PP NewsBrief: 2021-05-28

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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Open Position Needs Filling Immediately: Conservative Activist(s)

"The very word brings shudders and thoughts of disgust to any good, God-fearing conservative American: activist.

Hearing it brings up mental images of Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers, those smelly basement dwellers of ANTIFA and any University of Chicago, Berkley or (insert entitled, rich, white d-bag activist here) trust funder with nothing better to do with their lives than try to burn the world down around them. But perhaps the result of conservatives thinking of the word activist as a dirty word is the reason we’re getting our asses kicked up and down the social sphere.

The media is full of leftist activists (dare I say, communist activists). Hollywood is full of leftist activists. Professional sports are full of leftist activists. The Democrat party is absolutely full of virtue-signaling Marxist and leftist activists. Fortune 500 company board rooms are now full of leftist activists.

The GOPe locker room, on the other hand, is full of spineless surrender monkeys, more concerned with the wrong people’s opinion of them than they are of taking action to actually solve the problems that they whine & wail about during hits on Hannity and Maria Bartiromo.

Most conservative pundits don’t dare push the Overton window, step out of line of the “approved messaging” and are downright terrified of giving their audience any action items or specific instructions on things that need to be done, lest the leftist cancel mob come to their homes and pressure their bosses and advertisers to take away their paychecks.

...

There are a few out there, but we need legions of them if we truly expect to win back our Republic. Dan Schultz is an excellent example of a conservative activist. His Precinct Strategies Project, highlighted and popularized by appearances on Steve Bannon’s War Room, did exactly what a conservative activist needs to do:

• --He highlighted a problem (the GOP is built to have enormous power at the local level, as our Constitution intended it to be, yet over half of those local level, Executive Committeeman positions have sat empty for years, with the “Good Old Boy Network” occupying many of the slots that were filled).
• --He gave people the tools they needed (his How to be a Precinct Committeeman book and PrecinctStrategy.com website told people exactly what they needed to do to win these positions).
• --He catalyzed masses of people with a new understanding of just how much power they had in numbers.
• --He inspired people to get off their couches, run for their open local positions and take back their party.
• --Lin Wood, Tracy Beanz, and many others have followed Dan’s advice, and several have won positions by using Dan’s strategy.

...

I’ve been working with another conservative activist, Cindy Chafian, for many months now to assist her own conservative activities and to gain her wise insights on things that we at 1st Amendment Praetorian can be doing to fight for our Republic. Whether it’s specific actions like Dan’s above or rallies across the country to not only get people engaged but also to have the opportunity to hand out action items and specific things that Patriotic Americans can do to win our country back. We need to greatly expand the number of people that are doing more than just giving inspirational speeches or bits of hopium to make people feel good.

Tracy Beanz Diaz, who won the Horry County GOP EC election, stands with Gen. Michael Flynn, who endorsed her during the Unite for The Republic Rally.

We need fighters—conservative activists—pushing the envelope and leading the army of Americans who are disgusted with the way our nation is being destroyed from within....

...

So the question now is, what are you going to do? Will you say a few Patriotic things on social media and call that enough? Will you attend these rallies and consider your duty as a Patriotic American fulfilled? Or will you seek out one of the conservative activists who is giving out action items, telling people specifically how to take our Republic back? Most importantly, will you deliver on your tasks once given to you?

U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets), my alma mater of manhood, are known as “combat multipliers” because we travel to the furthest reaches of the hottest spots of the world and train, arm & equip rebel groups to take their own freedom back. If we could begin a Special Forces-like factory, churning out conservative activists by the dozens, we would win this war of information very quickly."

One thing often missing is discussions about an actual overall vision. Without that you won't have a good idea of whether your more basic actions are getting you to a place you actually want to go. This is something I am attempting to rectify via Sketch-a-Society.

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Biden White House refuses to compare Ryanair situation in Belarus to grounding Morales' plane to get Snowden under Obama

"Speaking to reporters at a White House press briefing on Monday, Psaki echoed the words of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, calling the arrest of journalist Roman Protasevich a “shocking act” and “a brazen affront to international freedom and peace and security by the regime” in Minsk.

A Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania made an emergency landing in Minsk on Sunday, due to an allegedly fraudulent report of a bomb on board. Protasevich was then arrested by police. The former editor of the Polish-based Telegram channel NEXTA Live is wanted in Belarus on charges of inciting mass unrest, referring to last year’s protests calling the presidential election stolen and demanding regime change in Minsk.

“We condemn the Lukashenko regime’s ongoing harassment and arbitrary detention of journalists simply for doing their job,” is how Psaki described the arrest on Monday, objecting in particular to Belarus “diverting a flight between two EU member states for the apparent purpose of arresting a journalist.”

...

Asked if she would have expressed similar concern over the 2013 incident in which the plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to land in Austria due to allegations NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was on board, Psaki brushed off the question.

“We work with our partners all over the world, I can't tell you anything else,” she said.

As it turns out, there was no need to ask the hypothetical. The White House press secretary was literally the State Department spokeswoman on duty in 2013, and did not express the slightest bit of outrage over the Morales incident, as journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out.

Asked if the US had any role in encouraging European countries to deny Morales the use of their airspace, Psaki said that US officials “have been in touch with a broad range of countries over the course of the last 10 days.” As for Snowden, she said he had been “charged with three felony accounts and should be returned to the United States. I don’t know that any country doesn’t think that that is what the United States would like to happen.”"

No mention though of the fact that Biden is still seeking extradition of the journalist Assange. Assange undermines every claim of respect for press freedoms all on his own. The poor fellow has paid quite the price to do it though.

