The Romans would, on occasion, engage in the practice of condemning the memory of emperors after their deaths. Monuments would be defaced, names struck from inscriptions, coins bearing their countenance recalled or countermarked.

America has seen its fair share of sanctions against memory in recent years, with schools, streets, and libraries renamed and statues toppled.

The latest batch of victims might be soldiers who were awarded Medal of Honor citations for their actions at the Battle of Wounded Knee.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has ordered a panel to convene and review 20 citations bestowed by the U.S. Army to troops who participated in that engagement. The panel must submit a report that includes a “retain or rescind” recommendation for each recipient by October 15.

Their awards cite actions including rescuing others in the heat of battle.

I wrote about the panel and the buried history of Wounded Knee today: One Brigadier General E. D. Scott actually published an investigation of the official records of the engagement in The Field Artillery Journal in 1939. He did so because the year before newspapers began referring to Wounded Knee as not the site of a battle but a “massacre.” 2/

Jocelyn Nungaray’s murder at the hands of two men from Venezuela has become a national flashpoint in the debate over immigration. It also comes on the heels of a series of rapes and killings by illegal aliens, mainly targeting girls and women. 🧵 The murder of Laken Hope Riley in Georgia was perhaps the most high-profile case before this. She was out on a jog when an illegal alien from Venezuela ambushed her and beat her so badly that he disfigured her skull. 2/

I have neighbors who owns pit bulls and they open their front door and allow them to run rampant in the neighborhood. They charge people and bark and run from property to property peeing and pooping. I’ve got between them and my kids once before.

We recently called animal control and the police after this happened a few times (they also came into our backyard and barked at my wife as she was about to leave the house) and nobody did anything. Animal control took the dogs for maybe two hours and allowed the owners to claim them. Within an hour of the dogs being home, the owner let them out again, and they immediately began terrorizing my neighbor’s dog while it was on their property. So I picked up a chair and scared them off, called animal control again. The guy who owns them doesn’t give a shit. It seems like he let his dogs out again as a flex. It’s like he knows the system is on his side or something. Very strange behavior. He just leaned on the railing of his porch and watched us chase his dogs around.

But the most bizarre thing is that I have neighbors who are loath to do anything because they seem to think it’s not nice. Not sure if this is an extreme case of “Midwestern nice” or something else. The owner is a white guy with a man bun who wears neon pink pants btw

BREAKING Trump has issued a statement in support of the Republican governors defying the Biden administration on the border

Just kidding, he posted about E. Jean Carroll about a dozen times





It just keeps going

Mike DeWine Is an Idiot

🧵

Today, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill designed to ban the crime against children called “gender-affirming care.” What DeWine presented as the well-thought-out reasoning behind his decision was a steaming pile of garbage.

DeWine claimed that, were he to support the bill, “Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is best for a child than the two people who know that child the best—the parents.”

“The Ohio way is to approach things in a systematic manner, to follow the evidence, to be careful, and that’s really what we’re doing,” DeWine added.

Where to begin?

Perhaps it's best to start by highlighting that there is little (to be charitable) to no (to be honest) solid evidence behind the long-term effectiveness of “gender-affirming care” for minors.

Two major investigations recently conducted by The New York Times and Reuters came to that conclusion, each in their own wending way. Moreover, the puberty blockers used in this obscene form of “care” are administered off-label—without approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The pharmaceutical companies that profit from this have no desire to even conduct clinical trials to establish their safety in this regard or attempt to understand the permanent consequences of blocking puberty at a critical developmental stage. Why should they bother? They have fools like DeWine who will gladly enable them to pump poison into the veins of your sons and daughters.

Read⤵️ Lupron Depot-Ped is the most commonly prescribed puberty blocker given to “transgender youth.” Here are some adverse events filed in the FDA’s reporting database in connection with the drug:

-Depression
-Suicidal ideation
-Emotional disorder
-Depressed mood
-Emotional distress
-Mental disorder
-Psychotic disorder
-Suicide attempt
-Growth retardation
-Antisocial behavior
-Psychotic symptom

⤵️

DeSantis' campaign has had problems. No doubt. But that's not the full picture. A key problem, one that had to be discovered the hard way, is that Trump has a patronage network that will not move to or support a different candidate.

