While we're at it... Part 6

 As of this writing, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is deciding the future of free speech in America. Appearing before the Justices are the Solicitor General of the United States, Attorneys General of Several states, and other interested or aggrieved parties. At stake is whether the government has the authority to censor speech it deems misinformation or harmful. In a complaint brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as by other concerned parties before US District Court Judge Terry Doughty, the government was found to have been using social media outlets as proxies in its efforts to censor speech that it considered unacceptable. The government appealed the decision which was subsequently upheld by the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals. The government further appealed that decision up the chain, which is why arguments are now being heard by SCOTUS.

So, what kind of speech you may ask got us to this point? Well, there was the argument over the origins of COVID 19, how to best handle the outbreak, and what sorts of treatments were available to fight the virus. There were the vaccines that were developed under Operation Warp Speed which were supposed to be a magic bullet when it came to stopping this bug dead in its tracks, the efficacy of said vaccines and any harmful side effects, as well as the shot mandates that were put in place by a host of agencies, both public and private. There’s the 2020 election and the belief by quite a few Americans (a number that continues to grow, oh by the way) that something untoward was going on in the battleground states the evening of, and subsequent days after the election. There are the 51 former intelligence luminaries who publicly decreed that the Hunter Biden laptop story had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation. There’s the January 6^th “insurrection” (or J6) that supposedly tried to take down our government and the belief that anyone who participated in that event needed to be locked up and the keys thrown away.  We were told that the 45^th President of these United States was the Insurrectionist in Chief who urged his followers to storm the Capitol as Congress was in the process of certifying the election results. Last but not least were the mysterious pipe bombs which were left outside the headquarters of both the Democrat and Republican National Committee (DNC & RNC) headquarters buildings on the evening of January 5^th. It’s against this backdrop that the government feels the need to protect us from less than truthful information. But what really is the truth here? Let’s find out.

In an interim report published by the Minority Staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on 12 June 2020, those of us fortunate enough to get our hands on a downloaded copy of this document were treated to the origins of the Biosafety Level 4 (BSL 4) lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), its connections to the Chinese military (PLA), and some pretty suspicious connections to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the University of North Carolina (UNC). For the uninitiated, this may not amount to much, but for some of us, it starts to connect the dots to a scheme that was meant to evade an executive order put in place by Barack Obama prohibiting Gain of Function (GOF) research. NIAID was run by your friend and mine, Dr. Anthony Fauci, better known as America’s doctor (Mengele, that is). It was under the umbrella of the NIH, run by Dr. Francis Collins. Dr. Ralph Baric is a renowned scientist at UNC whose expertise in the field of epidemiology and coronaviruses earned him the nickname “the father of the Frankenbug”, given his work on, you guessed it, GOF research. But there needed to be a go-between for this research to continue far from the prying eyes of any presidential administration and those busybodies in Congress. Enter Dr. Peter Daszak and his private non-profit organization Eco Health Alliance. All monies flowed through this conduit to the WIV. In fact, in a research paper on bat coronaviruses, Dr. Shi Zhengli of the WIV, acknowledged her benefactors at the NIH, NIAID, and UNC. Nothing to see here.

When the pandemic was in full swing, there were reports that started surfacing about an anti-viral drug that could not only help ease the effects of COVID, but could shorten its duration and severity, hydroxychloroquine. It didn’t take long for this drug to be savaged and the word put out that it not only didn’t it help but had some dangerous side effects. The problem is that those same side effects were part and parcel of the precautions and warnings for the on-label uses of the drug, which included anti-malaria, Lupus, and Rheumatoid Arthritis. If we get into the nitty gritty on drug research, we find that if there is an existing drug that can be repurposed for other uses (read off-label) then there is no use for the government to sanction development of any new medications. The other thing that Hydroxychloroquine had going for it was that it was a generic drug, which meant that it was cheap and plentiful (i.e., readily available to the masses). The same thing happened to another wonder drug called Ivermectin. In fact, this drug won the Nobel Prize for its creators as an anti-parasitic medication. It could be used in livestock as well as humans. But you wouldn’t know that based on the way that the FDA and others went after it.

