Boeing ‘Inappropriately Influenced’ FAA During Boeing 737 Max 8 Recertification – Senate Committee
By Evan Craighead – Sputnik – 19.12.2020
United Airlines announced on Friday that the Boeing 737 MAX 8 would be returning to the skies beginning February 11, 2021. The aircraft was grounded worldwide in March 2019 following the twin crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.
A 18 December report published by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation revealed that employees of both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) worked together to manipulate recertification tests of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 following two fatal crashes that together killed a 346.
The 102-page report, which comes some 20 months after the aircraft was grounded, detailed that Boeing “inappropriately influenced FAA human factor simulator testing of pilot reaction times involving a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) failure.”
The MCAS serves as a flight control system designed to enhance the Boeing 737 MAX’s pitch stability so that it feels and flies like other 737s.
“Twenty months ago, the Commerce Committee launched an investigation into FAA safety oversight. We have received disclosures from more than 50 whistleblowers, conducted numerous FAA staff interviews, and reviewed over 15,000 pages of relevant documents,” Rep. Roger Wicker (R-MS), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, wrote in his news release.
“Our findings are troubling. The report details a number of significant examples of lapses in aviation safety oversight and failed leadership in the FAA. It is clear that the agency requires consistent oversight to ensure their work to protect the flying public is executed fully and correctly.”
The Senate committee also alleged that senior FAA managers have yet to be appropriately reprimanded or held accountable for the “failure to develop and deliver adequate training in flight standards, despite repeated findings of deficiencies over several decades.”
In addition, senior FAA leadership may have obstructed a review of the 737 MAX 8 crashes initiated by Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General.
“FAA and Boeing were attempting to cover up important information that may have contributed to the 737 MAX tragedies,” the report alleges.
On Friday, it was reported by United Airlines that the Boeing 737 MAX 8 will resume flights out of its Denver, Colorado, and Houston, Texas, facilities. Other aircraft will reportedly be made available for those travelers uneasy about boarding the ill-starred aircraft.
“We will be fully transparent with our customers and will communicate in advance when they are booked to fly on a Max aircraft,” United Airlines wrote in a Friday news release.
The Controversial Covid RT-PCR Test: What Do We Know?
By Mark Taliano | Global Research | December 18, 2020
We know that the PCR tests being used are not “fit for purpose”, that they are for Research Use Only. They are not meant to be used as diagnostic tools, and the late inventor of the RT-PCR instruments was very clear about this. According to the late Dr. Kary Mullis,
“PCR detects a very small segment of the nucleic acid which is part of a virus itself. The specific fragment detected is determined by the somewhat arbitrary choice of DNA primers used which become the ends of the amplified fragment. “ (1)
We also know that Coding changes to Death Certificates have fabricated false perceptions about COVID lethality. CDC coding changes blurred the important distinction between dying OF COVID and dying WITH COVID. Consequently co-morbidities such as heart disease, cancer, etc. have been largely negated and COVID has been relegated an artificially high importance in terms of Cause of Death reporting.
Dr. Ngozi Ezike explained the “death count” in a May 2020 press conference with these words:
“I just want to be clear in terms of the definition of ‘people dying of COVID’.
So, the case definition is very simplistic. It means, at the time of death, it was a COVID positive diagnosis.
So, that means that if you were in hospice and had already been given, you know, a few weeks to live, and then you were also to have found to have COVID, that would have counted as a COVID death.
It means that if technically even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death.
So, everyone who is listed as a COVID death, doesn’t mean that that was the cause of death, but they had COVID at the time of death.
I hope that’s helpful.” (2)
According to H. Ealy, M. McEvoy et al in “Covid-19: Questionable Policies, Manipulated Rules of Data Collection and Reporting. Is It Safe for Students to Return to School?”:
“The 2003 guidelines for establishing death certificates had been cancelled. “Had the CDC used its industry standard, Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting Revision 2003, as it has for all other causes of death for the last 17 years, the COVID-19 fatality count would be approximately 90.2% lower than it currently is.” (3)
To summarize then, the tests that are widely used to test for COVID are not fit for diagnostic purposes. Additionally, prior to the announced pandemic, coding changes were made to Death Certificates that have resulted in false and very significantly increased COVID Death Statistics.
These two factors alone create substantial misperceptions about the danger and lethality of COVID-19.
Notes
(1) John O’Sullivan, ” The COVID-19 PCR Test Is Key To The Pandemic Fraud.” Principia Scientific International, 8 September, 2020. (The COVID-19 PCR Test Is Key to the Pandemic Fraud | Principia Scientific Intl. (principia-scientific.com) ) Accessed 16 December, 2020.
(2) “THE DEATH COUNT EXPLAINED: Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois Department of Public Health.” 16 May, 2020. YouTube (THE DEATH COUNT EXPLAINED: Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois Department of Public Health – Mark Taliano ) Accessed 16 December, 2020.
(3) H. Ealy, M. McEvoy et al , “Covid-19: Questionable Policies, Manipulated Rules of Data Collection and Reporting. Is It Safe for Students to Return to School?/If COVID Fatalities Were 90.2% Lower, How Would You Feel About Schools Reopening?” Global Research, August 09, 2020/Children’s Health Defense, 24 July 2020. (Covid-19: Questionable Policies, Manipulated Rules of Data Collection and Reporting. Is It Safe for Students to Return to School? – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization ) Accessed 16 December, 2020.
*
Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net where this article was originally published.
Why Black People Cannot Trust The Pfizer Vaccine
Unrecognizable female scientist with bacteriological protection suit investigating a vaccine in the laboratory
By Wesley Muhammad, Ph.D. | The Final Call | December 16, 2020
The Pfizer pharmaceutical company beat everyone to the punch by being the first Covid-19 vaccine to be granted Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA. There is an aggressive media and government campaign to “[push] blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans to the front of the [vaccine] line, ahead of whites.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs has apparently determined that these groups will be given priority for receiving the vaccine once it is available, despite the fact that 60 percent of the Covid-19 cases and 61 percent of the deaths among veterans are White (16 percent and 22 percent are Black, respectively).
But Black people have every reason to be profoundly suspicious of Pfizer as Pfizer has a history of doing horrendous medical experiments on Black people for profit. American drug companies routinely hop across borders in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America conducting risky drug experiments with little oversight. This is a legacy of the colonial view of “The Colony as Laboratory” for the Western powers.
