Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts

Thursday, September 22, 2022

Whistleblower: FBI Manipulating J6 Cases to Support Biden Narrative of a National Crisis of Extremism

Whistleblower: FBI Manipulating J6 Cases to Support Biden Narrative of a National Crisis of Extremism

(AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)

According to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, an FBI whistleblower has come forward with information about how the FBI is manipulating cases related to the Capitol riot to create “the illusion” that domestic violent extremism is a pervasive problem in the United States.

Just The News reports that Jordan wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray stating that “the ‘manipulative case-file practice’ was being conducted by the bureau’s Washington field office, which was instructing local FBI offices to open up cases on their books that were in fact simply related to the Capitol breach.”

Jordan wrote, “The FBI’s case categorization creates the illusion that threats from [domestic violent extremism] are present in jurisdictions across the nation, when in reality they all stem from the same related investigation concerning the actions at the Capitol on January 6.”

“Such an artificial case categorization scheme allows FBI leadership to misleadingly point to ‘significant’ increases in DVE threats nationwide,” Jordan added.

Jordan says that the whistleblower’s claims are “consistent with disclosures we have received from other whistleblowers that high-ranking FBI officials — including a senior WFO [Washington Field Office] official — are pressing front-line agents to categorize cases as DVE [domestic violent extremism] matters to fit a political narrative.”

The false narrative that the FBI is attempting to create curiously aligns with the narrative being pushed by the Biden administration. Earlier this month, Biden delivered a primetime speech warning about the threat posed by “MAGA Republicans” — whom he called a threat to our democracy.

In order to create the illusion that domestic violent extremism is a bigger problem than it really is, the FBI is also diverting resources away from investigations of other crimes.

“The whistleblower disclosed that the FBI is sacrificing its other important federal law-enforcement duties to pursue January 6 investigations,” Jordan wrote. “The whistleblower recalled, for example, being told that child sexual abuse material investigations were no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies.

The politicization of the FBI by Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland has already come under scrutiny in the way of the raid on Mar-a-Lago last month. Based on this latest whistleblower revelation, it’s clear that the politicization and weaponization of the FBI are even worse than we thought.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/09/20/whistleblower-fbi-manipulating-j6-cases-to-support-biden-narrative-of-a-national-crisis-of-extremism-n1630716

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Democrats Cynically Fund the 'End of Democracy'

Democrats Cynically Fund the 'End of Democracy'

By Tim Graham


The Democrat-enabling media are currently highlighting a Republican tactical rift on whether to support a national ban on abortions in the later stages of pregnancy. They are not spending much time on an obvious tactical rift among Democrats. Should Democrats be boosting "MAGA Republicans" as President Joe Biden screams in speeches that they're killing democracy?

On Sept. 12, "PBS NewsHour" reporter Laura Barron-Lopez laid out just how cynical Democrats are in backing these alleged monsters. In New Hampshire's GOP Senate primary, they spent $3.2 million attacking more moderate candidate Chuck Morse as a Mitch McConnell stooge to smooth the path for Trump-loving Don Bolduc to win. Now they think the reelection of Sen. Maggie Hassan is a fait accompli.

This is happening all over the country. In Maryland, Democrats spent $627,000 to elevate "election denier" Dan Cox, so they can finally elect a Democrat governor in a state that Biden won by 33 points.

But the snow-topped summit of cynicism came in Michigan's third congressional district, where Democrats poured $435,000 into promoting "election denier" John Gibbs. Gibbs then beat freshman Rep. Peter Meijer, who boldly voted for the second impeachment of Trump after the Capitol riot.

On PBS, Barron-Lopez turned to anti-Trump Republican strategist Mike Madrid, who called this a "moral travesty" that is feeding "toxicity." She did not find a Republican who would say Meijer was foolish to strike a pose that Trump should be removed from office with a week to go. Or provide time for a Republican who would note this is how cynical Democrats are — that they can honor you for your "courage" in opposing Trump, like you're one of those "good Republicans," and then spend a pantload to defeat you.

