Month: August 2023

Authored by Graham Young via The Epoch Times,

There is a totalitarian tendency stalking the world’s democracies. It draws on the idea of “misinformation” and “disinformation” to try to delegitimise opposition to government policies, whatever they might happen to be at the moment.

What is “misinformation” or “disinformation”? While there are suitable dictionary definitions—the first is accidentally untrue information, and the second is deliberately untrue information. These definitions beg the real question—“What is truth, and how do you determine it?”

This seems to have suddenly become a matter of pressing importance, particularly in the English-speaking world, with what looks suspiciously like a coordinated push by governments to introduce legislation to control “untruths” on the internet.

The UK has the Online Safety Bill, where truth is to be regulated by OFCOM, the Office of Communications. Ofcom is currently being taken to court by Canadian Mark Steyn because they fined him for interviewing Britains affected by vax injury.

Canada has a bevy of laws, and as we saw when the trucker’s bank accounts were frozen, in some of the harshest approaches ever seen to dissent by a democracy.

The last truck blocking the southbound lane moves after a breakthrough to resolve the impasse at a protest blockade at the Canada-U.S. border in Coutts, Alta., on Feb. 2, 2022. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)

While the United States is governed by the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech, the United States has a Disinformation Governance Board, and as the Twitter files have revealed, the U.S. federal government appears to clandestinely seek ways to evade the constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.

They do this under the cloak of national security, and to achieve their aim, “disrupting” a school board meeting with legitimate questions can be called an “act of domestic terrorism” so as to draw ordinary Americans into their net.

It’s no wonder then that Australia is now following the fashion and proposing to legislate the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023.

Labor has always been keen on political censorship, and indeed, back in 2009, Stephen Conroy, then the communications minister, introduced legislation to filter the internet in Australia.

Where Has This Impetus Come From?

Moves to establish these controls seem to have surfaced somewhere in 2018 or 2019 in a number of these jurisdictions, but they really started to gain public support in 2020. Or at least that’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from a review of Google searches on the two words.

Google search trends for misinformation and disinformation. (Screenshot/Google)

The 2020 spikes all occur to coincide with the appearance of COVID-19, which with the states of emergency and heavily controlled narratives, explains why concern about disinformation would be high. But what was happening in 2004?

On March 20, 2003, the Iraq War started based on the premise Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

In 2004, Google went public via an IPO (initial public offering), which explains why our graph starts there and suggests that if it had started earlier, we would have found the increase coincided with the ramping up of rhetoric against Saddam Hussein.

And what we now know is that the real misinformation and disinformation in 2003 was the government’s line and that huge amounts of the COVID-19 information that came from the government in 2020 was also misinformation or disinformation.

Politics in the Backdrop

While it is in the nature of governments to try to suppress information unfavourable to their position, as Senator Conroy’s misadventure shows, it is difficult to get naked censorship over the line when the public is generally unworried.

What makes today’s moves towards censorship dangerous is that the public is not only polarised, but they are scared, so a proportion is prepared to support online censorship because, in their own minds allowing someone else’s free speech could be a threat to their lives.

People wearing protective face masks walk on the street in Brooklyn, New York, on Oct. 7, 2020. (Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times)

Even so, the pushback against the proposed legislation in Australia has been quite extensive, including legal organisations like the Victorian Bar Council.

While there are good legal and free speech arguments against the proposed legislation, the most persuasive for me is the research on which the whole process is based, which demonstrates just how yesterday’s misinformation is today’s Gospel truth.

In 2017, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) was asked to “consider the impact of online search engines, social media and digital content aggregators (digital platforms) on competition in the media and advertising services markets.”

Their report in 2019 was mostly about competition issues, but one section touched on misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.

They did recommend that a body like the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) be empowered to police a code of conduct. However, in their report, the ACCC explicitly recommends excluding misinformation in any code of conduct and also limiting the types of disinformation that might be included.

That is because most of these matters can be dealt with by existing laws and institutions.

Why did ACMA ignore this report to produce the bill that it has? One must suspect political bias. Misinformation and disinformation are terms used more on the left than the right side of politics.

Inasmuch as both terms depend on what you believe to be true and there is this preponderance of usage on the left, then misinformation and disinformation become aligned with disputing things the left thinks are true.

COVID Misinformation

To get beyond the ACCC report, ACMA relies on research they commissioned from the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra, which looked for exposure to misinformation on the internet on COVID-19.

Amongst other things, they test five propositions, some of them still beloved of the left but which we now know definitely to be either false or at the very least, matters of scientific dispute. These propositions had to do with the efficacy of masks, the safety of vaccines, that scientific best practice was being followed by governments, that the risks of COVID were not being exaggerated, and that supplements could not be used to treat COVID.

