California Assault Weapons Ban Struck Down

by Stephen Gutowski for The Reload

A federal judge ruled Friday that California’s “assault weapons” ban is unconstitutional.

The court found the state’s ban on the sale of AR-15s and other popular rifles violated the Second Amendment. Judge Roger Benitez ruledthe guns targeted by California are in common use. He said the state ran afoul of the Constitution in restricting access to them.

“This case is not about extraordinary weapons lying at the outer limits of Second Amendment protection,” Benitez wrote. “The banned ‘assault weapons’ are not bazookas, howitzers, or machineguns. Those arms are dangerous and solely useful for military purposes. Instead, the firearms deemed ‘assault weapons’ are fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles.

“This is an average case about average guns used in average ways for average purposes.”

California’s ban is one of the oldest and most aggressive in the country. It was instituted in 1989 but has been expanded multiple times in the decades since. The state added more guns and features to the ban. Eventually, it banned the possession of unregistered “assault weapons” before the latest iteration of the ban was challenged by gun-rights groups in federal court.

Benitez said the AR-15’s versatility made it widely popular in the United States, and that popularity is part of what gives it protection under the Second Amendment. He compared the modular firearm to a “Swiss Army Knife” and noted its use for home defense and civil defense.

“Good for both home and battle, the AR-15 is the kind of versatile gun that lies at the intersection of the kinds of firearms protected under District of Columbia v. Heller and United States v. Miller,” he said. “Yet, the State of California makes it a crime to have an AR15 type rifle. Therefore, this Court declares the California statutes to be unconstitutional.”

Alan Gottlieb, whose group the Second Amendment Foundation filed the suit alongside other gun-rights advocates, said he was “thrilled” by the ruling. He said it demonstrates that the Second Amendment protects the AR-15 under Supreme Court precedent.

“The so-called assault weapon is the most popular rifle sold in the United States,” Gottlieb told The Reload. “It’s commonly owned and definitely protected by the Second Amendment and two previous Supreme Court rulings in Heller and McDonald.”

Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition that was also one of the plaintiffs, said the ruling bodes well for the group’s efforts to fight “assault weapons” bans across the country.

“In his order today, Judge Benitez held what millions of Americans already know to be true: Bans on so-called ‘assault weapons’ are unconstitutional and cannot stand,” he said in a statement. “This historic victory for individual liberty is just the beginning, and FPC will continue to aggressively challenge these laws throughout the United States.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D.) did not return a request for comment.

Benitez said striking down the law was necessary to protect the rights of California gun owners even if a majority of Californians support the gun ban.

“While the Court is mindful that government has a legitimate interest in protecting the public from gun violence, it is equally mindful that the Constitution remains a shield from the tyranny of the majority,” he wrote. “As Senator Edward Kennedy said, ‘[t]he judiciary is – and is often the only – protector of individual rights that are at the heart of our democracy.’ Law-abiding citizens are imbued with the unalienable right to keep and bear modern firearms.”

Benitez, a George W. Bush appointee to the United States District Court for the Southern District of California, has issued several rulings striking down California’s restrictive gun laws. The state has often appealed his decisions and found a friendlier reception in front of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Gottlieb said the plaintiffs expect California will appeal this ruling as well.

The ruling will not go into effect immediately. Benitez issued a temporary stay requested by Bonta to allow 30 days for the attorney general to file an appeal. The plaintiffs said they would continue to fight the state if it filed an appeal of the ruling.

“We look forward to continuing this challenge at the Ninth Circuit and, should it be necessary, the Supreme Court,” Combs said.

The Frenzy Surrounding the Trump-Reinstatement Claim Shows No Lessons Have Been Learned

Bonchie reporting for RedState

A few days ago, Maggie Haberman of The New York Times made a bombastic claim involving Donald Trump. The anonymously sourced report alleged that the former president believes he will be reinstated in August as President of the United States.

Much of the right found the assertion to be questionable. How close is Haberman to Trump’s current inner circle, after all, which is much smaller than when he was in the White House? But another outlet is now claiming to have “confirmed” Haberman’s reporting. That comes via Charles Cooke at National Review.

Instead, they should have listened — because Haberman’s reporting was correct. I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.

Now, I don’t think Cooke is making up sources. Cooke is not a Never Trump figure and I have no reason to believe he’s lying. Rather, it’s highly likely that sources did tell him what he’s reporting about Trump believing he’ll be reinstated in August. But again, how does that “confirm” the story? Is there a direct quote I’m missing? Is there a named source at least willing to stand behind their statement that I skipped over?

