A dozen compelling allegations of voting irregularities in 2020 election
By John Solomon | Just the News | November 23, 2020
While many Democrats and their allies in the traditional media argue there is no evidence of systemic voting irregularities in the Nov. 3 election, a mountain of evidence has been amassed in private lawsuits alleging there was, in fact, significant and widespread voting misconduct.
The question for the courts is whether the irregularities were widespread enough to impact the outcome or erase Joe Biden’s lead in at least three of the six battleground states where results are being contested.
And while both President Trump’s campaign and private entities like the Amistad Project are planning to file more lawsuits on Monday, Just the News reviewed the scores of filings and affidavits and declarations in the court cases.
Here are the 12 most compelling pieces of evidence presented to the courts as of Sunday night:
City of Detroit worker swears she witnessed thousands of ballots being falsified
Of all the sworn statements to date, career civil servant Jessy Jacob of Detroit provided the most sweeping claim of election fraud.
She stated in an affidavit she personally witnessed — and in some cases was instructed — to backdate thousands of absentee ballots the day after the election to make them appear legal even though they were not in the Qualified Voter File and had not arrived by the deadline. “I estimate that this was done to thousands of ballots,” her sworn statement says.
Jacob also described how in the weeks before Election Day she witnessed Detroit poll workers skipping voter ID checks and that she was “instructed by my supervisor to adjust the mailing date of these absentee ballot packages to be dated earlier than they were actually sent. The supervisor was making announcements for all workers to engage in this practice.”
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Jacob described 70 to 80 other poll workers who also were instructed to falsify ballots, potentially a massive fraud.
Nearly three quarters of Detroit’s precincts had mismatched voting totals
Wayne County Board of Canvassing member William Hartmann, a Republican, says in a sworn declaration that Michigan’s largest county certified results knowing there were massive discrepancies between the approved voter files and the ballots cast and counted in Detroit.
“In my review of the results, I determined that approximately 71% of Detroit’s 134 absentee voter counting boards were left unbalanced and many unexplained,” his statement said.
Hartmann also raised concerns that birth dates in voter ID files “were altered in the pollbooks.”
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Unfolded, pristine mail-in ballots flagged in Georgia
At least nine observers who watched an audit last week in Georgia’s razor-thin election have signed affidavits swearing they saw suspicious mail-in ballots, almost uniformly cast for Biden. The ballots were in pristine condition and had no creases on them, meaning the ballots had not been mailed in envelopes as required, according to the affidavits.
“It was pristine. There was a difference in the texture of the paper — it was as if they were intended for absentee use, but had not been used for that purpose,” Susan Voyles, a poll manager with two decades of experience, wrote in her affidavit about her time at a recount center in Fulton County. “There were no markings on the ballots to show where they had come from, or where they had been processed. I observed that the markings for the candidates on these ballots were unusually uniform, perhaps even with a ballot marking device.”
Thousands of ballots went uncounted initially in Georgia, belatedly discovered during audit
Election officials divulged last week that thousands of uncounted ballots were discovered in Georgia, most favoring Trump, during a post-election audit. They include:
- 2,600 uncounted ballots in Floyd County.
- 2,755 ballots in Fayette County that were not included in the original count
- 508 ballots in Walton County
Large numbers of Pennsylvania voters say their absentee votes weren’t counted or someone else requested their mail-in ballot
Just the News interviewed numerous Pennsylvania voters who say either their mail-in ballots were never counted or that someone else had appeared to request and obtained their mail-in ballots. A data scientist then projected from sampling that the problems were widespread.
In a sworn declaration, a respected mathematician says his analysis of election data and phone interviews with Pennsylvania voters raises questions about as many as 100,000 absentee ballots requested in the key battleground state where President Trump and Joe Biden are separated by just about 82,000 votes.
Williams College Professor Steven Miller, a Yale and Princeton trained math expert, said he analyzed Pennsylvania ballot data collected by former Trump campaign data chief Matt Braynard as well as 2,684 voter interviews conducted by a phone bank and found two concerning patterns. One involved possible votes that were not counted, the other ballots that appeared to be requested by someone other than a registered voter.
“I estimate that the number of ballots that were either requested by someone other than the registered Republican or requested and returned but not counted range from 89,397 to 98,801,” Miller said in the sworn statement provided to Just the News.
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Miller_DeclarationAndAnalyisPA_GOP_BallotRequestData_2020_Final.pdf
Las Vegas Review Journal columnist Victor Joecks disclosed he signed a total of nine other voters’ mail-in ballot envelops and eight of the ballots were accepted even though it was not the signature of the voter. That’s an 89% failure rate for Clark County’s signature validation techniques.
“It’s unclear how much voter fraud took place in Nevada,” Joecks wrote. “But it’s clear signature verification isn’t the fail-safe security check elections officials made it out to be.”
Joecks discussed the security weaknesses in a podcast with Just the News last week.
Social worker charged in Texas with submitting voter registration applications for nursing home residents
Kelly Reagan Brunner, a social worker in the Mexia State Supported Living Center in Texas, was charged with submitting voter registration applications for dozens of facility residents absent signatures or effective consent, including some residents who are not even eligible.
“State Supported Living Centers serve people with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” a press release from the Texas attorney general states. “Brunner submitted voter registration applications for 67 residents without their signature or effective consent, while purporting to act as their agent.
“Under Texas law, only a parent, spouse or child who is a qualified voter of the county may act as an agent in registering a person to vote, after being appointed to do so by that person. None of the SSLC patients gave effective consent to be registered, and a number of them have been declared totally mentally incapacitated by a court, thereby making them ineligible to vote in Texas.”
Computer issue in Oakland County, Mich., blamed as a GOP incumbent belatedly declared winner after first being told he lost.
While it had appeared that incumbent Republican Adam Kochenderfer had narrowly lost an Oakland County commissioner election contest, it turned out that he had actually won.
“A computer issue in Rochester Hills caused them to send us results for seven precincts as both precinct votes and absentee votes,” Oakland County Director of Elections Joe Rozell said in a text message, according to the Detroit Free Press. “They should only have been sent to us as absentee votes.”
Antrim County, Mich., reversed election results after error found
Due to an issue in Antrim County, Mich., it appeared that Biden had outpolled Trump according to the unofficial vote count. But it ultimately turned out that the president had actually beaten Biden in the county. According to a Nov. 7 statement from Michigan’s Secretary of State, Democrat Jocelyn Benson, “user error” was to blame for the incorrect unofficial results.
