Monday, May 9, 2022

Out of Touch: MAGA Crowd Unimpressed as Trump Touts Friendship With Johnson & Johnson Heir At Rally

 https://ussanews.com/2022/05/07/out-of-touch-maga-crowd-unimpressed-as-trump-touts-friendship-with-johnson-johnson-heir-at-rally/







Former President Trump appeared off message and out of touch with his base after introducing the billionaire heir of COVID-19 vaccine maker Johnson & Johnson during a Pennsylvania rally on Friday.

Trump touted his friendship with Jets owner Woody Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company, during a “Save America” rally in Greensburg, Pennsylvania in support of Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz, drawing little to no applause from the audience.

“Woody Johnson. A great gentlemen. You ever hear of Johnson & Johnson? He owns the place. I tell you what, this guy’s got cash like nobody’s got cash,” Trump announced.

To make matters even more awkward, Trump then bragged about how Johnson’s wife Suzanne is from Ukraine who is “having a hard time” coping with its conflict with Russia.

The incident drew widespread condemnation by conservatives on Twitter.

“This is exactly why every candidate should get into the 2024 GOP primary. Donald Trump has never been off message and out of touch. He’s now off message and out of touch,” said conservative commentator Jesse Kelly. “Only competition can bring him back. Either he gets back or he loses. Either way, the country wins.”

Conservative rapper Bryson Gray said: “Y’all support Johnson and Johnson now? Even though their jab is causing blood clots? Because Trump called the owner amazing and said he has a lot of money? Im just checking.”

This comes as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) restricted the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID injections on Thursday, citing links to life-threatening blood clots.

“After conducting an updated analysis, evaluation, and investigation of reported cases, the FDA has determined that the risk…warrants limiting the authorized use of the vaccine,” the FDA said in a statement. 

Nevertheless, despite studies highlighting a range of dangerous side effects from the jab and numerous governments restricting its use, Trump has stubbornly continued to tout the experimental COVID-19 injections as safe and effective and repeatedly encouraged his skeptical supporters to take it.

Watch the full Trump rally:



Medicine’s Tricky Operation: Grafting ‘Systemic Racism’ Onto Hard Science

The antiracist movement wants more than just legitimacy. 
It wants unimpeachable scientific authority.


A few years ago, concepts such as “white supremacy,” “systemic racism,” and “structural intersectionality” were not the standard fare of prestigious medical journals. But a February special issue of Health Affairs, the Washington, D.C.-based peer-reviewed journal, analyzes racial health disparities not through biology, behavior, or culture, but through the lens of  “whiteness,” along with concepts such as power, systems of oppression, state-sanctioned violence, and critical race praxis—a sampling of terms that appear in the issue.

The Health Affairs special issue reflects the effort of “antiracist” scholars to transform concepts still considered speculative and controversial—and some say unprovable—into scientific fact. It  is being advanced by other high-profile publications as well, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Scientific American, which last year published articles entitled “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy.”

But this scientific aspiration faces major challenges. Science demands verification, testability, and replicability, whereas race is a social construct that can be difficult to separate from factors like class or culture, and explaining the data often remains dependent on academic theories about systemic racism. The articles in Health Affairs indicate that elevating the concept of systemic racism from moral certitude to scientific fact will require developing new tools and methods.

In a Health Affairs paper titled “The Intellectual Roots of Current Knowledge on Racism and Health,” researchers from Harvard University and the University of Maryland identify “the critical need for paradigmatic shifts that incorporate racism as a driver of inequities,” noting that “scientific language has the power to encourage normative standards.” Those pushing the effort expect that it will take years to build up a knowledge base and critical mass of scholarly research. If successful, it would empower the antiracist movement with what advocates expect to be recognized as unimpeachable scientific authority.

According to researchers with this perspective, racial inequalities in lifespans, health, income, and other metrics largely result from one cause: cultural norms and unconscious beliefs that privilege whites and males at the expense of groups that lack power and are oppressed. Cultural elites advocating this view—whether one calls it wokeness, systemic racism, critical race theory, or just the truth—are now leaders of many top institutions in media, publishing, universities, scholarly journals, school systems, and government.

