Day: October 11, 2022

Biden DOJ Weaponized for 2022 Midterms

What could possibly go wrong?

BY FRED LUCAS

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-doj-weaponized-for-2022-midterms/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

What could possibly go wrong in giving the perfectly apolitical Department of Justice more power over elections?

A few too many one-offs, anomalies, and more than a couple of bad apples are enough to prompt even the most apt to provide the benefit-of-the-doubt to suspect the department has been politicized.

So it’s not very encouraging that the Biden administration’s Justice Department has made voting and elections a top priority, as detailed in my new book “The Myth of Voter Suppression.”

Thus far in 2022, an FBI SWAT team arrested a pro-life speaker at his home, raided the home of a former president, and expanded its net for extremism to include concerned parents at school board meetings, all while an FBI whistleblower says the bureau ran interference to protect Hunter Biden.

Such anomalies and one-offs–that tend to always lean in one direction–perhaps shouldn’t raise concerns about the department’s expanding role in American democracy. On Oct. 4, Justice Department officials held a virtual briefing with 300 election officials and workers across the country, primarily about grant funding and physical security of voting sites. That would be entirely appropriate, though one is left to wonder given the Justice Department has too often shown its partisan stripes.

President Joe Biden signed a March 2021 executive order pushing an all-of-government approach to expanding voter turnout, largely based on recommendations from Demos, a liberal think tank. Don’t forget that Biden already set the predicate earlier this year for probing outcomes his party doesn’t like when he declared the election “could easily be illegitimate.”

In late 2020, a Demos policy brief called for the incoming Biden-Harris administration to use executive action to “strengthen Department of Justice’s enforcement of and guidance on voting rights statutes” and “pursue aggressive civil and criminal enforcement of federal voting rights protections.”

The Biden Justice Department obliged, filing lawsuits against the states of Arizona, Georgia, and Texas over their election integrity measures in those states.

Biden further appointed top Justice Department officials with a long record of opposing any voter ID laws and state laws that promoted accurate voting lists.

One is Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general.

Gupta returned to the Department of Justice after running the civil rights division during the Obama administration, which included overseeing the 2015 lawsuit to try to stop North Carolina’s voter ID law.

Gupta is a former CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and was previously a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, as well as a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Biden also named Kristen Clarke as the assistant attorney general to lead the Civil Rights Division that oversees the DOJ’s Voting Section.

Clarke was previously the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and worked for the New York attorney general’s office and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

In the face of a bona fide open-and-shut case of voter intimidation, Clarke, as a private lawyer, lobbied the Justice Department to drop its case against the far-left New Black Panther Party, which was seen on video intimidating voters at a Pennsylvania polling place during the 2008 election. The intimidation was perceived as benefitting Democrats, so it apparently didn’t matter. The Obama Justice Department complied with the push.

Clarke further led a lawsuit to stop the then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp from enforcing election integrity policies.

In July 2021, the Department of Justice issued guidance on federal statutes regarding voting methods—including mail-in voting—and warnings on conducting post-election audits, which Democrats staunchly opposed.

In June 2021, the Justice Department sued Georgia over its voting law regarding the use of voter ID for absentee ballots. The Biden DOJ’s complaint in federal court contends that provisions of the law were adopted to deny or abridge the right to vote based on race. The following November, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Texas over what it claimed were “restrictive voting procedures.” The Justice Department also sued in July 2022 to claim Arizona election reforms suppressed voting.

The lawsuits continue even void of evidence. As “The Myth of Voter Suppression” points out, the 2022 primary elections, the first test of the 2021 state election reforms, show the laws didn’t suppress anything.

Georgia had a 168% increase from the off-year primary of 2018. In Texas, turnout was 17.7% in 2022, about 3 million votes compared to 17.2% in the 2018 primary. Arizona had a record primary turnout in 2022 of 35.12%, or 1.4 million ballots cast, compared to the 33.3% turnout in 2018, with 1.2 million ballots casts.

In response to Biden’s executive order, the Justice Department announced in May 2022 that it would provide “educational materials related to voter registration and voting” and “facilitate voter registration, for all eligible individuals in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.” Convicted felons have generally been a reliable Democrat voting bloc.

With just a little over a month before Election Day, it will be interesting to see how political the Justice Department will be before and after the actual voting.

Lives and Liberty Lost by Order of the Deep State~Freedom, innovation, progress, opportunity, and choice — all on the Left’s chopping block.

BY JONATHAN EMORD

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/lives-and-liberty-lost-by-order-of-the-deep-state/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Three-quarters of all federal law is not enacted by those we elect but by the unelected heads of over 200 government departments, agencies, and bureaus.  Under our Constitution, only Congress has the power to make laws (Art. I: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States . . .”), and yet, through a deliberate circumvention of the Constitution, federal agencies have for over one hundred and forty years created, enforced, adjudicated, and punished parties for violating laws Congress never enacted.  Indeed, as Professor Philip Hamburger explains, the administrative state is largely indistinguishable from the dreaded Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission that the Founding Fathers condemned for their abuses and constitutionally prohibited.

