(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) A recent television and online survey of Americans found that 57% of potential voters want the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be investigated as potential side effects of the many COVID vaccines and boosters pile up.
According to the Post Millennial, 70% of Republicans and 49% percent of Democrats believe that the situation warranted further investigation.
49% of people surveyed believed the CDC communicated with complete information; 41% asserted that the public did not get a comprehensive view of the side effects. The final 10% said they were unsure.
Participants answered questions about the likelihood of the CDC providing complete information about the side effects of the jab, and whether or not Congress should investigate the institution for how it provided vaccinations.
Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, called for a total “reset” of the institution in order to more adequately avoid “confusion” surrounding any potential future pandemic situations.
The CDC recently announced that they will be performing an investigation into the most recent Bivalent Pfizer-BioNTech booster, as some have raised concerns that people over 65 years old who take the shot may be at heightened risk for strokes.
The updated booster shot was available to the public for several months before the Biden administration came forward with the news, despite constant claims of “transparency” and “honesty.”
The CDC also noted that cases of myocarditis—a heart disease characterized by inflammation of the heart muscle—rose dramatically, particularly in men ages 16 to 24.
Institutions are attempting make this disease seem like a usual occurrence for children and young adults. New York Presbytirian Hospital released a 30-second ad where a young girl discusses her diagnoses and doctors provided her with medication to decrease her heart’s swelling.
Few pediatric myocarditis cases—about 100 to 200 per year—appeared in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) before 2020. In 2021 the number climbed toward 30,000, and in 2022 it reached about 23,000.
(Headline USA) Greece prevented around 260,000 migrants from entering illegally in 2022 and arrested 1,500 traffickers, an official said Saturday.
Citizens’ Protection Minister Takis Theodorikakos was speaking to ambassadors from other European Union countries plus Switzerland and the United Kingdom as he guided them to a still expanding border wall in the country’s northeast.
Theodorikakos emphasized to the 28 envoys that Greece’s border is also the EU’s external border.
“The task (of protecting the border) needs the support … of European public opinion, the European Union itself and its constituent members individually,” Theodorikakos said. “It is our steadfast position that member states of first reception cannot be (the migrants’) only European destinations.
“There must be solidarity among member-states and a fair sharing of duties…close coordination is a must,” he said.
The Greek minister’s sentiments were echoed by Cypriot Ambassador Kyriakos Kenevezos, who spoke of the “need for understanding” from countries that don’t have external EU borders.
U.K. Ambassador Matthew Lodge said that “our priority is to protect the human life and dignity endangered by the criminal trafficking networks … even though we are no longer an EU member, we are closely cooperating,”
Greece’s five-meter (16-foot) steel wall facing neighboring Turkey to the east across the Evros River — called Meric in Turkey — currently extends more than 27 kilometers (17 miles) and, according to Greek authorities, helps cover another 10 kilometers (six miles). Greece is currently expanding the wall, adding a 35-kilometer (22-mile) stretch with the ultimate goal of extending it to cover most of the 192-kilometer (120-mile) border.
Greece has repeatedly accused Turkey of weaponizing the plight of migrants by encouraging them to cross the border to discomfit Greece and the rest of the EU — effectively cooperating with traffickers. Turkey accuses Greece of violent pushbacks that endanger the lives of migrants.
The EU’s border protection agency, Frontex, will add another 400 border guards in Greece — 250 of them in February — to the existing 1,800-member force, Theodorikakos said.
(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Leftist University of Bergen in Norway decided to waste their taxpayers’ money by launching a study on whether white paint is racist or not and asking how the aesthetic of white paint helped the country to contribute to white supremacy and helped “[make] the world whiter.”
“Whiteness is not only a cultural and societal condition tied to skin color, privileges and systematic exclusion but materializes everywhere around us,” according to a rundown of the study.
“Although Norway is not a conventional colonial power, this project will show how the country has played a globally leading role in establishing white as a superior color. Until now, however, this story has been lesser known to scholars and the public.”