For reasons that become obvious, this is a sacred cow few people on the right are prepared to poke, let alone slay.

Tucker Carlson's first post-Fox advertising deal was with a company in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor. Once that happened, the hope of impartiality was gone. It's the same deal with Human Events and Post Millennial. The Human Events Media Group acquisition of Post Millennial was led by Trump donor and booster Jeff Webb, so there was no chance those publications would swing behind or help a Trump rival.

Consider that when Daniel Penny's legal defense fundraiser blew up because DeSantis promoted it, Post Millennial did a story about it *without mentioning DeSantis* once. It was like Stalinists erasing a purged person from a photograph.

When I was still doing conservative media, I was told that Team Trump was monitoring programs for critics, using their influence to try to suppress them. There is just no scenario in which a network like this will select a candidate that is best for the movement rather than the network itself, even if the individuals involved were to want the latter.

The whole thing was described to me simply as: if you play ball, you get access; if you decide that Trump isn't the best way forward, you lose access (and worse, if you don't keep your mouth shut). If you're a personality, that means no more invitations to Mar-a-Lago for a movie screening or retweets from big accounts. But there was no way of knowing how any of this worked until someone challenged Trump, then the whole thing sprang into action and circled the wagons around him and himself.

The ramifications of all this will extend beyond the primary, regardless of the outcome. There will be permanent fractures and disillusionment. That's how I feel about national "right-wing" politics right now. But to understand why, you have to understand the networks. Nothing against @AuronMacintyre btw, these are just my thoughts on the broader rw landscape

New: While serving in the Trump administration, Brooke Rollins was, among other things, instrumental in the passage of the First Step Act that freed rapists and murderers from federal prison

She now runs Trump’s official think tank, making over $550K

🧵

Rollins was one of the advisers who told Trump that getting tough on Black Lives Matter/George Floyd rioters in 2020 would seem racist

He of course agreed with her

Vivek is responding to my reporting. He isn’t being honest. He didn’t just say something “stupid” on a podcast. He sent members of Congress a memo advocating against lifting lockdowns and for creating a national registry. A company he created pitched the idea to the FDA and worked with the federal government on it.

Here’s a timeline:

-February 2020: Datavant, a healthcare data company created by Vivek, recruits George W. Bush-Era FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach.

-March 2020: Datavant begins spearheading a registry of COVID-19 patients by pooling medical records from across the country (WSJ).

-April 3, 2020: Vivek says on the Rockefeller Client Insights podcast that he supports a system where people would be “segregated” under a national testing regime.

-April 8, 2020: Datavant is in touch with the FDA about a “proposed registry” that “would aim to include every patient who has been tested for COVID-19” (WSJ).

It was around this time that Vivek circulated the memo I obtained to members of Congress in which he argued against lifting lockdowns and for implementing universal testing to determine who could go back to life. He concluded by proposing a “public-private” partnership, which is what his company Datavant pitched to the federal government.

-November 2020: Vivek’s company announced that it was collaborating on gathering patient data with the National COVID Cohort Collaborative, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

Vivek didn’t just support lockdowns—he tried to profit from it while collaborating with the very “regime” he claims to oppose. Then he tried to bury it, like he tried to bury details about his background by paying a Wikipedia editor to sanitize his biography weeks before declaring his candidacy.

https://twitter.com/vivekgramaswamy/status/1730011191768977629

He and his team have to pretend this is about the podcast because what I actually wrote is far more damning. I knew they would. That’s why I wrote this at the end:

Exclusive: Vivek Ramaswamy Supported COVID Segregation

🧵

“Could we tolerate a national system in which certain people on the basis of a biomarker are segregated?”

That sounds like an excerpt from a science fiction novel about a medical dystopia. But it’s a quote from Vivek Ramaswamy, the biopharma entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate.

In April 2020, as the U.S. went into lockdown, Ramaswamy said he would be open to that kind of system to determine who could “go back to normal life.” He described it as an “inequity,” but concluded that “everyone stands to benefit from it.” Ramaswamy made the comments during an episode of Rockefeller Client Insights, the podcast of Rockefeller Capital Management.

