for Trump, Trump is a smart mother-effer, because he first used Russian interests to get the White House, and then immediately turned on Russia’s interests. 

    Bottom Line Then:

    • PUTIN, THEN, IS AN IDIOT, AND TRUMP? THE SMART-AS-HELL-TACTICIAN.

    CHRIS WALLACE makes the point that Trump was tough on Russia with CHRIS COONS (Democrat from Intel Committee).

    Putin expanded Russian territory under Bush, Obama, and now Biden. NOT Trump.

    THE ENTIRE 3-HOURS is magnificent. I wish all Republicans pushed back like this. The truth is on our side!

    Sec. Of State Pompeo Schools Dem. Senator On Trump’s Tough Russia Policy

    THE FEDERALIST updated this post:

    • “Just Like Obama, Trump’s Russia Policy Speaks Louder Than His Words”

    ….The Helsinki summit did not change my view of the Russian president. As I have reiterated many times, Putin is pure evil. There is no doubt in my mind that U.S. intelligence agencies arrived at the correct conclusion: Russia did meddle in the U.S. 2016 election, and Putin himself directed the operation. Again, I speak from personal experience on this topic: In 2012, Russian intelligence services interfered in the Georgian parliamentary elections, boosting the Kremlin’s preferred candidate through disinformation operations.

    Thus, my opinion of President Trump’s policy vis-à-vis Russia is perhaps more positive than one might assume from my background. My reasoning is two-fold: After a lifetime of firsthand experience with Russian aggression, I must evaluate Trump’s actions against the proper historical context. In doing so, I have found that Trump’s actions speak for themselves.

    The Outrage Seems Selective

    On the first point, I consider it unfair that Trump’s performance in Helsinki has garnered harsher criticism than other incidents in recent memory. In 2012, for example, a hot microphone at a global nuclear security summit picked up then-President Barack Obama assuring Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” to negotiate with Putin after the presidential election.

    During a debate with GOP opponent Mitt Romney the same year, Obama casually dismissed the Russian threat, quipping: “The 1980s called; they want their foreign policy back.” Although Trump could certainly have been more forceful by condemning Putin’s crimes, his statements at the Helsinki press conference were nowhere near as concerning as his predecessor’s remarks about Russia.

    This brings me to my second point: Trump’s actions toward Russia speak louder than words—and so did his predecessor’s. Indeed, the Obama administration’s foreign policy undermined America’s credibility in my region, which Putin considers Russia’s “backyard.” There are many opinions about Trump’s rhetoric on Crimea, but it is a fact that the Russian land grab in Ukraine happened on Obama’s watch.

    How, exactly, did this happen? During and after Ukraine’s revolution of 2014, which ousted a Kremlin-backed dictator, on a daily basis the United States cautioned Ukraine not to escalate in response to Russian aggression. Thus, Putin saw an opportunity to annex Crimea without risking a direct confrontation with the West—and he seized it. Putin is a bully, but not a fool.

    What a Difference Two Years Makes

    Rather than changing his course after Moscow redrew the borders of Europe by force, Obama doubled down. Despite bipartisan consensus in favor of selling lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine, and vocal support from his own administration officials (including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton), Obama repeatedly refused to authorize the sales.

    Instead of anti-tank weapons, the Ukrainians defending their territory from Russian invasion received hot blankets and canned goods from the Obama administration. At the same time, Obama asserted that the Ukraine conflict had “no military solution.” With these words—and more importantly, these actions—he was perceived by some on the Russian side as accepting the Kremlin’s sphere of influence in Ukraine.

    Despite my warnings, the Obama administration also essentially turned a blind eye to Russian meddling in Georgia’s 2012 elections. The result was devastating not only for Georgia, but for American interests: A Kremlin-backed oligarch (who has substantial interests in Russian energy firm Gazprom) ascended to power in a strategic U.S. ally. Moreover, Russia’s meddling in Georgia’s elections functioned as a proving ground for information operations later used in the United States. To his credit, Obama accepted this reality in 2016, when he expelled dozens of Russian diplomats, but this response was too little, too late.

    By contrast, Trump authorized the sale of lethal defensive weapons to both Ukraine and Georgia in 2017. The Trump administration went beyond the congressional mandate in sanctioning Russian authorities involved in the annexation of Crimea. Earlier this year, the United States imposed the harshest sanctions yet, targeting Russian oligarchs as well as government officials.

    Trump’s rhetoric on energy at the Helsinki summit, which has been largely overlooked, is also a reason for optimism. The backbone of the Russian economy is energy, and Russia’s dependence on fossil fuels is Putin’s Achilles heel. At Monday’s press conference, Trump stated that U.S. liquefied natural gas exports would “compete” with Russian gas in Europe. This reflects Trump’s comments at the NATO summit, where he criticized Germany for supporting the Nord Stream II pipeline. Trump was correct to call attention to this project, which will enrich the Kremlin at the expense of struggling pro-Western allies like Ukraine…..

    Again, a more recent FEDERALIST article makes ann excellent point regarding the comparison of Trump and Biden:

    A recent Harvard-Harris poll found that 62 percent of Americans believe that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump were still in the Oval Office. As former senior intelligence officials under President Trump, we agree with that view.

    Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 when George W. Bush was president. Russia took Crimea in 2014 when Barack Obama was president. Russia has now invaded Ukraine with Joe Biden as president. However, when Donald Trump was president, Russia did not seize territory from any of its neighbors.

    During his four years in office, Trump not only successfully deterred Russia from acting against Ukraine, he effectively deterred a lot of bad behavior across the planet. He focused on ending America’s foreign wars rather than launching new ones. At the same time, he brokered the Abraham Accords to expand peace in the Middle East.

    The exercise of American power to deter adversaries is a complicated business. It involves a mix of military, economic, political, and diplomatic strategies and actions that together communicate the costs of threatening U.S. national interests.

    Ultimately, the art of statecraft boils down to whether a president projects American strength that deters adversaries, or projects American weakness that emboldens our adversaries. 

    So how did Trump succeed in containing Putin while the Russian autocrat has run wild with others in the White House? Why was he so successful at spreading peace elsewhere? We believe the long answer begins with these ten ways that Donald Trump projected American strength and kept the bad guys in check:

    1. Rebuilt the American Military
    2. Crusaded for American Energy Dominance
    3. Set the Tone by Launching Surgical Missile Strikes in Syria in Early 2017
    4. Developed Strong Relationships with Middle Eastern Nations Based on Mutual Interests
    5. Was Ruthless with the Taliban While Winding Down the Afghanistan War
    6. Crushed the ISIS Caliphate
    7. Demonstrated a Consistent Willingness to Take out the Bad Guys 
    8. Stood Up to China 
    9. Strategically Used Unpredictability as an Asset in Foreign Affairs 
    10. Advanced Tough Russia Policies and Provided Lethal Aid to Ukraine while Maintaining an Open Dialogue

    Each of these points are worthy of unpacking in-depth, but there are several that illustrate the dramatic difference in approach between Trump and Biden, starting with Afghanistan…..

    Stuff That Didn’t Age Well

    If there was one thing I have learned over the years of attacks against Bush over eight years, and now Trump… the rule of thumb is to wait about a week (or more) for the truth of the situation to come out. This is a prime example. Many who have a visceral hatred for Trump immediately jump on the band wagon [just like BDS, Bush Derangement Syndrome — there is TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome]… and… the below meme is a prime example.

    During conversation with a Facebook friend about a meme posted regarding the Dianne Feinstein with Attorney General Bill Barr, I linked the FULL exchange to the exchange. After some talk, the below meme was posted:

    Not a day after he posted the above, a writer I check in with daily had this post, entitled: “NBC NEWS MAKES CORRECTION TO TRUMP-PUTIN STORY.” In it she notes:

    After incorrectly reporting that President Trump had discussed former White House counsel Don McGhan’s potential testimony in the House with Russian President Vladimir Putin, NBC News was forced to issue a correction:

    CORRECTION (May 3,2019, 1:51 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this article incorrectly included one topic that White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Presidents Trump and Putin discussed on Friday. They did not discuss the possibility of former White House counsel Don McGahn appearing before Congress. Sanders was answering a question from reporters about whether McGahn would testify before Congress.