They also find that the more exposed to the internet you are, the more likely you are to delve beyond the mainstream and the more likely you are to be exposed to “misinformation.”

The surveying was done over the December 2020 to January 2021 period when vaccines weren’t even available and lockdowns were all too prevalent.

While you might have been able to make a case for the five propositions then, you certainly can’t now. The subjective reality of the researchers is tipped on its head.

Those most exposed to digital platforms and less relatively exposed to mainstream media were the best informed.

It appears that the best antidote to misinformation is a free exchange of ideas.

Ironically, one of the most contentious parts of the ACMA proposal is that all government information be treated a priori—as true and not subject to a code of conduct—letting the cat out of the bag as to its true purpose.

What Will Happen to the Public Exchange of Ideas

This bill is about partisan control by elements within the government and the public service who believe the public should unquestionably believe what they are told.

Imagine that principle being extended from COVID-19 to matters of race and biology.

Supporters hold placards during a Yes 23 community event in support of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, in Sydney, Australia, on July 2, 2023. (AAP Image/Bianca De Marchi)

If the bill were to be passed, what would even the Opposition be allowed to say about The Voice, given the constant refrain from the government that they are spreading “misinformation.”

It is hard to see ACMA not taking action to thwart the democratic process.

Australia doesn’t have a bill of rights, but perhaps some simple propositions, like the right of citizens to dispute government information, should be embedded in the Constitution.

When you align the government and the public service together and then add massive corporations, sporting codes, and community groups like churches, it is very difficult for the truth to get out. But out it must if we are to continue as a successful, pluralist, liberal society.

We can only find out what is true by letting it duke it out with what is untrue. Sometimes in this approach, we find we were wrong in the first place.

Allowing a Nanny State actor to determine what is true will not lead to truth but to civil unrest and poverty.

Following the 15th annual BRICS summit, which was held in Johannesburg, South Africa last week, the bloc of five major emerging economies announced the admission of six new members.

Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates are set to formally join the group on January 1, 2024 to expand the bloc’s footprint in the Global South and grow its economic and political clout on the world stage, establishing a real counterweight to the Western-dominated G7.

As Statista’s Felix Richter notes, the new bloc will represent roughly 46 percent of the world population, account for 29 percent of the world’s gross domestic product in nominal terms and 37 percent of global GDP at purchasing power parity.

You will find more infographics at Statista

“We shared our vision of BRICS as a champion of the needs and concerns of the peoples of the Global South. These include the need for beneficial economic growth, sustainable development and reform of multilateral systems,” South African president Cyril Ramaphosa said at a press briefing announcing the outcomes of the summit. He also indicated that the addition of the six new members is just the beginning of the bloc’s expansion process.

“As the five BRICS countries, we have reached agreement on the guiding principles, standards, criteria and procedures of the BRICS expansion process, which has been under discussion for quite a while,” he said. “We have consensus on the first phase of this expansion process, and further phases will follow.”

Interestingly, the new additions don’t move the needle too much in either category, as the new BRICS which will continue to be dominated by China and India, both in terms of population and economically. Combined, the six new members will account for roughly 10 percent of the group’s aggregate GDP, as Saudi Arabia is the only trillion dollar economy among the new entrants.

Authored by Scott Sturman via The Brownstone Institute,

Totalitarians describe a world dominated by positive feedback loops, where the slightest perturbation to a system expands unchecked and leads to instability and chaos. It is a world defined by an airplane wing in the midst of a low speed stall, where a pilot is given only one flawed, aerodynamic choice—to raise the nose of the aircraft by instinctively increasing the wing’s angle of attack. But this maneuver increases the drag on the aircraft out of proportion to the increase in lift, and without corrective action leads to catastrophe.  

Totalitarians, who exploit and manipulate the physical and social sciences to restrict personal freedom and human rights, promote subjective science which is convenient to their needs and unbalanced. Protective negative feedback loops are ubiquitous in nature and force systems towards stability and equilibrium but are ignored or marginalized in order to engender a sense of futility and fear in the general population. The ensuing desperation leads to political choices based on emotional and imperfect information and results in unanticipated excesses, persecution, and tyranny.

Marx, the unrepentant and frustrated anti-capitalist, never understood capitalism’s ability to self-correct. He mistakenly envisioned the free market as a system dominated by avarice and static behavior— a simplistic dialectic and zero-sum game that led to the exploitation of the workers and accumulation of great wealth by employers. The Marxist mindset fell victim to the presumption that positive feedback loops dominated capitalism, and the corrective, sustaining elements of negative feedback were nonexistent in a system predicated on efficiencies and flexibility to distortions in the market. 