The Administrative State makes decisions that sacrifice individual liberty and property, but also even human life—all without adherence to constitutional limits on government power.  A single example can illustrate the point.  For over sixty years, to protect drug companies from competition, the FDA has maintained a blanket ban on information associating nutrients with disease risk reduction, thus giving drug companies a monopoly on therapeutic claims.  Under that ban, the FDA prohibited Americans from receiving at the point-of-sale information associating 800 micrograms of folic acid in dietary supplements with a reduction in the risk of neural tube defects (e.g., spina bifida and anencephaly).  That ban was held unconstitutional in Pearson v. Shalala in 1999, but for at least two decades before the Court ruled, FDA’s censorship resulted in an estimated 2,500 preventable NTDs each year and countless NTD-related abortions.  FDA continues to censor numerous nutrient-disease claims that, if allowed, would save lives.

Consider just a few more examples of the unconstitutional power and abuses visited upon us by the Administrative State.  The Founding Fathers were very familiar with general warrants and believed them antithetical to individual liberty; they prohibited them in the Fourth Amendment.  Prohibited, general warrants are nevertheless used every day by federal administrative agencies, a flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.  In Stanford v. Texas, the Supreme Court explained that “[v]ivid in the memory of the newly independent Americans were these general warrants known as writs of assistance under which officers of the Crown had so bedeviled the colonists.”  Justice Potter Stewart wrote for a unanimous Court that Americans were entitled to “’ be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects from intrusion and seizure by officers acting under the unbridled authority of a general warrant.”  Yet every day, general warrants are issued by federal agencies, like the FTC, the EPA, and the BLM, acting without a federal court order and commanding Americans to produce all manner of the most sensitive financial records and documents entirely on suspicion and without ever having to prove probable cause.

As early as 1895, in Coffin v. United States, the Supreme Court made unequivocal that those accused by the government were entitled to a presumption of innocence.  Yet every day the Administrative State presumes those it accuses to be guilty until they prove themselves innocent.  Moreover, the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is ignored in the administrative law context, such that routinely individuals accused by agencies are ordered to provide testimony against themselves.

It is a cardinal constitutional principle, articulated well by Madison in Federalist No. 47, that the prosecutor not also be the judge because impartial justice is impossible when the very official seeking conviction of the accused is also the one with legal authority to decide the dispute.  Madison wrote: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”  And yet, when administrative law judges decide a case, their decisions are but recommendations to the agency heads, the very heads who ordered the prosecution in the first place.  That leads to biased decision-making.  Indeed, former FTC Commissioner Joshua D. Wright explained that in his agency’s history, he could not find a single instance in which the accused was ever found innocent of the wrongdoing charged by the FTC:  Every time FTC accuses, it holds the accused guilty!

Under the Sixth and Seventh Amendments, every American is entitled to a jury trial before the government imposes a penalty (a restriction on his or her liberty or a command that he or she pay the government money or forfeit property).  And yet, when administrative agencies impose huge fines, discontinue any enterprise, or deny the accused the right to advertise, label a product, or market a good or service, the party affected is denied the right to a trial before an impartial jury of peers.

These are among many violations of constitutional rights that take place across the United States as Administrative Agencies enforce their rules which Congress never passed into law.  There are thousands of Americans who have lost their jobs, lost their businesses, lost their livelihoods, and, indeed, lost their liberty and lives because of government agencies depriving Americans of constitutional rights to achieve politically preferred outcomes.  The Deep State has swallowed not just political enemies but honest, hard-working Americans in virtually every field of endeavor.  Freedom, innovation, progress, opportunity, and choice have all been put on the chopping block by the voracious regulatory state that now dominates and controls America.

Until we limit law-making to Congress, as the Constitution requires, and until we end Administrative Agency rights violations, we will never enjoy that liberty that is our birthright as citizens of our constitutional republic.  An updated version of a bill I wrote with Norm Singleton for Ron Paul years ago would help solve the problem.  Called the Congressional Responsibility and Accountability Act, it would prohibit any administrative agency proposed rule from taking effect unless passed into law by Congress, and it would sunset every existing regulation within three years unless passed into law by Congress.  Add to that a requirement that agencies bring charges before independent federal courts, elimination of administrative law courts, and demand for de novo judicial review of all agency actions, and we would be well on our way to restoring the constitutional rights protections taken from us by the Administrative State.

Reprinted From Townhall.

Is This America? Jan. 6 Prisoners Ask for Transfer to Gitmo~When a U.S. administration treats Taliban prisoners better than American citizens.