Foreign drug trials in the Third World are cheaper, faster, and provide huge pools of human guinea pigs for experimentation with minimal red tape or regulation. In 2006 Rep. Tom Lantos of California, the senior Democrat on the International Relations committee, cited an unconscionable Pfizer case as an example of “large pharmaceutical companies, both here and in Europe … using these poor, illiterate and uniformed people as guinea pigs.”
At the beginning of 1996 Pfizer was sitting on a new, potentially billion-dollar blockbuster drug, according to Wall Street analysts. The antibiotic Trovan was not yet approved by the FDA. Pfizer had enrolled thousands of adults in Trovan clinical trials and they wanted to debut the drug as a therapy for bacterial meningitis, but there were a number of problems. There was already an effective treatment for meningitis available, the antibiotic ceftriaxone. But Pfizer’s biggest problem was children.
In order to gain maximum market share and achieve the predicted $1 billion per year from this drug, Pfizer needed to develop an oral form that proved safe for pediatric use. But Trovan had never been tested on children, and in animal models it caused liver toxicity and joint damage. In addition, bacterial meningitis was rare in the U.S. There were thus not enough children suffering from it for a convincing clinical trial. However, as luck would have it, a ready pool of children suffering from the disease had suddenly, coincidentally, and inexplicably become available—in Africa!
In 1996 an unprecedented epidemic of cerebrospinal meningitis (CSM) erupted oddly in the Muslim half (the north) of Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa. This was Africa’s worst ever CSM outbreak. Hardest hit was Nigeria’s largest northern state, Kano. “For Pfizer, the timing was oddly fortuitous.” Together with the World Health Organization (WHO), Pfizer “volunteered” to help. Vaccines and effective antibiotics were already long in use and could have tamed this epidemic, but curiously these were not made adequately available. It is believed that local health officials were paid off in order to obstruct efforts to halt the epidemic.
Pfizer officials saw in the Nigerian outbreak “a unique opportunity to test their drug without the restrictions of FDA clinical study protocols.” The Pfizer team roared into Nigeria on a chartered DC-9 and roared out five weeks later. But between April 3 and May 15, 1996, Pfizer engaged in an indefensible, illegal medical experiment in Kano using 200 gravely ill Nigerian children as young as 3 years old, who were either given the unapproved experimental drug Trovan or inappropriate doses of the alternative, ceftriaxone. Pfizer never obtained authorization from the federal government of Nigeria to conduct the experiment within its borders and was unable to produce any records documenting that the children or their parents were informed that they were part of an experiment.
“For weeks, Pfizer dispensed Trovan to Nigerian children and babies with complete disregard for all scientific research protocols.” A report on the Kano Experiment from a Nigerian federal panel concluded that the experiment violated Nigerian law as well as international law. Pfizer did no long-term follow up on the children and left Nigeria without any significant information about the final health impact of Trovan on this group. We now know that, due to this illegal and unethical experimentation, the children suffered various degrees of adverse effects and long-term disabilities ranging from deafness to muteness, paralysis, brain damage, loss of sight, and slurred speech; 11 died.
The successful operation of Pfizer’s Kano Experiment relied on the corruption of the local health care system. Nigerian healthcare professionals were paid almost double their normal salary to participate in the study. Pfizer hired Nigerian doctor Abdulhamid Isa Dutse to run the Kano Experiment. However, Dutse was chief “only in name.” Actually, the experiment was directed totally from Pfizer’s U.S. office. Publications on Trovan inaccurately listed Dutse as the lead author, when in fact he was kept in the dark about experiment results; data that appeared in papers with his name on them was actually withheld from him. Later Dutse lamented:
“I have trusted people and am disappointed. I regret the whole exercise, I wonder why on earth I did this.” However, after the Kano Experiment, Dutse ascended to the position of dean of the Kano medical school. Dutse’s role in the Kano Experiment seems analogous to the roles of Nurse Eunice Rivers, scapegoat for the U.S Public Service’s infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and possibly of Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, made the face of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Covid-19 Vaccine today. On October 5, 2020 Dr. Dutse walked into Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, suffered a cardiac arrest and died.
During a 1997 FDA audit of the Nigerian Trovan trial or “Kano Experiment,” Pfizer produced as proof of authorization a fraudulent letterhead document granting clearance for the trial by a Nigerian ethics committee that did not exist at the time. Dutse revealed later that Pfizer instructed him to concoct and backdate the fraudulent ethics committee letter.
In 2007 the state of Kano sued Pfizer for U.S. $2.75 billion, while the Nigerian federal government sued for U.S. $8.5 billion in damages, alleging that the pharmaceutical giant “pretended it came (to Nigeria) to render humanitarian service” but in actuality “Pfizer devised a scheme under which it misrepresented and failed to disclose its primary motive in seeking to participate in giving care to the victims of the epidemic.” Nigeria even sought criminal charges against Pfizer officials, including the CEO at the time of the experiment, William Steer. To squash the case Pfizer continued to engage in unethical behavior.
In 2010 a U.S. diplomatic cable uncovered by WikiLeaks revealed that Pfizer hired investigators to look for evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general Michael Aondoakaa in an effort to persuade him to drop the legal action. The cable reported a meeting between Pfizer’s country manager, Enrico Liggeri, and U.S. officials at the Abuja embassy on April 9, 2009, discussing using leaks to the local media to pressure the Nigerian attorney general to drop the cases against Pfizer. This effort failed. In 2011 Pfizer began making payments to the victims involved in the suit as part of a $75 million settlement. In the end, an incredible and unprecedented 12,000 Nigerians died from meningitis in the curious 1996 epidemic, despite the “help” pledged by the WHO and by Pfizer.
Now, that same Pfizer is trialing a brand new, never-before seen experimental vaccine platform—the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine—and Black people are to be “prioritized” in this grand experiment! The innovative and terrifying mRNA vaccine is the brainchild of a secretive Pentagon agency, a military technology R&D operation named the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA, as it is commonly known, “specializes in turning science fantasies into realities” but for military purposes. DARPA doesn’t actually invent things itself.
Instead, it outsources its scientific tasks to universities, military labs and defense contractors, such as Pfizer and Moderna. Pfizer has been an important military contractor for decades, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to do research and development for the Pentagon, including biodefense contracts as far back as 2013. In that year DARPA awarded Pfizer a $7.7 million contract to innovate the type of mRNA vaccine platform that is now being rolled out in “warp speed.” DARPA awarded Moderna a similar contract of up to $25 million in 2013 as well. Thus, behind both Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine BNT162b2 and Moderna’s mRNA vaccine mRNA-1273, is DARPA. This Covid-19 vaccine is thus a piece of military technology. And Black people are being invited to cut to the front of the line.
