Month: August 2023

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The fate of five people accused of conspiring to obstruct access to an abortion clinic in Washington is now in the hands of a federal jury after the prosecution and defense wrapped up their respective cases in federal court last week.

Each defendant faces up to 11 years in prison.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sent jurors home on Aug. 25 after they began deliberations following closing arguments by attorneys a day earlier. Deliberations are scheduled to resume on Aug. 29.

The defendants are charged with “conspiracy against rights” and conspiracy under section 248 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which is part of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.

Section 248 states that it is “unlawful for a person to use force, the threat of force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure or intimidate a person because he or she is or has been obtaining or providing reproductive health services,” according to a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) summary.

The FACE Act has been criticized by federal lawmakers, including Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who has said the Biden administration enforces the law selectively.

Mr. Roy and other lawmakers signed a letter in March stating that the Biden DOJ used the FACE Act more than two dozen times in 2022 against pro-life activists, but until this year, the statute “had never been used to indict individuals related to an attack on a pro-life pregnancy center or house of worship.”

Lauren Handy of Virginia and nine other defendants were indicted in 2022 for conspiring to obstruct access to the Washington Surgi-Clinic, which provides abortions, in October 2020. The indictment from last year states that “it was the purpose of the conspiracy to create a blockade to stop the Clinic from providing, and patients from obtaining, reproductive health services.”

Some in the pro-life movement refer to this kind of direct-action tactic as a “rescue” because it may save an unborn human’s life.

The DOJ said the indictment stated that “as part of the conspiracy, [seven defendants] traveled to Washington, D.C., from various northeast and midwestern states, to participate in a clinic blockade” that was broadcast on Facebook. Eight of the defendants “forcefully entered the clinic and set about blockading two clinic doors using their bodies, furniture, chains, and ropes.”

Nine defendants allegedly violated the FACE Act “by using a physical obstruction to injure, intimidate and interfere with the clinic’s employees and a patient, because they were providing or obtaining reproductive health services.”

If convicted of the offenses, each of the defendants faces a maximum of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $350,000, according to the department.

Ms. Handy and four other co-defendants—Herb Geraghty of Pennsylvania, Heather Idoni of Michigan, William Goodman of Wisconsin, and John Hinshaw of New York—went on trial two weeks ago in the nation’s capital.

Judge Kollar-Kotelly, who was appointed in 1997 by President Bill Clinton, ruled (pdf) on Aug. 7 that the defendants may not claim in their defense that they took action to shield others from bodily harm.

“A defendant may not don a vigilante’s hood to insert themselves into a situation of their own making and subsequently claim defense of a third person to justify their actions,” the judge wrote.

The defendants “agree that they traveled to the District of Columbia to engage in preplanned activity, forcing their way into the clinic shortly before it opened. Without the imminent threat of either a greater evil or death or serious bodily injury, neither a duress nor necessity defense is available.”

Ms. Handy is the director of activism for Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, which describes its mission as mobilizing “grassroots anti-abortion activists for direct action and [to] educate on the exploitative influence of the Abortion Industrial Complex through an anti-capitalist lens.”

After being sentenced to jail time on a separate charge in July 2022, Ms. Handy said, “As a Catholic and progressive myself, I am compelled by my deeply held beliefs (religious and political) to put my body between the oppressed and the oppressor.”

Ms. Handy’s attorney, Martin A. Cannon, senior trial counsel at the Thomas More Society, a public interest law firm, told The Epoch Times that he’s cautiously optimistic.

The co-defendants are “a remarkable bunch of people, just the most peaceful, loving people you ever saw,” Mr. Cannon said in an interview on Aug. 26.

The prosecution has been lumping all the co-defendants together “like they’re all the same, but the DOJ has to prove its case individually against each defendant.”

“When you step back and look at the evidence, what you really see is there’s a few people who might have been doing the things that are prohibited by FACE, but the bulk of the people were doing things that FACE does not prohibit,” he said.

“You can think of all kinds of conventional, historical Martin Luther King kind of protests that have been going on forever, that FACE does not prohibit. And most of the people in this case were actually doing stuff like that and not violating FACE.”

“The government wants to say, ‘Well, there’s two or three or four that were violating FACE—all of you conspired, so we’re just going to all throw it in together.’ And I don’t think they get to really do that. And I think the jury was paying some attention to that.”