NorWhite — the study on whiteness and paint — observes a paint pigment titanium white that was developed in Norway through “historical, aesthetic and critical” lenses to determine how the development of the color contributed to “social transformation” and how the innovation led to “planetary consequences,” according to the New York Post.
“Currently the Norwegian innovation TiO2 [titanium dioxide] is present in literally every part of modern life…” the description stated.
“The primary research question is: What are the cultural and aesthetic changes instigated by titanium white and TiO2 surfaces — and how can both the material in itself and these changes be conceptualized and made visible?”
The University of Bergen associate professor and historian Ingrid Halland, who works on the study, received a 12 million Norwegian Krone (about $1.2 million US) grant from the Research Council of Norway, a government agency.
“The overall objective of NorWhite is to critically and visually investigate the cultural and aesthetic preconditions of a complex and unexplored part of Norwegian technology and innovation history that has — as this project claims — made the world whiter,” the description said.
The lawsuit filed in St. Louis is the latest of many anti-life measures designed to challenge restrictions on abortion enacted by conservative states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. That landmark ruling left abortion rights up to each state to decide.
Since then, religious anti-life activists have increasingly used religious freedom lawsuits in seeking to protect the legality of infanticide. The religious freedom complaints are among nearly three dozen post-Roe lawsuits that have been filed against 19 states’ abortion bans, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Missouri lawsuit brought on behalf of 13 Christian, Jewish and Unitarian Universalist leaders seeks a permanent injunction barring the state from enforcing its abortion law and a declaration that provisions of its law violate the Missouri Constitution.
Missouri Senate President Pro Tem Caleb Rowden, a Republican, called the lawsuit “foolish.”
“We were acting on the belief that life is precious and should be treated as such. I don’t think that’s a religious belief,” Rowden said.
Within minutes of last year’s Supreme Court decision, then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Gov. Mike Parson, both Republicans, filed paperwork to immediately enact a 2019 law prohibiting abortions “except in cases of medical emergency.” That law contained a provision making it effective only if Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The law makes it a felony punishable by 5 to 15 years in prison to perform or induce an abortion. Medical professionals who do so also could lose their licenses.
Missouri already had some of the nation’s more restrictive abortion laws and had seen a significant decline in the number of abortions performed, a phenomenon also occurring in Texas.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the faith leaders by Americans United for Separation of Church & State and the National Women’s Law Center, said sponsors and supporters of the Missouri measure “repeatedly emphasized their religious intent in enacting the legislation.”
In Indiana, lawyers for five anonymous women — who are Jewish, Muslim and spiritual — and advocacy group Hoosier Jews for Choice have argued that state’s ban infringes on their beliefs. Their lawsuit specifically highlights the Jewish teaching that a fetus becomes a living person at birth and that Jewish law prioritizes the mother’s life and health.
In Kentucky, three Jewish women sued, claiming the state’s ban violates their religious rights under the state’s constitution and religious freedom law. They allege that Kentucky’s Republican-dominated legislature “imposed sectarian theology” by prohibiting nearly all abortions. The ban remains in effect while the Kentucky Supreme Court considers a separate case challenging the law.
Missouri Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, said in a statement that he will “defend the right to life with every tool at my disposal.”
“I want Missouri to be the safest state in the nation for children and that includes unborn children,” Bailey said.
(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Steven Crowder, a conservative personality, blasted big conservative news corporations over their employment contracts earlier this week, saying these companies “punish conservative content creators on behalf of Big tech.”
Crowder, who has been demonetized on YouTube for a very long time, posted a 28-minute video on Tuesday to his channel talking about the terms of an employment offer from a conservative media company that he did not name, according toBreitbart.
“I went into free agency, I looked over the offers and I saw the claws come out,” he said. “And I don’t just mean unreasonable demands for control, but what I would argue are immoral terms that actually punish conservative content creators on behalf of Big Tech.”
