Reader’s Links for April 26th, 2023

Here is a link to the VladTepesBlog social media Mastodon Pod. Please feel free to check it out and sign up for an account if you are sufficiently annoyed with Twitter and Facebook to try something new.

Each day at just after midnight Eastern, a post like this one is created for contributors and readers of this site to upload news links and video links on the issues that concern this site. Most notably, Islam and its effects on Classical Civilization, and various forms of leftism from Soviet era communism, to postmodernism and all the flavours of galloping statism and totalitarianism such as Nazism and Fascism which are increasingly snuffing out the classical liberalism which created our near, miraculous civilization the West has been building since the time of Socrates.

This document was written around the time this site was created, for those who wish to understand what this site is about. And while our understanding of the world and events has grown since then, the basic ideas remain sound and true to the purpose.

So please post all links, thoughts and ideas that you feel will benefit the readers of this site to the comments under this post each day. And thank you all for your contributions.

This is the new Samizdat. We must use it while we can.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

70 Replies to “Reader’s Links for April 26th, 2023”

  1. NYT – APRIL 25 2023 – Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong’

    In his most extensive interview yet, Anthony Fauci wrestles with the hard lessons of the pandemic — and the decisions that will define his legacy.

    It was, perhaps, an impossible job. Make one man the face of public health amid an unprecedented pandemic, in a country as fractious as the United States, and there were bound to be disappointments and frustrations, and they were bound to get personal.

    Still, in December, when Elon Musk joked on Twitter that his “pronouns” were “Prosecute/Fauci,” it felt like the cresting of a turning tide against the man who had played essentially that role for the first three years of the pandemic. At least 30 state legislatures have passed laws limiting public-health powers in pandemics. This January, the month after Anthony Fauci retired as the four-decade head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, barely half of Americans said they trusted the country’s public-health institutions to manage a future pandemic.

    The Wall Street Journal named that as his legacy — sowing distrust about public health and vaccines. Earlier in the pandemic, the leftist magazine The Drift mocked Fauci as “Doctor Do-Little,” and Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, proposed that Fauci had “blood on his hands.” Upon the announcement of Fauci’s retirement, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also a Republican, celebrated: “Grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”

    Of course, there were mistakes and missteps, including some by Fauci: describing the threat to the country as “minuscule” in February 2020, for instance; or first advising against wearing masks, and moving slowly on aerosol spread; or playing down the risk of what were first called “breakthrough infections” in the summer of 2021. And the broader public-health establishment that Fauci came to embody made other mistakes, too, even if it wasn’t always easy to know at the time or identify later who exactly was responsible. Almost certainly, schools stayed closed longer than they needed to. Very conspicuously, American vaccination rates never approached the levels of peer nations — and the problem wasn’t just the anti-vaccine right. Quarantine guidance was abruptly shortened in the midst of the Omicron variant, when thresholds of community-spread levels were suddenly redefined as well. There was no effective paid sick leave instituted, and the official end of the pandemic emergency on May 11 imperils the Medicaid coverage of 15 million Americans. But three years on, whether you are focused on Covid’s direct carnage or on its collateral damage, it seems irrational to pin the brutality of America’s pandemic on policy failures, however much Americans want to put the blame somewhere. Or on someone.

    Over several hours and multiple Zoom and phone calls in April, I spoke with Fauci about that: how he saw the full story of this historic public-health emergency and the role he played in it. At times, he was defensive, even combative, particularly when it came to episodes in which he felt that his own positions had been misconstrued and on the matter of gain-of-function research and the origins of the pandemic. But on the whole, he was reflective, even humble, especially about the way that Covid-19 exposed the limits of public health and, in his telling, kept surprising him and his fellow scientists.

    “I’m a physician,” he told me in response to criticism that he had pushed the country too far. “That’s my identity. I’ve taken care of thousands of patients in one period of my life during the early years of H.I.V. I believe that I have seen as much or more suffering and death as anybody has in most careers. I don’t mean to seem preachy, but I don’t want to see people suffer and I don’t want to see people die.”

    David Wallace-Wells: Three years ago, in March 2020, you and many others warned that Covid could result in as many as 100,000 or 200,000 American deaths, making the case for quite drastic interventions in the way we lived our daily lives. At the time, you thought “worst-case scenarios” of more than a million deaths were quite unlikely. Now here we are, three years later, and, having done quite a lot to try to stop the spread of the virus, we have passed 1.1 million deaths. What went wrong?

    Anthony Fauci: Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis we’ve done worse than virtually all other countries. And there’s no reason that a rich country like ours has to have 1.1 million deaths. Unacceptable.

    Wallace-Wells: How do you explain it?

    Fauci: The divisiveness was palpable, just in trying to get a coherent message across of following fundamental public-health principles. I understand that there will always be differences of opinion among people saying, “Well, what’s the cost-benefit balance of restriction or of masks?” But when you have fundamental arguments about things like whether to get vaccinated or not — that is extraordinary.

    Wallace-Wells: Even now, when we talk about pandemic response, we focus on things like school closures and masks, but it seems to me that Covid mortality has been shaped much more by the country’s vaccination levels. There have been three times as many American deaths since Election Day 2020 as before. And we’ve done much worse, compared with our peers, since vaccination began than we had before.

    Fauci: I mean, only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly. We’re not even in the top 10. We’re way down there. And then: Why do you have red states that are unvaccinated and blue states that are vaccinated? Why do you have death rates among Republicans that are higher than death rates among Democrats and independents?It should never ever be that way when you’re dealing with a public-health crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen in over a hundred years.

    That’s part of it. The other part of it has nothing to do with that divisiveness. It has to do with the fracturing of our health care delivery system in this country. We have let the local public-health and health care delivery system really suffer attrition. And the health disparities — racial and ethnic health disparities. Every country has a little bit of that, but we really have a lot of it.

    Wallace-Wells: You called America’s pandemic performance virtually the worst in the world on a per-capita basis. But judging by excess mortality, the U.S. ranks about 40th worst in the world — still much more brutal than you would want from the world’s richest country, but not quite as extreme. When I look around the globe, I guess you could say there were a few relative success stories in East Asia. But everywhere across Europe and the Americas, there are no real successes; it’s just degrees of failure. Policies differed from place to place, but not by that much. And while some managed better than others, everybody suffered. Which makes me wonder, was it vanity to believe, as many of us did early in the pandemic, that we had the tools we needed to bring the nightmare to an end?

    Fauci: Yeah, you’re probably onto something there, David. I remember a public conversation I was having about the importance of a very effective degree of preparedness — how much it will allow you to escape significant damage from an outbreak. And I remember saying, depending on the transmissibility, morbidity and mortality of a particular pathogen, that sometimes no matter how well you are prepared, you are going to get a lot of hurt. This was one of those outbreaks. And you’re absolutely right. When you look around, nobody did great, except maybe one or two countries. Most everybody did poorly. Even those countries that had no political divisiveness the way we had, they did poorly. There were gaps and inadequacies in both preparedness and response that varied among different nations.

    Wallace-Wells: So what does that tell us about public health going forward? There seems to me to be almost a growing consensus, at least at the level of political discourse, that we went overboard, that we tried to do too much, that pandemic containment was quixotic or even counterproductive.

    Fauci: Yeah — I could say, well, hey, we tried our best, and we still got screwed, so we’re going to get screwed no matter what happens in the next one. I don’t think that’s an appropriate response. I think we can still improve significantly. And I put it into two general buckets. First, the scientific preparedness and response, and then the public-health preparedness and response.

    And on vaccines, because of the extraordinary amount of effort and resources we had put into decades of preparedness to develop vaccine platforms and optimal immunogens, we did something that was unprecedented.

    Wallace-Wells: Mass vaccination in under a year.

    Fauci: How much worse would it have been if we didn’t have a vaccine in 11 months? If it took three years to get a vaccine, we would have had five million deaths here. And the world, instead of having seven million deaths, which is an underestimate —

    Wallace-Wells: It’s probably 20.

    Fauci: Yes, it’s probably 20. And it would have been double that without vaccines. So I don’t think we should throw our hands up and say we could not have done any worse.

    Wallace-Wells: Let’s talk about the vaccines. It was the fastest rollout in history, a miracle of modern medicine. But we had vaccines designed by the end of January 2020. The Phase II safety trials were completed by early July. Could we have accelerated the rollout from there and blunted that awful first winter surge? Could we do it faster in the future?

    Fauci: Yes. The G7 talks about it: the hundred-day mission, to have distribution within a hundred days. Not that everybody gets vaccinated, but that you start doing it. Is that easy? No, it’s going to be really hard. Is it possible? I think so.

    Wallace-Wells: And what about rollout? So often Americans talk about vaccine hesitancy as you did a few moments ago: that fewer Republicans than Democrats are vaccinated, and that red states are less vaccinated than blue ones. But in addition to the partisanship gap, there were also large vaccine gaps by education, income and race. What could we have done betterto promote vaccination among those groups?

    Fauci: David, I don’t have a great answer for you. I don’t know. There are so many complexities involved here. I think we tried. I know we tried. How effective we were, that’s a different story. Even with the vaccine trials, we anticipated reluctance on the part of brown and Black people. And I personally put in a lot of effort, as did Francis Collins and some of my colleagues at the Vaccine Research Center, to make sure that there was proper representation in the clinical trials. But right off the bat, we were dealing with a new type of vaccine, an mRNA vaccine. And there was this smoldering level of suspicion and that divisiveness in the country. And then there was the whole idea of people not getting vaccinated, and then came mandating.

    Wallace-Wells: You think that was harmful?

    Fauci: Man, I think, almost paradoxically, you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why are they forcing me to do this? And that sometimes-beautiful independent streak in our country becomes counterproductive. And you have that smoldering anti-science feeling , a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country.

    The thing that astounded me is that when there were surges of infections in certain regions and the hospitals were being overwhelmed, people were still saying it’s fake news. I mean, people whose loved ones were in the hospital were denying that it was Covid. It seems inconceivable. That’s why I have to say I really don’t know. I wish I had an answer, but some very strange psychodynamics were going on in our country.