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-this-america-jan-6-prisoners-ask-for-transfer-to-gitmo/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Since Jan. 20, 2021, America has gone swiftly from being a free republic to being an authoritarian regime in which foes of the rulers are locked up and subjected to conditions that are designed to destroy them and deter others from emulating them. Based on the false claim that the Jan. 6 entry into the Capitol constituted an “insurrection” aimed at nothing less than overthrowing the government, the Biden regime, chiefly Attorney General Merrick Garland, is working to criminalize legitimate political opposition to the Democrats’ far-Left agenda. In his infamous Sept. 1 speech before an ominous red-and-black backdrop and two Marines, Biden claimed that “MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” Those were not mere words. The regime is acting upon them.

The Biden regime has decided to treat the Jan. 6 protesters, who are overwhelmingly patriotic Americans guilty of nothing more than supporting the former president and being concerned about the integrity of the 2020 election, as if they were dangerous enemies of the state. And so in America today, we not only have a Marxist regime that wants to crush all dissent; we have a gulag and political prisoners.

Last Sunday, Gateway Pundit published a letter from 34 of these prisoners to Garland, a rabid partisan and sinister authoritarian who has sicced the FBI on parents protesting the woke agenda at school board meetings, and who is virtually certain to ignore it and allow the inhuman treatment it describes to continue. The prisoners wrote:

When one considers a society that distinguishes itself upon the standards of a “First World Country” allocation among the other numerous Nations around the globe, while informing its citizens that they belong to a country that ensures “Liberty and Justice for All”, it’s difficult to imagine then, that The United States of America, supposedly the wealthiest Nation on the planet, would subjugate its own citizens to that of incarceration and injustice instead, all while administering medieval standards of living to the agonizing occupants of its “Correctional Facilities”.

The prisoners went on to charge that in the District of Columbia Jail, they were “all but slowly murdered in every way except for their very soul being ripped from their famished chests on behalf of this mercilessly sinister institution.” They added that “if this pale dungeon of Human Rights Violations dared to summon any honesty of hard choice pertaining to the abhorrent atrocities that take place behind these unforgiving doors, they should erect a sign above the front gate that says, ‘Abandon All Hope, Yee [sic] Who Enter Here.’”

These Americans, whose most serious crime is trespassing, state that they “have and will continue to endure” a long list of horrors, including “Begging for Help / Water / Medical Aid / Mercy through a 4-inch by 10-inch window of cold metal doors”; “No Visitations”; “No Religious Services”; “No Attorney Access”; and “Mail delayed 3-4 months prior to delivery.” Their laundry is returned “with brown stains, pubic hair, and or reeking of ripe urine.” They have found worms in their salads at mealtime, and the food is so poor that many are now suffering from a variety of ailments. In their cells, they endure black mold, cockroaches, and mice, and are denied “basic cleaning equipment to sanitize Living Space.” They have been “Stuck in Cells for 9 days without showers.” Medical professionals arrive months after they were requested, or not at all. They’re allowed to use tablets that are filled with “C.R.T. Propaganda”; “Re-Education Propaganda”; and “Racially Biased information.” They are made to endure “Solitary Confinement for 25 ½ hours or more at a time.” They have been “repeatedly Mocked and or Insulted for our skin color or “religious” documentation,” and have been “compared to ‘Beasts’, ‘Dogs’ and ‘Hogs by ‘The Final Call’ Magazine.” Jail staff mock them by wearing “Democrat, Black Lives Matter, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden related attire.” Meanwhile, they are “sent to ‘The Hole’ if we express any political views whatsoever.”

That isn’t even close to all of it; the prisoners even charge with physical and sexual assault by the guards. They accordingly ask Garland: “We hereby request to spend our precious and limited days, should the government continue to insist on holding us captive unconstitutionally as pre-trial detainees, to be transferred and reside at Guantanamo Bay, a detention facility that actually provides nutritional meals, routine sunlight exposure, top-notch medical care, is respectful of religious requirements, has centers for exercise/entertainment for its detainees despite the fact that those residents are malicious terrorists, real members of the Taliban and few are United States Citizens, instead of remaining trapped within the wretched confines of cruel and unusual punishment of the DC Jail.”

This is not grandstanding. The few remaining prisoners at Gitmo are treated far better. Biden’s handlers have a far more positive view of the Taliban than they do of conservative Americans. It is breathtaking that anything of this kind could happen in America, and it’s an indication of how far the Biden regime is from our founding principles. But this treatment will continue: the regime needs its scapegoats, and its bogus “insurrection” narrative, and so these unfairly persecuted people will continue to be made to pay for the crime of being in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Church of Everyone: Why so many Catholics are leaving.

BY WILLIAM KILPATRICK

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-church-of-everyone/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Pope Francis recently called for a “Church open to everyone.”  Nothing new here.  The Church has always been open to everyone—including sinners.  The Church has always acknowledged that it is “a Church of sinners.”

