Trump pushes boundaries of executive powers

Donald Trump began his second presidency with an avalanche of executive orders, continuing the trend of 21st-century presidents to assume the role of an elected monarch.

Trump Tests the Limits of Executive Orders | Reason | J.D. Tuccille:

April 2025 - "Well before President Donald Trump returned to office, his supporters boasted that he would start the second term with a flurry of executive actions. The new president exceeded expectations with an avalanche of pardons, orders, and edicts on matters great and small. Wide-ranging in their scope, the orders 'encompassed sweeping moves to reimagine the country's relationship with immigration, its economy, global health, the environment and even gender roles,' noted USA Today.

"Some should be welcomed by anybody hoping for more respect for liberty by government employees. Others extend state power in ways that are worrisome or even illegitimate. All continue the troubling
trend, over the course of decades and administrations from both major parties, for the president to assume the role of an elected monarch....

"'If it seems as if more recent presidents have had more power than even Washington or Lincoln, it's not an illusion,' Harvard Law School's Erin Peterson wrote in 2019. 'The last three presidents in particular have strengthened the powers of the office,' including through executive orders.... 

"Joe Biden, who took office in 2021, was told to 'ease up on the executive actions, Joe' by even the sympathetic editors of The New York Times after a flurry of executive orders that set a new record up to that point.... Sympathetic to his policies, they pointed out the orders could be reversed by a future executive. Inevitably, and understandably, many of Trump's actions upon assuming office for the second time have involved reversing Biden's orders — some of which had themselves nullified Trump's first-term actions. It's a battle of government by decree with the advantage going to whoever currently holds the presidency....

"Some of Trump's executive orders are very welcome, indeed, for those of us horrified by federal agencies pushing the boundaries of their power.... But other orders seek to exercise power beyond the boundaries of presidential authority — or even the power of the federal government....

"These issues will be hashed out in court. But flaws in these ideas could have been exposed during congressional testimony and debate. It's especially difficult to justify many of these orders given that Republicans hold the majority in both houses of Congress. But even if the legislature was divided or controlled by Democrats, the federal government consists of three branches intended to slow action and encourage deliberation.

"Trump is on firm and even welcome ground when he uses his presidential power to rein in executive agencies and undo the excesses of his predecessor. But making policy and passing laws is supposed to be difficult and should be left to the messy channels established by the Constitution."

Read more: https://reason.com/2025/03/04/trump-tests-the-limits-of-executive-orders/

Trump signs executive orders | Associated Press | March 6, 2025:

Did modern monetary theory elect Trump?

Modern monetary theory (MMT) argues that the federal government, as the sole issuer of legal tender, can issue virtually limitless amounts of new money to fund itself. The years 2020-2024 in the USA provided an unambiguous test of this theory.

Did modern monetary theory elect Donald Trump? | Hill Times | Phillip Magness and Alexander William Salter:

November 19, 2024 - "[M]odern monetary theory is a fringe school of economic thought arguing that the federal government, as the sole issuer of legal tender, can issue virtually limitless amounts of new money to fund itself. Bucking thousands of years of evidence that such reckless policies lead to currency devaluation, advocates shirk all blame when inflation occurs, insisting instead that prices increased due to 'corporate greed' and 'price gouging.' Perhaps some of that sounds familiar....

"The Biden-Harris administration began its term assuming it could 'run the economy hot' while also avoiding inflation. They added another multi-trillion-dollar stimulus to Trump-era COVID relief spending, believing they could escape the repercussions of its price tag..... On the fiscal side, extravagant spending greatly increased government indebtedness. On the monetary side, running the printing press to keep interest rates low flooded financial markets with liquidity. The predictable result was too much money chasing too few goods — the classic recipe for dollar depreciation, better known as inflation.

"When the first signs of an inflationary spiral appeared in summer 2021, the White House responded with an official stance of denialism. Price level increases were only 'transitory,' they assured us, adopting a talking point from modern monetary theory theorist Stephanie Kelton. 

"As the problem lingered ... the White House doubled down on fringe theories, such as blaming 'corporate greed' instead of its own spending habits. As recently as July 2024, Council of Economic Advisors chair Jared Bernstein adopted the modern monetary theory-aligned inflation narrative of economist Isabella Weber, who contends that producers made an 'implicit agreement' to exploit a price shock during the pandemic and extract profits from the public.... Kamala Harris attempted to turn this conspiratorial reasoning into policy by proposing price controls at the grocery store — a scheme rejected by most economists, but championed by Weber, Kelton and other modern monetary theory advocates.... 

"Modern monetary theory fooled Washington’s elite because its message was seductive: If there’s any slack in the economy and the government prints and spends in its own currency, policymakers don’t need to worry about price hikes. The years 2020-2024 provided an unambiguous test of this theory. The answer: It’s bunk. 

"Consumer price inflation peaked at 9 percent during the summer of 2022. Central bankers were late to the game to tighten, even adopting the modern monetary theory talking point about “transitory” inflation for a brief but critical moment in early 2021. Elected Democrats scrambled to minimize the role their profligacy had played in forcibly raising the cost of living, culminating in Harris’s grocery store price control proposal as the centerpiece of her economic platform....

"Fed officials should have predicted the consequences of keeping money growth above economic growth for so long. President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris should have recognized that continued fiscal follies would pressure the Fed to embrace money mischief, and that price controls simply made the administration look economically illiterate and out of touch. This rhetoric began as a convenient political argument for stimulus spending, then morphed into an act of self-deception on the part of the Harris campaign.

"As election day exit polling revealed, the electorate repudiated the modern monetary theory narrative. Americans are fed up with over-credentialed experts inventing new reasons to ignore basic economics. The laptop class has only itself to blame for elevating these fringe theories, thereby facilitating Trump’s electoral comeback."

Read more: https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4996296-modern-monetary-theory-inflation/ 

Modern Monetary Theory explained | Economics Understood | April 25, 2021:

Understanding the Trump landslide

Trump in Arizona, June 2024. Photo by 

Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

As with many Canadians (and Americans) these days, my starting point for reading the daily news day is social media site, X. The site owner, Elon Musk, maintains a free speech policy one cannot find anywhere else. The advantage of that to me is that, after an hour or so, I can get both an overview of the news and a short list of stories to follow up for possible mention on my blog. 

Yesterday, though, all I could find was one story that everyone wanted to post about, the 2024 American election result. It was not just that the Republicans won, but the size of their win. Not only did Donald Trump take the presidency; his party also took control of both houses of Congress. That is hyuge (as the new president would say) in the American system, where the Presidency and Congress (the executive and legislative branches) are formally independent. Let me emphasize its hyugeness by repeating it in its own paragraph. 

( A ) In 2024, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House. 

It seems that everyone on earth, or at least everyone on X, wants to talk about nothing else; and everyone has their own theory of why (A) occurred. One theory that I could not find anywhere on X was my own. I would like more people to know of my theory – not just because it was mine, but because it allowed me to predict (A) four years ago. Indeed, I offered my prediction at the time as a test of my theory: (A) happening would not prove my theory correct, but the failure of (A) to happen would have falsified this version of it. 

I wrote up my theory, and made my prediction, back in November 2020, in an article called " US election results are more of the same ." I was commenting on the fact that: 

( B ) in 2020, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House.

Checking back, I also discovered that: 

( C ) In 2016, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House;

( D ) In ​​2008, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House;  

( E ) In 2000, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House; and 

( F ) In 1992, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate and the House. 

To sum up: For the entire millennium so far, every incumbent president has been replaced by a challenger from the other party, in a repudiation of the incumbent's party. This repudiation has been total, with the challenger's party taking control of Congress as well as the White House. 

Those are facts. Are they just a coincidence or is there a theory that explains them? The theory that I have come up with goes like this: 

The first part follows from Ludwig von Mises' theory of interventionism. Mises taught that, while intervention was meant to be a compromise between minimal and total government, it would always tend toward the total. Each government intervention would have new, unintended consequences, new problems which had to be solved by yet more intervention. In that way, government would grow. But (and this is my own idea at this point), as government increased, so would the problems it created. It would tend to become a bigger, more commanding government trying to perform ever more functions; but it would also increasingly tend to fail at performing any of those functions well. It would increasingly tend to fail at even its core functions of courts, police, and national defense. Given enough time, it would become both a totalitarian state and a failed state. 