The American Medical Association’s 86-page strategic plan for racial justice and health equity challenges prevailing standards of quality and merit as a strategy of protecting the privileged domain of white males: The AMA condemns “equal treatment” and meritocracy as “malignant” white supremacist ideologies that obscure “true power and site of responsibility.” The Association of American Medical Colleges, which co-sponsors the accrediting body for U.S. medical schools, is working to establish an advocacy culture in medical schools that haven’t yet gotten with the program voluntarily.

Dissenters say that the medical establishment has become captive to a leftist ideological agenda. They argue that “antiracism” can be hard to distinguish from anti-science when it fixates on a single variable (race), selectively seeks out data to prove a hypothesis (confirmation bias), ignores plausible alternative explanations—and worst of all—silences criticism.

“Confounding science with political ideology is never good,” said Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, whose monthly column was terminated at Scientific American after 18 years in a disagreement over what Shermer saw as woke ideology infecting the venerable publication. “They’re saying we already know the answer—the answer is racism,” Shermer said in a phone interview with RealClearInvestigations. “We’re going to ignore all the other variables. They’re just reducing complex problems to one variable.”

The Health Affairs articles in the February special issue rely on sociological theories, personal testimonials, and even poetry to augment traditional scientific protocols. Scholars “encourage the use of a theory-driven approach” to interpret data that would otherwise have to be treated as random or inconclusive.

“This approach just drives me crazy,” says Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney specialist who retired last year from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “It’s basically finding associations and claiming it proves causality. They are going to find evidence for their theory because they are trying to do everything they can to prove their theory. That’s why they keep saying: We have to find the evidence.”

One way of summarizing this dispute is that traditionalists like Goldfarb are suspicious of scholarly activism as a corrupting influence on science, whereas researchers like those writing for Health Affairs are suspicious of neutrality and colorblindness as a cloak for systemic racism.

“This feels like an example of institutional capture, where you’re only good if you buy into the theory,” says Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, who describes the race-focused scholarship as an example of stubborn data being shoehorned into an uncooperative theory. “What happens is, other scholars begin to pick at it, and it falls apart,” Ferguson added. “Twenty years out this is going to look like a huge embarrassment.”


X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- May 9

 



Well, I decided to try to get back into playing video games for a bit, and I spent 2 hours trying to beat a game that I've put off for months: Super Mario World. Took a lot of attempts at the end, but I did it!

Here's tonight's news:


The Exasperated American ~ VDH

Will the voters channel their furor at this regime of lies into an unprecedented turnout at the polls in November?


A large majority of Americans now have no confidence in Joe Biden and his administration, which often polls below 40 percent, with negatives nearing 60 percent. 

Despite the 15-month catastrophe of his regime, the level of his own unpopularity remains understandable but still remarkable. After all, in 2020 voters already knew well of his cognitive deficits and the radicalism of his agenda. They saw both clearly starting in 2019 and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the primary debates, and the general election. 

So what did Biden’s voters imagine would happen when a cognitively challenged president, controlled by hard-Left subordinates, entered office—other than what he has done?

Now, as then, the media is fused to the progressive agenda and does—and did—its best to turn a non compos mentis Biden into a bite-your-lip centrist empath in the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” mode.

The American people know that on every occasion their president speaks, he will slur his words at best. At worst, he will have little idea where he is, where he has been, or what he is supposed to be saying or doing. When he is momentarily cognizant, he is at his meanest, or he simply makes things up.

Our new normal of a mentally incapacitated president is not entirely new in American history—Woodrow Wilson was an invalid during the last months of his presidency. But Wilson’s condition was well hidden. Quite novel is the idea that the American people know the man in the White House is cognitively disabled and simply expect him to confirm that bleak diagnosis each time he opens his mouth.

If Donald Trump exaggerated, Biden flat out lies daily. His most recent untruth was his assertion that the MAGA movement represents “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.” Biden cannot really believe that roughly half the country is now more dangerous than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, the American Nazi Party, the American Communist Party, and the Ku Klux Klan. And this comes from the mythically moderate “good old Joe from Scranton”?