Then, PBS turned to Democrat strategist Martha McKenna, who continued the cynical dance by blaming Republicans for all this. GOP voters are elevating the MAGA candidates, and not those millions of dollars in Democrat ads.

We were told this is the same strategy played by Claire McCaskill, who boosted Rep. Todd Akin in the Missouri Senate primary in 2012. After Akin won the primary, he was severely pummeled by the national media for suggesting women didn't get pregnant in a "legitimate rape." In every election cycle, you can count on the media to play up GOP gaffes and pretend they've never heard a Democrat say anything stupid or morally obtuse.

Then at the end of this long cynical enterprise, the Washington Post Opinions section sent out an email headlined "Mainstream Democrats romped in the primaries. Republicans went full MAGA." Assistant editor Drew Goins repeated the theme: "In short, Democrats won on moderation. Republicans went full MAGA."

This is boiling balderdash. Take abortion, the issue the liberal journalists are touting as the midterm manna in the Democrat desert. Is Hassan "moderate" on abortion? No. Is Hillary Scholten — the Democrat who lost to Meijer in 2020 and is running again — an abortion "moderate"? No. How about Wes Moore, who's facing Dan Cox in the Maryland governor's race? No, he adores NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Democrats cynically backed candidates that their media buddies can paint as scary "hard-right" kooks while they pose preposterously as the sensible essence of moderation. They are so aerobically cynical that they can align this whole exercise with Biden's "restoring the soul of the nation."

These trashy tacticians should just admit they would do just about anything to win. That's where their moral compass is pointed.

https://www.creators.com/read/tim-graham/09/22/democrats-cynically-fund-the-end-of-democracy

Saturday, September 17, 2022

The Constitutional Lessons Learned from the 2020 Elections

The Constitutional Lessons Learned from the 2020 Elections

Allen West

After any training event in the military, or even in combat, you conduct what is called an AAR (After Action Review). The purpose is to assess the positives and negatives of the evolution just encountered. Especially in combat, this is necessary because the victor on the battlefield is the one who can improvise, adapt, and overcome. As we say, "no plan survives first contact" and "the enemy always has a vote." Therefore, as we are less than 60 days from the 2022 midterm elections, I think it is critical to reassess the constitutional lessons learned from two years ago. It is not my intent or desire to talk about who won, voting machines, and allegations the elections were stolen. I want to address that which we objectively know is true.

First, from a constitutional perspective, we need to never allow anyone, elected or not, to believe that a so-called emergency suspends the rule of law. As well, a virus with a 99.5 percent recovery rate is not exactly what one would classify as an emergency; then again, as Rahm Emanuel aptly asserted, "never let a good crisis go to waste.”

The only people, according to our rule of law, who can make or amend laws are those in our respective legislative branches. However, in 2020 we saw many seize emergency powers, unconstitutionally in most cases, and alter respective election laws. These people were governors, judges, and some secretaries of state. Sadly, even in my home state of Texas early voting was unconstitutionally extended an additional week by the governor who had far exceeded his 30-day "emergency" powers. There were other states where these unconstitutional actions occurred, such as Georgia, where a secretary of state entered into a consent agreement with a political activist to reference signatures on mail in ballots. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona there were questionable actions taken that affected standing election law...all without legislative involvement. This cannot ever be allowed to happen again in our constitutional Republic.

Speaking of mail in ballots, it was Eric Holder who wrote an op-ed piece for TIME magazine in April 2020 titled, "How Coronavirus Should Permanently Change Elections in America"...ya know, more of that fundamental transformation garbage. Holder, who was head of the National Democrat Redistricting Committee, held a thesis that due to Covid, unsolicited mail-in ballots should be the standard. 

Talk about a real lesson learned about the introduction of nefarious voting activities. I think we came to find out that ballots were being mailed to some very suspect addresses. Two years ago, we got seriously confused about what is an absentee ballot, as opposed to unsolicited mail-in ballots, and the infamous drop boxes.

I will admit to being a voting traditionalist. I believe that our national elections should be a holiday. I am not keen on early voting where the rules are often different than those on Election Day. If you are not in country or near your polling location, then you submit an absentee ballot, which is a controlled item. The fact that ballots were freely mailed out to questionable locations last cycle is disconcerting, and it is practice that must not be allowed to continue. Having served in the military I am very knowledgeable about absentee ballots, and folks, we have problems there.