    Wallace-Wells: Is it just our country? Or is that built into the challenge of communication during a new pandemic, where you have moving targets and uncertainties but you also need to offer concrete guidance through the fog of war?

    Fauci: Inherently, communication in pandemics is difficult under the best of circumstances. What has been so troubling to me as a health official is when you are dealing with a moving target, the evidence is evolving and new data becomes available, but you get so many different people with their own sets of data that are not real data. But even in a perfect world, it would not be easy.

    Wallace-Wells: It sounds as if you are talking about this primarily as a phenomenon of the right. But you’ve been criticized a fair amount from the left as well, especially as the Biden years have worn on. This is an oversimplification, but on the right, you could say the main thrust of criticism was that the public response was too heavy-handed. On the left, it has been that it was too hands-off. That in the Biden era, guidance about masking and testing and quarantining were driven less by public-health concerns than by what was seen by the White House as economic, political and social realities — that people wanted to move on, however many people were dying.

    Fauci: I certainly think things could have been done differently — and better — on both sides. I mean, anybody who thinks that what we or anybody else did was perfect is not looking at reality. Nothing was done perfectly. But what I can say is that, at least to my perception, the emphasis strictly on the science and public health — that is what public-health people should do. I’m not an economist. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint. It was for other people to make broader assessments — people whose positions include but aren’t exclusively about public health. Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something.
    Certainly there could have been a better understanding of why people were emphasizing the economy. But when people say, “Fauci shut down the economy” — it wasn’t Fauci. The C.D.C. was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.

    Wallace-Wells: One thing I’ve seen you emphasizing lately is the lesson that you need to act early to stop exponential growth, and that earlier interventions are much more effective than later interventions. But in January and February and even into March of 2020, you and a lot of other folks in the public-health infrastructure were spreading a message that most Americans didn’t really need to worry about the virus, that it wasn’t a real risk to most of us. It wasn’t until later in March that the alarm was really raised. Was that too late? Could we have raised the alarm earlier? And if so, what would the effect have been, do you think?

    Fauci: Well, first of all, this is one of the things that keeps getting distorted. When I said we don’t need to do anything different right at this moment, please don’t forget that was followed by a semicolon, and then a “however,” and then by, “This could change rapidly, and we better be prepared for that.” I said that every single time. And the people who want to do gotchas on me only show the first part.

    Wallace-Wells: But if you go back in time, if you put yourself in February 2020, you’re telling Helen Branswell, for instance, that this virus was low-risk and that you didn’t want to stake your credibility on what could be a false alarm. Do you wish you had said then more emphatically that this is a real, urgent threat and that we need to stand up our defenses immediately?

    Fauci: Yeah, I think, retrospectively, we certainly should have done that. If you look at what we knew at the time, though — we didn’t know that in January. We were not fully appreciative of the fact that we were dealing with a highly, highly transmissible virus that was clearly spread by ways that were unprecedented and unexperienced by us . And so it fooled us in the beginning and confused us about the need for masks and the need for ventilation and the need for inhibition of social interaction.

    Wallace-Wells: The asymptomatic spread.

    Fauci: To me, that was the game-changer. And if we knew that very early on, our strategy for dealing with the outbreak in those early weeks would have been different. So when people say to me, “Could we have done better?” Of course, of course. If you knew many of the things then that now you know, definitely you would want to do things differently.

    Wallace-Wells: But looking back from the vantage of today, if we had implemented the policies that we implemented in the middle of March instead in the middle of February, would we actually be in a very different place now, in 2023? I don’t want to sound fatalistic, but it has been such a long pandemic. Would moving faster in those first months have made a material difference to our overall response?

    Fauci: I don’t know. It is conceivable that we would’ve ultimately been in the same situation. And would we have been able to shut down the economy? Would the country have accepted it, when you had a handful of cases and one death? I’m not saying that’s a reason not to do it — we should have, probably, if we knew what we know now. But with just a few cases, I don’t know if we would’ve gotten the country to shut down.

    Wallace-Wells: Part of that was issues with testing, right? Because we had many more infections than reported cases back then — our testing was so bungled. How big a problem was that?

    Fauci: Huge. It was a huge, huge, huge problem. Not only the technical mess-up by the C.D.C., but then the follow-up of not encouraging the use of other tests from other sources and instead saying: “No, wait, wait, we’ll fix it. We’ll fix it.” As opposed to saying, “Hey, let’s just allow these other tests that are readily available.”

    Wallace-Wells: It was around the same time that the mask guidance wavered — first, masks were not recommended, and then they were. But I want to ask you to reflect on the even bigger picture: Were the culture-war fights over masking worth it? Or did those fights have a bigger negative impact on future vaccine uptake among conservatives than the positive impact they had on spread? To be clear: I’m not someone who doesn’t think masks work. I think the science and the data show that they do work, but that they aren’t perfect and that at the population level the effect can be somewhat small. In what was probably our best study, from Bangladesh, in places where mask use tripled, positive tests were reduced by less than 10 percent.

    Fauci: It’s a good point in general, but I disagree with your premise a bit. From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent. But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work.

    But I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, David, when it comes to masking, I don’t know. But I do know that the culture wars have been really, really tough from a public-health standpoint. Ultimately an epidemiologist sees it as an epidemiological phenomenon. An economist sees it from an economic standpoint. And I see it from somebody in bed dying. And that’s the reason it just bothers me a lot — maybe more so than some others — that because of the culture wars you’re talking about, there are people who are not going to make use of an intervention that could have saved their lives.

    Wallace-Wells: Let’s talk about herd immunity. In 2020, you talked a fair bit about what it would take to get there. A Times article in December 2020 suggested that you had been raising your estimate for the threshold at which herd immunity would arrive.

    Fauci: That article gets completely distorted, David. That has been weaponized against me.

    Wallace-Wells: Well, tell me how I should see it.

    Fauci: Not how you should see it. I’m telling you what it is, and then you’ll make up your own mind. I’m not that presumptuous. But when I was “changing the numbers,” it was a garbled conversation. What I was trying to tell Donald was that we don’t know what the threshold of herd immunity would be. But I probably could have been more clear that we were talking about a moving target, because we didn’t know how transmissible the virus was.

    Wallace-Wells: But when I watched your recent lecture at Georgetown, you didn’t talk about herd immunity at all. Nobody does. Which makes sense, given that perhaps 95 percent of the country has had the disease, on top of the almost 70 percent who have been vaccinated, and the virus is obviously still circulating. And in fact a number of epidemiologists I’ve spoken to have told me that given the nature of this virus, we should have never entertained herd immunity as a possibility, given the way SARS-CoV-2 replicates in the body. What went wrong there?

    Fauci: Well, I don’t think anybody did anything wrong. What went wrong was that the virus did not act the way one would have thought the virus would act. We made an assumption that turned out to be an incorrect assumption — that this was going to act like other viruses.
    The classical definition of herd immunity has been completely turned upside down by Covid. And let me go through the steps. Herd immunity is based on two premises: one, that the virus doesn’t change, and two, that when you get infected or vaccinated, the durability of protection is measured in decades, if not a lifetime. With SARS-CoV-2, we thought protection against infection was going to be measured in a long period of time. And we found out — wait a minute, protection against infection, and against severe disease, is measured in months, not decades. No. 2, the virus that you got infected with in January 2020 is very different from the virus that you’re going to get infected with in 2021 and 2022.

    Wallace-Wells: Sometimes it seems to me we would be better off thinking of Omicron as an entirely different virus. It’s so distinct from not just the ancestral strain but also the early variants.

    Fauci: Exactly. The vaccines protected well against infection and disease with Alpha, Beta and Delta. Then along comes Omicron. It evades immunity so well that a vaccine doesn’t even protect very well against infection. So with a changing virus and a duration of immunity that doesn’t last — what is herd immunity for that virus?

    Wallace-Wells: But beyond the evolution of the virus, should we ever have expected herd immunity with a virus like this? My understanding is that because of the way SARS-CoV-2 replicates in the upper airway and the mucosal passages, it is very hard, if not impossible, to stop transmission.

    Fauci: That’s true but unrelated. That makes it more complicated to know who’s infected and capable of transmitting and who’s not. But it still doesn’t change the concept of herd immunity.

    Wallace-Wells: So were we wrong to ever expect that after a given amount of infection and vaccination, the disease would disappear? Because that was an extremely conventional view in 2020.

    Fauci: It depends on what you mean by “disappear.” If you control community infection at a low-enough level that it doesn’t disrupt society, to some people that means it disappears. To other people, it means, well, it’s there, but it doesn’t bother society very much.
    But be careful: No, it was not completely out of line to think that you could get protection against infection — that even if you got some virus in you, it wouldn’t be of a high-enough titer to transmit to somebody else.
    And then we found out something that was stunning. When you looked at the titer of the virus in infected and asymptomatic people and a virus in the nose of symptomatic infected people, it was the same. What the hell is going on here? That was a big surprise. So we were wrong, but we weren’t wrong because we didn’t interpret data in front of us. We never had those data. We did not know early on that 50 to 60 percent of the transmissions would be asymptomatic. That was like, whoa. When I saw those data, I said: This is different. We’re dealing with a disease the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

    Wallace-Wells: Just to refresh my memory, when did we learn that? Late spring 2020?

    Fauci: Mid- to late spring. People were saying that anecdotally in February and early March. But we didn’t really fully realize it until the end of March.

    Wallace-Wells: So by the time vaccinations were rolling out in December, we had a relatively good idea about all of these dynamics and the way they worked in the immune system. At that point, many Americans were thinking, we’re going to get these two shots, and we’re never going to see this disease again. But at that point, experts probably knew enough to know that was wishful thinking, right? After all, all the trials actually demonstrated was protection against severe disease.

    Fauci: Yes. We probably should have communicated better that the clinical trials were only powered to look at the effect on clinically recognizable disease, symptomatic disease. Although, at least with the ancestral strain, they did protect against infection to a certain degree.

    Wallace-Wells: Did we do enough to communicate the age skew of the disease? At the outset, we had a public-health approach that was sort of built around universal protection and the idea that we needed to limit transmission as much as we could in order to protect the most vulnerable people we knew. I think the average American knew that it was more dangerous among older people and that it was more dangerous for people with comorbidities. But I still think, honestly to this day, that almost no one appreciates just how wide that age skew really is, given that the risk to someone in their 80s or 90s is perhaps hundreds of times as high as it is to someone in their 20s or 30s.