But when Francis says “open to everyone” he seems to have something else in mind.  Traditionally, when Catholics spoke of a “Church of sinners” it was understood to mean repentant sinners:  people who were sorry for their sins and were trying their best to sin no more.

By contrast, what Francis and other woke/progressive Catholics seem to mean is “proud sinners:” people who are proud of their lifestyle choices and see nothing sinful about them.

Two Catholics that immediately come to mind are Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.  Both seem proud of their pro-abortion stance and if challenged both simply double down on their position.  And both can point to gestures by Francis indicating that he considers them Catholics in good standing.

Francis has praised other prominent abortion advocates including Emma Bonino whom Life Site News refers to as the “notorious Italian abortionist.”  Although Bonino had not only promoted abortion but had also personally performed numerous abortions, Francis referred to her as one of Italy’s “forgotten greats.”

In a recent piece for Front Page, journalist Joseph Hippolito makes the case that Francis has chosen to abandon Catholicism’s historic opposition to abortion in all but name…”  Hippolito argues that abortion is largely “irrelevant” to Francis.

I bring this up because many Catholics—perhaps a majority—have a different view of Francis.  Because of some statements he has made about abortionists being like a “hit man,” they assume he is strongly opposed to abortion.  He is, after all the pope; so, they reason that he is automatically opposed to abortion, same-sex unions, and the LGBT agenda; and is automatically in favor of Church teaching on chastity, marriage, contraception, and so on.

But it just isn’t so, and the best evidence can be found by looking at a list of his appointments over the years.

It’s often said that “personnel is policy.”  In other words, a leader’s policies can best be discerned not by what he says, but by who he hires.  If, for example, the president’s appointments for secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff were all pacifists, we could safely conclude that the president was also a pacifist.  We could further assume that he would probably pursue a policy of appeasement.

Let’s look at some of Francis’ key appointments.  Hippolito explains that the clearest evidence of Francis’ relative indifference to abortion comes from Cardinal Vincenzo Paglia, the President of the Pontifical Academy for Life.  During a recent television interview, Paglia said the Church had no interest in opposing Italy’s Law 194 which legalizes abortion in the first trimester.  Paglia said that the law represented “a pillar of our social life.”

So, here’s the head of the Pontifical Academy for Life which, as Hippolito points out, was founded by John Paul II “specifically to oppose abortion,” and he thinks Italy’s abortion law is “a pillar of our social life.”

Did Francis know Paglia’s views before he appointed him to the post?  Well, of course, he knew.  Paglia was already notorious for having a billboard-size homoerotic mural painted on the wall of his cathedral.  What’s more, Paglia himself appears in the painting—nude, embracing another man, and surrounded by entangled bodies of both sexes.  One would not need to be very astute to assume that Paglia might not embrace the Church’s stance on abortion—nor the traditional Catholic view of same-sex unions.

Although Francis says he wants a Church that is “open to everyone,” the highest and most influential posts in the Church are not open to everyone.  Increasingly, they seem to be open mainly to prelates who are sympathetic to the LGBT ideology.

This is not to say that LGBT-friendly prelates are themselves involved in sexual activities, but that they are strongly supportive of the LGBT agenda.  With that in mind, here are some of the more prominent LGBT-friendly prelates in the U.S. who Francis has promoted to high positions.

Most recently, Francis elevated San Diego Bishop Robert Mc Elroy to the office of cardinal.  McElroy was the only North American among the 21 churchmen who Francis made cardinals during an August 27 consistory in Rome.  Normally, the office conferred on McElroy would be given to a higher-ranking bishop in a larger diocese.  In this case, that would be Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco.  But Francis passed over Cordileone—most likely as punishment for Cordileone’s having barred Nancy Pelosi from receiving Communion because of her strident pro-abortion stance.

Like Francis, however, McElroy has no problem with pro-abortion politicians receiving Communion. So, Francis gave him the nod.  Another plus for McElroy was his strong support and encouragement of the LGBT community.

Along with his auxiliary bishop John Dolan, Mc Elroy once celebrated a mass for “families of the LGBT community.”  After Holy Communion “Nicole” Murray-Ramirez, a nationally-known drag queen activist was allowed to speak to the congregation from the lectern.  Afterward, Murray-Ramirez presented McElroy and Dolan with a humanitarian award on behalf of an international drag queen organization.

An interesting footnote to all this is that after the LGBT-ing of the Church in San Diego, and shortly after making Mc Elroy a Cardinal, Francis promoted auxiliary bishop Dolan to be the new bishop of Phoenix—one of the largest and fastest-growing dioceses in America.