    HILARIOUS. I bet “unnamed sources” are at the center of this story. You can add this to the TRUMP IS CHUMMY WITH PUTIN conspiracy the Left and NeverTrumpers have:

    Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said the U.S. has a full range of options available to help oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and didn’t rule out “ultimately” using military action on top of diplomatic, political and other pressure points.

    “We’re preparing those for him so that when the situation arises, we’re not flat-footed,’’ Pompeo said on ABC’s “This Week,” one of three scheduled appearances on Sunday morning political shows.

    [….]

    Trump on Friday said Russian President Vladimir Putin assured him he isn’t seeking to “get involved” in the crisis, although Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton both said earlier in the week that the Kremlin talked Maduro out of leaving Venezuela after U.S.-backed Guaido attempted to end his regime by calling for a military uprising.

    “The president has made clear, we want everyone out, and that includes the Russians,” Pompeo said.

    FACEBOOK RESPONSE

    BROOKINGS INSTITUTE with “book-ends” from TOWNHALL:

    Joe Biden, president creampuff, thoroughly fears Putin, and so Ukraine and the world suffers. Trump did not fear Putin in the least, and so Russia did not gain one extra inch of Ukrainian territory from 2017 to 2020.

    Lie, Lies, And More Leftist Lies

    Along with Colbert, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, and the ‘mainstream’ media continue their non-stop, massive lies about Donald Trump being ‘soft’ on Russia. On June 28, 2020 Pelosi blabbed, “I don’t know what the Russians have on the president,” referring to the “Russian bounty”’ hoax.

    The media machine fervently wants you to believe that Russia/Putin “have something on Trump,” which impeded him from taking aggressive action to curtail Putin’s excesses. Concurrently, no U.S. president in recent history was tougher on Russia than Donald Trump.

    What Does the Record Show?

    EXCERPT OF 2018 VIA THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTE’S LIST OF OVER 50

    Dec 21 Statement – Increasing security assistance to Ukraine’s navy

    The U.S. Department of State announced it would provide an additional $10 million in Foreign Military Financing to further build Ukraine’s naval capabilities in response to Russian attacks near the Kerch Strait.

    Dec 19 Sanctions – In response to Russia’s continued disregard for international norms

    18 Russian individuals were sanctioned for their involvement in a wide range of malign activities, including attempting to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election, efforts to undermine international organizations through cyber-enabled means, and the Skripal attack in the United Kingdom.

    Dec 7 Statement – In response to Russian false allegations on chemical weapons use in Aleppo, Syria

    The U.S. Department of State refuted Russia’s and the Assad regime’s false accusations that the opposition and extremist groups conducted a chlorine attack in northwestern Aleppo.

    Dec 4 Statement – Withdrawing from the INF Treaty

    Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. would withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 60 days if Russia did not return to compliance.

    Nov 26 Statements – In response to dangerous escalation in the Kerch Strait

    Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley condemned Russia’s decision to intercept, fire on, and seize three Ukrainian navy vessels in the Black Sea.

    Oct 19 Indictments – In response to attempted interference in U.S. political system

    A Russian woman was charged for her alleged role in a conspiracy to interfere in the U.S. political system, including the 2018 midterm election.

    Oct 4 Indictments – In response to malicious cyber-related activities

    7 officers of the Russian military intelligence service (GRU) were charged for their involvement in hacking Olympic athletes, anti-doping organizations, and chemical weapons monitors.

    Sep 20 Sanctions – In response to malicious activities

    33 Russian individuals and entities were sanctioned for their role in U.S. election interference and their involvement in supporting military operations in Syria and Ukraine. A Chinese entity and its director were also sanctioned for purchasing jet fighters and missiles from Russia.

    Sep 12 Executive Order – Imposing sanctions for election interference

    President Trump signed an executive order imposing sanctions on any nation or individual who authorizes, directs, or sponsors meddling operations in U.S. elections. The order would allow for the freezing of assets and the limiting of foreign access to U.S. financial institutions, as well as a cutoff of U.S. investment in sanctioned companies.

    Sep 6 Statement – In response to Salisbury attack

    The United States issued a joint statement with France, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom, reiterating its outrage at the use of a chemical nerve agent in Salisbury and expressing full confidence in the British assessment that the suspects were officers of the Russian military intelligence service (GRU).

    Aug 21 Sanctions – In response to malicious cyber-related activities

    2 Russian individuals, a Russian company, and a Slovakian company were sanctioned for helping another Russian company avoid sanctions over the country’s malicious cyber-related activities.

    Aug 21 Testimony –  Assistant Secretary of State A. Wess Mitchell before the Senate Foreign Relations CommitteeAug 8Sanctions – In response to Salisbury attack

    The U.S. administration announced it would restrict remaining sources of foreign assistance and arms sales to Russia, and deny U.S. credit to Russia, including through the Export-Import Bank. Restrictions would also prohibit the export of security-sensitive goods and technology.

    Jul 25 Testimony –  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before the Senate Foreign Relations CommitteeJul 25Declaration – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issues Crimea Declaration

    Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a formal policy reaffirming the U.S. rejection of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The announcement was released an hour before his scheduled testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

    Jul 16 Meeting –  Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki, FinlandJul 13Indictments – In response to malicious cyber-related activities

    12 Russian intelligence officers were sanctioned for their involvement in hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton presidential campaign.

    Jul 11-12 Meeting –  NATO Summit in Brussels, BelgiumJun 11Sanctions – In response to malicious cyber-related activities

    5 Russian entities and 3 individuals – all closely linked to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) – were sanctioned.

    Apr 6 Sanctions – In response to worldwide malign activity

    7 Russian oligarchs and the companies they own or control, 17 senior Russian government officials, and a state-owned Russian weapons trading company (and a bank it owns) were sanctioned for their roles in advancing Russia’s malign activities – including the continued occupation of Crimea, engaging in cyberattacks, and supporting Assad’s regime.

    Mar 26 Expulsions – Russian intelligence officers in Washington and Seattle

    48 Russian intelligence officers from the Russian embassy in Washington were expelled, and the Russian consulate in Seattle was ordered to close, in response to the Skripal poisoning in the United Kingdom.

    Mar 25 Expulsions – Russian intelligence officers in New York

    12 Russian intelligence officers from the Russian Mission to the United Nations in New York were expelled for actions deemed to be abuses of their privilege of residence.

    Mar 15 Sanctions – In response to election meddling and cyberattacks

    5 Russian entities and 19 individuals were sanctioned for conducting a series of cyberattacks and interfering in the 2016 U.S. elections.

    Mar 15 Alert – In response to Russian government cyber activity

    The Department of Homeland Security and FBI issued a joint Technical Alert on Russian government actions targeting U.S. government entities, as well as organizations in the energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing sectors.

    Mar 15 Statement – In response to Salisbury attack

    The United States issued a joint statement with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom strongly condemning the Salisbury nerve agent attack and suggesting Russia was responsible for it.

    Mar 14 Statement – In response to Salisbury attack

    The U.S. administration issued a statement expressing its solidarity to the United Kingdom over the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, and sharing its assessment that Russia was responsible for it.

    Mar 4 Statement – In response to Russian and Syrian regime attacks on Eastern Gouta, Syria

    The U.S. administration condemned the military offensive that the Assad regime, backed by Russia and Iran, had been conducting in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta region.

    Mar 4 Poisoning –  Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, EnglandFeb 16Indictments – In response to election meddling and cyberattacks

    3 Russian entities and 13 individuals were indicted for conducting information operations to influence the 2016 U.S. elections.

    Feb 15 Statement – In response to “NotPetya”

    The U.S. administration condemned the Russian military for launching a destructive cyberattack in June 2017, also known as “NotPetya.”

    Feb 13 Statement – Proposing sanctions on Latvian bank involved in illicit Russian-related activity

    The Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed a new rule to ban ABLV Bank AS, Latvia’s third-biggest bank, for its involvement in illicit Russia-related activity.

    Feb 7 Military Action – In response to attack on U.S.-held base in Deir Ezzor, Syria

    U.S. troops killed hundreds of Syrian forces backed by Russian mercenaries (as well as Russian private military contractors). The American bombing was launched in response to a surprise attack on a U.S.-held base in the oil-rich Deir Ezzor region in Syria.

