Many say it doesn't matter where COVID-19 came from, but it does. The cover-up of its origin typifies institutional rot. Our leaders have been lying and persecuting whistleblowers. Such rampant abuses of power threaten our democracy and civilization.
Now, it’s up to Congress to demand answers from the intelligence community and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.
How long did they know?
And why did they keep it a secret?
In February of this year, the Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, told a reporter that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
Why, then, didn’t he say something sooner?
The cover-up was vast and insidious.
Our sources were terrified to tell us what many had long suspected.
They only did so because they are as outraged as the American people should be and felt a moral obligation to speak out.
Not only did the highly infectious respiratory virus kill millions, but the response to it also shut down businesses and schools, upended societies, and caused enormous collateral damage.
Governments threw out their pandemic playbooks, which until COVID-19 had centered around voluntary measures and protecting high-risk groups — not long-term school and business lockdowns and mask mandates.
Why?
And, in the name of public safety and preventing “vaccine hesitancy,” governments declared war on free speech.
Facebook censored The New York Post’s accurate February 2020 op-ed pointing to a lab leak as the cause.
Twitter kicked journalists off its platform.
And the White House menacingly threatened Facebook and Twitter with extinction, in the form of revoking their license to operate, if they didn’t censor “often-true content,” including stories of vaccine side effects.
Why?
For the last six months, we have seen whistleblower after whistleblower come forward bravely, as the law allows, only to be punished.
FBI officials punished whistleblowers for exposing the agency’s targeting of innocent Americans for “domestic terrorism” and “violent extremism.”
China deserves plenty of blame for what happened.
The Wuhan lab had repeatedly failed to maintain proper safety levels.
And totalitarian societies, by punishing dissent, can’t self-correct in the way democracies can.
But powerful US officials enabled the disaster.
In 2014, President Barack Obama had banned the “gain of function” research that likely caused the pandemic.
Fauci and his collaborators violated the spirit if not the letter of the law by sending that research to China, and spinning it as something other than gain of function.
The abuse of power is pervasive in the federal government.
Congress must act now to create an independent and bipartisan commission on the origins of the COVID pandemic, and why US government officials participated in its cover-up.
Congress also must take immediate action to defund and dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex, whereby contractors of the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation demand that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms censor disfavored… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
And Congress must establish stronger oversight of its biomedical establishment.
The worshipful news media coverage of Fauci is particularly appalling in retrospect, now that we know that he personally sought to squelch the lab leak hypothesis for self-interested reasons.
The greatest change of all must be in the way Americans view their leaders and institutions.
We must be much more suspicious of the official narrative.
The people who cry “disinformation” are, often, trying to censor accurate but inconvenient truths.
And the people who accuse others of “spreading conspiracy theories,” are, as we have just seen, often conspiring to spread disinformation.
/END
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Everybody in L.A. knows there aren't enough police officers. It has little more than half as many per capita as Chicago. And yet @GavinNewsom @MayorOfLA @KamalaHarris and *every single* Democratic governor opposed calling out the National Guard.
California has half the population as Germany and a bigger economy. We pay the highest taxes by far. And yet, not only does LA have nearly half the police per capita as Chicago, Mayor @KarenBassLA wants to lay-off 400 police officers.
@KarenBassLA They're not going to be satisfied until the rest of LA burns down.
There's no shortage of police in L.A., said @GavinNewsom a few hours ago. In fact, L.A. has far fewer police per capita than other big cities. And now, the protesters have overrun the police and blocked the highway. Video: @AnthonyCabassa_
L.A.'s lack of police has been one of the biggest crime stories in California for a decade. As such, @GavinNewsom is either lying or even more in a bubble than we knew. And now, naturally, LA's radical-Left mayor and city council want to cut 400 more police officers.
@GavinNewsom Kamala Harris did more than anyone to pass the initiative that decriminalized open air drug dealing and shoplifting. She’s pro-crime because she’s against civilization — at least for poor and working class people, not her and her neighbors.
Around the world, governments are threatening & censoring US social media platforms for legal speech. Now, @SecRubio @StateDept says it will deny visas to foreign nationals engaged in censorship against Americans, US tech companies, and people posting from inside the US.
Since taking office, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has taken a series of actions to push back against growing foreign government demands to censor American citizens and American technology companies like Google, Meta, and X.
In April, Rubio shut down the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which had funded censorship advocacy by the Global Disinformation Index, a UK-based NGO with ties to the Intelligence Community.
The idea that the Biden administration viewed millions of Americans as a terrorist threat sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s not. Newly declassified documents show that in December 2021, the FBI and DHS labeled opponents of Covid mandates "Domestic Violent Extremists."