Yeah, we should be deeply suspicious.
This would not be the first time the government would have operationalized mass vaccinations for covert military purposes. In 2012 Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta confirmed the CIA’s unethical use of the cloak of public health and medicine to advance a military-intelligence objective by making operational use of vaccination programs. For example, the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan have vigorously opposed polio vaccination campaigns in their lands, charging that the U.S runs a spy network under the guise of these vaccine programs and also sterilizes Muslim children. Neither of these charges are mere “conspiracy theory” as they have been proven true.
In 2010 the CIA initiated a clandestine mission to locate (and then kill) Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan through the use of a fake “free vaccination” program targeting Pakistani women and children in areas surrounding Bin Laden’s presumed hideout. CIA agents recruited senior Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi to organize a sham hepatitis B vaccination operation and paid generous sums to health workers used in the plot. Nurses would travel from house to house looking for women ages 15 to 45 to cajole into taking their needle. Mothers were paid to vaccinate their children.
But none were given an actual Hep B vaccine. Rather, blood was drawn and then some concoction was injected into them. The aim of this vaccine ruse was allegedly the extraction of DNA from children of Bin Laden to confirm that he was in the area. Spies posing as polio vaccinators got close to Bin Laden’s home. The clandestine mission was apparently successful and on May 2, 2011 U.S. Navy Seals raided the three-story compound in the suburb of Abbottabad and killed Osama Bin Laden. The Taliban was proved correct to reject the free vaccinations of Western-affiliated campaigns as these campaigns were indeed cover for military/intelligence operations.
Thus, for reasons well beyond Tuskegee, Black people are rightly suspicious of the Covid-19 vaccines being rolled out in “warp speed.”
Wesley Muhammad holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies and is a student minister in the Nation of Islam. He is also a sought after speaker, author, member of the NOI Research Team and the Nation of Islam Executive Council. Follow him on Instagram @wesleymuhammad. This is part one in a series of articles.
WHO (finally) admits PCR tests create false positives
Warnings concerning high CT value of tests are months too late… so why are they appearing now? The potential explanation is shockingly cynical.
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | December 18, 2020
The World Health Organization released a guidance memo on December 14th, warning that high cycle thresholds on PCR tests will result in false positives.
While this information is accurate, it has also been available for months, so we must ask: why are they reporting it now? Is it to make it appear the vaccine works?
The “gold standard” Sars-Cov-2 tests are based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR). PCR works by taking nucleotides – tiny fragments of DNA or RNA – and replicating them until they become something large enough to identify. The replication is done in cycles, with each cycle doubling the amount of genetic material. The number of cycles it takes to produce something identifiable is known as the “cycle threshold” or “CT value”. The higher the CT value, the less likely you are to be detecting anything significant.
This new WHO memo states that using a high CT value to test for the presence of Sars-Cov-2 will result in false-positive results.
To quote their own words [our emphasis]:
Users of RT-PCR reagents should read the IFU carefully to determine if manual adjustment of the PCR positivity threshold is necessary to account for any background noise which may lead to a specimen with a high cycle threshold (Ct) value result being interpreted as a positive result.
They go on to explain [again, our emphasis]:
The design principle of RT-PCR means that for patients with high levels of circulating virus (viral load), relatively few cycles will be needed to detect virus and so the Ct value will be low. Conversely, when specimens return a high Ct value, it means that many cycles were required to detect virus. In some circumstances, the distinction between background noise and actual presence of the target virus is difficult to ascertain.
Of course, none of this is news to anyone who has been paying attention. That PCR tests were easily manipulated and potentially highly inaccurate has been one of the oft-repeated battle cries of those of us opposing the “pandemic” narrative, and the policies it’s being used to sell.
Many articles have been written about it, by many experts in the field, medical journalists and other researchers. It’s been commonly available knowledge, for months now, that any test using a CT value over 35 is potentially meaningless.
Dr Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the PCR process, was clear that it wasn’t meant as a diagnostic tool, saying:
with PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody.”
And, commenting on cycle thresholds, once said:
If you have to go more than 40 cycles to amplify a single-copy gene, there is something seriously wrong with your PCR.”
The MIQE guidelines for PCR use state:
Cq values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported,”
This has all been public knowledge since the beginning of the lockdown. The Australian government’s own website admitted the tests were flawed, and a court in Portugal ruled they were not fit for purpose.
Even Dr Anthony Fauci has publicly admitted that a cycle threshold over 35 is going to be detecting “dead nucleotides”, not a living virus.
Despite all this, it is known that many labs around the world have been using PCR tests with CT values over 35, even into the low 40s.
So why has the WHO finally decided to say this is wrong? What reason could they have for finally choosing to recognise this simple reality?
The answer to that is potentially shockingly cynical: We have a vaccine now. We don’t need false positives anymore.
Notionally, the system has produced its miracle cure. So, after everyone has been vaccinated, all the PCR tests being done will be done “under the new WHO guidelines”, and running only 25-30 cycles instead of 35+.
Lo and behold, the number of “positive cases” will plummet, and we’ll have confirmation that our miracle vaccine works.
After months of flooding the data pool with false positives, miscounting deaths “by accident”, adding “Covid19 related death” to every other death certificate…they can stop. The create-a-pandemic machine can be turned down to zero again.
… as long as we all do as we’re told. Any signs of dissent – masses of people refusing the vaccine, for example – and the CT value can start to climb again, and they bring back their magical disease.
What have they got to hide? While trying to dismiss suggestions of ties to UK spooks, Bellingcat founder again lies about finances
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | December 17, 2020
For a man who loves the public eye, and revels in accolades, Bellingcat chief Eliot Higgins is rather evasive when it comes to the funding his group receives from governments, and continually struggles to get his story straight.
On Monday, controversial US government-funded ‘online investigations’ website Bellingcat published a bombshell exclusive, claiming Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny had been closely followed by a host of FSB (Federal Security Service) operatives on his various travels around Russia, before he was allegedly poisoned with Novichok in August. The nerve agent is said to be the most deadly known to man.
