(Tom Gantert, The Center Square) Christopher Rufo broke a story in 2022 about gender activists at Chicago’s Lurie Children’s Hospitals and public-school administrators collaborating to provide sexually explicit material and promoting “radical gender theory” to students.
Rufo, a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute, wrote the hospital provided a policy guide for school administrators that encouraged the schools to adopt a “gender-affirming approach” to curriculum and allow students to play sports and use restrooms in accordance with their gender identity.
Rufo’s reporting on the gender battles in public schools has drawn widespread attention. He was described by a 2022 New York Timesarticle as “the conservative activist who probably more than any other person made critical race theory a rallying cry on the right – and who has become, to some on the left, an agitator of intolerance.”
In January, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Rufo to the New College of Florida board of trustees. The board of trustees then removed the president amid claims by DeSantis’ administration that the college was putting political ideology above teaching students, the Wall Street Journalreported.
And in February, Rufo released a guide he developed for state legislatures on how they could “curb the excesses of radical gender theory in public schools.”
The guide proposes that legislators pass laws forbidding public school teachers, administrators and employees from encouraging students from withholding information from their parents about gender identity related issues. It also would mandate that parents be informed about anything gender-related involving their child.
For example, the guide states, “No classroom instruction on human sexuality, sex education, gender identity, or -concepts shall occur in kindergarten through grade 5,” unless it is required by the law.
Rufo also has put out a parent’s guide with how to deal with Critical Race Theory.
GLSEN, formerly the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, did not respond to an email seeking comment. Tina Dyakon of the Poynter Institute didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. The National Association of Secondary School Principals didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation also didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
Larry Sand, a former teacher and president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network, was supportive of Rufo’s guide.
“The most important part of ‘A Model for School Practices Relating to Sexuality and Gender’ is that schools must become more transparent … with an emphasis on ‘parent,'” Sand said in an email to The Center Square. “Throughout this impressive document, Rufo stresses that parents must give consent before their children’s teachers get into dicey areas that were unthinkable and even scandalous until most recently.”
(Casey Harper, The Center Square) The new head of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee blasted the Biden administration for giving few answers after thousands of taxpayer files were leaked to an outside group.
House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., sent a letter to Russel George, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration, raising concerns about the leak of “confidential tax information” and the lack of accountability over that leak.
The issue began when the news group ProPublica reported in June 2021 that it had been given private tax returns for thousands of Americans spanning over 15 years
From ProPublica:
Thanks to an analysis of its unprecedented trove of IRS data, ProPublica is revealing the 15 people who reported the most U.S. income on their taxes from 2013 to 2018, along with data for the rest of the top 400.
The analysis also shows how much they paid in federal income taxes – and it demonstrates how the American tax system, which theoretically makes the highest earners pay the highest income tax rates, fails to do so for the people at the very top of the income pyramid. The top 400 earners pay noticeably lower tax rates than the merely rich; and, if you include payroll taxes, a married couple making $200,000 a year could end up paying higher tax rates than a person making $200 million a year.
The leak may have had political motives, since it was used to prove, as ProPublica put it, that “the very richest pay lower rates than the merely rich.”
Who was responsible and who will be held accountable are now the lingering questions. Smith’s letter came the same week that Biden’s nominee to lead the tax-collecting agency took a series of tough questions from the Senate Finance Committee as part of his confirmation process.
In a different hearing, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the Senate Finance Committee in June 2021 that she would look into the leak.
“[Yellen] also indicated that she would keep Congress updated on the matter. Yet, nineteen months after this outrageous leak, Congress, and, more importantly, the American people have no idea how this betrayal of taxpayer confidentiality happened or whether anyone has been held accountable,” Smith wrote in his letter.
Yellen said the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration would handle the matter, but so far few answers have been released, hence Smith’s letter.
“A detailed status of this review is necessary to ensure TIGTA is conducting a comprehensive investigation that will be completed in a timely manner…” the letter said. “This leak of taxpayer information cannot be ignored, and TIGTA as well as the IRS can be confident that the Ways and Means Committee will work tirelessly to ensure accountability. Congress and the American people should not have to wait years to get answers.”
Meanwhile, the IRS is steeped in other issues. As The Center Square previously reported, the agency faces major backlogs, serious scrutiny over how it will handle $80 billion handed down via the Inflation Reduction Act, questions over millions of destroyed documents and more.
