Trump Outlines 3-Phase Approach to ‘Opening Up America Again’ Amid COVID-19

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OPENING UP AMERICA AGAIN

President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a cautious, three-phase approach—one that still gives wide latitude to governors—for reopening the shuttered economy in states that have had low rates of transmission of COVID-19.

“Based on the latest data, our team of experts now agrees that we can begin the next front in our war, which we’re calling, ‘Opening up America again,’” Trump said. “… We are not opening all at once, but one careful step at a time.”

The president has said he would like to see the economy moving again by—or even before—May 1 in some states. He said the plan is based on “hard, verifiable data” and that the peak death rate from the disease is now behind us.

When can America reopen? The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission, a project of The Heritage Foundation, is gathering America’s top thinkers together to figure that out. Learn more here.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

“Thanks to our all-out military operation and the extraordinary devotion of our people, we believe we will experience far fewer deaths than even the optimistic projections,” Trump said.

“We have incredible people that we’re working with, and we’re going to bring our country back, and it’s going to be bigger and better and stronger than ever before,” he said.

Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, presented slides to explain the phases of the process of reopening the country. Birx said each phases would be “related to 14 days of decreasing evidence of illness.”

  • Phase one is designed to “mitigate the risk of resurgence” and would allow public venues, such as arenas, theaters, and restaurants to reopen, only under certain social distancing conditions. However, “all vulnerable individuals should continue to shelter in place,” and low-risk individuals should continue social distancing.
  • Phase two only applies for regions with no evidence of a rebound. Visits to hospitals, nursing homes, and similar locations will remain prohibited. However, schools, day care centers, and camps can reopen, and nonessential travel can resume. Public venues can begin to ease social distancing restrictions.
  • Phase three is also for states or areas with no evidence of a rebound, but has fewer restrictions than phase two. Even vulnerable individuals would have more freedom, but should still practice social distancing, while others are urged to avoid “crowded environments.”

The president noted that “benchmarks must be met at each phase.”

Reacting to the president’s plan, Heritage Foundation President Kay C. James stressed that “good public health policy is good economic policy.”

“The administration is rightly working to restore livelihoods in the midst of catastrophic job losses, while also taking care to balance Americans’ health and safety,” said James, who is also chairwoman of The Heritage Foundation’s 17-member National Coronavirus Recovery Commission. The panel is working to provide recommendations to federal, state, and local governments, as well as to the private sector.

“I look forward to working with the administration to help move prudently toward getting Americans’ lives back to normal,” she added.

Vice President Mike Pence said the phased approach will focus on preventing recurrence of the coronavirus in states where it has declined.

“There is a focus in the president’s new guidelines on the most vulnerable,” Pence said. “We made this very clear to the governors today. These new guidelines for opening up America again can be implemented on a statewide basis or on a county-by-county basis.”

“The predominant and completely driving element that we put into this was the safety and the health of the American public,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who also serves on the White House’s coronavirus task force.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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China Keeps Suppressing Religion While Squelching Truth About COVID-19

RELATED VIDEO: Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

America’s Pyrrhic Victory

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In the end, we’ll see this pandemic wasn’t Armageddon after all. It was merely, as Fauci himself admitted, a bad flu, as we do get from time to time. But one of the patients who lies dying is America.

An unintended consequence of my years of reading Agatha Christie mysteries is that I learned how to separate the red herrings from the salient facts hiding in plain sight, which are always the key to solving the puzzle. Admittedly, the queen of the mystery novel often outsmarted me, as many times her chief detective Hercule Poirot conducted his denouement before I’d figured out who done it; nevertheless, I learned quite a bit from his exemplary method. And I’m going to attempt to use it now with respect to the unprecedented situation in America today.