Crowder’s video went viral and people started to think about what company put forward the offer. Many people thought that it was the Daily Wire.
On Wednesday, Jeremy Boreing — the Daily Wire CEO — said that, indeed, the company offered Crowder a job. In a 52-minute video, Boreing defended the “opening offer,” which was revealed to be a four-year deal worth fifty million dollars, with an option to renew the deal for another two years at twenty-five million dollars.
Aside from the regular content that Crowder was supposed to produce, there was a part of the contract that was called “Boycotts, Content Strikes, or Bans from Major Social Media Platforms” that seemed to be a concern for Crowder, since if people and Big Tech would boycott his content, he would lose money.
Crowder suggested that it is an opportunity for leftists to control a content creator.
“Hey liberals, boycotts work. They work on our guys. We’ll punish them for you.”
However, Boreing defended the company by saying that ”this isn’t about punishing the content creator.”
“This is about if the Daily Wire is going to leverage… probably $100 million by the time you have marketing, infrastructure costs, by the time you pay for all the legal compliance, all technology that it takes to support Steven’s show, and Steven’s show even at the price that we offered for it,” Boreing said.
“If the show makes dramatically less money, well, then Steven has to make less money because we’re making less money.”
Brock, who began as a rare unicorn—a gay Republican critic of Bill and Hillary Clinton—became the consummate opportunist: a mercenary who flipped sides to the highest bidder and morphed into one of the most strident and unscrupulous of all left-wing operatives.
David Brock/IMAGE: YouTube
While he has written at length about the betrayal, his precise reasons remain clear as mud. Nonetheless, he went from helping to expose Bill Clinton’s past rape allegations (courtesy of victims like Paula Jones), to recanting his entire body of research and enjoying the perks of being a favored Clinton pet project.
Hillary Clinton personally “‘encourage[ed]’ and ‘advised Brock on creating’ Media Matters as ‘a liberal equivalent of the Media Research Center, a conservative group that has aggravated Democrats for decades,’” wrote reporter Glenn Thrush, who himself would later be exposed for asking Clinton campaign officials to vet his Politico articles during the 2016 election.
Thrush noted that other members of “Clinton’s extended family of contributors, consultants and friends … played a pivotal role in helping Media Matters grow”—among them, billionaire George Soros and ex-Chief-of-Staff John Podesta, who together provided some $2 million in seed money.
CIRCLE THE WAGONS
William (left) and Zachary Zulock (right) mugshots: Walton County Sheriff’s Office
Two decades later, although Media Matters often flies under the radar, it likely plays a substantial role in supplying the talking points that ricochet around the left-wing media echo chamber, including the vast majority of those considered to be “mainstream” news outlets.
Thus, when Media Matters went on the offensive recently—in response to a bombshell investigation about an Atlanta-based gay couple accused of raping their adopted children and pimping them out to others as part of a pedophile ring—one could safely assume that they were either delivering marching orders for other media to circle the wagon around alleged groomers William and Zack Zulock, or else offering justification to ignore the story altogether.
The left showed more outrage this week because an NHL player didn’t wear a rainbow before a game than they did for two men pimping out their kids.
Media Matters’s hot-take on the four-part series from Townhall detailing the gut-wrenching experiences of the two pre-teen boys: “In the year 2023, prominent right-wing commentators still have a problem with same-sex parents.”
“It’s an appalling story, but also appallingly familiar—sexual abuse by household members is unnervingly common, particularly for children who pass through the foster care system,” the so-called watchdog wrote in defense of the Zulocks, while instead attacking Fox News host Laura Ingraham and others for daring to cover it.
Despite the Left’s summary dismissal of the crime, all signs point to the fact that the Zulocks leveraged their position as outspoken LGBT activists to, effectively, hide in plain sight—knowing full well that they could use the victim card to deflect blame in the same way that accused serial predator Kevin Spacey attempted to use #MeToo scandal as his opportunity to come out of the closet.
DRAG RACISTS?