FACE makes it a crime to use force, threats, or physical obstruction to intimidate, cause injury, or interfere with a person providing or obtaining reproductive health services, he said.

“What the DOJ missed is that Lauren was not doing this because of reproductive health services. She saw a video of this very same doctor at this very same clinic, pretty implicitly acknowledging that babies are getting born alive in his clinic. And if they do, he will just leave them alone to die.

“That is not legal. There’s no available argument that a living baby at any gestational age outside the womb is a pregnancy. And when the baby winds up outside the womb, he goes from a place of no protection into a place of protection, as the procedure from that point out, whatever happens to him is outside of the FACE Act. And he gets all the same protections that a four-year-old kid would get.”

Ms. Handy is “entitled to defend those babies just like she could defend a 4-year-old getting dragged in someplace and killed or neglected or whatever.”

“She didn’t violate the other provisions of FACE, either. She never used force. She never used threats. She never used physical obstruction. She didn’t injure. She didn’t intimidate. She didn’t interfere,” Mr. Cannon said.

Meanwhile, co-defendant Jay Smith of New York accepted a plea deal. On Aug. 7, he was sentenced to 10 months of incarceration to be followed by 36 months of supervised release, court records indicate.

The remaining four co-defendants—Jonathan Darnel of Virginia, Joan Andrews Bell of New Jersey, and Paulette Harlow and Jean Marshall of Massachusetts—are scheduled to be tried on Sept. 6.

The DOJ, which is handling the prosecution, didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

Unveiling another astonishing revelation from the ongoing education crisis within Baltimore City, investigative journalist Chris Papst from Fox45 News’ Project Baltimore dropped a bombshell: 

“STUNNING: Baltimore City Schools received 29 federal Covid grants totaling $799M to fight learning loss. Yet, in 2023, just 9.1% of all 3rd-8th graders tested proficient in math. MEANING, taxpayers gave an additional $799M and 91% of Baltimore students are NOT math proficient.” 

STUNNING: Baltimore City Schools received 29 federal Covid grants totaling $799M to fight learning loss. Yet, in 2023, just 9.1% of all 3rd-8th graders tested proficient in math. MEANING, taxpayers gave an additional $799M and 91% of Baltimore students are NOT math proficient.

— Chris Papst (@chrispapst) August 29, 2023

Maryland’s spending on education stands at some of the highest in the country. In Baltimore City, the school district’s budget is the fourth largest in the nation. Even extra Covid funds weren’t enough to push the needle to drastically improve math test scores. 

Earlier this year, Papst’s team revealed that 23 schools in the crime-ridden metro area had zero students proficient in math. The investigative team has been investigating corruption in the metro area’s school district for seven years. Corruption might not stop at Baltimore but could extend to the leadership of the Maryland State Department of Education (read: Maryland Superintendent’s Deleted Texts and Hidden Email Surfaces Amid Intensifying Grade-Rigging Scandal). 

Folks on X, formerly known as Twitter, are raising questions about the whereabouts of the funds: 

Maybe they were using LeBron James as a consultant.

— Horse Sense (@the_capper_) August 29, 2023

Looks like Z-E-R-O ROI; 2019 data:https://t.co/6tIUiQNh9c pic.twitter.com/n1Ujxs6TMw

— orion (@orionsxspear) August 29, 2023

That doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that the local teachers unions have filled the campaign war chests of democrat politicians.

— Sprocket the Cat (@NicholasZeger) August 29, 2023

So, we have to ask, where did the $799 million go, how many/who should be headed for prison, and how much of the money is recoverable?

— Senator Bulworth (@senatorbulworth) August 29, 2023

I wonder where all the money went???

— George Goff (@Navy3241) August 29, 2023

Are local and state officials misappropriating taxpayers’ dollars? 

Baltimore is a totally corrupt hell hole. What did you expect? 😆

— migos.eth ⚡️ 5⃣8⃣0⃣.eth (@imbrue001) August 29, 2023

Why aren’t more taxpayers outraged? It’s your money. 

Authored by David Gortler via The Brownstone Institute,

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) V-safe website quietly stopped collecting adverse event reports with no reason or explanation.

The V-safe website simply states: “Thank you for your participation. Data collection for COVID-19 vaccines concluded on June 30, 2023.” If you go there today, V-safe directs users to the FDA’s VAERS website for adverse event reporting, even though officials continually derided VAERS as “passive” and “unverified.” 

