In 1992, Suparna Dutta arrived in the US from India.
In 2020, Mrs. Dutta spoke to the Fairfax County VA school board. They ignored her.
In 2021, Suprana Dutta stood up, took a stand and worked to help Glenn Youngkin win the race for Virginia governor. Today, 2022, thirty years after arriving at the place of hope and opportunity for her family, she speaks at the inauguration of Governor Youngkin.
At the end of her inspiring *remarks Mrs. Dutta proclaims, “God bless the United States of America!”
The quest for truth-in-COVID did pick up some steam in late spring 2021.
Not about the vaccine, though.
About the origins of the virus.
From the first days of the epidemic, strong circumstantial evidence suggested Sars-CoV-2 had leaked from a Chinese lab. Both the virus itself and the facts around its emergence pointed to human intervention.
Wuhan, the city of 10 million people where the first cases were found, is home to China’s most important viral research laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute aggressively researched bat coronaviruses, which China had viewed as a serious risk since the original SARS outbreak in 2003.
In 2017 the institute opened China’s first Biosafety Level 4 laboratory. Level 4 labs are the most secure available, designed to handle deadly pathogens such as Ebola. But just months after the lab opened, U.S. State Department officials visited and reported in a cable to Washington that the new facility was at risk of a serious accident. They found “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
The troubled lab was located only miles from the first cluster of cases in central Wuhan. And it had worked with a virus very similar to Sars-CoV-2 known as RaTG13 (or RaBtCov/4991), which had been found in a cave in 2013 after several miners working there became seriously ill with pneumonia.
That cave—like other caves that had large numbers of the bats that were the original animal hosts for naturally occurring coronaviruses—was nowhere near Wuhan. It was located in southern China, several hundred miles away. And the Chinese couldn’t trace a chain of human transmission from that region to Wuhan. They had reported no early cases in the villages and cities around the caves, or between the caves and Wuhan.
Early on, Chinese and international reports had offered a different potential explanation for the fact Sars-CoV-2 had emerged first in Wuhan. They linked the outbreak to a large “wet market” there. Wet markets, which are common in China, sell wild and domesticated live animals for slaughter. An NPR reporter visited a similar market in Hong Kong and reported that “it’s quite obvious why the term ‘wet’ is used. . . . The countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted.”
But the theory was discounted within months, because Chinese researchers could not find Sars-CoV-2 in tissue samples of animals taken from the Wuhan wet market.
Meanwhile, from the start of the epidemic, Chinese authorities at every level behaved as if they had something to hide. Sending police to silence Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who in late December 2020 had first warned about the new pneumonia, was only the first step.
An Associated Press investigation in June 2020 found that China had “sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome, of the virus for more than a week after three different government labs had fully decoded the information. . . . Chinese government labs only released the genome after another lab published it ahead of authorities on a virologist website on Jan. 11.” The next day, China shut down that other lab for “rectification.”
Beijing also told the World Health Organization it did not believe people could transmit the virus to each other. Five days later, with hospitals in Wuhan filling, China reversed course and acknowledged that people could and did spread Sars-CoV-2.
Still, China refused to give the WHO detailed data on COVID patients for another 10 days, according to the Associated Press investigation. Nor would it let international experts visit Wuhan to see what was happening firsthand. On February 7, the New York Times reported, “C.D.C. and W.H.O. Offers to Help China Have Been Ignored for Weeks: Privately, Chinese doctors say they need outside expertise. But Beijing, without saying why, has shown no interest so far.”
Finally, three days after that article, China allowed an international team inside its borders.
At best, China’s attitude revealed badly misplaced national pride. Through 2020 and into 2021, long after the virus had become a far larger problem in the United States and Europe than in China, the People’s Republic continued to stonewall.
In January 2021, more than a year after the coronavirus first emerged, China finally allowed a WHO team of scientists to speak to researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology for an investigation. But the inquiry faced such severe Chinese-imposed restrictions that no one expected it to investigate aggressively.
Meanwhile, Sars-CoV-2 itself had several characteristics that suggested it might not be entirely natural.
From the start, it was both remarkably communicable and surprisingly stable, as if it had been optimized to infect humans. Throughout 2020, it hardly mutated. (The sudden acceleration in variants came alongside widespread vaccinations, and viral mutation is a known risk of vaccinations.)