The inconsistencies in mailing out absentee ballots to our Armed Forces must stop. There were states, such as Pennsylvania, where ballots were allowed to just keep coming in well after the election. Yet our military still continues to have their ballots spoiled. Too often military ballots are mailed out late, in some cases purposefully. It is imperative that we protect our military voters as they are deployed serving and protecting our freedoms, way of life, and on occasion, affording others the ability to vote. This is an important issue for the American Constitutional Rights Union. We began our Protect Military Votes Project in 2020.

Another demographic that must be protected when it comes to absentee ballots are our senior citizens. There are many stories of abuse of seniors and the infamous ballot harvesting in senior living centers. The stories that we receive at the American Constitutional Rights Union are very disturbing. It is imperative that we ensure ballots are not being ghosted and filled out by others. Family members, this is a huge responsibility and you must step up and protect your loved ones in their golden years and you can find tools to help protect your family at our Protect Vulnerable Voters website. 

If you have not noticed (apparently the White House press secretary has not) we have an issue with 3-4 million illegal immigrants who have entered the United States under the Biden regime. First, this is totally unconstitutional. Second, be advised of the progressive socialist left's attempts to have them vote. That latter position has already been tried by NYC Mayor Eric Adams, and the State of California for local elections. Folks, I have to show a picture ID to board a plane; funny, illegals do not, they can show their arrest warrants. We need to be very aware of illegals being used to vote in this upcoming election...hence no more unsolicited mail-in ballots. If showing a valid photo ID is racist, then every doggone airline in America is racist. Heck, so are all the hotels who ask for picture ID.

Lastly, no more Mark Zuckerberg, or any other leftist elitist oligarch intervention into our electoral process. This fella directly gave more money to the Harris County supervisor of elections office than they are budgeted back in 2020...why? Oh, by the way, Harris County is the largest county in Texas, top five in the country.

Before any military battle you send your scouts out first to gather intel and information about the enemy’s deployment. We need to have a dedicated force of poll watchers and workers who will not be pushed around and told to leave their assigned post by partisan election workers. Truly, if you see something, say something, and we must have a system of reporting questionable, illegal, or criminal activities. The ACRU has developed a hotline (888-820-VOTE) and will assist in tracking and reporting these actions to the proper authorities.

Never forget the quote that many attribute to Josef Stalin, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.” That is how Marxists roll, but if we heed the lessons learned from the 2020 election...we won't be fooled again.

Steadfast and Loyal.

https://townhall.com/columnists/allenwest/2022/09/12/the-constitutional-lessons-learned-from-the-2020-elections-n2612931

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

The DoJ Argues that the Intelligence Community Overrides the Judiciary

The DoJ Argues that the Intelligence Community Overrides the Judiciary

At this point in time I have no regard for the probity or competence of the Intelligence Community and neither, apparently, does Judge Aileen Cannon, who earlier this week ordered the appointment of a Special Master to review those documents seized in the Mar-a-Lago raid, which it claims are classified. The Department of Justice appears to have been surprised that it has lost credibility and filed a motion seeking a stay on that portion of the order and a Notice of Appeal to the Eleventh Circuit indicating its intention to file an interlocutory appeal.

I don’t think the trial judge who issued a very well-considered order will grant the stay. I don’t think the Eleventh Circuit will, either. I don’t think the Eleventh Circuit will even grant an interlocutory appeal on this matter. I do think all of these pleadings reveal the weakness of the grounds for a search and seizure of materials at the home of Donald J. Trump, the overreach of the warrant, and the expansive search itself. Worse for the DoJ and FBI, I believe their actions amount to a claim that under no circumstances does the judiciary have a right to question anything the Intelligence committee does as long as it makes a claim of “national security.” Such a claim is scary and should be -- and I think will be -- denied.