At first glance, the evidence presented seems compelling, although significant question marks hover over how the organization was able to access certain data – which included the passport details, vehicle registration information, phone numbers and call records of the alleged agents accused of being involved.
Even staunch Kremlin critics are convinced the material was provided by Western intelligence services in some fashion. In response to an article in which I noted that, among other things, BBC journalist Mark Urban had stated that Bellingcat received many of its sensitive documents as a result of GCHQ hacking, the collective’s founder Higgins took to Twitter to dismiss its significance, falsely claiming I’d been “deployed” for the purpose.
While the piece didn’t tackle the ever-thorny issue of Bellingcat’s finances, in his limp riposte Higgins, for reasons unclear, felt it incumbent to claim details of his organization’s funders, “along with the results of an independent audit” of its accounts, could be found on its website.
This too is an outright lie. While an independent audit of Bellingcat’s accounts for 2019 is available, this relates to its Netherlands-based Stichting, or ‘foundation’, established November 2018, not the UK-based commercial entity, which was founded by Higgins in November 2015. These are two entirely separate legal entities, in different jurisdictions.
The UK-based Bellingcat’s accounts are totally opaque, and while the website’s ‘about’ section does offer a list of funders – which includes the US state-agency National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – the amounts each entity gives, and whether this list is comprehensive, isn’t at all clear.
Moreover, Bellingcat’s receipt of funds from the UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) is entirely unmentioned. Instead, it’s sparingly and evasively stated that the organization is a “partner” in the Open Information Partnership (OIP), without mentioning the initiative is entirely FCO-bankrolled, to the tune of millions annually.
The OIP is a narrative management, or information warfare, outfit which serves as an umbrella group for various organizations considered amenable to the UK government’s agenda.
Higgins has long-been extremely sensitive about allegations of receiving Whitehall funds, which reached fever pitch in late 2018 when files related to the Integrity Initiative, a secretive FCO military intelligence operation, were leaked by hacktivist collective Anonymous. Several of the documents referred to Bellingcat, some suggesting the two organizations were collaborating on certain projects.
Bellingcat’s founder and chief was repeatedly probed on the question following the file dump, but strenuously denied his company had conducted any work for or with the Initiative, or received FCO funding – denials difficult to maintain when FCO files related to OIP were leaked by Anonymous March 2019.
The documents make it clear that the OIP is a “disinformation factory” which seeks to, among other things, influence “elections taking place in countries of particular interest to the FCO.”
Bellingcat staffers Aric Toler and Christiaan Triebert were named as part of OIP’s ‘training support’ team in one document. When quizzed, Triebert revealed Bellingcat was “subcontracted” by OIP lead partner Zinc Network to “give workshops to journalists in the Baltic States and Balkans” on the FCO’s dime.
It’s not clear how much Bellingcat has reaped from this arrangement to date. Curiously though, given the endeavour’s scope, Triebert said he was “surprised” to see his name in the files, and was unfamiliar with the project, as it hadn’t been discussed with him previously.
It’s surely a supremely strange “small, independent” organization in which staff are offered up for projects without their knowledge or consent, and their employer enters into significant commercial agreements without apparent internal consultation.
In any event, the question of whether there’s any meaningful difference between being “subcontracted” or funded by the UK state is an open one, particularly given OIP is entirely financially reliant upon the FCO, and its activities are wholly directed by the department. Nonetheless, it’s a distinction Higgins and Bellingcat are evidently determinedly keen to maintain, to the point of conscious and deliberate obfuscation.
Ironically though, it may be the FCO that actually wishes to distance itself from Bellingcat. An assessment it commissioned of the organization’s suitability for OIP by Zinc Network found Higgins et al were “discredited” due to “spreading disinformation,” and “being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.” Despite this damning indictment, they were still invited to participate and play a leading role in OIP.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
Texas hospital botches vaccine PR stunt as nurse jabbed with EMPTY SYRINGE
RT | December 17, 2020
An El Paso, Texas, hospital tried to promote Covid-19 vaccination by turning its first doses into a media event, but the publicity stunt backfired when one of the nurses being inoculated was apparently stuck with an empty syringe.
Video of Tuesday’s vaccinations of five nurses at University Medical Center of El Paso showed the second nurse being jabbed with a needle, but the plunger won’t go down because it’s already at the bottom of the syringe.
The video circulated on social media on Thursday, but rather than focusing on the embarrassing blunder, some observers suggested that posting the footage was an attack meant to diminish public confidence in vaccines.
For instance, when independent journalist Tim Pool tweeted the video on Thursday, Democrat strategist Nate Lerner said, “It’s really weird how anti-vaccine you are. You’ve been hanging out with Alex Jones too much, my guy.”
Another Democrat commenter also smelled an anti-vaxxer rat. “A mistake that probably happened because of the media attention,” he said of the botched shot. “The real question is, what are you trying to accomplish with this tweet? Furthering distrust in institutions that function great while still being susceptible to the occasional bit of human error?”
The hospital issued a statement on Wednesday afternoon, saying the nurse in question was inoculated “again” to “remove any doubt raised that he was not fully vaccinated and further strengthen confidence in the vaccination process.”
University Medical Center, the first hospital in its region to receive the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, implied that the scene with the apparently empty syringe was legitimate. It said that “re-vaccinating the nurse will not cause adverse effects.”
Twitter users mocked the public-relations blunder. “We must demand higher-quality propaganda,” one observer said.
Other observers pointed out that the El Paso incident is just one of several videos on social media that appear to show deceptive or botched public vaccinations. One such video shows Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk purportedly receiving a flu shot in April, but the syringe is covered with a cap.
According to a Reuters fact-check of the video, however, Palaszczuk had received her shot moments earlier, and the video shows it being re-enacted for photographers.
Also on rt.com:
SECOND health worker in Alaska suffers allergic reaction after getting Pfizer Covid-19 jab
Instagram is Using False “Fact-Checking” to Protect Joe Biden’s Crime Record From Criticisms
By Glenn Greenwald | December 17, 2020
A long-standing and vehement criticism of Joe Biden is that legislation he championed as a Senator in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly his crime bill of 1994, contributed to the mass incarceration of Americans generally and African-Americans specifically.