The bullied people also know the Biden problem has no remedy. The 25th Amendment that Democrats and the Left raised nonstop in efforts to remove Trump—from the Rosenstein-McCabe wear-a-wire embarrassment and former Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee’s congressional tomfoolery to the incessant Montreal Cognitive Assessment demands—won’t apply to Biden. 

Either the media will continue to rebrand his incapacity as Ciceronian eloquence or it will privately gloat that Kamala Harris is so off-putting, so uninformed, so unpopular that the people would prefer an amnesiac Biden to a nonimpaired Harris. The truth is, the three doyens of Democratic progressivism—Joe Biden, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—all struggle with cognitive decline, and rely heavily upon the media and the Democratic Party’s political attack machine to enjoy asymmetrical exemption. (Though, in Feinstein’s case, her support is wavering.)

Americans feel there is no remedy for this downward spiral until November. To get a sense of their dilemma, imagine a Richard Nixon in 1973 caught lying during Watergate but with Spiro Agnew waiting in the wings without a trace of scandal—except with one difference: the current media is now attacking not the president’s shortcomings, but the president’s critics who point them out.

Even if the Republicans were to win a 60-vote majority in the Senate, they would hesitate to impeach Biden simply because Harris is a more frightening prospect. And some Marquess of Queensberry centrist RINOs would not wish to codify the Democrats’ new standard of impeaching an opposition president the minute he loses the House of Representatives in his first midterm. 

Most of the country has awakened to the fact that the Trump-Russia collusion story was essentially a Hillary Clinton campaign effort to destroy a political opponent, a presidential transition, and a presidency. And they know Clinton will never be indicted for her conspiracies and racketeering even if her minions rat her out to seek reduced charges for themselves. 

That hoax was followed by an impeachment vote over a phone call based on two more lies: 1) the Biden family was neither corrupt nor used Joe Biden’s office as vice president and his future political career to leverage payments from Ukraine, and 2) Donald Trump canceled military aid to Ukraine rather than sent them critical Javelin anti-tank missiles put on hold by the Obama Administration.

Americans know Google, Facebook, and Twitter censors were all enlisted in the effort to destroy a former president and his outspoken supporters. And they know there is no real remedy unless two or three more enlightened billionaires follow Elon Musk’s lead.

If Roe v. Wade were to be repealed, many Americans in red states will remain appalled that some blue states will allow abortions, especially late-term abortions after 22 weeks. But nearly all will accept the rule of constitutional democracy and thus the states’ rights to make their own laws that do not conflict with federal legislation as passed by Congress and signed by the president. 

These red-state citizens know the opposite is certainly not true: blue state officials will do all they can to attack those who disagree with them; who consider abortion the destruction of human life in the womb. Expect more California-style official travel bans.

Americans know that the Department of Homeland Security’s new “Disinformation Governance Board” will, by design, be run by an arch-disinformationist Nina Jankowicz. The board’s entire purpose is to coordinate with the media to brand oppositional expression as “hate speech” and “mis-, dis-, and mal-information so that critics preemptively self-censor and moderate their opposition.

In this regard, they know that the Biden regime awards positions of great power in the U.S. government to those who do the very opposite of the intended offices’ purview. The goal is pure nihilism. 

Thus, a mythographer and propagandist will adjudicate “truth.” A homeland security secretary will do his best to make the border entirely insecure. The secretary of transportation will see to it that freeways and bridges are not built. The department of energy’s task will be to ensure less energy is produced and its transportation is more expensive and more dangerous than ever. And the secretary of defense will oversee the most humiliating retreat in modern American history in Afghanistan as he cites our chief existential threat to be either climate change or “white supremacists.”

The people know the Left eventually always loses the support of the voters. But leftists still believe they can achieve and retain power, given that they control America’s cultural and informational institutions. 

The Left remains hell-bent on radically changing the demography of the United States. And it always manufactures new hysterias—from the claim that Trump was “100 percent responsible” for every American death during the COVID-19 pandemic, to border officers “whipping” innocent illegal aliens, to Vladimir Putin single-handedly causing sky-high gas prices and the worst inflation since the 1970s. Each week brings another prairie fire hysteria. No sooner than it is exposed and refuted, and the Left is on to another conflagration.

