California AG Sues SoCal School District For ‘Outing’ Trans, Pronoun Students To Parents
California attorney general Bob Bonta has filed a lawsuit against a Southern California school district over a recently adopted policy that requires schools to notify parents if their children change their gender identification or pronouns.
“It tramples on students’ rights,” said Bonta, who’s seeking a court order to immediately halt the Chino Valley Unified School district from what he called “forced outing” of transgender students that violates their civil rights, NBC Los Angeles reports.
The move comes after Chino Valley Unified, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, adopted the policyfollowing a shift in leadership on the school board. Other Southern California districts have adopted similar policies and Bonta said he believes they will also be affected by this litigation, though they are not named in the suit.
In a response for a request for comment, the district’s director of communications said the district was not notified of the filing until after news organizations reported on the lawsuit. The district had not been provided an opportunity to examine the lawsuit Monday morning.
So – schools are allowed to hire queer activist teachers and feature books with leather-bound gay grandfathers making out, but if they let parents know that their child is pursuing an alternative lifestyle – the state will sue them.
“At this time, the District is working with its legal counsel to review the lawsuit and its contents,” Director of Communications Andi Johnston said in an email. “Prior to the filing, District personnel had been working with complete transparency in providing Attorney General Bonta’s office with requested documents and records. Superintendent Enfield spoke with the DOJ’s legal counsel weekly to confirm the District was providing requested files, which had changed several times from the original subpoena.”
The state’s lawsuit argues that the policy discriminates against transgender and ‘gender non-conforming’ students, and is in violation of the state constitution which requires equal protection for all students (from their own parents?) regardless of their gender expression, sexual orientation, or identity.
“Every student has the right to learn and thrive in a school environment that promotes safety, privacy, and inclusivity – regardless of their gender identity,” Bonta said in a statement. “We’re in court challenging Chino Valley Unified’s forced outing policy for wrongfully and unconstitutionally discriminating against and violating the privacy rights of LGBTQ+ students. The forced outing policy wrongfully endangers the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of non-conforming students who lack an accepting environment in the classroom and at home. Our message to Chino Valley Unified and all school districts in California is loud and clear: We will never stop fighting for the civil rights of LGBTQ+ students.”
Parents, meanwhile, say they have a right to know the decisions their children are making at school.
The Supreme Court might have ended race-based affirmative action in higher education, but as students return to the classroom this fall, the next frontier in the debate over discrimination in education and at work is already at our doorstep in K-12 public schools.
In his majority opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” The only way to achieve that constitutional imperative is for public school boards and superintendents to take a close look at the way they staff America’s K-12 classrooms.
A new report from the National Opportunity Project identifies widespread discrimination in public school employment practices. After reviewing responses to a litany of public records requests, evaluating job posts, and examining hiring criteria, the National Opportunity Project found that school districts are using divisive social and political ideologies, and in some instances race, to drive hiring decisions.
The biased K-12 hiring practices often stem from the en vogue “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI, initiatives that have been adopted by school boards and administrators in recent years. Once thought to be prevalent only in higher education, research by the National Opportunity Project demonstrates the trickle-down effect of discriminatory higher education practices; they eventually are adopted by K-12 public schools.
Many school districts fail to prioritize candidates’ educational and professional qualifications, and instead focus on applicants’ answers to questions about poorly-defined political causes such as “social justice” and “equity.” For example, in suburban Chicago, Evanston Township High School requires that “applicants must demonstrate a commitment to social justice, equity, excellence and high expectations for all students.”
In Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, teacher candidates are asked, “What does equity mean to you? How do you plan to keep equity at the center of your classroom?” Responses that show strong agreement with DEI concepts like “equity journey,” “equity work,” and “understand that race is a social construct” are rated more highly on a scoring rubric. This is just a small deviation from the race-based numerical rating system that was outlawed by the Supreme Court more than 20 years ago in Gratz v. Bollinger.
Hiring committees are also instructed to assemble teaching staff that reflect certain politics, social ideologies, and racial backgrounds. City Schools of Decatur in Georgia directs school leaders to staff hiring teams for racial and gender equity by “ensur[ing] that there is at least one person of color and one woman or gender-fluid individual on the interview panel. Individuals who embody other aspects of diversity should be included as well.”
The practical effect of these policies is that teachers in many of America’s K-12 schools are not being selected based on their teaching ability or experience connecting with our country’s youngest and most vulnerable. Instead, we’re selecting teachers based on subjective, quasi-political, and sometimes illegal criteria that have nothing to do with reading, writing, and math. Plus, these types of hiring practices stifle true diversity and result in a homogenous teaching staff educating from only one ideological perspective.
America is the land of opportunity, a place where free speech and free thought are to be protected and encouraged. No matter your political stripes, we all should find these hiring practices alarming and at odds with our fundamental values.
What’s more, as the Supreme Court recently reminded us, straightforward racial discrimination is unconstitutional. And trying to smuggle such discrimination through code words like “equity” is still problematic. As the Supreme Court has stated, “What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows.”
It’s past time to address these discriminatory hiring practices in K-12 schools. The college students fighting to end affirmative action wanted all students to be seen for who they are beyond their demographics. In the same vein, what makes good teachers must be determined by examining their qualifications, their track records, their education, and their commitment to achieving the best outcomes for their students. Teacher applicants should not—and considering recent Supreme Court precedent, cannot—be judged, ranked, or hired based on their race, gender, creed, or political views.