Personally I'd pardon Assange and turn Air Force One into "Con Air" for #WeThePeople of the world's persecuted truth-tellers. The elite can have no place to hide.

That's also why we need to make sure they don't succeed in their space endeavors. It's much easier to deal with them when they're locked on this rock with us.

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‘Vax for the Win!’ California launches ‘largest’ vaccine lottery in US with $1.5mn prizes & $50 gift cards for losers

"Newsom announced the new vaccine initiative during a Thursday press conference, outlining what he called a “multi-faceted” effort to encourage Californians to take the jab. Dubbed “Vax for the Win,” the program offers three tiers of rewards, including prizes of up to $1.5 million.

“The state of California today is announcing the most significant incentive program in the United States of America,” the governor said. “We’re putting aside more resources than any other state in America, and we’re making available the largest prizes of any state in America, for those that seek to get vaccinated.”

Starting Thursday, the state will begin handing out $50 “incentive cards” to two million fully vaccinated residents, which Newsom said would be distributed on a “first come, first serve basis.” Participants, who are automatically enrolled once they receive an immunization, will be able to redeem the reward either as a gift card for one of several grocery store chains, or as a prepaid cash card that can be spent anywhere.

In addition to the cards, two separate lotteries will also be held next month, with $50,000 prizes set to be doled out to 30 people between June 4 and June 11, while another 10 residents will win $1.5 million in a drawing on June 15 – the day California plans to lift its Covid-19 restrictions and fully reopen its economy."

The self-proclaimed biggest clown of all.

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Is Slack Destroying American Companies? Q&A With Antonio Garcia-Martinez

"After George Floyd’s death last summer, corporate leaders found themselves in an unusual position. With water-cooler conversations turbo-charged by chat programs like Slack, many firms saw outpourings of anger. Employees demanded their employers do something, or at least be seen doing something, to “confront racism.”

In some shops, employers were asked to recognize Juneteenth as a paid holiday. In others, there was a demand for more diverse hiring procedures. Significant donations to political organizations, scholarship funds, or product lines targeted to African-Americans were expected.

...

In some places, the connections between the companies’ core businesses and structural racism were apparent. For instance, many of the banks that made the most ostentatious pledges of support for Black Lives Matter were the same firms that targeted black communities with exotic subprime mortgage products, Wells Fargo’s “ghetto loans” episode being among the more infamous.

In other places, the connection was less clear. What should FitBit be doing to fix police brutality? How could Pinterest contribute? (They ended up removing ads on Black Lives Matter search results, so readers could “focus on learning about the movement”). Was it axiomatic that every company had a political role to play?

Soon, a new type of controversy arose, ironically at some of the companies with the reputations for most progressive management. The questions were less about race than workflow....

...

...Basecamp, CEO Jason Fried — long the owner of a rep as a progressive corporate leader, as his company has published five books on workplace culture — put the kibosh on controversial talk at work, banning “societal and political discussions.” Shopify, an e-commerce firm that broke ground after the January 6th riots by closing online stores tied to Trump or MAGA merchandise, has now become a symbol of corporate pushback. CEO Tobi Lütke just sent an email to employees explaining that work is not life and life is not work, and employee demands should be adjusted accordingly:

"Shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family. The very idea is preposterous. You are born into a family. You never choose it, and they can't un-family you. It should be massively obvious that Shopify is not a family but I see people, even leaders, casually use terms like “Shopifam” which will cause the members of our teams (especially junior ones that have never worked anywhere else) to get the wrong impression. The dangers of “family thinking” are that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go. Shopify is a team, not a family…

Shopify is also not the government. We cannot solve every societal problem here."

There’s a Frankensteinian irony to all this. Our biggest corporations spent decades steeping the public in weird Me Generation propaganda stressing the primacy of personal fulfillment, which fast became our real national faith as traditional religion lost influence. The result was a work-centric culture most of the rest of the world looked on as a kind of insanity. Alone among peoples who have a choice in such matters, Americans have long bragged about working themselves to death, feeling real pride in putting off distractions like marriage, kids, or “meaning” as they ran hamster wheels in pursuit of status and rock-hard abs, alone and at full speed toward the great beyond.

...

...we’ve come full circle. After training generations of Americans to forego personal lives and work their brains to mush in service of bigger profits, corporate leaders are waking up to find their companies staffed by people so psychologically dependent upon validation from work that they’re a net minus from a production standpoint, forcing bosses to beg them to shut up, go home, and get lives. Not many modern Americans know how to do any of those things, however, as can be seen in cases like that of Garcia-Martinez, where 2,000 employees claimed to be literally incapable of sharing a vast corporate structure with someone who once wrote a book containing passages they might have disagreed with, if they’d actually read it.

“The thought of conflating your entire political, moral, social, family, and religious being with your professional persona,” Garcia-Martinez says, “I think is extraordinarily fraught and difficult.”

Another irony: despite the progressive sheen of these campaigns, Slack agitation doesn’t represent a resurgence of labor. Unions used the strength of the whole workforce to protect the rights of the individual employee, among other things insisting that management not act without due process, evidence, etc. Slack, as has been seen in cases like Antonio’s, or the oustings at the New York Times of editor James Bennet and reporter Donald McNeil, often urges companies to bypass process and act in the heat of the moment. In any case, it’s a weird kind of liberalism that tries to override management to get employees fired, but that’s where we are in the modern American workplace."

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Corporate Media's Double Standard: They Attack Whomever They Want, But You Cannot Criticize Them

"On Monday, The Washington Post’s media reporter Paul Farhi contacted me to say that he had spoken with numerous editors and journalists at The Intercept, who voiced to him a wide range of personal and professional accusations about me. This was all in response to criticisms I had expressed about two recent Intercept stories. On Friday morning, The Post published Farhi's article about their attacks on me.