My problem here is not so much that someone would report something via anonymous sourcing, but rather that we are going to pretend that this circular game of quoting off-the-record sources actually constitutes a story as having been “confirmed.”

It’s only been a few months since the Russian bounties story, which included a claim that Trump ignored intel that Putin was paying the Taliban to murder U.S. troops, was shown to be false. Multiple outlets had supposedly “confirmed” that story via anonymous sourcing just as we are seeing now with this latest report. After that Russian bounties story blew up, a lot of conservative voices, including some from National Review, chastised the media for playing a circular game of sourcing when it was clear that it was the same, lying sources blabbing to everyone who would listen.

How do we know that’s not what’s happening here? We simply don’t know that. Cooke can report whatever he wants, but there is nothing “confirmed” about what he writes in his piece. Could right-leaning media, even if they are Trump skeptical (or anti-Trump) please learn their lesson for once? It’s really disappointing that we keep spinning in circles, watching stories fall apart, only to see the next “bombshell” swallowed whole the next time it drops.

I have no idea if Trump actually thinks he’ll be reinstated in August. It’s certainly possible as Trump isn’t shy about making out-there claims. Yet, it’s also completely possible that these “sources” are spreading this rumor in order to discredit Trump’s standing in the party. What I do know is that nothing about this story has been “confirmed,” and until that has happened, it shouldn’t be treated as such.

Hong Kong Tiananmen Square commemorations: In Pictures

 

People in Hong Kong are marking the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, but in a much more muted way than in previous years.

Macau and Hong Kong are the only places in China where people can commemorate the anniversary of the deadly 1989 crackdown by Chinese soldiers on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing. Estimates of the dead vary from a few hundred to several thousand.

But for the second year running, authorities in Hong Kong have banned an annual vigil for the event. They cite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic for the restrictions.

Officers closed off Victoria Park, where the annual vigil is normally held, and dispersed crowds who gathered with candles or their phone lights lit.

 

 

This year's anniversary is the first since a new controversial security law was approved, aimed at ending the city's pro-democracy movement and criminalising dissent.

On Friday, officials arrested pro-democracy activist Chow Hang Tung, vice chairwoman of the Hong Kong Alliance which organises annual vigils for victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

 

 

Thousands defied last year's ban on the vigil, knocking down barricades around Victoria Park.

But this year commemorations are so far more constrained. The new security law - passed in 2020 - makes it easier to punish protesters and reduces Hong Kong's autonomy.

 

 

 

There were calls online from activists to light candles, house lights and even cigarettes to mark the event at 20:00 local time (12:00 GMT).

Police warned of more arrests, and Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said that citizens must respect the law.

 

In  past years there were huge street demonstrations to mark the anniversary.

Thousands of people took part in a candle light vigil in 2019 - the last year the annual event could be held.

 

 

 

In mainland China, authorities have banned even oblique references to the events of June 4. Online, any discussion of the crackdown is strictly censored.

Taiwan commemorates the anniversary every year, using the event to criticise China and urge Beijing to embark on real political reform.

On her Facebook page, President Tsai Ing-wen wrote: "I believe that all Taiwanese who are proud of their freedom and democracy will never forget about this day and will firmly stick with their faith, unshaken by storms."

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57356140 

 

 Officers were out in force and sought to disperse any crowds

 

 

 

Fauci Email Dump Illustrates A Dismissive Physician Who Rose To Fame To Cover His Own Scandal

The treasure trove of Anthony Fauci's emails this week 

peels back the curtain on a government bureaucrat 

operating as a government bureaucrat.

Tristan Justice reporting for The Federalist

A treasure trove of emails from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci’s were made public this week by BuzzFeed News after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) opened the inbox of the nation’s face of the pandemic and ensuing institutional decay.

More than 3,200 pages dated from January to June 2020 reveal a portrait of a government bureaucrat lifted up as a god-like figure in the legacy media who did what most government bureaucrats do: operate in their own self-interest no matter the stakes. 

On Tuesday, the Washington Post published its findings from a smaller series of emails obtained through a separate FOIA request. It painted the most predictable narrative one could expect from the pinnacle paper of Trump resistance: the heroic image of an 80-year-old physician steering the nation through a once-in-a-generation pathogen in the apparent absence of presidential leadership. The Post, however, kept its retrieved emails concealed.

BuzzFeed, on the other hand, published all 3,324 documents. Those depict an arrogant, dismissive physician who from the very start began to cover for his potential role in the lab leak theory, going as far as to brand himself the most credible voice in the world on COVID to do so.