“The error in reporting unofficial results in Antrim County Michigan was the result of a user error that was quickly identified and corrected; did not affect the way ballots were actually tabulated; and would have been identified in the county canvass before official results were reported even if it had not been identified earlier,” according to the statement.
Numerous Republicans poll observers in multiple states say they were improperly ejected
From Michigan to Pennsylvania, numerous GOP poll observers say they were ejected or improperly kept from monitoring ballot-counting in big city election centers. Bipartisan poll watching is supposed to be one of the most important protections against fraud.
David Shestokas, a Chicago-based lawyer who joined several dozen other lawyers and Allegheny County residents to poll-watch in Pittsburgh, said observers for campaigns “were maybe 15, 20 feet from many of the tables, in a coral. Other tables may have been 100-150 feet away.”
“We literally had no input and no ability to watch anything,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, each and every one of those ballots was opened illegally.”
Voter drive in Nevada targeting Native Americans offered gifts as voting incentives
A get-out-the-vote effort by a Nevada Native American group included a raffle with cash prizes, a tactic the Trump campaign says amounted to an illegal incentive to vote.
The Nevada Native Vote Project, a group that seeks to “increase civic participation of the Indigenous populations in Nevada,” sponsored a “virtual raffle” during this year’s presidential election, according to a post on the group’s Facebook page.
The event, sponsored jointly with the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, informed voters that they would be entered in a raffle if they sent in a photograph of themselves with an “I Voted” sticker and/or a “ballot completion form.”
Among the prizes in the raffle were four $250 gift cards, four $100 gift cards and eight $25 gift cards, as well as “beadwork, t-shirts & more,” the raffle poster advertised.
Los Angeles prosecutors uncover scheme in which thousands of fraudulent ballots cast
Two men were charged last week with 41 counts for allegedly submitting thousands of fraudulent voter registration applications on behalf of homeless people, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office .
Marcos Raul Arevalo, 34, and 53-year-old Carlos Antonio De Bourbon Montenegro, aka Mark Anthony Gonsalves, were each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit voter fraud, eight counts of voter fraud, four counts of procuring and offering a false or forged instrument and four misdemeanor counts.
The 4-year (neoliberal) radicalisation of US media & Bidenites’ ‘unradical radicalism’
By Ramin Mazaheri | PressTV | November 22, 2020
For four years The New York Times editorial page has been unreadable because into every column – no matter the subject – an anti-Trump diatribe was inserted. For the world’s many billions who think there actually are issues other than the president of the United States, their obsession was incredibly tedious.
It reminded me of how the World Socialist Web Site ends every column with a reminder that the only solution – no matter the subject – is Trotskyist revolution. At least they keep that at the bottom, so you can avoid it if you want.
The difference between the two is that one is openly opposed to neoliberalism and neo-imperialism, while the other censors any discussion of these enormously crucial and socially-devastating concepts.
Joe Biden recently made waves for snapping at a reporter asking a difficult question, and it reminded us of how very coddled he was during the presidential campaign. But a possible change from Sleepy Joe to Cranky Joe may or may not be a problem – that depends on if his apparent election win survives the judicial oversight of the vote, something which is supported by 46% of America (per a poll by The Economist) but 0% of their mainstream media.
The bigger potential issue – and it’s a global one, because foreign journalists often ape the US, in what Iranians have called for 75 years “Westoxification” (being intoxicated by Westernism) – is what the US media actually evolves into post-Trump (if he loses).
In one of the many positive unintended consequences of Donald Trump, the US media went from the slavish sucking up to power during the Dubya Bush era of “wars without bodybags”, to “everybody loves Obama (even though in 2012 he beat Mitt Romney just 51% to 47%), to rediscovering that the press is not actually merely the public relations team of the government.
If Biden wins, will the US mainstream media quickly revert to sucking up to power? Will it be still only softball questions for President Biden?
Or does four years of decent reporting – sadly combined with a concurrent journalistic era of hysterical fear-mongering, Russophobia, urging hatred of one’s differently-voting neighbour and a moral outrage which rested upon a wilful ignorance regarding what Trump supporters really believe – actually have an impact?
The question reminded of an ancient Chinese aphorism: “The murder of a ruler by his minister, or of a father by his son, is not the result of events of one morning or one evening.”
The radicalisation of fake-leftists into faker fake-leftists? Or will the US truly reform its imperialist ways?
The larger point of that aphorism is that actions have consequences, and that if we allow things to go too far down the wrong road an unjust ruler gets murdered, or a country becomes as incredibly internally divided as the US now is.
Journalists are supposed to be combative and even provocative, but the problem here is entirely with the never-stated ideology of Bidenism. (Please note that is entirely different from me writing: the problem is with the rabidity of the never-Trumper ideology.)
Because actions have consequences, we should grasp that Bidenism is not just a “return to (the 2015) normal” but also includes a vindictive, ever-more flaming evangelical insistence that US-led Westernism (neoliberalism and neo-imperialism) is the one true religion, which Donald Trump was heretically and treasonously wrong to even partially call into question.
Who are these unreadable new and old columnists of The New York Times? I can tell you what they are not: they are not journalists who openly denounce imperialism, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the oppression of the Wall Street high finance class or the other key ideas which differentiate leftism from centrism and rightism.
No, the loudest Bidenites are people who are upset that Trump is now trying to pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq; are upset that Trump did not bomb Syria; could not care less about the famine in Yemen; and who would not have expressed outrage at all for the assassination of Iranian anti-terror hero Qasem Soleimani if Barack Obama had killed him.
The idea that Biden’s foreign policy is going to be less belligerent than Trump’s is something based only on hope and not on the past four years (nor Biden’s 47 years in public service). Just look at how Bidenites are preparing to deal with Trumpers and ask yourself: is the neo-imperial hegemon really going to treat foreigners – especially Muslims in oil-rich areas – better than their very own neighbors?
Bidenites essentially want to criminalise working for Trumpism, censor Trumpist analyses, and make Trump the very first president to ever be prosecuted (what happened to the outrage of Trump’s calls to prosecute “crooked Hillary”?). These are all “radical” in the very worst sense of the word. The obstacle in implementing such radical policies is that Trumpism won at every level on November 3rd except the presidency, in a total concretisation and not repudiation of Trumpism, whether one likes that or not; the problem is that Bidenites at this time in 2016 were, incredibly, already talking publicly about impeaching the then-president-elect Trump, gutting their credibility.