Long before that point is reached, the government would be failing to satisfy the needs of an increasing number of voters. Ironically, the more it tried to do, the more people it would fail to satisfy: as a government grows through interventionism, so does the number of dissatisfied voters. Those voters would give up on the party system to some degree. Some reject the system only slightly, becoming nominally independent but still retaining some loyalty to their old party. Others reject it completely and become non-voters. In between are the true independents, dissatisfied voters who reject and will vote to throw out either party. As their numbers grow, true independents increasingly determine the outcome of elections; and as they tend to vote against incumbent government, those incumbents will be totally repudiated at regular intervals. 

While the interval is regular, it is not independent of human agency. It can and has changed.  Currently it is four years (A-C), but before that it was eight (C-F). Since that change coincided with the first election of Donald Trump, it is fair to speculate that his first election is the main reason for the speed-up. Since his election, both parties have become increasingly negative. Negative campaigning has existed since the beginning of American democracy, but since Trump's election both parties have taken negativity to a whole new level. 

In the past the negativity of political campaigns began and ended with political campaigns. members of both parties were able to coexist socially outside political life. Today, though, politics and its negativity, never ends. Partisans of both parties have come to see the other party as intrinsically evil, good only to be destroyed. The challenger party does little more than point to the failures of the incumbent regime. The incumbent party increasingly dismisses the challengers' criticisms as "playing politics" and does nothing to correct them. As a result, the all-important true independents – who can confirm the flaws for themselves, as well as their failure to be corrected – are increasingly unsatisfied, increasingly likely to defect to the challengers at the earliest opportunity. They have become motivated by anti-incumbency. 

This election has confirmed that four-year interval. However, since Trump remains a player it does not tell us whether the interval stays at four years or reverts to eight following his retirement. Based on the data, there is no way to predict that, for now. All that can be predicted is that in four years' time both parties will once again march into battle as if marching to Armageddon; and in that election the Democrats will win. However, how long that Democratic president will stay in office cannot be answered at this time. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Harris/Biden and the separation of powers

Justin Trudeau's father once said that for Canadians, living next to the USA is like sleeping with an elephant; even if it's the tamest. most well-behaved elephant in the word, “one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” So for the next few days, GDPA will be looking at the American presidential election. For the most part, I'll hold to my 2020 vow to stop mentioning Donald Trump (one can read the blog archives for that), and focus on other, less well-known alternatives. 

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in May 2023. Photo by Joe Biden. Wikimedia Commons.

Harris/Biden and the separation of powers | X | Insurrection Barbie: 

November 2, 2024 - If Trump is a dictator, name one time he usurped power from the other branches of government to enact his will in violation of the separation of powers. 

Here are all the times the Harris/Biden administration did exactly that:

1. The Harris and Biden administration extended the eviction moratorium after COVID by abusing their emergency powers at the expense of private property rights. 
2. This administration issued vaccine mandates for workers because their 'patience' had run thin. This was struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.
3. Our constitution gives the legislative branch the power to pass laws. This administration was not able to cancel student loan debt by getting Congress to vote on a bill to do so. So, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did this by executive .... fiat. They did this after the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional. Twice. 
4. In violation of our first amendment, they tried to enact a disinformation governing board to censor your free speech. Ultimately the public backlash was so great that they scrapped the project for now.
5. Through executive fiat and death by regulation they have upended our energy policies making our emergency oil reserves drop to the lowest they have been since 1984. They killed the Keystone pipeline and they defied court rulings and continued to opt out against holding oil drilling sales. 
6. This administration threatened and coerced social media companies to silence the speech of American citizens because it did not agree with the position of the government, in violation of the first amendment. 
7. This administration has absolutely zero respect for property rights and have publicly announced that they pledge to protect [sic] 30% of land and water by 2030. That is a land grab....
8. This administration has purposefully ignored our immigration laws and allow 13 million people into the country. They have willfully failed to uphold deportation orders, letting them lapse....
9. [T]hey have failed to secure our border and have allowed 425,000 criminals who have been convicted into the country.
10. They have targeted parents for protesting at their children’s school board meetings in violation of their first amendment rights of free speech and have had the FBI place them on a watchlist.
11. They have targeted pro-life demonstrators and thrown them in prison while letting pro-abortion activists burn down clinics. The executive branch has to faithfully execute the laws without bias.... 
12. They were not able to pass any legislation in Congress to force their transgender agenda into the school system so they passed it by executive fiat and the courts struck down much of it at this point.

Read more: https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/1852587261650481476

US Democratic Party has abandoned democracy

The coverup of Joe Biden's cognitive decline, and the subsequent coronation of Kamala Harris without a vote, should make clear that the Democratic Party has no use for actual democracy. 

Photo by Jorge González. Courtesy Flickr, some rights reserved.

Democrats’ Disdain for Democracy | American Compass | Drew Holden:

August 13, 2024 - "The coverup of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the resulting coronation, absent a primary vote, of Vice President Kamala Harris should make one thing clear to would-be Democratic voters: the party views you with disdain. 

"For years, Democratic leadership insisted to their voters that ... [Biden] was fit as a fiddle. His memory was fine. Perhaps he was a 'super-ager.' In any case, he was going to be the party’s champion once again.... As the 2024 presidential primary — nominally the apparatus by which a party’s voters select their candidate — approached, party leadership took pains to limit who could be on the ballot. The choice was preordained. Despite questions about Biden’s fitness for another campaign — to say nothing of four more years as the man with the nuclear codes — the party tried to engineer early voting among his delegates to cement his name on the top of the ticket....

"That was until a team of 'super friends' — Democratic royalty, from Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi to Chuck Schumer and Jim Clyburn — was assembled to tell Biden that his time was up. Alongside private entreaties and anonymous quotes, the effort to compel Biden to step aside was accomplished behind closed doors, far from the prying eyes of voters....

"With Biden out of the way, the next logical step would have been a contested primary, where candidates made their case to the American people, and delegates from their states ... would decide on a nominee at the Democratic National Convention. This would have been the democratic choice: giving the party’s voters a say on their nominee.... Instead, party leadership quickly closed ranks around Harris.... No primary votes were cast for her but she was selected by acclamation by Democratic Party power brokers.... The last time Democratic Party voters had the opportunity to choose Harris, they were uniform in the opposite direction. As a candidate in the 2020 primary, Harris couldn’t crack double-digit support in Iowa despite an all-hands-on-deck effort in the state, leading her to suspend her campaign months before the caucus began.

"The move is emblematic of nearly every recent Democratic Party presidential nomination. The last meaningfully open presidential primary was in 2008, before the Obama re-elect, Hillary Clinton’s Harris-like coronation, and 2020’s anti-Bernie putsch. If Harris wins the presidency in 2024, it could be nearly a quarter-century between primaries where everyday Democrats had a say in their presidential nominee....

"What these events make clear is that, for all of its self-reverential talk of 'defending democracy,' the Democratic Party in fact disdains democracy as the method by which leaders are selected. What lies beneath all the flowery prose is a cold condescension, a conviction that party leadership knows better than voters what they want, and, in any case, what voters will have. Perhaps no issue illustrates the point better than immigration....  Americans of all political persuasions want the open borders policies that Biden and Harris embraced thrown out. So ... the Democratic Party ... nominated the member of Biden’s administration most publicly associated with the border crisis, whom the New York Times described in 2021 as 'in charge of the effort to stem migration from Central America': Kamala Harris.... 

"This doubling-down on contentious issues is characteristic of the Biden administration’s approach, but ... such an approach alienates voters, particularly independents, who 'on polarizing policies…are 30 points closer to Republicans [than Democrats]'.... Democrats and the Biden White House have sought to insulate themselves from the criticism by playing it safe, turning inward, and attempting to white-knuckle through the criticism. Biden hid from press engagements. Since being named his successor, Harris has done the same, failing to take live questions from the press for her first two-and-a-half weeks (and counting). While this strategy may work, ... it denies voters any insight into what the candidate stands for or plans to do if elected. Regardless of the electoral outcome, a strategy that relies on denying voters the information they need to form an opinion about a candidate is hardly a resounding embrace of democracy....