Among other things, that Post article features The Intercept's ongoing attempt to depict me as mentally unwell in order to delegitimize my criticisms of their shabby journalism. It quotes the site's editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, as saying I have “lost [my] moral compass and grip on reality,” echoing The Intercept’s prior claim that mounting anger at their organization is being fueled not by widespread revulsion over their increasingly unethical and politicized journalism but rather by my “unbalanced tweets.” The Post also quotes Reed as claiming that I have “done a good job of torching [my] journalistic reputation": liberal journalists, who only speak to and for one another, always believe that the primary if not sole metric of journalistic credibility is how popular one is among other liberal journalists. "He's a huge bully,” she added.

Depicting critics of liberal orthodoxies as mentally ill, rage-driven bullies, and shadows of their former selves, is a long-time tactic of guardians of establishment liberalism to expel dissidents from their in-group circles. A lengthy 2003 New Yorker smear job on Noam Chomsky headlined "The Devil's Accountant” — at the time when he was a rare and vocal critic of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy — described how Chomsky was once a credible voice but, sadly, has now "become increasingly alienated from the mainstream” because he "has no ideas to offer.” Chomsky's "thinking has grown simplistic and rigid,” the author wrote. She quoted Christopher Hitchens as saying that while he once admired Chomsky's stable ideology and noble commitment to principle, he is now going basically insane, describing his views of the war in Afghanistan as "the gleam of utter lunacy piercing through.”

...

...I've often noted that the reason the Nixon administration ordered a break-in of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst as a response to his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers was because depicting someone as psychologically unwell is the preferred method of power centers to distract attention away from valid critiques and to expel dissidents from their salons. The script which The Intercept and their liberal allies are using against me is an old, stale, and trite one.

All of this, quite obviously, is an attempt to distract attention away from The Intercept’s serious journalistic sins. It is also designed to personalize the anger which their behavior validly provoked onto me, to conceal the fact that numerous journalists across the political spectrum — not just me — reacted with disgust at what they did and what they are still doing.

One of the Intercept stories to which I (and many others) objected involved a fund-raising email sent by The Intercept to the public on May 4, in which they proudly boasted that they had obtained the full archive of private data on all users of the social media platform Gab. The Intercept vowed that they would use the data archive to target ordinary citizens, including QAnon conspiracy theorists and those who believe that the election was defrauded. Based on that promise, the email solicited donations from the public (why an outlet lavishly funded by the world's 73rd richest billionaire and which provides their largely unread writers and editors enormous, above-market salaries has to beg for donations from the public in the middle of a pandemic and joblessness crisis is, as I understand it, the subject of an imminent investigative exposé on their finances). Because I am not on their email list, I became aware of that Gab email only when a former senior Intercept editor forwarded it to me, furious that The Intercept was now doing the work of the NSA and FBI by infringing privacy rights rather than protecting them: a core mission of the organization's founding.

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The primary grievance which The Intercept is voicing in response to my criticisms of their work is the same one which liberal outlets now constantly try to weaponize in order to place themselves off-limits from criticism: namely, that by criticizing Intercept writers, I have “endangered” them — a dangerous and shabby standard which, like their liberal media brethren, they obviously do not apply to themselves. Why can The Intercept use a billionaire’s money to expose ordinary people’s Gab activities and produce a video smearing multiple journalists such as Townhall’s Julio Rosas and The Daily Caller's Jorge Ventura, but I and others cannot criticize them? Numerous other journalists and commentators, including Matt Taibbi and Jimmy Dore along with Fox News and the other news outlets whose journalists were smeared by The Intercept, along with the targeted journalists themselves, voiced the same criticisms I did.

...

...much of what is motivating The Intercept's rage is their institutional failures. They lost an enormous chunk of their membership base when I resigned last October, which they have not come close to replacing. They have repeatedly sent out emails pleading for donations on the ground that their fund-raising efforts are falling woefully short. And despite their enormous budget and exorbitant salaries, virtually nobody reads that site outside of a couple of writers..."

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eBay says it will let governments automatically remove listings

"In a move that observers fear may represent a setback for fair moderation of product listings – and of content in general – ecommerce giant eBay has announced that it is proceeding with a project aimed at allowing government regulators to remove items they see as “dangerous listings” directly from the site, with no need to consult the company.

eBay is also letting regulators – from some 50 countries around the world – decide that there is enough evidence that a listing might pose a risk to consumers, and once eBay declares these offices as “trusted authorities” their powers to remove items from the site will be unlimited. The company has not yet revealed the criteria that will guide this selection of state authorities it trusts to be making decisions in its place.

The company said the aim is to speed up and streamline the process of removal of listings, while the ones designated as dangerous will be considered either illegal or unsafe, and authorities will be able to delete them without further interacting with eBay.

eBay is talking up the project to wash its hands off responsibility for this type of online “moderation” as something that others in the industry will adopt as well, describing at the same time collaboration with authorities as “vital.”

But some, like Daphne Keller of Stanford Cyber Policy Center, formerly of Google, are suggesting that this might set a dangerous precedent, with the practice spreading to other types of online platforms, including pure user speech.

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Even contained to a marketplace, the new policy could prove to be rife with controversy and problems. Different countries have different rules about what constitutes an unsafe and illegal item, unintentional error or overreach has already happened in the past, sometimes even to prevent a big company’s competition from selling products.

It’s also not hard to imagine that authoritarian countries could use these powers to undermine political opposition from distributing products that, for example, express criticism of the regime."