These do not seem like the people who are going to herald a new era of tolerance for non-American ideas because they can’t even tolerate half of America’s ideas. Bidenism may turn out to be “Western universal values” on steroids because Bidenites realise there truly is a threat to the 2015 status quo, which they are obviously hell-bent on suppressing.
These do not seem like the people who are going to become more tolerant of those who do not accept America’s fake-leftist and divisive identity politics, which are entirely based around one thing: distracting from opposition to and the discussion of both neo-imperialism and neoliberalism.
Like Obama, will Biden get a Nobel Peace Prize for his election campaign?
Many of us are old enough to have seen the failure of this idea, currently held by many non-Americans, that the switching from a Republican to a Democrat will herald an entirely new era free from American belligerence.
The younger class may not remember the intense hatred Democrats had for George W. Bush, but the proof of it is in that shocking, totally unmerited Nobel. In 2013 Obama would be credibly quoted as saying, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
If things really do change for the better if Biden wins, journalists will have to have changed as well. Of course, we cannot expect their publishers and editors to allow them to be towards Biden but a fraction of how oppositional they were with Trump, but the younger generation of reporters have now been weaned on journalistic ideas which may prove hard for neoliberal and neo-imperialist forces to rein in.
However, the problem of their essential fake-leftism – of Bidenism – remains, no?
And this is a problem for journalists worldwide, who often read the US mainstream media and are so proud that they can understand a foreign language so well that they may fail to realise they are also imbibing Biden’s latent, never-stated neoliberalism and neo-imperialism; they are so happy Trump is gone they forget the corruption and anti-“universal values” stances which got him elected in the first place.
The worry is that instead of a genuine move away from American rightism, journalists in the US and abroad only imbibe a key hallmark of Bidenism: intolerance for dissent and the refusal to engage in dispassionate conversation about vital societal issues. The worry is that they become accepting of Bidenism’s flaming insistence that Western liberalism is the only acceptable form of human society worldwide – this is all adds up to the “unradical radicalism” of Bidenism.
Journalists must be skeptical, but they must be accurate – refusing to report on the reality of American Trumpism is as bad as those Americans whose family relations have become frozen because of their inability to tolerate their relative’s right to vote as they wish.
That’s an American problem, but the idea that Bidenism is actually an anti-imperial and anti-neoliberal movement, or that it will continue Trump’s relative drawdown of American forces worldwide – that’s something you’ve never actually heard from Bidenites.
Think you will (if Biden wins)?
Open Skies no more: US pulls out of Cold War-era deal that provided global security in diplomatic row with Russia
RT | November 22, 2020
President Donald Trump’s administration has on Sunday withdrawn from an international treaty that allows countries to monitor military hardware build-ups from afar, accusing Moscow – without evidence – of breaking its terms.
The Open Skies Treaty was first considered by the US and the Soviet Union in the 1950s as a possible way to increase transparency around troop movements and the deployment of nuclear weapons. It allows signatories to conduct a limited number of mutually beneficial aerial reconnaissance missions in the countries that are party to the deal, which includes the US, Canada, Russia and most of Europe.
In May, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pointed the finger at Moscow when he announced his country would seek to end its involvement in the treaty, claiming without evidence that Russia violated it. President Vladimir Putin’s government was presented with a set of new demands by US diplomats but refused them, calling them ultimatums.
As a result of the decision, the Americans will now no longer be able to operate unarmed spy plane flights over Russian territory, or that of the other signatory countries. They will also, in theory, be unable to benefit from intelligence gained from the program. However, there are concerns that the US will request aerial photographs of Russia taken by allies, while barring equivalent Russian flights over US military installations.
On Sunday, the Russian Foreign Ministry called that situation “unacceptable.” It added in a statement that Moscow “will seek firm guarantees that the states remaining in the treaty will fulfill their obligations, firstly, to ensure there are no barriers to observing their territory and, secondly, to ensure that the photographs from reconnaissance flights are not transferred to third countries that are not signed up to the deal.”
Open Skies is the latest international treaty that the US has pulled out of over tensions with Russia. Last year, Trump’s White House tore up the Reagan-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that had banned a number of highly destructive weapons with ranges of between 500 and 5,500km. At the time, Washington also accused Russia of breaking the conditions of the pact, while Moscow strongly denied the allegations.
The presumptive winner of the disputed US presidential elections, former vice president Joe Biden, has been critical of Trump’s approach to these Cold War-era treaties in the past. He has called the move to pull out of Open Skies short-sighted, and implied he would look to re-join the deal. However, this may prove challenging as the US might be forced to sign up to any and all new provisions of the Treaty that were made in their absence.
Michigan Legislators Face Calls For Possible Criminal Charges After Meeting With President Trump On Certification
By Jonathan Turley | November 21, 2020
We have been discussing the campaign of The Lincoln Project and others to harass and abuse lawyers who represent the Trump campaign or other parties bringing election challenges. Similar campaigns have targeted election officials who object to counting irregularities. Now, the Michigan Attorney General and others are suggesting that Republicans who oppose certification or even meet with President Donald Trump on the issue could be criminally investigated or charged. Once again, the media is silent on this clearly abusive use of the criminal code target members of the opposing party in their raising objections under state law.
On Friday afternoon, leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature met with Trump in the White House at his invitation. My column today explores the difficulty in any strategy to trigger an electoral college fight. However, the objections from legislators could focus on an host of sworn complaints from voters or irregularities in voting counts. We have not seen evidence establishing the type of systemic problems that would flip a state, let alone the election as a whole. While the legal team did raise some credible electoral concerns, I was also critical of Rudy Giuliani’s global communist conspiracy claim at the press conference this week. Some of these questions are being addressed in the courts. In the meantime, state legislators have a right to raise electoral objections and seek resolution in the legislative branch.
According to the Washington Post, Dana Nessel “is conferring with election law experts on whether officials may have violated any state laws prohibiting them from engaging in bribery, perjury and conspiracy.” It is the same weaponization of the criminal code for political purposes that we have seen in the last four years against Trump. Notably, the focus is the same discredited interpretation used against Trump and notably not adopted by the impeachment-eager House Judiciary Committee: bribery.
In Politico, Richard Primus wrote that these legislators should not attend a meeting with Trump because “it threatens the two Michigan legislators, personally, with the risk of criminal investigation.” This ridiculous legal claims is based on the bribery theory:
The danger for Shirkey and Chatfield, then, is that they are being visibly invited to a meeting where the likely agenda involves the felony of attempting to bribe a public official.