The same erroneous assumptions pervade the ideologies of the neo-Marxists and critical theorists, which have manifested in critical race theory (CRT) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). These philosophies are steeped in nihilism, victim oppression, and power structures based on phenotype. They are designed to exploit positive feedback loops, where any attempt of reconciliation or constructive dialogue is dismissed a priori as accentuating the problem. The solutions are predictable—the segregation of all subjective identity groups, the abrogation of individual rights in favor of state control, the confiscation of all personal property, and the moratorium on freedom of speech. 

The Covid-19 debacle provided an opportunity for the pharmaceutical companies, government health regulatory organizations, and the rank-and-file medical establishment to exaggerate the effects of positive feedback loops and minimize the protective outcomes of negative feedback loops in the biologic setting. To achieve these aims, it was necessary to discard centuries of medical science and the understanding that biological systems are inherently self-corrective, and infectious diseases are not an exception.  

Authoritative sources informed the public that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was destined to become more lethal as it mutated, a stunning departure to the lessons of virology. The use of therapeutics was described as a hopeless act of resignation, patients were instructed to avoid medical attention until gravely ill, and the coup de grâce—this, of all viruses, was not susceptible to the protections of natural immunity. Fear prevailed, the public panicked, and totalitarians were given free reign to do what they do best. 

The purveyors of climate change hysteria are masters of using computer modeling to introduce mass formation into all aspects of society. The models are incomplete and disregard the mitigating variables of cloud formation, climatic cycles, and the solar influences. Data is cherry-picked, paleoclimatic results ignored, and the fundamentals of heat transfer and its relationship to the electromagnetic spectrum treated as an afterthought.  

Climate change advocacy is the sine qua non of subjective science run amok. By politicizing science and dismissing detractors as heretics, the movement has successfully exploited a doomsday scenario based on exaggeration and conjecture. Its victims unwittingly forfeit their personal freedoms and economic security for themselves and much of the people of the Third World, who without access to plentiful, inexpensive energy are relegated to a life of poverty and destitution. 

Free speech serves as the bedrock of a free people. It is the purest form of a negative feedback loop. Its participants willingly participate in the exchange of ideas, where unsavory, illogical, and preposterous thoughts are judged in the public forum and soon discarded. Beneficial ones are nurtured, fine-tuned, and restated until they are transformed into workable solutions made possible by open public debate.

The great excesses of political drama that have befallen mankind are a result of censored and skewed speech that is sheltered from the stabilizing, collective intellect and commonsensical insights of a free society. The French Revolution demonstrated that not one single zealot was too pure for the revolution. 

This perversion of perspective led to outrageous examples of political absolutism. This scenario played out during the Russian Revolution and Stalinism, the National Socialism of Nazi Germany, the 20th century military warlords of imperial Japan, Maoist China, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot. Millions have died and suffered from despots who controlled all aspects of communication.

The democracies and constitutional republics of the world are being censored at the behest of elitists, who claim they alone know the “greater good.” Leo Strauss’s “noble lie” is rationalized as an excuse for the promotion of dishonestly to further what those in control define as noble.  

We are informed that free speech is dangerous and that it leads to hate, instability, and mayhem. But this disingenuous argument is the argument of tyrants, who gaslight and use words as weapons to disable a free people. Free speech is the salvation of an open, prosperous, and civil society and the embodiment of the sustaining benefits of negative feedback loops.  

Authored by Amy Denney via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Autism is increasing at rapid rates, and researchers may be looking in the wrong places for the answer as to why.

An extensive meta-analysis of 25 autism studies could shift the focus of research into the cause of autism from genetics to environmental triggers. That shift could open up new, revolutionary avenues for potential treatments.

The research ties the disorder to changes in the gut microbiome, a community of microbes that live in the colon and are responsible for creating metabolites and other compounds crucial to our health and wellness.

Many influences outside of the human body are killing these beneficial microbes, which aren’t genetically part of us but live in symbiosis with humans. The new study, published June 26 in Nature Neuroscience, has linked autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to a distinct microbial signature that’s dysbiotic, or unnaturally out of balance. As in an ecosystem, too much of certain problematic species can destroy the overall ecology or lead to problematic consequences, such as too many of certain metabolites and not enough of others.

Meanwhile, autism rates are increasing at a speed that defies improved screening and diagnostic practices, as well as genetic patterns. The Centers for Disease Control released statistics in April that show the latest autism rate was 1 in 36 children in 2020, up from 1 in 44 in 2018, and 1 in 150 in 2000.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that it’s time to direct resources to pinpointing exactly what it is in our environment that appears to “turn on” autism development, according to doctors who are treating patients with ASD.

“Genetic diseases aren’t responsible for epidemics,” Dr. Arthur Krigsman, a specialist who treats children with ASD around the world, told The Epoch Times. “There’s something in the environment that’s triggering a gene that otherwise would be silent. There is no gene responsible for an epidemic.”