Among the many on the left and libertarian right who have voiced this criticism (along with President Trump) is then-Senator Kamala Harris, who said during the 2020 Democratic primary race that Biden’s “crime bill — that 1994 crime bill — it did contribute to mass incarceration in our country.” When Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2015, Bill Clinton, who as president signed Biden’s bill into law, told the NAACP: “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Biden during a 2019 presidential debate: “There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that tough-on-crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine.” Booker then said in an interview with The Huffington Post that that Biden’s “crime bill was shameful, what it did to black and brown communities like mine [and] low-income communities from Appalachia to rural Iowa,” also denouncing it for “overwhelmingly putting people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses that members of Congress and the Senate admit to breaking now.”
In 2016, author and scholar Michele Alexander argued that Hillary did not deserve the votes of black people due to her and her husband’s support for numerous bills, including Biden’s 1994 crime bill, that led to the mass incarceration of African-Americans. Harvard’s Cornel West said in 2019: “When [Biden] says [the 1994 crime bill] didn’t contribute to mass incarceration, I tell him he has to get off his symbolic crack pipe.”
While that debate over the damage done by Biden’s crime bill has long raged in Democratic Party politics and the criminal justice reform movement, it is now barred from being aired on the Facebook-owned social media giant Instagram, or at least is formally denounced as disinformation. With Joe Biden about to enter the White House — one that will exercise significant influence in determining Silicon Valley’s interests, will be filled with tech executives, and was made possible in large part by Silicon Valley’s largesse poured into the Biden/Harris campaign — Instagram has arrogated unto itself the power to declare these well-established criticisms of Biden and his crime bill to be “False” and having “no basis in fact.”
As first noted on Monday by former Sanders campaign organizer Ben Mora, Instagram publicly denounced as “False” a post on Sunday by the left-wing artist and frequent Biden critic Brad Troemel, who has more than 107,000 followers on that platform. Troemel’s post said nothing more than what Biden’s chosen running mate, Kamala Harris, has herself said, as well as numerous mainstream media outlets and countless criminal justice reform advocates have long maintained.
Troemel posted a 1994 photo of a smiling, mullet-sporting Biden standing next to then-President Bill Clinton. The photo contained this caption: “Find someone that looks at you the way Biden looked at Clinton after signed Biden’s crime bill into law. Bringing mass incarceration to black Americans.” This was the same photo and caption which an anonymous Trump supporter under the name “realtina40” first posted back in June.
Shortly after Troemel posted this on Sunday, Instagram appended a note in red letters, with a warning sign that read: “Learn why fact-checkers have indicated that this is false.” That was followed by a note plastered over Troemel’s original post with the title: “False,” and which claimed “independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact.” The same thing was done by Instagram to “realtina40” original June post.
This is not the first time Troemel has been censored by Instagram for posting criticisms of Biden. In response to questions, he told me he first earned the “false” label when posting a meme in April which he had created that mocked Biden’s campaign messaging. Instagram’s retaliation happened after the Biden campaign loudly complained about Troemel’s satirical ad. Biden campaign operatives falsely blamed the Trump campaign for having created it, and then induced Twitter to censor it.
As Troemel told me: “Here you can see Dems using the Russia-tinged cover of disinformation as a way to discredit any and all criticism of Biden found on social media.” When Troemel re-posted that meme last month with the clear notation that it was satirical, Instagram began “shadow banning” him: severely limiting the reach of his posts. It was those events — all involving Troemel’s criticisms of Biden from the left — that caused Instagram to heavily scrutinize his postings, culminating in its blurring of his latest post with a “False” label that contained these well-documented criticisms of Biden’s crime bill.
The only thing that is demonstrably “false” here is Instagram’s Biden-shielding assertion that there is a “fact-checking” consensus that this criticism of Biden’s 1994 crime bill is false. It is true that one media outlet, USA Today, fact-checked the identical claim posted back in June by the anonymous Instagram user and concluded that “our research finds that while the crime bill did increase the prison population in states, it did not bring about a mass incarceration relative to earlier years.” But that article so concluded even while admitting that Biden’s “crime bill did increase the prison population in states” and “any increase in the overall prison population would automatically translate into a larger number of Black inmates.” The article’s own premises thus bolster, not refute, the claim at issue.
But numerous other media outlets and fact-checking organizations — far more than just one — concluded the opposite: namely, that there is at least a reasonable and substantial basis for these claims about Biden’s bill:
- PolitiFact rated as only “Half True” Biden’s claim that the 1994 crime bill “did not generate mass incarceration,” noting the bill provided funds to states on the condition that they force prisoners to serve longer sentences and that it bolstered the tough-on-crime climate that led to higher incarceration rates in the states (that was the same point Bill Clinton made to the NAACP: “the federal law set a trend…. [W]e had a lot people who were locked up, who were minor actors, for way too long”);
- The Washington Post’s designated fact-checker Glenn Kessler assigned two Pinocchios to Biden’s insistence that his crime bill “did not generate mass incarceration,” noting that “the bill encouraged states to build more prisons — with more money coming to them if they increased penalties.” Kessler cited a Brennan Center report that “the 1994 Crime Bill is justly criticized for encouraging states to build and fill new prisons.”The Post added: “There are many factors that contributed to the United States having such a high incarceration rate, but few dispute the crime bill was a contributor. Bill Clinton has acknowledged this.” The paper’s “two Pinocchio” rating means Biden’s denial contains “significant omissions and/or exaggerations…. Similar to ‘half true’”);
- CNN purported to fact-check the same claims from Biden and found that Biden’s denial “misses the broader impact that federal policy can have on the way that states incarcerate, including the influence of federal money,” concluding that the view that the 1994 crime bill was a significant factor in mass incarceration was, at the very least, debatable.
- The fact-check from NBC News flatly stated that “though the bill was not the root cause of ‘mass incarceration,’ it was ‘the most high-profile legislation to increase the number of people behind bars,’ according to a Brennan Center analysis in 2016.”
- Fact-checking Sen. Booker’s accusations against Biden, The Atlantic said: “it is true that the bill—which extended the death penalty to 60 new crimes, stiffened sentences, offered states strong financial incentives for building new prisons, and banned a range of assault weapons—helped lead to the wave of mass incarceration that’s resulted in the United States accounting for 25 percent of the world’s prison population.” It added that “a 2016 analysis by the Brennan Center concluded that the 1994 bill contributed both to the subsequent decline in crime and to the doubling of the rate of imprisonment from 1994 to 2009.”
- The New York Times’ fact-check of Biden’s denial rated it “Exaggerated,” quoting a criminologist to say that Biden’s bill “encouraged [states] to mass incarcerate further.”