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Digital Dollar: Central Bank Currency to Compete with Bitcoin

"The U.S. will consider pilot programs for Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Digital Dollars from the Digital Dollar Foundation (DDF) and private sector interests. One market actor involved is Accenture, an Irish company that was Andersen Consulting prior to its split from Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm during Enron’s 2001 accounting scandal.

Accenture is providing the “first phase of funding” for the DDF to “convene private sector thought leaders and actors” for a Digital Dollar Project (DDP) to “assess benefits and outstanding challenges.” Accenture will make the early testing grounds “accessible to all stakeholders” and is matching funds for the launch of the first five pilot programs. “The DDP is open to participants from all relevant sectors, including commercial institutions, the innovation community, non-profit organizations, and universities…” The first three pilot programs are to be announced within two months. “DDP intends to make its CBDC test ground transparent and, public and private, and serve as a neutral platform.”

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...DDF is promising that CBDC’s will bring modernization, facilitate economic inclusion, and represent a frontier for innovation in fields such as digital identity. The press release also says, “80% of the world’s central banks are engaged in research or experimentation toward developing a CBDC. These include the People’s Bank of China, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England.” China’s digital yuan is launching soon and being tested in major cities, including Beijing and Hong Kong, complete with expiration dates for a new way to centralize control over monetary stability or lack thereof. Such a manageable currency gives officials another tool to control, or create, boom and bust cycles.

In October of 2020, Trump-appointed Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell told a panel on digital payments hosted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), “We do think it’s more important to get it right than to be first,” assuring a look at potential benefits of a CBDC, potential risks, and to “recognize the important trade-offs.” He noted the need to evaluate considerations including cyberattacks, counterfeiting, fraud, illicit activity, the effect on monetary policy, and “preserving user privacy and security.”

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In an interview with Paypal President and CEO Dan Schulman, who is also founding CEO of Virgin Mobile and former Sprint executive: “Ten years from now, you will see a tremendous decline in the use of cash. All form factors of payment will collapse into the mobile phone… central banks need to rethink monetary policy…” PayPal had a record year during the 2020 lockdown, processing 15 billion+ payments for its 375 million users, launching contactless QR-code payments in 20 markets, and recently adding limited cryptocurrency functionality (users can only buy Bitcoin through Paypal and cannot send bitcoin into or out of their account).

Shulman is vying for his company to be a partner to new central digital dollar systems: “Central bank-issued digital currencies … might allow the government to open up Fed funding to other institutions besides banks, potentially companies like PayPal… so if you make a transaction it’s not your username and password that’s giving you permission to do that. It is 130 different variables that we look at on every single transaction, in milliseconds, to be sure that it’s you. It’s this idea of Big Data of really understanding who you are, not who you said you are.”

The Economist says, “[State issued digital currencies] could give governments, or a few private bosses, a wealth of information about citizens. It would also make the institutions a lot more vulnerable. A cyber-attack on the American financial system that closed JPMorgan Chase for a time would be distressing. A similar attack that shut down a Federal Reserve digital currency could be devastating.”

...

It remains to be seen whether digital currencies designed by the federal government and central banks in cooperation with private-sector financial interests in the U.S. will be fully trackable and confiscatable as most pilots worldwide propose. The opportunity for programmable functionality would seem too tempting to resist. A digital dollar could deposit funds in any account nearly instantaneously, such as Coronavirus or other stimulus payments, welfare benefits, and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan deposits. Central authorities could make inflation regulation baked-in, with parameters easily changeable by policymakers. It could also be used with A.I. to auto-process taxes and reparations or to prohibit unwanted behavior, such as the purchase of banned substances or books, without calling on human law enforcement."

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Facebook is suppressing ‘facts’ that are flagged as promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’, whistleblowers claim

"The conservative media watchdog organization published a purported internal Facebook memo concerning “Vaccine Hesitancy Comment Demotion.” The policy aims to “drastically reduce user exposure to vaccine hesitancy,” the document states.

Another document leaked to Project Veritas discusses how to flag and categorize “non-violating content” that raises questions about vaccination, “thereby contributing to vaccine hesitancy or refusal.”

Comments can be “demoted” if they are flagged as directly or indirectly discouraging people from getting vaccinated. It doesn’t matter if the content is factually accurate, Project Veritas reported, citing the leaked documents.

According to the reported policy, “shocking stories” about side effects linked to the vaccines can be suppressed, even if they are “potentially or actually true events or facts that raise safety concerns.” The company explains that such content should be discouraged because it could “present a barrier to vaccination in certain contexts.”

Facebook is also said to target comments that claim vaccination is not necessary due to low Covid-19 death rates, or argue for natural herd immunity against the virus, as such views are considered “indirect discouragement” that could hurt immunization efforts.

...

The content crackdown comes amid growing concern about side effects that have been linked to the vaccines. Numerous countries temporarily suspended their rollout of the AstraZeneca jab amid reports of blood clotting in people who received it. The pharmaceutical company has insisted the vaccine is safe, a position that has been echoed by the EU’s drug regulator. However, some have argued that there is insufficient data to show that the vaccines represented on the market are safe and effective long-term, as their rollout was fast-tracked amid the pandemic."

Maybe now more will see that it was never about stopping the spread of "false" information. It was always about situations like this.

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New law enables residents de-platformed by Big Tech to sue for up to $100,000 in Florida

"“Today, Floridians are being guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley power grab on speech, thought and content,” DeSantis said on Monday at a signing ceremony in Miami. “We the people are standing up to tech totalitarianism.”