Indeed, prelates with a record of supporting the LGBT movement tend to end up overseeing some of the nation’s most influential dioceses:  Blaise Cupich became the Cardinal/Archbishop of Chicago, Bishop Joseph Tobin was named Archbishop of Newark (he is now a Cardinal).  And LGBT-friendly Wilton Gregory was given the archdiocese of Washington, D.C.

The Washington, D.C. Archdiocese, by the way, seems to be reserved exclusively for LGBT-friendly bishops.  First, there was the notorious Theodore McCarrick, next was Donald Wuerl, and now Wilton Gregory (it is rumored that Joseph Tobin was also being considered).

Moreover, bishops with the proper LGBT credentials are also often tapped for important international appointments.  For example, in 2019 Blaise Cupich was put in charge of the Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse, despite the fact that Cupich himself has been credibly accused of covering up cases of priestly abuse.

But that sort of thing is no bar to upward mobility in the Francis papacy.  Despite everything that was known about Cardinal Mc Carrick, Francis, upon becoming pope, lifted all restrictions on Mc Carrick and sent him off to China, Iran, and other places as a kind of roving Vatican ambassador.

Moreover, Francis undoubtedly was aware that Bishop Mc Elroy has been credibly accused of covering-up instances of priestly sex abuse—including the rape of a young woman.  And Mc Elroy also covered up the knowledge he had of McCarrick’s history of abuse.

Speaking of Mc Carrick, mention should be made here of Bishop Kevin Farrell who shared an apartment with Mc Carrick for six years in Washington.  In 2016, Francis put the LGBT-friendly prelate in charge of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life. In 2018, Farrell was appointed head of the World Meeting of Families Conference in Dublin, and he promptly invited LGBT activist Fr. James Martin as a featured speaker. Most recently, Farrell was named by Francis as papal Camerlengo—a position which puts him in charge of the Vatican should Francis die or resign, and also gives him considerable influence over the cardinals’ choice of the next pope.

The next pope?  Would it be rash to assume that he will have a strong sympathy for the LGBT agenda? At this point, it seems rash to assume otherwise

One of Francis's most recent appointments is Portuguese Cardinal Jose Tolentino de Mendonca.  Mendonca was appointed as Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education.  According to Life Site News, “commentators have suggested that de Mendonca’s meteoric rise is due to his alignment with Francis’s ideology, particularly on the subject of LGBT matters.”  Among other things, de Mendonca wrote the introduction to the Portuguese translation of a book by radical Spanish nun, Teresa Forcades, who campaigned for the legalization of abortion and the recognition of same-sex “marriage.”

In a 2016 interview, Mendonca, echoing Francis, said that the Church must be “a place of welcome and mercy.” And he specifically mentions “homosexual persons” and the “remarried.” But how about the unborn? Are they also to be welcomed? And, if so, why does Mendonca praise a radical nun who campaigned for the legalization of abortion?

Francis says he wants the Church to be open to everyone, but his appointments show otherwise. They are not drawn from a broad spectrum of individuals who are representative of the views of a majority of practicing Catholics. Rather, they seem to represent mostly fringe elements in the Church.

How many ordinary Catholics would want a print of Cardinal Paglia’s mural hanging in their living room? How many would want to celebrate a prominent abortionist as one of the country’s “greats”? How many would want to be lectured to during Mass by a nationally-known drag queen activist?

Francis may want everyone to feel welcome in the Church, but he seems oblivious to the fact that a great many Catholics are feeling mighty uncomfortable with the Church he is shaping by his “in-your-face” appointments. According to Rorate Caeli, Cardinal Mendonca “was well known in the Portuguese Church for being the absolutely most fabulous fabuloso of the whole fabulousness.” The Catholic Church is supposed to be “The Church Universal,” but Francis seems intent on turning it into a club for the “fabulosa” and their friends.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the avant-garde in the Church experimented with kitchen table Masses, balloon Masses, clown Masses, and various theological innovations in the hope of bringing more bodies into the Church. Yet, between 1970 and 2021, the number of priests fell from 59,192 to 34,923. Meanwhile, weekly Mass attendance fell from 54.9 percent to 17.3 percent; and infant baptism from 1.089 million to 411,482.  Francis has been pope now for 10 years and there is no evidence that his attempt to revive sixties-style openness has done anything to stanch the flow. The doors to the Church may be open wide, but an alarming number of Catholics are choosing to walk out.

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William Kilpatrick

William Kilpatrick is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His books include Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West, What Catholics Need to Know About Islam, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Jihad.

VIRGINIA: ‘CHILDREN DON’T BELONG TO THE STATE!’ GOVERNOR Youngkin Defends Parental Rights in Schools

“Parents have a fundamental right to be engaged in their children’s lives,” Youngkin said. “And, oh, by the way, children have a right to have parents engaged in their life. And we needed to fix a wrong…children don’t belong to the state. They belong to families. And so, in these most important decisions, step one has to be to engage parents, not to the exclusion of a trusted teacher or an adviser, but to make sure that parents are involved in their children’s lives.”