- Regarding Biden’s denial that his 1994 crime bill “led to more prison sentences, more prison cells, and more aggressive policing — especially hurting Black and brown Americans,” Vox pronounced: “The truth, it turns out, is somewhere in the middle,” noting that “the law imposed tougher prison sentences at the federal level and encouraged states to do the same” and also ensured “an escalation of the War on Drugs.”
One could spend literally all day listing media outlets, criminal justice experts, and politicians from both parties who have insisted that Biden’s 1994 crime bill was a significant factor in mass incarceration generally and of African-Americans specifically, or that the assertion is at least reasonably debatable and grounded in empirical facts — exactly what Instagram has decided is out of bounds to state. It is axiomatically true, or at the very least logically reasonable, that if Biden’s crime bill led to more mass incarceration — and few doubt that it did — then the bill, in the words of the denounced Instagram post, “brought mass incarceration to black Americans.”
On Monday, The New York Post sought comment from Facebook about Instagram’s “False” label. The tech giant, in the words of that paper, said “that Instagram won’t end its censorship unless USA Today changes its assessment.” Yet the Post — long an advocate for tough-on-crime legislation — itself echoed virtually every other media outlet by noting that “whether Biden’s law contributed to mass incarceration is a matter of debate.”
Indeed, from what I can tell, USA Today is the only prominent media outlet of all the ones which fact-checked this issue to conclude that the claim about Biden’s bill is “false.” The overwhelming consensus of fact-checkers and experts is that the 1994 crime bill at the very least contributed to mass incarceration generally and of African-Americans specifically, and that the magnitude of that role is debatable.
But Instagram has closed this debate, at least on its platform. They have announced that the claims about Biden’s 1994 crime bill as expressed by not only Brad Troemel — but also Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, Cory Booker, Cornel West, the Brennan Center and countless others — has been proven false.
This episode demonstrates two crucial facts. The first is that what is so often passed off as quasi-scientific, opinion-free “fact-checking” are instead extremely tendentious, subjective and highly debatable opinions. That’s how Instagram can cherry-pick the conclusions of USA Today and treat it as if it is Gospel even though numerous other outlets, mainstream politicians in Biden’s own party, and criminal justice experts reached a radically different conclusion. “Fact-checking” in theory has journalistic value, but it is often nothing more than a branding tactic for media outlets to disguise their highly subjective pronouncements as unchallengeable Truth.
The second, more important point is that Silicon Valley giants lack any competency to determine the truth or falsity of political claims even when they act with the best of motives. Who at Instagram decided to rely on the USA Today claims while ignoring all the conflicting conclusions from other outlets and experts, and who decided how to apply that conclusion to the post at issue? And why did USA Today randomly decide to subject an anti-Biden meme about his crime bill from the account of a relatively obscure, anonymous Trump supporter but ignore similar statements coming from Senators Harris and Booker and Bill Clinton, thus handing Instagram an excuse to label any similar views as “False” and without “any basis”? Why are tech companies trying to officiate political debates this way?
Recall that the censorship of Twitter and Facebook of The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was based at least in part on the claim that the documents were the by-product of hacking and “Russian disinformation” — claims that have “no basis in fact.” As Matt Taibbi put it last week when warning of the dangers of YouTube’s decision to ban from its platform any questioning of the legitimacy of the 2020 election while still allowing similar questioning of the 2016 election: “There’s no such thing as a technocratic approach to truth. There are official truths, but those are political rather than scientific determinations, and therefore almost always wrong on some level.”
Moreover, the assumption that tech giants are acting with the best of intentions is completely unwarranted. Like every faction, these companies are awash with bias, partisanship, ideological dogma and self-interest. They overwhelmingly donated to the Democratic Party and the Biden campaign. Their executives are residing in virtually every sector of the Biden/Harris transition. Currying favor with the Biden administration — by, say, soft-censoring or discrediting harmful critiques of the President-elect — serves their corporate interests in multiple ways. And their overwhelmingly establishment-liberal employees are increasingly insistent that views they dislike should be censored off their platforms.
This is why it has been so dangerous, so misguided, to acquiesce to a campaign that is being led by corporate media outlets to insist that these tech giants abandon a belief in a free internet and instead censor more aggressively. That a person will now be declared by Facebook’s properties to be a disseminator of disinformation for voicing long-standing and well-documented criticisms of Joe Biden’s crime record is yet another bleak glimpse of a future in which unseen tech overlords police our discourse by unilaterally arbitrating truth and falsity, decree what are permissible and impermissible ideas, and rigidly setting the boundaries of acceptable debate.
When the elderly and frail die after receiving the COVID vaccine
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | December 16, 2020
CNN has the story. And it’s quite a story: “Why vaccinate our most frail? Odd vote out shows the dilemma”, December 4. [1]
“The vote to recommend long-term care residents be among the first to receive Covid-19 vaccinations was not unanimous.”
“Out of a panel of 14 CDC vaccine advisers, a lone doctor said no.”
“’Odd woman out, I guess,’ Dr. Helen ‘Keipp’ Talbot, of Vanderbilt University, told her colleagues. ‘I still struggle with this. This was not an easy vote’.”
“Talbot was worried about whether the vaccine would even work in such frail, vulnerable patients. Even more, she worried about how it might look if the vaccine failed in that group, or how it would affect public perception if residents died soon after getting the vaccine.”
“The Covid-19 vaccines have not been tested in the frail elderly, many of whom are residents of long-term care facilities.”
Let’s stop here for a moment. First, we learn that the clinical trials of the COVID vaccine have not used the frail and elderly as volunteers. Therefore, there is NO evidence that the vaccine is safe or effective in that very large group. If this doesn’t give the frail and elderly and their families pause for thought, nothing will.
Second, Dr. Talbot is worried about “public perception,” when the elderly die right after getting the vaccination.
Well, what would YOU think if your mother died the day after she received the COVID shot?
The CNN article gets worse. Read on. Next up is a comment from Dr. Kelly Moore, “associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition, which is supporting frontline workers who will administer Covid-19 vaccinations.”
“’Since they [the COVID vaccines] haven’t been studied in people in those [elderly] populations, we don’t know how well the vaccine will work for them. We know that most vaccines don’t work nearly as well in a frail elderly person as they would in someone who is fit and vigorous, even if they happen to be the same age,’ Moore said.”
Again—zero evidence the COVID vaccines work in elderly and frail populations. Most vaccines don’t “work nearly as well.”