Fauci Dismissed Early Evidence of Manmade Virus

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) enjoyed an 18-month head start to cover the origin of the novel Wuhan coronavirus after American media, in cahoots with Fauci, vilified theories alleging COVID-19 emerged from a lab in Wuhan.

New reporting from the Wall Street Journal last month, however, offered new life to the lab-leak theory after it narrated the story of three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) who sought hospital care with COVID-like symptoms. While the CCP claims the first documented COVID case was Dec. 8, 2019, the Wall Street Journal wrote researchers fell sick several weeks earlier in November.

According to a fact sheet from the Trump State Department and corroborated by officials within the Biden administration, the lab was at the time collaborating with the Chinese military while it conducted high-risk “gain-of-function” research into bat coronaviruses. In such research, scientists extract viruses from the wild and engineer them to infect humans to study potential therapeutics, including vaccines. This form of research is deemed so dangerous the U.S. government banned its funding between 2014 and 2017 to create guidelines within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to provide further review of such grant proposals.

The lab in Wuhan, however, operated with a $600,000 five-year annual grant of taxpayer dollars from Fauci’s NIAID to study bat coronaviruses during that time with money funneled through EcoHealth Alliance run by Dr. Peter Daszak. Up until two weeks ago, Fauci, who in 2012 defended gain-of-function research as worth its risk of a deadly pandemic, threw cold water on the lab theory and continued to play up the theory COVID-19 emerged from natural transmission from bat to humans.

Now, as more evidence emerges pointing to the Wuhan lab as the pandemic culprit, Fauci conceded he is “not convinced” the virus developed naturally. In the early days of the pandemic however, emails show credible experts brought to Fauci evidence and concerns COVID-19 came from the Chinese lab. Fauci brushed them off.

On Feb. 21, 2020, an associate professor at the Weill Cornell Medical College wrote to Fauci “we think that there is a possibility that the virus was released from a lab in Wuhan, the biotech area of China.” Fauci merely forwarded the correspondence to a colleague with “please handle.”

Two months later, Fauci’s response to an email from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director with the subject line “conspiracy gains momentum” with a link to an article about Fox News’ Bret Baier raising the lab-leak theory as plausible remains redacted.

In another email two days later, Daszak thanked Fauci for helping “dispel the myths” about COVID-19’s origin as a lab leak.

Fauci has vehemently denied the NIAID grant funded “gain-of-function” research circumventing the U.S. moratorium. Other credible experts, however, have contested Fauci and the NIAID’s claim, saying the money did not meet the term’s technical definition and was therefore able to bypass the review board erected following the U.S. moratorium to examine gain-of-function grant proposals.

Rutgers University Chemical Biology Professor Richard Ebright told the Daily Caller News Foundation in April the NIAID’s determination that the EcoHealth’s grant was something other than gain-of-function was wrong.

“The project’s abstract for the 2019 fiscal year, which referenced ‘in virtro and in vivo infection experiments’ on coronaviruses, ‘*unequivocally* required risk-benefit review,'” under the oversight board set up under HHS to review such grant proposals, the Daily Caller reported of Ebright’s analysis.

Former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade also called Fauci’s denial of the grant money as “gain-of-function” funding a surprise, given evidence of the experiments “with enhancing coronaviruses and the language of the moratorium statute defining gain-of-function as ‘any research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.'”

Another set of emails show Fauci in April last year writing about the role of gain-of-function research under the subject line “IMPORTANT” before he apparently took the conversation offline.

Fauci Ignored Warning Virus Was Beyond Containment

While ascending to fame as the nation’s doctor to prescribe containment measures to a friendly media, Fauci blew off a March 2020 email from a scientist named Erik Nilsen who warned spread of the coronavirus was beyond containment. Nilsen also accused China of sending out false data after he suspected the host nation of the first outbreak had stopped counting deaths from the coronavirus.

Months later, China had indeed been shown to be manipulating its public data.

“I have lots of information about China due to my business, scientific friendship, and other ties with many there, including immunologists & virologists at top-tier institutions and laboratories,” Nilsen wrote, explaining his WeChat account was temporarily suspended by the CCP in late February and early March in the pandemic’s first year. “I’m convinced you already know the outbreak is way past the point of containment, and, unfortunately, herd immunity will soon ensue. Then, outbreak 2 will happen shortly after, and, hopefully not ad infinitum.”

Fauci merely passed the inquiry to a colleague with the text, “too long for me to read.”

Facebook Collusion

Consistent with his favor among the greater political establishment, Facebook reached out to Fauci to participate in building the platform’s hub for virus-related news, an opportunity Fauci appeared excited to engage.