Without going into all the fine points of what it means to say a trial court order is an interlocutory order, basically it means that the order is not a final one. In this case, it is merely an order covering discovery matters in a trial. As Seth Barrett Tillman tweeted, ”The government has not been forced to return any materials, and no privilege rulings have been made for which to take an appeal.” He also gives an example of such an interlocutory, unappealable action by a trial court: He notes that J. Messitte refused to decide Trump’s motion to dismiss the Emoluments Clauses case and sat on it for three years until after the election when he dismissed it as moot after Trump lost.

Why is the DoJ so desperate to prevent a Special Master, even one with security clearance, to view those documents the department asserts are classified? (The parties each have offered two candidates for the position, one of Trump’s candidates, in fact, sat on the FISA court. Is he less certain to do this job properly than the National Archivist?) There are several possible explanations for the desperation I can think of -- none of which do credit to the attorney general. The first and most common supposition is that the documents which they claim must be kept even from the eyes of the Special Master relate to the FBI and DoJ’s role in fashioning and perpetrating the phony Russian Collusion fairytale. That would be damning indeed, and frankly, I see it as the most likely explanation: It is improper to classify documents simply to prevent embarrassment to persons or agencies. And anyone who does this is subject to sanctions. Obama’s Executive Order 13526 reads in relevant part:

Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations. (a) In no case shall
information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail
to be declassified in order to:

(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;
(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;
(3) restrain competition; or
(4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.

Despite leaking staged photos of the fruits of the search, along with claims that it involved “nuclear” information, in the latest pleading it’s revealed that the searchers seized copious amounts of news clippings, some clothing, passports, personal tax records and material clearly covered by attorney-client privilege. In other words, the agents seem to have viewed this is a general warrant to grab everything, something not permitted. The only “nuclear” thing mentioned is some document about the nuclear capacity of a foreign government -- hardly the nuclear code which had been bruited about by some media lackeys.

I think the delay rankles and disturbs DoJ as much as the likelihood that a Special Master will find the “classified” information was legally declassified by Trump and had been improperly classified in the first instance to protect those who engaged in this wrongful smear of a political candidate.

This, the second of my suppositions is related to the Hail Mary effort to stay the portion of the order which temporarily enjoins the government (pending completion of the Special Master’s review or further court order) from reviewing and using the seized materials for investigative purposes. The warrant was issued before the grand jury in D.C. even received or reviewed the 15 boxes of documents Trump turned over to the government. This suggests the department was eager to use whatever they could hose up at Mar-a-Lago before a further examination of the legality of their actions could be done -- and not coincidentally -- in time to affect the midterms.

In the meantime, the department yet again has been engaged in a leak to poison public opinion and any potential jury trial.

The feds continued to leak like crazy after the order, in a form of lashing out, getting the word out to The Washington Post that some of the documents related to a foreign government’s nuclear program (the leak didn’t say that such documents were classified). For years during Russia Collusion attacks, whenever there was a news cycle that might help Trump in the public eye, the feds leak something to grab back the news cycle; that tactic seems to be renewing itself.

Like Mark Wauck, I see these pleadings as asserting that the Intelligence community -- the very folks who promulgated and promoted the Russian Collusion story and went on to cast substantial doubt on the Hunter Biden computer contents, asserting they were likely “Russian disinformation” -- should be the sole arbiter of such matters. The problem with losing your credibility is that no sensible person will trust you again. As lawyers often tell juries, “"false in one thing, false in everything." True of government officials and agencies as it is for the rest of us. 

In sum, my hunch is that this latest effort by the Deep State is not going to go anywhere for a long time, if at all.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/the_doj_argues_that_the_intelligence_community_overrides_the_judiciary.html

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Why Did the FBI Raid Mar-a-Lago?

Why Did the FBI Raid Mar-a-Lago?

Trump’s ‘stash of nuclear secrets’ is this summer’s Kremlin collusion conspiracy. But the latest chapter of Russiagate may end with a bang.

BY

LEE SMITH

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago feels like peak Russiagate. There’s the synchronized press hysteria, moving from one absurd end-of-America “bombshell” to the next, accompanied by dark intonations regarding secrets about to be revealed and blustering accusations of high treason. Donald Trump was said to be hoarding “nuclear documents,” which he planned to peddle for billions to the Saudis. Who’s buying the map of Fort Knox? Does Trump have access to Colonel Sanders’ secret fried chicken recipe, too?