Our genes are wound up tightly in DNA spirals—many of them never being used—similar to blueprints that never make their way to the manufacturer. But cues in our environment can trigger epigenetic processes that trigger some genes to get turned on or others to get turned off, dramatically changing our likelihood of developing certain diseases or attributes.

The new research suggests that autism is linked to epigenetic triggers, which are influenced by the microbiome and modifiable over the course of our lifetime.

Researchers will undoubtedly keep trying to tease out some of the genetic links to the neurological disorder, which is largely diagnosed in childhood. Autism has been connected to more than 100 genes so far. But the puzzle has gotten more complex with environmental associations that seem to keep growing. And the heterogeneity of ASD makes it impossible to accuse one single factor as the cause.

The Epigenetic Nature of Autism

Many doctors believe that autism arises when “toxic” environmental pressures are applied and trigger epigenetic changes, Dr. Mark Cannon, a professor at Northwestern University, told The Epoch Times.

Toxicities can be biological and chemical but also emotional and social, and they can interfere with physiology. Examples include air pollutants, artificial food ingredients, glyphosate, medications, viruses, and even stress, which causes a biochemical cascade of changes in the body. All exert influence by changing the microbiome.

This community of trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi is responsible for breaking down food into metabolites, especially short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) that communicate vital information to the whole body to perform digestive, neurological, and other functions. The main roles of these gut bugs are metabolism, nutrient absorption, and immune function.

Microbiomes are constantly in flux, and it’s becoming impossible to define exactly what a healthy microbiome looks like because our industrial world has already altered our microbiome in severe ways. We’re only learning how to study them in detail now. That said, patterns are emerging, and studies are offering powerful clues about how diseases are linked to certain microbiome patterns.

Dr. Cannon pointed to an autism study published in 2012 in Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease that showed the epigenetic nature of autism. Rats were given SCFAs from a subject with autism.

The rats displayed abnormal motor movements, repetitive behavior, cognitive deficits, impaired social interactions, and other traits common in autism. The brain tissue of treated rats also showed neurochemical changes—such as innate neuroinflammation, increased oxidative stress, and glutathione depletion—consistent in patients with ASD.

“Conceptually, it is the author’s opinion that the pathophysiology of ASDs may be more completely understood as being similar to conditions such as ethanol intoxication, or diabetes, and the resultant complex interactions between diet, genetics, metabolism, host microbiome, and behavior, that are well known to exist in these treatable disorders throughout the life cycle,” Dr. Derrick F. MacFabe, the study’s author, wrote.

He suggested that SCFAs are the trigger of ASD or ASD behavior. SCFAs are derived from the fermentation of nondigestible polysaccharides, such as resistant starches and dietary fibers. Among their physiological functions, SCFAs are important to intestinal epithelial cell growth, which protects the gut barrier, and to inflammation regulation.

“Yes, you can turn autism on,” Dr. Cannon said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat at a conference and heard, ‘I always thought that was genetic,’ when in fact the data has never supported that.”

Disempowerment of Genetics

Focusing too much on genetics as the cause of disease can be a detriment to important avenues of research and treatment, and can discourage families with autistic children. Wholeheartedly embracing genetics leaves them powerless, Dr. Armen Nikogosian told The Epoch Times.

In that case, for people with autism and their families, the only option is to manage the symptoms with pharmaceuticals, he said.

Dr. Nikogosian shifted his entire medical practice in 2010 after one of his sons was diagnosed with autism.

“That’s the message I got. That’s the message a lot of parents get,” he said. “They’re entrenched in this idea that there’s this genetic cause involved in this.”

Dr. Nikogosian’s goal is to help parents who want to address the root causes of the disorder with a more holistic model of care that doesn’t rely on drug management of symptoms.

He said that the development of other treatments has stagnated because of the broad denial that environmental factors are involved.

“There’s absolutely, positively, no question there’s a massive input from environmental exposures,” Dr. Nikogosian said.

Some exposures that he explores with patients are heavy metal and mold exposures, multiple infections, and vaccines. Clarifying, quantifying, and understanding the contributions of environmental exposures are important, as it opens doors to novel treatments.

Some Environmental Influences Are Known

Autism researcher James Adams said that many hypothesized risk factors continue to be validated by research. In a recent study that he conducted on a small cohort of children with autism, he discovered that common themes were prevalent throughout research.

“It turns out mothers of kids with autism consumed lower fiber, less fiber than moms of typical kids. That’s important because fiber is a very important food for some gut bacteria,” he said. “You inherit most of your microbiome from your mother.”

A 2021 study in Frontiers in Immunology found that there’s an uptick of SCFA production in pregnant women associated with fetal immune system development. The study connected breastfed babies with more diverse and robust microbiome development.