A concept like that is sharply at odds with the image of the civil libertarian he has cultivated during the primary. It also raises questions about his anti-establishment bona fides.

During the podcast, Ramaswamy talked about different aspects of the coronavirus outbreak with Gregory J. Fleming, the president and CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management. Fleming asked him what a “path to normalcy” might look like, given what he described as a “potentially extended timeline” for the rollout of vaccines and treatments. The country was then more than 15 days into “15 days to slow the spread.”

“One path to normalcy and a path that I’d like to see further progress made on is broad rollout of our antibody tests,” Ramaswamy said. He corrected himself and continued:

“It’s not our company; I’m saying, as a society, rolling out the antibody tests such that we actually get our arms around what portion of the population is already immune through exposures that they may not have even known that they had. It might be 10 percent, it might be 20 percent, we might discover that it is some higher number. Those people are gonna be able to get back to work pretty quickly, get back to normal life because effectively they have the immunity badge, they have a badge in the form of their antibodies that protect them best we know from reinfection.

On the flip side, you then have the people who don’t have immunity, and the question is those who are negative on the antibody tests, what happens with them? Now, this has been—I’ve had discussions in the last few days with policymakers, a couple of people in Congress, one U.S. Senator, and I think this is not lost on folks. But I think one early topic that’s come up is, could we tolerate a national system in which certain people on the basis of a biomarker are segregated? To say you can’t go back to normal life, where certain people get a head start. Is that an inequity we would tolerate? I personally think that it is better than the status quo if we can send 10 or 20 percent of the people back on the basis of having immunity that’s proven on the basis of a lab-based result that’s now available. That’s a good thing, and everyone stands to benefit from it.”

A draft for discussion obtained by Contra shows Ramaswamy pitched this strategy to policymakers.

“After its apex of COVID-19 cases, each state should start to administer universal antibody testing to determine which individuals have immunity to SARS-Cov-2 and which individuals do not,” he wrote. “Individuals with immunity can return to normal life, be released from social distancing practices, and help restart the economy.”

“States should also have a well-designed plan for who should be released from social distancing norms to help revive the economy in advance of the availability of a COVID-19 vaccine,” he added.

Read⤵️
In the discussion draft, he countered concern of societal “backlash against discriminating on the basis of antibody test results” by arguing that the alternative would be to “lift shelter-in-place and social distancing mandates on everyone which would increase the risk of new outbreaks.” ⤵️

Myths of the Spanish Civil War

Spain, 1931.

Shortly after the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, the left launched a vicious campaign of persecution against Christians, burning churches and religious buildings in cities like Madrid.

Madrid would bear witness to the left-wing Republican government’s authorization and organization of death squads, which committed unspeakable acts of inhuman brutality against Christians and other political enemies.

A Nationalist uprising against the Republicans became inevitable after José Calvo Sotelo, a prominent conservative statesman, was dragged from his bed and murdered by leftists with the help of police officers. The government took no serious action in response and imposed censorship to conceal any inconvenient truths.

Both sides committed atrocities during the civil war. But the left was peerless in its depravity. Historian Julio de la Cueva recounts just some of the horrors it perpetrated against civilians in general and Christians in particular:

Sometimes a mock trial preceded execution; sometimes death came without any previous proceedings. A vast number of victims were “taken for a ride,” as the expression went, to be shot by the roadside or in the cemetery itself. Others were hanged, drowned, suffocated, burned to death or buried alive. On many occasions, victims were tortured .... Mockery, insults, blasphemy and coercion to blasphemy were very likely parts of the torture, which could also include forcing the victims to strip naked, beating, cutting, skinning and mutilation. In the cases of mutilation, there was a morbid fixation on genitalia, which must be placed within the context of both a macho culture and the age-old anticlerical obsession with the clergy’s sexuality. ... The combination of cultural and sexual references, ritualized violence and humiliation of the victim ... reached its most exact expression in instances of priests being treated like pigs at the slaughterhouse or bulls in the bullring. Finally, ... the corpses of clerics were likely to be dragged through the streets, exposed in public places, or desecrated in many other ways.