"Above all, democracy entails that political parties should aspire to be responsive to the wants and desires of the people. How Democrats and Republicans prioritize those wants and desires is a matter of political discretion. But the Democrats have made clear that they simply aren’t interested in the undertaking at all."

Read more: https://americancompass.org/democrats-disdain-for-democracy/

'Can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-American,' says president of a nation founded by an insurrection

Note: this article was originally written as parody. 

'You Can’t Be Pro-Insurrection And Pro-American,' Says President Of Nation Founded By An Insurrection | Babylon Bee:

July 27, 2022 · "The president shot back at what he called 'Super Duper Ultra MAGA Turbo Titans' Monday as he claimed 'you can't be pro-insurrection and pro-American' despite being the commander in chief of a nation founded by an insurrection.

"'Can you imagine Thomas Jefferson calling for the blood of tyrants? What if John Adams refused to pledge fealty to King George?' ... said the unblinking Biden, unflinching in the face of a citizenry increasingly questioning whether he is fit to be president.

"'Look, here's the deal, these Capitol insurrectioneserutes are traitors to American ideals because they wanted to challenge the results of an election,' Biden confirmed. 'I know this for a fact because a traitor is everyone who does not agree with me.'

"'We saw what happened,' he continued, referring to the events of January 6. 'Law enforcement agencies were speared with terrorist javelins dripping in blood, surrounded by carnage. These are all things that actually happened that I am not making up,' he added.

"At publishing time, White House officials had advised the president to stop saying 'we saw what happened' in regards to the January 6 capitol riots because he keeps describing events that never took place."

Read more: https://babylonbee.com/cleanArticle/you-cant-be-pro-insurrection-and-pro-american-says-president-of-nation-founded-by-an-insurrection

President Biden on Donald Trump: "You can't be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American." | C-SPAN | January 5, 2024:

"Disinformation" crusaders oppose 1st Amendment

Some critics of the injunction against the U.S. government using social media to suppress constitutionally protected speech actually have a problem with the Constitution itself.

Some Critics of the Ruling Against Biden's Censorship by Proxy Have a Beef With the 1st Amendment Itself | Reason | Jacob Sullum:

July 12, 2023 - "Some critics of last week's preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden, which bars federal officials from encouraging social media platforms to suppress constitutionally protected speech, reject the premise that such contacts amount to government-directed censorship. Other critics, especially researchers who focus on 'disinformation' and hate speech, pretty much concede that point but see nothing troubling about it. From their perspective, the problem is that complying with the First Amendment means tolerating inaccurate, misleading, and hateful speech that endangers public health, democracy, and social harmony.

Courtesy Library of Congress.

"The day after Terry Doughty, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, issued the injunction, The New York Times gave voice to those [latter] concerns in a piece headlined 'Disinformation Researchers Fret About Fallout From Judge's Order.' According to the subhead, those researchers 'said a restriction on government interaction with social media companies could impede efforts to curb false claims about vaccines and voter fraud'.... 

"'Most misinformation or disinformation that violates social platforms' policies is flagged by researchers, nonprofits, or people and software at the platforms themselves,' the Times notes. But 'academics and anti-disinformation organizations often complained that platforms were unresponsive to their concerns.'

 The paper reinforces that point with a quote from Viktorya Vilk, director for digital safety and free expression (!) at PEN America: 'Platforms are very good at ignoring civil society organizations and our requests for help or requests for information or escalation of individual cases. They are less comfortable ignoring the government.'

"The reason social media companies are 'less comfortable ignoring the government,' of course, is that it exercises coercive power over them and could use that power to punish them for failing to censor speech it considers dangerous. In the 155-page opinion laying out the reasoning behind his injunction, Doughty ... cites myriad communications that show administration officials expected platforms to promptly comply with the government's censorship 'requests,' which they typically did, and repeatedly complained when companies were less than fully cooperative. He emphasizes how keen Facebook et al. were to assuage President Joe Biden's anger at moderation practices that he said were "killing people'.... As the fretful researchers quoted by the Times see it, that is all as it should be....

"The Times paraphrases Bond Benton, an associate communication professor at Montclair State University, who worries that Doughty's ruling 'carried a message that misinformation qualifies as speech and its removal as the suppression of speech.' As usual, the Times glides over disputes about what qualifies as 'misinformation,' which according to the Biden administration includes truthful content that it considers misleading or unhelpful. But since even a demonstrably false assertion 'qualifies as speech' under the First Amendment, the 'message' that troubles Benton is an accurate statement of constitutional law. That does not mean platforms cannot decide for themselves what content they are willing to host, but it does mean the government should not try to dictate such decisions....

"In an interview with the Times, Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, complained that the U.S. takes 'a 'particularly fangless' approach to dangerous content compared with places like Australia and the European Union.' Those comparisons are telling. Australia's Online Safety Act empowers regulators to order removal of 'illegal and restricted content'.... Internet service providers that do not comply with complaint-triggered takedown orders within 24 hours are subject to civil penalties.... Freedom House notes that Australia's law includes 'no requirement for the eSafety Commissioner to give reasons for removal notices and provides no opportunity for users to respond to complaints'.... Australia's scheme plainly restricts or prohibits speech that would be constitutionally protected in the United States. 

"Likewise the European Union's Digital Services Act, which covers 'illegal content,' a category that is defined broadly to include anything that runs afoul of a member nation's speech restrictions. E.U. countries such as France and Germany prohibit several types of speech that are covered by the First Amendment.... These are the models that Ahmed thinks the U.S. should be following.... Critics like Ahmed, in short, do not merely object to Doughty's legal analysis; they have a beef with the First Amendment itself, which allows Americans to express all sorts of potentially objectionable opinions. If you value that freedom, you probably consider it a virtue of the American legal system. But if your priority is eliminating 'hate and disinformation,' the First Amendment is, at best, an inconvenient obstacle."

Read more: https://reason.com/2023/07/12/some-critics-of-the-ruling-against-bidens-censorship-by-proxy-have-a-beef-with-the-1st-amendment-itself/

Judge strikes down Biden's student loan bailout

Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness Plan Is Unconstitutional, Says Federal Judge | Reason - Elizabeth Nolan Brown: 

November 11, 2022 - "A federal judge has ruled unconstitutional President Joe Biden's plan to forgive student loan debt. In a decision issued yesterday, U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman ruled in favor of plaintiffs Myra Brown and Alexander Taylor. Brown has student loans but is entirely ineligible for Biden's forgiveness program because her loans are privately held. Taylor has loans but is ineligible for the full $20,000 in debt relief. The Job Creators Network Foundation sued on their behalf, arguing that Biden's bailout plan violated the Administrative Procedure Act (which requires a period of public comment) and that the Department of Education lacks the authority to implement the program.

"Pittman found that the program did not violate administrative procedure. Instead, he found that the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 ("HEROES Act") — which Biden used to justify his move — does not actually 'provide the executive branch clear congressional authorization to create a $400 billion student loan forgiveness program.' Bident's student debt relief plan 'is thus an unconstitutional exercise of Congress's legislative power and must be vacated.' 'In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone,' Pittman wrote in his decision....

"In a statement yesterday, Job Creators Network Foundation President Elaine Parker said Biden's bailout 'would have done nothing to address the root cause of unaffordable tuition: greedy and bloated colleges that raise tuition far more than inflation year after year while sitting on $700 billion in endowments. We hope that the court's decision today will lay the groundwork for real solutions to the student loan crisis'....

"The Department of Justice has filed an appeal, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said yesterday. More than 26 million people have already applied for student loan forgiveness, she said, and the Biden administration will keep their information 'so it can quickly process their relief once we prevail in court.'

"The Job Creators Network Foundation suit is one of several cases challenging the program. These include a lawsuit from six Republican-led states and one from the Cato Institute. 'Cato's suit joins at least six others, with plaintiffs making various claims of harm,' noted Neal McCluskey, director of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom, in a blog post. 'The ultimate aim of all the suits, though, is the same: To stop a move that is not only patently unconstitutional, but will inflict many painful costs on society.'

"'The constitutional issue is straightforward: The Constitution gives the power of the purse to Congress, but in declaring that it would forgive up to $20,000 in loans for households making below $250,000 a year, the Biden administration essentially created about $400 billion in new spending,' McCluskey wrote late last month."