VAERS and V-safe are mutually exclusive safety collection databases operated by the FDA and CDC, respectively. VAERS is an older way of collecting safety data where one can fill out a form online, or manually, or by calling a toll-free number, whereas V-safe is a device “app” which requires online registration. Both VAERS and V-safe collect personal information, lot numbers, dates and associated information, but V-safe was an active collection system geared towards a younger app-using demographic. 

Here is the last report before deletion.

Does this mean that the CDC believes that the mRNA Covid-19 injections are so safe, there is no need to monitor adverse event reports any longer? What is the argument against continued monitoring, especially since the V-safe website was already up and paid for? 

While CDC’s V-safe was stealthily and abruptly turned off, refusing to accept new safety reports, to this very day the CDC continues to urge everyone ages 6 months and older to stay up to date with COVID-19 vaccines and boosters. 

As a drug safety expert, I personally can’t cite another example of any agency or manufacturer halting collection of safety data. It seems even worse because mRNA technology is relatively new with long-term manifestations unknown. On top of this, both manufacturers and the FDA refuse to share the list of ingredients, such as lipid nanoparticles, which could affect individuals differently and take a long time to manifest clinically. 

Safety Data Collection Should Never Stop

Now, contrast that with the fact that the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) will still accept a safety report for a 30-year-old Ford Bronco II. Indeed, this is an oddly specific example, but only because I drove this exact vehicle as a family hand-me-down as a student, through my residency, fellowship, for my tenure as a Yale professor on the mean streets of New Haven and even during my years at the FDA as a medical officer /senior medical analyst. 

Like mRNA shots, Bronco IIs are still available on the market and people are still using them up to this very day. My Bronco became an intermittent topic of conversation with friends and FDA colleagues. One day, I was informed by a patrolling security guard at the FDA that it was the oldest car on campus.

I didn’t know much about cars (or mRNA technology) back then, but when a fellow FDA-er informed me that my Bronco II had noteworthy safety problems and that the NHTSA still had their eye on this vehicle (rollover accidents were more common and more fatal) I addressed the problem: I got rid of the reliable relic, even though I really liked it. 

NHTSA is still accepting safety reports on things like my 30-year-old Ford Bronco II, but the CDC isn’t accepting new safety reports on 2-year old novel mRNA vaccines.

CDC No longer accepting safety reports despite rapidly increasing safety findings:

Unlike my old Bronco, mRNA injections have only been on the market for about two years, and according to the FDA Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, mRNA “vaccines” have been named the primary suspect in over 1.5 million adverse event reports, of which there are >20,000 heart attacks and >27,000 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis just in the USA alone. Worldwide numbers would be greater. According to many references, including an FDA-funded study out of Harvard, VAERS reports represent fewer than 1 percent of vaccine adverse events that actually occur. 

Interestingly, the NHTSA link above on my Ford Bronco II only shows: one parts recall, one investigation and 23 complaints, and still features a button in the upper right hand corner for submitting new complaints. 

Wikipedia defines an humanitarian crisis or humanitarian disaster as a: “singular event or a series of events that are threatening in terms of health, safety or well-being of a community or large group of people.” Based on VAERS and previous V-safe findings, adverse events from mRNA shots in the USA alone could be considered a humanitarian crisis. 

Despite those alarming clinical findings, the CDC has concluded that collecting new safety reports is somehow no longer in the interest of America’s public health. Existing data from the V-safe site showed around 6.5 million adverse events/health impacts out of 10.1 million users, with around 2 million of those people unable to conduct normal activities of daily living or needing medical care, according to a third-party rendering of its findings. In other words, despite mRNA shots still being widely available and the CDC promoting its continued use, it’s “case closed” with regards to collecting new safety reports, under today’s federal public health administration. 

Will the CDC opine on the existing data or justify its halting of collecting new safety data? To the best of my knowledge, stopping the collection of public health information doesn’t have a clinical justification or scientific precedence — especially when it comes to an actively marketed product. 

In George Orwell’s 1984, characters were told by The Party to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Now, the CDC isn’t even allowing that evidence to be collected for viewing (and prospective rejecting). It’s a terrible idea for any product, let alone novel mRNA technologies. 