    Jan 29 Release – Russian ‘Oligarch list’

    The Department of the Treasury released a list of the most significant senior foreign political figures and oligarchs in the Russian Federation that could potentially be at risk of sanctions (114 senior political figures close to Russian President Putin and 96 oligarchs with a net worth of $1 billion or more).

    Jan 26 Sanctions – In response to Ukraine conflict

    21 individuals and 9 entities were sanctioned in connection with the conflict in Ukraine and Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

    Jan 19 Release – National Defense Strategy

    The Department of Defense released its National Defense Strategy, identifying Russia and China as strategic competitors to the United States.

    Iron Fist, not Kid Gloves  

    In all, as a Brookings Institute analysis revealed, the Trump administration enacted more than 50 sanctions or policy actions on Russia

    More Media #FakeNews (“Genius” and “Savvy”)

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    Clay Travis and Buck Sexton wade through the left’s lies about our interview with Donald Trump. These journos have nothing else left but to gaslight and demonize Trump.

    REAL CLEAR POLITICS notes the out of context nature of the MSM narrative:

    BUCK: Mr. President, in the last 24 hours we know Russia has said that they are recognizing two breakaway regions of Ukraine, and now this White House is stating that this is an “invasion.” That’s a strong word. What went wrong here? What has the current occupant of the Oval Office done that he could have done differently?

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, what went wrong was a rigged election and what went wrong is a candidate that shouldn’t be there and a man that has no concept of what he’s doing. I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, “This is genius.” Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.

    So Putin is now saying, “It’s independent,” a large section of Ukraine. I said, “How smart is that?” And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s strongest peace force… We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.

    By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened. But here’s a guy that says, you know, “I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent,” he used the word “independent,” “and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.” You gotta say that’s pretty savvy. And you know what the response was from Biden? There was no response. They didn’t have one for that. No, it’s very sad. Very sad.

    Marco Rubio says of the interview:

    Former President Donald Trump was being “sarcastic” when he referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “genius,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Tuesday. 

    “I heard that interview,” Rubio said during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “I’m not going off the press reports. I heard the interview. I didn’t hear him say that. I heard what I heard. A guy who was being sarcastic. He was saying, Oh, look at this guy, he’s a genius, this, that and the other.”

    Trump came under fire last week after his comments on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio show, on which he referred to Putin as being “savvy” and a “genius.”

    [….]

    “If it wasn’t for what the Trump administration did and laid the groundwork for, there’s no way Ukraine would still be able to hold out today,” Rubio said.

    (NEWSMAX)

    RED STATE rightly notes what Clay and Buck did when speaking about what the Left and Press has run with counters basic English context when “referring to someone as a ‘genius’ can carry with it, alternative meanings.”

    …Certainly, Trump’s talk on Putin has been at times sycophantic, something this author will not discount. However, referring to someone as a “genius” can carry with it, alternative meanings.

    For instance, when it comes to people like David Axelrod or Rahm Emanuel, I can admire their genius within politics and hold them in utter contempt because of how they choose to use their gifts. Adolf Hitler was a genius as an orator, but a genocidal sociopath. I do not presume to understand Trump’s motivations in his less-than-polished statements about the Russian leader; however, I simply state that Trump can believe Putin is a genius and a sociopath. While I can think Trump is a genius in manipulating the media (and trust me… he is), I can disagree with him on things like increasing deficit spending and his lowest-common-denominator rhetoric.

    When it came to Putin though, the left and the media (but I repeat myself) did their damnedest to tie Trump to Putin and Russia, despite the total lack of evidence of such a connection. Whether it was Russia-gate, in which Trump and his officials were never charged, or lofty stories of Trump and his behavior with Russian prostitutes, or even flat out fabrications, like was spun regarding Russian bounties on American servicemen in Syria, the media went to all lengths to make Trump appear weak against Putin and the Russians.

    Yet one stark reality cannot be ignored: Putin took no action against any of his neighbors during the Trump Administration.

    Regardless of Trump’s statements (which I often took issue with), the result of his foreign policy led to the lack of the entry of the US in any additional foreign conflicts for the first time in decades. That includes saber-rattling with any foreign powers.

    Meanwhile, when you look at Trump’s predecessor, the same cannot be said.

    Beginning immediately in 2009, Obama faced Russian games in Crimea in Ukraine. Russia, which had been exerting influence in the region towards the end of 2008 (after Obama’s election but before he took office) thrust the new leader (Obama) into a place many felt he was unprepared to be. Obama sat idly by and watched as Putin and the Russians pushed the area to the brink of war.

    In the months leading up to the conflict, the Russians had been issuing Russian passports to residents of other countries, an act which granted those people the rights of other Russian citizens, including the protection of the Russian military, should they need it. Protests, largely organized and funded by Russia, began popping up in Crimea, sending the region into chaos. Of course, this was the goal of the Russians, so they could use this conflict as a reason to enter Ukraine to reestablish peace on behalf of the (new) Russian citizens living in that region.

    Obama did nothing….

    (RIGHT SCOOP also responds to Meghan McCain)

    Hillary Clinton jumps into the fray and gets walloped! PJ-MEDIA has a great post in which I will steal two tweets from:

    Clay Travis and Buck Sexton break down Hillary Clinton’s lies about our interview with Donald Trump. How much wrong can the Democrats fit into just one year?

    President Biden “Checkmates” The Democrats (Larry Elder)

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    UPDATED!

    My audio follows…. but here is the SAGE’S official video:

    • President Joe Biden recently held a two-hour press conference in which he was asked if he would question the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm elections if new voting laws were not passed. “I think it could easily be illegitimate,” he answered, surprising many pundits who previously criticized Donald Trump for questioning the results of the 2020 election. But is it really that unusual or unreasonable for a U.S. president or presidential candidate to question certain aspects of an election?

    This is one of the best Commentaries by “Clear Eyed” Larry Elder… The SAGE hits it out of the park. (Yes it’s long, but worth your time.)

    This is definitely a “clean up on aisle ‘State Department’.” I include video where Elder uses audio, I also add some more “swerve” as well. Enjoy.

    Checking Facebook Factcheckers (and More Dammit!)

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    JUMP TO….

    (These are articles and excerpts — with some additional edits here — from my SITE’S FACEBOOK PAGE)

    Okay, I have been doing posts here-n-there with a montage of recent articles about the Covid-1984 gang and what I call “vaccine wars.” In this edition I will start out with a fact check of Facebook’s (FB) “fact check” of a linked article. This is the article with a slight excerpt, followed by my fact check (with a couple additional article links in it for my readers here). The article is titled, “COVID-19 Vaccines: Scientific Proof of Lethality,” and all it is is links to journal articles or papers by specialists calling for caution in whatever aspect they studied of the vaccines. Some are mild observations, others are potentially lethal. But they link mainly to medical journal articles.

    FACT-CHECKING FACEBOOK FACT-CHECKERS

    Here is the “Fact Check” — on my site’s wall they blurred the links graphic, and when you press “See Why” it brings you to a pop out window where you can link to the article refuting what you (I) put on your FB wall:

    Here is my own fact/fact check” if you will. Again, I will add articles for my readers to have more resources:

    RUSHED

    FACEBOOK says FALSE: because clinical trials under emergency use authorization showed them to be safe.

    THREE THINGS.

    First is that the trials were not nearly as long or under years long watch before fully approved, they were rushed. (CNN | WEB MD | HISTORY CHANNEL)

    And nothing says “we trust these products” like not being able to sue or be compensated for severe side effects (CNBC | NEWS18)

    55-YEARS

    Two, the FDA has actively tried to block the “clinical trials” paperwork and studies from becoming public.