Mr. Adams said that his research and other studies have shown formula-fed babies and those with increased use of oral antibiotics are more likely to be diagnosed with autism. Early delivery is also a risk factor for autism; the Frontiers article noted that premature birth tends to impact microbiome development. Babies delivered vaginally also have more diverse microbes and lower rates of illness than those born via cesarean section.

Other common, pregnancy-related factors for ASD include maternal obesity, maternal diabetes, and complications associated with trauma, ischemia, and hypoxia, according to data reported in Neuron in 2018.

A study recently published in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences that included 450 mother-child pairs noted that at age 2, children whose moms had experienced adversity as children had altered microbiomes. Other issues that moms can experience that appear to impact their babies’ microbiomes are antibiotic use and infections.

The pathway between the microbiome and autism has gained several validating findings, making it difficult to deny as a causal factor. In a perfect world, physicians say, it should lead to major changes in clinical settings.

“You always want to know the cause, because if you know the cause, you can stop the disease,” Dr. Krigsman said. “Stop looking for a gene that probably doesn’t exist and won’t be found. Try to find the cause, and then remedy that, remove that.”

Why Cause Matters

Microbiologist Kiran Krishna told The Epoch Times that what appears to be coming is similar to the global realization that smoking was causing cancer.

The tobacco industry eventually couldn’t stop the number of small, cumulative studies that clearly documented the link. Mr. Krishna said that the same thing is happening regarding the connection between the microbiome and autism, and the new meta-analysis is important because it can help other researchers attract grants and funding to look more intentionally at microbes and their environmental influences.

“Before this, we had smoke indicating the microbiome was involved in autism, and now we have fire,” Rob Knight, the director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at the University of California–San Diego and a study co-author, said in a statement.

There’s still a debate about whether the disease is driving dysbiosis, or the other way around. A 2021 study published in Cell concluded that dietary preferences, or restrictive eating that’s common among children with autism, is what causes changes in the microbiome. “We caution against claims that the microbiome has a driving role in ASD,” the researchers wrote.

Mr. Krishna suspects that the longitudinal data from the new study will help settle any lingering doubts as to whether the microbiome is a driver of ASD.

“We’re getting there because there are so many researchers globally that are interested in the microbiome,” he said. “We’re hitting that wave. There are somewhere around 10,000 published papers per year on the microbiome. That’s a tsunami. This paper … really puts a stamp that this is where we need to look.”

Keeping Genetics in Perspective

Jamie Morton, a corresponding author of the Nature study, told The Epoch Times that while there’s great data on how the environment shapes the microbiome, genetics will always be valuable because they determine how we’re influenced by toxic exposures.

He said that the study illustrates a cultural shift driving the marriage of researchers who tend to “camp out” in their own disciplines and are now uniting for the greater good of finding the cause of autism.

“That was one of the key points in our paper,” Mr. Morton said. “We wanted to highlight that when we are thinking about autism and these complex systems, you need everyone sitting in the same room. You need not just one dataset. You need all of them. You need genetics. You need microbiome. You need diet. You need metabolites, behavioral data, everything you can get your hands on.”

Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A movement is gaining momentum to pressure Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, county sheriffs, and the Florida Legislature to ban COVID-19 vaccines and all other mRNA vaccines in the state.

Republican executive committees in nine Florida counties—the local arms of the Republican Party of Florida—have adopted a resolution asking Mr. DeSantis and lawmakers to prohibit the sale and distribution of the vaccines in Florida.

The 83-page resolution also asks state Attorney General Ashley Moody to immediately seize all remaining vaccine supplies and conduct a forensic analysis of them.

The so-called “Ban the Jab” resolution adopted by the local Republican executive committees was written by psychotherapist Joseph Sansone.

It was adopted first by local-level GOP officials in Lee County, which includes Ft. Myers. It was then adopted by the committees in Collier, Lake, Santa Rosa, Seminole, St. Johns Hillsborough, and Brevard Counties. Franklin County became the ninth county to pass it on Aug. 19.

“On behalf of the preservation of the human race, the Lee County Republican Party calls upon Gov. DeSantis and the state legislature to prohibit the sale and distribution of Covid injections and all mRNA injections in the state of Florida, and for the state Attorney General to immediately seize all Covid injections and mRNA injections in the state of Florida and have a forensic analysis conducted,” the committee said in voting to adopt the resolution.

The resolution includes more than 140 exhibits of evidence that the authors say point to the independent findings of biomedical professionals and others concerned about vaccines.

None of the executive counties responded to The Epoch Times’ request for further comment.

The CDC declined to comment. The Republican Party of Florida, Pfizer, Moderna, and the FDA did not respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.