Let’s begin with the premise that we know almost nothing with any certainty about the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. We don’t know with certainty how it began, or whether it occurred in nature or was created in a lab. There is also great confusion and uncertainty regarding how cases are confirmed, and whether the number of deaths being reported in Italy and in the U.S., at any rate—since we can trust nothing coming out of Communist China—are accurate, since co-morbidities are generally not being factored in.  In addition, many assert the tests themselves are woefully inaccurate, producing both false positives and false negatives. Furthermore, last week the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent American hospitals a new directive to count COVID-19 as the cause of death even if it is merely “suspected” when a patient dies in the hospital. According to the directive, signed by Secretary Alex Azar, they are required to list: “Number of patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 who died in the hospital, or any overflow location on the date for which you are reporting.” (Italics mine).

So, what do we actually know for certain?

We know that the mainstream media has churned up enormous fear over the Wuhan flu, aka COVID-19. In fact, we can’t escape the ubiquitous picture of that spiky red ball that is out to get us. Does it strike you as odd that we were never on such intimate terms with any virus before? Apparently, none of them merited an artist’s rendition, let alone a fraction of the publicity this infinitesimal critter has amassed. If there were a virus Hall of Fame, we know who’d be in pride of place. We also know who can promote such stardom or notoriety overnight: our echo-chamber media propagandizers.

Truth be told, the media has not had such a field day counting up dead bodies since the war in Vietnam. Even the President is calling this flu epidemic a “war.” So we know there is a huge media campaign to impress us with the danger presented by this virus which is hyped as if it were the Black Death.

Turns out that COVID -19 is far less deadly than many other coronaviruses

Trouble is, the ballyhoo doesn’t fit the reality. Turns out that COVID -19 is far less deadly than many other coronaviruses have been, including SARS, MERS and Ebola, with their death rates of 20-40%, or the Avian flu with a whopping 60% mortality rate, whereas COVID-19 clocks in at a modest 1% or well below, closer to .1%, depending on whose data you trust.

In fact, Dr. Anthony Fauci himself affirmed in an article he co-authored for the New England Journal of Medicine’s March 26th issue, thatCOVID -19 is essentially “a severe seasonal influenza,” i.e. a bad flu. Nothing we haven’t seen before in terms of its death rate. Perhaps Fauci quietly published this article a couple of weeks ago to give himself plausible deniability later on when the public may well be clamoring for his scalp.

We also know that, as with the seasonal flu, most who succumb are our frail elderly—which is why we call them “frail.” Even a cold can result in pneumonia and death for our octogenarians. Have we forgotten that people grow old and eventually die of one thing or another? But I digress.

Let us now leave behind all thoughts and conjectures about the Wuhan flu/Chinese Coronavirus/COVID -19 pandemic, as if it had never occurred. Instead, let’s examine only the resultant facts, the way Poirot does as he separates out stories and fabrications from verifiable information to get at the truth. Let’s regard the reality before us without the distraction of the clangorous, anxiety-producing reports that are filling the airwaves.

Here then, are the facts stripped of all narrative: In America today, our Constitution and our Constitutional rights have been suspended. Our entire economy has been shut down. Schools have been closed.

Here then, are the facts stripped of all narrative

Churches and synagogues have been closed. A pastor was arrested for holding a church service in this country which was founded upon religious freedom. People are forbidden to congregate not only for religious worship, but even for their own weddings, bar mitzvahs, baptisms, and funerals, let alone birthday or anniversary celebrations.  Many states are under lockdowns in which you can be fined and/or arrested for leaving your home for an “unnecessary”  purpose. Public parks have been closed off to the very public they were intended for. Small businesses, the lifeblood of America and of our middle class, are dying in plain sight—many shutting their doors for good as the shutdown drags on.

Americans, in arguably the foremost of all first-world countries, suddenly can’t find toilet paper. And for weeks now, under draconian lockdowns in nearly every state, you can’t get a fast food hamburger, let alone sit down to a medium rare ribeye or grilled salmon at your favorite local restaurant; in many places you can’t get your pants hemmed or your dress dry-cleaned; you can’t get your teeth cleaned or cavities filled; you can’t get a haircut, manicure, pedicure, or a hip replacement, as these are all deemed “non-essential.”