The law requires social media platforms to be transparent about their content moderation practices and give users proper notice of policy changes. In addition to enabling individuals who are censored to seek monetary damages, the legislation allows the state's attorney general to sue Big Tech companies for unfair and deceptive trade practices.

Firms that are found to have violated antitrust law will be blocked from contracting with any state entity. The law prohibits social media firms from removing Florida political candidates, with penalties as high as $250,000 a day. All residents must also be allowed to block any candidate they choose to remove from their feeds.

...

The Republican governor said the legislation was made necessary by an unprecedented concentration of power, which Big Tech has used to enforce orthodoxy of thought on such issues as the origin of Covid-19 and the efficacy of pandemic lockdowns. “On major issues that deserve robust debate, Silicon Valley is acting as a council of censors,” he said. “They cancel people. When mobs come after somebody, they will pull them down. They shadow-ban people, which creates partisan echo chambers.”"

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Future virus ‘more deadly’ than Covid-19 will spark new pandemic, WHO chief warns

"“Make no mistake, this will not be the last time the world faces the threat of pandemic,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the UN agency’s annual assembly of health ministers from its 194 member states on Monday. “It’s an evolutionary certainty that there will be another virus with the potential to be more transmittable and more deadly than this one.”"

Well that's quite a low bar to clear considering over 99% of people survive this one...

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Ten “Good News” Covid Stories You Probably Missed

"Good News Story 1: Gosar Champions Resolution To Terminate COVID-19 Emergency Declaration In Effect Since March 2020

“Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) is championing a joint resolution to end the state of emergency declared by President Donald Trump on March 13, 2020, officially declaring the COVID-19 pandemic an emergency and giving the White House unique powers meant to curb the threat posed by the China-originated virus.

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Good News Story 2: Governors not Dictators! Pennsylvania voters impose new limits on governor’s powers

Pennsylvania voters became the first in the nation to curb their governor’s emergency powers, approving constitutional amendments proposed by Republican lawmakers angry over Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak. (The referendum initiative prevailed on a statewide ballot by a 7% margin: 53% “Yes”, 46% “No”) The Legislature’s top Republicans characterized the vote as a victory for individual rights and freedoms, a move to re-establish checks and balances to ensure a functioning, collaborative government…”

...

As the AP points out: “Wolf vetoed more than a half-dozen different bills designed to restrict his authority.”… Even now, after suffering a humiliating defeat at the ballot box, Wolf still claims he has his authority rests on an arcane “public health law and is unaffected by the ballot questions.” In other words, Wolf thinks he can ignore the will of the voters and do whatever the hell he wants, which is why it is so important that he–and the other aspiring tyrants across the country– be booted from office at the first opportunity....

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Good News Story 3: Utah lawmakers pass school mask mandate prohibition

“The Utah Legislature passed a measure Wednesday that would bar public schools and universities from implementing mask mandates…

“At some point this has to end,” Peterson said. “What this bill is really about is making sure we have those assurances to our students that they can go forward next fall and get right into the school year without the thought of masks and what that might mean.”

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Good News Story 5– Vaccine Refuseniks are gaining ground

We’ll let author Alex Berenson sum this one up:

“The #Covid vaccine push is just about over in the United States. First doses are down 70% from the April peak, to the lowest levels since mid-January – and that includes a temporary bump last week from the hideous decision to allow 12-15 year-olds to get the shot….

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Good News story 6: 29 States Have Now Terminated Mask Mandates

“To date, 18 states that had mask orders covering the general public have fully lifted them. Eleven states did not impose mask mandates at any point during the pandemic….

Most states that have completely reopened have done away with their mask mandates or never instituted one in the first place. But mask mandates, at least for those who are not vaccinated, may persist in parts of the country.

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Good News story 9: Former U.S. Health and Human Services advisor denounces Covid vaccine for children. Alexander says he has “grave concern for our children”

“It’s ‘reckless’ to vaccinate children for COVID-19,” said Former HHS coronavirus advisor, Dr. Paul Alexander on Fox News’” “Kids have a 1 in 50,000 chance of dying if they’re COVID-infected,” he added….The risk to children is so small, there is no reason to put our children in harm’s way at this point.”

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Good News story 10: 160 experts blast COVID vaccines as ‘unnecessary, ineffective and unsafe’

Excerpt from the Letter:

“In short, the available evidence and science indicate that COVID-19 vaccines are unnecessary, ineffective and unsafe… Actors authorizing, coercing or administering experimental COVID-19 vaccination are exposing populations and patients to serious, unnecessary, and unjustified medical risks.”"

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Former UK government advisor says advice from Google employee steered them towards lockdowns

"CEO and co-founder of Alphabet Inc. subsidiary DeepMind Demis Hassabis allegedly played a big role in convincing the UK government to ditch its initial COVID-strategy, the herd immunity approach. Herd immunity is an approach used in previous pandemics, where, instead of lockdowns, the disease is allowed to spread so that a large portion of the population become immune.

In a testimony before the UK parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee and the Science and Technology Committee, the Prime Minister’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings detailed how Hassabis and others convinced him to ditch the initial official government’s plan to handle the pandemic.

In the early months of 2020, just as the virus was starting to spread in the UK, the government’s plan was to limit, but not stop, the spread of the virus in the summer, hoping to achieve herd immunity by fall, effectively avoiding a second wave in the cold months.

...

However, he consulted Hassabis, Tim Gowers, and Ben Warner, who challenged the herd immunity strategy.

“I got in touch with [Gowers], and I started sharing SAGE documents with him in the week… then shortly afterwards, Hassabis, who I also started sharing documents with and talking to. They actually could understand these things.

