Tuesday, August 10, 2021

The Elite Beltway Pedigree of Officer “Redneck”

The only question now is which book publisher will 
give Fanone a multi-million- dollar advance.


Officer Michael Fanone plays the part well.

He speaks with what most Americans would consider a rural drawl. He wears flannel shirts during CNN interviews and photo shoots. Large tattoos bedazzle his neck and arms; he has a beard. In a swooning front-cover profile for Time magazine, Fanone told Molly Ball he considers himself to be one of the “rednecks” who voted for Donald Trump.

But a few overlooked yet eye-popping details in Ball’s piece undermine Fanone’s public persona as the besieged D.C. undercover narcotics officer who donned an official uniform for the first time in 10 years to help rescue his colleagues from bloodthirsty Trump “insurrectionists” on January 6. Fanone has been on a nonstop publicity tour for seven months, stalking Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and confronting his police union for its lack of support.

It all has a familiar ring; a photo posted last week by Alexander Vindman, now on a nationwide media blitz to promote his book about his role in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, was more than ironic. (Vindman is the national security officer who listened to Trump’s call with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky and helped shape the conversation as an impeachable “quid pro quo.”)

The pair illustrates how D.C. partisans will go to any extreme to destroy Trump and now, his supporters.

Fanone, like Vindman, has deep ties to the Beltway establishment. He was born in D.C. in 1980 and raised in the suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, situated in one of the wealthiest counties in the nation and home to much of the capital elite. Far from the rough-and-tumble life he projects on CNN interviews, Fanone grew up a rich kid.

Ball’s article vaguely described Fanone’s father as a lawyer, “a partner in a big firm” in Washington, D.C.. Fanone, Ball claimed, “hated the stuffy status-grubbing of fancy-pants D.C.”

She does not disclose his father’s name—and there’s a reason why.

Fanone’s father appears to be Joseph Fanone, senior counsel for Ballard Spahr, a Democratic Party-connected firm based in Philadelphia. (A search of past residences and other open source information seems to confirm the relationship. News organizations like Time have refused to name Fanone’s father.)

According to a campaign disclosure website, Ballard Spahr donated 88 percent of its total political contributions to Democrats in 2020. One of the firm’s partners served as a legal advisor to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign last year. Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, is now a special counsel at Ballard Spahr.

In January 2019, Ballard Spahr opened up a government relations office in Washington, D.C. A few months later, the head of the lobbying shop, Ken Jarin, co-hosted Biden’s first official fundraiser. The event raised more than $6 million.

Lawyers for Ballard Spahr helped defend Pennsylvania’s rogue election rules for the 2020 presidential election. “We defeated more than a half-dozen lawsuits by the Trump campaign—represented by Rudy Giuliani and others—and a handful of Pennsylvania Republican Congressmen against the state and Boards of Elections in various counties, challenging mail-in voting practices and absentee ballot validity,” according to a post on the firm’s website. “In Delaware County, the Ballard Spahr team was successful in both state and federal courts. Our work helped secure the Third Circuit decision that cleared the path to election certification in Pennsylvania.”

The firm is representing CNN in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by several news organizations seeking full release of classified documents related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into unfounded Trump-Russia election collusion. Protect Democracy, an anti-Trump group funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who also funds several NeverTrump projects, joined with Ballard Spahr to file a class action lawsuit against the Trump campaign for its use of non-disclosure agreements.

Not exactly the sort of recent portfolio that makes a law firm an uninterested political player.

Being the son of a partner in an influential D.C. law firm has its perks, such as the opportunity to attend one of the most prestigious schools in the country. Fanone’s parents sent him to Georgetown Prep—“the private school whose alumni include two U.S. Supreme Court Justices,” Ball reports in the Time puff piece—for one year but “was asked not to return.”

After a rich kid is kicked out of one elite academic institution, frustrated wealthy parents desperately try their luck at another elite academic institution. Fanone was then sent to an unnamed boarding school in Maine but he didn’t last there, either. He finally earned his diploma after graduating from Ballou High School, an almost all-black public school in D.C.

Fanone’s upbringing among the Beltway aristocracy undoubtedly puts him at ease while traversing the halls of Congress, demanding that top Republicans such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) take a meeting with him, or testifying in front of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s show trial about the events of January 6 as a way to finally take down Donald Trump and vilify his voters. Fanone probably felt right at home in the Rose Garden last week when Joe Biden signed legislation awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who “defended democracy” and fought back the “insurrection” on January 6.