    • IN FACT: in November of 2021 the FDA has asked a federal judge to give them 55 years to release data related to the Pfizer COVID vaccines (ISRAEL NATIONAL NEWS); and later Pfizer ditched 55-years and asked for 75 years of secrecy (WASHINGTON EXAMINER)

    These are from MEDIA’ITE

    So for FACEBOOK to say this without the public having any insight into the clinical trials is itself FALSE. (SEE: WINNING: A Court Victory for Transparency on Pfizer Covid Vaccine Data | First 500-Pages Released In December Showed Problems [PDF])

    And I will add a third. We do know that there have been many — publicly verified — issues with perfectly healthy people on a sports field that just drop dead or healthy young persons within days of the vaccine having major medical issues. One example is a young teen who was part of the clinical trials: https://tinyurl.com/yc6ehybj

    (See also Pfizer Whistleblowers [RPT] | See more stories: 1000 COVID STORIES)

    Nathan Emmanuel Esparza

    HERE IS A STORY ABOUT A LOCAL KID

    Nathan Emmanuel Esparza – Pfizer July 2021

    Died 13th July 2021 – Heart Attack Aged 16 Years Old

    Nathan was a young healthy 16 year old who was newly vaccinated with Pfizer.

    Nathan Esparza, a Castaic High School student and football player, tragically and passed away in his home of a Heart Attack on the evening of Tuesday, July 13th.

    Mauro Esparza (Nathan’s Dad) said “As I sit here and grieve for the loss of my best friend, and continue to hear my son, he left a great lasting impression on so many amazing souls….. this brings me some sort of comfort”.

    Castaic, California, USA

    I can personally confirm through neighbors he had just received the Pfizer vaccine. (More at NO MORE SILENCE)

    JOHN STOSSEL

    MORE EXAMPLES OF FB CHECKS:

    (See more at REASON)

    • The 11 Worst Fact-Checks By Facebook’s New Fact-Checkers (DAILY WIRE, December 2016)
    • Here’s Where The ‘Facts’ About Me Lie — Facebook Bizarrely Claims Its ‘Fact-Checks’ Are ‘Opinion’ (NEW YORK POST, December 2021)
    • Facebook Fact-Checkers Caught Making Wrong Fact Checks, Exposing Liberal Bias (LIES.NEWS, July 2020)
    • Facebook’s Lab-Leak Censors Owe The Post, And America, An Apology (NEW YORK POST, May 2021)
    • Facebook Fact Checkers Just Censored Peer Reviewed Science (WATTS UP WITH THAT, September 2021)
    • Candace Owens Sues Facebook Fact-Checkers For Defamation: ‘I’m Sick Of The Censorship’ (WASHINGTON EXAMINER, November 2020) ||| Candace Owens Challenges Fact-Checker, And Wins (DAILY WIRE, November 2020)
    • Covid-19: Researcher Blows The Whistle On Data Integrity Issues In Pfizer’s Vaccine Trial — Open Letter From The BMJ To Mark Zuckerberg (BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL, Decmber 2021)
    • Medical Journal Blasts Facebook For Using Fake ‘Fact Checks’ To Justify Censorship (THE FEDERALIST, December 2021)
    • Facebook VP Concedes ‘Fact Checkers’ Have Own Agenda (VISION TIMES, June 2021)
    • et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

    …MOVING ON…

    I found this interesting… I came across info regarding FDA “approval” that shows the swarmy nature of government run procedures.

    VACCINES ARE FDA APPROVED (LOL)

    Here is the intro to the story via JUST THE NEWS:

    Pfizer’s vaccine against COVID-19 has been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration, yet the pharmaceutical giant is still providing distributors across the country with an earlier version of the vaccine that predates FDA’s full approval.

    The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine allowed under federal Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in December 2020 and the Comirnaty vaccine approved by the FDA in August are identical, according to Pfizer and several experts.

    However, the two vaccines are legally distinct, raising questions over the legality of vaccine mandates….

    SEN. RON JOHNSON

    Here is Senator Ron Johnson’s key claim from the above interview:

    • SEN. RON JOHNSON: We do not have an FDA-approved vaccine being administered in the U.S. The FDA played a bait and switch. They approved the Comirnaty version of Pfizer drugs. It’s not available in the U.S. They even admit it. I sent them a letter three days later going “What are you doing?” What they did is they extended the emergency use authorization for the Pfizer drug vaccine that’s available in the U.S., here that’s more than 30 days later, they haven’t asked that very simple question. If you’re saying that the Pfizer drug is the same as the Comirnaty, why didn’t you provide FDA approval on that? So, there’s not an FDA-approved drug and, of course, they announced it so they could push through these mandates so that people actually think, “Oh, OK now these things are FDA approved.” They are not and again, maybe they should be, but the FDA isn’t telling me why. 

    Another posting on this notes the BAIT-N-SWITCH aspect of this whole thing via Jordan Schachtel at his SUBSTACK: Shell Game? There remains no FDA approved COVID vaccine in the United States

    I fact checked the fact checkers and couldn’t believe what I found. Despite the corporate press, Big Pharma, and the federal government telling us otherwise, it is absolutely true that there is no FDA approved COVID-19 vaccine available in the United States today. And there are no plans to make one available any time soon.

    I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s 100% true. And this reality hints at an incredible scandal within both Big Pharma and the U.S. Public Health bureaucracy.

    On August 23, the FDA granted full approval for a COVID-19 vaccine to Pfizer-BioNtech for a specific product sold under the brand name Comirnaty. The landmark moment — the “full approval” endorsement from the FDA — was heralded by the Biden Administration and countless states, and quickly leveraged to coerce millions into taking the shots. This product, Comirnaty, was fully authorized for the “prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older.”

    Yet Comirnaty itself has never made its way into the United States. The fully-approved version is nowhere to be found within our borders.

    A separate product, which remains under emergency use authorization (EUA), is the only “Pfizer shot” available in the United States.

    Early on, Pfizer and its government allies seemed to have a reasonable explanation for this issue. They claimed that Comirnaty was not yet available because the EUA shots were still lining the shelves, and claimed that the FDA-approved version would be available to all soon.

    Now, it’s been over 4 months since full approval, and Comirnaty is still not being distributed…..

    There is this story as well that I posted on my site’s Facebook that caught my eye, and it starts out by noting “There is a tectonic shift underway in the medico-scientific establishment: they are starting to walk back boosters.”

    BACKING AWAY FROM BOOSTERS?

    AMERICAN THINKER continues:

    The first indication of this dramatic change of attitude came from the United Kingdom last week.

    On January 7, Reuters ran a wire titled UK Says 4th COVID Jabs Not Needed for Now As Booster Effect Lasts. That piece featured the following sentence in its opening paragraph: “there is no need for now for people to have a fourth shot, British health officials said on Friday.”

    Three days later, the UK Mirror published a piece titled What Is ‘Living With Covid’? Boris Johnson Drawing Up Plans ‘To Be Rolled Out In March. The article quoted Dr. Clive Dix, the former head of the UK’s vaccine task force, who said:

    “It is pointless keeping giving more and more vaccines to people who are not going to get very ill. We should just let them get ill and deal with that.”

    A mere day later, Bloomberg put out an article titled Repeat Booster Shots Spur European Warning on Immune-System Risks. The piece opened as follows:

    European Union regulators warned that frequent Covid-19 booster shots could adversely affect the immune system and may not be feasible. Repeat booster doses every four months could eventually weaken the immune system and tire out people, according to the European Medicines Agency.

    The piece goes on to quote Marco Cavaleri, the Head of Biological Health Threats and Vaccines Strategy at the European Medicines Agency (EMA), who said that boosters “can be done once, or maybe twice, but it’s not something that we can think should be repeated constantly.”

    Cavaleri then went on to say something we had not yet heard from a high-level public health official:

    “We need to think about how we can transition from the current pandemic setting to a more endemic setting.”

    Around the same time, the World Health Organization (WHO) put out a statement which included this astounding sentence:

    “[A] vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is unlikely to be appropriate or sustainable.”

    This was a truly startling development since until a week before medical authorities world over were speaking about the need for the fourth (and even subsequent) shots. In fact, some countries like Britain and Israel have already started their administration.

    This sudden change of course indicates that there is something in the data that has the powers that be seriously worried. When it came to the Covid vaccines, the medical authorities have displayed an astonishing level of tolerance for side effects and collateral damage. So much so that they were even willing to let some children die unnecessarily for the sake of their vaccine agenda…….

    If true, then this IS BIG NEWS. Maybe this is why??

    The vaccinated population in the UK account for nearly 75% of alleged Covid-19 deaths, according to the UK Health Security Agency.