“The combination of Marc Warner, Hassabis, Tim Gowers – you had three incredibly able people who could understand the technicalities in a way that I couldn’t do, saying this to me, and that gave me the kind of confidence to say to the Prime Minister we should change,” Cummings said.

...

However, SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) scientists were not all in agreement that a lockdown was necessary.

“Demis Hassabis came in at my request. [I asked] Patrick Valance to bring him in. He’s one of the top data science and AI people on the planet and four people in SAGE argued with him, and said ‘You’re being too simplistic about all of this’. Then Tim Gowers said, ‘No, that’s not correct’. The scientists were still arguing about that at the same time on the 18th, and after that meeting,” Cummings said.

Eventually, allegedly after advice from the Google employee, the UK chose the lockdown approach, enforcing its first full lockdown on March 26, 2020."

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Regime vs. Regime

"The attempt of America’s ruling class to convict 455 persons of “armed insurrection”—i.e. of waging war against the United States, a species of treason—for protesting insufficient scrutiny of the 2020 election on January 6 in the Capitol, while at the same time it excuses and even cheers the burning and looting of courthouses, police stations, and downtowns all over America, is not the exercise of a “double standard.”

The people in and out of government who do this are not corrupt. Instead, acting as part of the regime—the oligarchy—they are replacing the American republic and waging war to crush its remains.

The sooner Americans realize that we are being governed by people at war with our Constitution and contemptuous of ourselves, the sooner those people may be treated as the enemies they are.

...

Keeping evaluation of cases within the administrative-judicial system—out of the hands of the accused’s peers—is an essential part of suppressing the reality of what happened and did not happen on January 6. Forcing the accused to plead guilty to charges formulated according to the narrative that white supremacist Americans unlawfully obstructed the 2020 election is essential to establishing the validity of that fraudulent political claim.

That, in turn, is an essential weapon in the oligarchy’s attack on the American republic and its supporters. Reality is the opposite: the oligarchy itself committed the only unlawful acts of interference during the 2020 election. Anyone looking for evidence of oligarchic interference may begin with Time magazine’s February 4 story, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” and continue to the ongoing campaigns to thwart audits of vote counts.

...

...the oligarchy’s system of justice consists precisely of negating what the U.S. Constitution defines as right. The founders passed the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth through Eighth Amendments, precisely to place the judicial power’s capacity to hurt individuals ultimately and firmly in the hands of the people. They did it to prevent those in power from using that power to cow opposition and force support. But that is exactly what the regime that calls itself “our democracy” is doing.

Consider: The Fourth Amendment prohibits officials from searching a person or his home and papers without prior consent or a legal order. A warrant must be based on probable cause, or reasonable suspicion of criminal behavior. It must also be very specific in describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. The Fourth Amendment is intended not just to prevent bothersome “fishing expeditions” into innocent matters. It also means to outlaw using investigations themselves as a form of punishment and intimidation.

And yet first the Justice Department, and now regime-friendly judges, have used and are using investigations to draw a dragnet through American society to embarrass, punish, and chill countless persons who are or may be opposed to the oligarchy’s desires. Having been at the Capitol on January 6, or merely in Washington, D.C., has been enough to earn a SWAT team’s intrusion and trashing of one’s home. Other departments of government including the armed forces, plus any number of corporations, examine social media posts for heterodox views. Though punishment does not always result, spreading fear always does. Which is the main point.

...

The Fifth Amendment’s prohibition of compulsory self-incrimination was meant to prevent officials from pressuring suspects into admitting guilt for crimes they did not commit. Guilt and innocence were supposed to be determined at trial. But the modern American justice system relies almost entirely on over-charging offenses and then discounting them to obtain a guilty plea—the truth of what really happened be damned. This has placed dictatorial discretion in officials’ hands, resulting in laxity for socio-political favorites and oppression for those out of favor.

Misuse of the plea bargain system is playing a major role in the oligarchy’s attack on the republic because the oligarchs are combining it with neglect of the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury, to hear and question witnesses, and to be defended by a lawyer. Trials for the events of January 6 are not to begin until at least some nine months after the fact, on no particular schedule. During this lengthy and indeterminate time, the accused are held in solitary confinement under conditions harsher than most murderers ever experience. Their lives have already been ruined. And for what? The pressure on them is enormous to sign anything and at least set a date by which their nightmare will end.

This is possible because the Justice Department also acts in defiance of the Eighth Amendment, which protects against excessive bail or fines. The Constitution’s framers assumed that all but a few dangerous defendants would be granted bail—money pledged in exchange for the promise to appear for trial. Overheated rhetoric aside, none of the persons arrested in connection with January 6 actually injured anyone, or have a history of injuring anyone. The allegation that they are dangerous is purely a political one, and the purpose of denying them bail is all too obviously to pressure them to support a political narrative and to warn the oligarchy’s potential opponents of what the administrative system has in store for them.

...

To keep this reality in context, one might recall Arlo Guthrie’s hilarious 1967 song “Alice’s Restaurant,” the saga of a hippie arrested for dumping trash, whom the legal system throws in with “all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people . . . Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! . . . nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me! . . . And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest Father raper of them all . . . he said, ‘What were you arrested for, kid?’ And I said, ‘Littering.’ And they all moved away from me.”"

========

Brandeis Dean Declares “Yes, All White People Are Racists”

"I have a different take on this controversy from some who have denounced Slater as engaging in simply another form of “race baiting.” I agree with Slater that we should be debating this issue. This is a view among many academics and should be respected as a good-faith understanding of the source of racism.