After the last of the Republicans had surrendered in 1939, Francisco Franco, the reluctant general who emerged as the hero of the Nationalists, laid his sword upon the altar of the Church of St. Barbara in Madrid, a city that had seen the birth of the left’s crusade and the peaks of its bloodshed.

Franco vowed that his hand would never take up the sword again unless Spain herself were threatened. On that day, he prayed, “Lord, benevolently accept the effort of this people, which was always Thine, which, with me and in Thy name, has vanquished with heroism the enemy of Truth in this century.”

But Spain’s victory would prove an illusion. Even while Franco was still alive, the left was already quietly rewriting the history of the war and gradually taking over institutions.

In 2019, under the directions of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, and with the approval of the Supreme Court, Franco’s body was exhumed from the Catholic basilica where it had rested beneath a 3,000 pound slab of granite since 1975. Franco originally decreed its construction as a monument to all those who perished in the fight for Spain’s soul, that their sacrifices may “defy time and forgetfulness.” The Valley of the Fallen, as the site is known, is a sprawling neoclassical complex that sits beneath the towering Cruz de los Caídos—the tallest Christian cross of its kind in the world.

On Thursday, Sánchez was reelected as prime minister by the nation’s parliament.

Read⤵️
This is fascinating story that casts doubt on the idea history is always written by the victors. It’s also filled with incredible ironies. For example, Pío Moa, one of the only and among the most influential scholars critical of the official narrative of the war and Spain used to be part of GRAPO, a Maoist terrorist-designated organization. Moa became disillusioned with the left and began asking questions.

NGOs receive taxpayer dollars to facilitate mass immigration all over the United States.

Senate Republicans appear to have caved to Democrats on defunding them.

Read⤵️ Republicans in the House introduced legislation (1) to defund these NGOs in April. The Senate companion bill introduced by Ted Cruz contained identical defund language (2). But it has now vanished in the proposal Senate Republicans released today (3).

Woman with credits in NBC and Teen Vogue says that “decolonization” taken to its logical conclusion is, in practice, the killing of civilians—the men, women, and children deemed “colonizers.”

That is obviously not intended to be true just for Israel. She means that this is the end point of decolonization anywhere. She sees in the horrific videos and images coming out of the Middle East what she wishes would happen to “colonizers” here in America.


These people can’t help themselves sometimes. They get too giddy and the mask drops.

https://twitter.com/overdramatique/status/1710689657757769783

DeSantis: “I think we need accountability for what this government did to this country with the COVID restrictions, mandates, and lockdowns. Donald Trump is not going to do that.”

Cheers and applause from Maher’s audience.

Maher asks DeSantis why he has in the past supported GOP candidates who questioned the results of the 2020 election. He responds by noting Democrats have done the same in recent history.

“Let’s go back to 2016, your friends in Hollywood were cutting ads telling the Electoral College to vote against Trump in the Electoral College because it was stolen. They said Russia stole the election—for years the said that. So don’t act like this is like a unique thing in the modern history of the country.”

Audience applauds.

Maher calls The New York Times “despicable” for lying about how DeSantis handled COVID, says he did a great job. He sails through abortion and election integrity questions. This was solid.

https://twitter.com/PatrickAmor2024/status/1707947448587497944

He did great. He’s going to need this kind of game for Newsom, that silver-tongued son of Satan.

https://twitter.com/beerandtokens/status/1707967329445777453

The only reason I've been loath to be critical of the DeSantis campaign is that MAGA grifters seize on whatever straws they can grasp. But it's fair to say DeSantis *needs* to attack Trump more aggressively now. These clips are good. But it needs to come from him and more often. Trump needs to be completely discredited and exposed as a fraud no matter what.

Trump did not finish the wall. DeSantis needs to press that point. Chad Wolf was funding sanctuary cities under Trump's watch—the administration was moving toward *expanding* legal immigration and proposing amnesty right up until COVID hit. Trump used laid-off Disney tech workers as stage props and abandoned them after vowing to end the H-1B visa program that was used to replace them. But he didn't do that. DeSantis should track those workers down and have them talk about how Trump used them and failed them.