Under Michigan law, any member of the Legislature who “corruptly” accepts a promise of some beneficial act in return for exercising his authority in a certain way is “forever disqualified to hold any public office” and “shall be guilty of a felony, punishable by imprisonment in the state prison not more than 10 years[.]”
We repeatedly discussed this theory during the Trump presidency. As I have previously written, a leading proponent has been former prosecutor and Washington Post columnist Randall D. Eliason, who insisted that “allegations of a wrongful quid pro quo are really just another way of saying that there was a bribe … it’s bribery if a quid pro quo is sought with corrupt intent, if the president is not pursuing legitimate U.S. policy but instead is wrongfully demanding actions by Ukraine that would benefit him personally.” Eliason further endorsed the House report and assured that “The legal and factual analysis of bribery and honest services fraud in the House report is exactly right” and “outlines compelling evidence of federal criminal violations.”
The theory was never “exactly” or even remotely right, as evidenced by the decision not to use it as a basis for impeachment. And yet, it’s back. Indeed, the greatest danger of the theory was not that it would ever pass muster in the federal court system but that it would be used (as here) in the political system to criminalize policy and legal disagreements. (Eliason recently defended the attacks on fellow lawyers who are represented those challenging election results or practices).
In my testimony, I went into historical and legal detail to explain why this theory was never credible. While it was gleefully presented by papers like the Washington Post, it ignored case law that rejected precisely this type of limitless definition of the offense. As I told the House Judiciary Committee, the Supreme Court has repeatedly narrowed the scope of the statutory definition of bribery, including distinctions with direct relevance to the current controversy in cases like McDonnell v. United States, where the Court overturned the conviction of former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell. Chief Justice John Roberts eviscerated what he called the “boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute.” The Court explained that such “boundless interpretations” are inimical to constitutional rights because they deny citizens the notice of what acts are presumptively criminal: “[U]nder the Government’s interpretation, the term ‘official act’ is not defined ‘with sufficient definiteness that ordinary people can understand what conduct is prohibited,’ or ‘in a manner that does not encourage arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.’”
I will not repeat the litany of cases rejecting this type of broad interpretation. However, the case law did not matter then and it does not matter now to those who believe that the criminal code is endless flexible to meet political agenda.
It doesn’t even matter that the Supreme Court reaffirmed prior rejections of such broad interpretations in a recent unanimous ruling written by Justice Elena Kagan. In Kelly v. United States, the Supreme Court threw out the convictions in the “Bridgegate” case involving the controversial closing of lanes on the George Washington Bridge to create traffic problems for the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., who refused to endorse then-Gov. Chris Christie. The Court observed:
“That requirement, this Court has made clear, prevents these statutes from criminalizing all acts of dishonesty by state and local officials. Some decades ago, courts of appeals often construed the federal fraud laws to “proscribe[] schemes to defraud citizens of their intangible rights to honest and impartial government.” McNally, 483 U. S., at 355. This Court declined to go along. The fraud statutes, we held in McNally, were “limited in scope to the protection of property rights.” Id., at 360. They did not authorize federal prosecutors to “set[] standards of disclosure and good government for local and state officials.” Ibid.”
That is the argument that I raised in the impeachment against the proposed articles of impeachment — supported by a host of experts on MSNBC and CNN as well as Democratic members — that the Ukrainian allegations could be charged as mail and wire fraud as well as crimes like extortion.
What is most disturbing is that, if there was an objection to voting irregularities or fraud, these legislators would be acting under their state constitutional authority. They would be investigated for carrying out their official duties under state law. Many of us can disagree with such objections. (I have stated repeatedly that I do not see the evidence of systemic voting problems to reverse such state results and I have criticized President Trump’s rhetoric). However, when Democrats like Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Cal.) challenged the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes in 2004, no one suggested criminal investigations. Nessel is threatening state legislators that, if they meet to discuss such objections, they might be targets of criminal investigations. That would seem an effort to use the criminal code for the purposes of intimidation or coercion. Imagine if this was U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr threatening Democratic legislators with possible criminal investigation for challenging Trump votes. The media would be apoplectic. Yet, when used against Republicans, major publications and politicians are celebrated for the use of the criminal code for such politically motivated threats.
As with the attacks on Republican lawyers, the threats against Republican legislators has been met with utter silence in the media. Just the familiar sound of crickets.
Why is challenging suspicious election results ‘a threat to our democracy’?
By Jack Hellner | American Thinker | November 21, 2020
On Thursday, President Trump’s legal team presented many pieces of information about the election that deserve to be investigated.
But the media have no interest in that.
Instead, they essentially black out the news and ask Trump to concede so they can crown their chosen king. Worst of all, they continue to falsely claim there is no evidence of fraud.
The New York Times and others have written about the potential fraud on universal mail-in ballots in the past, as have other outlets, but now they call Trump a liar.
The media outlets know that rules were changed to make mail-in ballots less verifiable, but they don’t care.
They know that observation of the counting has been essentially blocked in some towns in violation of the law, and they don’t care.
They know that election officials in some states are violating laws, but laws aren’t important as long as the media’s chosen one is ahead.
Statistically, it is rare for the up-ballot candidate, the president, to significantly underperform the down-ballot candidates, but the media don’t care.
Coattails without a coat? Tell us exactly how that could happen.
They know, or should know, that Biden outperformed Hillary in only four cities: Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, not the nation as a whole. They also know about over-votes in cities — that is, more votes than registered voters — and once again, they don’t care.
They know there have been questions about Dominion, the software provider in many states, because they certainly had those questions before.
They know that Democrat senators Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Amy Klobuchar had significant questions about Dominion in December 2019, but they don’t care. Can anyone imagine how loud the senators and journalists would be about potential fraud by Dominion if Biden were behind? But what we have now is silence from the senators and the supposed journalists.
They know that several swing states mysteriously stopped counting votes on Election Night, but they don’t care. As a CPA with 43 years of experience, the only reason I can think they stopped counting is to cook the books, commit fraud, and change the vote.
Yet journalists don’t even ask the states why they stopped counting.
The same supposed journalists who say Trump is destroying democracy by challenging election results are the ones who:
- Claimed that Trump was an illegitimate president for four years. These same journalists and other Democrats also called Bush an illegitimate president for four years after he beat Al Gore twenty years earlier. The playbook is always the same. Not once did I hear that Gore was threatening democracy by challenging election results for more than one month. Instead, the media cheered him on because Democrats are special.