NEW: Biden Administration Labeled Opponents Of Covid Mandates As “Domestic Violent Extremists,” Newly Released Documents Show
The designation infringed on the First Amendment and opened the door to investigating Americans for vaccine mandate skepticism.
by @shellenberger @C__Herridge and @galexybrane
Former President Joe Biden announces Covid vaccine mandates on September 9, 2021, in Washington, DC. Three months later (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The Biden Administration labeled Americans who opposed the COVID-19 vaccination and mask mandates as “Domestic Violent Extremists,” or DVEs, according to newly declassified intelligence records obtained by Public and Catherine Herridge Reports. The designation created an “articulable purpose” for FBI or other government agents to open an “assessment” of individuals, which is often the first step toward a formal investigation, said a former FBI agent.
The report, which the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has declassified, claims that “anti government or anti authority violent extremists,” specifically militias, “characterize COVID-19 vaccination and mask mandates as evidence of government overreach.” A sweeping range of COVID narratives, the report states, “have resonated” with DVEs “motivated by QAnon.”
The FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) coauthored the December 13, 2021 intelligence product whose title reads, “DVEs and Foreign Analogues May React Violently to COVID-19 Mitigation Mandates.”
The report cites criticism of mandates as “prominent narratives” related to violent extremism. These narratives “include the belief that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, especially for children, are part of a government or global conspiracy to deprive individuals of their civil liberties and livelihoods, or are designed to start a new social or political order.“
“It’s a way they could go to social media companies and say, ‘You don’t want to propagate domestic terrorism, so you should take down this content,’” said former FBI agent Steve Friend....
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Renewables don't risk blackouts, said the media. But they did and they do. The physics are simple. And now, as blackouts in Spain strand people in elevators, jam traffic, and ground flights, it's clear that too little "inertia" due to excess solar resulted in system collapse.
Six days ago, the media celebrated a significant milestone: Spain’s national grid operated entirely on renewable energy for the first time during a weekday.
At 12:35 pm today local time, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal, and parts of France. Although power was quickly restored in France, it could take a week to fully restore power in Spain and Portugal.
In an instant, the electric hum of modern life — trains, hospitals, airports, phones, traffic lights, cash registers — fell silent. Tens of millions of people instantly plunged into chaos, confusion, and darkness. People got stuck in elevators. Subways stopped between stations. Gas stations couldn’t pump fuel. Grocery stores couldn’t process payments. Air traffic controllers scrambled as systems failed and planes were diverted. In hospitals, backup generators sputtered on, but in many cases could not meet full demand.
It was one of the largest peacetime blackouts Europe has ever seen. And it was not random. It was not an unforeseeable event. It was the exact failure that many of ushave been, repeatedly, warning lawmakers about for years — warnings that Europe’s political leaders systematically chose to ignore.
While Portugal’s grid operator REN initially blamed the mass blackout on “extreme temperature variations” and a “rare atmospheric phenomenon,” and while some media repeated that framing, the reality is more serious. Weather may have triggered the event, but it was not the cause of the system’s collapse.
Spain’s national grid operator, Red Eléctrica, revealed that the immediate cause of the blackout was a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network” that forced Spain’s grid to disconnect from the broader European system, leading to the collapse of the Iberian Peninsula’s power supply at 12:38 p.m.
“No one has ever attempted a black start on a grid that relies so heavily on renewables as Iberia,” noted @JKempEnergy . “The limited number of thermal generators will make it more challenging to re-establish momentum and frequency control.”
In a traditional power grid dominated by heavy spinning machines — coal plants, gas turbines, nuclear reactors — small disturbances, even from severe weather, are absorbed and smoothed out by the sheer physical inertia of the system. The heavy rotating mass of the generators acts like a shock absorber, resisting rapid changes in frequency and stabilizing the grid.
But in an electricity system dominated by solar panels, wind turbines, and inverters, there is almost no physical inertia. Solar panels produce no mechanical rotation. Most modern wind turbines are electronically decoupled from the grid and provide little stabilizing force. Inverter-based systems, which dominate modern renewable energy grids, are precise but delicate. They follow the frequency of the grid rather than resisting sudden changes....
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Bravo to the Supreme Court for upholding the right of the accused under Alien Enemies Act to due process. "For all the rhetoric... today’s order & per curiam confirm... detainees... are entitled to... an opportunity to challenge their removal. The only question is which court..."
The Court adds, "Although judicial review under the AEA is limited, we have held that an individual subject to detention and removal under that statute is entitled to ‘judicial review’ ... as well as whether he or she 'is in fact an alien enemy fourteen years of age or older.'"
Kavanagh: "...all nine Members of the Court agree that judicial review is available. The only question is where that judicial review should occur."