By the way, did you ever stop to wonder just who is determining what is “non-essential”?  Funny, I don’t remember voting on this. When exactly did we surrender all power over our lives in the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Our men are humiliated and subdued, our women demoralized, and our children traumatized. But none of this is due to the Chinese coronavirus. Rather it is due to dictatorial governmental edicts, i.e. tyranny—exactly the kind of abuses that led to the American Revolution in the first place. On second thought, no, not exactly—the current abuses are much, much worse.

Who is determining what is “non-essential”?

Note also that all “large” gatherings are forbidden. This includes football games, baseball games, concerts, live theatre, movie theatres, the opera, ballet, symphony, and, oh yes, Trump rallies.

In our culture that venerates expertise, the prevailing experts have given us their sage advice: kiss America goodbye, and go wash your hands.

Now let’s dig deeper by lining up a few key facts completely stripped of the scary pandemic narrative. This is the point when Poirot would be asking “Cui bono?” Who stands to gain?

Almost overnight the burgeoning Trump economy has been trashed. All the amazing job gains have vanished and we’re moving more and more into the red, as unemployment soars. Many of these job losses will not be magically restored once the economy is turned back on.

Similarly, the gains in the stock market that had instilled hope and enthusiasm and renewed consumer confidence in America have now been summarily wiped out.

And the increasingly popular Trump rallies, all but guaranteed to help carry this President to a landslide victory in November while making any Democrat’s rallies look pathetic by comparison, have been swept off the map.

Add to that the fact that President Trump, albeit practically at knife-point, signed the biggest bailout in American history, which makes him responsible for adding trillions to our national debt, though up till now he prided himself on trimming wasteful spending.

Do you begin to see a pattern here?

Do you begin to see a pattern here?

At last we are poised to discover “who done it,” and as Agatha Christie mystery fans have learned to expect, we’re about to be shocked by the revelation. As in many of her finest tales, this denouement involves not just a single culprit, but the stealthy employment of accomplices you’d never have suspected.

So, without further ado, Mesdames et Messieurs, let’s proceed.

Largely obscured by the hysteria surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, lies a truly audacious plan. A plan that could not have been perpetrated without the collusion of the media and the UN’s World Health Organization, among other players. This colossal undertaking partakes of Goebbels’ “Big Lie” phenomenon: manipulation on this scale is so preposterous that people just can’t believe anyone would attempt it. Yes, the virus is real. But virtually everything created around it has been orchestrated and scripted—to serve a purpose.

So who are the culprits? They should be familiar to us by now, as they are the same enemies of America who seek to turn our nation into a Socialist dystopia; they are the ones bent on removing Trump because he stands in their way. They tried six ways to Sunday to take him down, but nothing worked—until now. They can be grouped together as a consortium of America-hating globalists, Leftists, Democrats, Progressives, RINOs, and powerful New World Order zealots, who have now gotten precisely what they wanted. Even if the nationwide shutdown were to end tomorrow, they would have succeeded in turning America into a mirror image of Communist China for at least a few weeks. They know it can be done. They know how to do it. They just did.

They have succeeded in jettisoning President Trump’s 3½ unprecedentedly successful years in office, and have tricked him into conspiring in what may turn out to be his own and America’s demise.

Now, do you still want to talk about the virus and whether it came from bats?

Do you want to talk about test kits, or “flattening the curve”?

Look around you. Look at our desolate downtowns, empty streets, shuttered stores—look at the sad eyes of your fellow citizens above their pathetically masked faces. This is the reality. The purpose of the media’s incessant fear-mongering as they gleefully trumpet “skyrocketing” new cases of the virus, is just to distract you from grasping the tragedy unfolding all around us.

In the end, we’ll see this pandemic wasn’t Armageddon after all. It was merely, as Fauci himself admitted, a bad flu, as we do get from time to time.

But one of the patients who lies dying is America.

And I fear that nothing short of Divine intervention can bring her back.

© All rights reserved.