(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) The number of cataclysmic events being swept under the rug by the Biden administration and other global authorities appears to have skyrocketed of late.
Arguably, global disasters like the COVID pandemic and the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines (more on that later), may be lumped into this category, but for the sake of simplicity, it’s worth focusing on three recent events that have dominated headlines over the past three weeks:
the incursion in U.S. airspace of at least one apparent Chinese spy balloon
the train derailment resulting in a toxic spill in Palestine, Ohio
Since there has been no shortage of news on all three, it isn’t necessary to recap the unfolding sagas in great detail.
However, it is worth noting that these seemingly disparate events may all have one common thread: With the world now closer than ever to the breakout of a third World War, according to the Doomsday Clock, each of these may potentially have been a man-made disaster.
Evasive messaging by the U.S government has only helped to fuel suspicions that more may be going on than meets the eye. Is it possible that all may be part of an interconnected network of shadow-attacks being waged both by and against us?
WEATHER WARFARE
High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program / PHOTO: Jessica Matthews, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Theories surrounding some type of covert weather machine may have begun in earnest 26 years ago, when then-Defense Secretary William Cohen acknowledged during a University of Georgia terrorism conference with then-Sens. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., that the Pentagon had the technology on its radar.
At the time, Cohen ominously previewed several sorts of bioweapons that continue to be at the forefront of current fears, even after a quarter-century. Among them were viruses genetically engineered to target specific races and insects engineered to create a famine.
“Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves,” Cohen acknowledged.
As early as 1993, the U.S. may have initiated its own program, known as the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program. In 2015, the facility, once operated by the U.S. Air Force in coordination with defense contractor BAE Systems, was transferred to the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
According to HAARP’s own website, the focus of its research has been on studying the properties of the ionosphere, the atmospheric layer “roughly 50 to 400 miles above Earth’s surface, right at the edge of space.”
That puts its purview within the same range as the International Space Station (211.3 miles) and Hubble telescope (369.7 miles), two of the most prominent man-made satellites orbiting the Earth.
TURKEY/SYRIA EARTHQUAKE
Cloud formations over Turkey preceding a series of devastating earthquakes that killed nearly 50,000 / PHOTO: Quinn Darkie via YouTube
In the aftermath of the devastating Kahramanmaras earthquakes—a series of magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 quakes that occurred in southwest Turkey on Feb. 6—several people noted the bizarre weather patterns that appeared concurrently in the sky.
With the lightning during the earthquake makes me think it could have been done with HAARP earthquake generation. Nicole Tesla created an earthquake with his technology once. The US threatened Turkey there could be terrorist attacks in Turkey for not participating in Ukraine https://t.co/sjtnDxByqQ
Others pointed out that the mayor of Turkey’s second-largest city, Ankara, had suggested the possibility of a man-made conspiracy in 2017, when a slightly smaller quake rocked western Turkey and the Greek islands.
2️⃣ŞİMDİ BU DEPREMİN SUNÎ BİR DEPREM OLABİLECEĞİNİ DÜŞÜNÜYORUM. BEN MUTLAKA BÖYLEDİR DEMİYORUM… ANCAK CİDDİ BİR İHTİMALDİR,
— İbrahim Melih Gökçek (@06melihgokcek) June 12, 2017
“Now I think that this might be a man-made earthquake. I do not say it is certain, but it is a very serious possibility,” Mayor Ibrahim Melih Gökçek tweeted (per Twitter’s translation).
“I say that it should be investigated,” he continued. “Was there any seismic research ship sailing near the epicenter? If so, which country does it belong to?”
The claims circulated widely enough around social media that sites like USA Today and Reuters issued robust “fact checks” that may have only strengthened the skepticism.
“There is ‘NO science’ linking clouds to earthquakes,” wrote Reuters, citing two researchers from the University of Washington—the same institution that nototiously led the way in early panic-mongering over the COVID pandemic.
USA Today‘s “fact check” specifically attempted to debunk any HAARP involvement in the earthquake, using researchers from two far-left schools, Boston University and the University of California, Los Angeles.
It also quoted HAARP program manager Jessica Matthews, who said that the researchers there “cannot create or amplify natural disasters.”
But Headline USA reached out to Matthews via email to follow up on the feasibility that other countries (or programs within the U.S. government) might have developed these capabilities. We will update with any response.