CNN: “When shots begin to go into arms of [nursing home and long-term care facility] residents, Moore said Americans need to understand that deaths may occur that won’t necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine.”
“’We would not at all be surprised to see, coincidentally, vaccination happening and then having someone pass away a short time after they receive a vaccine, not because it has anything to do with the vaccination but just because that’s the place where people at the end of their lives reside,’ Moore said.”
“’One of the things we want to make sure people understand is that they should not be unnecessarily alarmed if there are reports, once we start vaccinating, of someone or multiple people dying within a day or two of their vaccination who are residents of a long-term care facility. That would be something we would expect, as a normal occurrence, because people die frequently in nursing homes’.”
Right. Don’t be alarmed.
Don’t worry if people who are doing reasonably well suddenly die right after getting the COVID shot. It’s just a coincidence.
Their long-term health conditions just happened to kick in a day or two after vaccination. Nothing to wonder about.
Don’t kick up a fuss if it’s YOUR father or mother who died. Stay calm. You can be sure the doctors will let you know if your mother died from the vaccine. Of course they will.
Even though the vaccine has never been tested on the elderly and frail, the doctors know whether a death occurred from the vaccination or from other causes. And they’ll tell the truth. They always do.
The doctors quoted in this CNN article are obviously worried about people dying as a result of the vaccine. They know it’s going to happen. They’re thinking out loud about what they can do to stem the tide of public outrage—particularly from the families of those who die.
The best idea they can come up with is: “these people die anyway.”
I remind readers that, for months, I’ve been reporting on the huge percentage of all so-called COVID deaths that have been occurring among the elderly in nursing homes, in long-term care facilities, in hospitals, in their homes. [2]
These people were already suffering from multiple long-term serious health conditions. On top of that, they had been treated for years with an array of toxic medical drugs.
And then, they’re absolutely terrified when they receive a diagnosis of COVID. Then they’re isolated, cut off from family and friends.
And they give up and die.
NO VIRUS IS REQUIRED TO EXPLAIN THESE DEATHS.
This is forced premature killing of old people. It’s murder by COVID diagnosis and isolation. [2]
And now, these people will receive an experimental RNA vaccine, whose effects include auto-immune reactions; the body basically attacks itself. [3]
More killing.
And doctors advising the CDC are telling us not to be alarmed.
The deaths are just routine.
Lots and lots of doctors who know what’s going on are thinking, “What if all this comes back on ME?”
Well, it IS coming back on you, Doctors.
You’re killers in white coats who are supposed to be saving lives.
SOURCES:
[2] https://www.denverpost.com/2020/12/09/pfizer-covid-vaccine-allergic-reactions/
What Joe Biden’s Electoral College “Victory” Really Means
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | December 15, 2020
So, the electoral college cast their votes, and they handed Joe Biden the Presidency. The decision was never in any serious doubt.
We’ve been over the evidence the election was rigged, we’ve discussed at length the potential corruption of postal ballots (historically the least safe way to vote, and most liable to fraud). There’s no need to go over it again.
Given all that, it was inevitable the Electoral College would vote Biden in, and the lawsuits would be turned out of court unheard. You don’t go to the trouble of fixing a nationwide election and without knowing you have the judges and bureaucrats on-side first. When you’re staging a coup, the vast majority of the work is behind the scenes – securing the loyalty of soldiers and officials and media mouthpieces. You don’t actually act until the last minute, one frenzied moment of violent change, then a steady period securing of your position.
Donald Trump’s cause has been largely hopeless since well before polling day. He will be forced aside, one way or another. Likely peacefully, thanks to some backroom deal. What his many millions of supporters do after that is anyone’s guess…there is definitely a potential for chaos.
At this point the question isn’t “was the election fixed?”, the question is “why was the election fixed?”
The issue here isn’t whether or not America’s democracy is corrupt, anyone paying attention can see that it is (and has been for decades). The issue is why are they making it so obvious, and what is so important about Biden being President?
Is it about the Iran nuclear deal, Wearing masks? Funding the WHO, or staying put in Somalia? Unlikely. These are policy changes you can bring about through passive resistance, bureaucratic red-tape, or simply straight up saying you did them when you didn’t. You don’t need to stage a coup to keep 700 soldiers in Somalia.
So what would be worth all the trouble?
Perhaps for a possible answer to this question we should look back at the last US election so openly and obviously subject to creative vote distribution: Bush vs Gore in 2000.
The 2000 election was almost certainly fixed. It was clearly very important that George W. Bush became President, and with him came his coterie of neocon warmongers and puppetmasters.
Less than a year into his Presidency, 9/11 happened. Less than two months after that, the US invaded Afghanistan. The war on Terror had begun, and Iraq, Syria, and Libya would all be caught up in the blaze.
It wasn’t just about starting a few wars, either.
It was about a “single catastrophic and catalyzing event” triggering monumental changes in the way the world works. It was about Gitmo and Drone Strikes and Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. It was about normalising execution without trial, constant surveillance and keeping people scared.
It was about the Patriot Act “temporarily” halting people’s fundamental freedoms… forever. A huge policy shift that cemented Imperial power abroad, enforced draconian discipline at home and totally changed the political landscape of the entire planet.
I would expect something similar for Joe Biden’s contrived presidency. But what form will it take? Will it be due to the Covid19 “pandemic”, or can we expect another “catalysing event”? It could be the Great Reset, or the Green New Deal. Or both.
While Biden will likely endorse, and even reinforce, US troops all over Africa and the Middle East, his flagship policy is likely to be domestic rather international, and political rather than military. Some brutal authoritarian consolidation of control in a flimsy “progressive” disguise.
Whatever it turns out to be, it will be a sea-change in the way the world works. The Deep State don’t stick their necks out this far for anything less.
Hunter Biden News Should Shame Dismissive Media Outlets
By Mark Hemingway | RealClear Politics | December 14, 2020
Hunter Biden announced Wednesday he is under federal investigation for his financial dealings in foreign countries, including China. While the news sent shockwaves through Washington, D.C., it shouldn’t have been surprising. The announcement confirms many of the allegations of corruption that were leveled against Hunter Biden in the months leading up to the November elections – allegations the media steadfastly refused to cover.