Trump Pulls WHO Funding, Says Organization ‘Must Be Held Accountable’ [Video]

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President Donald Trump made it official Tuesday that the administration was halting money to the World Health Organization, the international body that said in January that COVID-19 could not be spread by human-to-human contact, and praised China’s response to the virus.

“Our countries are now experiencing—look all over the world—tremendous death and economic devastation because those tasked with protecting us by being truthful and transparent failed to do so,” Trump said. “It would have been so easy to be truthful. And so much death has been caused by their mistakes. We will continue to engage with the WHO to see if it can make meaningful reforms.”

Trump said funding will be stopped during a review of the organization.

“American taxpayers provide between $400 million and $500 million per year to the WHO. In contrast, China contributes roughly $40 million per year, and even less,” Trump said. “As the organization’s leading sponsor, the United States has a duty to insist on full accountability.”

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

“One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations,” Trump continued, adding, “The WHO’s attack on travel restrictions put political correctness above lifesaving measures.”

The United States contributes 14.7% of the World Health Organization’s $38 billion budget, while China contributes only 0.21%, according to WHO’s numbers.

According to WHO, contributions from the U.S. government, American citizens, and U.S.-based charities make up 76% of all voluntary contributions to the organization. That amounted to $945.6 million from 2016 to 2017.

Congress authorized about $123 million in taxpayer funding for WHO in the last fiscal year, and Trump’s fiscal 2021 budget request proposed to reduce funding to about $58 million.

The announced review by the administration also comes as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has begun an investigation into the WHO.

“The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet, and share information in a timely and transparent fashion,” Trump said from the Rose Garden during the daily press briefing. “The world depends on the WHO to work with countries to ensure that accurate information about international health threats is shared in a timely manner. If it’s not, to independently tell the world the truth about what is happening.”

Trump also faulted the WHO for delays in declaring a public health emergency that he said “cost valuable time, tremendous amounts of time.”

On Jan. 14, WHO unquestioningly circulated China’s official talking points in a tweet, saying, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.”

“The WHO failed to investigate credible reports in Wuhan that conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts,” Trump said. “There was credible information to suspect human-to-human transmission in December 2019, which should have spurred the WHO to investigate immediately. Through the middle of January, it parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that there was not human-to-human contact despite reports and clear evidence to the contrary.”

Brett D. Schaefer, a fellow in international regulatory affairs at The Heritage Foundation, contends this may not be the best time to cut funding for the WHO, and worse yet, could make it more difficult to hold the organization accountable.

“Instead of ending funding during the current crisis, the U.S. should condition future funding to specific actions by the World Health Organization,” Schaefer wrote in an op-ed for The Daily Signal.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said Jan. 30 that “China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.”

China backed Tedros in May 2017 when he ran for the top job at the World Health Organization.

During the press conference, Trump also announced the formation of Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups, which would involve bringing together leaders from different sectors of the economy and American life.

“We have a list of people that I’ll be speaking to over the next very short period of time, in many cases, tomorrow,” Trump said.

Kay C. James, president of The Heritage Foundation, is among those in the thought leaders group, which also includes former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and John Allison, former president and CEO of the Cato Institute. Others involved include top executives from health care, retail, sports, tech, and agriculture, among other sectors.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

RELATED ARTICLES:

In Sweden, There’s No COVID-19 Lockdown. Here Are 4 Things to Know.

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Michiganders Protest Gov. Whitmer’s Draconian COVID-19 Stay-At-Home Orders

RELATED VIDEO: War Against Corona – The Opposite of War.

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

PODCAST: The Dark Reality of China’s COVID-19 Cover-Up

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China discovered the new coronavirus in December, but chose to hide it from the world. Now nearly every nation on earth is paying the price for China’s actions.

Olivia Enos, a senior policy analyst in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation, joins the show to discuss her recent report, “How the Chinese Government Undermined the Chinese People’s Attempts to Prevent and Respond to COVID-19.“

Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.