CLOUDED JUDGMENTS
Geoengineering / IMAGE: The Economist via YouTube
Despite the robust denials among left-wing academics, media and government bureaucrats, some prominent authorities have given credence to the idea that such technology is within reach—if it does not already exist.
One of these is weapons manufacturer Northrup Gruman.
“Although it sounds like science fiction, weather machines are in action around the world already, influencing factors such as rainfall, storm severity and snowpack,” the company wrote on a website dedicated to the topic.
It noted that most of the current peaceful efforts to control the weather use cloud-seeding.
“For example, China is investing heavily in large projects to ensure sufficient agricultural water supply,” said the website. “News Corp Australia describes vast ground-based cauldrons or burners that release rain-making silver iodide particles into updrafts.”
The United Arab Emirates—a monument to man-made geoengineering if ever there were one—is exploring the technology to turn its arid, desert landscape into a lush oasis that will draw tourists.
The Canadian government, meanwhile, is trying to reduce the size of its hail, Northrup Gruman said.
If the company, known for its B-2 bombers, still seems too friendly a source to convince people that these developments could fall into the wrong hands, though, we must turn to the world’s quintessential Bond villain himself, George Soros.
It just so happened that, during a speech Thursday at the Munich Security Conference, Soros announced that he was devising his own process to use clouds to block the sun’s rays from melting polar ice caps.
“Our civilization is in danger of collapsing because of the inexorable advance of climate change,” Soros said.
“The melting of the Greenland ice sheet would increase the level of the oceans by seven meters. That poses a threat to the survival of our civilization,” he added. “I wasn’t willing to accept that fate, so I tried to find out whether anything could be done to avoid it.”
CHINESE SPY BALLOONS
Chinese spy balloon / IMAGE: AP; graphic by Ben Sellers, Headline USA
The distance from innocent cloud-seeding to destructive earthquakes may not have that big of a gulf.
As several security experts remarked after a massive spy balloon traversed the entire eastern half of the U.S., the seemingly harmless aircraft might have easily carried dangerous weapons that relied on electromagnetic pulses—the very thing ex-Pentagon chief Cohen warned about during the Clinton administration.
“There is speculation that this device was spying on critical targets or collecting information relating to our national defense, but it could just as easily have contained a nuclear device that could have been used to deliver a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which would have destroyed our electric infrastructure, rendering most electronic devices unusable,” wrote Texas state Sen. Bob Hall in an op-ed for the Examiner.
Citing 2015 congressional testimony, Hall said a balloon had already been used in past tests to lift a nuclear weapon to 85,000 feet, and that balloon tests were commonplace in the 1950s and ’60s.
“Even if people did not panic, they would soon begin to die,” he wrote.
“First, those who are dependent on electricity for oxygen, kidney dialysis, or mechanical means to stay alive would die in a matter of hours or days,” he said. “Those dependent on prescription medications would be next as the supply chain crumbled. Soon after, lack of food and shelter would begin to take its toll as people adjusted to a world for which they were unprepared.”
Of course, it may be no coincidence that this Chinese trial balloon appeared to fly over highly sensitive sites connected with national security—and that one of those was Fairbanks, Alaska, where the HAARP facility does its work.
DIPLOMACY GOES OFF THE RAILS
Portions of a Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed Friday night in East Palestine, Ohio. / PHOTO: AP
While the means for some sort of EMP-generated earthquake is not so far-fetched, the motive as to why someone would target Turkey or Syria remains elusive.
Yet, horrific though it may be to consider, the possibility of U.S. retaliation against a region strategically important to Russia cannot be taken off the table.
The disaster followed recent overtures by Russia to attempt to broker peace between rival Turkish and Syrian factions in the latter’s ongoing civil war—exacerbated by the power vaccum left following the U.S. withdrawal in the region.
It also comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to make Turkey a hub for natural-gas exports that would allow the pariah ex-superpower to reduce or end its reliance on the European market.
And its proximity to the Chevron-owned Leviathan gas field in the Mediterranean makes southern Turkey an enticing pass-through point to reach Russia’s TurkStream pipeline—a southern counterpart to the Nord Stream that spans the diameter of the Black Sea. (Western nations are also angling for a direct route to pass travers Israel and Turkey into their own areas of influence.)
The earthquakes in Turkey also came only three days after a suspicious train derailment in Palestine, Ohio, which wreaked considerable ecological havoc on the Ohio River watershed.