    Out of the over 3700 deaths reported from Dec. 6 to Jan. 2, over 2600 of them were fully vaccinated – over 70%, according to the data, and an additional 130 deaths attributed to the “partly vaccinated” brings the total up to nearly 75%.

    (PDF: COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report [Week 1] 6 January 2022)

    …TO WIT:

    The NEW YORK POST says that the “UK Health Security Agency said people who received three doses of Pfizer’s vaccine saw their protection drop from 70 percent to 45 percent within 10 weeks.” CNBC notes the fact that:

    Albert Bourla (PFIZER’S CEO and veterinarian)

    …Two-doses of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s vaccines are only about 10% effective at preventing infection from omicron 20 weeks after the second dose, according to the U.K. data.

    A booster dose, on the other hand, is up to 75% effective at preventing symptomatic infection and 88% effective at preventing hospitalization, according to the data.

    However, Bourla said it’s unclear how long a booster dose will provide protection against Covid. The U.K. Health Security Agency also found that boosters are only 40% to 50% effective against infection 10 weeks after receiving the shot….

     

    CONSPIRACIES BECOME REALITY

    MRNA CHANGES DNA

    BLOOMBERG has an article touching on this once “conspiracy” becoming reality. (The full article is HERE):

    ….In the biggest of the trio, the drug giant agreed to pay as much as $1.35 billion, including $300 million upfront, to Beam Therapeutics to partner on a technique for editing DNA. Two other deals will give Pfizer access to technology for synthesizing genetic material and delivering it to cells.

    “Clearly this is one of the top priorities that Pfizer and I myself have for this year,” said CEO Albert Bourla in an interview with Bloomberg Television. The New York-based drugmaker will “invest a lot of capital that has accumulated” through the sales of its Covid-19 vaccine back into this space, Bourla said.

    Developed with German partner BioNTech, Pfizer’s Covid vaccine has become one of the biggest-selling and most important pharmaceutical products of all time. While relatively difficult to ship and store because of temperature requirements, the messenger RNA shot is expected to bring in more than $36 billion for 2021, far outselling inoculations from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson that use other means to raise antibodies against Covid.

    Producing an mRNA-based Covid vaccine gave Pfizer expertise to apply to other mRNA opportunities, such as base editing, Beam CEO John Evans said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Pfizer and Beam plan to use mRNA to deliver edits that, if successful, would change a person’s DNA to fix or possibly even cure genetic disease….

    WITH OR OF COVID

    RED STATE brings us this gem:

    Since the beginning of the pandemic, a debate over the accuracy of the COVID-19 death totals has existed, with the attempt being to delineate who died directly from the virus vs. who died while having an incidental infection.

    That debate emerged because there have been numerous examples of people wrongly labeled as dying of the coronavirus when they clearly died by other means and would have done so regardless of infection. Typically, when a limited dive into the data produces such results (such as just looking at Palm Beach County), you can bet there are a lot more examples out there that just haven’t been discovered.

    Yet, for the better part of two years, any discussion of such miscategorizations resulted in a litany of derogatory responses. Either you were a conspiracy theorist, weren’t taking the pandemic seriously, or both. The press wrote countless articles insisting that the totals were completely accurate, especially during the Trump administration. The Washington Post even managed to call Sen. Joni Ernst, who is about as milquetoast of a Republican as you can get, a conspiracy theorist for asking questions. Meanwhile, social media companies would ban people for suggesting the totals were inaccurate.

    But as has been the pattern the last few months, from the admission that the lab leak theory is probable to revisions about the vaccines not stopping the spread of COVID-19, another major shift is taking place. Per CDC Dir. Rochelle Walensky, the government is preparing to release revised COVID death figures that will show those who died from the virus instead of the broader total of those who died with it.

    When taken in a vacuum, this announcement is a very good thing. Who wouldn’t want more accurate data regarding the pandemic? Especially when our inflated COVID death numbers are used to disparage the United States worldwide while other countries undercount their death totals.

    Yet, I can’t help but notice how politically convenient this is. Literally, just a few days after Joe Biden took the mantle of presiding over the most COVID deaths from Donald Trump, the government suddenly decides now is the time to revise the numbers? Yeah, there’s no way that’s a coincidence.……

    More and more evidence is showing what was called a conspiracy theory or xenophobia shows to be in fact reality.

    COVID ENGINEERED IN LABORATORY 

    TECHNO FROG has an excellent post on the matter — of which I will excerpt a portion from, but the ENTIRE article is worth your time:

    Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins have decried the theory that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a conspiracy theory.

    Back in March 2020, Collins said claims that COVID-19 was engineered in a lab were “outrageous.” He pointed to a new study that “debunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally.” Notably, one of the study’s authors, Kristian Anderson, had previously informed Fauci that some features of the virus “look engineered.”

    Never to be outdone, in May 2020, Fauci told National Geographic that this virus “could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.” Could not. He left no room for doubt:

    Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species

    Today, Congressional Republicans released e-mails revealing scientists and researchers – people who are certainly not conspiracy theorists – informing Fauci and Collins of their beliefs that the virus was man-made.

    Notes from a February 1, 2020 conference call were forwarded to Fauci and Collins on February 2, 2020. Here are the excerpts from the Republican release.

    Regarding the same February 1, 2020 phone conference, notes (likely communicating the position of Collins) state that experts needed to be convened to support the theory of “natural origin” or the “voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great harm to science and international harmony…” There was no concern for actually getting to the truth.

    Another February 2 email (to which Fauci and Collins were copied) from Dr. Andrew Rambaut states “from a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site.” Importantly, he observed the insertion “resulted in an extremely fit virus in humans.”

    Then there were efforts to completely shut down debate. Dr. Ron Fouchier remarked that debate on the origins of the virus would be a distraction and cause harm to science.

    And then in April 2020, we see Collins again asking government officials at NIH to “put down” the “very destructive conspiracy” that the virus was engineered…….

    (READ IT ALL!)

    Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)

    • “If the American people put us back in charge, we are definitely going to do this because we now know without a doubt that Dr. Fauci knew on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 that this thing [the COVID 19 virus] came from a lab,” said Rep. Jordan. (POST MILLENNIAL)

    And PROJECT VERITAS had a huge release of what is weightier than The Pentagon Papers.

    • Military documents state that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018 seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the gain of function research moratorium.
    • The main report regarding the EcoHealth Alliance proposal leaked on the internet a couple of months ago, it has remained unverified until now. Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, written by U.S. Marine Corp Major, Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.
    • “The proposal does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research,” a direct quote from the DARPA rejection letter.
    • Project Veritas reached out to DARPA for comment regarding the hidden documents and spoke with the Chief of Communications, Jared Adams, who said, “It doesn’t sound normal to me,” when asked about the way the documents were buried.

    [WASHINGTON, D.C. – Jan. 10, 2022] Project Veritas has obtained startling never-before-seen documents regarding the origins of COVID-19, gain of function research, vaccines, potential treatments which have been suppressed, and the government’s effort to conceal all of this.

    The documents in question stem from a report at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, which were hidden in a top secret shared drive.

    DARPA is an agency under the U.S. Department of Defense in charge of facilitating research in technology with potential military applications.

    Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense written by U.S. Marine Corp Major, Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.

    The report states that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the basis gain of function research moratorium.

    According to the documents, NAIAD, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, went ahead with the research in Wuhan, China and at several sites across the U.S.

    Dr. Fauci has repeatedly maintained, under oath, that the NIH and NAIAD have not been involved in gain of function research with the EcoHealth Alliance program. But according to the documents obtained by Project Veritas which outline why EcoHealth Alliance’s proposal was rejected, DARPA certainly classified the research as gain of function. 

    “The proposal does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research,” a direct quote from the DARPA rejection letter.

    Major Murphy’s report goes on to detail great concern over the COVID-19 gain of function program, the concealment of documents, the suppression of potential curatives, like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, and the mRNA vaccines……

    FEMINIST FATALE, NAOMI WOLF

    And GATEWAY PUNDIT covers Steve Bannon’s WAR ROOM discussion about this with the old guard feminist Naomi Wolf:

    On Tuesday morning Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine, and Dr. Naomi Wolf, a former Clinton adviser and democracy activist, joined Steve Bannon on The War Room to respond to the Project Veritas bombshell.