Patrick Hughes is founder and president of the National Opportunity Project, a nonprofit government watchdog and education organization.
In Desperate Attempt To Boost Housing, China Cuts Mortgage Rates For First Time Since 2009
With the market urgently demanding a bazooka or some other “whatever-it-takes“ policy reaction from Beijing in response to China’s slow-motion economic and housing sector trainwreck, Xi’s regime continues to play cat and mouse with traders and continues to trickle down tiny, piecemeal stimmies on a daily basis and this morning was no different when Bloomberg reported that China’s largest banks are set to cut interest rates on trillions of yuan of outstanding home mortgages (and deposits) for the first time since the global financial crisis, as policymakers dig deeper into their toolkit to shore up growth in the world’s second-largest economy.
And indeed, shortly after the report, China – which one year ago suffered through a crippling mortgage payment boycott which brought many of the country’s property developers to the brink of ruin – confirmed that its big (state-owned of course) lenders are reducing rates on the majority of the nation’s 38.6 trillion yuan ($5.3 trillion) of outstanding mortgages, with the reductions only affecting loans on first homes, two of the people said.
At the same time, lenders such as ICBC (Industrial & Commercial Bank of China) and China Construction Bank are poised to cut deposit rates later this week for the third time in a year, people familiar said.
The moves are part of a targeted push by Beijing to spur consumer spending, drive more funds into the stock market and alleviate pressure on lenders’ profit margins. The moves will also achieve none of that since nobody will allocate capital to – and in – a country where the largest asset, real estate, remains in freefall and where everyone is expecting some form of helicopter money to eventually emerge and contain the collapse.
The cuts to mortgage rates were highly anticipated by investors after the central bank hinted at support in mid-July. While China has reduced benchmark rates and pushed the average mortgage cost to a record low, most Chinese households didn’t benefit as banks won’t reprice existing loans until the beginning of next year.
“This is an incremental policy step, not a game changer because people’s confidence is still low,” said Macquarie head of China economic Larry Hu. “I think we’re going to see property easing come through in the coming weeks, I just don’t know if it’s going to be strong enough.”
While Chinese shares gained in offshore trading after Bloomberg reported the banks’ plans, it’s unclear whether the moves will be enough to spark a sustained revival in investor confidence. Authorities have so far avoided broader stimulus measures despite a deepening property crisis and growing deflation pressures that have put the government’s economic growth target of around 5% at risk.
JPMorgan analysts estimated that the annualized rate on new mortgages stands at 4.18%, about 60 basis points lower than the outstanding borrowings. That has prompted some consumers to take out out short-term loans to repay mortgages early. This is a mirror image of the US where the effective mortgage rate is more than half below where the prevailing current 30Y mortgage yield is!
More than 90% of China’s outstanding mortgages were for first homes as of July 2021, according to the latest public data available from the banking regulator. In 2022, more than 80% of new home loans were on first homes, according to the housing ministry.
With lower mortgage rates, however, also come lower deposits rates, and the reduction in the latter is meant to help lenders protect their margins as they extend lower rates to homebuyers. Big state banks may cut rates on local-currency deposits across key tenors by between 5 and 20 basis points, according to the report. Regulators have signed off on the plan, the people added. The cut may come as soon as Friday, one of the people said.
Of course, none of this will make any difference for the big picture. China’s financial sector is already struggling with soaring defaults at shadow banks, which have triggered a fresh wave of anxiety about hidden stress and the potential spillover to state-owned lenders. A default by Chinese property giant Country Garden – said to have far more adverse consequences than the bankruptcy of Evergrande – is looming, and will further crush sentiment and spread deflationary shockwaves both domestically and across the globe. Analysts have also highlighted growing risks associated with debt-laden local government financing vehicles, with Goldman Sachs saying the exposure of banks could weaken their capital positions and lead to lower dividend payouts.
Among the various other piecemeal measures introduced by China, Bloomberg notes that as of June, 100 out of 343 Chinese cities have lowered the rate floor of new-home mortgages or removed the minimum required, the PBOC said in its quarterly monetary policy report on Thursday. That has brought the nation’s average mortgage rate to 4.11% in June, down 0.51 percentage point from a year earlier.
In an extreme scenario assuming the entire mortgage loan book is refinanced with a rate reduction of 60 basis points, earnings at Chinese bank for next year will be cut by 8%, with net interest margins narrowing by 7 basis points, according to JPMorgan. The US bank expects that about 50% of mortgage owners are likely to refinance and most of the impact on bank earnings will be in the near-term.
The last time China allowed a similar move was during early 2009, when some state-owned banks gave a discount on interest rates to qualified borrowers in certain areas in response to the global financial crisis, according to a Zhongtai Securities report.
Futures on the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index rose 0.8% in Hong Kong, building on a two-day rally that’s been fueled by a slew of market-boosting measures from authorities. The contracts are still down about 17% from this year’s high in January. And with consensus demanding helicopter money and nothing less to boost sentiment, don’t expect the gains to stick.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign has released a brand new “summer blockbuster” political ad highlighting Democrats’ well-documented history of disputing election results.