At the same time, it turned out that civet cats and many other possible “intermediate hosts” for the virus didn’t seem vulnerable to Sars-CoV-2. For other coronaviruses, including the original SARS and MERS, intermediate hosts had provided a crucial link between the bats that had originally hosted the virus and humans. The lack of a plausible intermediate host was puzzling.
Further, the genome of Sars-CoV-2 contained a very unusual sequence that made it more dangerous, the “furin cleavage site.”
A May 2020 article in Nature highlighted the power and danger of furin cleavage:
Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, estimates that [the site] gives SARS-CoV-2 a 100–1,000 times greater chance than SARS-CoV of getting deep into the lungs. ‘When I saw SARS-CoV-2 had that cleavage site, I did not sleep very well that night,’ he says.
But bat coronaviruses generally do not have furin cleavage sites, raising the question of how Sars-CoV-2 had acquired its own. RaTG13, the virus that the Wuhan Institute had admitted working with, was the closest known viral relative of Sars-CoV-2, but by virology standards it was still relatively distant, and it lacked the furin cleavage site.
One possible answer for how the virus could have added the genes necessary to make the furin cleavage site lay in what scientists called “gain-of-function” research. The phrase is euphemistic, bordering on Orwellian.
In plain English, it means altering a virus’s genetic code to make it more dangerous.
Article by 'Wolf Howling" in The American Thinker
One way to conduct a coup is to control who can run for elected office. Examples of this abound in autocracies and police states, with the most recent being China’s coup in Hong Kong. America’s progressive left is attempting the same in this country, by targeting popular Republicans to make them ineligible for election.
Let’s start with the law and its origins. As a rule, the Constitution prevents Congress from prohibiting a person who meets the basic requirements of Article I § 2 (age, citizenship, residency) from competing in a federal election or being seated in government should they win. The sole exception, established after the Civil War in the 14th Amendment, § 3, is for those people who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” our nation.
The background to this is colorful. In British-American legal history, this issue arose under King George III in the 1760s. To simplify a complex story: John Wilkes, an immensely popular firebrand, was a vocal critic of King George. The King conspired with Parliament to ensure that Wilkes, even if elected, would not be seated in the House of Commons. In 1768, the House of Commons went so far as to pass a law preventing Wilkes from even standing for election.
Wilkes was a consequential figure in our history and a favored household name among our Founders. Because they were familiar with his travails, Wilkes’s actions and the actions King George and Parliament took against him gave rise to two clauses in the U.S. Constitution and two clauses in the Bill of Rights.
As to the latter, when our Founders drafted the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press and the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of general warrants owed much to Wilkes. In the body of the Constitution, the protection given representatives for speech on the floor of Congress owes much to Wilkes. And lastly, the fact that Congress cannot normally control who can run for election and then be seated in Congress owes almost entirely to John Wilkes.
In 1782, Wilkes convinced Parliament to expunge the law prohibiting him from standing for election. Five years later, as recounted in the 1969 Supreme Court case of Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486, James Madison adopted Wilkes’s arguments before Parliament to argue at our Constitutional Convention against giving Congress unlimited discretion to exclude people elected to that body. To do so, he said, would be to vest
an improper & dangerous power in the Legislature. The qualifications of electors and elected were fundamental articles in a Republican Govt. and ought to be fixed by the Constitution. If the Legislature could regulate those of either, it can by degrees subvert the Constitution. A Republic may be converted into an aristocracy or oligarchy as well by limiting the number capable of being elected, as the number authorised to elect. . . . It was a power also, which might be made subservient to the views of one faction against another. Qualifications founded on artificial distinctions may be devised, by the stronger in order to keep out partizans of (a weaker) faction.’
The only exception to this power written into our constitutional law came with the passage of the 14th Amendment on the heels of the Civil War after 1,500,000 Americans were killed or wounded and one of John Wilkes’s distant relatives assassinated a president. That limited exception is that people who have committed rebellion or insurrection against the U.S. may be excluded from running for office or excluded from office if they win an election.