Americans have a rough idea that the tragic death of George Floyd was not proof of an epidemic of lethal police shootings of black males. Yet that single death set off the entire woke conflagration of 2020 and, with the hysterias of the lockdowns, has nearly wrecked the country.

Yet in 2021, out of more than 10 million arrests in the United States, police shot about six unarmed black men. The same year, 346 police officers were shot, 63 fatally. Moreover, roughly 8,000 blacks were murdered mostly by other blacks—to relative media and political silence. Thousands of lost black lives mattered little—except the fewer than 1 in 1,000 of that total who were tragically and lethally shot while unarmed by police.

Finally, Americans did not approve of the rioting inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But they never can forgive the needless lies surrounding that act in an effort to fabricate an insurrection out of a spontaneous buffoonish riot.

So they recoil at the lies about Officer Brian Sicknick’s death. They are baffled about the silence surrounding the number of FBI informants among the January 6 protestors. They are angry about the lies about the lethal shooting of an unarmed Ashli Babbitt. They don’t understand the refusal to release all videos or communications pertinent to the government’s reaction to the riot. And they do not fathom the disproportionate treatment of those charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol versus those 14,000 arrested during the summer of 2020, when rioting led to more than 35 deaths, some 1,500 police officer injuries, and $2 billion in property damage and massive looting.

They shake their heads when Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) directly threatened two Supreme Court judges by name outside the court, ginning up an angry protest group at the doors. They are baffled that the White House press secretary sees nothing wrong with disseminating the private addresses of Justices in order to ensure mobs of protestors show up at their homes to intimidate them.

Of course, bullied Americans are furious over the open border. They are angry their lives are being insidiously destroyed by the Biden inflation and energy prices. They are humiliated by the Biden debacle in Afghanistan and angrier still over his spiking crime wave and his mean-spirited senility. They resent Biden’s efforts to blame all these self-inflicted miseries on Donald Trump, or the “Putin price hikes” or the inability of a presidency to do anything about supposedly organic forces beyond his purview.

But behind the popular furor is a sense of impotence in the face of the lies they are assaulted with day after day. In other words, bullied Americans are angry that people who control the nation’s institutions deliberately mislead them and do so because they hate them. 

Let us hope that they channel this historic exasperation in November in a manner we have never seen before in the modern era.


Pelosi Encouraging Public to Force SCOTUS to Change Leaked Opinion


Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

I’m still waiting for any of the prominent Democratic leaders to condemn the pro-abortionists who are targeting churches or Supreme Court justices. We’ve reported on the despicable actions and vandalism at churches, the firebombing of an pro-life organization, as well as the effort to target the homes of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts.

Let’s talk about who’s upending norms here. We’re not just talking about random people rioting; we’re talking about Democratic leaders encouraging intimidation and influencing the justices to change their vote. Pelosi is inciting a violation of 18 U.S.C. Section 1507.

“We have to have a clarity of what this draft decision means so that the final decision doesn’t go that far,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said on Friday. “Lincoln said, ‘Public sentiment is everything. With it, you can accomplish almost anything. Without it, nothing.’ And women just have to weigh in. I don’t think there’s a good outcome here, but I think there’s a better outcome than what we have seen in the first draft.”

Pelosi made similar remarks on Sunday. She was responding to the criticism of California Gov. Gavin Newsom that the Democrats hadn’t been fighting enough on the issue. Pelosi railed against that, saying that they had fought on the issue. “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked if it was a mistake not to push harder.

Pelosi responded that “the focus we have right now is an urgent one in order to try to improve” the Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision. She said she thought talking about how they hadn’t moved legislatively to codify Roe earlier was a “waste of time.” In other words, forget about the fact that they never tried to codify it; they thought they could just sit on the passage of Roe, even knowing that there were a lot of constitutional issues with the decision.

How is this not an effort to influence the decision of the justices? That’s exactly what this is. And it’s not just a random protester; it’s the House Speaker, one of the main leaders of the Democratic party. This is intimidation and calling for more intimidation — implicit in what she is saying.