The problem is that critical race theorists and advocates often insist that we must have a dialogue on race but it tends to be more of a diatribe. For an academic to voice opposing views on such issues is to risk investigation, re-training, or even termination, as we have discussed in past cases. The only dialogue allowed in these sessions tends to be the willingness to accept the underlying premises rather than alternative viewpoints.  Indeed, most sessions are treated as “trainings” to address “whiteness:” and “white privilege” rather than debating if this view is itself racially intolerant.  The same is true at corporations like Lockheed where top executives were sent into mandatory training to address “white male culture” and “white male privilege.”

Slater says that she seeks “an understanding of race and racism through honest and frank conversations” but it is clearly a discussion premised on the assumption of all white people being racist and “whiteness” being hateful. It is designed to be more therapeutic and transformative for white people than a real debate of the assumptions and stereotypes underlying this aspect of critical race theory.

It is a loss in my view and inhibits true evolution of viewpoints and assumptions. I accept that I many be blind or insensitive to racial bias or privilege, but I have serious concerns over the bias shown in some of these lectures and supporting material.

Colleges and universities were once places where controversial subjects could be debated in a passionate but civil exchange.  Assumptions were challenged and data reviewed. That is not happening on many of the issues that face us today. Certain subjects are treated as off-limits....

...

We cannot make true progress unless we are able to speak openly and freely on such subjects. Many disagree with the views of academics like Slater but few faculty members are willing to raise such disagreements openly on campus. To do so is to risk being labeled as an example of reactionary white privilege and hostility. Without such freedom to challenge underlying assumptions or viewpoints, these sessions will be viewed as indoctrinations rather than real discussions of race in society. That will serve to silence many but convince few."

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Gov. Abbott to Sign Bill Allowing Texans to Carry Handguns Without a Permit

"In another random act of federalism, Texas Governor Greg Abbott is set to sign a bill allowing Texans to carry handguns without a permit, so long as they haven’t been convicted of a violent crime.

The Texas House approved the bill just before midnight on Sunday in an 82-62 vote, and the Senate approved it Monday in a 17-13 vote. Abbott has indicated he will surely sign the proposal into law.

“We should have ‘constitutional carry’ in Texas,” he told a local radio station in April.

...

The bill would do away with the requirement for Texans to acquire a permit to carry a handgun if they’re not prohibited by state or federal law. It also preserves a Senate amendment enhancing the criminal penalties for felons and family violence offenders caught carrying a handgun.

Meanwhile, under current state law, Texans must be licensed to carry handguns – whether openly or concealed. Carriers must submit fingerprints, complete four to six hours of training, and pass a written exam and shooting proficiency test."

========

COVID-19 and the About-Face of Legal Elites

"American legal elites have performed an about-face in their views on quarantine law. Before 2020, a large number of law journal articles argued that quarantine and lockdown unconstitutionally restricted personal liberty and were not effective at preventing the spread of disease. But, after governments began imposing quarantine and lockdown during COVID-19, the authors of these same articles began supporting the very restrictions they had once regarded as unconstitutional and ineffective.

For example, one of the most prolific scholars on quarantine law is Professor Wendy Parmet of Northeastern Law School. Parmet has been publishing on quarantine law since near the beginning of her career in the early 1980s. Before March 2020, Parmet was critical of strict quarantine measures, warning that quarantines undermined freedom. In 2018, Parmet wrote that the law of quarantine itself had been “quarantined” from the Constitution because quarantine laws did not sufficiently protect constitutional rights. Parmet wrote that quarantines “run counter to the high regard that Americans place on autonomy … quarantine is rarely an effective public health strategy, and no evidence exists that it has proven effective in reducing morbidity and mortality in the U.S. in the last half-century.”

In 2009, Parmet criticized what she called the “dangerous-patient perspective,” where society stigmatizes certain infected individuals as “dangerous” and views these individuals as the cause of disease transmission. This perspective, Parmet argued, leads society to use quarantine to unduly violate individual rights “while neglecting broadly based epidemics and the conditions that foster them.” As recently as February 2020, Parmet wrote, “We should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus,” and “harsh measures tend to scapegoat already marginalized populations.”

But, Parmet, like many of her left-leaning colleagues, has changed her tune. In May 2020, Parmet wrote an article entitled “Rethinking Freedom,” in which she argued for increased restrictions due to COVID-19. Parmet stated:

“The intrusion of stay-at-home orders have quickly been seen as a violation of these rights and an affront to the Constitution. Liberty is more complex than this simplistic conception. … when the history of the pandemic is written, our one-sided view of liberty and the devaluation of public health that followed from it may well claim a starring role in the neglect that exacerbated the pandemic’s impact in the U.S.”

...

Another widely published author on quarantine law is Wendy Mariner. Mariner is a professor of law and public health at Boston University and was once the American Bar Association’s Section Representative to the Uniform Law Commission Study Committee on Declarations of Quarantine. In that capacity, Mariner’s role was to help draft recommendations for state legislatures in enacting quarantine laws. At the time, Mariner warned that  “We should be careful about declaring emergencies, because emergencies permit exceptions to the rules. If the risk of an emergency continues indefinitely, then the exceptions become the rule, and the rule of law itself is compromised.”

...

Since then, though, Mariner, too, has shifted her position. She has frequently tweeted about the government’s response to the pandemic, but, after April, she has not posted any comments critical of the quarantines or lockdowns.

...

Before 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was one of the most vocal opponents of government-imposed quarantines. In 2015, the ACLU and the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership published a report entitled, “Fear, Politics, and Ebola: How Quarantines Hurt the Fight Against Ebola and Violate the Constitution,” in which they argued that American officials abused quarantine laws during the Ebola crisis, and recounted how the ACLU filed numerous lawsuits to challenge these quarantines. The authors recommend that states and the federal government amend quarantine laws to give stronger protection to individual rights. The authors wrote that states should:

“Employ the least restrictive alternatives available to stem transmission of infection. Public health authorities have a wide array of tools available to control disease transmission short of quarantine. … Given the serious liberty interests at stake whenever a government authority imposes movement restrictions or quarantine, it must provide robust procedural protections to enable individuals to contest those restrictions.”