The progressive left is going all out to paint conservatives as “domestic terrorists” and to claim that the January 6 riot—a riot of a few hours by people with no weapons and carried out virtually without violence (and that may have been part of an FBI entrapment scheme)—is tantamount to our Civil War of 1861-1865. This is so far beyond ludicrous it is stunning. Yet progressives fully embrace this tactic as their only hope to stop a popular vote that promises to be a wave election in 2022 and an Electoral College vote that might return Trump to power in 2024.
The despicable Marc Elias, the man who paid for the Steele Dossier, stated in a series of tweets last month:
Before the midterm election, we will have a serious discussion about whether individual Republican House Members are disqualified by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving in Congress.
We may even see litigation.
I am making clear that members of Congress who engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States are not eligible to serve in Congress.
And miracle dictu, we already have our first lawsuit trying to keep a Republican off the 2022 ballot. On Monday, two far-left groups, one of which is associated with Bernie Sanders, filed a lawsuit “in North Carolina before the state board of elections to challenge the candidacy of Rep. Madison Cawthorn.” They claim that Cawthorn committed the crime of insurrection by challenging the election results and speaking at the peaceful January 6 rally.
This attempted coup by lawfare is not aimed merely at Republican congresspeople. It is very much aimed at Donald Trump and the presidency as well. As Liz Cheney, a “Republican” house member sitting on the left’s kangaroo “January 6 Committee,” recently stated during a CBS interview:
I’m very focused right now...on the work of the select committee.... I can tell you that the single most important thing, though, is to ensure that Donald Trump is not the Republican nominee and that he certainly is not anywhere close to the Oval Office ever again.
There is no other way to describe this tactic than as an attempted coup using our courts, carried out by a deeply disingenuous group of people motivated solely by an unquenchable thirst for power. This is a deeply cynical attack on our Republic and our democratic traditions. Indeed, if the progressives succeed in their lawfare, they will have managed a coup, obscenely relying on the Constitution to, de facto, end our experiment as a constitutional republic.
Henry Ford boasted in his 1922 autobiography that he once stated, “Any customer can have a car painted any color he wants so long as it is black.” One hundred years later, the progressive left has taken that concept for its own. Between the effort to federalize election laws and its attempted coup through disqualifying Republicans, the progressive left is essentially saying to the electorate, “American citizens can vote for any candidate they like, so long as the candidate is a Democrat.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/the_democrats_are_attempting_a_coup_by_lawfare.html
Police in the US state of Texas are negotiating with a man who appears to have taken hostages at a synagogue in the town of Colleyville.
It is not known if he is armed or if anyone has been hurt.
The service was being streamed live when the incident started. The feed has since been taken down, but not before an angry man could be heard saying he didn't want anyone to be hurt.
Police have deployed special weapons teams to the scene.
It is unclear how many people are inside the building. Local residents are being evacuated.
The police department in Colleyville said in a tweet at 11:30 (16:30 GMT) that it was "conducting SWAT operations" at the address of the Congregation Beth Israel.
Two hours later the department said the situation "remains ongoing".
"We ask that you continue to avoid the area. We will continue to provide updates via social media," it said
In the post-Trump era, the pundit class remains obsessed with the state of the Republican Party. Is it still in thrall to Donald Trump? Does it remain committed to “democracy,” as circumstantially defined by those clutching pearls as they whisper the question fretfully? Can it sustain a sufficiently broad coalition, ranging from economic libertarians to the “Let’s Go Brandon” contingent, in order to take what appear to be highly winnable elections in 2022 and 2024?
Beneath this breathless focus on the Republican Party and its electoral prospects, a much larger story hides in plain sight. What is acceptable political discourse today, and how aberrant is it from a historical perspective?
In the first several decades of the republic, the ideological divide was between an agrarian-populist party and a commercial, mostly classically liberal party. While these coalitions marched under different party banners at varying times, the philosophies they embodied, by today’s standards, would fit neatly into the center and rightward ends of the political continuum.
The modern Democratic Party retained centrist vestiges throughout the 20th century, but by the end of the Clinton Administration its moderate wing (best embodied by the Democratic Leadership Council) was a spent force. At the presidential level, Democrats nominated increasingly left-leaning candidates (whether out of opportunism or conviction) although these candidates dressed up as centrists for general election purposes. Similarly, Democratic congressional and local candidates moved as far Left as their respective electorates would allow. Today’s Democratic congressional caucuses contain very few moderates; the Blue Dog Coalition in the House of Representatives, which counted 59 members among its ranks in 2008, now numbers only 19, despite maintaining a majority in that body.