    Dr. Malone called it “bigger than the Pentagon Papers.”

    Dr. Wolf called it “manslaughter of millions of people coordinated at the highest levels.”
    Boom!

    NAOMI WOLF: The fact that Dr. Fauci grossly perjured himself is hugely apparent. It is the least of the crimes if indeed these are verified documents… I can’t overstate this, this is a premeditated kind of manslaughter of millions of people coordinated at the highest levels according to these documents. Treatments that would have saved lives were intentionally or reportedly intentionally suppressed.

    Via The War Room:

    [….]

    READ THE DOCUMENTS

    The DAILY WIRE joins the mix as well with an excellent article documenting “Top U.S. and British scientists reportedly thought that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, likely escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.” Continuing with their article, the reason they kept quite about it was due to international relations: “but some were hesitant to let the debate play out in the media because they were concerned about ‘international harmony.'”

    THEY KNEW

    “An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that ‘a likely explanation’ was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab,” The Telegraph reported. “The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have ‘accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans.’”

    However, a top Dutch scientist and a top U.S. public health official warned that discussing the lab leak theory could cause serious geopolitical issues and could harm China.

    Dr. Francis Collins, the then-director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), replied to Farrar, writing: “I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”

    Another scientist, Dr. Ron Fouchier, a Dutch virologist and Deputy Head of the Erasmus MC Department of Viroscience, responded to Farrar, “Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”

    The report added:

    In the emails, Sir Jeremy said that other scientists also believed the virus could not have evolved naturally. One such scientist was Professor Mike Farzan, of Scripps Research, the expert who discovered how the original Sars virus binds to human cells.… The emails also show that Bob Garry, of the University of Texas, was unconvinced that Covid-19 emerged naturally.

    Viscount Ridley, co-author of Viral: the search for the origin of Covid, said that the emails showed “a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible, for political reasons.”….

    BABYLON BEE’S PROPHECY

    And here is a WEASEL ZIPPER’S story regarding hospital shortages due to laying workers off due to no vaccinations:

    Science science and more science.

    Via Politico:

    Hospitals and long-term care facilities are so short staffed that many are compelling Covid-positive doctors and nurses to return to work, arguing that bringing back asymptomatic or even symptomatic staff is the only way they can keep their doors open amid a spike in hospitalizations.

    The practice, allowed by the most recent CDC guidance, underscores the dire situation in which many facilities find themselves as more than 120,000 people nationwide are now hospitalized with the virus — almost three times the total from Thanksgiving when Omicron was first detected.

    Keep reading…

    See more at: 5 Recent Babylon Bee Headlines That Were Surprisingly Believable

    Hospital beds in some of the largest cities have cut beds:

    And seemingly another political move to protect Biden, and that is to….

    STOPPING REPORTING OF COVID-CASES

    The WORLD SOCIALIST WEBSITE has the story:

    The US federal government will no longer require hospitals to report the number of people who die from COVID-19 every day, according to new guidelines from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

    On January 6, the HHS published updated guidelines on which information hospitals provide to the agency. The guidelines note the “retirement of fields which are no longer required to be reported,” among which is “Previous day’s COVID-19 deaths.”

    The guidelines note, “This field has been made inactive for the federal data collection. Hospitals no longer need to report these data elements to the federal government.” This change goes into effect February 2.

    Another Biden Admin CYA was the hospitalization rates, which I dealt with just last week. ELECTION CENTRAL 

    If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that Covid-19 hospitalizations appear to be skyrocketing to new heights around the country. Hospital after hospital is suddenly once again filled with Covid patients, or so it seems. As it turns out, the numbers are not only lying, they’re being distorted in such a way that further lessens public trust in agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to accurately and objectively provide information.

    The issue has to do with what types of hospital admissions actually get counted as Covid-19 patients. Obviously, patients suffering from severe illness due to Covid are included in this count. However, so are patients who visit the hospital for a scheduled procedure or another acute emergency, yet then test positive for Covid-19 while they’re there. They could be asymptomatic, having no Covid issues, but suddenly they become a “Covid hospitalization” and greatly inflate and exaggerate the numbers.

    [….]

    In a recent interview, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted that hospitalization numbers are greatly exaggerated, and the actual number of attributed Covid-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic may be exaggerated as well, but she doesn’t know by how much:

    CNN anchor Jake Tapper has criticized as “misleading” the admission by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it counted COVID patients who had been admitted to hospital for something else.

    Tapper was reacting to comments CDC director Rochelle Walensky made on Fox News on Sunday that “up to 40 percent” of patients had been admitted to hospitals with another medical emergency but had been later detected as having COVID.

    When asked by Fox News anchor Bret Baier if there was a breakdown of how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. were “from COVID” or “with COVID,” Walensky gave a non-committal answer in which she said “our death registry…takes a few weeks to collect,” and that “those data will be forthcoming.”

    The numbers are repeating around the country, with at least 40%, perhaps higher, of non-Covid hospital admissions in New York City being incorrectly included in the count:…..

    MEDIA BIAS TO PROTECT BIDEN

    AMERICAN GREATNESS has an article about the Associate Press ordering “its staff to stop covering the total number of coronavirus cases in the country and around the globe.” Saying it is a “dramatic shift in focus… apparently shifting the parameters of what a ‘case’ truly means.” CONTINUING:

    Fox News reports that the sudden change can be seen in a recent article from the AP titled “Omicron wave prompts media to rethink which data to report,” by author David Bauder. In the article, published on Wednesday, Bauder claims that, while the number of positive coronavirus cases and hospitalizations had previously been “barometers of the pandemic’s march across the world,” the ongoing spread of the Omicron variant from South Africa “is making a mess of the usual statistics, forcing news organizations to rethink the way they report such figures.”

    “The number of case counts soared over the holidays, an expected development given the emergence of a variant more transmissible than its predecessors,” Bauder wrote. “Yet these counts only reflect what is reported by health authorities. They do not include most people who test themselves at home, or are infected without even knowing about it. Holidays and weekends also lead to lags in reported cases.”

    As a result, the AP speculates that if every single positive test was included, then the total number of cases would be “substantially higher” as a result of dramatic inflation and exaggeration of many instances.

    “For that reason, The Associated Press has recently told its editors and reporters to avoid emphasizing case counts in stories about the disease,” Bauder continued. “That means, for example, no more stories focused solely on a particular country or state setting a one-day record for number of cases, because that claim has become unreliable.”…..

    LEFTIE MOMS RAGE AGAINST THEIR MACHINE!

    This first article is via THE ATLANTIC: Why I Soured on the Democrats: COVID school policies set me adrift from my tribe.

    MOM #1

    Until recently, I was a loyal, left-leaning Democrat, and I had been my entire adult life. I was the kind of partisan who registered voters before midterm elections and went to protests. I hated Donald Trump so much that I struggled to be civil to relatives on the other side of the aisle. But because of what my family has gone through during the pandemic, I can’t muster the same enthusiasm. I feel adrift from my tribe and, to a certain degree, disgusted with both parties.

    I can’t imagine that I would have arrived here—not a Republican, but questioning my place in the Democratic Party—had my son not been enrolled in public kindergarten in 2020.

    Late that summer, the Cleveland school system announced that it would not open for in-person learning the first 9 weeks of the semester. I was distraught. My family relies on my income, and I knew that I would not be able to work full-time with my then-5-year-old son and then-3-year-old daughter at home.

    Still, I was accepting of short-term school closures. My faith in the system deteriorated only as the weeks and months of remote-learning dragged on long past the initial timeline, and my son began refusing to log on for lessons. I couldn’t blame him. Despite his wonderful teacher’s best efforts, online kindergarten is about as ridiculous as it sounds, in my experience. I remember logging on to a “gym” class where my son was the only student present. The teacher, I could tell, felt embarrassed. We both knew how absurd the situation was.

    Children who had been present every day the year before in preschool, whose parents I had seen drop them off every morning, just vanished. The daily gantlet of passwords and programs was a challenge for even me and my husband, both professionals who work on computers all day. About 30 percent of Cleveland families didn’t even have internet in their home prior to the pandemic.