    Fauci: You are hitting on some terrific points. Did we say that the elderly were much more vulnerable? Yes. Did we say it over and over and over again? Yes, yes, yes. But somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. Like 85 percent of the hospitalizations are there. But if you ask the person in the street, they may say, “Oh, yeah, elderly are more vulnerable, but everybody’s really vulnerable” — which is true, but to a much lesser extent.

    Wallace-Wells: In the vaccine rollout, did we make a mistake in prioritizing health care workers as opposed to seniors?

    Fauci: I don’t know if it was a mistake. A mistake is such a charged word. “Fauci made a mistake, people died. Fauci lied, people died.” Come on. I don’t know if it was a mistake. I think the standard way of protecting people who are at greater risk every day was a sound principle.

    Wallace-Wells: And then, did we talk enough about the risk of breakthroughs? Through the summer of 2021, the messaging was that breakthrough cases were very rare and functionally never resulted in serious illness. But beginning with the Delta variant, both of those things became much less true. And now, in 2023, more than half of our deaths are among vaccinated people. Was there enough communication to prepare people — especially the vulnerable elderly — for some continuing risk going forward?

    Fauci: I mean, we tried. David, we’re playing a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking here. This is some really serious Monday-morning quarterbacking.

    Wallace-Wells: Well, yeah, that is the game we’re playing — trying to learn from what happened. I’m not trying to prosecute you on any of these points. I’m just trying to ask: What went right? What went wrong? What do we understand better now? And what could we do better next time?

    Fauci: Of course we could have done better. We tried. If you look at what I was saying in the months before I stepped down, and what Ashish Jha is saying to this day, it’s that if you are vaccinated and boosted and have available therapy, you are not going to die, no matter how old you are. We were very explicit in saying that. Did people hear that? I don’t know. How loud do you have to say something for people to understand? How often have you got to say it?

    Wallace-Wells: OK, let’s talk about origins. My understanding of your position and perspective is that you feel there’s strong and accumulating evidence pointing to a zoonotic origin of the pandemic, as opposed to a lab leak. But you don’t feel as if the case is closed.

    Fauci: Yes. Absolutely. I feel that until you have a definitive proof of one or the other, it is essential to have an open mind. And I have been this way from the very beginning, David, notwithstanding the criticisms to the contrary. But I want to highlight the difference between possible and probable. If you look at what’s possible, I absolutely keep an open mind until we get a definitive proof of one versus the other. However, as a scientist, I could not ignore the accumulation of evidence favoring one versus the other.

    Wallace-Wells: I also think a natural occurrence is more likely. But that evidence strikes me as more circumstantial, in the sense that we have papers demonstrating that, based on samples collected in January, the wet market in Wuhan, China, was a superspreading site early in the pandemic. But while that’s suggestive, it doesn’t seem to me to be proof that the pandemic began there. On top of which, all indications are that the first human case was in December, if not earlier. What am I missing?

    Fauci: Well, the emergence of two separate isolates, the A and B lineages, argues really strongly that it wasn’t just a superspreader event. Both A and B came from the market. A and B weren’t anyplace else early on. That’s pretty strong evidence, but it’s not definitive. And so you and I are not far off at all.
    But one other thing that is tough to talk about: Because both are possible, even putting aside probability, we should be strengthening whatever it takes to prevent both — to prevent a new natural occurrence or a new lab leak. For the lab leak, you can do it by always re-examining the guidelines that you do for studies, making sure protocols are in place, making sure there’s transparency. On the other side, to address the possibility of a natural origin, you have to pay close attention to the animal-human interface and get rid of this wet-market stuff where you bring wild animals into close contact with humans. Which they shouldn’t have done: As you well know, the rule was no wild animals in the market.

    Wallace-Wells: I wrote an essay recently about this — that we don’t need to know to take action. But moving beyond policy, if we don’t yet have definitive data and are balancing probabilities in our minds, how should we think about these two narratives? The two stories seem very different to me. If we’re talking about a natural origin, we might think of it as a morality tale about the incomplete triumph of the modern world over nature — and how the natural world still threatens us. If we’re talking about it as something that came out of a lab, it’s much more a story of hubris — we did this to ourselves.

    Fauci: David, I think we did it to ourselves if it was either one. I disagree with you a little bit there, saying it’s on us if it’s a lab leak. I think it’s on us no matter what it is.

    Wallace-Wells: How do you mean?

    Fauci: The animal-human interface is something we need to pay very close attention to. That’s how the bird flu happens — you put birds in pens with people and pigs.

    Wallace-Wells: And think about factory farming …

    Fauci: If it’s a natural occurrence, for goodness’ sake, natural occurrences occur all the time. We should have been doing something about that. If it’s a lab leak, then we really should have been much, much more attentive to protocols and training and restrictions.

    Wallace-Wells: But the particular responsibility shakes out a little bit differently if it’s ultimately some vendor in a wet market who is illegally transporting animals or if it’s the product of this international research apparatus, right? I don’t want to overstate the American authority or oversight over every experiment at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — let alone the Wuhan C.D.C. But there is a large American component to the development of this whole international enterprise, going back several decades, and you’ve played a role in developing and funding that.

    Fauci: First of all, all of the intelligence groups agree that this was not an engineered virus. And if it’s not an engineered virus, what actually leaked from the lab? If it wasn’t an engineered virus, somebody went out into the field, got infected, came back to the lab and then spread it out to other people. That ain’t a lab leak, strictly speaking. That’s a natural occurrence.

    Wallace-Wells: Even in that case, the research itself is still playing a role. But when you say everyone agrees it was not an engineered virus — I don’t think they do. I think they generally agree it was not purposefully engineered to be a bioweapon. I don’t believe they’ve ruled out other forms of engineering — direct genetic interventions or serial passage of viruses.

    Fauci: David, you could have taken a virus and serially passaged it in 1920. I could do that tomorrow in your kitchen. You don’t need to do engineering.

    And if you look at the viruses that the $120,000-a-year grant was given through EcoHealth to the Wuhan Institute to do surveillance on, and you look at the viruses that they studied that they published in the literature, and that was in all of their progress reports, those viruses could not possibly ever turn into SARS-CoV-2, even if they tried to turn them into SARS-CoV-2, because they were evolutionarily so far from SARS-CoV-2 that anybody who knows anything about virology would say there’s nothing you could do to those viruses that would turn them into SARS-CoV-2. Yet what gets conflated is that the N.I.H. funded them, therefore you are liable for the lab leak if it’s a lab leak. It had nothing to do with what we did, because the viruses were unable to be made into SARS-CoV-2.

    Wallace-Wells: I’m not suggesting that the work described in that particular EcoHealth grant led to the pandemic. But we know that there was a lot of other work being done in Wuhan. And if I were you, and I was going to sleep every night thinking that there was even some very small chance that the virus came from a laboratory doing the kinds of research that I had helped promote and fund over the last few decades, I think that might weigh on me a bit, even if I was absolutely sure I had done everything I had done with the best intentions.

    Fauci: Now you’re saying things that are a little bit troublesome to me. That I need to go to bed tonight worrying that N.I.H.-funded research was responsible for pandemic origins.

    Wallace-Wells: I’m not saying you need to do anything. I’m putting myself in your shoes and telling you what I think it would mean to me to really believe there’s a chance, even a very small one, that this pandemic was the result of a lab leak.

    Fauci: Well, I sleep fine. I sleep fine. And remember, this work was done in order to be able to help prepare us for the next outbreak. This work was not conceived by me as I was having my omelet in the morning. It is a grant that was put before peer review of independent scientists whose main role is to try to get data to protect the health and safety of the American public and the world. And it was judged that this type of research was important.

    Wallace-Wells: Do you think the experience of the pandemic — and the possibility of a lab origin, however remote — should change how we think about the risks and benefits of this entire field of research?

    Fauci: You have to have a totally transparent process that involves scientific input and community input — informed community input. Because if you do what some people are saying we should do and shut down all gain-of-function research, you’ve got to make clear what you’re talking about. What do you mean by “gain of function”? Some want to pass a law: All gain-of-function should be stopped. But if all gain-of-function stops, you will have no vaccines for flu. You will have no vaccines for any of the other diseases, because all of that manipulates a virus or a pathogen to gain a certain function to be able to make a vaccine.

    So first of all, we’ve got to do a better job of getting people to understand what gain-of-function is. So when Rand Paul asked me, did you fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan? I said, absolutely not. So if you and I talk about gain-of-function, David, we better define what we’re talking about, because we’re going to confuse the crap out of everybody.

    Wallace-Wells: Well, maybe it’s a small point, but when I think about that exchange, what I think is that you could have said: “First, there are a lot of things that people may think of as gain-of-function. They involve any manipulation of viruses, including things that we all know are beneficial, like producing annual flu vaccines, and including some things that I feel very strongly are beneficial, even if there are some who feel otherwise. The definition we use at the N.I.H. is much narrower, and the work described by the grant you are referring to does not meet that definition. But I understand the broader question you are raising, and I feel strongly that this kind of work is worthwhile, and if you’ll allow me, I’ll explain why.”

    Fauci: David, have you ever testified before a congressional committee?

    Wallace-Wells: I have, actually.

    Fauci: How difficult is it to get a sentence like that out? Look at an interview between me and Jim Jordan. How many words did I get in there?

    Wallace-Wells: Well, then, let’s have that conversation right now. The floor is yours. What would you say?

    Fauci: What you said is what I agree with. You are asking me, why didn’t you say that, if you agree? If I had the opportunity to say it, I would say the same thing. It’s a broad category. You’ve got to have the right balance of oversight. But there are clear, absolute benefits that you need for society.

    Wallace-Wells: And what about pandemic preparedness more generally? Let’s say we’re working from scratch and designing the system at a white board. What reforms are needed?