President Trump shared the roughly 10-minute video in an Aug. 28 post on Truth Social, calling it a “must-watch.”
“Republican supporters and President Trump are being ridiculed, persecuted, and even prosecuted by Biden, congressional democrats, and their radical prosecutors for raising questions about the accuracy of the 2020 victory,” the video begins.
“This may be one of the most hypocritical acts in history considering the Democrats have violently claimed that the last three Republican Presidential wins were stolen, rigged, and illegitimate, and it was Democrats who tried to stop the certification of a Republican President,” it continues.
The video goes on to cite a number of occasions in which Democrats have challenged election results, including during the 2000 presidential election when former Vice President Al Gore lost in a close-call race against President George W. Bush.
Mr. Gore ultimately challenged the results in the U.S. Supreme Court amid a clash over which candidate had received Florida’s 25 electoral votes.
The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that a previous Florida Supreme Court order for an elective manual recount of that state’s presidential election ballots was unconstitutional and Mr. Gore eventually conceded the race.
In the video, multiple Democrats—including President Biden, former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—can be seen questioning the 2000 election results, with President Biden stating outright that he believes Mr. Gore won the race.
U.S. Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton makes a concession speech after being defeated by Republican President-elect Donald Trump, in New York on Nov. 9, 2016. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)
Clinton, Pelosi Question Election ‘Integrity’
The video also shows footage of some Democrats refusing to participate in the official certification of the 2000 election results, including snippets of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) objecting to the “fraudulent 25 Florida electoral votes,” as well as other lawmakers declining to join in the certification.
It goes on to cite multiple other incidents in which Democrats challenged election results, including in 2004, when former President Bush defeated Democrat candidate John Kerry.
In one clip, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) can be seen calling for independent testing of voter equipment in Ohio after the election, while in another, former Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) claims there were “numerous irregularities” with the elections.
Ms. Clinton and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can also be seen questioning the “accuracy and integrity” of America’s elections.
The video later shows Democrats questioning the results of the 2016 presidential election, in which President Trump beat Ms. Clinton.
Ms. Clinton can be seen telling audience members at event that the election can be “stolen” from candidates and that President Trump “knows he is an illegitimate president.”
The video narrator went on to say that “some Democrats continued to promote the totally false narrative that President Trump had somehow conspired with the Russians” to win the election, alongside footage of multiple Democrats making false claims about the now disproven Russian interference narrative.
Former President of the United States Donald Trump, also the front runner for the Republican presidential candidate nominee, was booked and released on bond at Fulton County Jail on Aug. 24, 2023. (Fulton County Sheriff’s Office)
Trump Booked in Fulton County Jail
“The Democrats have also accused Republicans of stealing many other elections, including in Georgia, the very same place where tainted Democrat Georgia Prosecutor Fani Willis is now unfairly prosecuting President Trump for suggesting there was voter fraud,” the narrator continues, referring to Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ loss against Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.
“Many in America are asking why President Trump is being prosecuted for doing the very same thing Democrats like Biden and Hillary have done, and the answer is very simple. Like a third-world corrupt dictator, Biden will use any means necessary to beat the one Republican he knows he can’t beat,” the video narrator concludes.
The video from the Trump campaign comes shortly after President Trump was booked into the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta on Aug. 24 after surrendering himself to authorities following his indictment on racketeering and conspiracy charges.
After handing himself over to authorities, President Trump, 77, had his fingerprints and mugshot taken before being released on a $200,000 bond roughly 20 minutes later.
The indictment charges President Trump and 18 others in relation to their efforts to dispute the results of the 2020 election in the state.
President Trump was booked on 13 charges including a violation of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer, conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree, and conspiracy to commit filing of false documents, among others.
He has denied any wrongdoing and repeatedly claimed he is the victim of a political witch hunt.
Orbán – Hungary’s longest-serving prime minister – knows a thing or two about Russia (having grown up under their occupation, and been arrested and thrown into jail by Russian-backed police for his efforts to liberate the country) and Ukraine (a nation with which is shares a border), and so Tucker sat down to ask him – what exactly is going on in Ukraine right now (given the propagandic opacity of news in America).
“It is not just a misunderstanding, it is a lie,” Orban begins, when asked about the fact that American media continue to claim that ‘Ukraine is winning’ the war.
He suggests that the Biden administration misunderstands Russia, and attempting to remove Putin could lead to dangerous instability.
“To understand the Russians it’s a difficult thing, especially if you have an ocean between you and Russia.”
Orbán points out that Western political conversations often center on freedom, while Russian conversations focus on keeping the country together, and warns against the dangerous implications of the U.S. strategy, particularly for countries like Hungary that are geographically closer to the conflict.
“Don’t misunderstand the Russians. So they’re not going to get sick of Putin and throw him out, come on, it’s a joke.”
He criticizes Vice President Kamala Harris for suggesting that Ukraine could join NATO, saying it was an unrealistic proposal that escalated tensions.
Instead, the Hungarian PM urges a new security architecture that respects Ukraine’s sovereignty but doesn’t include NATO membership.