This leftward shift in the party has resulted in a hyper-focus on finely parsed, boutique issues out of touch with the concerns of mainstream voters. The Democrats no longer seem to care about the political version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: public safety, competent service provision, and a strong economy that provides jobs and tax revenues. Ignoring the axiom that there is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up garbage, the party’s platform is now dominated by wokeism, interest group advocacy, anti-rationalist, and post-empirical jeremiads, and outright gaslighting (Jen Psaki, call your office) deployed to defend whatever positions the party might pronounce as intrinsically right and just.
One could credibly assert that the only serious policy debates occurring today are those between the libertarian/neoconservative and populist/nationalist wings of the Republican Party. As the John Birch, tinfoil hat, and nativist elements were purged from the party decades ago, its remaining factions resemble those from the earliest years of the republic, which constituted substantially all of American political discourse for over 150 years.
In contrast, the Democrats’ inexorable march to the Left has caused it to abandon its more centrist elements while simultaneously absorbing uber-collectivist and illiberal tendencies once thought beyond the pale of acceptable politics. Far-Left Democratic officeholders no longer shy away from the socialist label, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are not only a rising force at the local and national level, but actively count a number of Democratic Party members among their membership, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The DSA is not a formal political party, but rather a socialist organization working, by its own admission, within the Democratic Party to weaken and ultimately abolish capitalism.
Needless to say, abolition of the system responsible for lifting more people out of poverty than any other economic system in human history is not a mainstream position. Unfortunately, as doctrinaire leftism has captured the nation’s institutions and large swaths of the culture, it’s unlikely the Democrats will excommunicate their extremist wing as the Republicans have done. In fact, that “wing” now commands the core of the party organization. What was once fringe is now central.
What can be done?
No less a moral tribune and intellectual titan than Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) coined a phrase during the Trump Administration that can be repurposed and better used to animate the supermajority of Americans who do not hold far-Left positions: “push back on them . . . tell them they’re not welcome.”
It is well past time for Americans to reclaim their ideological patrimony and reject the poison of collectivism injected into the bloodstream of the American body politic. Once purged of its extremist elements, there is no reason the Democratic Party can’t revive itself as a responsible center-left party—or, alternatively, see the two major parties once again form around classically liberal and populist groupings, with Marxism consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs.
Being There is a 1979 comedy starring Peter Sellers. Sellers plays a simpleton Washington, D.C., gardener named Chance. Chance is thick as a brick. Through a series of chance events, coupled with Chance uttering platitudes and silly-speak, Chance is taken and mistaken as a deep-thinking political scholar. D.C. insiders and politicians are so taken with Chance’s nonsense that he becomes a rising political star.
By the end of the movie, Chance is seen as next in line for the presidency. But Chance isn’t smart, or good at anything. Chance is an idiot, who is elevated to a position he is wholly unqualified for – next in line for the presidency.
Here is one of Chance’s political ‘insights’
“In the garden, growth has its seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then get spring and summer again.”
The D.C. insiders take Chance’s nonsense as brilliant allegoric commentary on politics. The audience knows that Chance is an idiot — the joke’s on the politicians who think he’s really an oracle.
I give you, Kamala Harris.
Kamala is quite easily the worst politician in modern history, maybe ever. She’s done nothing of substance to elevate her political star. She is just one Biden brain-freeze from assuming the office of the presidency, yet in reality, she is Chance the gardener. She is Veep based on her status as a woman of color.
Harris’ poll numbers are lower than Biden’s, and Biden’s numbers, are a disaster. A few days ago, she sat for an interview by NBC. She was asked questions slightly harder than “what’s your favorite ice cream.” She was asked about changing course, doing something different. The camera turned to Harris. Harris looked like Bambi in the headlights, and her well-practiced, whiny voice said the following:
“It is time for us to do what we been doing. And that time is every day. Every day it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down”
I give you, Chance the gardener aka Kamala Harris
We saw earlier this week that consumer price index (CPI) numbers were up seven percent from the same time last year, the highest jump since 1982. Even CNN said, “Yikes!” in response.