In an opinion piece published over the weekend, Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart defended Fanone as a hero and sneered that “[a]nyone unwilling to recognize [Fanone’s] valor is delusional.” Capehart also slammed those who “pretend” that January 6 was “anything but an attempt to overthrow our government.”

But it is Fanone, not insurrection-deniers, playing pretend. Fanone now spends most of his time booking media interviews—he’s on mental health leave from the department—condemning the former president and his supporters in vicious terms. He is, after all, following the successful formula of anti-Trump actors such as Alex Vindman. Fanone now is the toast of the town he’s inhabited his entire life, a town contemptuous not just of Donald Trump but of 75 million Americans who voted for him.

The only question now is which book publisher will give Fanone a multimillion-dollar advance.


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X22, Red Pill, and more-August 10

 



Tonight's lineup of news from the 'fighting off evil side:


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Vietnam Veteran Store Owner Confronted By Transgender CouncilMAN Over A Store Sign

 


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Cuomo Condemns America’s History Of Prejudice Against Italian, Grandma-Killing Sex Predators



ALBANY, NY—Amid calls for his resignation, embattled New York Governor Andrew Cuomo defended himself as the victim of America's cruel history of bigotry against Italian people who murder the elderly while also being sex predators. 

"I'm being persecuted, and I'm sad to say this is nothing new," said Cuomo in a statement. "America has struggled with this kind of racism for a long time. We Italian guys have a long and proud culture of groping every single woman we encounter, and of killing thousands of seniors in nursing homes. It's just a part of our heritage, and too many people in this country are prejudiced against that. I really feel sorry for them. It's sad, really."

The Italian grandma-killing sex predator community has released a statement of solidarity with the governor. 

"We celebrate Governor Cuomo having the courage to live his truth," said the Italian American Grandma-Killing Sex Predator Civil Liberties Union, or IAGKSPCLU. "We understand this is a difficult time for him, and we condemn in the strongest possible terms all forms of racism against his proud and noble ethnic heritage."

Chris Cuomo of CNN could not be reached for comment. 


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Pelosi’s Contemptible Fraud

 Surely when this nauseating and redundant slanderfest bombs out, 
unreasoning Trump-hate will be a harder sell.


It is depressing to consider that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives committee of inquiry into the events of January 6 will probably not be generally exposed as the contemptible fraud that it is by the tainted and corruptly partisan national political and social media. It has already been adduced beyond challenge that President Trump advised his followers on January 6, if they went to the Capitol, to “demonstrate peacefully and patriotically.” On listening to his speech again, it is completely unexceptionable, and he gives clearly his complaints about the voting and vote-counting procedures. 

A moron could deduce that where there are 44 million mailed and “dumped” ballots floating around, strange things are likely to happen in an election where a flip of 50,000 votes in three states would have changed the election result. It is an incontestable fact that the Trump Administration and campaign had nothing to do with what went on after the president addressed his followers near the White House on January 6. It is equally clear that almost none of the intruders at the Capitol were armed. There is not one scintilla of truth in any claim that President Trump or his collaborators had anything to do with promoting any intrusion at the Capitol or any physical threat to anyone, or any disturbance of the normal lawful processes of government. It has also been clearly established that President Trump, several days before the intrusion at the Capitol, offered 10,000 National Guardsmen as supplementary reinforcements in recognition of the fact that some of his supporters might be in a hostile mood on January 6.

The FBI, tarnished and demeaned by the Comey-McCabe politicization of the bureau though it is, can still presumably conduct a competent investigation. Hundreds of people arrested as Capitol trespassers on January 6 have been intensively interrogated for months with all the enticements available to American prosecutors to extort and suborn false inculpatory testimony with immunity against perjury proceedings, and nothing damaging to Trump or his campaign has emerged. 

It is inconceivable that Pelosi’s one-party Star Chamber, pre-confected smear job of the former administration will produce anything of any probative value. The huge crowd that the president addressed on the morning of January 6 had come to Washington to demonstrate their outrage at what they believed—with considerable reason, despite totalitarian attempts to suppress all discussion of it—was a tainted election, and in addition to protesting the failure of the judicial system to judge the merits of any of the 19 lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and other plaintiffs including the attorney general of Texas supported by 18 other states, to address the integrity of the voting and vote-counting procedures of the six swing states. (The election went off without any controversy at all in the other 44 states, which in itself implies targeted electoral tampering.)

In Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, there were a great many more votes than were needed to change the election result that were either unverifiable as valid or counted without the required effective observation of the representatives of all of the parties in the election. In each case, the modifications to voting conditions taken allegedly in respect of the requirements of the pandemic to facilitate access to the polls, were not approved by the state legislatures as the Constitution requires, but by either the state executive or judicial branches. None of these cases was judged on its merits and all were rejected for process reasons. In these circumstances, it would have been astonishing if the 75 million Trump voters and the candidate himself were not seriously aggrieved.

In the absence of a proper adjudication, no one can say with the circumstantial evidence that has accrued and is notorious, that there is not a significant possibility of a dishonest election. The refusal of the judiciary at several levels including the U.S. Supreme Court, to hear any of the relevant cases incites the inference that the high court at least was sufficiently sensitive to campaign and post-election Democratic calls for an expanded Supreme Court that they ducked the issue knowing that overturning an election result especially in favor of so controversial a politician as Trump would overload the system and create an intolerable state of controversy. That may have been a correct political decision and agitation for a radical alteration of the Supreme Court seems to have abated, giving the country an increased state of confidence of dispassionate verdicts in politically sensitive cases. But the justices are jurists and not politicians, and the high court’s evasions did nothing to assuage the anger and the disappointment of the Trump supporters and of Trump himself.                       

When current cant and emotionalism subside, it will be seen that Trump’s own response to what he has some reason to believe was the theft of an election was comparatively moderate: an address to a very large number of his supporters with a request that they be peaceful if they proceeded to the Capitol. The reason for the successful trespass was the rank negligence of Speaker Pelosi and the hopelessly incompetent mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, in ignoring the request of the chief of the Capitol Police transmitted by the sergeant at arms for reinforcements and in declining the president’s offer of reinforcements. 

Instead of any promise of an objective inquiry following upon any unfinished business from the extensive investigations that have already been conducted by people whose avocation it is to investigate illegalities and not put on down-market political circuses, we can be sure of a Trump-hate burlesque of the impartial and dignified inquiry that the apologists and promoters of this pre-cooked farce have promised. It was enough to be confident of this when the Red Queen Pelosi banished two of the Republicans Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) dutifully nominated to a committee which he had declared in advance to be an industrial-strength smear job against the former president.

This was reinforced by Pelosi’s replacement nomination of two of the most vociferous Republican Trump-haters, Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). And just to get us into the mood for the disgrace that was afoot, television viewers were treated to the greatest act of partisan and congressional pretended sniveling since Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), moved by President Trump’s temporary suspension of direct entrance into the United States from terrorism-exporting or afflicted countries in 2017, simpered that the Statue of Liberty was weeping and then induced a few tears himself. This week’s sequel was when Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the most egregious and frequent liar in the Congress, still professing to have found evidence of collusion between President Trump and the Russian government that he has been unable to produce, started whimpering and sobbing with grief over some aspect of the January 6 episode. Kinzinger, who should be expelled from the Republican Party along with Cheney and any other Republican who voted to impeach Trump, gave a follow-up act which, while a better and lengthier simulation of weeping than Schiff’s almost slap-stick effort, was a less monstrous affront to the intelligence and taste of viewers.

This abominable charade will be an even greater enormity than the second Trump impeachment which, it will be recalled, occurred after Trump left office. The almost complete absence of integrity and responsibility of the American national political and social media is a national crisis. They may try to pretend that Pelosi’s kangaroo court is genuine, But it will almost certainly be an even greater failure at mudslinging and defamation than the shameful Mueller inquiry and the two impeachments. Tom Friedman of the New York Times told us that Trump-Russian collusion was as serious an attack on the country as Pearl Harbor and 9/11; George Will and others make the 9/11 comparison. Surely when this nauseating and redundant slanderfest bombs out, unreasoning Trump-hate will be a harder sell.