“This isn’t public yet, but we’re building a Coronavirus Information Hub that we’re going to put at the top of Facebook for everyone (200+ million Americans, 2.5 billion people worldwide) with two goals: (1) make sure people can get authoritative information from reliable sources and (2) encourage people to practice social distance and give people ideas for doing this using internet tools,” read a March 15 email from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “This will be live within the next 48 hours.”

Zuckerberg continued: “As a central part of this hub, I think it would be useful to include a video from you because people trust and want to hear from experts rather than just a bunch of agencies and political leaders.”

Another offer remains redacted.

“Your idea and proposal sound terrific. I would be happy to do a video for your hub,” Fauci replied. “We need to reach as many people as possible and convince them to take mitigation strategies seriously or things will get much, much worse. Also, your idea about [REDACTED] is very exciting.”

Zuckerberg reiterated Facebook’s commitment to promoting authoritative information to its users. In February, Facebook announced an “update” in its effort to combat “misinformation” in which the platform would remove posts claiming “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured.” The company policy remained in place for months, until it was finally rescinded last week.

Emails Debunk Fauci Explanation On Mask Flip-Flop

Of all of Fauci’s inconsistencies, the NIAID director’s position on face masks has been the most visible. The doctor went from discouraging their use to demanding them as permanently essential post-pandemic.

“If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn’t really do much to protect you,” Fauci told the USA Today editorial board in late February of 2020. “There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask.”

The message was consistent with CDC research on pandemic preparation that did not encourage face masks for similar reasons. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Fauci told CBS’ “60 Minutes” just several weeks later.

Yet Fauci would go on to encourage Americans to wear two masks by January, and then seasonally mask by May with no exceptions even for vaccinated persons. When asked about his changed position, Fauci explained his early opposition stemmed from concern those in high-risk environments such as hospitals wouldn’t have access.

“We were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerend that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.” Fauci said in June last year. “We wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus.”

Behind the screen, however, Fauci appeared to oppose mask use for scientific, not supply, reasons.

“The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material,” Fauci wrote to Sylvia Burwell on Feb. 5, 2020, likely the same woman who served as HHS secretary in the Obama administration. “It might however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.”

Fauci’s final recommendation in that email was not to wear a mask.

Behind The SARS-CoV-2 Origination Backstory All Roads Lead to 'Stop Trump'

by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse

Ballot audits not withstanding, I doubt there is a bigger story that will surface this year and this one has familiar tentacles…

As the discussion surrounding the release of emails from Anthony Fauci ripples through the media, we should all consider carefully the consequential ramifications of the discussion upon our nation.  At the heart of the current debate is a question about whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from a bio research lab in Wuhan China. An article in Vanity Fair magazine provides some stark background to contemplate:

[Excerpt] – […] In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

[…] In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.” (read more)

There are a lot of familiar institutions and people within the article highlighting just how political everything around the COVID outbreak became.  As a nation we have all lived through the consequences of these political manipulations.  However, the application of Occam’s razor can serve as a guide; and I think the data is aligning in one specific direction.

Whether the virus originated in a Wuhan lab and was leaked accidentally or whether it was created by Chinese scientists and released purposefully is obviously something that will be debated for quite some time.  For the sake of this particular point of discussion that particular aspect is less important.  What is important, and indeed more factually likely, is that regardless of SARS-CoV-2 origination there were political elements inside the U.S. who sought to take advantage of the crisis.

As President Obama’s former chief of staff and later Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, famously said: “never let a crisis go to waste.”   I think the answers to the outcome of COVID-19 in the era of President Donald Trump can be identified within that statement.  Unfortunately, that means the discussion of COVID-19 is going to be exponentially politicized and that means discovering the truth will be even more challenging.

Nothing happens in a vacuum and as we have noted within these pages for years if you follow the sequence and timeline you get a better picture of what is really going on.  Consider this sequence:

• A once beloved Bill Gates, the primary advocate for COVID vaccines, suddenly became a target by the political left.  It was quite a shift.
• The White House announces their support of investigation into the origin of COVID-19.
• Media report on State Dept investigators who were handcuffed during their research into the COVID origination.
• Suddenly discussion of the “Lab Leak Theory” was permitted by those who control the platforms of speech.
• Media then report of Anthony Fauci gaining a lucrative book deal.
• Joe Biden gives a speech in Oklahoma on Tuesday; and immediately thereafter the White House announces no more public appearances for the remainder of the week.
• The Fauci emails are released under the auspices of a FOIA fulfillment.