Dr. David Gortler, a 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is a pharmacologist, pharmacist, research scientist and a former member of the FDA Senior Executive Leadership Team who served as senior advisor to the FDA Commissioner on matters of: FDA regulatory affairs, drug safety and FDA science policy. He is a former Yale University and Georgetown University didactic professor of pharmacology and biotechnology, with over a decade of academic pedagogy and bench research, as part of his nearly two decades of experience in drug development. He also serves as a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center

Authored by Steven Kovac via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Two weeks before the 2020 election, a woman dropped off more than 10,000 voter registration forms with a city clerk in Muskegon, Michigan.

The number of forms was a red flag for the city clerk, Ann Meisch. Less than 4,000 of the city’s voting-age residents weren’t registered to vote.

Ms. Meisch called the police, triggering an investigation by the Michigan State Police. An Oct. 26, 2020, police report from that probe recently surfaced after Michigan state lawmakers obtained it through a Freedom of Information request.

At the time, Brianna Hawkins, the woman who delivered the forms, was employed by GBI Strategies, an out-of-state firm working to boost Democrat voter turnout in urban centers in key swing states to help then-candidate Joe Biden defeat President Donald Trump. According to the police report, when questioned by Muskegon Police Department investigators, Ms. Hawkins said her job was to register voters and help them obtain absentee ballots.

State Republican Party officials Phil O’Halloran and Lori Skibo obtained the police report. Mr. O’Halloran provided it to The Epoch Times.

An article by a nationally known fact-checking service disputed recent conservative media accounts of the Muskegon episode.

“While the total number of voter registration forms submitted by that person may add up to as much as 12,500, very few of them were deemed to be fraudulent,” the fact checker said.

“Page 3 of the MSP [Michigan State Police] report says Meisch ‘turned over 42 suspected fraudulent applications to Officer Foster [of the Muskegon Police Department] for examination.’”

The fact checker didn’t state that the 42 applications were a sampling.

Checking the Fact-checkers

However, the numbers tell a different story and raise a question: If there were only 42 suspected fraudulent voter registration applications submitted to the city clerk, why didn’t she register the rest of the batch?

In 2020, the population of the City of Muskegon was 38,309, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Of these, 29,800 people were of voting age.

Ms. Meisch told The Epoch Times in an August 10 email that in 2019, there were 25,957 registered voters in the city. In 2020, the number of people registered to vote increased by 2,077 to 28,034.

That means the pool of voting-age people not registered to vote that Ms. Hawkins had to work with was only 3,843.

Ms. Hawkins dropped off more than 10,000 voter registration forms in incremental batches, suggesting that thousands of the forms never made it onto the city’s registered voter roll.

“Even a casual observer can readily see that something is wrong. The numbers do not add up. The number of registration forms turned in by one person represents a third of the population of the city,” Mr. O’Halloran told The Epoch Times.

Clerk Suddenly ‘Cannot Speak’

The Epoch Times later contacted the city clerk with two more questions: Where did the completed voter registration forms filed by Ms. Hawkins come from, and are those extra voter registration forms that were rejected by her office in her custody?

In other words, what happened to the 10,423 voter registration forms that didn’t result in a person being added to the city’s voter roll?

Ms. Meisch replied in an Aug. 13 email: “I cannot speak to the facts of the case at this time. I am sorry that I cannot be of more help.”

According to the 2020 police report, Ms. Meisch told authorities that some of the irregularities found on the voter registration forms submitted by Ms. Hawkins included invalid and nonexistent addresses, erroneous phone numbers, signatures that didn’t match those on existing records, and numerous forms that appeared to be filled out and signed by the same hand.

Sixteen GOP 2020 electors lawfully nominated by the Michigan Republican Party to cast electoral college votes for President Trump if he carried the state were indicted in July by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, on fraud charges for allegedly knowingly and willfully advancing the “false claim” that there was large-scale voter fraud in the state during the 2020 presidential election.

Mr. O’Halloran told The Epoch Times that he hopes the exposure of the Muskegon case will help exonerate the Republican electors. He called it a “cruel irony” that Ms. Nessel, who he says appears to have helped bury “a state investigation into what appears to be actual forgery of election documents,” is prosecuting “the innocent Michigan 16 for a contrived ‘forgery’ in a case that hinges on the AG’s contention that there was ‘no evidence of fraud.'”

Attorneys for some of the 16 Trump electors argue that their clients merely positioned themselves as place-holders ready to legally step in if ongoing investigations into voter fraud determined that President Trump won the state of Michigan in 2020.