Read more: https://reason.com/2022/11/11/bidens-student-loan-forgiveness-plan-is-unconstitutional-says-federal-judge/

Biden says Covid pandemic is over, but 'White House' disagrees

Biden says Covid ‘pandemic is over’, despite US daily death toll in the hundreds | The Guardian:

September 19, 2022 - "Joe Biden has said 'the pandemic is over' in an interview broadcast on Sunday, though he admitted 'we still have a problem with Covid', as the US continues to grapple with coronavirus infections that kill hundreds of Americans a day. The president told CBS’s 60 Minutes: 'We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape'.... 

"Last week the World Health Organization declared the end of the pandemic was 'in sight', after revealing that [world] weekly deaths were at the lowest level since March 2020. However, it cautioned that coronavirus still posed an 'acute global emergency' and highlighted that during the first eight months of 2022 more than 1 million people died from Covid-19.... But nearly 400 people a day continue to die from Covid in the US, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/19/biden-says-covid-pandemic-is-over-despite-us-daily-death-toll-in-the-hundreds

White House ridiculed after walking back Biden’s statement that pandemic is over: ‘He is not in charge’ | MSN - Gabriel Hays, Fox News:

Sep. 20, 2022 - "But according to CNN, an administration official told the outlet that 'the President's comments do not mark a change in policy toward the administration's handling of the virus, and there are no plans to lift the Public Health Emergency.' The current emergency status, which had been announced in January 2020, is still extended through Oct. 13.... 

"[T]he fact that the White House had to clarify and essentially walk back the president’s claims about the state of the pandemic drew scathing criticism from Biden administration critics, who insisted that this tension between Biden and his staffers may be another hint they do his job for him. 

"'He is not in charge,' tweeted The Spectator contributing editor Stephen Miller, who also shared an image of the CNN headline that read, 'White House says Covid-19 policy unchanged despite Biden’s comments that the "pandemic is over."' In subsequent tweets, Miller added, 'It wasn't a gaffe. It wasn't a slip. He said it pretty definitely twice. In the same interview he dared anyone who questioned his mental fitness.... Biden reportedly complains that he looks weak. This is why. His own administration undercuts him every time he opens his mouth,' he wrote, and then asked, 'Is he in charge or not?'

• Republican communications figure Matt Whitlock remarked, 'Fascinating that the White House walked back Biden’s comments on Taiwan and COVID, but decided to let his comments that 'historic inflation is no big deal" stand.' 
• 'Like clockwork. Biden’s handlers are out in force,' commented Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas....
• Radio host Derek Hunter mocked Biden, writing, 'Didn’t Joe say something about just watch him when asked whether or not he has the mental abilities to be President? One interview, at least two walk-backs by staff (so far). #WatchMe.' 
• Abigail Marone, the press secretary for Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., asked, 'Who exactly is running the country here?' 
• 'We have a non-president,' declared Claremont Institute president Ryan P. Williams.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/white-house-ridiculed-after-walking-back-biden-e2-80-99s-statement-that-pandemic-is-over-e2-80-98he-is-not-in-charge-e2-80-99/ar-AA122CVh

Covid and the Psychology of Totalitarianism

Never Again? Israel’s mask mob echo the Holocaust | The Conservative Woman - Donna Edmunds:

June 30, 2022 - "In January this year, a young woman went to the opera.... The woman, known only as M, has a medical mask exemption and arrived with her face uncovered. Soon after, she was violently turned upon by her fellow opera-goers. ‘There were about 400 attendees, about 100 of them were shouting at me (people physically blocking my way to my seats and not letting me through) people telling me not to stand near them and shooing me away,’ she wrote in her Telegram post. ‘A woman hit me on the head. I didn’t speak a single word to all these people, I was literally cowering in place and at no point did I speak or reply or gesture to any of them, after the initial blow up I just went straight to security.’

"Thankfully, the security staff were supportive of M, moving away the more aggressive among the crowd and threatening to evict them. Some of the staff seemed shaken by what they had witnessed. They escorted M to her seat and stood guard at the end of her row throughout the performance. This scene would be shocking enough had it taken place somewhere like Berlin, which has seen this sort of irrational out-group persecution by supposedly enlightened citizens before. It’s all the more disturbing that it actually took place in Tel Aviv, Israel.

"Israel is a country awash with Holocaust memorials.... Yet when Covid struck in March 2020, Israel was among the countries that most enthusiastically embraced the harshest of public health measures. Its citizens suffered months of lockdowns, business closures, school closures, mask mandates and the most insulting policy of all: the ‘green pass’ – a vaccine passport which segregated society into the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’. Deckchairs appeared on Tel Aviv beach labelled ‘reserved for vaccinated people only’. The parallels with our history, only eight decades behind us, were striking and alarming, yet astonishingly the majority were content to sit inside warm restaurants during the winter of 2021, watching those who were unwilling or unable to be vaccinated turned away or shivering outside under inadequate patio heaters without a murmur of dissent....

"We know that nearly 400,000 Jews died in the Warsaw Ghetto, but how many of us know why the ghetto was created? That it was a public health policy? When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 and bombed Warsaw, the city’s sewerage system was damaged and typhus quickly spread. German propaganda already blamed Jews for spreading disease, so, although typhus was found throughout the city, it was the Jewish neighbourhoods that became ‘restricted epidemic areas’. Although by the summer of 1940 typhus cases were falling, German doctors persuaded the authorities to create a ghetto to prevent further spread. The creation of the ghetto, where overcrowding and lack of food were rife, caused a spike in cases.

"Fast-forward to 2022, and not everyone was content to go along with the narrative. Some of us wondered how so many could be so blind to the history repeating in front of their eyes. What did those Tel Aviv opera-goers think they were doing when they mobbed M?

"A Belgian psychologist and academic gives us the answer. Mattias Desmet has spent the last few years studying the rise of totalitarian regimes and was already uncomfortable with the direction Western societies were headed in when Covid hit.... In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Desmet explains that societies in which a large number of people have anxious, lonely lives lacking in meaning are ripe for totalitarianism to set in. In those conditions, people are looking for a narrative that creates purpose and a sense of shared endeavour. Many people found exactly that in the Covid era. If left unchecked, the false narrative of mass formation descends into violence and persecution. It descends into the Holocaust.

"Desmet explained what is required to avert this dismal fate. ‘It’s really crucial that the people who are not in the process of mass formation continue to speak out, because if they don’t, the mass hypnosis becomes deeper and deeper, and typically reaches the point where the masses become so fanatically convinced of the narrative they believe in, that they believe it is necessary to eliminate the people who don’t go along with it,’ he said. ‘This is because once someone is in mass formation he feels an overwhelming solidarity, and he’s convinced that people who don’t share the solidarity, who don’t go along with the masses, lack solidarity, lack citizenship. Consequently they are not human any more and have to be destroyed.’

"He added: ‘If dissident voices stop speaking out, then the process that happened in the Soviet Union around 1930 and in Germany around 1935 will typically start to happen [again]. Once the dissident voices, the opposition, stop speaking out within the public space, within a period of six months to one year, the cruelty starts.’

"When I heard about M’s experience, I knew I had to speak out. And I wasn’t the only one. Along with my partner and a few others, most notably historian Andrew Barr, we set about writing a declaration – a warning – from the Jews to the world. We have been here before. We know where division, demonisation and mass psychosis lead. We cannot let it happen again.

"Some have said that we are insulting those who died in the Holocaust by highlighting the clear parallels between Covid policies and the events leading to the Holocaust. We say the opposite: that only by learning from history and ensuring that nothing of the sort ever happens again can the memories of those who died truly be honoured.... Others have said that our declaration has been made redundant by the apparent rollback of Covid policies. Flights are taking off again, people are unmasked, the world is returning to a semblance of normality. To those people I say two things: first, in May, Joe Biden stated frankly: ‘Covid isn’t over.’ Second, our governments have had a taste of absolute power. They now know they can lock us up at the drop of a hat. If they’ve done it once, they will do it again, unless we make it abundantly clear that we won’t be so meek the next time....