Then there are the vaccines themselves. This was supposed to be the end-all, be-all of our efforts to fight this pandemic. We were told that as soon as we, as a country, reached herd immunity, we could reopen our businesses, schools and resume other aspects of our lives. But that never happened. Within a few months, the vaccines’ effects wore off, and newer more virulent strains (which were nowhere as dangerous) started popping up. It basically became a game of “whack a mole” where every time the public health establishment claimed to have things under control, they faced a new variant. Worse yet were the breakthrough infections that were being experienced by vaccinated individuals. And then the bottom fell out. There was evidence starting to show up, both anecdotally and through empirical means that there were some dangerous side effects to these vaccines. The public health establishment denied that these events were connected to the vaccines, but studies conducted overseas painted a much different picture. One drug being pushed by the powers that be to help with the effects of COVID was Remdesivir. It was originally developed as a treatment for Ebola but was repurposed to fight COVID. The results were so miserable using this drug that it earned the nickname “run death is near.”  Another “promising” drug, Paxlovid, was used by the President, First Lady, and Dr. Fauci himself to treat their COVID infections. Ironically, all three suffered rebound infections after using this drug. How’s that for promising?

The mandates were a textbook case of federal government overreach at times, whether it was masks or vaccines. As an airline pilot I was on the road the day a federal judge struck down the mask mandate on commercial aircraft and other forms of transportation. In her ruling, she determined that Title 42, which had been used to justify the mandate, only applied to those individuals coming into this country, where their health status could not be ascertained. It did not apply to public transit in the various metropolitan areas. That authority was reserved for the respective states and municipalities who chose to go down that road. Lastly, she blasted the federal government over its abuse of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) when it used emergency authority to enact the mandate but never held a public notice and comment period per the APA. On the vax side of the house, I’ll point to the military and the unwarranted requirement for our service members to get the jab. In Part 11 of the Aftermath series, I delve into this in detail. At the end of the post is a very telling segment about how far the government was willing to go to get what it wanted. It’s not very confidence inspiring.

One of the things that COVID brought us, for better or worse, was a change in how people voted. Democrat lawyers around the country put on a full court press in the courts to make exceptions to voting laws in order to allow for absentee voting and vote by mail. A lot of this involved unsolicited ballots mailed out to voters. It didn’t matter if they were dead, incarcerated, or no longer in the jurisdiction where their votes would be cast. Drop boxes were sometimes installed in uncontrolled and unmonitored locations which invited potential fraud. There is a documentary that was released by conservative film maker Dinesh Dsouza and a group called True the Vote that gives specific examples of this, it’s called 2000 Mules. Then there were the Zuck bucks. Money donated by Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, that disproportionately went to Democrat leaning areas to help get out the vote. A lot of this is explained in an excellent book by Mollie Hemingway called Rigged. I suggest reading it to get an idea of what Republicans (and the rest of us, I might add) were up against during the 2020 election cycle. Last, but by no means least is the elephant in the room, the Hunter Biden laptop. When Donald Trump had his congratulatory phone call with President-elect Zelensky of Ukraine, he wound up mentioning fired prosecutor Viktor Shulkin who had been investigating a corrupt oligarch and his energy company Burisma. A company that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter sat on the board of.  He was impeached for supposedly offering a “quid pro quo”, arms for investigating the firing and any connections to the Biden family, and by extension, his rival in the upcoming presidential election. The man was prescient as ever. We have since found out that the laptop was real and had been in the possession of the FBI since late 2019. The idea that it was Russian disinformation was planted by the Bureau itself when they realized that a book written by New York Post reporter Miranda Devine was about to be published exposing the Biden crime family, based on info gleaned from the data on said laptop. The book was aptly named Laptop from Hell. Nearly one in three voters who cast a ballot for Joe Biden stated had they known that the laptop story was in fact true, would not have voted for the current president.

Those evil conservatives were not only election deniers, but also wanted to overthrow a duly elected administration by interfering in the certification of the election results. That was the narrative behind the J6 riot and Capitol breach. It didn’t matter that even in defeat, Donald Trump had offered Congress and the District up to 10,000 National Guard troops to help keep the peace in the run-up to J6. An offer that was turned down by Congressional leadership and the mayor’s office. So, the question that needs to be asked is, if you’re offered an overwhelming force of military personnel to help keep your workplace safe at such a critical time, why would you not want them there? Optics is not a good reason, especially given the internet chatter about potential violence being picked up by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Even if you never used the full compliment of troops made available, any number of troops in riot gear would have been a major deterrent for anyone looking to cause trouble. Additionally, most of these same folks, given how we had been deploying our Guard units to global hotspots, most likely had training and experience in spotting bad actors in less than ideal situations. The sort of bad actors alleged to have been in the crowd at the Capitol on J6. What’s even more interesting (from an “inquiring minds want to know” perspective) is the lack of access to the closed circuit television (CCTV) footage during the riot. One would think that in order to get to the bottom of things all leads needed to be followed regardless of where they took those doing the investigating. The J6 Committee didn’t see it that way and neither did House leadership. Which is why those tapes remained behind a wall of impenetrability, that is, until Republicans took over the gavel. With new leadership came an air of openness and candor and a willingness to release the CCTV footage from J6. Footage, that as it turns out, has been quite damning in the government’s case against quite a few J6 participants. Not damning for the defendants/accused but damning for the government.