    I kept hoping that someone in our all-Democratic political leadership would take a stand on behalf of Cleveland’s 37,000 public-school children or seem to care about what was happening. Weren’t Democrats supposed to stick up for low-income kids? Instead, our veteran Democratic mayor avoided remarking on the crisis facing the city’s public-school families. Our all-Democratic city council was similarly disengaged. The same thing was happening in other blue cities and blue states across the country, as the needs of children were simply swept aside. Cleveland went so far as to close playgrounds for an entire year. That felt almost mean-spirited, given the research suggesting the negligible risk of outdoor transmission—an additional slap in the face.

    Things got worse for us in December 2020, when my whole family contracted COVID-19. The coronavirus was no big deal for my 3- and 5-year-olds, but I was left with lingering long-COVID symptoms, which made the daily remote-schooling nightmare even more grueling. I say this not to hold myself up for pity. I understand that other people had a far worse 2020. I’m just trying to explain why my worldview has shifted and why I’m not the same person I was.

    By the spring semester, the data showed quite clearly that schools were not big coronavirus spreaders and that, conversely, the costs of closures to children, both academically and emotionally, were very high. The American Academy of Pediatrics first urged a return to school in June 2020. In February 2021, when The New York Times surveyed 175 pediatric-disease experts, 86 percent recommended in-person school even if no one had been vaccinated.

    But when the Cleveland schools finally reopened, in March 2021—under pressure from Republican Governor Mike DeWine—they chose a hybrid model that meant my son could enter the building only two days a week.

    My husband and I had had enough: With about two months left in the academic year, we found a charter school that was open for full-time in-person instruction. It was difficult to give up on our public school. We were invested. But our trust was broken.

    Compounding my fury was a complete lack of sympathy or outright hostility from my own “team.” Throughout the pandemic, Democrats have been eager to style themselves as the ones that “take the virus seriously,” which is shorthand, at least in the bluest states and cities, for endorsing the most extreme interventions. By questioning the wisdom of school closures—and taking our child out of public school—I found myself going against the party line. And when I tried to speak out on social media, I was shouted down and abused, accused of being a Trumper who didn’t care if teachers died. On Twitter, mothers who had been enlisted as unpaid essential workers were mocked, often in highly misogynistic terms. I saw multiple versions of “they’re just mad they’re missing yoga and brunch.”

    Twitter is a cesspool full of unreasonable people. But the kind of moralizing and self-righteousness that I saw there came to characterize lefty COVID discourse to a harmful degree. As reported in this magazine, the parents in deep-blue Somerville, Massachusetts, who advocated for faster school reopening last spring were derided as “fucking white parents” in a virtual public meeting. The interests of children and the health of public education were both treated as minor concerns, if these subjects were broached at all.

    Obviously, Republicans have been guilty of politicizing the pandemic with horrible consequences, fomenting mistrust in vaccines that will result in untold numbers of unnecessary deaths. I’m not excusing that.

    But I’ve been disappointed by how often the Democratic response has exacerbated that mistrust by, for example, exaggerating the risks of COVID-19 to children. A low point for me was when Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe inflated child COVID-hospitalization numbers on the campaign trail. It was almost Trumplike. (If I lived in Virginia, I admit I probably would have had to sit out the recent gubernatorial election, in which the Republican candidate beat McAuliffe.)

    (READ IT ALL!)

    MOM #2

    And another Leftie mom wrote about an almost identical experience[s] in POLITICO: How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics: I’ve never felt more alienated from the liberal Democratic circles I usually call home.

    June 26, 2020, was the day I went public with just how angry I was about my son’s school closing down for Covid, and my life hasn’t been the same since.

    I had begun to sense a difference between my own feelings and those of my mom’s text group, which included nine of us whose kids had gone to preschool together since they were 2 years old; the kids were 8 at the time. These were the parents of my son’s closest friends. We even had a name for our group, the “mamigas”— as most of us were either Latinas or married to Latinos and shared a commitment to bilingual education.

    I tweeted, “Does anyone else feel enraged at the idea that you’ll be homeschooling in the fall full-time? Cuz my moms group text is in full-blown acceptance mode and it bugs the shit out of me.” I didn’t know it yet, but this would be my first foray into school reopening advocacy, which eventually included helping lead a group of Oakland parents in pushing the school district to be more transparent about the process of reopening (particularly in negotiations with the teachers union) and writing several pieces on the topic.
    I probably should have inferred that becoming a school-reopening advocate would not go over well in my progressive Oakland community, but I didn’t anticipate the social repercussions, or the political identity crisis it would trigger for me. My own experience, as a self-described progressive in ultra-lefty Oakland, is just one example of how people across the political spectrum have become frustrated with Democrats’ position on school reopenings.

    Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters. Members of the parent group I helped lead were consistently attacked on Twitter and Facebook by two Oakland moms with ties to the teachers union. They labelled advocates’ calls for schools reopening “white supremacy” called us “Karens,” and even bizarrely claimed we had allied ourselves with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s transphobic agenda.

    There was no recognition of the fact that we were advocating for our kids, who were floundering in remote learning, or that public schools across the country (in red states) opened in fall 2020 without major outbreaks, as did private schools just miles from our home. Only since last fall, when schools reopened successfully despite the more contagious Delta variant circulating, have Democratic pundits and leaders been talking about school closures as having caused far more harm than benefit.

    Some progressive parents now admit they were too afraid of the blowback from their communities to speak up. And they were right to be wary. We paid a price.

    So did Democrats, even if they didn’t realize it until later, or still don’t. Glenn Youngkin’s surprise gubernatorial win in Virginia in November was a wake-up call for the party. As has been recognized, Youngkin’s focus on school-related issues, especially after Terry McAuliffe made a dismissive remark about parents, was an effective tactic. Still, all over Twitter I saw progressives denying that parent anger at prolonged school closures was a major issue in that election — they claimed it was all about anti-critical race theory sentiment, despite research showing school pandemic policies were more to blame. Even more disturbing, as evidenced in the comments on a recent tweet by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), is that many still believe shutting down schools for a year or more was justified.
    Some progressive parents now admit they were too afraid of the blowback from their communities to speak up. And they were right to be wary. We paid a price.

    So did Democrats, even if they didn’t realize it until later, or still don’t. Glenn Youngkin’s surprise gubernatorial win in Virginia in November was a wake-up call for the party. As has been recognized, Youngkin’s focus on school-related issues, especially after Terry McAuliffe made a dismissive remark about parents, was an effective tactic. Still, all over Twitter I saw progressives denying that parent anger at prolonged school closures was a major issue in that election — they claimed it was all about anti-critical race theory sentiment, despite research showing school pandemic policies were more to blame. Even more disturbing, as evidenced in the comments on a recent tweet by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), is that many still believe shutting down schools for a year or more was justified.

    Some unions and districts are now using last year’s closures as a precedent. Recently, with the Omicron surge, several major school districts announced they were switching to remote learning for a week or more, including Newark and dozens of other New Jersey districts, Ann Arbor and Cleveland. Then last week, the Chicago teachers union voted for a sickout, followed by teachers in San Francisco and Oakland engaging in similar actions.

    Spring 2020 had been a disaster for my son when his school in the Oakland Unified School District switched to emergency remote learning. He had recently been diagnosed with ADHD and did not do well with me at home — he often flatly refused to do any work. Although I saw a range of reactions by teachers to emergency remote learning that spring, and know that some went to great lengths to keep their students engaged, my son’s teacher only met with the kids one-on-one on Zoom for 15 minutes a week. Beyond that, parents were given worksheets to do with our kids; there was no actual instruction that spring.

    When the new school year began in August 2020, Oakland provided only fully remote instruction. My incredibly bright but impulsive son found the temptation of having a computer screen in front of him irresistible — and would often open other windows or try to surf the internet.

    By January 2021, with my son increasingly disengaged as Zoom school dragged on and no hope of an imminent return to school in Oakland, I promised him I wouldn’t make him go through another year like this. I knew that he desperately needed to learn alongside other kids.

    I had until then resisted my dad’s suggestion that I consider sending him to private school. I was a proud alumna of San Francisco public schools and planned for my kids to attend Oakland public schools, despite their reputation for behavioral and academic problems. As an interracial, bilingual/bicultural family, what we wanted was for our son to attend a dual-language immersion program with plenty of other kids of color. My family was also in no way able to pay for private school.