It’s no laughing matter to the American press, or for the partisan operatives and national security bureaucrats who feed them their cues. For them, the Mar-a-Lago raid is Russiagate II: The Palm Beach Papers.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’ proposed damage assessment of the documents is a remake of the January 2017 intelligence community assessment which claimed, without evidence, that Vladimir Putin wanted to put Trump in the Oval Office. The extensive redactions on the affidavit the FBI used to get a warrant to raid Trump’s home are akin to the excessive redactions on the application that the FBI showed a secret court in 2016 to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. What was true for the original Russiagate holds here, too: The redactions are designed to hide not state secrets, but government corruption.

The Mar-a-Lago raid feels like Russiagate because, well, it is Russiagate: a conspiracy theory weaponized by the country’s courtier class to serve the interests of a delirious and deracinated oligarchy, spawning daily prophesies of doom fed by an endless supply of national security “leaks” asserting that the former commander-in-chief really was and is a secret Russian agent. And proof of the president’s treachery, chant the priestly keepers of the “collusion” mysteries, will soon be revealed to the public. It is their blanket justification for every past crime and every new banana republic-style abuse of power, accompanied by a drumbeat of ever more outlandish and violent threats.

It is in this context that the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago should be understood: Government records and reports from political and media operatives and bureaucrats who previously starred in Russiagate I give evidence that the FBI raided Trump’s home to seize documents exposing the crimes that the FBI and Justice Department have been committing since 2016. The fact that Russiagate shows no signs of ending anytime soon is bad news for the republic, betrayed from within by a performative elite whose ability to project power outside its gilded bubble requires a steady supply of paranoia, fear, and hysteria.

The story of the Mar-a-Lago raid begins at the end of Trump’s presidency, when he declassified documents related to Russiagate. Those records contain evidence of how the FBI spied on Trump’s campaign, presidential transition team, and administration. The documents reportedly include transcripts of FBI intercepts of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to collect the electronic communications of Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page, and reports regarding Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the two main confidential human sources used by the FBI to spy on Trump’s circle.

Kash Patel, who served in a variety of Pentagon roles and as a principal deputy in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration, has said that 60% of the documents related to Russiagate are already in public view. As lead investigator for the House Intelligence Committee’s probe of the FBI’s illegal investigation of the Trump campaign, Patel helped get vital Russiagate records declassified. When Trump named Patel to the ODNI post, he and acting Director Richard Grenell put more Russiagate documents before the U.S. public in 2020. Patel has told the press that what Trump declassified on Jan. 19, 2021, constitutes the remainder of the Russiagate records—which is what the FBI was apparently after.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/fbi-raid-mar-a-lago-trump-russiagate-lee-smith

Thursday, September 1, 2022

Peter Schweizer: ‘My Son Hunter’ Is ‘Information Lifted from the Pages of My Book and Turned into Flesh’

Peter Schweizer: ‘My Son Hunter’ Is ‘Information Lifted from the Pages of My Book and Turned into Flesh’

peter-schweizer-hunter-biden-getty
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
5:30

Peter Schweizer, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Windescribed the upcoming film My Son Hunter as “information lifted from the pages of my book and turned into the flesh.”

Schweizer, who is also a Breitbart News senior contributor and president of the Government Accountability Institute, made his comments during a panel discussion Thursday night on Truth Social hosted by former California congressman and current Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes.

Watch the panel:

My Son Hunter, which marks Breitbart’s expansion into film distribution, was a crowdfunded project inspired by the investigative reporting of Schweizer and Breitbart News about the Biden family’s corruption.

Schweizer, who was the first to report on Hunter Biden’s corrupt business dealings with foreign governments at a time when his vice president father was negotiating U.S. foreign policy with those regimes, described My Son Hunter as an entertaining “shorthand version” of his 300-page bestselling book chronicling the Biden family corruption.

“I think what people are going to get in this film is information lifted from the pages of my book and turned into the flesh,” Schweizer said.