Seemingly for his unwillingness to simply acquiesce to every talking point provided by Washington, and instead to put his nation’s people first – and their energy and food needs – Orbán has been called a “fascist” numerous times by western media, a ‘puppet of Putin’ and ‘friend of Russia’..
Carlson asked Orbán, “are you worried about being crushed by the US?”
“It’s dangerous,” replies the Hungarian PM, recognizing that “I am not the favorite politician of the liberals, but nobody’s perfect.”
But, he adds that he doesn’t care because there are more important values required to uphold a civil society:
“There are certain things that are more important than me, than my ego: family, nation, god.”
“To be Hungarian is to be very proud of it. We love the nation, we love the country, and we are proud of it. It’s not every much mainstream thinking, political thinking of a western society.
But in Hungary, we are still very patriotic and Christian and committed to those values. Not from an ideological level, but on the streets everyday,”
The Hungarian approach is simple, he explains, “Washington is far away, Russia and Ukraine are close,” noting that decisions made in the US can have immediate impacts for his nation.
“It’s dangerous is my answer. So we should not neglect the importance of that fact and when the United States and this administration does not like you, or considers you as an enemy or a having a backtrack, it’s dangerous in international politics,”
Reflecting on NATO’s stance in the Ukraine war, Orbán exclaims:
“this is a bad strategy, we have to stop it” adding that “we cannot beat [the Russians], we will not kill their leader, they will never give it up, they will invest more.”
“What finally will count is boots on the ground, and the Russians are far stronger.”
Orbán then makes the ultimate mistake among global leaders, he praises former US president Trump:
“Call back Trump. That’s the only way out. Call back Trump,” Orbán said.
“Because you know, you can criticize him for many reasons. I understand all the discussion. But the best foreign policy of the recent several decades belonged to him. He did not initiate any new war. He treated nicely the North Koreans and Russia, even the Chinese. You know, he delivered a policy which was the best one for the Middle East, Abraham Accords. So he had very good foreign policy.”
“He’s [Trump] criticized because he’s not educated enough to understand foreign policy. This is not the case,” Orbán told Carlson.
“Facts count and his foreign policy was the best form for the world in the last several decades I have seen. And if he would have been the president at the moment the Russian invasion started, no, it would not be possible to do that by the Russians. So Trump is the man to save the world and probably the human beings in the world as well.”
Additionally, commenting on the fact that the US government is currently indicting the former president, the Hungarian leader frowns and says:
“…using the justice system against a political opponent… in Hungary, that’s impossible to imagine… that was done by the communists.”
His most ominous warning comes last:
“This is a very dangerous moment now,” he concludes, adding that it should be obvious to everyone that “the third world war is knocking on our door.”
Watch the full interview below:
Ep. 20 Hungary shares a border with Ukraine. We traveled to Budapest to speak with the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. pic.twitter.com/LOzpMrQNIz
Alabama could become the first state to execute a prisoner by forcing him to breathe in pure nitrogen, a novel method that has never been used.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office asked the Alabama Supreme Court in a court filing on Aug. 25 to schedule the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder-for-hire killing of a preacher’s wife in the 1980s.
“It is a travesty that Kenneth Smith has been able to avoid his death sentence for nearly 35 years after being convicted of the heinous murder-for-hire slaying of an innocent woman, Elizabeth Sennett,” Mr. Marshall said in a statement.
That court filing to the state’s top court also indicated that Alabama plans to execute Mr. Smith via nitrogen hypoxia, according to a news release from the attorney general’s office. The method of execution is authorized in three states, including Alabama, but it’s never been tried before.
While nitrogen makes up about 78 percent of the air inhaled by people and is harmless when inhaled with oxygen, the execution method will force the inmate to breathe 100 percent nitrogen. The method would deprive the death row inmate of oxygen before they would then pass out “within a minute” before dying shortly after that, some experts have said.
“Placed into a pure nitrogen environment, the convict would be unconscious within a minute (possibly even after a breath or two) and would be dead soon after,” Charles Blanke, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine, said in a Fox News interview. “Its failure rate, that is, cases in which the prisoner survives, would likely be much lower than what we see with current death penalty methods.”
Proponents of the execution method say that it would likely be painless. However, opponents have said it’s essentially a form of experimentation on people.
“No state in the country has executed a person using nitrogen hypoxia and Alabama is in no position to experiment with a completely unproven and unused method for executing someone,” the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that provides legal representation to those who may have been denied a fair trial, told the Associated Press.
Alabama authorized nitrogen hypoxia in 2018 amid a shortage of drugs used to carry out lethal injections, but the state has not attempted to use it until now to carry out a death sentence. Oklahoma and Mississippi have also authorized nitrogen hypoxia, but have not used it.
However, Alabama likely doesn’t have to prove whether a pure nitrogen-based execution in humane, one professor said.
“The burden is on the condemned inmate to show that it is torturous rather than the burden being on the state to show that it’s not,” Richmond University law professor Corinna Barrett Lain in an interview with Scientific American. Ms. Lain said that the most humane method of execution is likely death via firing squad.
Alabama has been working for several years to develop the nitrogen hypoxia execution method, but has disclosed little about its plans. The attorney general’s court filing did not describe the details of the how the execution would be carried out. Corrections Commissioner John Hamm told reporters last month that a protocol was nearly complete.