“Things Are Very Different Now”

Mr. O’Halloran, chairman of the state party’s election integrity committee, told The Epoch Times in an Aug. 21 interview that he and Ms. Skibo were motivated in their efforts by state GOP Chair Kristina Karamo, who encouraged them to “research the facts, make sure they are legit.”

Ms. Skibo told The Epoch Times that it was a Republican precinct delegate from Muskegon who brought the 2020 incident into the spotlight.

“The person saw something wrong and did something about it,” she said.

Now head of the poll challenger operation for the state party, Ms. Skibo remembered her own days as a precinct delegate and volunteer challenger at Detroit’s central vote-counting center in 2020.

“After seeing all the irregularities that night, I really believed that a team of Republican Party attorneys were going to show up the next morning demanding answers. I remember how angry I was when the state party did absolutely nothing,” she said.

“Things are very different now that we have a truly grassroots-led party.”

The actions of the two high-ranking Michigan Republican Party officials are a sea change compared with the position previously taken by a GOP-led state Senate panel. The panel released a report in June 2021 stating that its investigation could find “no systematic fraud” in the 2020 election.

What Happened to the Muskegon Probe?

Participants in the Muskegon investigation in 2020 were the Muskegon City Police, the Michigan State Police, the Michigan Attorney General’s Office, representatives of the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office, and, according to Michigan State Police records, the FBI.

On Aug. 14, The Epoch Times asked the FBI’s national press office whether the bureau is currently investigating or has ever investigated the Muskegon case, and if so, what’s the status or outcome of their probe.

The FBI didn’t respond by press time.

Submitted By Gun Owners of America, 

It didn’t take long for anti-gun politicians and talking heads to begin weaponizing the tragedy in Jacksonville, Florida, for their own political advantage.  

One pundit—former Smith and Wesson executive turned Giffords Senior Policy Advisor Ryan Busse— took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to use the deaths of Americans to push his gun control agenda: 

This is the rifle used in the racist mass murder in Jacksonville. It’s from Palmetto State Armory, the same company that proudly markets directly to extremists and domestic terror orgs like the boogaloo boys. pic.twitter.com/QLSvNhdHia

— Ryan Busse (@ryandbusse) August 27, 2023

He must not have agreed with the wise words of the local sheriff who, in a press conference regarding the Jacksonville shooting, said: 

“The story [in the media] is always about guns. [But] people are bad — this guy’s a bad guy. If I could take my gun off right now, and I lay it on this counter, nothing will happen.  

It’ll sit there — but as soon as wicked person grabs ahold of that handgun and starts shooting people with it — there’s the problem. The problem is the individual.”

Sheriff Waters’ nugget of wisdom reveals precisely what is wrong with Ryan Busse’s push for gun control. 

We’re thankful for the leadership of Sheriff Waters in Florida this weekend.⁰⁰And he’s absolutely right, the problem is the individual. Wicked people will always do wicked things.

pic.twitter.com/deKXe01145

— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) August 28, 2023

Until anti-gun advocates look past their desire to blame guns, they’ll never be able to address the real problems.  

Ryan Busse wants to blame a gun company—Palmetto State Armory—for manufacturing the firearm used in the shooting.

But Sheriff Waters understands that the Jacksonville killer was an evil man with evil intentions.  

And as it turns out, the Jacksonville killer is just copying other racist mass murderers from Buffalo, New York, and Christchurch, NZ, who also scribbled on their rifles with a white marker. 

This isn’t about Palmetto State Armory—other mass murderers have used different tools, including trucks, knives, and bombs. And this isn’t about America—the same thing happened in Christchurch, New Zealand. 

In fact, in the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, he specifically outlines his desire to push gun control through his own actions, causing societal friction. In his mind, gun control could cause a second civil war in the US. Even the markings on his firearm were designed to incite the corporate media into enflaming the debate further than his awful actions could go on their own.

These tragedies are textbook cases of killers mimicking each other’s techniques. The Buffalo, NY killer wrote: “The media loves to hate on the AR-15, which may increase coverage and public outcry.” It sounds exactly like what the Christchurch shooter described in his manifesto. 

As a country, we must stop sensationalizing mass murderers and their actions for the purposes of advancing a gun control agenda and look at the root causes of this violence, such as: 

1. The severe mental illness driving these racist, violent actions. 

2. The “media contagion effect,” which rewards mass killers for their violent actions. 

Americans should demand accountability from the media for the role they play in encouraging future acts of violence. 