Accusations Against the Vaccine

The resolution adopted by GOP officials across the state includes a statement from Francis A. Boyle, the human rights lawyer and international law professor credited with writing the Biological Weapons and Anti-Terrorist Act of 1989. That legislation established the U.S. Code’s current bioweapon definition. 

Mr. Boyle described the vaccines as “COVID frankenshots” and alleged that they are “existentially dangerous to the

It also cites a coalition of 17,000 physicians and medical scientists gathered in May 2022 for what they called the Global COVID Summit.

That summit decided to “recognize that the disastrous COVID-19 public health policies imposed on doctors and our patients are the culmination of a corrupt medical alliance of pharmaceutical, insurance, and healthcare institutions, along with the financial trusts which control them.”

The resolution also cites the national Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which chronicles reports of adverse reactions to vaccines including COVID-19 vaccines.

Following the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, there was a reported 1,700 percent increase in VAERS reports and a 4,400 percent increase in reported “life-threatening conditions,” according to Florida’s own VAERS data.

In total, more than 41,000 adverse-effect VAERS reports were filed in Florida in 2021 and more than 9,000 in 2022.

The Governor’s Actions

Mr. DeSantis, currently running for the Republican nomination for president, already has taken measures to push back against vaccine mandates in the state.

He persuaded the Florida Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury in December 2022 to determine if any crimes were committed during the vaccine’s rollout.

In May, he signed four medical freedom bills.

Senate Bill 252 prohibits discrimination based on vaccination status and bans vaccine passports.

House Bill 1387 bans gain-of-function research in the state of Florida.

Senate Bill 1580 guarantees freedom of speech protections for physicians and medical professionals, such as protection for whistleblowers and the ability to object to participating in any treatments.

And Senate Bill 238 link provides protection against discrimination based on health care choices by keeping any investigations on the matter confidential. 

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo has been critical of the federal government’s pressure for citizens to submit to COVID-19 vaccines.

“Healthcare professionals should always communicate the risks of a medical intervention to their patients in a manner that is clinically appropriate and meets standards of ethical practice,” he said during a round-table discussion with Mr. DeSantis in December 2022.

“President Biden and Big Pharma have completely prevented that from happening—it is wrong.

“With these new actions, we will shed light on the forces that have obscured truthful communication about the COVID-19 vaccines.”

Dan Berger contributed to this report.

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

In almost every state, law students who pass their state bar examination, which allows them to practice law, take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution.

But the country’s top law schools teach future lawyers and judges the opposite.

Many now teach that the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the nation since its ratification in 1788, is broken and should be scrapped.

At least that’s what two members of conservative think tanks believe after reviewing courses at the country’s Top 10 law schools, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report in 2022. They examined the teaching at Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia universities and others.

Law professors at elite schools are open about their disdain for the U.S. Constitution, the researchers found.

“They’re saying they want to get rid of the Constitution—they’re making no secret about it,” said J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. He’s also worked for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center and former DOJ counsel, agreed.

The radicalization of law schools is a threat to freedom not previously encountered in the nation’s history, Mr. von Spakovsky said.

“In fact, some of them are very direct in teaching kids that they need to be revolutionaries, according to these courses that these law school students are taking,” he told The Epoch Times.

Pitching the Ditching of the Constitution

In 2022, Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn—who teach law at Harvard and Yale universities, respectively—wrote a New York Times editorial titled “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed.”

In it, they wrote that the struggle over the Constitution has proven to be a dead end for liberals. They called the founding document “undemocratic” and “inadequate.”

“The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism,” they wrote in the piece.

The writers reasoned that it would be far better if liberal legislators had the power to make a case for abortion and labor rights on their own merits without having “to bother with the Constitution.”

That way of thinking has pushed law schools increasingly to the political left over the past decade, Mr. Adams said.

“The stuff they’re teaching now is straight-up Marxist. There’s a big difference from just 10 years ago.”

Mr. von Spakovsky and Mr. Adams have been sounding the alarm about what’s happening within the country’s law schools through articles examining law school curricula.

Schools often teach that the Constitution is a tool of discrimination that must be uprooted, Mr. von Spakovsky said.

The idea that the Constitution and the United States are hopelessly flawed stems from critical race theory (CRT) and the concept of promoting social justice.

CRT has been spotlighted by works such as The 1619 Project by New York Times writers.

The 1619 Project, widely lauded by the political left, paints the United States as a country founded on slavery. It characterizes the nation’s Founding Fathers as racists.

While The 1619 Project has been rejected by many academics, historians, and politicians, its teachings have been embraced vigorously by the left. Many have held it up as a model of how history should be taught to children and college students.

The ideology upholds that thinking that “our Constitution is a patriarchal, oppressive document used to suppress minorities and just about everyone else,” Mr. von Spakovsky said. “And we are supposedly a systematically racist, misogynist society, and these law students need to go out and preach and practice revolution.”