Meanwhile, a number of Alabama inmates seeking to block their executions by lethal injection, including Mr. Smith, have argued they should be allowed to die by nitrogen hypoxia.
According to the Alabama attorney general’s office, the pastor of the Westside Church of Christ in Sheffield, Alabama, in March 1988 sought to hire a hitman to kill his wife after incurring substantial debts and having an affair with another woman. The pastor, Charles Sennett, then took a large life insurance policy on his wife, Elizabeth Sennett, before hatching a scheme to have his wife murdered.
Mr. Sennett, according to the release, then hired Mr. Smith and John Parker, a friend of Mr. Smith, to kill Mrs. Sennett and pay them $1,000 each for the killing. The release said she was “ambushed,” beaten, and stabbed multiple times before her death. A week after his wife’s slaying, Mr. Sennett committed suicide and was never charged.
Mr. Smith was tried for the murder in 1989 and again in 1996. He was convicted both times with capital murder, receiving the death penalty both times.
In July 2010, Mr. Parker, who was convicted and sentenced to death, was executed for Mrs. Sennett’s death via lethal injection at the Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama. The U.S. Supreme Court at the time rejected a stay minutes before the execution began.
“I’m sorry. I don’t ever expect you to forgive me,” Mr. Parker told the woman’s family before his execution. “I really am sorry.”
At the time, Charles Sennett told outlets that the execution was “one of the steps we have to take to get closure and justice,” adding that “we still have another step with Smith, but tonight was a step in the right direction.”
Following the Supreme Court’s denial of President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, the interest on those debts begins accruing on Sept. 1, with loan repayments due on Oct. 1. Amid this souring backdrop, there has been a number of employers rushing to attract talent – in the form of debt assistance programs.
Bloomberg cited new data from job site Handshake that showed the share of full-time job listings mentioning student debt repayment programs has doubled since 2019. The share currently stands at 3% of all job listings.
More than 40.5 million borrowers owe a whopping $1.4 trillion in student loans. Using a 10-year payment period and a 5.8% interest rate, Barclays (in a separate report) calculates those folks owe an average of $390 monthly. Handshake data shows about 50% of the class of 2024 will graduate with student debt.
The days of companies offering employees free cafes, restaurants, and well-stocked micro kitchens are over. Instead, offering student debt relief programs is the new way to attract talent.
Christine Cruzvergara, Handshake’s chief education strategy officer, expects an increasing number of employers will begin to offer student loan relief perks in the years ahead to attract the best talent.
“The perk helps with higher retention of younger career employees,” according to Megan Bourque, head of benefits at Fidelity Investments. She said her firm first offered the assistance program in 2016, allowing eligible staff who work more than 30 hours a week to access up to $15,000 over seven years’ worth of monthly payments.
“With a cohort of workers increasingly burdened by student debt, help paying it down is likely to have wide appeal,” Cruzvergara said, adding, “It’s such a large swath of our graduating class now that it’s undeniably an issue for an entire generation.”
Forget free food perks. New grads with insurmountable debts will now search for companies offering the best assistance plans.
A service member who earlier this year blew the whistle and disclosed data from a Pentagon medical database showing a spike in the rate of myocarditis in the military in 2021, after the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, is going public.
The whistleblower is active-duty Navy Medical Service Corps officer Lt. Ted Macie. He has also revealed new data showing a substantial rise in accidents, assaults, self-harm, and suicide attempts in the military in 2021, compared to the average from 2016 to 2021.
This includes a 147 percent increase in intentional self-harm incidents among service members, and an 828 percent increase in injuries from assaults.
Lt. Macie told The Epoch Times that he began “keeping an eye on” a defense medical database when another whistleblower alerted him to a rise in health-related incidents in the winter of 2021/2022.
The Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) is a depository of all diagnoses—recorded using International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes—when an active service member is seen on- or off-base by a military or civilian provider. The database does not include any personally identifiable information of service members.
In January, Lt. Macie and his wife traveled to Washington with a report of the data he collected from DMED.
It showed that diagnoses of myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, jumped 130.5 percent in 2021 when compared to the average from the years 2016 to 2020. Myocarditis is a serious condition that can lead to death.
All four of the COVID-19 vaccines authorized in the United States can cause myocarditis, according to U.S. officials. COVID-19 can also cause myocarditis, though some experts say the data on that front is weaker.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated the vaccines in 2021, a requirement that remained in place until Congress forced its withdrawal in late 2022.
The data also showed spikes in diagnoses of pulmonary embolism (41.2 percent), blood clots in the lungs, ovarian dysfunction (38.2 percent), and “complications and ill-defined descriptions of heart disease” (37.7 percent).
DMED Data
Lt. Macie downloaded the data almost a year after the Pentagon said it fixed a data corruption issue with the DMED.
In 2022, other military whistleblowers reported shocking spikes in disease rates after the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccine. But the Pentagon responded that those figures were not correct because some diagnoses in the years 2016 to 2020 had not been counted, an issue stemming from “corrupt” data.
After the Pentagon said the issue was corrected, Lt. Macie and others—including First Lt. Mark Bashaw, a preventive medicine officer in the Army, Navy Lt. Billy Mosley, Army Surgeon Lt. Col. Theresa Long, and Army doctor Maj. Samuel Sigoloff—noticed that there were still concerning signs of increases in diagnoses, such as myocarditis and pulmonary embolism.