Predictably, the ACLU does not take this position any longer. In a “COVID response report,” posted on its website, the ACLU noted that it had filed over 145 COVID-related legal actions. In these lawsuits, the ACLU advocated for various policies, including expanding the right to vote by mail, releasing inmates from prison, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s releasing detained individuals who are at risk of disease.

The ACLU did not, however, generally contest the lockdowns. Its only challenge to the lockdowns was when the ACLU argued for access to abortion clinics. The ACLU reported, “We and our state affiliates have sued in seven states to fight back against politicians cutting off access to abortion during the crisis.” In its COVID response report, the ACLU made no other arguments against quarantine or lockdown.

...

It is doubtful that, if former President Trump and other conservatives had supported aggressive quarantine and lockdown measures, these scholars would have re-examined their beliefs and said, ‘We were wrong, and Trump is right.’

In fact, in many of the articles referenced above, the authors discussed how, during the Ebola crisis, governors, who desired to prove themselves “tough” on Ebola, unjustifiably quarantined people who had returned from Africa. The authors believed that these governors imposed quarantines for political reasons rather than to protect public health; they further believed that politicians influenced the CDC for political purposes. Mariner observed:

“Indeed, the CDC already made what appeared to be politically motivated policy decisions while under political fire. … the hysteria, politicization, and rejection of evidenced-based legal decisions created more harm than the disease itself. … With public fear of Ebola steadily increasing, many public officials let their political interests drive their actions. Governors who were up for reelection in states like New Jersey and Connecticut decided to issue strict quarantine orders.”"

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Chris Hedges: Israel, the Big Lie

"Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie.  Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.

Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.

...

...And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.

The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia.  Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.

The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

...

Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy.  Saudi Arabia, a country that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.

...

...Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people.  From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land.  The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.  Israel is not defending the rule of law.  Israel is not a democracy.  It is an apartheid state.

That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors....

...

...Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.

The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country....

...

Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv....

...

Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims.  This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military.

There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States.  The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies.  The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society.  We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down.  It will be devastating for the Palestinians.  It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street."

If only Hedges could see past the outdated left/right paradigm he'd be able to see a bit of his own bias and the possibilities for broad unification on a number of issues.

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How Team Biden ended COVID Mania overnight

"How was the Biden Administration able to flip the switch on COVID Mania and turn off the Safety Regime virtually overnight, after 15 months of a ruthless propaganda and fear campaign claiming that America was in the midst of a perpetual pandemic of endless death and destruction? Luckily for Team Biden, the current White House are beneficiaries of Democrat, or D.C. insider privilege. And because they are part of the insider’s club, they have the ability to control and manipulate the power centers in D.C. at a moment’s notice. To make sense of this rapid, perplexing change of events, you have to understand how our institutions in Washington, D.C. actually work.

...

Understanding the real formatting of the D.C. beltway means being familiar with the de facto power structure in Washington, and being able to identify the people who are actually in charge. Contrary to what is being reported in the press, political appointees like CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and her colleagues on the same hierarchical level are not in fact in charge of much at all. Sure, Dr. Walensky may have a powerful, respected title and some lofty credentials, but that doesn’t mean she has the independent authority to make executive-level decisions. She and her colleagues were appointed to these positions with the understanding that they would dutifully take orders from the White House, no questions asked. Dr. Walensky and others in Government Health were vetted prior to their appointments to make sure that they would be loyal to the *real* power structure in D.C. The powerful individuals in town are policy officials who work directly with the White House, and not at CDC headquarters in Atlanta. Had she publicly dissented from the White House talking points, Walensky would be sent packing the next day. She and her colleagues choose to partake in this system because embracing its practices offers tremendous upside and prestige to their careers.

...

Could Donald Trump have pulled this off in the same way? I’m not so sure. It’s important to understand how Washington works when someone who threatens the administrative state comes into town, as opposed to someone who is supported by the federal bureaucracy.

The federal bureaucracy is overwhelmingly liberal and conformist when it comes to supporting the power centers in Washington. In the 2016 elections, 95 percent of political donations went to Hillary Clinton, who, like Joe Biden, is very much the ultimate D.C. insider.

When an insider White House like the Biden Administration is in charge of the executive branch, the civil service acts in solidarity with the administration. They rightly do not perceive the Biden Administration as a threat to The System. When an outsider like Donald Trump comes into town, the civil service makes it their mission to make the outsider’s job as difficult as possible. From 2016-2020, we saw the extremes of this phenomenon on display, as the federal bureaucracy made it their mission to not only undermine the president, but to attempt to remove him from office by any means possible.

If a term two Trump Administration had decided to make this sudden move, it would almost have certainly been met with complete outrage, a federal bureaucracy in complete revolt, mass resignations, the corporate press accusing the president of committing mass murder, and woke corporations perhaps making mask and vaccine requirements even more stringent upon entry.

...

...observe how expeditiously the Biden Administration has been able to tame the rabid animal in the spotlight-seeking Fauci, who has fallen in line with the talking points regarding masks and school openings. Make no mistake, a dissenting Fauci will be thrown under the bus multiple times if he acts out of line, and the political scientist in the NIAID chief is careful not to overstep his portfolio."

Donald Trump may not have been up to fighting the Deep State but someone is eventually going to have to take them head on.