    But I began to fear that even in-person school in fall 2021 was at risk because of the impossible demands of the teachers union (that schools remain fully remote until there were “near-zero” Covid cases in Oakland) and apathy of the school board and district; even after teachers were prioritized for vaccination, there was no urgency to get kids back to the classroom. My dad offered to help pay for private school, and we applied. In March we were notified that my son was admitted to a private dual-language immersion school, and that we had been granted a 75 percent scholarship. There was still no deal in place between Oakland’s school district and the union to return to in-person school. I had lost all faith in the decision-makers to do what was best for my kid. So I made the only logical decision.

    Even then, I feared what fellow parents might think of me. I’m well aware of the stereotypes of white parents choosing the private-school option when the going gets tough at public schools. I told myself that prioritizing being a “good leftist” at the expense of my son’s well-being wasn’t good parenting, but as a red-diaper baby myself, the white guilt dies hard. My own parents had sent me to an elementary school with a huge majority of Black and Pacific Islander students; while many might assume the white parents documented in the New York Times podcast “Nice White Parents” were pioneers, my parents reverse-integrated me into a “failing” school 40 years ago. Sending my kid to private school was accompanied by a lot of angst.

    My fears were amplified by the backlash I and other school reopening advocates had faced throughout the school year, particularly on social media. There were a range of insults lobbed at us: We were bad parents who didn’t care about our own kids or teachers dying, we only wanted our babysitters back and our frustrations about school closures were an example of “white supremacy.” Los Angeles teachers union head Cecily Myart-Cruz stated that reopening schools was “a recipe for propagating structural racism.”

    (READ IT ALL!)

    CNN FAILS THE #SCIENCE TEST

    Jake Tapper Slams NYC’s Mayor Adams For Non-Citizens Voting

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    CNN’s Tapper Slams NYC’s Dem Mayor Adams For Non-Citizen Voting, A “Mockery” Of American Citizenship (WEASEL ZIPPERS hat-tip)

    Justice Sotomayor Falls For Media Manipulation

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    These people (lefty judges on the Supreme Court) are just as clueless as the dopey Democrat behind the Starbucks expresso machine.

    SOTMAYOR SAYS 100,000 CHILDREN IN HOSPITAL

    PJ-MEDIA notes that this this “false claim can be easily fact-checked thanks to data from the Department of Health and Human Services.” Continuin they continue to say:

    …which says that the current number of confirmed pediatric hospitalizations with COVID in the United States is 3,342.

    Those are hospitalizations with COVID, not from COVID.

    How exactly did Sotomayor get it so wrong? How can a Supreme Court justice so irresponsibly spread misinformation? Further, why should the hospitalization rate matter at all? The issue before the court is not the severity of the disease; it’s the constitutionality of Biden’s mandates.

    THE CDC FACT CHECKED STATS

    EVEN CNN

    Even CNN forced to fact check Justice Sotomayor’s astonishingly false Covid lie…!!

    RIGHT SCOOP adds to the data coming in showing that the Lefty SCOTUS members are either lying or horribly misinformed — maybe by CNN? MSNBC?

    Sotomayor and Breyer lied through their teeth today about Covid. The media, when they aren’t ignoring this or saying the justices were RIGHT are claiming it was simply error or misspeak. But none of that is true, it was deliberate lying, like we see every day from their fellow activist liberal Democrats across the government and media, to include Fauci, Biden, and the rest.

    And new hospital data from New York only shows how BAD of liars they are.

    That’s right. So much for the “overwhelming hospitals” line of bull. If ICUs are full it’s because of procedure, not people coming in due to covid. And that means it’s not a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” too, by the way.

    She’s right. This was treated as a conspiracy theory for TWO YEARS and now we know it to be FACT.

    And same in Florida last month.

    But we have kids in trunks and Biden still pushing for mandates.

    Seb Gorka on Newsmax

    Sotomayor: The Stupidest Person to EVER serve on the Supreme Court.

    Bari Weiss Wrecks CNN’s Brian Stelter!

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    (Just note “far right” is believing that gender/sex is binary) Bari Weiss, a former editor at The New York Times, spoke to CNN’s Brian Stelter about the tens of millions of regular Americans who know this to be true (despite what the mainstream media tells you to believe): “The world has gone mad.”

    Brian Stelter is wrong… YouTube is increasingly removing (along with Twitter and Facebook and other social media outlets) any push back on “gender fluidity” and MANY other topics. Corporations disallow many a person’s views that tend toward conservative ideals. The schools and universities? Fuhgeddaboudit! And while Barry Weiss might have had CNN medical contributor Dr. Leana Wen remarked in June that any investigation of the lab theory shouldn’t lead to anti-Asian discrimination mixed up with this science writer for The New York Times who says promotion of the theory that the virus was manufactured in a Wuhan, China lab and escaped is “racist.” Glenn Greenwald notes the Tweet:

    Stelter may also start with the Yale Law administrators who suggested a student’s membership in the Federalist Society could be grounds for discipline, including preemptive disbarment. I could go on, but I need to go to work.

    Dave Rubin Discusses Joe Rogan Pressing CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    (Watch until 6:50) Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report shares a clip of CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta making the mistake of appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience. Joe Rogan gives Gupta an absolutely relentless grilling concerning CNN’s lies about his using Ivermectin to treat COVID. Rogan points out that CNN intentionally misled their audiences by portraying Ivermectin as a horse dewormer despite it being used in humans as well. He refuses to back off, continually asking him how he feels that a news organization willfully lies to its audience. Dave also does a special “ask me anything” question-and-answer session on a wide-ranging host of topics, answering questions from the Rubin Report Locals community.

    MORE Media Retractions… and Fact-Checks by NPR??

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    This first story deals with a story run by CNN via RED STATE… hold for the hilarity of DDS (DeSantis Derangement Syndrome):

    I wrote earlier about a story that spread far and wide, helped by a CNN report, that four teachers died from COVID within 24 hours in Broward County.

    CNN then tried to hook it up to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his ban on mandating masks, leaving it up to the parents to decide for their own children.

    But as I noted, school hasn’t even started in Broward County, and doesn’t start until August 18. So any teachers who got sick did so while on vacation, on summer break, and it had nothing at all to do with mask mandates, no mask mandates, or the schools.

    [….]

    The story originally claimed three teachers and a teacher’s assistant had died within 24 hours of COVID.

    Now the media is walking back that statement.

    Even now, even with this correction, they’re still only citing the teacher’s union president. How do they even know this correction is accurate? How do they know that whole 24 hours thing was accurate? Or that it was “from COVID” and not “with” COVID?….

    And in this story from REASON, they note NPR getting in on a correction of the CDC (hat-tip RIGHT SCOOP):

    Another CDC data flub distorts delta variant contagiousness. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) claimed the delta variant of COVID-19 is “as transmissible as” chickenpox. It’s not true.

    Chickenpox, caused by the varicella-zoster virus, is one of the most contagious diseases we know of. “If one person has it, up to 90% of the people close to that person who are not immune will also become infected,” states the CDC website.

    One person infected with chickenpox will infect an average of 10 people when everyone in a population is vulnerable to catching it. (This transmissibility number—referred to as R0—goes down when people have immunity to the disease.)

    “The initial COVID-19 strain had an R0 between two and three,” computational biologist Karthik Gangavarapu told NPR. The delta variant has an R0 between six and seven. For chickenpox, the R0 is nine or 10.

    How did the CDC conclude that these were equivalent?

    For one, the leaked document underestimated the R0 for chickenpox and overestimated the R0 for the delta variant. “The R0 values for delta were preliminary and calculated from data taken from a rather small sample size,” a federal official told NPR. The value for the chickenpox (and other R0s in the slideshow) came from a graphic from The New York Times, which wasn’t completely accurate.

    Apparently, the federal agency charged with disseminating COVID-19 data and setting public health policy is taking its cues from a newspaper infographic. Oh my…..

    MSM Telegraphs It’s Bias (Larry Elder vs. The World)

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    Larry Elder’s Show from Wednesday the 26th (2021) was good. The upload is mainly from the first hour, however, I add a lot of video to compliment his excellent points. Very long but worth the watch and listen.