The nation’s largest social media companies went further: They made the shocking decision to actively censor the New York Post’s eye-opening scoop revealing evidence of Joe Biden’s son’s influence peddling that was recovered from an abandoned laptop. Twitter locked the newspaper out of its own account for weeks. Facebook prevented the Post’s story from being widely distributed, even though neither Joe Biden nor his campaign disputed the authenticity of the documents published by the paper.
In retrospect, not only do the documents appear to be authentic, but a Daily Beast report Thursday notes evidence that the Hunter Biden investigation was hiding in plain sight. One of the FBI documents from the laptop published by the Post “included a case number that had the code associated with an ongoing federal money laundering investigation in Delaware, according to several law enforcement officials who reviewed the document. Another document — one with a grand jury subpoena number — appeared to show the initials of two assistant U.S. attorneys linked to the Wilmington, Delaware, office.” Hunter Biden claims he only learned of the investigation this past week, but these documents suggest otherwise.
Even a cursory inquiry by the New York Post’s competitors would have confirmed that Biden was under federal investigation. One journalist did behave like a reporter. In late October, Sinclair Broadcast Group correspondent James Rosen reported that Hunter Biden was under active investigation and a Justice Department official confirmed his scoop. Almost without exception, America’s press corps refused to follow up on Rosen’s revelation — or even report it.
It’s bad enough that the allegations were ignored, but the media response to the story was far worse. Without making any meaningful attempts to independently verify any of the details, they immediately asserted that Hunter Biden’s laptop was part of a “Russian disinformation” campaign.
Natasha Bertrand, a Politico reporter known among Trump supporters for her credulous reporting on the Steele dossier, wrote a piece headlined “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” The New York Times reported, “Trump Said to Be Warned That Giuliani Was Conveying Russian Disinformation” and, further, that Trump “shrugged off” the warning about his aide, who was involved in bringing the laptop story to light.
Both stories appeared on Oct. 15, the day after the Post’s bombshell report. In the broader media, the default explanation for the laptop became – once again – a Vladimir Putin-backed conspiracy. By contrast, the idea that an erratic Hunter Biden, who once left a crack pipe and his dead brother’s state attorney general badge in a rental car, forgot to pick up his laptop at a computer repair shop a short distance from his house was deemed far-fetched.
Even setting aside the charges specifically connected to the laptop, what was known about Hunter’s foreign dealings was damning enough that the media should have demanded Joe and Hunter answer a slew of pointed questions. Instead, there was only one puffy, televised ABC News interview with Hunter Biden that also aired, probably not coincidentally, on Oct. 15, perfectly timed to rebut the Post.
When asked about his controversial job serving on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma, Biden’s response to ABC vacillated between self-serving and dishonest. “There’s been a lot of misinformation about me. … Bottom line is that I know that I was completely qualified to be on the board to head up the corporate governance and transparency committee on the board,” he said.
The assertion, absurd on its face, went largely unchallenged by ABC. Biden didn’t speak the language of the country where Burisma is headquartered, had no experience in the oil and gas sector, and had never served on the board of a for-profit company. Moreover, getting paid a million dollars a year to serve on a corporate board is unheard of. Corporate watchdogs have noted that his post was rife with conflicts that would have violated federal securities law if Burisma was a U.S. company. He got the job weeks after it was announced his father was overseeing America’s Ukraine policy from the White House.
Instead, Hunter was allowed by ABC to present himself as the victim. “I gave a hook to some very unethical people to act in illegal ways to try to do some harm to my father. That’s where I made the mistake,” Biden told the credulous network. “So I take full responsibility for that. Did I do anything improper? No, not in any way. Not in any way whatsoever.”
ABC also whiffed on the China question. Biden told ABC News he hadn’t personally profited from a $1.5 billion deal with Chinese interests brokered by his investment firm, an implausible denial for which he presented no evidence. ABC did not ask him about an email in the New York Post report purportedly showing that Ye Jianming, chairman of the CEFC China Energy Co. conglomerate, was paying Hunter Biden $10 million for “introductions alone.”
A recent Senate report reviewed by Fox News seems to confirm these troubling allegations. “Hunter Biden had business associations with Ye Jianming, Gongwen Dong and other Chinese nationals linked to the Communist government and the People’s Liberation Army,” the report says. “Those associations resulted in millions of dollars in cash flow.”
Nor did ABC News ask Hunter Biden about receiving a 2.8 carat diamond worth $80,000 that a shadowy Chinese tycoon delivered to his hotel room. Neither Joe nor Hunter were asked about this during the campaign, even though Hunter admitted to taking the diamond in the pages of the New Yorker magazine last year. This suspicious gift is now reportedly part of the FBI probe.
In fairness, some skepticism of an October surprise being foisted on the public by a right-leaning tabloid and Rudy Giuliani, who’s no stranger to getting out over his skis in defense of Trump, would have been warranted.
But some media figures so quickly descended into condescending arrogance that some apologies appear in order, given what we now know. The managing editor of taxpayer-funded NPR declared it a “waste of time” to report on the Hunter Biden allegations. The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum assured us, “Those who live outside the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not, of course, need to learn any of this stuff [about Hunter Biden].”
However, many of the key allegations in the New York Post report weren’t just about Hunter. They raised questions about whether Joe Biden was a participant in his son’s foreign wheeling and dealing. Nonetheless, Applebaum’s Atlantic colleague David Frum went even further. “The people on the far right and far left that publicized the obviously bogus [New York Post ] story were not dupes. They were accomplices. The story could not have been more fake if it had been wearing dollar-store spectacles and attached plastic mustache,” he wrote.
Unfortunately for Frum, the question of who was acting as an “accomplice” is now a bigger issue than ever. “According to Biden campaign metrics, online chatter about the Hunter Biden story during the election’s last week was greater than it was around Hillary’s emails during last month of ’16,” observed the Daily Beast’s Sam Stein last month. “The difference: it never spilled over into mainstream outlets.”
Given that Biden’s Electoral College victory was even narrower than Trump’s in 2016 – about 40,000 votes spread across three narrowly won states – Stein’s observation that the media suppression of the Hunter Biden story may have helped Joe Biden win now looks like a troubling indictment. A chilling media precedent has been set to not just discredit, but actively censor legitimate reporting on political corruption weeks before an election.
Mark Hemingway is a writer in Alexandria, Va. You can follow him on twitter @heminator.
Copyright © 2020 RealClearHoldings, LLC.
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From the Archives
Anti-science
The infinite list
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 12, 2022
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iran War Confusion & Mixed Messaging /Lt Col Daniel Davis
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- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
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