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Billionaire-backed mining firm to seek electric vehicle metals in Greenland

 /Pool via REUTERS

COPENHAGEN, Aug 9 (Reuters) - Mineral exploration company KoBold Metals, backed by billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, has signed an agreement with London-listed Bluejay Mining (JAY.L) to search in Greenland for critical materials used in electric vehicles.

KoBold, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to hunt for raw materials, will pay $15 million in exploration funding for the Disko-Nuussuaq project on Greenland's west coast in exchange for a 51% stake in the project, Bluejay said in a statement.

Shares in BlueJay traded 26% higher on the news.

The license holds metals such as nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum and the funding will cover evaluation and initial drilling.

KoBold is a privately-held company whose principal investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate and technology fund backed by Microsoft (MSFT.O) co-founder Bill Gates, Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg, Amazon (AMZN.O) founder Jeff Bezos, and Ray Dalio, founder of the world's largest hedge fund Bridgewater Associates.

 

 Pool via REUTERS

COPENHAGEN, Aug 9 (Reuters) - Mineral exploration company KoBold Metals, backed by billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, has signed an agreement with London-listed Bluejay Mining (JAY.L) to search in Greenland for critical materials used in electric vehicles.

KoBold, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to hunt for raw materials, will pay $15 million in exploration funding for the Disko-Nuussuaq project on Greenland's west coast in exchange for a 51% stake in the project, Bluejay said in a statement.

Shares in BlueJay traded 26% higher on the news.

The license holds metals such as nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum and the funding will cover evaluation and initial drilling.

KoBold is a privately-held company whose principal investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate and technology fund backed by Microsoft (MSFT.O) co-founder Bill Gates, Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg, Amazon (AMZN.O) founder Jeff Bezos, and Ray Dalio, founder of the world's largest hedge fund Bridgewater Associates.

Other KoBold investors include Silicon Valley venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz and Norwegian state-controlled energy company Equinor.

BlueJay said previous studies found the area in western Greenland has similarities to the geology of Russia's Norilsk region, a main producer of nickel and palladium.

"This agreement is transformative for Bluejay," said the comany's CEO Bo Steensgaard. "We are delighted to have a partner at the pinnacle of technical innovation for new exploration methods, backed by some of the most successful investors in the world."

(Corrects 5th paragraph to reflect that Breakthrough Energy Ventures is an investor in KoBold, not an owner)

 

https://www.reuters.com/business/billionaire-backed-mining-firm-seek-electric-vehicle-metals-greenland-2021-08-09/ 

 


 

 

 

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Who Saw This Coming? Online Black Market Expands for COVID-19 Vaccine Passports


Jennifer Oliver O'Connell reporting for RedState 

Anyone could have seen this coming for miles. The advocates and opponents of vaccine verification are getting louder, so The Associate Press delved deeper into the growing Black Market industry of vaccine passports.

As the delta variant of the coronavirus sweeps across the United States, a growing number of colleges and universities are requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination for students to attend in-person classes. But the mandatory requirement has opened the door for those opposed to getting the vaccine to cheat the system, according to interviews with students, education and law enforcement officials.

Both faculty and students at dozens of schools interviewed by The Associated Press say they are concerned about how easy it is to get fake vaccine cards.

Duh. I mentioned this market back in May. Doesn’t take much time or even any skill, since unlike drivers licenses and passports, there are no security protocols to overcome.

And this is proving my colleague Nick Arama‘s point that these diktats bring suffering to the very people the Left claims to champion: vulnerable young people, the poor, the disenfranchised, and people of color.

Across the internet, a cottage industry has sprung up to accommodate people who say they won’t get vaccinated for either personal or religious reasons.

Also medical reasons, but the anti-science vaccine pushers only believe the ScIEnCE! that their “experts” want to push.

Olivia Sandor went on Fox News’ Hannity in July, and shared her story of being rejected by Brigham Young University Hawaii, despite having a legitimate medical exemption:

Incoming college freshman Olivia Sandor was denied admission into her dream institution, BYU Hawaii, after requesting to be exempt from taking the COVID-19 vaccine due to her high-risk medical history.

Sandor, whose doctor reportedly wrote an exemption letter — made public by Turning Point USA — on her behalf, shared her story on “Hannity” Monday. She explained how, after being given a vaccine back in 2019, she was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre Syndrome – which left her paralyzed from the waist down for more than a month.