Biden’s politicized FBI now hiding Chinese infiltration of U.S. election software as crucial midterms approach

Image: Biden’s politicized FBI now hiding Chinese infiltration of U.S. election software as crucial midterms approach

BY J.D. HEYES

SEE: https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-10-10-bidens-fbi-now-hiding-chinese-infiltration-us-election-software-midterms.html;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

(Natural News) There is no doubt among reasonable Americans that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump.

Not only did he win every bellwether county in the country except one, but he also won states that normally indicate a victory for the candidate as well as a historic amount of votes — 74.5 million — for a Republican presidential candidate.

The proof was expertly laid out in the blockbuster documentary “2000 Mules,” which was produced by noted conservative documentarian Dinesh D’Souza. After lamestream media types and Democrats demanded proof for months of election fraud and theft, D’Souza delivered it, but of course, the same liars denied the evidence was real.

Two experts involved in the making of that film, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote, have since made another alarming discovery that they say is being covered up by the Biden regime: Namely, that China has managed to infiltrate a major U.S. election software company in a way that could alter the outcome of yet another round of elections, the November midterms.

According to a report from the Kanekoa News Substack:

In a live chat released on Monday, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips appeared together on “truethevote.locals.com” to discuss their 15-month involvement with what was characterized to them as a “counter-intelligence operation” with the Federal Bureau of Investigation into American election company Konnech Inc.

Konnech, based out of East Lansing, Michigan, builds software to manage the poll workers, poll locations, campaigns, assets, and supplies necessary to run elections in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Phillips said a cyber analyst he was working with encountered an “oddity in some of the URLs” in January 2021 including at vote4la.com, vote4detroit.com, and vote4boston.com. Konnech’s PollChief software application used the URLs to gather personally identifiable information regarding poll workers.

Using BinaryEdge, software that companies utilize to find and assess risks of cyber breaches, Phillips said, “We began to look at where these URLs resolve to. We found that most of them resolve to one I.P. address and that I.P. address — the URL resolved in China.”

“What we also learned in our review, apps.konnech.com [.net], resolved into this same URL in China, meaning that the application itself was residing in China,” he added.

“In Binary Edge, you can figure out what type of database they are using, their database port, and all the different services offered by ports in this particular application living in China. It turned out that not only did it live there, but they left the database open,” Phillips continued.

This database “stored the personally identifying information of over a million Americans,” he noted.

After deciding that “this was a major national security risk,” Engelbrecht and Phillips wasted no time in taking what they had learned to the FBI.

When the pair took this information to the FBI, the bureau “said the information was forwarded to their counter-intelligence operation, and a counter-intelligence op was opened up in January or February of 2021,” Phillips noted.

He then described how he and Engelbrecht went on to play an active role in the problem. “They engaged us in the operation, they were communicating with us on a regular basis. They were communicating with Catherine regarding communications with the target and this went on for approximately 15 months,” he said.

The experts also said that the FBI field office they were working with for the 15 months was “legitimate” and not “political law enforcement.”

“These were legitimate people who believed that this software posed a national security risk to the United States of America and they were working with us closely to try to stop this from being in place during the midterms,” Phillips explained.

“The focus point was always we needed to remove this software from the election, but taking a step further, there were a lot of other concerns that the bureau had,” he said, adding that agents told the pair that Konnech was already on the FBI’s radar for a number of other reasons.

In April, Engelbrecht said she got a call from the field office, which relayed that headquarters in Washington, D.C., had gotten involved. She said literally everything changed after that phone call.

There was no more goodwill, there was no more let’s work together, the script had been flipped, and now we were the target,” she said. “That was a very disturbing call.”

The Substack report continued:

The agent informed Engelbrecht that “two women” at the FBI’s headquarters believed that Phillips and Engelbrecht were “in the wrong for doing this” and that the D.C. office was now trying “to figure out how you guys broke the law to find all of this.”

Engelbrecht added, “which of course we didn’t, but that was kind of their MO [modus operandi], they were going to try to pin something on us, and today you can pick your headlines about how the FBI has done this time and again.”

“The problem is they know about this, and they chose to do nothing. They chose to investigate it, and in the end, they chose to blame us, but this is China. These are Chinese operatives in the United States; these are Chinese citizens who are programming this,” Phillips added.