The Daily Signal Podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Virginia Allen: When the coronavirus was first discovered in Wuhan, China, the Chinese Communist Party tried to cover it up. Doctors who were treating patients with the virus and citizen journalists who [were] trying to report on the situation were silenced.

China has restricted aid from foreign humanitarian organizations and the limits they place on free speech and nonprofits within their own nation have restricted efforts to fight COVID-19 quickly.

Here with us to break down China’s role in covering up the coronavirus and what America’s response should be is Heritage Foundation senior policy analyst in the Asian Study Center Olivia Enos. Olivia, thanks so much for being here.

Olivia Enos: Thank you so much for having me, Virginia.

Allen: Now, you have just completed and published a wonderful long report titled “How the Chinese Government Undermined the Chinese People’s Attempts to Prevent and Respond to COVID-19.”

And Dr. Li [Wenliang], we’ve heard a little bit about him. He was the initial doctor that discovered COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. What do we know about Dr. Li in his attempts to inform the world of, really, the seriousness of this virus?

Enos: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s just amazing that China essentially took a classic play out of its playbook this time around by starting to silence whistleblowers like Dr. Li, as you mentioned.

Dr. Li started to see an emergence of a pneumonia-like virus and he really just sort of sounded the alarm on it, and especially given that it was so infectious. He was called in for questioning, forced to recant what he had said about it.

Unfortunately, Dr. Li actually ended up dying of coronavirus himself. But he was sounding the alarm all the way back in December and we really didn’t start hearing reports emerging from China until January.

So I think that there was a lot of lost time due to the fact that Dr. Li was silenced from the start.

And not only did you have Dr. Li and other whistleblowers being told to stay quiet on this, but you also saw China and the Chinese Communist Party saying, “We’re not going to allow civil society to be involved in a really major way. Instead, we want the Chinese Communist Party to be the hero, the primary agent that is acting to respond to this virus and we want to sideline the Chinese people and the civil society,” that really could have helped in responding, especially early on.

Allen: Olivia, I think for so many of us in our Western culture this is just so bizarre for us to hear, that a medical professional would come to the government and say, “I have real concerns about this,” and their response would be total cover-up.

Could you just explain a little bit about how the Chinese really operate and is this behavior really in alignment with what we have seen from China’s party before?

Enos: I think this is very typical and, in fact, when I first started researching for the paper, I didn’t realize that the silencing of whistleblowers in the context of a major health crisis had actually happened previously.

There was a similar incident where a doctor sounded the alarm during the SARS epidemic in 2002 and 2003, and he started calling into question some of the government’s reporting on this and he started to really let the world know that actually the rate of infection and the number of deaths due to then SARS was much higher than what the Chinese government was reporting.

So this is very typical of China and the Chinese Communist Party likes to maintain a tight grip on information.

This is why they have their famous firewalls that restrict people’s access to different resources on the internet.

It’s why the Chinese government has consistently engaged in tamping down on religious expression, whether somebody is a Christian or Muslim or a Falun Gong practitioner or a Buddhist or any faith, because they see it as threatening to the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s also the reason why they have historically tamped down on civil society.

So a lot of the restrictions that were outlined in the paper, for example, the Chinese government preferring, it’s really a misnomer, but they call them government-affiliated nongovernmental organizations, as the only ones that can respond really just shows and demonstrates to us that the Chinese government is willing to sideline civil society.

It’s really, I think, at the end of the day, because the Chinese Communist Party prioritizes its own image and its own well-being above the well-being and health of the Chinese people. And I think we’re seeing that play out during COVID-19.

Allen: Yeah. So, obviously, within China there are restrictions on those “nonprofits” that are allowed to operate, and like you say, they’re really kind of tied to the government and it’s not at all what we would typically think of a nonprofit. What about outside organizations, I mean, groups like Doctors Without Borders, have they been allowed into China?

Enos: By and large any sort of aid and assistance from international NGOs has been turned away and it’s been done in favor of the Chinese NGOs like the Chinese Red Cross.