Joe Biden’s response was a case study in delusion. “Today’s inflation numbers show a meaningful reduction in headline inflation over last month. We are making progress in slowing the rate of price increases,” Biden tweeted, contrary to all reality.
Unfortunately, now the Producer Price Index (PPI) numbers are also out. The PPI is a measure of wholesale prices for goods and services and they are an indicator of what will be happening to the CPI in the future. The numbers were not good, they jumped 9.7 percent from the prior year, near double-digit numbers, the biggest jump on record.
So was the White House’s response any better after the PPI than when the CPI numbers came out? No, they doubled down on the delusion. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki blamed Republicans.
Psaki doesn’t even seem to have any idea what she is saying. Um, Jen? The Democrats have complete control of the government, not the Republicans. You haven’t “unclogged the supply chains,” there are still about 100 ships stuck in the backlog at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach which is as high as it was last year. The Democrats haven’t passed the Build Back Better bill, one of Joe Biden’s many failures. But spending more with it would make inflation worse not better — another indication of how far from reality the Biden team is if they think it would make inflation better. It’s one of the reasons that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) refused to go along with it. The Republican proposal — to slow more spending that would increase inflation — would do more than anything the Biden team has done so far, given the spending is, at least in part, which has led to the spike in inflation.
This just shows how desperate the White House is if this is where Psaki is going. They don’t have a lot of options at this point. Joe Biden’s approval is circling the drain and going down fast, at only 33 percent approval according to the latest Quinnipiac poll, with Biden down across all categories and all groups. The empty shelves across the country are getting Biden tagged on Twitter with things like #BareShelvesBiden. And those bare shelves are hard for Joe Biden to get around, with stores looking like the old Soviet Union. Not a great look. They seem completely at sea as to how to deal with any of the issues.
Though the writing was on the wall well before Tuesday, the incendiary comments President Joe Biden made during the speech he gave in Georgia where he proclaimed that if you don’t agree with him on the filibuster then you were no better than prominent Democrat racists of the past are being credited with hardening the positions of Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema rather than persuading them over to his side .
“I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered?” Biden asked rhetorically at the time. “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? This is the moment to decide. To defend our elections. To defend our democracy.”
Though Biden has been roundly criticized not just by leaders on the right but by some in his own party over his racially-charged, counter-productive remarks, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had nothing but high praise for Biden’s speech when asked about it today during her daily press briefing.
Specifically, Pelosi was asked by a reporter if she thought Biden’s comparison of his political opposition to Democrat racists of days gone by went too far. Though she appeared a bit out of sorts over the question at first, Pelosi quickly recovered, not only declaring the speech “was wonderful” but also insultingly stating that Biden’s references to Bull Connor were no big deal because, in her (rambling) words, “nobody knows who Bull Connor is.”
“The only criticism I would make, too, I wouldn’t say they’re criticism but observations, nobody knows who Bull Connor is,” she claimed. “You know, if we’re making the case to say wanna be with Martin Luther King or Bull Connor, who’s that? Wanna be with Martin Luther King or the, Martin Luther King and John Lewis or the people who unleashed the fierce dogs on them? That’s who Bull Connor is. Strom Thurmond, none of us have a lot of happy memories about Strom Thurmond,” she laughed before gushing again about how “fabulous” Biden’s speech allegedly was.
Watch (starts at about the :48 mark):
For starters, Biden’s references to Thurmond were not comparisons made to Biden’s modern-day political opponents. His comments were praise of Thurmond, who once helped filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1957 but who in later years supported extending the Voting Rights Act. So from that perspective, Pelosi’s disjointed comments about how “none of us have a lot of happy memories” about Thurmond made no sense considering Biden, who in the past praised the segregationists he worked with, didn’t appear to view Thurmond from an “unhappy” perspective.
Secondly, how insulting was it that Pelosi believes that because, in her view, “nobody knows who Bull Connor is” that it was an okay comparison to make? If someone compared her to the late conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, who Democrats absolutely hated, would she be okay with it because “nobody” supposedly knows who Schlafly was? I don’t think so.