After receiving word that BYU would be requiring all students to be vaccinated, Sandor’s team of medical providers advised her against being injected with the non-FDA-approved coronavirus vaccine and wrote her a letter of exemption.

“I do not want to relapse and have another episode of Guillain-Barre,” she said. “It’s really, truly not worth it to me.”

BYU denied her admission to the school, despite $200,000 in scholarship money already gifted to Sandor, blaming the call on state vaccination mandates.

Sadly, they dragged their feet on this decision, so Sandor’s other scholarship offers to other universities were rescinded. All BYU-HI has to offer her is, So sad. Too bad.

So what do administrators and other students expect will happen when these ridiculous restrictions for a virus that 97 percent of young people recover from are implemented? Black Market vaccine verification will be just the tip of the iceberg.

An Instagram account with the username “vaccinationcards” sells laminated COVID-19 vaccination cards for $25 each.

A user on the encrypted messaging app, Telegram, offers “COVID-19 Vaccine Cards Certificates,” for as much as $200 apiece. “This is our own way of saving as many people as we possibly can from the poisonous vaccine,” reads the seller’s message, viewed by at least 11,000 app users.

An increasing number of inquiries to these sites and similar ones appear to be from those who are trying to get fake vaccination cards for college.

A Reddit user commented on a thread about falsifying COVID-19 vaccination cards, saying, in part, “I need one, too, for college. I refuse to be a guinea pig.”

Therein lies the rub. Even if these learning institutions were consistent in accepting medical exemptions, why should people willingly give themselves over to what is essentially an experiment? Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson are free from liability. Will the educational institution accept blame if a male student contracts myocarditis? Or if someone like Sandor, who has a legitimate and horrific reaction to certain vaccinations, becomes permanently paralyzed? Will the institution cover medical expenses and care for life?

Are any college students or their parents even bothering to ask these questions? There are at least 115 million people in our nation who don’t wish to be vaccinated because of personal, medical or religious reasons; yet, we are holding these people accountable for a variant that the glorified vaccinated are not only contracting, but spreading.

How does this make sense? And why do you think people who are willing to follow the rules under normal circumstances, are now choosing to pay for a fake verification?

According to a tally by The Chronicle of Higher Education, at least 664 colleges and universities now require proof of COVID-19 inoculations. The process to confirm vaccination at many schools can be as simple as uploading a picture of the vaccine card to the student’s portal.

In Nashville, Vanderbilt University places a hold on a student’s course registration until their vaccine record has been verified unless they have an approved medical accommodation or religious exemption.

The University of Michigan says it has a system in place to confirm employee and student vaccinations. A spokesman for the college told the AP the school has not encountered any problems so far with students forging their COVID-19 vaccination record cards.

But Benjamin Mason Meier, a global health policy professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, questions how institutions can verify those records.

“The United States, unlike most countries which have electronic systems in place, is basing its vaccination on a flimsy paper card,” he said.

In a peek at the Twitter feed of AP’s expert voice, we get an idea which side of the argument Meier is on. As if his dig at the U.S. medical system wasn’t a clue.

Along with the retweets on his feed about climate change being “widespread, rampant, & intensifying” (Gee, sounds exactly how they talk about COVID!), Meier is a clear disciple for vaccine mandates and makes that plain in his expert opinion.

Meier tweeted last week that he spoke with several students who were worried about the accessibility of fraudulent vaccine cards and that they knew a fellow student who had submitted one to the university.

“There needs to be policies in place for accountability to make sure that every student is operating in the collective interest of the entire campus,” he said.

Isn’t this the same argument that Georgia, Texas, and other states are making to pass their voter integrity laws?

Hmm…


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The Babylon Bee Presents: A Back-To-School Shopping List For Your Liberal Child



The day you have dreaded is finally here! It's time to send your progressive kids into that COVID-infected world of white supremacy known as public school. Will a bully misgender them? Will they meet enough sexual partners? It can be a scary time, but it's slightly less scary if you're prepared. Here's what you should have on your shopping list:

-Extra kleenex in case there are no conservative students nearby to drink their tears: Conservatives are usually walking around with special tumblers for catching delicious liberal tears, but your child should be prepared-- just in case they aren't around.

-Ziplock baggies of Kale: Every good liberal keeps at least a few of these on hand to fuel their rage at heteronormative white supremacy. Be sure to stock up on extra kombucha as well. 