Creating Revolutionaries

Classes such as “Decentralized Resistance” and “Law and Inequality” at Yale University are examples of the far-left infiltration of law schools, Mr. Adams claims in his series of articles.

The “Decentralized Resistance” class is about social change that results from “everyday resistance.” Accumulating widespread and numerous acts of everyday resistance can precipitate “quasi-revolutionary” change, class instruction tells law students, Mr. Adams said.

“Law and Inequality” explores “inequality along lines of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and class,” he said.

This kind of classroom instruction has given rise to the far-left notion that prisons should be emptied because they’re “racist,” Mr. von Spakovsky said.

The popularization of these ideas also led to the election of George Soros-funded prosecutors in Democrat-run cities. Mr. Soros is a Hungarian-born businessman who has donated billions to left-wing causes.

Conservatives lament that Soros-friendly prosecutors care more about criminals than their victims and allow them to go unpunished while crime spirals out of control.

Left-wing ideology holds that laws wrongly target minorities more than white people. Proponents of that thinking say society needs to find a more equitable way of dealing with crime, such as using social workers to rehabilitate lawbreakers instead of putting them behind bars.

“What they want is lawyers and judges who simply decide cases based on ideology, not on the law,” Mr. von Spakovsky said.

Fighting Words

Cancel culture, censorship on social media platforms, and the rise of activists who successfully shut down opposing speakers work together to demonstrate the left’s “unbelievable contempt” for the First Amendment, the bedrock of democracy, Mr. von Spakovsky said.

“They literally equate words with violence,” he said.

“So if you are expressing any kind of opinions that they disagree with, [they argue that] you don’t have a First Amendment right to engage in that kind of speech because it suppresses minorities and others,” he said.

Several classes at Stanford University demonstrated a shift away from the more routine courses on torts and contracts to classes with a more militant tone, Mr. von Spakovsky wrote in his articles.

Stanford law school offers “Violence, Resistance, and the Law,” which teaches how the law “suppresses and invites resistance” and identifies the “subjects against whom legal violence is deployed.”

“The State of Democratic Discourse” course at Stanford is “devoted to a candid discussion about the current state of public discourse, both nationally and in universities, focusing especially on misinformation and intimidation.”

Gag Rules

Those ideas played out in real life in March when the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society invited 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak on campus.

While he tried to deliver his speech, a mob of about 100 students heckled and shouted him down while faculty members did nothing. And some encouraged the students.

Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to address the hecklers.

Instead, Tirien Steinbach, Stanford Law School’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, took to the podium, scolding the conservative judge for the “harm” he inflicted with his rulings.

Students were angry at Judge Duncan because he refused in 2020 to allow a transgender inmate convicted of possessing child pornography to change his pronouns to female.

The judge had to be escorted from the law school by federal marshals.

Ms. Steinbach was put on administrative leave and resigned in July. But Stanford didn’t punish students or other administrators and only required them to complete free speech training.

Law and Disorder

The now-viral video of the judge’s treatment grabbed public attention and drew concern from conservatives.

Austin Knudsen, Montana’s attorney general, wrote a May 16 letter to Montana Supreme Court Chief Justice Mike McGrath addressing left-wing tactics in law schools.

Students are “far too comfortable using intimidation to silence opposing viewpoints,” Mr. Knudsen wrote.

Activist students, he wrote, are “self-styled members of the progressive vanguard and justify their actions based on the perceived evil of conservative legal views.”

He warned that disruptions at elite law schools are everyone’s problem, and “Montana can’t bury its head in the sand and hope it goes away.”

“We are at a turning point for the integrity of the legal profession,” he wrote.

The behavior on campus will soon show up in the courts if there are no consequences for the student’s actions, Knudsen warned.

Monkey Business

Top law schools have demonstrated a dramatic shift in focus, even when compared with just 10 years ago, Mr. Adams said.

It’s important to take notice because graduates from elite law schools go on to influence government, courts, academia, and corporate America, he said.

The preaching of CRT, radical gender ideology, feminism, and climate change have been woven into much of the curriculum of Ivy League schools, such as Harvard Law, according to his review.

He noted a feminist offering at Harvard Law called the Bonobo Sisterhood, a one-credit course at Harvard Law. The class examined how people can learn about feminism from primates in a male-dominated society.

The course examines the “power and potential of female alliances to disrupt patriarchal systems.”

The course description reads: “Through a legal, political, social, cultural, and economic lens, we ask what lessons the bonobos—our close primate relatives who share 98.7% of our DNA—offer humans for creating a society free of male sexual coercion.”

Cradle of CRT

Columbia University, the cradle of critical race theory, also offers classes on CRT.

The Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, developed Marxist ideologies that came to be known as The Frankfurt School.

After being forced out of Germany by the Nazis, the institute’s researchers relocated to Columbia University in New York in 1933 and developed critical theory.

That legacy now shows up in Columbia law classes, such as “Legal Methods II: Critical Race Methods: Practices, Prisms, and Problems.”

The class description says the United States “suffers from many forms of discrimination,” and the course will examine the “interface between legal interpretation, lawmaking practices, and racial hierarchy,” Mr. von Spakovsky noted in his review.

The widespread social justice focus at top law schools suggests law firms would be better off hiring lawyers from state schools, he said.

But even there, “woke” ideology is rampant.

In a December 2022 Epoch Times story documenting CRT’s effect on conservative college students, one law student at a Florida University confirmed that the Constitution was attacked in his law class.

The student, who wished to remain anonymous, recalled students arguing that the Constitution was illegitimate from the start and was written by racist, old, white men.

The professor didn’t express that he condoned that point of view. But he didn’t offer a rebuttal, either, the student said.

Poisoning the Well

Not all conservatives are pessimistic about the future of the legal profession.

According to William Jacobson, a clinical law professor and director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School, concepts such as CRT have long been taught in law schools.

Mr. Jacobson founded the Legal Insurrection website, which tracks CRT.

The increasing popularity of CRT in schools prompted him to start CritialRace.org in 2020, which maintains a database of schools and colleges that teach or employ CRT-related policies.

He doesn’t keep a database on law schools that teach CRT because, traditionally, that’s the only place it was taught, Mr. Jacobson said.

It wasn’t until recently that the concepts began trickling down into K–12 classrooms and other college courses. That’s where the concept became more controversial, he said.

The problem started when CRT evolved into anti-racism training.

It sounds innocuous. But the theory is to prescribe racism against whites and others of “privilege” in the name of retribution for racism against minorities in the past, present, and future.

“At the law school level, it’s not going to bring down America,” he said.

But it can certainly “poison the well,” Mr. Jacobson said, by dividing people based on race or gender into oppressors or victims.

Former President Donald Trump’s mugshot has become a phenomenon. The left thinks it’s the ultimate ‘gotcha,’ while Trump supporters immediately recognized it as a badge of honor. Within an hour or so of booking, Trump was already selling t-shirts of it on his website.

Trump’s martyr status reached far and wide…

Boom🔥 #TrumpMugShot pic.twitter.com/mPueCx7O6P

— Freedom 🇺🇸🦅 (@PU28453638) August 25, 2023

Blacks for Trump – THEY GOING TO FAFO 👀 #BlacksForTrump #DonaldTrump #TrumpMugShot #Trump2024 #PresidentTrump #TrumpArrest #TrumpIndictment pic.twitter.com/DWcKSDVmlx

— HumanDilemma (@HumanDilemma_) August 26, 2023

And there’s much, much more.

“Now I ain’t sayin’ she a vote rigger”#TrumpMugShot at Fulton County

By the Memefellas of the Dilley Meme Team@Ramble_Rants @TAftermath2020 @MakaveliMemez @C3PMeme @Fuknutz pic.twitter.com/npHltFhIwC

— Ramble_Rants (@ramble_rants) August 25, 2023

Now, Politico reports that as of Saturday, Trump has raised $7.1 million since the mugshot – with $4.18 of it coming in on Friday, the single-highest 24-hour period of his campaign to date, according to a person familiar with the totals.

The campaign’s fundraising has been powered by merchandise it has been selling through his online store. After Trump was taken into custody, the campaign began selling shirts, posters, bumper stickers and beverage coolers bearing Trump’s scowling mugshot. The items bear the tagline “NEVER SURRENDER!” and range in price from $12 to $34.

The campaign has also been prodding online donors with emails and text messages. And on Thursday night, while flying back from Atlanta to Bedminster, N.J. Trump sent out his first tweet in more than two years directing supporters to his website. The site’s landing page includes the mugshot and asks supporters to “make a contribution to evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House and SAVE AMERICA during this dark chapter in our nation’s history.”

The fundraising blitz illustrates how Trump has parlayed his four indictments into campaign cash, rallying his hardcore supporters.

Trump’s campaign says it has raised nearly $20 million in the last three weeks, during which time Trump was indicted on charges related to his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and for trying to overturn the Georgia vote count in the 2020 election. That figure is more than half of what Trump raised during his first seven months in the 2024 race.

“It’s a bunch of bullshit,” indeed…

Q: What do you think about the indictment!

A: it’s a bunch of bullshit!#TrumpMugShot pic.twitter.com/7iNuRPS4iJ

— American.357 (@ASimplePatriot) August 25, 2023