But the really telling thing about what Pelosi said was that she just assumes that most people listening to the speech were too stupid to know U.S political history which, come to think of it, is exactly how Democrats like to view voters: Too stupid to know the truth and gullible enough to fall for their constant rotation of spin, demagoguery, and lies.
While some may not know who Bull Connor was, there were many in the crowd who did know, according to some reports I read where reporters said they heard gasps from the crowd when Connor’s name was mentioned.
The bottom line though is that whether or not people know who Connor is, it was a disgusting reference to make and a despicable cheap shot from the man who promised to be the “uniter in chief.” We shouldn’t be mad at either Biden or Pelosi, though, because they ripped the masks off and told voters who they really are this week. And as I’ve said before, the American people should respond accordingly at the ballot box come the fall midterms.
Sen. Ron Johnson is not planning his Senate retirement anytime soon. The Wisconsin lawmaker is running for reelection, he announced this week, at which the corrupt media predictably came out, guns blazing.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza, for instance, announced that the “Senate’s leading conspiracy theorist is running for another term,” and The Nation ran an article calling him an “off-the-deep-end” senator.
But while attention-seeking pundits attack Johnson for opinions that don’t conform to the left-wing narrative (opinions held among many Americans outside the Beltway, by the way), his opinions are often proved to be exactly right. There’s quite a long list of “Ron John” statements and actions that, after sending the media into a tizzy and Big Tech giants into a censorship spree, have held up quite well over time. Here are some of them.
During a February 2021 hearing to examine the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Johnson condemned the violence then went on to read an eyewitness account of the day’s events. Originally published in The Federalist, it detailed the presence of provocateurs in the crowd and confusion among many of the pro-police “MAGA” protesters who didn’t attend the rally to perpetrate violence.
The media lost it, ignoring his condemnation of the violence to smear Johnson as a conspiratorial nutjob. CNN, New York Daily News, Daily Beast, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and even the Washington Examiner ran articles attacking him as “deranged.”
Yet the account Johnson read was entered into the record without objection from lawmakers of either party. And since then, instead of learning more information about Jan. 6 that refutes eyewitness accounts of “provocateurs,” Americans have been treated to political playacting (including literal musical theater) from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sham commission, more hyperventilating from the media, and repeated stonewalling from the FBI on questions about potential provocateurs caught on video, such as Ray Epps.
Johnson was also ahead of the game on the Capitol Police component of Jan. 6, including pushing to correct the media and Capitol Police’s lies about what happened to the late Officer Brian Sicknick.
Johnson has been a consistent voice for those who don’t feel they have one on Covid shots and the mandates that accompany them. He’s given Americans a forum to discuss their firsthand adverse shot reactions, for which he’s been smeared in the corrupt media as “fundamentally dangerous” and as a peddler of “misinformation.”
In November 2021, YouTube suspended Johnson’s channel for the fifth time for seven days for a video of a panel on vaccine-related injuries, labeling it “Covid misinformation.” Yet we know adverse reactions do occur.
In April 2021, when Johnson questioned forcing every American to get vaccinated and slammed the idea of pushing vaccine mandates on citizens, Anthony Fauci came after him on MSNBC — which other outlets amplified, calling the senator an “idiot anti-vaxxer.”
Fast-forward to 2022, and Johnson has been vindicated: Even with a federal vaccine mandate in place, case numbers are up higher than ever; and even the triple-vaccinated are still contracting and spreading the virus.
Big Tech has twice censored the sitting U.S. senator by nuking videos discussing early Covid treatments. In February 2021, YouTube removed videos of sworn testimony from Dr. Pierre Kory about early treatments. Then in June, YouTube suspended Johnson’s account for one week for remarks he made about early Covid treatments in Milwaukee.
Shutting down scientific inquiry and debate is inherently anti-science, however, as scientists who dissent from some of the questionable Covid conventional wisdom have pointed out.
“For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, has said of this type of censorship. “If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, ‘Oh, it’s misinformation’ without actually giving a reason. And saying, ‘Look it disagrees with the CDC’ is not enough of a reason. Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate.”