 

This shift in the overall narrative where the media, White House and Big Tech platforms like Facebook were now supporting discussion of the “lab leak theory” – starts to make sense when you put the engineering into the sequence.

The release of the Anthony Fauci emails was part of a FOIA fulfillment.  The administrative state knew these emails were going to be released, and that explains why multiple vested interests started trying to get out in front of the information by opening up the “lab leak” discussion for new approvals.  In essence, knowing this information was about to enter the public bloodstream, all of those vested interests had a reason to get out in front of the story.  Hence, the previously forbidden discussion(s) and topics were now approved for public debate.

That to bring us to a key question:  Why would the Deep State release these emails, instead of just hiding them?

This point, which will be overlooked by most, should be very familiar to CTH readers…. The FOIA fulfillment of these emails has a very distinct fingerprint that implies there is something much larger in the background.

You will remember the Carter Page FISA application was also released under the guise of a FOIA fulfillment.  On July 21, 2018, the Mueller team (led by Andrew Weissmann) released the Page FISA application, the first release of a FISA application in history, with the motive to hide/bury the much larger issue of President Obama’s administration using the Intelligence Community to conduct surveillance on their political opponents.

Everyone jumped on the stories around the FISA release, and few people paused to ask why this “Top Secret” Title-1 Search and surveillance authorization document was released in the first place?   Requesting the public release of such a top secret document would have been the easiest FOIA request to deny… but the DOJ choose to release it.

The Mueller/Weissmann motive was simple: they needed to cloud the bigger issue of surveillance of a political campaign (they also knew SSCI Security Officer James Wolfe had already leaked it to the media on March 17th of 2017).

Everyone was excited to read and discuss the content of the FISA application and exhaust thousands of column inches on the discussion as people took sides based on the DOJ/FBI justification for the FISA itself.

The Weissmann release had the intended effect… people stopped debating whether President Obama was conducting political surveillance on behalf of Hillary Clinton and their political alignment.  THAT debate was a much bigger issue that just disappeared with the emergence of the FISA application.

The release of these Fauci emails has an almost identical smell, which would indicate there is a much bigger story in the background that this release is intended to dilute.

Perhaps the bigger story is the creation of the virus; perhaps the bigger story is an intentional release of a manufactured virus; or perhaps the bigger story is the manipulation of the virus -the creation of a fraudulent narrative- to achieve political goals.  Against the backdrop of “never letting a crisis go to waste”, the latter seems much more likely.

The origination of SARS-CoV-2 (natural or lab leak) becomes a moot point.  What matters is how the operatives in the U.S. sought to take advantage of the crisis the COVID outbreak provided.  The timing of the steps they took to take advantage of the opportunity also align with the outbreak.  Even the selection of Joe Biden as the front-man beneficiary just before Super-Tuesday 2020 fits into the opportunity timeline. The COVID-19 outbreak became a tool to achieve a variety of objectives:

• The stalling of a fantastic economy that was benefiting every American voter.

• Deployment of mail-in ballots that can be used and manipulated to achieve fraudulent results.

• Controls over presidential debates to avoid a weak candidate being exposed or confronted.

• The deployed ‘excuse‘ for a very visible lack of voter enthusiasm for the puppet (Biden).

In short, without COVID as a tool the manipulated election outcome is more difficult. The ‘never let a crisis go to waste‘ strategy includes the necessary precursor of a crisis.  Everything downstream was manipulated political opportunity.  All roads lead to “stop Trump.”

On February 25, 2020, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, former DOJ Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s sister, who was director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (link) held a conference call with reporters.  Messonnier’s remarks were rogue and not approved by HHS secretary Alex Azar. Messonnier’s remarks were made without authorization from anyone in the White House:

“We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare for the expectation that this could be bad.” … “I understand this whole situation may seem overwhelming and that disruption to everyday life may be severe. But these are things that people need to start thinking about now.” (link)

The alarming message from Dr. Messonnier was quickly picked up by most major news organizations and pushed into all reporting on the issue.  The COVID panic had begun.

While the attack weapons were previously being put into position it was Messonnier’s alarm that triggered the first wave of political confrontation against the Trump administration. The narrative was triggered.  The alarms were sounded.  The crisis was officially being exploited and COVID was now fully weaponized to eliminate the Presidency of Donald Trump.

Just like the release of the Carter Page FISA application was cover for the bigger story, there’s little doubt the administrative state sees the release of these Fauci emails as a strategy toward keeping political weaponization of the crisis, the removal of President Donald Trump, hidden in the background.

As President Obama’s former campaign manager stated so openly…