    Fauci:Do you have two weeks to talk?
    If you look at what worked for us, it was on the science side: the extraordinary investments that were made for decades before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. First, the work in platform technology that led to essentially a revolution in how we make vaccines. No.2 is structure-based immunogen design. That helped with antiviral design, too — that has been the most underrated part of our response. I mean, show me a person who’s vaccinated, got infected, took Paxlovid and died. I can’t find anybody.
    Then you look at what we didn’t do so well. What we didn’t do so well was in the infrastructure and communication and transparency — all the things that go on with public health. We also had a public-health system that we thought was really, really good. But it was really, really antiquated. We didn’t even know what was going on at a given time. Now, I don’t want to be criticizing the C.D.C. In fairness to them, they recognize themselves that they need to bring their public-health data collection into the 21st century. And they had a culture that was an academic culture, in which we don’t say anything until we’ve essentially written the manuscript and it goes out and it’s being published — as opposed to, we need to know today what’s going on. As a result, in trying to gather information during the pandemic, we had to rely on conference calls in the middle of the night or early in the morning with Israel, with South Africa, with the European Union, with our colleagues in the U.K. We have to change that.
    We’ve got to know day by day: What are the variants? What are their mutations? How many people are getting infected? Instead, we were blind. We were swimming in the dark.

    Wallace-Wells: So if you had an infinite budget and were designing our systems from scratch, that would be your top priority?

    Fauci: We don’t need an infinite budget. We just need a sustained commitment to science and public health. Spending $5 billion for an Operation Warp Speed for next-generation coronavirus vaccines is great. But after that. …
    The next pandemic may be 25 years from now. It could be 50 years from now. Remember, the last transforming pandemic was 1918. We had pandemics in 1957, 1968 and 2009, but nobody hardly even noticed them, to be quite honest with you.

    Wallace-Wells: You see an awful lot of normalization in this pandemic, as well. Is it possible, given that, to cultivate that more sustained commitment?

    Fauci: One of the things I did in my life that I’m most proud of that isn’t purely science was my outreach in the gay community during the early years of H.I.V. Now, the gay community with H.I.V. is very, very different from the ultraright MAGA community with Covid. However, there is a bit of connection there — a segment of society that was bucking against what the government was trying to do.
    What the gay population was saying is that you’ve got to take our thoughts into consideration, and that you have a too-rigid clinical-trial apparatus. One of the best things I did in my life was put aside their theatrics and their attacks on me and started listening to what they had to say. And what they had to say was not just a kernel of truth; it was profound truth. It was mostly all true.
    So I have always felt when there are people pushing back at you, even though they in many respects are off in left field somewhere, there always appears to be a kernel of truth — maybe a small kernel or a big segment of truth — in what they say. One of the things that we really need to do is we need to reach out now and find out what exactly was it that made them push back. Because so many people cannot be completely wrong.

    Wallace-Wells: Can that resistance we saw in this pandemic be overcome? Or do the struggles we see all around the world with this virus a sign that those obstacles are somewhat ineradicable features of human life?

    Fauci: I don’t know if they’re ineradicable. But they’re very difficult.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/24/magazine/dr-fauci-pandemic.html

    ========================
    twitter @RandPaul

    Dr. Fauci today in the @nytimes:

    “Something clearly went wrong, and I don’t know exactly what it was.”

    Who wants to tell him??

    https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1650987112668311558

    ================================
    twitter @Risemelbourne

    Ontario Canada A Portable Truck Billboard, plastered with the Canadian Unfortunate Coincidences

    + 46 sec video

    https://twitter.com/Risemelbourne/status/1650994562729660417

    ==================================

    APRIL 24 2023 – ‘The Redacted Emails Were Incriminating Enough’: Ron Johnson Accuses Dr. Fauci Of Covid-19 Cover-Up

    • redacted – So it was ALL a lie and they KNEW it

      A [new study](https://www.cell.com/heliyon/pdf/S2405-8440(23)01324-5.pdf) shows that face masks are not proven to prevent viral infections and carry possible harms to those who wear them.

      The peer-reviewed study from German researchers shows that there is a possible toxicity when wearing masks due to the constant exposure of carbon dioxide.

      And yet masks were mandated for so many children.

      In one study “masks frequently led to breathing problems in 100 school children between 8 and 11 years of age especially during physical exertion.”

      The study shows that the medical community has long since known about the dangers of prolonged CO2 exposure.

    • redacted – Justin Trudeau TRIES to rewrite Covid history, but we won’t let him

      Justin Trudeau says that he has always been sensitive and understanding about vaccine hesitancy.

      That’s a lie.

      He called people who did not want to get vaccinated misogynists, racists and extremists.

      He said that they had “unacceptable views.”

      He targeted them and took their bank accounts.

      He absolutely should not to get a victory lap for empathetic governance during the Covid-19 pandemic! No way!

    • global news – “High bio-hazard risk” in Sudan after laboratory seized, WHO warns

      There is a “high risk of biological hazard” in the Sudanese capital Khartoum after one of the warring parties seized a laboratory holding measles and cholera pathogens and other hazardous materials, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.

      Speaking in Geneva via video link from Sudan, the WHO’s Nima Saeed Abid said technicians were unable to access the National Public Health Laboratory to secure the materials.

    • DAILY MAIL – Now be prepared for DOG FLU!

      Mutated form of avian influenza that strikes canines is ‘creeping’ towards being able to infect humans, scientists say

      Virus has descended from a type of avian flu first detected in dogs in 2006
      Study found the virus is better able to recognise human cell receptors

      Humans could one day be struck down by ‘dog flu’ – a mutated form of avian influenza which is slowly evolving.

      H3N2 seeded itself in dogs almost two decades ago. It can cause pooches to suffer from a runny nose and cough and be deadly in extreme cases.

      Since then, it has become established within canines and evolved to become a dog-specific virus.

      more :

      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12010555/Now-prepared-DOG-FLU-Mutated-form-avian-influenza-creeping-infecting-humans.html

      ======================================

      DAILY MAIL – First H3N8 bird flu victim may have caught virus from a WET MARKET

      – as it’s revealed China did not report 56-year-old woman’s case for a month

      The woman first became ill on February, 22 and died on March, 16

      Samples later taken from the wet market tested positive for influenza A(H3)

      The H3N8 strain is not normally thought to spread between humans

      Vaccine makers say they’re ‘standing ready’ for human bird flu pandemic

      The 56-year-old, from the Guangdong province, first became ill on February 22 and was admitted to the hospital with severe pneumonia on March 3.

      She died 13 days later on March 16.

      more:

      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11963933/First-patient-die-H3N8-bird-flu-caught-killer-strain-wet-market-officials-fear.html

    • APRIL 26 2023 – CNN – Hear what Dr. Fauci says hampered US response to Covid-19 pandemic

      ( 10 min 47 )

    • BBC – Andrew Bridgen: MP expelled by Tories after Covid vaccine comments

      The Conservative Party has expelled MP Andrew Bridgen after he compared Covid-19 vaccines to the Holocaust and was found to have breached lobbying rules.

      The member for North West Leicestershire had already lost the party whip, meaning he was sitting as an independent.

      But the Tories have now stripped him of his party membership as well.

      Mr Bridgen said his expulsion “confirms the culture of corruption, collusion and cover-ups”.

      A Conservative Party spokesman said Mr Bridgen was expelled “following the recommendation of a disciplinary panel”.

      He has 28 days, from the date of his expulsion on 12 April, to appeal.

      Mr Bridgen said he intended to stand again at the next election.

      “My expulsion from the Conservative Party under false pretences only confirms the culture of corruption, collusion and cover-ups which plagues our political system,” he said in a statement.

      “I have been a vocal critic of the vaccine rollout and the party have been sure to make an example of me.

      “I am grateful for my newfound freedom and will continue to fight for justice for all those harmed, injured and bereaved due to governmental incompetence.

      “I will continue to serve my constituents as I was elected to do and intend to stand again at the next election.”

      ‘Careless and cavalier’

      Mr Bridgen has spent months voicing concerns about the safety of Covid vaccines.

      In December he called in Parliament for a “complete suspension” of the vaccines based on what he described as, “robust data of significant harms and little ongoing benefit”.

      This went against the overwhelming weight of evidence, from a number of different independent teams of researchers, that found the benefits far outweighed any known harms.

      He lost the whip in January after posting a tweet describing the Covid vaccine roll-out as “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust”.

      Prime Minister Rishi Sunak condemned the comments as “utterly unacceptable”.

      Earlier that month, he was handed a five-day suspension for breaking the MPs’ code of conduct banning lobbying.

      The cross-party Commons Standards Committee found Mr Bridgen had breached rules by failing to declare his financial interests in Mere Plantations when writing to ministers about the company.

      The Cheshire-based firm had donated money to Mr Bridgen’s local party and funded a trip to Ghana.

      Following an investigation, the committee concluded the MP had shown a “careless and cavalier” attitude to the rules.

      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-65402195

      GBN- Andrew Bridgen DEFENDS HIMSELF after being EXPELLED from Conservative Party

    • APRIL 26 2023 – JUST IN: Rand Paul Asks Samantha Power: ‘Did USAID Fund Coronavirus Research In Wuhan China?’

  2. CBC – NDP urges Liberals to reject any request by France to extradite Hassan Diab

    NDP justice critic Randall Garrison is calling on the Liberal government to block any attempts by France to extradite Hassan Diab, an Ottawa academic found guilty in absentia on terrorism charges related to the bombing of a Paris synagogue. ‘We have a clear case of miscarriage of justice in France,’

  3. It all started with a question – one I thought fairly simple: what data and studies has the CDC used to justify the mandate to exclude unvaccinated non-citizens, non-immigrants from entering the United States? The question stemmed from the Presidential Proclamation of 25 October 2021 in which President Biden declared a resumption of global travel to the United States.

    The President proclaimed the administration would “…implement science-based public health measures” to control the transmission of COVID-19 for the nation. These measures were founded on three pillars of health and safety relating to COVID-19: vaccination, mask-wearing and testing. Of the three health pillars keeping Americans safe, mask-wearing was overturned by a court order on 18 April 2022 and the requirement for pre-departure testing was rescinded by the CDC on 10 June 2022.

    https://brownstone.org/articles/the-best-available-science-the-cdc-and-the-vaccine-travel-mandate/

    • REPORTS: Tucker May Have Been Fired Because of His “Prayer Talk” and Possibly Because Murdoch Children Want to Sell FOX
      By Joe Hoft Apr. 26, 2023 7:45 am14 Comments

      Tucker Carlson reportedly shared that he may have been fired due to his comments on prayer and the Murdoch family wanting to sell FOX News.