-A brown paper bag: This should be used to cover your child's head if they're white. 

-Bricks and Molotovs for the anti-school-choice protest their teacher is organizing: Make sure your kid is prepared for the most important life skill: protesting! 

-A coffin, since they will probably die of COVID: If your liberal kid is going to school, they will definitely get COVID and die. Be sure and have their last will and testament ready to go as well. 

-Extra opposite-gender clothing in case they need to switch genders during recess: It's a great way to get out of kickball. 

-Cyanide capsule for if someone tries to give them an opinion they disagree with: If someone expresses a conflicting opinion, it's game over. Train them to quickly bite down on the capsule and fall over to avoid debate. 

-Gasoline and matches in case they ever encounter an American Flag: Or worse... a Tuttle Twins book! 

-Set of crayons for drawing inclusivity rainbows: Don't forget to remove all white crayons. 

-A calculator that gives an answer of "5" when you enter "2+2": Teach your kid to reject western obsession with "correct answers" and decolonize math!

-Extra Plan B pills: Also, be sure to pack a megaphone so they can shout their abortion at recess! 

-Spiked mace to crush human skulls with: In case they encounter a Nazi.

-A Tuttle Twins book: For burning. 


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Vaccine And Mask Coercion Is A Purge Of Republican Voters, And Republicans Are Letting It Happen

Republicans are still by and large allowing their own voters to be purged 
from employment and schooling based on their evidence-informed 
convictions that oppose reality-defying leftist groupthink.



Myriad Republican lawmakers are standing idly by, letting their voters be threatened with not being able to support their families or access education due to their medical and political beliefs about the just response to COVID.

After a lull in the push to implement vaccine mandates and vaccine passports this spring — conveniently when the majority of state legislatures are in session and therefore could be more responsive to voter concerns — the issue is back with a vengeance.

Both private and public institutions are reinstituting counterproductive and ineffective COVID responses like masks due to another round of media-ginned fear about variants that are less dangerous than the original. Vaccine passports, mandates, and pressure are therefore surging again, with “learning” institutions that are really social conformity systems pushing experimental genetically based therapies, social restrictions, and face coverings, even on children who are at less risk from COVID and Delta than they are from the seasonal flu.

The COVID Threat Isn’t What People Are Being Told

As with the initial COVID outbreak, the mounting hysteria and pressure are far out of proportion to reality. Now, the vast majority of high-risk people have accepted experimental protections against COVID, death rates are low, we know of effective therapeutics for hard cases, and there is plenty of hospital capacity. Daily COVID deaths are now one-fourth the average daily deaths from heart disease and one-third the average daily deaths from cancer.

Source: New York Times dashboard, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html.

We have been promised “back to normal” for more than a year, and what we are instead getting is more of the same use of that promise to force us into harmful behaviors and social re-engineerings. Republicans are largely out to lunch on this, or worse, helping.

Half of Americans have by now taken the full course of COVID-19 therapy shots. For those who weren’t manipulated into this decision, that is their prerogative. 

But it should also be the prerogative of the other half of Americans to decide that they prefer the risks of a case of COVID-19, which are low for the vast majority of the population, to the risks of trying novel treatments overseen by highly politicized health agencies that have proven they put politics before science. So even if federal agencies remove the “emergency use authorization,” as they’ve been hinting at for some time for naked political reasons, everyone with eyes to see is aware that process is so highly politicized that Americans can have no confidence the decision was made on reliable and objective data.

Governments, employers, and schools are using the United States’ long history of vaccine research and acceptance to push people into subjecting their highly personal health decisions to government and employers, as well as essentially forcing people to identify themselves as the kind of free-thinkers very powerful people are currently identifying as “dangerous.”

Pressuring People Into Medical Decisions Against Their Will

Two of the three U.S. COVID shots are a new kind of genetically based therapeutic that does not have the long track record of experimentation and reliability of other forms of vaccines. The other shot, the Johnson and Johnson version, has significantly lower effectiveness. Scientists openly note that the COVID mRNA treatments “may be one of the fastest drug development processes in history” and that “While each approach has its pros and cons, mRNA-based vaccines possess unique facets not available in the other [traditional vaccine] approaches.”