It took the Biden administration maybe a week to undo virtually all of Trump's immigration accomplishments because he was never actually serious about the issue. People in the White House told me they were shocked by how serious Biden's landing teams were, in contrast to how clownish the Trump administration had been. Trump got so little done on his signature issue that it seems like he was never president.

Trump is also remarkably vulnerable on his other signature issue: economic nationalism. Offshoring continued apace under Trump. He didn't stop it at all; data from the Labor Department indicates that it actually *accelerated* under Trump's watch. Which is why he did absurd things like blame the leadership of the United Auto Workers for factories that closed under his watch after he promised to bring manufacturing back. That's also the reason UAW leadership recently told him to get lost after he said he would try to use them as campaign props like he did Disney workers.

What few benefits the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—Trump's gift to Paul Ryan—provided Middle Americans will begin to expire in 2025, but Trump ensured that the tax cuts for corporations are *permanent.*

The big companies his supporters view as promoting values inimical to their own? Trump guaranteed they would permanently benefit from his tax cuts—but not the average American.

Nobody talks about that. DeSantis should be drilling Trump on that. Why did he leave Middle America behind?

Similarly, DeSantis has a relationship with RFK Jr., and he knows, like RFK Jr. knows, that Trump sold out Americans to pharmaceutical companies. Pfizer was the largest health company donor to Trump's inauguration. Trump not only staffed his administration with their henchmen. He also gave them a windfall with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. To date, Trump's act has slashed the average tax rates of Big Pharma companies by more than 40 percent. There is almost no type of corporation more loathsome than these. Trump was their biggest boon and created incentives for them to keep their profits, investments, and jobs abroad.

That was a theme of the Trump administration: ignore Republicans/throw them crumbs while doing things that benefit their enemies. Right now, the most relevant example is that Trump's DOJ dropped a corruption case against Bob Menendez in 2018, then commuted the sentence of Menedez's biggest benefactor, a corrupt Democrat megadonor convicted of Medicare fraud, in his final hours as president. DeSantis should kill Trump on this.

DeSantis is the only person running who can show people who are willing to listen that Trump was not only a failure but a catastrophe for Republicans because he failed them while managing to convince them otherwise. All the money, energy, and resources that go to Trump are wasted on someone who systematically betrayed the people who elected him in 2016. The most important thing DeSantis can do is help people see. Others have commented on technical things the DeSantis campaign can do better. There’s truth to all those things. But the single most important task for DeSantis is to show Americans that Trump failed them and betrayed them, and that he will do it again if given the chance.

Trump once fell for a prank call where he believed he was speaking with Sen. Bob Menendez. He congratulated who he believed was the New Jersey Democrat for dodging corruption charges in 2018 after Trump’s DOJ declined to retry Menendez after a mistrial. Trump later commuted the sentence of Menendez’s major donor and fellow Democrat, Salomon Melgen, who was also a co-defendant with Menendez in the corruption case. These embarrassing facts might explain why Trump is downplaying the Justice Department’s charges against Menendez, and why his team is suggesting Menendez is the victim of a conspiracy.

New:






After the mistrial, Trump’s DOJ said it would retry Menendez. After a judge dismissed some of the charges, Trump’s DOJ abruptly changed course and declined not to pursue the case against this hilariously corrupt Democrat. Trump was apparently pleased. politico.com/states/new-jer…

MAGA promoted Michael Wolff’s absurd claim that DeSantis kicked Tucker Carlson’s dog during a dinner. It wasn’t just paid Trump surrogates. Anons who constantly whine about the biased media also instantly joined in sharing Wolff’s reporting as true. But Tucker has now confirmed Wolff’s reporting was false, as if that wasn’t obvious.

On the one hand, if you were spreading this claim as true, you’re an idiot.

On the other hand, MAGA has become everything it initially claimed to oppose. There is really no reason to ever defend these people from a smear or any sort of attack. They don’t deserve it.

https://twitter.com/emeriticus/status/1704343688954908857

These are the people who rush to defend guys like Andrew Tate as victims of media bias but will without flinching abandon that skepticism toward the media when it might benefit Trump. MAGA is simply beneath contempt.