      On Monday morning, TGP reported:

      Tucker Carlson is OUT at Fox News.

      “Tucker Carlson Tonight” was Fox’s top rated show!

      Tucker’s last show aired Friday.

      Fox said interim hosts will cover Tucker’s time slot until a new host is named.

      Via Fox News:

      FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.

      Mr. Carlson’s last program was Friday April 21st. Fox News Tonight will air live at 8 PM/ET starting this evening as an interim show helmed by rotating FOX News personalities until a new host is named.

      This was huge news. FOX last week settled with Dominion Voting Systems and agreed to a reported payment of over $787 million and then Carlson with the biggest show on cable TV is fired a few days later.

      There have been many reports on why Tucker was let go. One report at The Huffington Post claims the following:

      He doesn’t like all the spiritual talk,” the source said.
      The report went on to state that Murdoch reportedly called off his engagement with his to-be fifth wife because she thought Tucker was a messenger from God.

      Tucker Carlson may have been fired from Fox News after going too hard on the “prayer talk,” according to a new report in Vanity Fair.

      A source briefed on Fox Corp. chair Rupert Murdoch’s decision-making said Carlson was ousted over remarks he made during a speech Friday night at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th Anniversary gala in Maryland, according to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman.

      The source said Carlson’s speech was laced with religious overtones that were too extreme even for Murdoch. During the address, Carlson called abortion “child sacrifice,” cast American politics as a battle between “good and evil” and suggested the solution was taking “10 minutes a day to say a prayer about it.”

      The source told Vanity Fair, “that stuff freaks Rupert out.

      He doesn’t like all the spiritual talk,” the source said.
      The report went on to state that Murdoch reportedly called off his engagement with his to-be fifth wife because she thought Tucker was a messenger from God.
      TGP shared Tucker’s talk at the Heritage event:

      Vanity Fair claims in a report that Tucker was fired by FOX CEO Suzanne Scott who called and fired him on Monday morning [emphasis added]:

      Carlson has told people he doesn’t know why he was terminated. According to the source, Scott refused to tell him how the decision was made; she only said that it was made “from above.” Carlson has told people he believes his controversial show is being taken off the air because the Murdoch children intend to sell Fox News at some point.

      This is all we know now. If true this won’t help the sale price of FOX

      https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/tucker-says-he-may-have-been-fired-because-of-his-prayer-talk-and-because-murdoch-children-want-to-sell-fox/

    • “They [FOX] Can’t Afford to Have Hosts Who Are Pushing Americanism” – Kari Lake Sends Message to Tucker Carlson, Discusses Joe Biden’s Re-Election Bid With Eric Bolling
      By Jordan Conradson Apr. 26, 2023 8:15 am53 Comments

      Arizona’s true Republican leader, Kari Lake, joined Eric Bolling on Newsmax Tuesday to discuss the 2024 Presidential Election and the recent decision by Fox News to let go of Tucker Carlson, the top-rated network news anchor in the country.

      The Gateway Pundit reported on Monday that FOX News announced they were parting ways with their top-rated prime-time host, Tucker Carlson, after his final show last Friday.

      Steve Bannon immediately weighed in on the news, telling his War Room viewers, “With this, I don’t know why anybody needs to watch anything on the Murdoch empire.”

      Fox News has been playing for the other side for a long time now. Everybody remembers when fake news crank Bret Baier called Arizona for Joe Biden in 2020 before the polls were even closed and while voters were still waiting in line. But this was a shock to America, as Tucker was one of the only remaining voices for the populist Americans on Fox.

      As The Gateway Pundit reported, Tucker was the only Fox host who had Kari Lake on his show to discuss her stolen election, showing his support for her lawsuit against the fraud by Katie Hobbs and Maricopa County. “I completely agree with you, and if you care about Democracy, this would be at the top of your list. I’m glad you’re doing this,” said Tucker regarding Kari’s stolen election lawsuit.

      Tucker had to go because Fox News wants to push propaganda that benefits the ruling class DC elites and derails President Trump’s MAGA agenda. They don’t care if it was a bad move for the business, losing them billions in stock value.

      “It’s very obvious right now that Fox News has become the establishment GOP, which is really the Uniparty Republicans,” said Kari Lake. “They can’t afford to have a Tucker Carlson speaking out over the next year and a half because it will ruin their push toward globalism.”

      Lake and Bolling also discussed brain-dead Joe Biden’s recently announced 2024 re-election bid. Kari Lake declared that she is “100% in the corner of President Trump” and called Joe Biden “one of the biggest losers we’ve ever seen in politics.”

      Lake further slammed Biden for doing the dirty work of the Cartels and the Chinese Communist Party with policies that are destroying our country and economy and for hiding from debates against RFK Jr.

      Before ending her segment, Lake gave a message to Tucker: “Speak out.” “We need your voice over the next year and a half to save our country,” she said, assuring him that Americans would chip in to help him fight a lawsuit by the disgraced Fox Corp.

      Watch below:

      Boling: Yesterday, Tucker Carlson got blindsided. He got fired by Fox News, and you know, we pointed out that Fox News is moving far left. They’ve moved to the center, they’re even pushing themselves farther left with Paul Ryan on the board and Karl Rove being one of their major voices over there. What do you say to the people who are watching right now who said, you know, I’ve had it with Fox? They called Arizona first for Biden, which they shouldn’t have. And now they’ve fired Tucker Carlson.

      Lake: Well, I mean, they’re running a business. They have the right to run it the way they will. And it’s very obvious right now that Fox News has become the establishment GOP, which is really the Uniparty Republicans. They’re the ones who are really in bed with the left. It’s the Democrats and the Republicans in the Uniparty who are pushing a globalist agenda, and they can’t afford to have hosts who are pushing Americanism, who are America First and love this country. They can’t afford to have a Tucker Carlson speaking out over the next year and a half because it will ruin their push toward globalism. That’s why they got rid of Bongino.

      What I say to every host that is left on Fox News, which is the establishment news channel: Do not let them use your voice, your reputation, your heart, and your soul to push propaganda about establishment politics that are going to destroy our country. Step away. Don’t let those golden handcuffs handcuff you to an agenda and narrative and propaganda that you don’t support. This is your time to stand up. We have a year and a half to save our country. I worry, I don’t know what Tucker’s deal is, but I worry that he might still be under contract and they’re literally going to be paying him 10, 20, 30 million a year to just sit there and be quiet. We can’t afford to have Tucker Carlson’s voice silenced for a year and a half. I don’t know if Tucker’s listening to this, but if he happens to hear it, I beg you, Tucker Carlson, to speak out. Break the terms of that contract. We need your voice over the next year and a half to save our country. And if you get sued by your former employer, we will help create a defense fund to help you fight that lawsuit. We need your voice. We need every American’s voice who cares about this country in the next year and a half to save our Constitution and to save our country.

      https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/they-fox-cant-afford-to-have-hosts-who-are-pushing-americanism-kari-lake-sends-message-to-tucker-carlson-discusses-joe-bidens-re-election-bid-with-eric-bolling/

    • Daily Mail Tracks Down Tucker Carlson in Florida – Catches Up with Former FOX Host on Dinner Date with His Wife of 32 Years
      By Jim Hoft Apr. 26, 2023 9:55 am55 Comments

      The Daily Mail ambushed Tucker Carlson on the way to dinner with his wife of 32 years on Tuesday night.

      Tucker told the Daily Mail reporters “retirement” was going great so far.

      The British tabloid posted the first photos of Tucker Carlson since his departure from FOX News was reported on Monday.

      Hollywood attorney Bryan Freedman is negotiating Tucker Carlson’s exit package from FOX News.

      Tucker has yeat to make any public statements on his departure from FOX News.

      Via The Daily Mail.

      It’s been barely two days since his brutal ouster from Fox News – but Tucker Carlson looks like a man without a care in the world.

      The TV firebrand shrugged off the media storm and insisted he was more interested in enjoying a romantic date with his wife Susan as he broke his silence in an exclusive chat with DailyMail.com.

      ‘Retirement is going great so far,’ chuckled Carlson, 53, as he emerged from his $5.5 million beach home in Boca Grande, Florida on Tuesday night.

      ‘I haven’t eaten dinner with my wife on a weeknight in seven years.’

      Pressed on his future, the flame-throwing former host of Tucker Carlson Tonight flashed a broad smile and joked: ‘Appetizers plus entree.’

      https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/daily-mail-tracks-down-tucker-carlson-in-florida-catches-up-with-former-fox-host-on-dinner-date-with-his-wife-of-32-years/

  4. Two middle school students are suing their Michigan school district after they were forced to remove their “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts in February, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), who represent the students, announced Tuesday.

    Tri County Middle School Assistant Principal Andrew Buikema and teacher Wendy Bradford allegedly told the students to take off the sweatshirts that featured the line commonly used among critics of President Joe Biden as a euphemism for “fuck Joe Biden,” according to the complaint. The district alleged that the sweatshirts violated school policy that prohibits profane language on clothing because the phrase is “is intended to ridicule the President with profanity,” but FIRE challenges they violated the students’ First Amendment rights.

    https://newrightnetwork.com/2023/04/students-sue-school-district-after-being-forced-to-remove-lets-go-brandon-sweatshirts.html

  5. First son Hunter Biden kept his business partners apprised of at least two scheduled one-on-one meetings with Antony Blinken, emails reviewed by The Post show.

    The decade-plus-long relationship between Blinken and Hunter made headlines last week after the House Judiciary Committee revealed that former CIA acting director Michael Morell testified in private that Blinken — then a Biden 2020 campaign adviser — “triggered” a letter from 51 ex-intelligence officials that sought to discredit The Post’s reporting on bombshell emails from the first son’s abandoned laptop.

    https://nypost.com/2023/04/25/hunter-biden-told-burisma-colleague-of-blinken-meet-emails/

  6. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) leading Sudan representative warned of a ‘huge biological risk’ as fighters seize Khartoum’s central public health lab.