That’s why GOA is a staunch proponent of legislation in Congress condemning the media for using mass murderers for viral content.  

Resolutions introduced by Representative Andy Ogles and Senator Mike Lee called on the media to voluntarily adopt standards to minimize the “media contagion effect” and deny mass killers the publicity and infamy they desire. 

If corporate media and politicians stop weaponizing tragedies, perhaps we could work together and “do something” effectively. 

*   *   * 

We’ll hold the line for you in Washington. We are No Compromise. Join the Fight Now.

From Down Under comes a rare triumph for victims of manipulative social media “fact-checking.” 

Facebook parent Meta has suspended the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) from its fact-checking operation after investigative reporters exposed its leftist bias and the expiration of its fact-checking certification from the entity that coordinates Meta’s policing of speech. 

“Considering both the nature of the allegations against RMIT and the upcoming referendum, we have decided to suspend RMIT from our fact-checking program,” a Meta spokesman told Sky News.

The spokesman was referring to the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum, which calls for creating a new political entity to “make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government … on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.” Australians refer to it as “the Voice.” 

In a lengthy August 23 exposé, Sky News uncovered multiple conflicts of interest and fact-checking policy violations by RMIT’s so-called “FactLab.” Facebook’s deputized RMIT thought-police had frequently blocked and suppressed anti-Voice journalism on Facebook, including that of Sky News. Sky found that, between May 3 and June 23, every one of RMIT’s fact-checks about the Voice scrutinized content that bolstered the case for voting ‘no’ on the measure.  

Facebook is manipulating the public almost everywhere on Earth.

That is why they won’t open source their algorithm. https://t.co/iO0PUO1joF

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 23, 2023

“The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) requires participating organizations to demonstrate a commitment to nonpartisanship and fairness,” Meta told Sky News. “The IFCN will determine whether RMIT FactLab’s expired certification should be reinstated.”

RMIT FactLab is led by former Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reporter Russell Skelton. Sky reported that Skelton “has published dozens of tweets criticising conservative viewpoints and the journalists he has been tasked with fact checking.” He’d also explicitly advocated a “yes” vote on the Voice, in violation of IFCN’s published fact-checking principles.  

RMIT fact-checker Renee Davidson, who has also publicly supported the Voice, reposted a tweet accusing anti-Voice politician Peter Dutton of engaging in “fear-mongering through racism.” 

“The decision of a foreign headquartered social media platform to interfere with legitimate public discourse during a referendum to change the Australian Constitution is particularly egregious and cannot go unaccounted,” wrote Australian Senator James Paterson in a letter to Meta that preceded news of RMIT’s ejection from Facebook’s constellation of fact-checkers. Paterson also asked Meta to explain how it would stop putting its thumb on the scales as the vote approaches. 

Though RMIT was previously certified in its fact-checking role by IFCN, that credential expired last December. The contract between RMIT and Meta authorizes Meta to void the deal if the school loses its certification, but — up until now — Meta had allowed RMIT to keep on censoring content anyway. 

While it’s nice to see this rare comeuppance for the fact-checking regime, RMIT’s ejection will do little to disrupt the Big Tech-Big Media thought police regime as it relentlessly suppresses voices that counter the leftist agenda.  

Authored by Dan Alban and and Daryl James via RealClear Wire,

Police recruits join the force to help others and fight crime. Research confirms it. But priorities changed when sheriff’s deputies detained Eh Wah in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, and found more than $53,000 in his car.

Law enforcement training kicked in, and the purpose of the traffic stop switched from public safety to raising revenue. The deputies seized the cash and spent the next six hours interrogating Eh Wah, looking for any excuse to justify civil forfeiture, a process that allows the government to take and keep cash, cars and other assets without a criminal conviction.

Oklahoma agencies normally keep quiet about civil forfeiture, which is why the state ranks among the worst in the nation for civil forfeiture transparency. Oklahoma publishes no statewide reports, conducts no regular audits, and tracks only limited metrics.

The silence is strategic. The more people learn about civil forfeiture, the less they like it. But Oklahoma police and prosecutors have voiced opposition in recent weeks to H.R. 1525, the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act (FAIR), a bill that would reform federal civil forfeiture.

Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics Deputy Director Brian Surber says the measure would take money from state and local agencies, making it harder to fight drug cartels and other criminal enterprises.