Since word spread that Lt. Macie was the only active-duty member at his command who didn’t receive the COVID-19 vaccine, and was actively suing the secretary of defense, Lt. Macie said people began to come to him in confidence telling him about adverse reactions, which they were convinced were “from the shot,” he said. “These anecdotal, but compelling personal injuries, were a motivator to get things on the right track.”
After verifying Lt. Macie’s report with the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the top Republican on that panel, sent a letter (pdf) to Mr. Austin in March asking the Pentagon to confirm Lt. Macie’s data.
Lt. Macie had suspected the Pentagon would not respond, based on his experience of previous requests made within the department going unfulfilled.
“In the event our suspicions were correct, I kept additional data to reveal as soon as the data we brought [to Washington] was confirmed, or after being ignored for some time,” he said.
“Much to my surprise,” said Lt. Macie, the Pentagon, in a July reply (pdf) to Mr. Johnson’s letter, confirmed that his data was accurate.
In the Pentagon’s response, Gilbert Cisneros Jr., undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, pointed to data on the rate of cases per 100,000 person-years, a way to measure risk across a certain period of time. For almost all the conditions that showed an increase in cases in 2021, he stated, the new case rate was higher for service members with a prior COVID-19 infection than for those with a prior COVID-19 vaccination.
“This suggests that it was more likely to be [COVID-19] infection and not COVID-19 vaccination that was the cause,” Mr. Cisneros stated.
Lt. Macie said he plans to bring the additional data he kept “up my chain of command with the aim of a resolution and validation for injured service members, but I’m not holding my breath.”
Lt. Macie has also brought this new data to the office of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), hoping to get the attention of the House Armed Services Committee, a panel Mr. Gaetz sits on. Lt. Macie is not aware of what Mr. Gaetz and his staff will do, but the lawmaker’s office acknowledged in June that “they will take a look,” he said. The Epoch Times has reached out to Mr. Gaetz’s office for comment.
Rise in Accidents, Self-Harm
According to his research, health-related incidents in 2021 rose substantially above the five-year average from 2016 to 2020. “As some may expect,” he said, “internal injuries like myocarditis (130 percent), tinnitus (42 percent), and cerebral infarction (stroke) (43.5 percent) are on the rise.”
But it was Macie’s wife who became curious, asking about other types of injuries.
“What about external cause morbidities, like burns, accidents, self-inflicted harm, and injuries that are not expected to be associated with the COVID shot?” he said.
With the new data he discovered, the following incidents exhibited increases in 2021 above the five-year average: exposure to forces of nature (773 percent), water transport accidents (7,400 percent), land transport vehicle (526 percent), suicide attempts (33 percent), assault (828 percent), slipping, tripping, stumble and falls (471 percent), and intentional self-harm (147 percent).
Some of these not only increased in 2021 but continued to rise in 2022. The Epoch Times has viewed screenshots of this data from the DMED.
Historically, if the Pentagon noticed a trend in certain areas like abuse and suicide, he said, the department would hold a safety stand-down—a military-wide mandatory training and review where all commands require one hundred percent participation.”
“What will higher-ranking general officers, the Surgeon General, Defense Health Agency, and Joint Chiefs do when they receive word that ICD codes/injuries for these incidents are on the rise?” said Lt. Macie.
“Soon, we’ll see if the same people who claim that the service member is their top priority actually show that through their action,” he added.
According to Lt. Macie, there are a few possibilities concerning the new data collected.
“If the data is correct, and is confirmed by [the Pentagon], more than just a stand-down needs to happen. Rising problems like self-harm, suicide attempts, accidents, and assault must be addressed immediately, not just the mess of [vaccine] injuries.”
He noted that the Pentagon may, for a second time, reply saying the data is incorrect, even though the department previously said they’ve resolved the data corruption issues in the system to prevent future errors. But such a reply would raise even more questions going to the integrity of the database and whether there is a cover-up at play, he projected.
Lt. Macie hopes that Congress will press the Pentagon for answers concerning this new data.
But if lawmakers fail to do this, “the people need to step up to hold our government accountable.”
Lt. Macie emphasized that his views do not reflect those of the Department of Defense or the Department of the Navy. The Pentagon didn’t return inquiries by The Epoch Times seeking an explanation for the rise in external cause morbidities.
Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluded the Food & Drug Administration failed to conduct the proper analyses before rejecting some vaping product applications. The court’s unanimous decision in Fontem US v. FDA upheld the FDA’s denial of Fontem’s application to market flavored vaping products, in line with prior D.C. Circuit precedent, but rejected the FDA’s denial of Fontem’s applications for unflavored products, and became the second circuit court of appeals to accuse the FDA of a “surprise switcheroo” when reviewing vaping product applications. This is all further evidence that the FDA has a vaping problem.
The FDA regulates vaping products—also known as ENDS or “electronic nicotine delivery systems”—because it “deemed” them to be tobacco products in 2016, subjecting them to regulation under the federal Tobacco Act. As a consequence, all such products that were not on the market by 2007 must obtain the FDA’s approval in order to be sold legally. Because of how narrowly the FDA defines individual products, this has meant the FDA has had to process applications for thousands and thousands of products, and in its rush to process these applications, the FDA appears to have cut some corners.