    “There is a huge biological risk associated with the occupation of the central public health lab… by one of the fighting parties,” said the United Nations (UN) WHO Sudan representative, Dr. Nima Saeed Abid, during a video call with reporters Monday. Abid told reporters that one of the warring factions seized the lab, expelled technicians, and warned of a “high risk of biological hazard.”

    https://newrightnetwork.com/2023/04/lab-holding-dangerous-viruses-seized-by-fighters-posing-high-risk-of-biological-hazard.html

    Note: Sounds like Victoria Nuland’s latest sandbox is going to be the source of the next lockdown pretext… Win-win for the deep state!

    • This is nothing new. Suddenly it’s a headline grabber.

      We found them in Japan after the war.
      Russia has a long history of such biolabs. Even had special sections in gulag for scientists. Last year news broke of a Russian lab on China’s border. Target: genetic-specific infectious agents.

      We have these labs all over the world. Researchers collaborate irrespective of nationality, hyper-focused on playing god.

  7. Top 7 SERIOUS HEART PROBLEMS Caused by the Vascular-Clogging Covid Jabs
    by S.D. Wells April 26, 2023 in Healthcare, News and Opinions
    There are not many things more devastating to a parent than to watch their child’s health spin out of control, or worse yet, the child passes away before they do. As of late, even the healthiest kids and teens on the planet are experiencing serious heart problems after getting the mRNA Covid spike-protein-producing “vaccines.” In case you are unaware, mRNA instructs human cells to produce millions of microscopic prions that resemble an influenza virus and invade every organ of the human body.

    https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/2023/04/top-7-serious-heart-problems-caused-by-the-vascular-clogging-covid-jabs

    • Elon loves DeSantis
      Bush, Rove love DeSantis

      Shortly before the 2020 election, Rupert Murdoch, the Foxy man invited Ron DeSantis and his wife Casey for lunch at his ranch and told DeSantis he would support him in 2024.

      On the night of the 2020 election, why did Foxy News call the Mail-in guy as winner in Arizona? There were still hundreds of thousands to be counted.
      When I went to bed at 3:15 am Trump was ahead in many states, but they did not call them. Magically, overnight, Mail-in guy votes came from everywhere.

      Foxy News showed us just how this was accomplished.

      We are just the “little people” manipulated by the elites. Will there be consequences?

  8. At the 2022 Teacher of the Year ceremony hosted by the White House on Wednesday, President Biden claimed that school children don’t belong to parents “when they’re in the classroom.”

    “They’re all our children. And the reason you’re the teachers of the year is because you recognize that. They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours when they’re in the classroom,” he said.

    Later in the speech, Biden targeted Republicans and the parent movements in local school districts that have fought to remove from libraries and curricula books that promote radical gender and racial ideologies.

    https://news.yahoo.com/biden-claims-school-children-don-234147454.html

  9. WICKED: Arizona Democrat State Rep. Caught On Camera Stealing Bibles and Hiding Them in Refrigerator and Couches in House Members-Only Lounge (VIDEO)
    By Jordan Conradson Apr. 26, 2023 8:45 am0 Comments

    Democrat Arizona State Rep. Stephanie Stahl-Hamilton was caught by a security camera earlier this month hiding Bibles by stuffing them in couch cushions and the refrigerator of the House members-only lounge.

    House members began to notice the trend of missing bibles starting in March, and cameras were set up by security. It was on April 10 that Stahl-Hamilton was finally caught red-handed.

    Watch below:

    Conservative State Rep. Rachel Jones shared this story on Twitter, asking, “What?!!!”

    Fox reports:

    An Arizona state lawmaker was captured on video snatching a Bible off a table in the House’s members-only lounge before stashing it outside of camera view.

    The Arizona House of Representatives was alerted about the mysterious disappearance of a pair of Holy Bibles on March 23, which are normally left on display in the House’s members-only lounge, according to a statehouse source.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/wicked-arizona-democrat-state-rep-caught-on-camera-stealing-bibles-and-hiding-them-in-refrigerator-and-couches-in-house-members-only-lounge-video/

  10. Michigan Democrats Try Criminalizing GPS Use, Have to Suspend Voting When They Start Losing
    By Ben Wetmore Apr. 26, 2023 9:00

    Democrats suspended voting on a bill package today to further criminalize all non-car GPS use in the Michigan House of Representatives, when the bill was on the floor and the voting was in progress. They then quickly adjourned.

    The hypocritical left-wing coalition of ‘defending Democracy’ had to cheat in order to prevent a humiliating defeat for their own bill package, HB 4250-4252.

    This bill package prohibits the holding or using of a mobile electronic device while driving. The bills also increase the penalties for a violation and allow the suspension of a license for multiple offenses. The bills go even further to prohibit receiving text messages while driving. These bills would allow suspension of your driver’s license after 3 offenses.

    Democrats were outlawing the use of GPS on your phone, making it only legal if it was part of the vehicle.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/michigan-democrats-try-criminalizing-gps-use-have-to-suspend-voting-when-they-start-losing/

  11. Trading of First Republic Bank Stock Halts After Share Price Plunges… US Government to Seize?
    By Cristina Laila Apr. 26, 2023 10:15 am0 Comments

    Trading of First Republic Bank stock halted for the second time on Wednesday after its share price plunged more than 50%.

    Earlier this week First Republic Bank said customer deposits tumbled 40% in Q1 – worse than Wall Street expected.

    Deposits fell to $104.5 billion in the first quarter but the bank says deposits have since stabilized.

    The US government may seize First Republic Bank, according to Fox Business.

    More on this developing story from Yahoo Finance:

    According to CNBC, First Republic Bank will cut its work force by 25% and reduce its office space.

    Last month First Republic was downgraded to junk by S&P.

    “We believe the risk of deposit outflows is elevated at First Republic Bank despite the actions of federal banking regulators and the bank actively increasing its borrowing availability to mitigate risk associated with the bank failures over the last week,” S&P said in a statement.

    “Still, if deposit outflows continue, we expect First Republic would need to rely on its more costly wholesale borrowings. This would encumber its balance sheet and hurt its modest profitability,” said S&P, according to Market Watch.

    Top Executives at First Republic Bank sold $12 million in company stock before shares plummeted last month, according to the Wall Street Journal.

    Customers were lined up at a First Republic Bank in Los Angeles last month to withdraw their money after Silicon Valley Bank failed.

    WATCH:

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/trading-of-first-republic-bank-stock-halts-after-share-price-plunges-us-government-to-seize/

  12. Sudanese Militants Seize US-Funded BioLab in Khartoum Containing Dangerous Samples of Measles, Cholera, Other Pathogens
    By Jim Hoft Apr. 26, 2023 9:26 am254 Comments

    The World Health Organization warned of the potential of a “high risk” event after Sudanese militants seized control of dangerous bio lab in Khartoum as fighting continues in the capital city.

    Dr. Fauci was behind funding of several international biolabs as NIAID Director from 1984 to 2022.

    Natalie Winters at The War Room reported that the US is funding the biolabs in Sudan.

    Sudan’s National Public Health Laboratory – whose recent seizure by militants has prompted warnings of causing a “huge biological risk” – received financial and personnel support from U.S. government bodies including the Department of Defense, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health agency, War Room can reveal.

    The stunning revelation follows Nima Saeed Abid, the World Health Organization (WHO) representative in Sudan, admitting the situation was “extremely dangerous” because “we have polio isolates in the lab, we have measles isolates in the lab, we have cholera isolates in the lab.” U.S. federal funding has directly supported research conducted by researchers from the high-risk laboratory into cholera.

    “There is a huge biological risk associated with the occupation of the central public health lab in Khartoum by one of the fighting parties,” he added.

    The lab, which is based in the country’s capital Khartoum, is a recipient of support from a variety U.S. government agencies including the Department of Defense (DOD), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC), and United States Agency for International Development (USAID). During Dr. Fauci’s tenure as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency leader, he also allocated funds to support research involving scientists from the controversial laboratory.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/sudanese-militants-seize-us-funded-biolab-in-khartoum-containing-dangerous-samples-of-measles-cholera-other-pathogens/

  13. APRIL 26 2023 – House members introduce resolution defining what victory in Ukraine would look like

    A bipartisan group of House lawmakers are introducing a resolution calling for the United States to support an outright victory for Ukraine in its war against Russia.

    Republican Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina emphasised the need to not make the mistakes of history.

    “We must not repeat the error of Sept. 1, 1939,” he said in reference to efforts to prevent the Nazis from invading Poland. The resolution would require a full review from the House Foreign Affairs Committee before it goes to the House floor. Yahoo! News first reported on the resolution.

    The text “affirms that it is the policy of the United States to see Ukraine victorious against the invasion and RESTORED TO ITS INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNIZED 1991 BORDERS.”

    That year marked when the Soviet Union collapsed and an independent Ukraine emerged. But in 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin seized Crimea, which the United States did not stop. In addition, Mr Putin has supported separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk, known collectively as the Donbas.

    Mr Wilson is sponsoring the legislation with Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, who co-chairs the Helsinki Commission that was co-foundeed in 1976 to ensure Russia abided by its international agreements.

    “The only way to maintain peace is through strength,” Mr Wilson said, referencing former president Ronald Reagan.

    The resolution comes as House Republicans have become increasingly hostile to sending aid to Ukraine. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has said that the United States would not give a “blank check” to the country as it defends itself from Russia’s onslaught. Similarly, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has proposed legislation to audit speding in Ukraine.

    In addition, many Republicans criticised President Joe Biden for visiting Ukraine earlier this year on Presidents’ Day.

    https://ca.news.yahoo.com/house-members-introduce-resolution-defining-142911488.html

    ============================

    APRIL 26 2023 – Zelensky said that Kyiv will not make territorial compromises for the sake of peace

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Kyiv would not make territorial compromises to achieve peace. He also said that, according to Kiev, the territorial integrity of Ukraine should be restored within the borders of 1991.