Some, including Clint Siegner of Money Metals News Service, already have sounded the alarm that the supposed train accident might, in fact, have been more of a quid-pro-quo sabotage situation.
Siegner cited a tweet from Donald Trump Jr. that hinted at some sort of a link between the derailment and the Biden administration’s apparent attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines, which were recently confirmed as an act of U.S. eco-terrorism by investigative journalist Seymour Hersch.
We’ve had train wrecks day in and day out for the past week, coincidentally, right after a report about our possibly taking out Russia’s Nordstrom 2 pipeline and yet not a single reporter has asked if perhaps it’s a retaliation against our critical infrastructure. I hope that’s…
“We’ve had train wrecks day in and day out for the past week, coincidentally, right after a report about our possibly taking out Russia’s Nordstrom [sic] 2 pipeline and yet not a single reporter has asked if perhaps it’s a retaliation against our critical infrastructure,” Trump tweeted.
WHO IS JOHN GALT?
Fittingly, Siegner compared it to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, in which leftist hubris and incompetence drive the world to chaos as power-hungry government scientists shift their focus from improving society to creating a Doomsday device known as Project X.
Few might have imagined the specificity with which so many of Rand’s predictions have borne out, exactly as written in the 1957 tome.
Unfortunately, with no John Galt to save the day, these mysterious acts of terrorism on the nation’s infrastructure and ecosystem are likely to continue.
He warned in a recent interview that the series of smaller attacks on food-production plants and other facilities might also be considered acts of terrorism.
“[T]hese are all being carried out to exterminate the human race and collapse human civilization,” wrote Adams. “Yet 99% of those who are being exterminated continue to remain oblivious to what’s happening, and many of them actively support the exterminators!”
Lane Cogdill, a woman who thinks she is non-binary and teaches at Silver Spring International Middle School in the Montgomery County Public Schools District, endorsed the woke doctrine on systemic racism, according to Breitbart News.
“As a history teacher who cares about racial justice, I keep hearing people saying, like, ‘I understand protesting, but I don’t understand rioting and looting,'” she said. “Let me just remind y’all, this country was literally built by black people.”
The non-binary leftist propagandist claims, erroneously, that “Black people’s bodies were literally the currency that our white founding fathers used to fund for revolution.”
Cogdill also attacked her own race.
“As far as I’m concerned, as a white person, and as a history teacher, if your ancestors built this country, you have the right to burn the motherf—-r to the ground,” she whined.
“And White people I’m [going to] need you to do better because your opinion on this is at best, irrelevant, and at worst, literally propagating white supremacy.”
Cogdill is attempting to indoctrinate the country, but she is also indoctrinating and grooming her students.
She admitted to secretly collecting information on students’ gender changes, and hiding it from parents, other teachers and the school administration, according to Fox News.
“I always ask a trans or questioning-student as soon as I find out what is the name you prefer? What pronouns do you prefer? Who else knows? And how would you like me to refer to you when I speak to your family, to the administrators, to other teachers, in front of other students?” she explained. “Some students ask me not to disclose their identity, and that’s a promise I always honor.
This secretive collecting of the ‘gender identity’ of her students is in accordance with school policy, according to Cogdill.
“Not a soul at my district or my school had brought it up because as it turns out… everything I said aligns exactly with explicit district policy,” she said.
Cogdill also feels the need to communicate about her own sexual orientation and identity to her students.
In one video on what appears to be her TikTok account, she shows posters describing her own fabricated gender inside of her classroom.
“The pronouns th[at] mostly affirm me are ze/zir or they/them or he/him. My title is Mx. Cogdill – Mx. – rather than Ms. or Mr. And I ask my students … to use Mx. instead of ma’am or sir,” she explained.
“I changed my name to Lane because it’s gender-neutral. I also go by Theo, which is affirming because my masculinity is not always recognized by other people.”
(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe announced Monday that the board of directors of the organization he founded had fired him, after weeks of public obfuscation, denials and assurances from board members that they weren’t plotting to oust the star investigative reporter.
O’Keefe made the announcement in a video that provided more details on why he was given the boot in the wake of two bombshell undercover video reports on Pfizer that he produced. The board of directors used the pretext of a fundraising disagreement as cover for the firing, according to O’Keefe.
🚨BREAKING VIDEO🚨 #JamesOkeefe addresses #ProjectVeritas staff as he exits from the organization he founded following a high-profile board dispute.