Sources include:

Kanekoa.Substack.com

NaturalNews.com

FDA Withholds Autopsy Results of Those Who Died After COVID Shots

BY MARCO CACERES

SEE: https://thevaccinereaction.org/2022/10/fda-withholds-autopsy-results-of-those-who-died-after-covid-shots/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has refused a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to release the autopsy results of people whose deaths were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after receiving a COVID-19 shot. The FOIA request was submitted by The Epoch Times newspaper.1

“VAERS is a centralized vaccine reaction reporting system that was among the safety provisions secured by parents of DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine injured children in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986,” explains Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder-and-president-of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). It is jointly operated by the FDA and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).2 3

According to The Epoch Times, the FDA declined to release any autopsy reports of VAERS deaths, even redacted copies, citing FOIA section (8) (A) which allows federal agencies to withhold information from the public if an agency “reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by an exemption,” with the exemption being “personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”1 4

FDA Refusal to Provide Autopsy Info Attributed to Concerns Over Personal Privacy

The FDA reportedly also cited federal law that blocks the release of “personnel, medical and similar files the disclosure of which constitutes a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”1 4

One possible reason for the FDA’s reluctance is that neither officials at the FDA nor at the CDC have found (or at least openly admitted)  a “causal association” between the COVID shots and the post-COVID vaccination deaths reported to VAERS. A study published last year in the journal Clinical and Experimental Vaccine Research stated:

These regulatory agencies have not found a causal association, and there is no reason to state that the COVID-19 vaccine causes death. Data from the VAERS and available clinical information (death certificates, autopsies, and medical records) does not establish cause and effect between deaths and reported deaths. Deaths following vaccination equated to deaths caused by vaccines are irresponsible, misleading and scientifically inaccurate.5

To release autopsy reports of people who died after receiving COVID shots might lead to uncomfortable questions about the conclusions reached by FDA and CDC officials and raise the specter of a national re-evaluation and lots of second opinions regarding the safety of the shots.

That does not appear to be a conversation these and other public health officials at the helm of government agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, specifically, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), appear anxious to have.

Those responsible for operating these federal agencies, not to mention countless doctors, scientists, and politicians around the country, have staked their reputations on assuring the American public that the COVID shots do not cause harm, much less death. Why indeed would they want to investigate and give space to a conversation by asking legitimate questions and offering dissenting views?

More Deaths After COVID Shots Reported in VAERS Than Any Other Vaccine

It must already be difficult enough having to acknowledge the 16,516 deaths in the U.S. reported to VAERS after COVID vaccinations as of Sept. 14, 2022.1

Still, it is a public conversation that should be allowed to take place. After all, it is no minor thing that, as Fisher notes, “There have been more deaths reported to VAERS following COVID-19 vaccinations than for any other federally recommended vaccine since VAERS became operational in 1990.”2

All of the FDA’s stated concerns about protecting privacy seem rather bogus, as the autopsy results sought through the FOIA request could be released with personal information blacked out. “The personal information could easily be redacted without losing the potential learnings from [the] autopsy,” said Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate who serves as an adviser to the FDA.1

Besides, Witczak logically points out:

If someone submits their experience to VAERS they want and expect to have it investigated by the FDA. This includes autopsy reports. Autopsies can be an important part of postmortem analysis and should be done especially with increased deaths following COVID-19 vaccination.1

Why is transparency on this issue such a stumbling block for the FDA?

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Click here to view References:

1 Stieber Z. EXCLUSIVE: FDA Withholding Autopsy Results on People Who Died After Getting COVID-19 Vaccines. The Epoch Times Sept. 30, 2022.
2 Fisher BL. More Deaths Reported to VAERS Following COVID-19 Vaccinations Than for Any Other Vaccine. The Vaccine Reaction July 11, 2021.
3 TVR Staff. Only One Percent of Vaccine Reactions Reported to VAERS. The Vaccine Reaction Jan. 9, 2022.
4 The United States Department of Justice. THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT, 5 U.S.C. § 552.
5 Lamptey E. Post-vaccination COVID-19 deaths: a review of available evidence and recommendations for the global population. Clin Exp Vaccine Res September 2021; 10(3): 264–275.

How FEMA Put ‘Equity’ Ahead of Disaster Management; “Find opportunities for equity in the big chunks of federal money.”

BY DANIEL GREENFIELD

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-fema-put-equity-ahead-of-disaster-management/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

“It is our lowest income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions,” Kamala Harris told the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum during the recovery effort for the victims of Hurricane Ian.

“We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity.”

That is what FEMA is already doing.

FEMA uses something called the National Risk Index to calculate the risk to any area. The NRI can then be used to determine which communities should get how much funding to cope with natural disasters. Armed with an NRI evaluation, cities, counties and towns can apply for Hazard Mitigation Assistance grants. Billions in these grants have been handed out. The trouble with the NRI is that it’s less science and more sociology. And very leftist sociology at that.

The Index is made up of three components, the actual natural hazard, “community resilience” and “social vulnerability”. The last is really affirmative action for natural disasters. As FEMA puts it, social vulnerability calculates the “susceptibility of social groups to the adverse impacts of natural hazards”.Or as the old joke has it, “Earth destroyed: minorities hardest hit.”