- Regurgitated the Russian collusion lie for years with zero evidence.
- Never cared about all the lies and crimes of people in the Obama/Biden administration as they set out to destroy Trump and protect career criminal Hillary Clinton from prosecution.
- Called Trump a liar for saying the Obama administration spied on his team when it is clearly true.
- Use congenital liars and criminals like James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Jim Clapper, and John Brennan to attack Trump with known lies.
- Cheered Obama/Biden on as they lied continuously about Obamacare and the Iran deal.
- Willingly spread the lies about what Trump said in Charlottesville and spread the lie that Trump had not denounced radical white supremacists.
- Along with other Democrats, called Trump and his supporters racists, sexists, bigots, homophobes, xenophobes, and every other name in the book as they bragged that Trump was divisive and continually say they are for unity. The media and other Democrats always play the race and sex card because their policies are so unpopular.
- Looked the other way concerning all the kickbacks to the Clinton and Biden families from foreign sources and never cared about the women the Clintons and Biden were accused of abusing. The women were expendable.
- Sought to destroy white Christian boys from Kentucky and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, without evidence, solely because of their connection to Trump. The party that preaches unity will destroy anyone who gets in its way as it pursues its quest for power.
- Continually lie that Trump never cared about the coronavirus and never did anything about it and didn’t care about the people dying, and falsely blamed him for all deaths related to COVID. The truth is, from the CDC in August, that less than 7% of the people who died with COVID died solely because of COVID. Over 93% died because of cancer, heart disease, liver disease, lung disease, diabetes, obesity, and other co-morbidity factors. Therefore, blaming all of the deaths on COVID is a political, agenda-driven decision, not a scientific one. I assume that it is to scare the public into submission. Why don’t the media ask the CDC why it never counted deaths the same on the seasonal flu or swine flu?
- Continually claim that the science is settled that humans and oil cause temperatures to rise and climate change when there is no scientific data to support that. The scientific data shows that in the last 150 years crude oil use went from zero to around one hundred million barrels per day, yet temperatures have risen and fallen and are within one to two degrees. It should be noted that a little ice age ended in 1850 and a little warming would be normal. Facts haven’t mattered for a long time, only power for government with Democrats in control.
Lately, the public have been treated to an Obama bragging tour where he and the fawning media have been rewriting history as fast as they can. They lie that Obama/Biden handed off a thriving economy. The truth is they had the slowest economic recovery in seventy years. They lie that there were no scandals during the Obama/Biden years. The truth is that there were massive continuous scandals that the media chose to bury. Obama lies that the only reason that Hillary lost is because we are racists. The truth is his policies were unpopular and wages were stagnant, especially for those at the bottom.
Summary: The biggest threat to our democracy, freedom and prosperity is a sycophant media that campaigns for one party and seeks to destroy the other. We are not a systemically racist country and it is absolutely not a threat to our democracy for anyone to challenge the results in an election especially when there are so many questions.
The fascist neo-left and the Trump Factor
By Ghassan Kadi for the Saker Blog | November 21, 2020
Nearly three weeks after the American elections, Americans and the world in general, are still none-the-wiser; not knowing who really won and if the votes have all been legitimate or otherwise.
And the man who is supposedly trying to make America respectable again, yes, Joe Biden, started his ‘tenure’ ironically by presenting his own disrespect by breaking the law and declaring himself as ‘president elect’ and establishing an illegal entity in the name of the ‘Office of President-Elect’.
There are serious accusations that allege that dead people have voted, that boxes of late illegal ballots (all voting for Biden) suddenly appeared from no-where, that the Dominion machines have been deliberately rigged in a manner that favoured Biden, that ballot observers from the Trump camp were not allowed to scrutineer, and much more.
Whilst all of the above points are considered allegations from the legal point of view, the Democrat camp should not be concerned at all if it has nothing to hide. If anything, if it is serious about restoring America’s respect in the eyes of the world, it should encourage transparency and investigations that prove without a single speck of doubt that they are all false. But that same camp that refused the legitimate results of a Trump win four years ago and then fabricated stories like Russiagate and others, is now urging the whole world to believe that the alleged Biden win is legitimate and that there was no interference.
Apart from allegations, what each of us knows for fact is that the media, especially social media, especially Facebook and Twitter have been instrumental in restricting and censoring posts and comments that favour Trump. At the same time, they implemented a blackout relating to the serious allegations of corruption about Biden and his family. If this is not interference in the election results, then what is?
Given the reach and power of social media, and given that most people are not interested in fact-finding, Facebook and Twitter have been engaged in a deliberate campaign of choosing what they allowed to be published and preventing others based on and only on their political views vis-à-vis the American elections.
Once the dust settles one way or the other, if there is any justice left in this world, social media personnel who have forged and implemented those policies must face trial.
What is most ironic about this whole new world that is everything but brave, is that the filthy rich and corrupt are cloaking themselves with the attire of the Left. There is really nothing left of the original Left in today’s Left.
Many, if not most of today’s ”Lefties” are inclined towards the current version of the political Left without really discerning that much has changed since the days of Castro and Guevara.
Today’s Left does not represent the working class.
Today’s Left is not concerned with achieving social justice.
Today’s Left is not concerned with ending capitalism and feudalism.
Today’s Neo-Left, is the consortium of globalists who own sweat shops in developing countries. They are the war-mongers, the arms dealers, the foot soldiers of thought police and they insist that your six-year-old children and grandchildren must learn about subjects like gender fluidity instead of learning history.
The devolution of the former political Left has been taking place for at least three decades, since the collapse of the USSR perhaps and the emergence of the so-called ‘New World Order’. But the 2016 Trump election has fast-tracked the process. George Soros who has an axe to grind with Communism became overnight the principle benefactor of most post-USSR Left movements. For better or for worse, it was as if he wanted to make sure that he contained the Left in a manner that deviates it from its original ideology. But he is not alone, and he is probably not doing this only because of political conviction. His ‘bigger’ partners, whether he is aware of their presence or not, have got a much bigger fish to fry; the fish of global control.
But is globalism what it appears to mean or is it a new form of hegemony? Let us not get into this herein. This will be the subject of the next article. Enough to say that what seems to surface from the actions and agendas of globalists is that they are adamant about destroying Western values; including democracy.