Absolutely brutal exchange. Trump claims he doesn’t know who gave Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation while he was president when pressed by Megyn Kelly.

MK: “The truth is though, not only did you not fire Fauci, who is loathed by many, many, millions of Republicans in particular, but also some Democrats.

Trump: “By the way--”

MK: “You made him a star. You made him a star. This is the criticism of you. That you made him the face of the White House coronavirus task force--”

Trump: “You think so?”

MK: “--that he was out at every presser . . . and that you actually gave him a presidential commendation before you left office. Wouldn’t you like a do-over on that?”

Trump: “Uhhhhh, I don’t know who gave him the commendation. I really don’t know who gave him the commendation.”

MK: “Well a presidential commendation—”

Trump tries to talk over her here, so it is a little hard to hear, but it sounds like she says he may as well have given a commendation to Mark Milley if Fauci got one.

Also, it’s easy to miss, but MK notes at the very beginning that Trump changed his answer for why he didn’t fire Fauci. First, he said it was because Fauci had been around for a long time and that it would have been too controversial a move. She quotes him saying it would have created a firestorm. Only later did Trump say he *couldn’t* fire Fauci because he’s a civil servant. But as MK notes, the problem wasn’t just that he didn’t fire him--he made Fauci a star.

I don’t think a guy who says “I don’t know” who gave Fauci a presidential commendation while he was president is equipped to drain the swamp.

Credit for the clip: @JoelWeingart_
Here’s the original. I’ve been having problems with tweeting videos not working the way it should lately unless they’re posted directly. Very annoying.

https://twitter.com/joelweingart_/status/1702144093206262094

With a new round of possible coronavirus restrictions on the horizon, now’s a good time to talk about how a Vivek Ramaswamy company tried to profit from COVID-19 the last time. It’s a story fundamentally at odds with his new persona as an anti-establishment freedom fighter.

The first thing you need to know about Vivek is that the letters “Roi” in the name of the pharma company he founded, Roivant, actually stand for “return on investment.” The second thing is that he made a mountain of money on a drug for Alzheimer's disease that ultimately failed at trial.

So, in early 2020, Roivant subsidiary Datavant began work on digital infrastructure to collect and track health records, focusing on COVID-19. In other words, Datavant was positioning itself to profit from the biomedical surveillance state.

In a 2021 conference organized by the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, a unit of the CDC, it was noted that “DATAVANT was the originator and the host and the original organizers of the database” that several organizations collaborated with.

Right before that meeting, Vivek had stepped down as CEO of Roivant and became chair of the board of directors. He stepped down from the board of directors this February with the GOP primary in mind. But much of Datavant’s work had been done before that. He had already become the face of the database.

This seems like a story about Vivek. But it’s actually an indictment of the MAGA influencers, podcasters, and publications promoting him.


Story cited above by @JordanSchachtel dossier.today/p/ramaswamy-co…

The Trump campaign paid a firm $600,000 in 2020 to prove fraud swung the election. They looked into everything from voter machines to dead people voting.

When they found fraud didn't swing the election, the Trump campaign hid the findings from the public.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/… The Trump campaign paid $750,000 to second firm to investigate voter fraud, also in late 2020.

The firm's founder said, "Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false."

The Trump campaign also hid those findings from the public. washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04…

Jan. 6 was a dark day for democracy. Trump is a loser who refused to concede the election despite no evidence of fraud, all while raising hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters. Mike Pence did the right thing.

That’s what Vivek wrote in his book last September.… https://t.co/sGl1K65cG3twitter.com/i/web/status/1…




I’m not sure there’s a bigger indictment of the current right than how easily it is manipulated by people who say the right words. There’s certainly a machine behind it. People get paid to promote others. There are incentives that drive this phenomenon, especially on Twitter. But… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Trump’s Save America PAC has spent more than $40 million on legal costs so far, which is more than his campaign raised in the second quarter of 2023, and its single largest expense. That number is expected to grow, too.

Much of the money comes from small-dollar donors who gave… https://t.co/lFwT2O9dtAtwitter.com/i/web/status/1…




Background on the 2020 grift:

https://twitter.com/emeriticus/status/1684051225346547713