“Our mission continues on. I’m not done. The mission will perhaps take on a new name…” pic.twitter.com/H0mO4fMiea
“A few days after the Pfizer story, I was informed by an officer of Project Veritas that he would resign unless I step down as CEO,” O’Keefe’s said. “We’ve been having a conflict of vision over fundraising, there were tactical disagreements about the boldness of approach soliciting donations.”
It came down to priorities, O’Keefe said.
“We measure our success in terms of what we produce, not just in terms of our wallets,” O’Keefe explained.
O’Keefe fired the employee after the disagreement and subsequently was informed that the board was planning to restructure the company. He learned the news via an email he received while sitting on a plane waiting to depart, and was told the meeting was scheduled for the moment he was due to land.
“It became clear to me in that moment, I would be removed from my position at Project Veritas,” O’Keefe said.
He was spot on with the prediction, and the public backlash over the board’s decision has been fierce.
(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Anaheim Union High School District is implementing a Black Lives Matter Task Force to police middle and high school students about how their “implicit biases affect others” and the “daily effects of white privilege.”
The task force assisted in building the school’s curriculum in order to address “issues related to racial justice.”
“In an effort to bring the concepts of racial justice to the forefront of your education during Black History Month, the BLM Task Force created a lesson for all 7th graders to help you explore and think critically regarding concepts of race, racism and racial equity,” the curriculum said.
According to the Daily Caller, students and staff created the BLM Task Force, who put together the lessons specifically for grades 7-12, arguing that “it is a crucial part of Civic Engagement.”
The new lessons are part of a 2020 resolution by the high school’s board mandating teachers to add the assignments to their classes as either lessons or homework. The curriculum requires science teachers to give a lesson on “implicit bias,” teaching kids to not “judge a book by its cover.”
Lessons for older students focus on empathy, prejudice, the “school to prison pipeline,” the “daily effects of white privilege” and so-called systemic racism.
A lesson known as “stay woke” is geared towards 11th graders. The class instructs kids on the origins of alleged implicit biases and their effect on others. Students also reflect on assimilation and cultural identity.
Throughout the entire curriculum there are themes of black victimhood and critical race theory, and discouragement of dissenting ideas.
“This lesson is designed to help you explore and think critically about concepts such as race, racism and racial equity, which can be a challenging topic,” the curriculum stated. “Inappropriate comments or remarks will be identified for correction.”
Implemented for Black History Month, the curriculum encourages students to sign up for other events promoted by the Task Force, usually offering community service hours or earning extra credit.
Many found this approach to be detestable, but Wenyuan Wu, executive director of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, objected to it on the grounds that students are struggling with their actual academic performance in Anaheim.
“The 2022 California Smarter Balanced test results show that only 23% of students in the Anaheim Union High School District could do math at the grade level and the English proficiency level was 43%,” Wu said. “Instead of ramping up its efforts to help struggling students from underprivileged backgrounds academically, AUHSD has doubled down on its indoctrination attempts to infuse Race Marxism in math, science, history, social studies and more.”
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Adam Fox hasn’t been heard from since last Wednesday, when he was unexpectedly transferred to one of the world’s most notorious prisons in Florence, Colorado.
Fox, the alleged “ringleader” of a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor, had been incarcerated in a county jail, where he was communicating with an independent journalist for a documentary about his case.
Fox and the other man convicted in the kidnapping conspiracy, Barry Croft, also recently recorded video statements intended for the House Weaponization Subcommittee, which was formed to investigate FBI malfeasance. Fox and Croft are calling for the congressional body to subpoena sealed discovery material from the case, promising it will reveal that the FBI’s 12-plus undercover informants and agents incited the plot and entrapped them.
Headline USA published Croft’s statement last Monday. The next day, the two men were sent to other facilities, and haven’t been heard from since Wednesday.
Headline USA understands that Fox has been sent to ADX Florence supermax prison, while Croft is at an Oklahoma facility waiting to be transferred again—possibly to the high-security prison in Terre Haute, though his family hasn’t confirmed that yet and the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment.
Fox and Croft’s family think that the transfers are retaliation for them talking to the documentarian, and for issuing statements for the Weaponization Subcommittee.
“[The government] wants to shut them up because they don’t want the truth to be exposed,” said Fox’s mom, Christina Fox—she has a different last name now, but Headline USA is using her previous name at her request for privacy reasons.
After government secured a conviction against Fox in his second trial conviction last year, Christina said she expected her son to eventually be transferred to another facility.