Fontem, which markets vaping products under the Blu and myBlu labels, sought to challenge the FDA’s denial of several of its products. Among other things, Fontem accused the FDA of failing to perform the required analyses before issuing its denials, and at least with regard to Fontem’s unflavored products, the D.C. Circuit agreed, finding the FDA failed “to engage in the holistic public health analysis required by the statute.”
From Judge Rao’s opinion for the court (joined by Judge Walker and Senior Judge Ginsburg):
With respect to Fontem’s unflavored products, the FDA also denied Fontem’s applications on the public health ground. While the FDA identified multiple “deficiencies,” it failed to analyze the tradeoffs necessary to make a public health finding. Nor did the agency explain how the specific deficiencies relate to its overall conclusion that Fontem failed to demonstrate its unflavored products were appropriate for the protection of public health. The agency’s denial therefore failed to comport with the requirements of the Tobacco Control Act.
In denying Fontem’s unflavored products, the FDA relies solely on the public health ground. The FDA could have promulgated regulations imposing consistent requirements on the composition and manufacturing of tobacco products. Had the agency done so, Fontem’s failure to meet those standards would be an independent and sufficient ground for denying the applications, regardless of the overall public health consequences of Fontem’s products. But the agency has not exercised its regulatory authority. Because the FDA has chosen to proceed application by application under the public health ground, it must undertake the holistic inquiry required by the statute. . . .
Instead of making an overall assessment that Fontem had not shown its products were beneficial to the public, the agency identified five highly technical deficiencies. But nothing in the denial order explains how the deficiencies relate to the overall public health consequences of Fontem’s unflavored products. And despite the express statutory requirement that the agency consider the “risks and benefits to the population as a whole,” including the “increased or decreased likelihood that existing users of tobacco products will stop using such products,” 21 U.S.C. § 387j(c)(4), nowhere in the denial order did the FDA address the potential benefits of Fontem’s products for the public at large. Nor did it consider the possibility that existing users of combustible tobacco products such as cigarettes would reap health benefits by transitioning to Fontem’s vaping products. . . .
And, as noted above, the D.C. Circuit found that the FDA has had difficulty following its own guidance about what sorts of information and analyses companies must submit when seeking product approval.
The FDA’s failure to correctly apply the public health inquiry to Fontem’s unflavored products led it to make another serious error. In its initial deficiency letter, the FDA requested certain information from Fontem, thereby indicating such information would be sufficient for the agency to approve Fontem’s products. Cf. 21 U.S.C. § 387j(c)(3) (providing an application denial “be accompanied by a statement informing the applicant of the measures required to remove such application from deniable form”). But in several instances, the FDA changed its tune in the denial order, reproaching Fontem for failing to provide information the agency had never explicitly sought. With respect to Deficiency 2, for instance, the FDA initially requested a “scientific justification for why consecutive puffing does not cause an increased risk of user injury” and “[t]he target value, upper and lower range limits, and test data” for the studies employed by Fontem. But after Fontem provided that information, the FDA faulted Fontem for failing to provide “scientific justifications” for its puff counts or the “maximum values” of “aerosol temperature measurements.” Similarly, with respect to Deficiency 3, the FDA’s letter requested information about the quality control processes at one facility. Yet the denial order faulted Fontem for failing to provide information about the processes at a different facility.
Shifting the regulatory goalposts without explanation is arbitrary and capricious. By indicating in its deficiency letter that Fontem could resolve issues with its applications by providing specific information, the FDA represented such information would be sufficient to secure approval. By later requiring different information, the agency “pull[ed] a surprise switcheroo.” Env’t Integrity Project v. EPA, 425 F.3d 992, 996 (D.C. Cir. 2005). The lack of consistency and notice to regulated entities is another unlawful consequence of the agency’s departure from the holistic public health inquiry.
The D.C. Circuit upheld the FDA’s denial of Fontem’s applications for flavored products, likely (in part) because of prior D.C. Circuit precedent affirming the FDA’s conclusion that “flavored products present greater risks than other tobacco products” in that they may be more attractive to non-tobacco users, and youth in particular. In Prohibition Juice v. FDA, a prior D.C. Circuit panel broadly embraced sweeping (although not particularly well substantiated) claims about the appeal of flavored vaping products to youth and paid little attention to the FDA’s need to consider the negative health consequences of making non-combustible products less attractive to current and prospective smokers. While this may have boxed in the current panel with regard to flavored vaping products, largely because (as the panel noted) the FDA’s analysis of Fontem’s flavored products was “consistent . . . with the balance” struck in that prior opinion, it did not prevent the court from carefully scrutinizing the FDA’s treatment of unflavored products.
Despite the FDA’s partial victory in Fontem, this decision is another potentially significant setback for the agency. The FDA is facing multiple lawsuits challenging its product application denials, and while it has prevailed in some cases, it has had significant losses in the Eleventh and Fifth Circuits, with another significant case pending before the Fifth Circuit sitting en banc.