When my wife and I were in Russia on the 70th Anniversary of Victory over Nazi Germany, we were in total awe watching the Eternal Regiment on Nevski Prospect in St. Petersburg. Men and women proudly, silently and dignifiedly marching carrying photos of family members who perished fighting the Nazi malice. What was most amazing was seeing young boys and girls giving flowers to the elderly as a mark of respect. This is because students in Russia study history. The young generations must never take for granted the privileges they have. If they do not understand and respect the sacrifices of their forebears, they will never be able to realize what their own obligations are for today and the future. Many Americans do not know what the 4th of July stands for any more than they know how many States there are in the Union. Children growing up in the West have no idea, no idea at all, how and why they live in affluent countries with public services and government-financed welfare.
And when the million man/woman march was over many hours after it started, we could not see a single empty drink can dumped on the street, not even cigarette butts. And then we remembered that a few days earlier when we were in Moscow admiring among other things, the subway/metro stations, we did not witness any evidence of vandalism or graffiti either on the carriages or in the stations.
A far cry from what we see in the West, because to be proud of who one is has become taboo in the West; courtesy the neo-Left and their henchmen.
Personally, I used to feel concerned of what the armed Right-wing Evangelicals might do if they have it their way. But despite their heavy public display of weapons, I didn’t see any evidence to show that they have taken to the streets for the purpose destroying shops and looting. In saying this, and I am not saying that the pro-Trump militias are incapable of perpetrating organized violence, but recently thus far they haven’t. If anything, with all the BLM-associated violence and the attacks Trump supporters have recently faced, the armed conservatives have thus far displayed a huge degree of self-control and abidance by the rules of the law. They argue that their presence is to protect private and public property, and evidence seems to stack up in their favour.
On the other hand, and despite the bias of mainstream media, videos have emerged showing BLM supporters not only looting, but also terrorizing those who disagree with them and refuse to put their fist up in show of support.
Today’s Neo-Left activists are the ones using Nazi tactics; not the other way around. They are the controlled opposition and the foot soldiers of the thought-police; and these are undeniable facts. If anything, the Trump factor has enhanced their exposure.
And if you resurrect Guevara and catapult him into today’s political world without giving him a crash refresher course, he would not know which side of the political divide is which. If anything, he may think that it is the other way around.
In the event of a Biden win that Trump’s supporters may see as unfair, they may be driven to become violent, I don’t know. What I do know is that I have seen serious and concerning rowdy violent behaviour from the Left that makes me now feel that I am more fearful of organizations such as Extinction Rebellion than I am from the armed Evangelicals.
When the late and great Martin Luther King Jr. made his historic ‘I have a dream’ speech, he did not dream of a day when angry mobs would use the excuse of human rights in order to loot and pillage, gang attack supporters of their political opponents, and break the law and Constitution.
And when John Lennon sang ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Imagine’, he was hoping that one day political leaders would take heed and start putting their hearts before what they can achieve militarily.
Among other things, the thing with Trump is that he is/was not a politician. What drove him from being a profiteering tycoon to a man who wants to end American wars in the world is not something I can explain or understand. Clearly though, even if he is merely running America as a corporation, he must realize that it is not in America’s interests to be constantly engaged in expensive wars that do not have any benefit for America itself. If this is pragmatism from a profit-and-loss business perspective, then I don’t have any problems with this. I want to see American troops pulling out of conflict regions in the world. They have no business in Japan, South Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq and my beloved Syria to name a few places.
The thing about Trump is that he is not even a typical die-hard Republican. The archetypal Republicans are not a bunch of ‘nice guys’ either. How can anyone forget the legacy of the GOP? How can we forget George W Bush’s war on Iraq and his lies about the alleged Iraqi WMD’s? And what about his gang of infamous neo-cons; Perle, and Wolfowitz; not to forget Cheney, McCain, and many more from the gung-ho Republican Right that invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, killed at least a million civilians and only ended up creating more problems than the ones they claimed they needed to resolve?
Whether Trump wins or loses the legal battle against what looks like a huge body of evidence of electoral fraud at different levels, between now and January the 20th 2021, unlike what the social media brainwashers want people to think and believe, he is not a ‘presidential candidate’, he remains to be the President of the United States of America and he remains to be the Commander in Chief.
To this effect, in as much as the POTUS is domestically building up a huge legal case against the alleged win of Biden, he equally seems to be preparing for the worst-case scenario on international matters. He is working on the contingencies of losing by seemingly making serious efforts into ending wars and the presence of American troops overseas. May he be successful doing this if he is true to his word.
But Mr. President, if you really want to clean up the slate as much as possible in case you lose the legal battle against the corrupt who serve the Deep State, you must then remember that partial withdrawals do not end wars. A drawdown is not a withdrawal. Stand by your promise and let history festoon you as the man who ended all of America’s wars overseas. For even if you leave one soldier, yes Mr. President, one single American soldier on the soil of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, or any other place on earth where his presence is not legitimately requested by the people of that land, then you will be remembered in history as the man who faked withdrawals of American troops; and you despise fake actions Mr. President, don’t you?
Last but not least Mr. President, you must at least stop the oil theft from Syria, repeal the Caesar Act, and pardon Assange.
Assange, Mr. President, is the victim of your enemies. His ‘crime’ was to expose the dirty works of Hillary. How can you not drop all charges against him?
And Mr. President, should you win the legal battle and prove that your opponents have cheated the public, you MUST then clean up the swamp with an iron fist and a high pressure hose. Zuckerberg, the Clintons, the Bidens, CNN, as well as officials that helped fabricate stories about you. The whole gamut of filthy lying manipulators must face justice and the next four years will be a case of now or never.
The electoral issues are something for the American legal system to decide; provided that the system continues to have the power to reach a decision that is lawful and not dictated by the party machine of the Democrats, their cohorts and henchmen with Facebook, Twitter and Google being on the top of the list.
Martin Luther King Jr. would now be saying I’m having a nightmare, I am having a nightmare because in the name of social justice, in my name, protestors are attacked, shops are looted and elections are getting rigged.
The failings of the Neo-Left do not mean that the neo-Right, Trumpism, is always or even necessarily sometimes right by default. What is pertinent is that the choice between the former and traditional Right and Left has now morphed into a choice of discerning right from wrong, and it is the Neo-Left activists who are behaving like Fascists, courtesy the Trump factor.
The Blizzard of Bogus Journalism on Covid
BY Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research | November 20, 2020
This game of hunt-and-kill Covid cases has reached peak absurdity, especially in media culture.