Except with FEMA, it’s not a joke, it’s policy.

“Black and African American communities often suffer disproportionate impacts from disasters,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell claimed.

FEMA’s social vulnerability data set lists the percentage of immigrant, Asian, Hispanic and black populations as representing a higher “vulnerability” to a natural disaster. A town that is 40% black, 33% Hispanic, and 12% Asian is calculated by FEMA as being more at risk than a town that is made up of 23% Italian-Americans, 44% Irish, 9% Jews, and 18% Swedish-Americans.

Grants to prepare the town and the area for a hurricane are likely to be awarded accordingly.

Two towns with the same risk level, but different racial numbers will put the minority town ahead of the non-minority one when it comes to aiding to prepare for a disaster.

That racial discrimination is built into FEMA’s algorithms. When FEMA personnel tell federal and state legislators that they’re just following the numbers, they are actually using numbers that were specifically racially biased to provide affirmative action disaster planning and reward the Democrat electorate with special preferences. Some of which flow to the politically connected.

The racial bias at FEMA is part of the overall ‘equity’ push by the Biden administration. Every component of the federal government, from the military to NASA to FEMA was obligated to offer a political loyalty oath in the form of an equity plan. And to conduct political equity indoctrination sessions within their organizations and bring in leftist groups to lecture them on their politics.

FEMA’s Building Alliances for Equitable Resilience begins with a rejection of equality in favor of equity. The introduction by Chauncia Willis, a former wellness and diversity coach, urges disaster officials to reach out to “LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, Black Lives Matter chapters”.

Black Lives Matter is better known for causing national disasters than remedying them.

Willis claims that minority groups may feel the impacts of natural disasters most “severely” because of “immigration status”, “race”, and dictated that equity should be “a goal throughout all parts of your work”.

Jo Linda Johnson, the director of FEMA’s Office of Equal Rights, argued that the “whole community must be honest and acknowledge that the historical denial of equity and lack of opportunity to participate in economic, social, and civic life is intertwined with current concerns.”

Instead of actually working on disaster relief, FEMA was being transformed into a welfare system oriented toward denouncing America and white people as racist.

The FEMA brochure urges, “Find opportunities for equity in the big chunks of federal money.”

These days, FEMA talks about equity more than disaster relief. The set of priorities could be clearly distinguished when FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell commented on the confirmation of her deputy, Erik Hooks by stating that he would help “infuse equity across our agency, advance our nation’s emergency management and readiness and address the growing threat of climate change.” Equity comes in ahead of emergency management.

FEMA’s three missions are now identity politics, responding to emergencies, and global warming advocacy. Only one of those is actually the non-partisan task it’s supposed to be performing.

And it’s not as if FEMA has been shy about putting identity politics at the center of its agenda.

In his statement to the Committee on Homeland Security last year, Hooks revealed that FEMA’s new strategic plan under Biden was to “(1) instill equity as a foundation of emergency management; (2) lead whole of the community in climate resilience, and (3) promote and sustain a ready FEMA and prepared nation.”

Equity came first, global warming second, and disaster response third.

Hooks spoke at length about “instilling equity as a foundation of emergency management”, identity politics quotas at FEMA, “ensuring our employees increasingly reflect the diversity of the nation”, and global warming. He spent less than a minute on actual disaster response.

Under Biden, FEMA leaders talk in activist leftist terms about bringing social change. “At FEMA, we strive to place equity at the center of our efforts and do our part in addressing and correcting these historical injustices,” Criswell declared.

“At FEMA, and across the Biden-Harris Administration, we know even more work must be done if we are to live up to the promise of Juneteenth and ensure everyone in this country lives a life of dignity,” Hooks sonorously chanted.

None of this is the job of FEMA, but under the Left, every agency and organization under its control spends most of its time denouncing America and promising more equity.

Meanwhile, FEMA remains fundamentally broken.

Every round of natural disasters brings more congressional hearings, media outrage, and FEMA officials explaining why they messed up this time. When the FEMA failures happen under a Republican president, they’re front and center, but when they happen under a Democrat, like Obama, they’re quickly hushed up. Either way, though FEMA has never worked and the rebooted identity politics organization is even less likely to help the people it’s supposed to.

The prominence of identity politics at FEMA will only further undermine trust in it and the statistical tampering that turns risk evaluations into affirmative action will raise questions about a variety of statistical models including those that are utilized for insurance purposes.

The American people deserved an unbiased disaster management agency untainted by racialist and political agendas. FEMA was functionally broken before, it’s now also tainted by racism and partisan agendas. Those need to be rooted out beginning with anything involving “equity”.

When disaster strikes, hurricane, earthquake and other survivors need to believe that they’re not being discriminated against before or after the disaster. The only way to do that is to get “equity” and the “social vulnerability” index out of FEMA before they end up costing lives.