What happened to Eh Wah undercuts this narrative. He was not a drug lord or even a low-level dealer. He was a volunteer manager for a Christian rock band, raising money for Thai orphans and Burmese refugees. Some of the cash belonged to Eh Wah and the band members, following a monthslong tour across several states. The rest came from concert donations and belonged to the orphans and refugees.

Carrying cash is legal. The money in the car was legitimate. And none of it related to a broken taillight — the reason for the 2016 traffic stop on U.S. Route 69. Eh Wah, who neither smokes nor drinks, had nothing illegal in his vehicle. Other than driving with a burned out bulb, he did nothing wrong.

The deputies pounced anyway, putting civil forfeiture in motion.

To prevail, at least in theory, the government must link seized assets to criminal activity by a preponderance of the evidence, a low standard that means government hunches are more likely correct than not. But in the vast majority of cases, the government does not have to prove anything by any standard.

Property owners get trapped in procedural mazes and lose by default. Many people give up without ever seeing a judge. They often have no choice. Civil forfeiture includes no right to counsel, and attorney fees often outweigh the value of seized assets.

Once the process ends, participating agencies keep 100 percent of the proceeds for themselves. The result is a powerful incentive for police and prosecutors to self-fund through aggressive enforcement.

The FAIR Act would not affect Oklahoma law. But it would end “equitable sharing,” a maneuver that allows state and local agencies to transfer seized property to the federal government for civil forfeiture, and then take a cut of the proceeds when the process ends. Oklahoma agencies pocketed more than $2 million this way in 2020.

Oklahoma District 12 Attorney Matt Ballard wants to protect this revenue stream. What he fails to mention is that equitable sharing circumvents state law, which should not happen. Oklahoma agencies should follow Oklahoma law, which already makes civil forfeiture far too easy.

State and local agencies collected $6.2 million for themselves in 2020 under Oklahoma law — above and beyond equitable sharing — representing more than 75 percent of proceeds. Indeed, the civil forfeiture case against Eh Wah was brought under Oklahoma law, not through the feds.

Eh Wah fought back with free representation from our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, and recovered his cash. Now civil forfeiture apologists want to call his ordeal an “outlier.”

But they have no data to support that claim. And they miss an important point: Even if proceeds come entirely from criminals, which they do not, the process skews law enforcement priorities.

Agencies shift their focus from following criminals to following the money, which creates blind spots. At least one study shows that increased forfeiture revenue actually reduces crime closure rates.

Innocent property owners like Eh Wah suffer. But so do officers, who get stuck working as fundraisers rather than crimefighters. The FAIR Act would help refocus law enforcement on its true priority—protecting the public, not the bottom line.

Dan Alban is a senior attorney and co-director of the National Initiative to End Forfeiture Abuse at the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Va. Daryl James is an Institute for Justice writer.

By Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com

Chevron has evacuated three oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico ahead of tropical storm Idalia which is strengthening to a hurricane and expected to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday.

The U.S. supermajor said on Tuesday that it had evacuated non-essential personnel from its Blind Faith and Petronius platforms, and all staff had been removed from its Genesis platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil and gas production continued on Tuesday at Chevron’s operated platforms and other facilities in the Gulf of Mexico, a spokesperson told Reuters.   

In the 7 a.m. CDT Tuesday update on Hurricane Idalia, the National Hurricane Center said that Idalia is strengthening as it moves northward over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico.

“There is a danger of life-threatening storm surge along portions of the Florida Gulf coast. Heavy rainfall has the potential to produce flash and urban flooding across portions of the west coast of Florida, the Florida Panhandle, and southern Georgia,” the National Hurricane Center said.

Idalia is expected to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday and create chaos and gasoline shortages just ahead of the Labor Day weekend, when more drivers are expected to hit the road, analysts say.

As of Tuesday morning, the percentage of gas stations in Florida without gasoline remains low but is constantly rising, GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, said.

Gasoline demand in Florida ahead of Idalia could lead to shortages but they will be temporary, AAA Auto Club spokesman Mark Jenkins told Florida’s WUSF Public Media.

“As long as the Tampa Port remains open then gasoline will continue sailing into the region. And deliveries will be made until the actual storm itself is passing through, and then that’s considered to be unsafe to transport fuel, and most people wouldn’t be on the road at that time anyway,” Jenkins said.

Moreover, Hurricane Idalia is not expected to impact refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast supplying Florida as these are on the Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi coasts, he added.