" I invite you to sign the Isaiah 62 Declaration here. https://isaiah62declaration.com/"
                For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent
                For Jerusalem’s sake I will not be still
                Isaiah 62:1

Read more: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/never-again-israels-mask-mob-echo-the-holocaust/

Biden deploys U.S. combat troops in Somalia

Why Are US troops going to Somalia? | Inkstick - Kate Kizer:

May 25, 2022 - "In March 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US military wanted President Joe Biden to reverse President Donald Trump’s last-minute removal of US military trainers from Somalia right before he begrudgingly left office. Instead, without any public or congressional debate, Biden decided to redeploy US troops to Somalia to fight against al-Shabab, an armed non-state group that has launched attacks against civilians and government forces for decades — and against whom the United States has never officially declared war.

"As has become the trend under this presidency, establishment forces in the administration appear to have once again given the president advice that is both politically and strategically short-sighted — and he’s far from the first. Like in Afghanistan, US policymakers have chosen militarism and perceived realpolitik in Somalia for the last four decades: President Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger cozied up to the genocidal Siad Barre regime.... There was the infamous Black Hawk Down disaster during the Clinton administration; undeclared CIA drone strikes for the last two decades; the list goes on and on. Trump quickly ramped up US drone strikes and special forces operations in these areas, including Yemen, Somalia, and Libya....

"All these episodes have one thing in common: US policymakers perceive Somalia as a battlefield rather than a country full of people caught in the cross-fire of armed men vying for power. So there was the hope of a new approach when Biden’s team reportedly halted US drone strikes in so-called 'areas outside of active hostilities' — locations like Yemen, Libya, and Somalia ... as part of his administration’s proclaimed counterterrorism policy review.

"Biden’s decision to send US troops back to Somalia officially dashed any hope that the administration’s counterterrorism review would end or, at minimum, significantly curtail its undeclared, often covert wars in Somalia and beyond. His decision to engage the US military in another nation-building project with zero congressional authorization is eerily similar to what was attempted in Afghanistan. Given that the past decades of US covert action and trying to build a national military have merely led to a strengthening of al-Shabaab (as has been the case in other countries, the US is conducting counterterrorism) rather than its weakening. It begs the question: what was actually 'reviewed' by the administration over the last year?

"Unfortunately, even before Biden decided to return US troops to Somalia, it had been clear for some time that the president was not going to change the course of the United States’ post-9/11 wars. Officials in the National Security Council told me last fall that the chaos of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan cooled any appetite for withdrawing US troops from other war zones. And while the administration never announced an official end to the counterterrorism review, its new counterterrorism czar — then at the Department of Homeland Security — debuted that the future of these wars was essentially no new strategy.

"There’s little to no evidence that this administration has wrestled with the facts that the US government is fundamentally inept at training and professionalizing foreign militaries, the ineffectiveness of (let alone the racism inherent to) concepts like countering violent extremism (CVE), and that providing weak institutions with millions or billions in money for war incentivizes corruption and conflict. So instead, the prescription is more CVE, more rebranded counterinsurgency and drone wars, and more lawlessness to establish the rule of law. The main difference is merely the explicit focus on exporting the duty of carrying out these wars to foreign militaries.

"All of this brings us back to ... the mission’s intention to create and train a professional and capable national Somali security force that can eliminate al-Shabaab and has legitimacy in the eyes of the Somali people. This recycling of past failed strategies once again misses why there is no US military solution in Somalia: a state’s legitimacy does not come from foreign military training, and it certainly won’t come from a security force trained by the very foreign military that continues to kill the very people Somali forces are supposed to protect..... 

"In returning US troops to Somalia, Biden has kept the US stuck in a military-first mindset that focuses on eradicating or undermining the enemy on the battlefield — not addressing the root causes of insecurity and conflict. It is now up to Congress to check his decision — only Congress has the sole constitutional duty to declare war. But the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force application to Somalia is flimsy at best. The president’s deployment certainly meets the 'introduction in hostilities' threshold of Section 8C of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, meaning that the deployment of US troops to an active war zone puts them at imminent risk of war, requiring Congress’ affirmative approval. But with Congress in a militaristic crouch on Ukraine, it’s unclear whether there is political will to invoke its war powers over renewed US war in Somalia."

Read more: https://inkstickmedia.com/why-are-us-troops-going-to-somalia/

Biden flip-flops on wealth tax

Biden's Desperate Wealth Tax Flip-Flop } Reason - Peter Suderman:

March 29, 2022 - "In December 2019, when Joe Biden, still campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, released his tax plan, much of the coverage focused on the contrast between his comparatively [moderate] plan and the plans issued by his more progressive rivals. A CNBC report on his plan was labeled 'wealth tax wars. A Washington Post headline noted that  Biden's $3.2 trillion tax plan highlighted 'divisions' with Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.). Among the starkest of those divisions was that the former vice president had rejected calls by Warren and Sanders to back a wealth tax on the richest Americans. 

"On the campaign trail, Biden himself played up that contrast. Among the criticisms lobbed at the Sanders and Warren wealth tax proposals was that they were fundamentally punitive, because they taxed wealth of a small, specific group of individuals. He told a wealthy crowd of supporters in Los Angeles that while they shouldn't expect a tax cut from him, there would be 'no punishment either'.... He complained about divisive tax policy, and rejected the idea of a 'a single tax, on a single group of people'.... 

"Yet now, as president, Biden has embraced a wealth tax of his own. In his latest budget plan, Biden proposed something the White House has dubbed the 'Billionaire Minimum Income Tax,' which applies to all income, realized and unrealized, for households worth more than $100 million. The Biden administration is framing this as a form of 'prepayment' on future capital gains — which is to say it's a form of taxation on money that someone has not actually seen, based on the value of their holdings. It's not exactly the same as the wealth taxes proposed by Warren and Sanders, but it's designed around the same fundamental idea: the taxation of personal wealth, rather than of cash income, which often takes the form of difficult-to-value assets. 

"Most of the same criticisms that applied to the Warren and Sanders plans still apply: Biden's plan probably wouldn't raise nearly as much money as the administration assumes: Wealth taxes are exceptionally difficult and resource-intensive to administer, which is why most OECD countries that have implemented wealth taxes eventually dropped them. It's also quite likely to be unconstitutional. At minimum, if it passed, it would be tied up in court.  

"But ... it's not intended to pass, which makes this exercise even more of a charade. Biden's latest wealth tax proposal is part of the White House's annual budget proposal, which is always a sort of wish list rather than a realistic path forward for the budget. Biden's wealth tax, then, is a desperate policy gimmick by a White House struggling with low approval numbers on the economy.... 

"It's a publicity stunt, however, that tells us something, not only about Biden's leftward drift, but about his comportment as president, given his previously stated opposition to the idea. Biden is willing to make an obvious phony of himself, embracing a policy he knows is punitive, divisive, unworkable, and virtually certain not to pass — and he's willing to do so simply to get attention. Not only is Biden not a moderate, he is evidently not trustworthy either."

Read more: https://reason.com/2022/03/29/bidens-desperate-wealth-tax-flip-flop/

Biden plan to ban menthol cigarettes unpopular

The GOP’s Newest Midterm Issue: Menthols? | Washington Free Beacon - Collin Anderson: 

April 25, 2022 - "With voters across the country already sour on Joe Biden's handling of immigration, foreign policy, and the economy, Republicans have identified another issue to rally midterm voters against Democrats: the president's proposed menthol cigarette ban. 

"According to an April Echelon Insights poll obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, swing-state voters in Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina widely disapprove of the ... ban. Fifty-two percent of Georgia and Nevada voters and 50 percent of North Carolina voters say the administration should keep menthols legal. Just 28, 31, and 30 percent of voters, meanwhile, want to ban the flavored cigarettes in Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, respectively.... 

""Forty-nine percent of Nevada voters — including 60 percent of Hispanic voters in the state — would be less likely to support a candidate who 'vocally supported' a menthol ban, the poll shows. Just 21 percent of Silver State voters would be more likely to back a menthol ban supporter, according to the poll.

"The Biden administration announced its intention to ban menthol cigarettes on April 29, 2021.... Roughly one year later, however, the proposed ban is still in limbo, and the Biden administration's delay has not helped sell the move to voters ... nearly 90 percent of voters in Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina believe the administration should not 'spend their time banning menthol cigarettes,' the Echelon poll shows. As a result, more than 60 percent of voters in the three states believe Biden should take a pause on the ban....