    […]Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, after a telephone conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, said that Kyiv would not make territorial compromises to achieve peace.

    He stated this in his Telegram channel.

    “There can be no peace at the expense of territorial compromises,” Zelensky said.

    He also said that, according to Kiev, the territorial integrity of Ukraine should be restored within the borders of 1991.

    https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2023-04-26-zelensky-said-that-kyiv-will-not-make-territorial-compromises-for-the-sake-of-peace.H1-vuIp8Q2.html

    =========================

    MSNBC – Zelensky has ‘long and meaningful’ call with China’s president

    • europravda – China is ‘always on the side of peace’ Xi tells Zelensky in first phone call

      • This is the go-to war crime allegation these days. Goat-herders in Afghanistan and Israelis and tards in Kosovo. They’re all doing it.

        Rape by HIV-positive enemy soldiers was the biggie a couple decades ago. Stealing neonatal incubators was good for a while.

    • Tim is right, the Government should be afraid of the People instead of the People being afraid of the Government.

      Note the way Tim is saying we are winning, he has left the kibs and has joined the ranks of the same.

  14. WSJ – Jacinda Ardern Is Going to Harvard to Study Online Extremism

    New Zealand’s former prime minister to research extremist content, leadership and artificial intelligence

    Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s former prime minister, is going to Harvard University.
    Ms. Ardern is set to move to Massachusetts this fall in her biggest undertaking since she stepped down in January as New Zealand’s leader. Harvard officials said Tuesday that Ms. Ardern would do three concurrent fellowships in the law and government schools.

    She said she would be at Harvard for one semester and then return to New Zealand, which is more than 9,000 miles from Cambridge, Mass.

    “I am incredibly humbled to be joining Harvard University as a fellow—not only will it give me the opportunity to share my experience with others, it will give me a chance to learn,” she said in Harvard’s statement.

    Ms. Ardern, 42 years old, gained international prominence during her more than five years as prime minister. She was the country’s youngest leader since the 1850s and gave birth while in office. She won admirers for her empathetic approach to politics, particularly after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, which killed more than 50 people. She wore a hijab, a traditional Muslim head covering, to talk with grievers.

    Her government later imposed a sweeping gun ban and she pledged to counter the spread of terrorist content online. The lone gunman live-streamed the shootings on sites including Facebook and had posted about his growing radicalization on social media.

    She resigned as prime minister in January because she said she didn’t have the energy to continue the job. Her popularity eroded in her last two years in office as some New Zealanders grew frustrated with the country’s ongoing border closure and lockdowns in Auckland. She had been praised for her early pandemic policies and the country’s low death rate.

    During her time in office she endured frequent threats, some of which were prosecuted in the court system, and had a big security detail. She was a member of the center-left Labour Party.
    The university said Ms. Ardern would join Harvard Law School as a fellow studying how to monitor artificial-intelligence tools and extremist content online.

    The university said she would concurrently build “principled leadership” skills during two fall fellowships at Harvard Kennedy School: the Hauser Leaders Program and the Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Program. The Angelopoulos program is designed for high-profile leaders transitioning from office, Harvard said.

    “As leaders, there’s often very little time for reflection, but reflection is critical if we are to properly support the next generation of leaders,” Ms. Ardern said in Harvard’s statement.
    Since leaving office, Ms. Ardern has joined the board of trustees for the Earthshot Prize, Prince William’s environmental organization. She said she is also a special envoy for Christchurch Call, a group advocating the elimination of extremist content online.

    Ms. Ardern said on Instagram Tuesday that Harvard invited her to be a fellow.
    “While I’ll be gone for a semester (helpfully the one that falls during the NZ general election!) I’ll be coming back at the end of the fellowships,” she said. “After all, New Zealand is home!”

    https://archive.ph/HHqw0

    • The Kennedy School is Harvard’s toilet.
      Losers like Mike Dukakis and Dan Rather pay themselves or get somebody else to pay for the privilege of a Harvard address.

  15. The Scary Real Origin of “Politically Correct” (Pt. 2) | Konstantin Kisin | POLITICS | Rubin Report

  16. APRIL 26 2023 – Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm Backs Requiring Military To Go Electric Vehicle Only By 2030

  17. Brazil court suspends Telegram messaging app in neo-Nazi probe

    A Brazilian court on Wednesday ordered the countrywide suspension of the Telegram messaging app after its parent company failed to provide data sought by authorities on neo-Nazis operating on the network, officials said.

    In the framework of a probe into neo-Nazi activity on social networks, the court fined Telegram a million reais (about $198,000) per day for “not complying,” and ordered the “temporary suspension of (its) activities,” Justice Minister Flavio Dino said in a video sent to journalists.

    https://insiderpaper.com/brazil-court-suspends-telegram-messaging-app-ruling/

    ==========================

    Brazil Court Orders Ban on Telegram Over Neo-Nazi Content

    Messaging service will be fined $197,600 per day, judge orders

    Social media platform didn’t share content police requested

    A federal court ordered a temporary ban on Telegram in Brazil after the messaging service refused to share information about neo-Nazi groups with the country’s Federal Police.
    The company will be fined 1 million reais ($197,600) per day until it complies with the court order, according to the decision.

    “There are groups there called anti-Semitic fronts operating on these networks,” Justice Minister Flavio Dino told journalists on Wednesday. “We know that this is at the root of violence against our children and adolescents.”

    The Federal Police requested access to Telegram as part of an investigation into a November school shooting in the city of Aracruz, the authorities said.

    The order against the Dubai-based social media platform follows a widening clampdown on so-called fake news and hate speech online by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s administration. Earlier this month, Elon Musk’s Twitter was condemned by both government officials and regular Brazilians for resisting initial calls to police content and accounts that promoted violence in schools.

    Nearly two-thirds of Brazilian smartphone users have downloaded Telegram, according to one recent survey. As of Wednesday afternoon, it was still operating and available in online stores like Google Play.

    This is not the first time the company has run afoul of Brazilian authorities. Last year, a Supreme Court judge briefly banned the platform, which boasts over 700 million monthly users worldwide, after it failed to respond to orders to take down posts and channels accused of spreading misinformation.

    Then, Telegram worked quickly to comply with the demands, claiming it had missed emails. And two days after the court ordered Internet providers and app stores remove Telegram, the court reversed the ban — essentially before it took effect.

    Telegram did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to its communications team.

    https://archive.ph/I2QlS#selection-4127.0-4127.94

  18. THE BIDEN LEGACY: HHS Whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas Tells Congress Biden Administration Is “Middleman” in Multi-Billion Dollar Migrant Child Trafficking Operation
    By Jim Hoft Apr. 26, 2023 4:15 pm0 Comments

    HHS whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas testified today in front of the house Judiciary Committee.

    Rodas told Congress that today in the United States children will work at slaughter houses, factories, and restaurants to pay their debt to the smugglers, traffickers and cartels.

    And… The US Government has become the “middleman” in a large scale multi-billion dollar child trafficking operation, run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children.

    So is this what Joe Biden meant by he wants to ‘finish the job’ in his second term?

    Todas told Rep. Andy Biggs, “There was no one with law enforcement experience overseeing where children are going.”

    Here is the testimony by HHS employee Tara Lee Rodas on “The Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Children.”

    Tara explains in detail the disgusting abuse of migrant children by the Joe Biden regime.

    There have been over 5 million illegal aliens, including migrant children, who have flooded across the US Southern Border under Joe Biden’s watch.

    Rodas Testimony: “The… by Jim Hoft

    FOX News reported:

    A House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Wednesday will feature the testimony from a whistleblower who will warn lawmakers that the U.S. has become the “middleman” in a multi-billion dollar migrant child trafficking operation at the border.

    The hearing, “The Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children,” will be held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement and will examine the surge in unaccompanied children (UACs) at the southern border.

    According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics, the number of UACs who came to the border shot up from 33,239 in FY2020 to over 146,000 in FY 2021 and 152,000 in FY 2022. So far in FY 2023 there have been over 70,000 encounters of unaccompanied children.

    When child migrants are encountered at the border, they are transferred into the custody of Health and Human Services (HHS) and then united with a sponsor — typically a parent or family member already in the U.S.

    But the Biden administration has been rocked by a number of reports that officials have been unable to make contact with over 85,000 child migrants, and more recently that administration officials ignored signs of “explosive” growth in child labor. A number have been forced into indentured servitude to pay back smugglers and have worked in dire conditions.

    The Wednesday hearing will hear from three witnesses: Tara Lee Rodas, a whistleblower and former employee at HHS; Sheena Rodriguez, founder and president of Alliance for a Safe Texas; and Jessica Vaughn, director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

    Rodas will warn of a problem that predates the administration, but that has increased significantly during the recent migrant crisis, according to a copy of her written testimony obtained by Fox News Digital.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/?p=925744

    • Ben and Jerry’s ice cream factory had 14 year old migrant kids working there. Sanctimonious leftists.

  19. Corsi: The Biden Crime Family Story Is Not Going Away
    By Jim Hoft Apr. 26, 2023 4:00 pm36 Comments

    Guest post by author Jerome Corsi

    With President Biden announcing his reelection campaign today, the 2024 presidential election has officially started. Biden’s announcement may explain why the Hunter Biden laptop story suddenly broke into mainstream media news.

    We have to put the Biden announcement together with the news yesterday that Susan Rice is leaving the Biden White House in May. Rick Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence under President Trump, has called Rice the “shadow president.” Suppose Rice was Obama’s operative placed in the Biden White House to allow Obama to pull the strings of Biden’s surrogate president. In that case, her departure might suggest Obama plans to extend his puppet mastery by getting his wife elected to replace his former vice president. Should Susan Rice agree to be the campaign manager for Michelle Obama’s presidential race, Barack could remain the puppet master pulling the strings. California Governor Gavin Newsom certainly wants to run, and there is speculation a Newsom/Rice ticket (or possibly a Rice/Newsom ticket) would have appeal to the Democratic Party’s far-left base.

    The 2024 presidential race in the Democratic Party heated up last week when Robert Kennedy, Jr. announced his candidacy. Kennedy’s entrance into the race promises to make the Democratic primary season an internecine battle, with Kennedy rejecting the neo-Marxist values of the totalitarian “woke” leadership that today controls the DNC.