But with Fox being a non-violent offender with no prior convictions, the mother thought he’d be placed in a medium-security prison, where he could undergo substance-abuse and mental-health therapy. Fox was the recently divorced homeless man with diagnosed depression living in the basement of a vacuum repair shop in 2020—which critics say made him a prime target for FBI informants to manipulate.
So it came to Christina’s shock and horror when Fox called last Wednesday to say he was being transferred to Florence supermax, the home of inmates such as drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols and 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef.
Christina said her son and Croft were transferred Tuesday morning. Both were transported in individual cages inside of separate vans, she said.
“He said he was put in a cage when they transported him,” said Fox’s mother. “I don’t know if it was just for the trip to Detroit, or also on the flight.”
Croft’s mother, Rosemarie Battaglia-McGuire, told Headline USA similar information. Battaglia-McGuire has been receiving status updates on her son via his girlfriend.
“They’re treating them like genocidal maniacs, transporting them in cages,” she told Headline USA.
Christina further said that when she spoke with Fox on Wednesday from Oklahoma, he hadn’t received his prescribed Zoloft and Buspar medication for depression and anxiety.
“Those are medications that you just can’t stop abruptly,” she said. “My concern is that his anxiety is going to get the best of him.”
Christina said she’s terrified for her son’s safety. Fox apparently told his sister multiple times during his criminal proceedings that he was worried about being killed if convicted.
“It’s a nightmare because I don’t know what’s happening to him. I don’t know if he’s safe. This prison has a lot of violence in it. There are inmates stabbed there every week; constant assaults,” she said.
“And I don’t understand why our government took someone who isn’t violent—and didn’t even do anything—and they take someone with his history and put him in with the worst of the worst.”
Indeed, the supermax at Florence is often where the Bureau of Prisons houses inmates with histories of violent behavior in other prison facilities. Human rights watchdogs have repeatedly criticized Florence for its abuses, including force-feeding inmates and keeping them in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day—a practice mental health experts say amounts to psychological torture.
Florence is also known as a facility that prevents inmates from speaking to the media. Some inmates are put under what are known as “special administrative measures”—only being allowed one phone call a month, having all letters read and redacted by the FBI, having no access to media and having their lawyers prohibited from sharing what they are told by clients.
The inability of potential whistleblowers to contact the public was detailed in a book by Kathy Wilburn-Sanders, who lost her two grandchildren in the Oklahoma City bombing. Wilburn-Sanders, one of the “Oklahoma City dissidents” who believes that the U.S. government didn’t catch everyone involved in the bombing, was attempting to interview Nichols about his other co-conspirators.
However, then-supermax warden Robert Hood denied Wilburn-Sanders her interview because it “could pose a risk to the internal security of this institution,” he said in a letter.
Wilburn-Sanders suspected at the time that “somewhere, some agency with power wanted to keep Nichols quiet.”
“What were they hiding?” Wilburn-Sanders wondered. “Could identifying additional [accomplices] reveal the identity of government agents who were involved in the failed sting operation?”
Wilburn-Sanders again tried to interview Nichols over the phone in 2006—this time live on CBS’s 60 Minutes—but was unsuccessful. She later learned from Nichols’s mother that he was blocked from calling her.
“He said that officials notified him, on the day he was to make the call, that my name had been removed from his calling list—permanently … Nichols had found out about the permanent ban as he prepared to dial my phone to start the 60 Minutes interview,” she wrote. “My conversations with Nichols were officially and forever terminated in 2006.”
The Terre Haute prison Croft could be headed to has similar restrictions on communications. Terre Haute is home to one of the country’s two “communications management units,” which are prison facilities designed to prevent terrorists and organized crime figures from communicating with their networks outside. Headline USA published a story about CMUs last week, detailing the saga of a man who says he’s being held there in retaliation for refusing to be a government informant in a gun-walking operation similar to Operation Fast and Furious.
Fox and Croft both have appeals pending in their cases. Meanwhile, their families are still urging the Weaponization Committee to obtain the sealed case records—before it’s too late.
“I’d encourage people to write the committee, write Chairman Jim Jordan—have them subpoena the discovery material in that case. Because if they want to learn the truth about the FBI, it’s right there in black and white,” said Fox’s mother.
“Once that discovery is made public, this whole thing gets blown wide open.”