While we’re on the subject of J6, let’s go back a day to January 5^th. That was the evening those pipe bombs were placed outside DNC and RNC headquarters by a still unknown individual. In CCTV footage that has been widely circulated, you can see this individual doing something on their cell phone, yet no one has tried to identify who this was by using geolocation or metadata that is commercially available. This was the same technology behind the efforts of the forensic researcher who tracked down the drop box stuffers in the 2000 Mules documentary. I find it absolutely remarkable that law enforcement claims not to have been able to obtain the data to do so (it was somehow lost). Even more remarkable is how each and every Capitol CCTV camera that was trained on the DNC HQ was slewed away from the action while bomb disposal efforts were being undertaken. Odd, to say the least.

So, we now know that the government is not only capable of getting things wrong in a big way but covering it up as well. It’s also capable of doing illegal, unconstitutional things to certain citizens it deems dangerous. Are the justices willing to signal to the American people that they have no problem looking the other way while all of this is happening, or are they going to remember what the Constitution is all about?  A set of negative liberties detailing what government cannot do to its citizenry. That, dear reader, is the question before the court.

                                          Looks like the "experts" are losing

While we're at it... Part 5

 

A few notes on the testimony of former director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Dr. Robert Redfield before a house committee investigating the origins of COVID 19.

If he felt that he was being frozen out of any discussion of the origins of this virus with his counterparts, then why didn’t he kick this upstairs to his bosses at Health and Human Services? After all, Secretary Azar was the overall department head. Fauci, Collins and Redfield all worked for him.

Once he became a part of the Coronavirus task force, why didn’t he bring this up with the Vice President, who headed up the task force, or Jared Kushner, who had the president’s ear, or even HUD Secretary Ben Carson, who himself was a renowned MD? More to the point, he had a kindred spirit in Dr. Scott Atlas, who joined the effort in the summer of 2020, and made no bones about ferreting out data that showed we were overreacting to this virus.

What I’m left with, in the aftermath of all that happened, is an individual who had no spine to stand up for what he believed. Even worse, that belief would prove to be the most likely cause of our predicament, covered up by the perpetrators of this entire sad state of affairs.

 

A few notes on the former VP and his claim that Donald Trump put him and his family in danger because of the Jan 6^th riot at the Capitol.

Given my reading of a verbatim copy of the transcript of Trump’s speech that day, not a single word was spoken that would have incited the sort of violence and lawlessness that we witnessed. To the contrary Mr. Trump urged his supporters to head over to the Capitol and peacefully make their voices heard. When a side-by-side comparison of the timelines of the festivities and the Capitol breach are compared, it becomes evident that the violence had already started before the President’s speech had concluded.

Having read Dr. Atlas’ book about his time at the White House, it becomes apparent that the VP and Chief of Staff (COS) did not acquit themselves very well. The President was looking for a paradigm shift for how this pandemic was being handled. He stated on multiple occasions that the cure could not be worse than the disease, but that’s exactly what happened. Rather than take heed of the actionable information Dr. Atlas was producing, the VP and COS decided that they were unwilling to rock the boat and make any dramatic changes as to how things were proceeding. Individuals who are now household names like Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and John Ionides of Stanford, Dr. Martin Kuldorf of Harvard, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Dr. Joseph Ladapo of UCLA, all gave feedback to Dr. Atlas on their findings and even made a visit to the White House to meet the President and speak with the VP. Drs. Gupta, Bhattacharya, and Kuldorf would go on to pen the Great Barrington Declaration arguing that we knew who this virus adversely affected and that measures could be put in place to mitigate its effects on them. Dr. Ladapo so impressed Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida that he was offered the job of Surgeon General of the State. Yet all these heavy hitters barely moved the needle.

Can you imagine what would have happened had these opportunities been taken advantage of? The pandemic for all practical purposes would have been over by the fall of 2020. The economy would have been opened up again, with minimal damage done to it. Schools could have reopened for a new school year with minimal loss of learning on the part of students (on the downside, parents wouldn’t have been able to see for themselves the nonsense being jammed into their kids’ heads). This would have cemented Trump’s (and Pence’s for that matter) reelection in the 2020 general, and we wouldn’t be suffering through the fallout created from rank incompetence and corruption of the so-called adults in the room in the current administration.