To say the least, the lines between LGBT culture and less acceptable forms of sexual deviancy are often deliberately blurred. Even within the Biden administration, ex-Energy Department staffer Sam Brinton, who was celebrated as a transgender pioneer, had a much darker side.
Still more troubling, though, than the Left’s embrace of depraved individuals is its long history of trying to use sexuality to attack Republicans.
‘Kitara’ / IMAGE: @stillgray via Twitter
It is not a stretch to suppose that much of the Democratic ire directed toward Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., is less related to his shaky relationship with the truth—a quality that they rarely ever condemn in their own elected officials—than to the fact that Santos is openly gay, representing a serious threat to the near-monolithic control that Democrats have enjoyed within the LGBT community.
Even so, the recent allegations that Santos may have been a drag-queen in Brazil put leftists in uneasy territory as they sought to strike a balance of attacking him without undermining their latest transgender messaging.
Indeed, like it is for Brinton and the Zulocks, Santos’s sexuality may prove to be one of his best assets in defending from attacks—provided Democrats don’t succeed in floating the rumor that he is actually lying about being gay.
OUTED AND EXTORTED
Conservatives who are less candid about their bedroom behavior have no such luck.
Red-pilled billionaire Peter Thiel, a major financial backer of former President Donald Trump, was notoriously outed by the left-wing website Gawker in 2007.
Thiel ultimately got his revenge, bankrolling a lawsuit by Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea after the gossip site published an illicitly obtained sex tape of the wrestling legend.
Gawker was forced, as a result, to declare bankruptcy and never quite recovered, although it has since returned to the web targeting—who else?—George Santos.
Meanwhile, another far-left site, the Daily Beast, set its sights on a different target, CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp.
Matt Schlapp delivers the welcome speech at CPAC’s 2022 conference in Budapest, Hungary. / PHOTO: MTI via AP
Essentially, the staffer, who remains anonymous as of Jan. 21, accused Schlapp of “‘aggressively fondling’ his ‘genital area in a sustained fashion’ while the staffer drove Schlapp home from an evening of drinks at Atlanta bars,” wrote the Daily Beast.
However credible the account may seem, the strong implication is that Schlapp’s case resembles that of John Weaver, the co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, who resigned in disgrace after he was accused of making inappropriate advances on male staffers who were mostly college-age and younger.
But a key detail buried in the reporting about Schlapp’s alleged groping incident is that the accuser is, in fact, in his late 30s.
Clearly more context is needed to understand what really happened between Schlapp and the Walker staffer on the night of Oct. 19. Was it a case of misinterpreted or mixed signals? A drunken lapse of judgment? Or the first domino in a cascading series of accusations that could lead to Schlapp’s professional downfall.
The staffer’s own account, if true, would suggest that Schlapp felt a sincere rapport and later tried to resove the issue after the individual conveyed his discomfort in a follow-up text message.
Yet, the fact that the staffer appeared ready to sue and extort Schlapp—potentially ruining his marriage and marring the influential CPAC brand—raises valid questions about who was really victimizing whom.
DEMOCRATS DELIGHT
As far as the Daily Beast’s involvement, there is no question about where its interests lay in lobbing a salacious allegation against a powerful conservative by insinuating that he is gay.
Without the collateral damage to Schlapp’s reputation, this late-night exchange between two fully grown adults is hardly a lawsuit but more of a human-resources issue at best.
Thus far, CPAC officials have stood behind Schlapp, and his lawyer has warned that a legal response may be coming.
“The Schlapp family is suffering unbearable pain and stress due to the false allegation from an anonymous individual,” said lawyer Charlie Spies, according to DNYUZ. “No family should ever go through this and the Schlapps and their legal team are assessing counter-lawsuit options.”
Conservatives may have some soul-searching to do based on how the case plays out. Is the witness credible? Is the account plausible? And if it is, so what? Is it worth torpedoing the CPAC conference over a private matter?
But of all these questions, one may be most central: If Schlapp were a Democrat, how might this play out differently?