[LISTEN: Sen. Ron Johnson Has Some Questions For The ‘Covid Gods’]
In October 2021, Wisconsin radio host Dan O’Donnell’s YouTube account was suspended after he posted an interview with the senator about opposing vaccine mandates for kids.
We didn’t have to wait for ground-breaking scientific discovery on this one; we’ve known since the beginning of the pandemic that children are at almost zero risk of dying from coronavirus, and now we know that Covid shots don’t prevent people from contracting nor spreading the virus. Johnson was scientifically spot-on to oppose vaxx mandates for children, given children’s near-zero risk from a bout with Covid versus the potential risks of shot complications.
Corporate media ginned up all types of attacks when Johnson, as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, dug into the Biden family corruption linked to Hunter Biden.
The New York Times described it using the “Russian disinformation” moniker. Time Magazine smeared him as the Senate’s “one-man Biden prosecutor.” And the Washington Post described Johnson’s investigation as a nakedly partisan ploy to get Donald Trump re-elected.
This was all a distraction from the fact that Johnson and Sen. Chuck Grassley successfully revealed millions of dollars in questionable financial transactions between Hunter Biden and his associates and foreign individuals, including the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and people with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Biden associate Tony Bobulinski confirmed aspects of the report after its release.
Johnson triggered the media in July when he mouthed to a Republican group that climate change is “bullsh-t.” The corporate media went berserk, with CNN and Chris Cuomo calling Johnson a climate change “denier.”
The senator has reinforced repeatedly that he doesn’t deny that the climate is changing, but rather that he isn’t an “alarmist” and doesn’t buy Democrats’ apocalyptic predictions.
Big surprise, plenty of data backs this up. The American Enterprise Institute has documented 50 years of failed doomsday predictions by so-called “experts” in the corrupt media and Democrat Party. For instance, ABC claimed in 2008 that Manhattan would be underwater by 2015. In 2011, The Washington Post claimed that cherry blossoms would bloom in winter.
Climate genius Al Gore also predicted in 2008 that five years later the North Pole would be free of ice. And in 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., predicted that Miami would be underwater in a few years. Yet in 2022, Miami is still very much above ground.
Last month, Johnson noted a number of simple things Americans can do to keep themselves heathy, such as taking Vitamin D, Vitamin C, and zinc, and gargling mouthwash to reduce viral load if they get COVID.
He was swiftly berated in print and on-air by the likes of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, HuffPost, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone. Forbes said Johnson’s “Advice Exemplifies The Rising Tide Of Anti-Science,” and MSNBC’s Joy Reid called him a “fool” and a “public health menace.”
Johnson’s mouthwash claim about viral load is supported by scientific research, however, such as this study. Additionally, Dr. Bruce Davidson, a faculty member of the Georgetown Department of Otolaryngology, conducted a study on the use of antiseptic mouthwash to control coronavirus, published in the American Journal of Medicine, and found that mouthwash can help protect people from Covid-19 pneumonia.
Even FackCheck.org had to admit, “Johnson is right that mouthwashes ‘may’ reduce the virus’ ability to replicate in people.”
On July 14, Johnson claimed natural immunity is “as strong if not stronger than vaccinated immunity,” against which WaPo deployed its fake fact-checkers.
“Fact-checker” Salvador Rizzo gave it “four Pinocchios” (an analysis that Johnson’s team eviscerated), and WaPo’s bogus fact-checker-in-chief Glenn Kessler called it one of the “Biggest Pinocchios of 2021.”
Johnson’s claims, however, come straight out of a pair of studies that confirmed natural immunity is stronger than COVID vaccine-acquired immunity. The pre-print Israeli study found that people with natural immunity could be 13 times less likely to contract the virus than those who were solely vaccinated, contradicting CDC findings.
Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician who was a professor at Harvard Medical School for a decade, dissected and compared the CDC study and the Israeli pre-print and explained why the latter is more reliable.
Johnson’s years-long involvement in getting to the bottom of the Russia hoax and the Ukraine phone call impeachment is enough to fill a book (see here, here, here, here, here, and here), but suffice it to say that, true to form, the media were relentless, and the right was pretty much right about everything. In fact, the truth about that story is likely far worse than most have heard. Here’s hoping Johnson continues to pursue that truth using the powers of a U.S. senator.