(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) A recent study conducted in Britain found that those with higher cognitive abilities tend to be less concerned with political correctness.
Researcher Louise Drieghe and colleagues surveyed 300 American adults to measure cognitive abilities, and then asked them to answer questions about political correctness and freedom of speech, Summit News reported.
After taking a standardized test to measure intellectual capacity, participants were asked to respond to statements such as: “Every individual has the unalienable right to express their thoughts freely,” and “Censorship of speech leaves little room for debate and diverse points of view.”
They also responded to prompts like, “I get mad when I hear someone use politically incorrect language,” and “I try to educate people around me about the political meaning of their words.”
Upon analyzing the results of the survey, researches found “a moderate positive correlation between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech, and a moderate negative correlation between cognitive ability and concern for political correctness.”
In other words, the smarter one is more likely to accept free speech and reject political correctness, which is a phenomenon limited primarily to the Left.
The findings of the study affirm what many on the Right have suggested for some time now, that the Left relies on “midwits“–the sort of people who thrive in bureaucratic settings–to enforce their dogmas of political correctness.
According to columnist Noah Carl, the findings reveal the problematic direction that the West is going as it constructs and reinforces institutions that systematically reward the mediocre who think only within the confines of the established woke machinery.
“Britain’s elite cultural institutions – the BBC, universities, the national trust – are dominated by the woke. Since smart people tend to get ahead in life, you might assume the woke would have higher intelligence. Not so, according to a new study.”
(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) During an interview on CBS News’sFace the Nation on Sunday, host Margaret Brennan confronted supposed anti-capitalist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., about selling pricey tickets for his book tour via Ticketmaster.
Tickets for the front section of the venue cost $95 each. The book itself costs $28.
Brennan suggested Sanders was reaping the benefits of capitalism via ticket and book sales, also noting that Ticketmaster had recently been the subject of a congressional inquiry into its “anti-competitive behavior” for a dynamic pricing model that had driven high-demand tickets into the thousands of dollars.
“Aren’t you benefiting, yourself, from this system that you’re trying to dismantle?” Brennan asked.
Sanders replied that the publishing house makes the decisions about pricing.
“First of all, those decisions are made totally by the publisher and the bookseller,” he said. “I think there’s one case where in one place here in Washington, Politics and Prose, an independent bookseller, is charging some tickets—most of them, I think, are $40, $50—and you get a book as well.”
Sanders maintained that he didn’t “make a nickel” out of the entire process, having already received his cut on the front end.
Brennan then pressed Sanders about whether he was OK.
“No, not particularly, but I have nothing to do with that,” he claimed.
“If you wrote a book, it would probably be the same process,” Sanders told Brennan, explaining that he must “operate in the system” in order to sell his book.
Several Republican politicians called out Sanders for using Ticketmaster to shill for his event.
“Anyone else see the ‘irony’ in Bernie Sanders selling tickets for his ‘It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism’ book tour on Ticketmaster?” Rep. Bill Huizinga, R-Mich., wrote on Twitter.
Anyone else see the “irony” in Bernie Sanders selling tickets for his “It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism” book tour on Ticketmaster?
The summary of Sanders’s book characterizes it as “a progressive takedown of the uber-capitalist status quo that has enriched millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the working class, and a blueprint for what transformational change would actually look like.”
Despite the insistence by Sanders that socialism is the way forward, the American public is shifting more and more toward capitalism.
A poll from Rasmussen Reports found that only 17% of 900 likely voters preferred socialism to capitalism, with 67% in favor of capitalism.
A large majority of potential voters also said they would never vote for an avowed socialist.
(Headline USA) Amid ongoing criticism over his comments about Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, Don Lemon was absent Monday from “CNN This Morning.” Co-host Poppy Harlow told viewers that “Don has the day off.”
Lemon has not been on the air since Thursday, when during a discussion on “CNN This Morning” about the ages of politicians he said that the 51-year-old Haley was not “in her prime.” A woman, he said, was considered in her prime “in her 20s, 30s and maybe her 40s.”
Challenged by Harlow, Lemon added: “Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just saying what the facts are.”
Lemon has since apologized, but he has been widely condemned, including by CNN CEO Chris Licht. According to the New York Times, Licht chastised Lemon during an editorial call Friday, saying his remarks were “upsetting, unacceptable and unfair” and a “huge distraction.”
A CNN spokesperson had no immediate comment on whether Lemon would be back Tuesday.