(Headline USA) Arizona’s attorney general has put a hold on executions in the state after the governor ordered a review of death penalty protocols.
The review ordered Friday by Gov. Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s first Democratic governor since 2009, came as the state’s new Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, withdrew her Republican predecessor’s request for a warrant to execute a convicted killer who initially asked to be executed but later backed out of that request.
While Hobbs’ order didn’t declare a moratorium on the death penalty, Mayes will not seek court orders to execute prisoners while the review is underway, said Mayes spokesperson Richie Taylor.
The review comes just days after the governor appointed Ryan Thornell, a prison official in Maine, as Arizona’s new corrections director.
Arizona, which currently has 110 prisoners on death row, carried out three executions last year.
The state has been criticized for taking too long to insert an IV into a condemned prisoner’s body in early May and for denying the Arizona Republic newspaper’s request to witness the last three executions.
On Friday, Mayes withdrew a motion made by her Republican predecessor Mark Brnovich for a warrant for the execution of Aaron Gunches, who was first sentenced to death in 2008 for killing his girlfriend’s ex-husband.
Gunches earlier this month withdrew his request to be executed, citing recent executions he said amounted to “torture.”
Arizona is the only state to currently have a working gas chamber.
The last lethal gas execution in the United States was carried out in Arizona more than two decades ago. The state refurbished its gas chamber in late 2020. Corrections officials had declined to say why they restarted the gas chamber.
All three prisoners executed in Arizona last year declined lethal gas, leading them to be put to death by injection, the default execution method.
(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) The Florida Department of Education [FDOE] rejected the AP African American Studies course because of its woke content, saying that the course violates Florida law and lacks educational value.
Among many things, the course contains things like “Black Queer Studies,” cultural appropriation, reparations and the “global influence of the Black Lives Matter” movement, according toBreitbart.
“[FDOE] does not approve the inclusion of the Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies course in the Florida Course Code Directory and Instructional Personnel Assignments (adopted in State Board of Education Rule 6A-l.09441, Florida Administrative Code),” the department’s letter to Brian Barnes, a senior director of College Board Florida Partnership, stated.
“As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”
“In the future, should College Board be willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion,” the letter added.
Other things included in the course that FDOE considered inappropriate were topics like “the Black Feminist Movement, Womanism, and Intersectionality,” “Black Power,” “Black Pride,” “Black Queer Studies” and “Afrofuturism.” The course also talks about how it is wrong for white authors to write about the history of black people in America.
Bryan Griffin, press secretary for Gov. Ron DeSantis, said that FDOE thinks the course lacks historical accuracy, serves as a “vehicle for a political agenda and leaves large, ambiguous gaps that can be filled with additional ideological material, which we will not allow.”
“As Governor DeSantis has stated, our classrooms will be a place for education, not indoctrination,” he said.
DeSantis has previously emphasized that it will not allow schools to “twist history.”
“You can’t teach history that’s being used to pursue an ideological agenda. You can’t teach that the foundations of our country were somehow evil. Our founders pledged their lives, fortunes, sacred honor, and they put a marker in the sand,” DeSantis said.
(Headline USA) The White House said Friday that President Joe Biden “looks forward” to sitting down with new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to discuss a range of topics, including perhaps the thorniest challenge confronting Washington this year: raising the nation’s debt limit.
One hitch: That statement came with no actual invitation to the White House, and no date nor time for a meeting.
Rather, the White House again emphasized that Biden is not willing to entertain policy concessions in exchange for lifting the debt limit, which is the nation’s borrowing authority.
The U.S. bumped up against that limit Thursday, and the Treasury Department has deployed “extraordinary measures” to stave off default for at least a few more months.
The top two Democrats in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York, will meet with Biden on Tuesday, the White House said.
McCarthy, R-Calif., and his new majority in the House have said they will push changes, such as overhauls to entitlement programs, in order for Congress to raise the debt limit.