"According to the Echelon poll, roughly two-thirds of Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina voters oppose the ban because they feel it would be ineffective. More than 60 percent of voters in the three states, meanwhile, believe the ban would 'push the product out of legitimate stores and onto street corners where gangs and violent criminals sell and generate profit for organized crime.' That number includes 77 percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada, 60 percent of Democratic voters in Georgia, and 64 percent of independent voters in North Carolina.

"The American Civil Liberties Union voiced a similar concern last year, calling the ban a 'policy disaster waiting to happen' because it would create 'large, underground illegal markets' and cause 'a massive law enforcement problem for states, counties, and cities.' Earlier this month, ... Democratic power broker Al Sharpton penned a letter to the Biden administration that said a menthol ban would 'expose consumers to dangerous contraband cigarettes' and 'promote criminal activity.'"

Read more: https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/the-gops-newest-midterm-issue-menthols/amp/

New science undercuts case for vaccine mandates

McCaughey: New vax science shows mandates unwise | Boston Herald - Betsy McCaughey:

November 8, 2021 -"New scientific findings in the prestigious Lancet Infectious Diseases journal blow a hole in the argument that workers need to get vaccinated to protect those around them. The findings prove the foolishness of forcing police and other public employees to get jabbed or lose their pay. And President Joe Biden should retract his order to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to compel large employers to mandate vaccines.

"The journal reported Thursday that COVID-19 vaccines have 'minimal' impact on preventing transmission of the delta strain ... the COVID strain currently causing over 99% of U.S. cases. Vaccines protect the people getting the shots from serious illness, but they don’t stop the delta variant from spreading to others....

"Americans should choose to get vaccinated. The key word is 'choose'.... Though shots are no guarantee against getting infected and spreading it to others, they provide significant protection (90% or more) against hospitalization and death. I’m triple jabbed. Choosing not to get vaccinated is choosing to risk your own life. The health risk to others is minimal. Most vaccines — against polio, smallpox, measles and other diseases — prevent infection and spread. But not COVID-19 vaccines....

"Governors and mayors from Maine to Los Angeles are demanding that public employees, and even nurses and doctors, hailed just months ago as heroes, get vaxxed or go without a job. Just as politicians don’t read the bills before voting on them, they don’t keep up with science but still want to tell the rest of us what to do.

"The groundbreaking findings in Lancet show that fully vaccinated people who came down with COVID infected others in their household at the same rate (about 25%) as unvaccinated people did (about 23%). The vaccinated had just as much viral load in their upper respiratory tract, making them just as contagious. The British researchers also found that vaccinated people were only somewhat less likely to contract the virus (25%) compared with the unvaccinated (38%)....

"Meanwhile, the White House is pressing large companies to mandate vaccinations and calling on OSHA to enforce that policy with hefty penalties. The Build Back Better bill increases the penalties tenfold to as much as $700,000 per incident for hazardous conditions, threatening bankruptcy for all but the largest enterprises. The Biden administration expects to publish the rules in the Federal Register in the coming days, affecting about two-thirds of the private sector workforce. Yet the new science undercuts OSHA’s claim that unvaccinated people are a workplace hazard.

"Lancet Infectious Diseases stressed the urgency of improving current vaccines or developing new ones to actually 'protect against asymptomatic infections and onward transmission.' Foolishly, the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress vilify the vaccine developer Moderna for making a profit and threaten to seize its patents. It’s possible COVID will continue morphing into new variants, requiring new vaccines from companies like Moderna. When you’re fighting a war — in this case, against a killer disease — attacking your own ammunitions maker is no way to win it."

Read more: https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/11/08/mccaughey-new-vax-sciences-shows-mandates-unwise/

Read study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00648-4/fulltext

Biden: Vaccinated are "not going to get Covid-19"

Fact check: Biden makes false claims about Covid-19, auto prices and other subjects at CNN town hall | CNN - Daniel Dale & Tara Subramaniam:

July 22, 2021 - "President Joe Biden participated Wednesday [July 21] in the second CNN town hall of his presidency, taking questions from anchor Don Lemon and local residents in Cincinnati. As he did at his February town hall, Biden made a number of false or misleading claims....

"Calling on Americans to get vaccinated against Covid-19, Biden said, 'If you're vaccinated, you're not going to be hospitalized, you're not going to be in the ICU unit and you're not going to die.' In another exchange moments later, Biden said that even if vaccinated people do 'catch the virus,' they are 'not likely to get sick.' But then, during a third exchange, Biden said that since the vaccines 'cover' the highly transmissible Delta variant of the virus: 'You're not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations'....

"Biden's second claim – that vaccinated people are 'not likely to get sick' – was accurate. But the blanket promises in his first and third comments – that vaccinated people are simply 'not going to be hospitalized,' 'not going to die' and, even with the very contagious Delta variant, 'not going to get Covid' – were inaccurate. Covid-19 vaccines are highly effective, and they sharply reduce the likelihood of infection, serious illness and death. However, contrary to Biden's categorical declarations, they do not guarantee that people will not get the virus or will not be hospitalized or die. Even vaccinated people on Biden's own staff have been infected. So have a senior aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, multiple Democratic state legislators from Texas who have been in Washington, DC, this month; and various other high-profile people....

"The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ... notes on its website that 'vaccine breakthrough cases will occur, even though the vaccines are working as expected' and 'there will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized or die from Covid-19.'"

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/22/politics/fact-check-biden-cnn-town-hall-july/index.html

Covid-19: Unvaccinated face 11 times risk of death from delta variant, CDC data show | British Medical Journal - Owen Dyer:

September 16, 2021 - "Unvaccinated Americans have died at 11 times the rate of those fully vaccinated since the delta variant became the dominant strain, indicate surveillance data gathered over the summer by the US Centers for Disease Control. Vaccinated people were 10 times less likely to be admitted to hospital and five times less likely to be infected than unvaccinated people, found one study that tracked adults across 13 states and cities.1

"Levels of protection were lower than were conferred by vaccines offered at the end of spring, the study found.... From 4 April to 20 June unvaccinated people died from covid-19 at 16.6 times the rate among the fully vaccinated (95% confidence interval 13.5 to 20.4). Between 20 June and 17 July that rate fell to 11.3 (9.1 to 13.9). Before 20 June admissions of unvaccinated people with covid-19 to hospital were running at 13.3 (11.3 to 15.6) times the rate among the vaccinated, but this had fallen to 10.4 (8.1 to 13.3) after that date. Unvaccinated people were infected at 11.1 (7.8 to 15.8) times the rate of the vaccinated before 20 June but at only 4.6 (2.5 to 8.5) times the rate thereafter. These figures represent declines in crude efficacy, for all vaccine types combined, from 94% to 91% for death, 92% to 90% for hospital admissions, and 91% to 78% for infection."

Read more: https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2282

Read study: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037e1.htm?s_cid=mm7037e1_w

Biden misleading about Covid, Johnson suggests

Sen. Ron Johnson Drops Truth Bomb on True Number of ‘Fully Vaccinated’ People Dying with Covid | Becker News - Kyle Becker: 

October 1, 2021 - "Senator Ron Johnson [R-WI] took to the Senate floor on Thursday to unveil some Covid facts that the mainstream media have been censoring.... Johnson referred directly to public health figures from England, because health authorities in the United States are obfuscating the facts or misleading Americans with their Covid reports.

"'Let’s look at some data,' Sen. Johnson said. 'The type of data we are not getting from our healthcare agencies, so we have to look, unfortunately, to England and Israel, that are more transparent.... I will give you the highlights ... from Public Health England [PHE].... 

"'This is from [PHE's] Technical Briefing number 23, dated September 17th, 2021. It covers cases for about seven-and-a-half months,' he continued. 'What the data shows for that seven-and-a-half month period in England, there were about 750,000 new Covid cases. About a little under 600,000 of those were Delta variant – about eighty percent. The number of deaths associated with those 600,000 Delta cases was 2,542,' Johnson added. 'Which gives us a Case Fatality Ratio of about 0.4. Now, again, case fatality is higher than infection fatality because these are actually registered cases and there are all kinds of infections that never get registered.... [T]o put this in context, an infection fatality rate for a bad flu season is slightly under 0.2,' he went on. 'Half of this. Just to put things in perspective.'