Talk about an ‘insurrection.’ Remember how we’re supposed to accept the results of elections (except of course when Democrats lose). We’re now throwing the norm of not talking about judicial decisions while they are still being considered under the bus, and also doing away with “the Court has spoken and we must accept it.”

There’s also a greater point — we’re all supposed to understand that the Court isn’t supposed to be subject to politics or what people think, it’s supposed to be purely based on the Constitution and the law. But Pelosi is explicitly saying she doesn’t give a darn about that, and quoting Abraham Lincoln of all people to support her case. I’m fairly certain that Lincoln would have understood the basic constitutional concept of not trying to undermine the independence of the Court.



Correcting a Grave Constitutional Error

Correcting a Grave Constitutional Error 

The Supreme Court is on the verge of correcting a grave constitutional mistake. Its decisions in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey(1992), creating and upholding a "right" to abortion, were not only wrongly decided but are so deeply flawed that the cost of keeping them far outweighs any benefit.

The leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organizationexplaining why Roe and Casey must be overruled proves the point. Abortion advocates want to keep what Roe and Casey created: a national policy of nearly unrestricted abortion that most Americans oppose. But they don't even try to defend those decisions as legitimate interpretations and applications of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court may be part of our system of government, but it does not run the country. Its job is to interpret and apply the law to settle legal disputes. When that law is the Constitution, as Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson explained at her recent confirmation hearing, the Court must discern its "original public meaning" and impartially apply it to the facts of a case.

Roe and Casey fail that test miserably. The Court did not even try to find the meaning, original or otherwise, of the 14th Amendment, where the right to abortion supposedly resides. More than half of Justice Harry Blackmun's majority opinion in Roe is a rambling, error-ridden account of "abortion history," and Blackmun never explained how any of it was relevant to the question of whether the Constitution protects a right to abortion.

Some of the harshest criticism of Roe has come from scholars who actually support abortion rights. Professor John Hart Ely wrote in 1973 that this "very bad" decision "is not constitutional law, and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be." Three decades later, Professor Kermit Roosevelt wrote that "Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether."

Fifty years of relentless propaganda about "choice" and the "right" to abortion have not budged what Americans believe about the issue. States were already legalizing abortion in difficult cases or crisis situations before Roe was decided. Roe legalized abortions in every other scenario, when a woman simply does not wish to be pregnant.

A large majority of Americans has consistently believed that these abortions, even in early pregnancy, should be illegal. Instead, the Supreme Court forced upon the nation an abortion policy more permissive than nearly any other on Earth—in the name of a Constitution that is silent on the issue.

Supreme Court
The US Supreme Court is seen past un-scalable fencing in Washington, DC, early on May 5, 2022. - The fencing is being set up due to the protests that have occurred in response to the leaked draft of a majority opinion that would shred nearly 50 years of constitutional protections. The draft, obtained by Politico, was written by Justice Samuel Alito, and has been circulated inside the conservative-dominated court, the news outlet reported. Politico stressed that the document it obtained is a draft and opinions could change. The court is expected to issue a decision by June. Stefani Reynolds / AFP/Getty Images

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) appeared at an event after the Dobbsopinion leaked, arguing that most Americans do not want the Supreme Court to overrule Roe. By that standard, the Court should never have decided Roe in the first place.

The Roe v. Wade that most Americans today say should be retained simply does not exist. Nearly 40 percent of Americans (and more than 50 percent of those under 30) believe that Roe involves school desegregation or environmental protection, or simply do not know what it is. Many of those who can at least identify the right issue falsely believe that Roelegalized abortion only in the first three months of pregnancy.

Fox News poll found that while a majority of Americans say that Roeshould not be overturned, a majority also support banning abortion after 15 weeks, a limitation that Roe does not allow. Politico's own poll, conducted after its revelation of the Dobbs draft opinion, found that support for retaining Roe has fallen to just 50 percent.

Others claim that abandoning Roe and Casey will necessarily endanger "rights" to such things as same-sex marriage—perhaps a concession that the Supreme Court also made up those rights. But this argument is not new. The plaintiffs challenging the abortion ban in Roe, for example, argued that the Court should create a right to abortion because it had already created other unwritten rights. The Court rejected the comparison, saying that the presence of the unborn child makes abortion "inherently different" from (and possibly not even related to) other privacy rights.