Take a look at Supermarkets are the most common place to catch Covid, new data reveals. It’s a story on a “study” assembled by Public Health England (PHE) from the NHS Test and Trace App. Here is the conclusion. In the six days of November studied, “of those who tested positive, it was found that 18.3 per cent had visited a supermarket.”
Now, if the alarm bells don’t go off with that one, you didn’t pay attention to 7th grade science. If the app had also included showering, eating, and breathing, it might have found a 100% correlation. Yes, the people who tested positive probably did shop, as do most people. That doesn’t mean that shopping gives you Covid and it certainly doesn’t mean that shopping kills you.
Even if shopping is a way to get Covid, this is a very widespread and mostly mild virus for 99.8% percent of the population with an infection fatality rate as low as 0.05% for those under 70. Competent infectious disease experts have said multiple times that test, track, and isolate strategies are nearly useless for controlling viruses such as this.
This story/study was so poor and so absurd that it was too much even for Isabel Oliver, Director of the National Infection Service at Public Health England. She sent out the following note:
Thank you. One down, a thousand to go.
The New York Times pulled a mighty fast one with this piece: “States That Imposed Few Restrictions Now Have the Worst Outbreaks.” This would be huge news if true because it would imply not only that lockdowns save lives (which no serious study has thus far been able to document) but also that granting people basic freedoms are the reason for bad health outcomes, an astonishing claim on its own.
The piece, put together by two graphic artists and seemingly very science-like, speaks of “outbreaks,” which vaguely sounds terrible: packed with mortality. It’s odd because anyone can look at the data and see that New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut lead the way with deaths per million, mostly owing to the fatalities in long-term care facilities. These were the states that locked down the hardest and longest. Indeed they are locking down again! Deaths per million in states like South Dakota are still low on the list.
How in the world can the NYT claim that states that did not lock down have the worst outbreaks? The claim hinges entirely on a trivial discovery. Some clever someone discovered that if you reflow data by cases per million instead of deaths per million, you get an opposite result. The reasons: 1) when the Northeast experienced the height of the pandemic, there was very little testing going on, so the “outbreak” was not documented even as deaths grew and grew, 2) by the time the virus reached the Midwest, tests were widely available, 3) the testing mania grew and grew to the point that the non-vulnerable are being tested like crazy, generating high positives in small-population areas.
By focusing on the word “outbreak,” the Times can cleverly obscure the difference between a positive PCR result (including many false positive and perhaps half or more asymptomatic cases) and a severe outcome from catching the virus. In other words, the Times has documented an “outbreak” of mostly non-sick people in low-population areas.
There are hundreds of ways to look at Covid-19 data. The Times picked the one metric – the least valuable one for actually discerning whether and to what extent people are sick – in order to generate the result that they wanted, namely that open states look as bad as possible. The result is a chart that massively misrepresents any existing reality. It makes the worst states look great and the best ones look terrible. The visual alone is constructed to make it looks as if open states are bleeding uncontrollably.
How many readers will even know this? Very few, I suspect. What’s more amazing is that the Times itself already debunked the entire “casedemic” back in September:
Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.
Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time….
In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.
All of which makes one wonder what precisely is going on in this relationship between cases and severe outcomes. The Covid Tracking Project generates the following chart. Cases are in blue while deaths are in red.
Despite this story and these data, the graphic artists at the Times got to work generating a highly misleading presentation that leads to one conclusion: more lockdowns.
(My colleague Phil Magness has noted further methodological problems even within the framework that the Times uses but I will let him write about that later.)
Let’s finally deal with Salon’s attack on Great Barrington Declaration co-creator Jayanta Bhattacharya. Here is a piece that made the following claim of the infection fatality rate: “the accepted figure of 2-3 percent or higher.” That’s an astonishing number, and basically nuts: 10 million people will die in the US alone.
Here is what the CDC says concerning the wildly disparate risk factors based on age:
These data are not inconsistent with the World Health Organization’s suggestion that the infection fatality rate for people under 70 years of age is closer to 0.05%.
The article further claims that “herd immunity may not even be possible for COVID-19 given that infection appears to only confer transient immunity.” And yet, the New York Times just wrote that:
How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination.
Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.
How is it possible for people to make rational decisions with this kind of journalism going on? Truly, sometimes it seems like the world has been driven insane by an astonishing blizzard of false information. Just last week, an entire state in Australia shut down completely – putting all its citizens under house arrest – due to a false report of a case in a pizza restaurant. One person lied and the whole world fell apart.
Meanwhile, serious science is appearing daily showing that there is no relationship at all, and never has been, between lockdowns and lives saved. This study looks at all factors related to Covid death and finds plenty of relationship between age and health but absolutely none with lockdown stringency. “Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate,” says the study, echoing a conclusion of dozens of other studies since as early as March.
It’s all become too much. The world is being seriously misled by major media organs. The politicians are continuing to panic and impose draconian controls, fully nine months into this, despite mountains of evidence of the real harm the lockdowns are causing everyone. If you haven’t lost faith in politicians and major media at this point, you have paid no attention to what they have been doing for the better part of this catastrophic year.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
Poll: 80% of US deeply divided on basic values
© REUTERS/Terray Sylvester
By Ramin Mazaheri | Press TV | November 21, 2020
Chicago – The US presidential election remains unresolved but what seems crystal clear is that the nation is divided more than anytime since the 1960s, or perhaps even the 1860s.
A new poll found that nearly 80% of America says they are “deeply divided on its most foundational values”. Whoever is inaugurated in January will face a deeply mistrustful and disbelieving public, as the poll also finds that just 30% of Americans believe the country will grow more united in 2021.
For a nation which is the richest in the world and which faces no serious external threat, such levels of disharmony are shocking even to many Americans themselves.
Distrust is not something which grows overnight. Many attribute the division to the American liberal’s obsession with so-called “identity politics”, which divides and re-divides people into smaller and smaller tribes based on gender, race, ethnicity, urban-rural, coastal-inland and on and on.
US conservatives are criticized for having a limited view of unity due to an “us versus them” mentality, which leaves little room for change or modernization.
The United States is proving unable to resolve a host of enormous problems: protecting from the coronavirus pandemic, Great Depression-levels of unemployment alongside a skyrocketing Wall Street, endemic economic inequality which has exploded in 2020, constant racial discrimination, record disharmony between genders, a Congress which is half as popular as an often deeply unpopular President, and, of course, a disputed election, the third in six tries.