"'Now, President Biden – and this has been parroted by media and news media – said that what we are currently experiencing is a "pandemic of the unvaccinated",' Johnson said. 'They don’t really give us any data to back that up. They just proclaim, pronounce that 99 percent of people with Covid now are unvaccinated. But they don’t give us the data.

"'Well, we have data from England,' he went on. 'And here’s the data. So, of the 600,000 cases in England, 43% were the unvaxxed, 27% were with the fully vaxxed, another 30% were with partially vaxxed, or just undetermined.'

"'Here is another quote from President Biden,' he continued. 'President Biden said, "if you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized. You’re not going to an ICU unit. You’re not going to die. You’re not going to get Covid, if you have these vaccinations".... I kind of doubt it,' he said. 'Because in England, of the 600,000 new cases of Delta, of the over 2,500 deaths, 63% of those deaths, 1,613 people, were the fully vaccinated. Twenty-eight percent were with the unvaxxed.'

"A fact check of Public Health England’s technical briefing shows that he is right. Here is the information that was reported. The circled number cited by Sen. Johnson is in the category '>14 days post dose 2' which means 'fully vaccinated' as it is commonly used.

Courtesy Becker News

"'Now, this is information the American people have probably never heard,' he said. 'This information, by conveying it, I will get attacked. I will be vilified. I will be censored. I will be suppressed. So, that is one of the reasons I come to the floor of the Senate to reveal this information that the American people need to know,' he concluded."

Read more: https://beckernews.com/sen-ron-johnson-drops-truth-bomb-on-true-number-of-fully-vaccinated-people-dying-with-covid-42177/

Portrait of a Covid charlatan

The Impersonator: Eric Feigl-Ding, COVID-19, and an implicit far-left agenda | Substack - Jordan Schachtel, The Dossier:

October 26, 2020 - "If you’re on social media and you follow news related to the coronavirus pandemic, chances are you’ve stumbled upon some panicked pandemic posts coming from a man named Eric Feigl-Ding,* a nutritionist and longtime democrat political operative who has succeeded in impersonating a medical professional, and is generating a cult following in the process. With one hysterical tweet after another, Feigl-Ding went from having a small social media following to accumulating a massive army of influence. Feigl-Ding’s consistent elevation of fear and panic, doom and gloom, and his relentless themes of chaos and destruction ,,, brought his accounts millions of clicks and views, and hundreds of thousands of new followers. And he did it all without having a clue what he’s talking about.

"At the beginning of 2020, Feigl-Ding was an unpaid, visiting scientist in Harvard’s nutrition department. His academic research centered entirely around nutrition, diet, and exercise. If Eric Feigl-Ding was interested in pandemics and the study of viruses, his research and academic credentials did not reflect that. When the coronavirus pandemic began to make waves in the media, everything changed. Feigl-Ding, an aspiring politician, appeared to see an opening to influence the masses and build up his brand....

"But ... Feigl-Ding’s frequent use of Harvard-associated credentials to elevate his baseless COVID-19 proclamations greatly upset some of his colleagues (despite many of them advocating for the same draconian measures proposed by Feigl-Ding to 'combat' the virus), and landed him in hot water.... Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, described him as a 'charlatan exploiting a tenuous connection for self-promotion.' The Association of Health Care Journalists also took notice, reporting that he has 'precisely zero experience in infectious diseases.' An unnamed source at Harvard told the Chronicle on Higher Education in April [2020] that Feigl-Ding has 'been asked many times to stop promoting himself as having specialized knowledge.' In [the second half of 2020], Feigl-Ding updated his profile to show that he is no longer associated with Harvard.... 

"In order to sell his purported expertise on COVID-19, Feigl-Ding has repeatedly misrepresented his credentials.... [P]rior to the pandemic, Ding clarified that he was a PhD nutritionist, and not a medical doctor. He has since removed the PhD label from his account.  [He] has continued to muddy the waters surrounding his credentials, taking it to new heights ... in a pro-Biden Super PAC (funded by Silicon Valley billionaires) ad about the coronavirus pandemic. It features 'Dr' Feigl-Ding in a lab coat with tie ensemble that is associated with the attire worn by a medical doctor.... 'Joe Biden has a plan,' Feigl-Ding says in the ad. 'He listens to medical experts. Joe Biden will do what needs to be done so we can live a healthy, normal life again.' Many reporters were falsely led to believe that Feigl-Ding was one of the medical doctors featured in the ad spot.....

"Feigl-Ding has long been a far-left activist who advances his agenda under a healthcare reform label. In 2018, he ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in Pennsylvania. Universal healthcare and medicare for all, or socialized medicine, was the centerpiece platform of his congressional run. According to Science Magazine, Feigl-Ding was supported in his run by political networks associated with far-left democrat mega donor George Soros, and FEC records reflect that. Feigl-Ding’s ties with Soros go back many years. In 2008, he received a Soros scholarship for his medical school studies (he would later drop out).... Feigl-Ding finished an unimpressive third place in the PA-10 2018 Democratic Primary. 

"Feigl-Ding remains closely connected to the Soros network. He currently serves as Treasurer of the The Paul and Daisy Soros Fellows Association (PDSFA). And through his Twitter and Facebook feeds, Feigl-Ding has utilized his unwarranted credential as a 'COVID-19 health expert' to promote his far-left politics, disguised as healthcare expertise, to hundreds of thousands of people....

"Feigl-Ding’s political aspirations did not cease with his failed congressional run. During [the 2020] election cycle, he ... contributed over $110,000 of his own money to a non-profit he founded called Health Justice For All. His organization’s website claims to be 'building a grassroots network to expose Big Pharma, to fight for affordable medications, and to elect a bold new generation of leaders who will not stop fighting Big Pharma until there is health justice for all.' However, there is nothing particularly health oriented about this organization. FEC records show that Feigl-Ding uses Health Justice for All to run attack ads against Republicans and supportive ads for Democrats.

"Social media’s foremost COVID-19 hysteric has leveraged his baseless pandemic panic promotion to achieve newfound fame. [During the presidential race last year] the hyper-political nutritionist turned 'COVID-19 expert' ... dedicated his social media feed to nonstop promotion of Joe Biden’s candidacy for president. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but it’s safe to say that Eric Feigl-Ding’s rise to 'public health' stardom has delivered plenty of opportunities to resurface as a true contender in the future political arena."

Read more: https://dossier.substack.com/p/the-impersonator-eric-feigl-ding

* signatory of the John Snow Memorandum

Business elites back Biden's vaccine mandates

The Business Roundtable Of Elite CEOs Backed Biden’s Vaccine Mandate: Their Reasons May Surprise You | Bloomberg - Jack Kelly:

September 12, 2021 - "The Business Roundtable, a group representing some of the largest U.S. corporations, gave its support last week to President Joe Biden’s plan to require private-sector companies with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccination or, alternatively, conduct weekly Covid-19 testing. The Business Roundtable’s members include the upper echelon of CEO elites, including luminaries such as Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Jane Fraser from Citigroup, Amazon’s newly installed CEO Andy Jassy and Apple’s Tim Cook.

"A statement from the group approvingly said, 'Business Roundtable welcomes the Biden Administration’s continued vigilance in the fight against [Covid-19]. America’s business leaders know how critical vaccination and testing are in defeating the pandemic, which is why so many have invested resources in encouraging and incentivizing their customers and employees to get vaccinated, including providing paid time off.' The CEOs added, 'Over the past several weeks, many companies have decided to implement a vaccine mandate for some or all of their employees, a decision we applaud'.... 

"Biden’s mandate took management out of the equation. They no longer have to weigh both sides of the vaccination debate, risking alienating a sizable portion of the employees. Managers won’t have to worry about being the bad mom or dad and could place the blame squarely on Biden and say that it's out of their control.

"We’ve seen a trend of major corporations cozying up to the federal government. Being on the same side of the President and current administration helps companies stay in their good graces. Therefore, its not too surprising to see the CEOs quickly backed Biden’s plans.