Authored by Jessie Zhang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

In light of a court case launched by a group of doctors challenging the Queensland government’s COVID-19 vaccination mandates, records have revealed that the first deaths in the Australian state were individuals who were fully vaccinated.

A list of the state’s first 183 COVID-19 deaths from the pandemic’s start on March 13, 2020, until Jan. 27, 2022, produced by Queensland’s chief health officer in an affidavit, indicates it was known to authorities as early as Jan. 2022 that the vaccines may not be preventing deaths.

The list shows that the first locally acquired COVID-19 death was one in their 80s and another in their 30s, with both having received two doses of the vaccine in December 2021 and January 2022, respectively.

While Queensland recorded seven deaths early in the pandemic, these cases were acquired outside of the state and before vaccine rollouts began.

Queensland’s border opened in December 2021 after 80 percent of the state population vaccination was reached. By Dec. 31, 2021, nearly 90 percent of the population over 16 were fully vaccinated.

Queensland’s Workplace Mandates

The case, which was launched against the state, calls for the September 2021 directive requiring employees in public health and aged-care facilities to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to be revoked.

A specialist from the case, psychiatrist Peter Parry, said that in the three decades of his career, he had never been subject to disciplinary action until now.

“I graduated from medical school 40 years ago and in all that time have never had a single complaint about me presented to a medical board or AHPRA,” he said.

The reason he chose to decline the COVID-19 vaccines was because these are “not normal vaccines.”

“We hope, by bringing evidentiary material and expert witness testimonies before the Supreme Court, that the Justices will look at the evidence and rule in our favour. If successful, large numbers of experienced nurses, allied health, and doctors will be able to return to assist an overstretched Queensland public health system,” he added.

In addition to enforced work mandates, Premier Annastacia Palazczuk barred the unvaccinated from accessing services and freedoms such as hospitals, disability services, aged care, libraries, and hospitality venues.

This was enforced by proof of vaccination requirements at venues, which the Queensland government said was to keep Queenslanders safe.

BREAKING: Fully vaccinated Queenslanders will be rewarded to keep our freedoms from 17 December or when we reach the 80% double dosed milestone. #covid19 pic.twitter.com/WICAlLvxl0

— Annastacia Palaszczuk (@AnnastaciaMP) November 9, 2021

Messaging Shifts to Reducing Severe Illness

Initially, in 2021, the Queensland Government closed the state’s borders and encouraged people to get vaccinated against COVID-19. They aimed to reopen the borders once 80 percent of the population was vaccinated, with the goal of stopping the virus’s spread and safeguarding vulnerable citizens.

However, when the borders reopened after reaching the target, COVID-19 cases surged instead of decreasing. When it became clear that the vaccines didn’t entirely prevent infection or transmission, the focus of the messaging shifted to highlight the vaccines’ effectiveness in reducing severe illness and death.

It is still a condition today for most Queensland health staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to ensure the ongoing safety of employees, patients, visitors and the wider community.

“The overwhelming benefits of COVID-19 vaccination continue to outweigh the potential risks, and this is substantiated by enormous amounts of safety data based on billions of doses worldwide,” a spokesperson for the TGA told The Epoch Times in an email.

Pfizer Dismisses Concerns Over Vaccine Mandates

The news of the deaths follows a parliamentary inquiry into the COVID-19 mandates heard from the Australian heads of Pfizer Australia that the vaccine mandates coerced Australians into getting vaccinated for COVID-19, saying they had a choice.

Appearing before an Australian senate inquiry into the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, Pfizer Country Medical Director Dr. Krishan Thiru and Dr. Brian Hewitt, the head of Regulatory Sciences for Pfizer, dismissed concerns of senators that Australians had been coerced into getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

“I believe firmly that nobody was forced to have a vaccine,” Dr. Thiru said.

“Mandates for vaccine requirements are determined by governments and health authorities. I believe everybody was offered an opportunity to get a vaccine or not get a vaccine. I don’t believe that anybody was forced to take a vaccine.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Hewitt, when asked if he believed Australians in states that were subject to large-scale mandates—like Western Australia or Victoria—were not forced into getting the shot even when they found they were unable to earn a living without receiving a vaccination, replied he did not believe mandates compelled individuals into vaccinating.

“The mandates for vaccine requirements are determined by governments and health authorities. I don’t believe that the mandates actually forced individuals to get vaccinations,” he said.

Victoria Kelly-Clark contributed to this report.