And while the FDA may not be eager for Supreme Court review of its vaping product handiwork, these cases have created a circuit split over how the FDA’s application denials should be evaluated, making it more likely a vaping product application denial eventually makes its way to One First Street. And insofar as these cases shine a light on the FDA’s inconsistent and arbitrary decisionmaking, one might wonder whether these cases could influence how courts evaluate other controversial policy decisions the FDA is currently trying to defend in court.
The reigning narrative of Sweden during the pandemic is that the Swedish government took a brazenly hands-off approach to COVID-19—and suffered mass, avoidable deaths as a result.
During the spring and summer of 2020, Sweden bucked the international trend by not issuing emergency stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, or school closures. With the exception of restrictions on nursing home visits and large gatherings, the country stayed open during that time.
The concurrent spike in COVID deaths it experienced, particularly in comparison to its Scandinavian peers, was all the proof politicians and much of the press needed to dismiss its liberal approach as inferior to Chinese-inspired lockdowns that swept the rest of the globe.
The New York Times called the country a “cautionary tale.” Then-President Donald Trump denounced the country’s approach on Twitter.
Yet, this interpretation of Sweden’s COVID-19 performance as disastrous and deadly is largely wrong, argues Johan Norberg in a new paper for the Cato Institute.
The data that’s accumulated over the past three years suggests that Sweden’s “laissez faire approach seems to have paid off,” writes Norberg.
“It seems likely that Sweden did much better than other countries in terms of the economy, education, mental health, and domestic abuse, and still came away from the pandemic with fewer excess deaths than in almost any other European country, and less than half that of the United States.”
Sweden has largely been dismissed as a failure on COVID-19 because its COVID death rate was middle-of-the-back of the list when compared to other European countries and much higher than other Scandinavian countries that had harsher restrictions.
Neighboring Norway had about half the COVID death rate of Sweden when looking at the period of January 2020 to June 2023, for instance.
Yet Norberg argues just looking at COVID deaths overstates the deadliness of the pandemic in Sweden, given the country’s greater surveillance of COVID cases and broader definition of a “COVID-19 death.”
Swedish “authorities automatically checked the lists of people who were infected against the population register, so everyone who died and had tested positive for the virus was counted as a COVID-19 death, even if they died from a heart attack or a fall,” writes Norberg.
That contrasts with Norway, which depended on individual doctors to proactively report COVID-19 deaths to public health authorities. As a result, the Norwegians probably undercounted their COVID deaths, while Sweden overcounted.
Instead, Norberg focuses on excess deaths—the difference between the number of overall deaths in the country and the expected number of deaths based on past mortality rates. Here, Sweden ended up having the fewest excess deaths of any European country, seeing only a 4.4 percent excess death rate.
That’s slightly better than Norway’s 5 percent and less than half of Europe’s average excess death rate of 11 percent.
Sweden did get hit harder earlier in the pandemic, and it’s on this earlier performance that much of the commentary about the country’s pandemic failures came from. That snapshot is misleading.
“Sweden’s comparatively dismal performance at the start of the pandemic was mostly a result of other countries having managed to delay cases and deaths, rather than having prevented them,” writes Norberg. “Sweden suffered most of its deaths in 2020, while the Nordic neighbors and many other countries got them in 2022.”
The Cato paper cites one Norwegian public health official as saying, “Other countries managed to delay some deaths, but now, three years after, we end up at around the same place.”
Norberg’s paper repeats a common practical argument against lockdowns: that they’re unnecessary because people will voluntarily restrict their interactions with others in response to rising risk of the virus.
“That people adapt voluntarily when they realize that lives are at stake. Swedes quickly changed their behavior and mostly followed the recommendations,” writes Norberg, citing data showing a rise in remote work arrangements and a collapse in public transit ridership early in the pandemic.
He suggests that the reliance on voluntary compliance meant Swedes were more willing to comply with pandemic precautions for longer. Mandatory COVID restrictions in other countries bred backlash to any countermeasures, leading to a greater number of deaths later on.
Perhaps that’s true. But if it is, it doesn’t seem any of it made much of a difference in the deadliness of the pandemic. Again, Sweden ended up in basically the same place in terms of overall mortality as its Nordic peers (and in a much better place than many other rich countries.) To the degree voluntary pandemic precautions worked, they likely had only the same delaying effect as its neighbors’ mandatory lockdowns.
The real benefit of Sweden’s more liberal pandemic policies then appears to be that it had far better social and economic outcomes than its neighbors, despite experiencing roughly the same number of excess COVID deaths.
Swedish students suffered no learning loss during the pandemic, whereas half of U.S. students did. The country’s economic growth outperformed the eurozone and the United States. It avoided other countries’ increased suicide rates and deteriorated mental health.
To be sure, Sweden’s COVID-19 policies weren’t completely anarchic. Some of the restrictions the country adopted during the winter of 2020 and spring and summer of 2021 were comparable, or even stricter than what many U.S. states had in place.
That includes bans on public gatherings of more than eight people from November 2020 through May 2021. By comparison, many U.S. states had ended capacity restrictions and mass gathering limits well before then.
The country was nevertheless much more respectful of people’s individual choices during the pandemic than other European countries and most U.S. states. That additional freedom doesn’t appear to have proven more deadly in the aggregate. Instead, it seems to have helped Sweden avoid many of the asocial knock-on effects of banning or restricting public life for months or years at a time.