The Chinese Red Cross actually has a very checkered history but even in more recent days they’ve really fallen under fire for misappropriating the aid that they received because there are documented cases by The New York Times of them essentially taking aid that was supposed to go to the Chinese people and instead giving it to the Chinese government.

So I think you really are seeing the Chinese government hamstringing its own response by saying, “No, we’re not going to allow other NGOs in.”

Just for context, in the U.S., faith-based organizations, faith-based universities or health care systems or other NGOs, they contribute $303 million annually to the economy.

This is huge in terms of total assistance and this is what the Chinese government is missing out on when they say that faith-based organizations aren’t allowed to be represented in China.

Imagine what it would be like if China itself had its own domestic faith-based and, of course, non-faith-based civil society actors that were able to respond on such a massive scale.

Allen: Let’s go back for a second and just talk a little bit about when this first started in China and those initial discoveries that the Chinese people were making.

We know in addition to medical professionals that there were also some citizen journalists that really caught wind of this and they tried to warn the Chinese people and the rest of the world what was going on, what happened to those journalists?

Enos: You’re absolutely right. There were a lot of individuals [that] were, in some cases, human rights lawyers-turn[ed]-citizen journalists. In some cases, businessmen-turned-citizen journalists or just ordinary Chinese.

What we started to see was that the Chinese Communist Party was essentially making them disappear. And the excuse would be that they were going into forced quarantine due to COVID-19, but the forced quarantine happened several months ago and the quarantine time period is 15 to 21 days, typically. And they have not yet reappeared, as far as I can tell.

So this is very typical of China. You see critics often being silenced in one way or another, whether that’s them being subjected to reeducation through forced labor, them actually being killed. We’ve had individuals who’ve actually visited The Heritage Foundation in the past who returned to China and ended up dying like a week and a half later.

And these are very well-known advocates for freedom, for faith-based organizations. Some of them were Christian. So it’s really alarming to see that happening.

But, of course, the most massive scale that we’ve really seen is in more recent years, the rapid collectivization of Uighur Muslims to the tune of 1 to 3 million that are currently held in political reeducation facilities today where they’re subjected to indoctrination, where they’re forced to rescind a lot of what they believe, forced to learn Mandarin, and in some cases tortured or required to engage in forced labor.

So really what we’re getting is this picture of a Chinese Communist Party that does not respect civil liberties, that does not respect individual freedom. And we should be very concerned.

Allen: We also know of a man, he was a Christian by the name of Sun Feng, and in the midst of all this information starting to come out in China, he just sent a message to some friends of his and said, “Hey, we should really all begin to pray and fast that this virus is ended.” What happened to Sun Feng?

Enos: Yeah, it’s a really remarkable story. Mr. Sun was actually called in for questioning and was told that he was called into questioning for offering up “unauthorized prayers.”

I think this example really highlights the fact that the Chinese Communist Party invades into the most private and closely held beliefs of individuals.

I mean, this is a behavior that does not harm anyone, to engage in prayer and fasting, but the Chinese Communist Party sees it as a threat because they’re really threatened by anything that might be perceived as an authority that individuals might give their allegiance to that is not the party.

So I think this is, obviously, very concerning but also typical of China where you do see the targeting of people simply for having faith.

Allen: Yeah. Wow. And one of the ways that now we’re seeing that China is trying to control the virus and the spread is through an app called Alipay Health Code that actually ranks someone in China on how likely they are to be a carrier or to have been exposed to the virus. But there are a lot of concerns about this app and just that it’s really highly invasive of people’s personal privacy.

Can you explain just kind of what the app is, what it does, and why it poses privacy threats?

Enos: Yeah. The Alipay Health Code app is a huge invasion of privacy. It essentially gets downloaded onto your phone and it has the ability to communicate with local law enforcement by sharing very personal data, including your GPS location. I think it actually has the ability to register your temperature too. It definitely tracks transactions.