Now, the pro-abortion argument pushes in the opposite direction, saying that overruling Roe and Casey would endanger those "inherently different" rights. Anticipating this argument, the Dobbs draft opinion repeatedly makes something crystal clear:

To ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.

Ten years after Roe, President Ronald Reagan wrote that the "real question" concerning abortion "is not when human life begins, but, what is the value of human life?" This is and will always be the real question, and neither the Supreme Court nor the Constitution provide the answer. When the Supreme Court corrects this grave constitutional error by removing Roe and Casey as obstacles, the American people and those we elect to represent us will finally be able to answer that question for ourselves.

Thomas Jipping is a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. 


Have No Fear, the WaPo Editorial Board Says To 'Ignore Hysteria Over the Disinformation Governance Board'

Have No Fear, 

the WaPo Editorial Board Says To 'Ignore Hysteria Over the Disinformation Governance Board'

Have No Fear, the WaPo Editorial Board Says To 'Ignore Hysteria Over the Disinformation Governance Board'

Last week, it was revealed that the Department of Homeland Security had put together a Disinformation Governance Board, which was so chilling, even the department's Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged they could have done a better job explaining it. Unfortunately, Mayorkas' explanations didn't help, and the more we hear about those involved, the worse the whole idea sounds. Sure enough, Democratic allies in the mainstream media, in this case, the editorial board of The Washington Post, is assuring we have no place freaking out over such government restrictions.

On Tuesday, the editorial board posted their view, to "Ignore the hysteria over the Disinformation Governance Board."

The editorial itself is brief and somewhat useless. It hardly strikes confidence. Here's how they try though, with added emphasis:

The Disinformation Governance Board, (whose acronym is the Soviet-sounding DGB) is supposed to aid coordination among DHS offices as they counter viral lies and propaganda that pose a threat to domestic security. Done right, this is a useful function. Mr. Mayorkas mentioned campaigns by human smugglers targeting migrants to trick the Haitian community into thinking they could enter the United States without risk of deportation. Russia’s persistent efforts to influence U.S. elections are well known. Studying the “best practices” for stymying these attempts and sharing them with government actors could do a great deal of good.

What the board is not tasked to do is to establish what is true and what is false, or to push Internet services or anyone else to rake a tougher line on expression in general. Indeed, the board has no operational authority at all.

Already, components of the agency are gathering knowledge about what rumors are circulating so that they might respond. They, as well as government actors charged with disseminating the facts to debunk popular falsehoods or with educating citizens on how to avoid being fooled in the first place, need to know how to execute their roles effectively — as well as how to do so without infringing on civil liberties. The board is supposed to ensure that these government authorities — from the Federal Emergency Management Agency as it counters scammers following natural disasters to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as it instructs critical infrastructure companies on how to secure themselves against hackers — respect human rights.

They word above is "done right," and even that is worth arguing with. For the editorial also acknowledges that "the particulars weren’t really clear at all." What they go on to suggest, laughably so, is that it's merely the name that is the problem.

The editorial, predictably, blamed the "hysteria" that we are told to "ignore" on Republicans, in this case, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who, like so many others, has likened the board to George Orwell's "1984," including when it comes to the Ministry of Truth. Again, it wasn't merely McCarthy, though. "Ministry of Truth" was trending over Twitter for days after the board was announced.

Not mentioned is Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who, in a hearing earlier this week, grilled Mayorkas as no one else could, reminding him that it's the U.S. government that is "the greater propagator of disinformation in the history of the world," and thus they're the last entity we should want policing so-called "disinformation," if they don't even know what it is. 

The senator also passionately reminded that we work our issues out "by debating this, we don't work them out by the government being the arbiter. I don't want the government guardrails," Paul said, using Mayorkas' own phrasing, as he added "I want you to have nothing to do with speech."

Sen. Paul went on to ask the secretary, "do you think the American people are so stupid they need you to tell them what the truth is? You can't even admit what the truth is with the Steele dossier. I don't trust government to figure out what the truth is! Government is largely disseminating disinformation," he aptly reminded. 

Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), had shared a rather fitting take on it over Twitter on Saturday morning.