Given the COVID death declines among the highly vaccinated at-risk population, these interventions are likely already saving lives, and thank God for that. But this technology is still very new, and it is not a technology Americans have previously been required to take to go to work or school. There are many reasons for allowing people to freely opt into medical novelties rather than coerce them, not least of which is that free and informed consent is a basic legal principle as well as a prudential moral one.

As the Catholic bishops of Colorado note, “Therapeutic proportionality is an assessment of whether the benefits of a medical intervention outweigh the undesirable side-effects and burdens in light of the integral good of the person, including spiritual, psychological, and bodily goods. The judgment of therapeutic proportionality must be made by the person who is the potential recipient of the intervention, not by public health authorities or by other individuals who might judge differently in their own situations” (h/t Leila Lawler).

As anyone who has read about the wonders of vaccine development knows, vaccines have had some problems. For example, some versions of early polio vaccines actually afflicted children with polio. Mistakes like this are how science proceeds, but that’s not a very comforting thought to anyone whose child got polio from a vaccine.

Nor is it of any comfort to anyone now considering whether to inject themselves or their children with novel treatments that were developed and are being pushed by the same class of authoritarians who viciously censor all information contrary to their political designs, have spent the last year lying about COVID and science, and treat citizens who question them like cattle to be prodded, branded, and corralled.

Using Pledges of Hysteria Allegiance to Purge Republican Voters

That brings us to the COVID protocols as purge. I live in Indiana, where both legislative houses and our governorship are controlled by Republicans — not that they’ve protected my family’s freedoms or quality of life in the last year. Throughout this state that voted 57 percent for Donald Trump in 2020, where people largely don’t believe the lying corporate narrative wildly overhyping COVID, children are still being forced to mask and cycle through rounds of Zoom school to access the public funds set aside for their education.

Businesses are pressuring workers to take the novel therapies regardless of whether the workers are at significant risk from a case of COVID. In-state universities are forcing faculty and students into novel COVID injections, with no response from the state legislature. Our state attorney general even issued an opinion supporting universities forcing low-risk young adults into these novel COVID prophylactics.

This spring, constituents pestered our legislature to protect us from this kind of medical coercion, and to ban public and private vaccine passports. State Republican leaders punted, then adjourned until next spring.

Now their voters are being threatened with loss of their livelihoods and the state-sponsored abuse of their children this fall if they don’t consent to unnecessary medical treatments or evidence-free “virus mitigation” procedures that dehumanize interactions, delay children’s development, and destroy the joy of living. People who rightly judge that their college-age children are at low risk for COVID and therefore don’t need experimental injections face the prospect of cutting their kids off from access to higher education as punishment for this reasonable risk assessment.

A friend who is a maintenance worker received a “mandatory” survey from his employer asking for his “vaccine status” — which is private health information protected by HIPPA. (Imagine if an employer sent around a survey asking people to list their BMI or whether they use contraception!) Merely receiving the survey is coercion — any decent man who loves his children is now put on notice that his ability to take care of them may hinge on his compliance with totalitarian demands. This man has voted Republican all his life and moved from a blue state to a red state specifically to protect his family.

What are Republicans doing to defend his ability to freely provide for his family? Jack nothing. Do everything the Biden administration says about COVID, or unemployment bread lines for you.

Another Hoosier friend is facing the prospect of being outed to his far-left colleagues as a conservative — these taxpayer-paid colleagues think the conservative voters who provide their salaries are evil bigots — due to his state university employer’s planned COVID protocols for this fall. He can either lose students from families who don’t want their kids masked again, or he can jeopardize his employment and professional relationships by questioning the university’s extremist and anti-science COVID protocols.

Vote For Us So We Can Do Nothing For You

What are Republicans doing to keep their voters like these from being purged from the professions they’ve spent decades developing skills in and rely on to support their families? What are Republicans doing for the families whose children will be irrevocably damaged by yet another year of anti-science youth masking and Zoom classes? Nothing.

COVID pressure has been seamlessly grafted into the cancel culture edifice, and most Republicans are simply allowing their own voters to be purged from employment and education based on their evidence-informed convictions.

The last time this kind of situation came to a head, a man named Donald Trump ran an insurgent campaign that nearly broke the Republican Party. If Republicans can’t get their heads out of their rear ends after that kind of wake-up call and start protecting their voters from the obvious political weaponization of the permanent pandemic, they will finish their own party.


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