    The central question confronting Democratic Party is now apparent. How will these various contenders to the throne move Biden aside? No political party can easily bar a first-term president from running again. Biden’s age, unpopularity with the electorate, and apparent senility are detriments to his reelection chances. So too will be a rough period of stagflation (high inflation and negative economic growth) will be a detriment for Biden. The Hunter Biden laptop story might just fade into history if Biden should decide running for a second term is maybe not such a good idea. Or does Biden calculate the only way to keep Hunter Biden free of federal criminal indictments is to run for reelection and retain power?

    But one political calculation is now certain. The story of “The Big Guy” is not going away.

    The Biden crime family story has already become mainstream media news. And with the U.S. continuing to commit billions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine, the Hunter Biden ties in that country are almost sure to become a campaign issue.

    On Sunday, April 23, 2023, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board published an opinion piece unexpectedly published a story entitled “Joe Biden and the 50 Spies of 2020.” The editorial featured the testimony of Mike Morell, the former deputy CIA director under Barack Obama, who organized a statement from 51 former U.S. intelligence operatives declaring Hunter’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The editorial also discussed a phone call Anthony Blinken, then a senior advisor to the Biden campaign and now secretary of state, placed to Morell on October 17, 2020, three days after the New York Post published damaging emails from Hunter’s laptop. The WSJ editorial pointed out that Biden used the “Gang of 51’s statement” during the final presidential debate, arguing the Hunter laptop story was “a bunch of garbage.”

    The final paragraph of the WSJ editorial shows no sympathy for Biden or his son in the incident. The WSJ editorial concluded as follows:

    Intelligence officials, former as well as current, have a particular duty not to spread disinformation because they have access to classified information that the public can’t check. The press overwhelmingly went along with the false Biden campaign claims because it wanted Mr. Biden to win. These 51 officials have done more to damage the credibility of the CIA and FBI than anything Donald Trump has said. Ditto for the complicit media.

    On April 21, 2023, the Washington Post predictably defended Biden in an article that quoted Mark Zaid, a lawyer “who says he represents” more than a half-dozen of the signers of the Morell letter. “What [the] GOP is doing is far greater politicization than what they allege of Dems,” the newspaper quoted Zaid. “Origins of the letter do not detract from fact contents remain 100% accurate. Focus on facts.” The point is that the Washington Post felt compelled to defend Biden in print again as the 2024 presidential campaign has begun building in intensity.

    The Watergate burglary occurred on June 17, 1972, but Richard Nixon won a landslide reelection in November. Senator Sam Ervin opened the Watergate hearings on March 28, 1973, but Richard Nixon did not resign until August 8, 1974. In 2008, former White House attorney Geoff Shepard wrote a book entitled The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President (New York: Sentinel, 2008). Shephard argued Kennedy Democrats exploited Watergate to put Ted Kennedy in the White House in 1976.

    With Donald Trump leading all GOP candidates for the 2023 nomination, we will surely hear much about Hunter Biden and his laptop. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has begun subpoenaing bank records on Biden family member finances, with Comer telling reporters at least a dozen relatives of President Biden are likely to be exposed from benefiting from foreign business deals tied to Biden. TGP reports the Biden family took tens of millions from entities directly connected to the CCP, China’s military, and Ukraine.

    TGP has led the Biden crime family story from the start. When the public fully understands the Biden family financial scandal, it will make child’s play out of the Watergate bags of cash that operatives for the Committee to Reelect the President (affectionally known as CREEP) carried around in 1972. Biden realized as vice president that “America for Sale” was a theme he could sell for billions to Ukrainian oligarchs and the CCP leadership, among others.

    Investigative reporter Jerome Corsi has agreed to write an exclusive series of stories for TGP to explore the exploits of the Biden crime family in depth. Since 2004, Corsi has published over 30 books on economics, history, and politics, including two #1 New York Times bestsellers. In 1972, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University. His book, Volume I in his Great Awakening Trilogy, The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, received highly positive reviews from prominent climate scientists. Volume II, The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation, is scheduled for publication on November 14, 2023. Dr. Corsi has resumed podcasting on his new website TheTruthCentral.com, which is now on the Internet in its first development phase.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/corsi-the-biden-crime-family-story-is-not-going-away/

  20. Elon Musk Spotted Entering Senator Chuck Schumer’s Office
    By Anthony Scott Apr. 26, 2023 6:30 pm54 Comments

    CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, was spotted by several photographers at Capitol Hill late Wednesday afternoon.

    Musk arrived at the Capitol Building in a blacked-out Tesla and soon after arriving, he made his way to Senator Chuck Schumer’s office.

    Musk met with Sen. Schumer for a little over an hour.

    When exiting the Capitol, a group of reporters asked him what the meeting was about, and Musk replied, “the future AI and the Economy.”

    WATCH:

    Musk’s arrival:

    Per The Hill:

    Twitter CEO Elon Musk was seen on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), according to reports.

    Reuters initially reported on the meeting, citing an aide, but it was not immediately clear what the meeting would cover. The Hill has reached out to Schumer’s office for details.

    In recent weeks, Schumer has reportedly been working on AI regulations.

    Patriots for America
    Musk himself is very skeptical of AI and has, on several occasions, called for engineers to pause all AI developments in order to establish safety research on the new technology first.

    Musk’s meeting with Schumer is quite surprising considering in recent months, Musk has been critical of Schumer.

    In March, Musk mocked Schumer’s opinions of January 6th on Twitter.

    READ:

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/elon-musk-spotted-entering-senator-chuck-schumers-office/

  21. Transgender Montana Lawmaker Barred From House Floor For the Rest of 2023 Session
    By Cristina Laila Apr. 26, 2023 6:53 pm32 Comments

    Transgender Montana lawmaker Zooey Zephyr was barred from the House floor after protesters stormed the gallery.

    GOP lawmakers on Wednesday voted to ban Zooey Zephyr from the House floor for the rest of 2023.

    “Zephyr can vote remotely under the terms of the punishment handed down by lawmakers.” Fox News reported.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/transgender-montana-lawmaker-barred-from-house-floor-for-the-rest-of-2023-session/

  22. Joe Biden Uses Cheat Sheet with Reporter’s Question Written on It
    By Cristina Laila Apr. 26, 2023 5:08 pm
    TruthGettr

    Joe Biden on Wednesday held a joint press conference with South Korean President Yoon in the Rose Garden.

    Biden took questions from a list of pre-approved reporters.

    Joe Biden used a cheat sheet to get through the questions.

    A photo of his cheat sheet reveals he needed help pronouncing a reporter’s last name.

    Joe Biden’s cheat sheet also had the reporter’s question written on it in bold type.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/joe-biden-uses-cheat-sheet-with-reporters-question-written-on-it/

  23. Turkish President Erdogan Hospitalized After Suffering Heart Attack

    Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was hospitalized after suffering a heart attack on April 26, 2023.

    According to the statement issued by the presidency, Erdogan was taken to the hospital in critical condition and received treatment for myocardial infarction, commonly known as a heart attack.

    The President’s office also announced that all of Erdogan’s pre-election speeches and public events have been cancelled until May 3rd, two weeks before the election. The announcement has caused uncertainty in the political sphere, as Erdogan’s re-election campaign was already facing significant opposition from other political parties.

    […]

    https://bnn.network/breaking-news/turkish-president-erdogan-hospitalized-after-suffering-heart-attack/

    ============================

    Türkiye rejects ‘baseless claims’ on President Erdogan’s health

    Recep Tayyip Erdogan to attend Thursday’s nuclear power plant opening virtually, says communications director

    Türkiye on Wednesday rejected “baseless claims” about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s health.

    “We categorically reject such baseless claims regarding President @RTErdogan’s health. The President will attend tomorrow’s nuclear power plant opening via videoconference,” the country’s Communications Director, Fahrettin Altun, said on Twitter.

    “No amount of disinformation can dispute the fact that the Turkish people stand with their leader and @RTErdogan and his AK (Justice and Development) Party are set to win the May 14 elections,” Altun added.

    The directorate’s center for combating disinformation also said the claims shared on some social media accounts that President Erdogan “had a heart attack and was hospitalized” did not reflect the truth.???????

    Meanwhile, the Justice and Development (AK) Party’s spokesman, Omer Celik, said there is “immoral false news” being published by some foreign media outlets about Erdogan’s health.

    “Our president is on duty. After a little rest, he will continue his programs in the same way,” Celik said on Twitter.

    He also expressed his thanks for the get well wishes sent from all over the world.

    https://www.aa.com.tr/en/turkiye/turkiye-rejects-baseless-claims-on-president-erdogans-health/2882301

    ========================================

    TASS – Turkish presidential administration’s agency refutes reports about Erdogan’s heart attack

    The post said that the president would attend the first ceremony for nuclear fuel loading at the Akkuyu nuclear power plant

    ANKARA, April 26. /TASS/. The agency for combating misinformation, established under Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s Directorate of Communications, denied on Wednesday that he had suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized.

    The agency wrote on its Twitter page that the allegations about President Erdogan’s heart attack and hospitalization were untrue. The post said that the president would attend the first ceremony for nuclear fuel loading at the Akkuyu nuclear power plant, which would take place on Thursday via live video link.

    https://tass.com/world/1610277

  24. Syracuse University Students Object to Talk From Woman Who Escaped Communist Nightmare of North Korea, Call Her a Liar
    By Mike LaChance Apr. 26, 2023 9:30 pm159 Comments
    TruthGettrGab

    Just last week, students at Whitworth University in Washington state objected to a talk from a woman who survived Mao’s communist revolution in China.

    Now, students at Syracuse University in New York have objected to a talk from Yeonmi Park, who escaped from the communist nightmare of life in North Korea. They even called her a liar.

    American college students are objecting to hearing from people who escaped real communism.

    Part of the reason for this has to be that so many American college students have been brainwashed into believing that socialism/communism are some sort of left wing utopia.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/syracuse-university-students-object-to-talk-from-woman-who-escaped-communist-nightmare-of-north-korea-call-her-a-liar/