"Sectors that have been itching to get people back into an office setting, such as Wall Street banks, will be happy with the decision. One of the pushbacks from people against returning to the office was that they feel it is dangerous to be in an office setting. They’d also have to worry about daily interactions with people on the buses, trains and city streets, as they’re commuting to and from work.

"One of the biggest issues that we don't talk about is the possibility of a potential disaster for some big cities, such as New York, if workers don’t return to their offices. The major source of tax revenue in New York is derived from the large Wall Street and other industries that are based in the Big Apple. There’s a large ecosystem of restaurants, bars, nail salons, gyms, retail stores and shops that rely upon office workers to patronize their places of business. If workers don’t return en masse, they’re likely doomed. 

"There could be a cascading disaster. Real estate landlords will hemorrhage money. Small businesses could close up shop with significantly fewer people around. There would be an enormous free fall in tax revenue going into the city coffers. With less money, the city will have no choice other than to aggressively cut costs. This includes laying off police officers, firefighters, train and transit workers, teachers, sanitation garbage collectors and other public personnel. Museums and public-backed cultural events will lose funding. 

"The cuts and layoffs will make the city dirtier and more dangerous. There will be reports — like we saw during the pandemic — of an increase in crime and violence. When people read about the crime figures and watch graphic clips of violence on television and online, they’ll be afraid to go back into Manhattan. This could easily create a downward spiral. Employees would understandably say that they won’t return to the City for fear of their personal safety.

"The business leaders ... know that this could happen. This may be one of the reasons why Wall Street, which is a big player in New York, led the push for bankers, brokers and traders to return to the office, as they could foresee what may possibly happen if everyone remained working at home."

Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/09/12/the-business-roundtable-of-elite-ceos-backed-president-bidens-vaccine-mandate-their-reasons-may-surprise-you/

Biden flip-flops on vaccine mandates

Biden vaccine mandate marks another White House flip-flop | Fox News - Jessica Chasmar: 

September 9, 2021 - "President Biden announced Thursday that all employers with more than 100 workers will be forced to either require employees to have coronavirus vaccinations or test unvaccinated employees weekly, despite White House statements in July that such mandates were 'not the role' of the federal government.

"Biden's directive, which is expected to affect as many as 100 million Americans, was announced during public remarks discussing his COVID-19 plan. The mandate will require all businesses with more than 100 workers to have those employees vaccinated or tested weekly for the virus, affecting about 80 million Americans. The roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid will also have to be vaccinated under Biden's edict. 

"The mandate appears to contradict comments made by White House press secretary Jen Psaki during a July 23 press briefing that a COVID-19 vaccine mandate is 'not the role of the federal government.' 'That is the role that institutions, private-sector entities and others may take,' Psaki said at the time. That certainly is appropriate. Also, local communities are going to take steps they need to take in order to protect people in their communities.'

Biden also vowed before he was sworn in as president that he wouldn’t make the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory. 'I don't think it should be mandatory, I wouldn't demand it to be mandatory, but I would do everything in my power … It's like I don't think masks have to be made mandatory nationwide,' Biden said in December.

Read more: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-vaccine-mandate-federal-government

The Biden Admin is losing its unwinnable War On COVID, so they're scapegoating 'unvaccinated' Americans | The Dossier - Jordan Schachtel: 

September 9, 2021 - "Policymakers within the Biden Administration have clearly seen the COVID-19 data out of Israel, the first country that went all in on population-wide mRNA shots. It shows that mRNA injection efficacy is waning, which is why Israel went full steam ahead with the 3rd booster shot. It’s too early to tell exactly how that will pan out, but in the meantime, the Biden Administration needs to find a way to shimmy their way out of declaring victory over COVID just a couple months ago, given its clear resurgence throughout our nation among both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals....

"At first, they took a somewhat more diplomatic approach, blaming the 'Delta variant' for their failures to deliver. But now, they’ve shifted their wrath onto fellow Americans, specifically, the 25% of 'unvaccinated' individuals in America who refuse to submit.... None of it makes scientific sense, but it doesn’t have to, because it’s no longer about health or science, but in protecting the reputation of the White House.

"The Biden Administration is losing its unwinnable 'War on COVID,' and as its ratings go down in flames, it has backed itself into a corner. Instead of being honest about their failures with the American people, Biden officials are choosing to triple and quadruple down on these broken policy measures. They’re purposely pitting Americans against each other, and labeling the 'unvaccinated' as the ultimate scapegoat for their failures. Time will tell if they succeed, or if Americans decide to find the courage to reject the latest series of unconstitutional edicts."

Read more: https://dossier.substack.com/p/the-biden-admin-is-losing-its-unwinnable

U.S. FDA officials resign over Biden booster plans

Anger, frustration at FDA over Biden’s booster plan; two top regulators resign | Ars Technica - Beth Mole:

September 1, 2021 - "Two top vaccine regulators have resigned from the Food and Drug Administration, revealing anger, frustration, and turmoil at the federal agency as it faces intensifying pressure to authorize COVID-19 vaccine booster shots and doses for children under the age of 12. The two regulators leaving are Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review (OVRR), and OVRR Deputy Director Phil Krause. Gruber has been with the FDA for more than 30 years, and Krause has been at the agency for more than a decade.

"Their resignations, first reported by pharmaceutical trade publication BioCentury, were apparently sparked by frustration that the Biden administration had overstepped the FDA in announcing plans to offer COVID-19 booster shots beginning on September 20. The pair also clashed with higher-up Peter Marks, who reportedly went along with the administration's plans. Marks is the director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), which includes the OVRR. Marks announced the two resignations in a letter sent to FDA staff ... published in full by biopharmaceutical outlet Endpoints News.

"As news spread of the high-profile resignations, current and former FDA regulators were quick to reveal growing tensions coming from some in the agency who see the Biden administration's booster plan as premature, unnecessary, and out of step with regulators' opinions. Politico, which spoke with 11 former and current health officials, described the situation at the FDA as a 'potential mutiny' among agency staff and outside vaccine experts."

Read more: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/anger-frustration-at-fda-over-bidens-booster-plan-two-top-regulators-resign/

Biden's top-down booster plan sparks anger at FDA - Politico - Sarah Owermohle:

August 31, 2012 - "The Biden administration’s decisions over when to administer coronavirus vaccine boosters are triggering turmoil within the Food and Drug Administration, frustrating regulators and sparking fear that political pressures will once again override the agency’s expertise. FDA officials are scrambling to collect and analyze data that clearly demonstrate the boosters' benefits before the administration’s Sept. 20 deadline for rolling them out to most adults. 

"Many outside experts, and some within the agency, see uncomfortable similarities between the Biden team's top-down booster plan and former President Donald Trump's attempts to goad FDA into accelerating its initial authorization process for Covid-19 vaccines and push through unproven virus treatments.... Now the agency is facing a potential mutiny among its staff and outside vaccine advisers, several of whom feel cut out of key decisions and who view the plan to offer boosters to all adults as premature and unnecessary....

"Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock sent a memo Tuesday evening to vaccine regulators, reiterating her support as frustration over the process spreads within their ranks.... The tensions between FDA's regulators and top Biden administration officials — including Woodcock, who has publicly endorsed the booster plan — come as the agency begins to tackle its most difficult decisions yet on Covid-19 shots. Many center around making them available to children under 12, whose bodies react differently to the virus and vaccines to prevent it. FDA will have to decide whether the rising number of cases in kids warrants making shots available to them on an emergency basis, before the lengthier approval process, which is more likely to detect any rare side effects. But for now, much of the discord within the agency centers on the administration's decision to push ahead with boosters before FDA's top scientists had a chance to weigh in.

"It was 'the administration's booster plan; it wasn't the FDA's booster plan,' said Paul Offit, a University of Pennsylvania infectious disease expert who sits on FDA’s vaccine advisory committee.... Another senior health official with direct knowledge of the situation said that political appointees within the White House largely steered the mid-August booster announcement.

"Biden added to the confusion and controversy last weekend when he suggested that boosters could be administered just five months after the initial regimen, rather than the eight his administration had just proposed. Those remarks, coming after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, fueled worries that an administration that had pledged to 'follow the science' was letting politics dictate outcomes."

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/31/biden-booster-plan-fda-508149