Virginia's Del. Nick Freitas, a Republican, also had some pithy takes of his own.

Freitas, and many others over Twitter, took to highlighting the outlet's tagline of "Democracy Dies in Darkness."


Closer look at looming recession: Consumers and jobs market may not be as healthy as you think

Closer look at looming recession: 

Consumers and jobs market may not be as healthy as you think

Consumers have enjoyed the upper hand in the last year and a half, with a fistful of money, a pick of jobs, and great bargaining power. But those good times are about to end, some analysts warn.

Despite surging inflation and economic contraction last quarter, many economists still mostly avoid recession talk. Instead, they focus on positives like strong consumer spending and savings and ample jobs. But upon closer inspection, even those pillars are showing cracks, some say.

“The tide has turned,” Michael O’Rourke, chief markets strategist at JonesTrading, said. “Stagflation is a legitimate, if not likely, threat.”

Spending and savings are strong, but for how much longer?

It’s true, consumer spending has continued to power the economy. When the economy unexpectedly shrank 1.4% last quarter, economists pointed to the 2.7% increase in consumer spending as a silver lining. Consumer spending accounts for about two-thirds of the economy.

Travel industry executives also tout strong bookings for the upcoming summer season, showing that consumers are still “revenge spending,” or determined to spend no matter what the price to make up for time lost due to the pandemic.

But how consumers are supporting that spending might be key. In March, the savings rate dropped to 6.2%, the lowest level since December 2013.

“Consumers are dipping into the savings amassed during the pandemic to keep spending afloat in the face of blistering inflation,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton. This is because wage increases haven’t kept pace with inflation. Average hourly wages rose 5.6% over the last 12 months in March, but consumer inflation jumped 8.5%.

“The niggling worries are still there that as the cost-of-living squeeze intensifies and as savings are eaten away, there may be less appetite to pay for an easier life,” wrote Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst with Hargreaves Lansdown, in a commentary. “With many supermarkets and restaurants set to pass on the cost of higher commodity prices, more consumers may begin to trim budgets by starting with little luxuries like on demand delivery.”

There are other signs a drop in discretionary spending may come sooner than later, too, especially if prices keep rising. The share of adults planning to book trips over the next year dipped slightly in March from February, according to the latest consumer spending survey by Morning Consult.

“There are two competing forces at play: the pent-up demand driving “revenge spending” on categories like travel versus growing concern about inflation and rising price sensitivity starting to impact discretionary purchases,” said Kayla Bruun, Morning Consult economic analyst. “So far, the “revenge spending” seems to be winning out, but more recently – especially starting in March – we began to see signs that inflation concerns, and price sensitivity are starting to have more of an impact.”

Jobs market shifting again

The Great Resignation – record numbers of people quitting in search of more flexibility, benefits, and higher wages – has been one of the biggest stories of the pandemic. For now, the job market still looks strong - April saw employers add 428,000 jobs, 38,000 more than Bloomberg's mean estimate from economists. But that’s not likely to last either, some say.

Amazon, the second-largest employer in the country, recently surprised analysts when it said it had over-expanded and now had too many workers and needs to cut costs. Other businesses like Netflix and Robinhood, which were highfliers during the pandemic, also announced layoffs. Meta, Facebook's parent, ordered a hiring freeze.

High demand and shortages everywhere forced a lot of businesses, including Amazon, to bulk up fast. However, with inflation high and demand likely to wane, more and more businesses will find that they also expanded too much and will start cutting back or not hire at the same pace, said O’Rourke.

“There are implications for a broad spectrum of the economy, from jobs to investments in transportation and equipment, warehouses and real estate,” he said “Most alarming is that Amazon is a company that usually gets "it" right.”

This is likely to swing the pendulum back to employers. So people who are still playing musical chairs with jobs may end up without a chair, some warn.

“We have employees making “demands” of management regarding even coming back to the office,” said Matthew Matigian, chief executive at Blue World Asset Managers. So this shock “is what I am predicting will yield the re-set on people’s current expectation that higher paying jobs will always be easy to find or that as an employee you get to take zero risk, have no responsibility yet somehow direct company policy.”