The Republican promise revived the prospects of a major fiscal standoff and reform. “President Biden: I accept your invitation to sit down and discuss a responsible debt ceiling increase to address irresponsible government spending,” McCarthy said on Twitter earlier Friday.
(Deroy Murdock, Headline USA) Even after being elected speaker of the House early Jan. 7, on the 15th ballot, Kevin McCarthy still has detractors on the Right.
Never mind that the promising, new, conservative rules to which he agreed establish a three-fifths majority to raise taxes, cap federal spending, require a balanced budget (eventually), mandate 12 separate appropriations bills rather than stage omnibus spending orgies, force a term-limits vote, and much more.
Regardless, some conservatives still hear McCarthy’s name and say: “Show me.”
How can McCarthy show conservatives, once and for all, that he is one of them—or, at least, will accept their agenda?
McCarthy should do what the gobsmackingly feeble and accommodationist Senate GOP “leader” Mitch McConnell of Kentucky fails to do on virtually every issue except judicial appointments: Unite Republicans, divide Democrats and invite members of the donkey party to make asses of themselves by confirming their woke, radical socialism.
McCarthy did this magnificently last week via two votes.
First, precisely one Democrat, Texas’s Henry Cuellar, joined 219 unanimous Republicans to require medical practitioners to care for any live baby who survived an abortion, despite its attempted murder in utero.
The advice of 99.5% of House Democrats (210 of 211) to such abortion-proof babies: “Drop dead.”
Second, a grand total of three House Democrats joined 219 unanimous Republicans who condemned physical attacks against pro-life establishments, organizations, and churches, including 41 domestic-terrorist acts that this measure specified.
McCarthy should schedule similar bills. Each should unify his caucus, trigger internecine Democrat warfare and let the House minority expose its extremism.
Such legislation should:
Declare that any baby who survives abortion is a live American citizen imbued with equal protection, due process, and all constitutional, civil and legal rights.
Democrats moaned that the aforementioned bill would endanger abortion-surviving babies by forcing abortionists to send them to hospitals via ambulance.
Fine.
Give Democrats a chance simply to agree with all Republicans that a baby who, somehow, foils an abortionist is not just a pile of medical waste but a living, breathing citizen and the youngest of all Americans.
Forbid any federal agency from banning natural gas stoves, heaters, water heaters, electricity generators, Bunsen burners or any gas-powered appliance or device. No agency or federal employee could spend any time or money on gasophobic prohibitionism. Republicans would lock arms. Dems might split along green-energy and blue-collar lines.
Order the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the amount of unspent COVID-19 money.
Put 90% of those funds into reducing the national debt. The debt limit would not be increased until those funds were consumed.
Keep 10% of these funds to investigate C-19’s origins, prevent future pandemics and for use as a rainy-day fund against any pandemic that might erupt.
Halt federal law-enforcement-assistance funds to George Soros-style state-level attorneys general and local district attorneys who refuse to prosecute criminals. Phony, thug-hugging “prosecutors” who are de-facto public defenders—such as Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, Chicago’s Kim Foxx, St. Louis’s Kimberly Gardner, Los Angeles’s George Gascon and Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner—would have until Oct. 1 to demonstrate a change of attitude. After that, if they insist on wet-nursing career criminals, they must do so without federal crime-fighting dollars.
Designate Antifa a domestic-terrorist group. After demolishing public and private property, torching police precincts, and otherwise perpetrating nationwide mayhem during and after the George Floyd riots, Antifa deserves the blackest of marks. Let’s see how many Democrats vote against their party’s Blackshirt brigade.
Label MS-13 a terrorist organization. This Latin American gang beheads Americans for laughs. Republicans should give Democrats a chance to stop the laughter.
Make the Trump tax cuts permanent. Republicans should draw this line in the sand and invite thinking Democrats to join them.
Such a legislative agenda should brighten America’s prospects, cheer conservatives and earn for Kevin McCarthy his rightist critics’ grudging respect, if not their love.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor.