Scenes from “My Son Hunter” featuring Emma Gojkovic, Laurence Fox, Gina Carano, and John James. (Courtesy of MySonHunter.com)

In fact, Schweizer said that the truth about Hunter Biden’s corruption seems almost too outrageous for fiction.

“It’s such an unbelievable story in a way,” Schweizer said. “I mean, imagine if you were a screenwriter, and you went to producers in L.A. and you said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea for a film. It’s going to be [about] the vice president’s son. He’s going to take tens of millions of dollars from the Chinese. He’s going to be a coke addict. And then he’s going to leave his laptop computer at a repair store. And that thing’s going to [be made public], but the mainstream media is going to try to cover it up.’ I mean, the producers would just laugh you out of the room. Yet, that’s exactly what happened.”

The bestselling author also praised the film’s ability to capture the complexity of the relationship between Hunter Biden and his father with both humor and sincerity.

“I think this is what will surprise a lot of people: the complexity of the Joe and Hunter Biden relationship because they talk about how much love they have for each other, and I’m sure that that’s part of it. But it’s a very complex, layered relationship,” he said. “I think there is frustration and resentment that Hunter has towards his father because he’s expected to bag all this money for the family, and he’s put in these situations. And I think the film captures that perfectly.”

John James and Laurence Fox in “My Son Hunter.” (Courtesy of MySonHunter.com)

The Truth Social panel—which also include Donald Trump Jr., My Son Hunter director Robert Davi (Licensed to Kill, Die Hard, The Goonies); and Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow—was quick to note the Justice Department and the FBI’s disparate handling of the Trump and Biden families, as evidenced by the treatment of Hunter Biden.

“I’ve investigated corruption for decades on going after Republicans and Democrats,” Schweizer said. “The treatment that the Bidens and received compared with the treatment of the Trumps, there’s absolutely no comparison.”

Schweizer called the Biden family corruption “absolutely the worst that I’ve seen.”

“You literally have the most powerful family in the United States taking money from our sworn rivals’ and taking it from four businessmen who are linked with Chinese intelligence,” Schweizer stated.

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 20: U.S. President Joe Biden hugs his son Hunter Biden, wife Dr. Jill Biden and daughter Ashley Biden after being sworn in as U.S. president during his inauguration on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. During today's inauguration ceremony Joe Biden becomes the 46th president of the United States. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

President Joe Biden hugs his son Hunter Biden during his inauguration at the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

He also praised the film’s portrayal of the “transactional nature” of Hunter Biden’s dealings with foreign power players, especially his dealings in China.

“For all the crazy stuff that Hunter Biden was doing—for all the money he was taking from Russia and Ukraine—the stuff from China worries me the most because China is of course, our chief rival on the global stage; and I think, as the film captures perfectly, [the Bidens] had multiple deals in China. And these are people that were connected, that were sending millions of dollars to Hunter Biden, and he was literally performing no tangible business service in return,” Schweizer said.

“I’m going go out on a limb and say, I don’t think that these connected Chinese businessmen linked to the CCP, linked to Chinese intelligence, are in the habit of giving gifts with no strings attached to the politicians’ families in America,” he continued, adding that the film captured “the transactional nature” of these deals.

Schweizer said My Son Hunter’s ability to flesh out the complex research in his books is matched by its entertainment value.

“It’s also just damn entertaining,” he said. “I mean, it’s funny—it’s laugh out loud,” he said, praising the film’s ability to “take a serious, important subject and not get rid of the seriousness, but also make it entertaining.”

My Son Hunter—which is available for pre-order now and will be available for download and streaming starting September 7—stars Laurence Fox (Victoria, Inspector Lewis, The Professor and the Madman) as Hunter Biden; Gina Carano (The Mandalorian, Dead Pool, Heist) as a Secret Service Agent; and John James (Dynasty) as Joe Biden.

Watch the trailer:

My Son Hunter is available for PRE-ORDER NOW and will be available for download and streaming starting September 7.