The poll makes it clear that belief in the nation’s division is not a partisan issue, as Democrats, Republicans and independents all agree in similar proportions. Americans only seem to be able to agree on one thing – that they really, deeply disagree.
Snopes: ‘Misleading’ to Correctly Point Out Biden’s Cancer Charity Spent Millions On Salaries, Zero On Research
By Chris Menahan | InformationLiberation | November 18, 2020
The Biden Cancer Initiative spent the majority of the millions it brought in on salaries and zero on research but pointing that out is “misleading,” according to Snopes.
The New York Post exposed Biden’s shady “charity” in an article last week titled, “Tax filings reveal Biden cancer charity spent millions on salaries, zero on research”:
The Biden Cancer Initiative was founded in 2017 by the former vice president and his wife Jill Biden to “develop and drive implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes,” according to its IRS mission statement. But it gave out no grants in its first two years, and spent millions on the salaries of former Washington DC aides it hired.
The charity took in $4,809,619 in contributions in fiscal years 2017 and 2018, and spent $3,070,301 on payroll in those two years. The group’s president, Gregory Simon, raked in $429,850 in fiscal 2018 (July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019). https://t.co/bukDnvSGU8
— Corey R. Lewandowski (@CLewandowski_) November 15, 2020
The charity took in $4,809,619 in contributions in fiscal years 2017 and 2018, and spent $3,070,301 on payroll in those two years. The group’s president, Gregory Simon, raked in $429,850 in fiscal 2018 (July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019), according to the charity’s most recent federal tax filings.
Simon, a former Pfizer executive and longtime health care lobbyist who headed up the White House’s cancer task force in the Obama administration, saw his salary nearly double from the $224,539 he made in fiscal 2017, tax filings show.
“Sometimes disinformation states the facts correctly but frames them misleadingly,” Snopes’ Bethania Palma said in a “fact-checking” article on Monday.
“Although the charity spent no money on cancer research grants, this fact is misleadingly framed in that the Biden Cancer Initiative wasn’t a grant-giving organization,” Snopes said.
Though Snopes acknowledged the “charity” spent over $3 million on salaries, they failed to mention that was the majority of the $4,809,619 total they took in. They also failed to mention that Simon was a longtime health care lobbyist.
Snopes reported that Simon told them the organization was dedicated to “creating collaborations among companies, universities, nonprofits, patient groups, researchers, and the government” and their mission “was to work with patients from the bottom up to make things change.”
Sounds legit!
Joe Biden: I Do Not Want a National Shutdown; I Just Want a National Shutdown.
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | November 20, 2020
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden declared that he would be ready and willing as president to follow the recommendation of scientists to shut down the country in the name of countering coronavirus. Then, on Thursday, Biden insisted he would not, as president, impose a national shutdown.
But, it turns out Biden, in his Thursday comments, was just playing a word game. He defined “shutdown” such that it describes something no government has undertaken in the name of countering coronavirus and something very different from what most people understand the term “shutdown” to mean in this context. Then Biden proceeded to describe the actions he wants to take that fall right in line with shutdowns governments have imposed and with what people generally understand as a coronavirus-related shutdown.
On Thursday, when a reporter had just begun asking a question by restating Biden’s earlier declaration about shutting down the country, Biden interrupted, insisting that his previous declaration was just a hypothetical. He then stated:
I am not gonna shut down the economy, period. I am gonna shut down the virus. That’s what I’m gonna shut down. I’ll say it again: No national shutdown; no national shutdown.
That sounds like a rather emphatic 360 reversal from Biden, except that talk of “gonna shut down the virus” instead of shutting down the economy sounds like the use of a euphemism to paper over an actual national shutdown. Think of it like America’s “war on drugs.” The war is really on people who are surveilled, searched, arrested, imprisoned, and otherwise acted upon harshly by government. Yet, politicians can claim the war is on drugs, not people.
Biden then proceeded, in his comments interrupting the reporter’s question, to discuss his plan for a national shutdown, all the while stating that it would not be a national shutdown:
[E]very region, every area, every community can be different and so there’s no circumstance which I can see that would require total national shutdown. I think that would be counterproductive. But, there are constraints in which the degree to which businesses can be open. For example, it’s one thing to say that you can have, in a state where the infection rate is not as high, you can have a gymnasium open. It’s another thing to say it can only be open four hours a day with X number of people. The church I go to — my Catholic church — they don’t allow more than 40 percent of the people to come into the church. Those are rational decisions. It’s not shutting down everything. It’s calibrating based on what the threat is.
Biden declares he opposes a “total” shutdown where the government shuts down “everything.” The fact is that no local, state, or national government in the world has imposed such a shutdown. While shutdowns in America and across the world have imposed major restraints on economic activities and people’s freedom of movement, they have never shut down everything. For example, people have not been required to starve to death in their homes. Grocery stores have remained open. Also remaining open, in many cases, were restaurants for drive through, take out, and delivery. In shutdowns, restrictions were placed on these and other businesses deemed “essential” by government, but they were not shut down. Similarly, shutdowns across the world have imposed extreme mandates on what people do and where people may go, but such restrictions have never been “total.”
Shutdowns in the name of countering coronavirus have been largely defined by governments taking it upon themselves to determine what businesses can be open and to dictate how businesses allowed to remain open can operate. Shutdowns also tend to come with various other government rules including prohibiting the assembling of more than a certain number of people, mandating mask wearing, and imposing limitations on people’s activities outside of home.
Biden on Thursday just said he does not intend to impose a “straw man” national shutdown — a type of action nobody is talking about and that has not been imposed by any governments — and then proceeded to describe how he desires to implement exactly what in common parlance would be called a national shutdown. When Biden says he or the United States government should decide, based on looking at coronavirus information, whether any particular gym in America may be open and, if it is decided the gym is allowed to be open, how many hours a day the gym is allowed to operate and how many people are allowed to be in it, he is saying he supports a national shutdown.
In shutdowns, some stores are closed entirely. Others have mandates placed on them, such as occupancy and hours limits. These are exactly the kind of restraints on businesses that Biden says he wants to impose while claiming he opposes a national shutdown. To us Biden’s language, though he denies it, Biden is in fact supporting a national shutdown, “period.”
Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute.
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From the Archives
Examples of hate speech by Israel against Palestine
1. “There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies, not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.” Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
2. “The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more”…. Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time – August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post, August 30, 2000
3. ” [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs.” Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the Beasts”. New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
4. “The Palestinians” would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls.” Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
5. “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
6. “How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.” Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.
… Continue
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