Rebecca Mansour is Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News. Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/08/26/peter-schweizer-my-son-hunter-is-information-lifted-from-the-pages-of-my-book-and-turned-into-flesh/

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Good riddance to Fauci and his calamitous, costly career

Good riddance to Fauci and his calamitous, costly career

Whatever comes next in the pandemic, we all have cause to rejoice at the best news since the arrival of the COVID vaccine: Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, has announced his retirement. His long and singularly disastrous career ends in December.

Never in the history of the public-health profession has anyone been so richly rewarded for doing so much harm to the public’s health. Whether or not he actually helped start the COVID pandemic — by funding dangerous research in the Chinese lab that may have created the coronavirus — he promoted a series of policies in America and the rest of the world that did even more damage than the virus.

Except possibly for the Great Depression, the lockdowns were the costliest public-policy mistake ever made during peacetime in America.

Fauci warned that AIDS could be spread through “routine close contact” in the 1980s.
Fauci warned that AIDS could be spread through “routine close contact” in the 1980s.
Deanne Fitzmaurice/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Fauci got away with it by invoking the authority of science while violating its fundamental principles. Before COVID arrived, the world’s leading epidemiologists had warned that lockdowns would be futile and cause catastrophic collateral damage, but Fauci simply ignored that advice.

As evidence mounted of the policies’ failure, he persisted by deploying the skills honed during five decades in Washington: bureaucratic infighting, media manipulation and fearmongering.

In the 1980s, he made national news by warning that the AIDS virus could be spread by “routine close contact” among family members, becoming one of the early prophets of the AIDS “heterosexual breakout” that would supposedly decimate the general population. That prospect needlessly terrified the public for more than a decade, but it boosted public funding for AIDS research, including a long and costly Fauci project to develop an AIDS vaccine.

Fauci, Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield served on former President Donald Trump's COVID-19 task force.
Fauci, Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield served on former President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 task force.
Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

The vaccine venture failed, but it enabled Fauci and two of his collaborators, Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield, to develop a relationship that they exploited during their service on the White House COVID Task Force. Birx, the task force’s coordinator, and Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, joined with Fauci to bully the Trump administration into following their dictates on COVID.

The three secretly agreed to all resign if any of them were fired, and they never disagreed with one another at the task-force meetings, as Scott Atlas recounts in his Washington memoir, “A Plague Upon Our House.”

Atlas, a health-policy analyst at the Hoover Institution, tried getting his colleagues at the meetings to consider the evidence that lockdowns and mask mandates were not working, but the three bureaucrats had no interest in debating it — or bothering to read the studies. To his amazement, they made no pretense of conducting any sort of cost-benefit analysis of their policies and never deigned to even discuss the vast social and economic collateral damage.

They were bureaucrats solely focused on compelling the public to follow their arbitrary rules. There was no reason to force vaccinations on people who had already acquired natural immunity to COVID, but the bureaucrats were determined to punish anyone who defied their authority — and silence any scientist who criticized them.

Early in the pandemic, prominent virologists expressed concerns by email that the virus had been created in the Wuhan laboratory, but they publicly dismissed that possibility after a teleconference with Fauci and other officials who had been funding research at the lab.

When eminent researchers from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford issued the Great Barrington Declaration, calling for a traditional public-health policy focused on protecting the vulnerable instead of shutting down society, Fauci dismissed it as “total nonsense,” and the mainstream media, as usual, parroted his smears and claims.

Fauci owed much of his success to decades of cultivating the right journalists — always quick to return a phone call or email, always available for a TV appearance, always happy to provide an authoritative quotation when he had no idea what he was talking about. Above all, he was always ready to satisfy journalists’ need for scary news and doomsday predictions.

Terrifying the public was good for business. The journalists were rewarded more clicks and higher ratings; Fauci and his fellow bureaucrats amassed more power and bigger budgets.

Fauci became the highest-paid federal employee, earning more than $400,000 per year, and stands to collect a pension estimated at $350,000 a year. That’s an appalling sum, considering the lasting harm he has done to children and adults in America and the rest of the world. But it’s a small price to be rid of him.

John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal and a co-author of “The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.”

https://nypost.com/2022/08/23/good-riddance-to-fauci-and-his-calamitous-costly-career/