But it’s incredibly invasive and it does share that private information with law enforcement, and the individual’s ranking—the different color codes, as you mentioned, that people receive—can be affected by whether or not you’re a member of the Chinese Communist Party, which should have absolutely nothing to do with your susceptibility or likelihood of contracting COVID-19, it’s just been really remarkable to watch that.

And especially to see the rollout of this app against the backdrop of the Chinese government’s more sinister use of surveillance technology, which we know is one of the ways that they were able to rapidly collectivize the 1 to 3 million Uighur that are currently held in political reeducation facilities today.

So even though the Chinese government or maybe even other people who are looking at, well, how do we develop the smartest or most effective response to the coronavirus might say, “Well, why don’t we deploy surveillance technology?”

But I think given China’s sinister use of it and the lack of rule of law and accountability that exists in China, I think this is a pretty concerning use of the technology and definitely should lead people to ask questions like, how will this be used once COVID-19 is over?

Allen: Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s scary. So, in other words, it could be an app that the Chinese government kind of decides, “Oh, actually, this is helpful. We’ve liked collecting this information. We’re just going to keep doing it.”

Enos: Exactly. And then they can use it to target their political opposition. And, as we talked about before, just the way that they so quickly pulled citizen journalists aside and put them in forced quarantine or the way that they responded to Dr. Li, it’s just abundantly clear that that surveillance technology can be used to silence their opposition and that they’re not afraid to use that.

Allen: Wow. So considering the way that China has really handled this virus and the whole situation in trying to cover it up, do you think that America should be taking actions right now to really reprimand China for their actions? And if so, what would that look like?

Enos: Well, I think that … the U.S. definitely should call upon China to respect freedom of speech, respect civil society’s ability to act and respond, and, of course, respect freedom of religion.

And that’s something that we have been doing to press on China for a long time now, especially on requesting things like loosening the restrictions for civil society organizations to be able to register, etc.

But I think in the midst of COVID-19 we have an especial amount of leverage in order to press for those because the U.S. is the top single country donor to China in the midst of the coronavirus. We’ve donated, as of mid-March, $1.3 billion to try to alleviate the suffering of the Chinese people.

So, in addition to requesting that China respects these rights and pushing on them in diplomatic engagements with them, I think that we should also be requesting access for the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] because if the Chinese Communist Party isn’t willing to put their best foot forward in order to help the Chinese people, then perhaps the U.S. government can.

I think that beyond that we need to communicate to Chinese government officials that the U.S. is watching and that we have tools in our tool box, Treasury specifically, that would enable us to target individuals on human rights and corruption grounds.

So while we may not sanction them only for things that they’ve done during their coronavirus response, we will definitely be looking for ways to target individuals who are engaging in religious freedom violations and suppressing freedom of speech as a general habit.

Allen: Are you hopeful that we might see China kind of take from this situation, “Oh, wow, there are real benefits to being a freer society, maybe we should kind of try that out”? Is there really any possibility that we might see them loosen anything or do you think that’s highly unlikely?

Enos: I think we can always hold out hope, but I do think it’s unlikely, especially under President Xi Jinping’s leadership where we’ve just seen almost a rapid return to almost an old version of what China used to be like during the Cultural Revolution.

And I think this is especially vivid, as I mentioned before, in the case of their treatment of the Uighur, but certainly true of Tibetan Buddhists, in their crackdown on Christians.

I really think that Xi Jinping has tried to consolidate power and so I’m skeptical of any rapid changes, but I think the U.S. government has long been out there actively promoting freedom, not just for folks in the U.S. but for people all over the globe.

And I think this is a really unique time in the midst of a global pandemic for Americans to demonstrate the resiliency of a democracy.

I mean, one of the most beautiful things—even in going through suffering and being in our social distancing, pseudo quarantine states ourselves—has been seeing average Americans step up. Whether that’s people offering to go and get groceries for their neighbors or churches being willing to give up their tithe or civil society organizations that are making sure that people have masks.

I think that even if we can’t convince the Chinese government to change its ways, at the end of COVID-19, if the Chinese people know that average Americans care about them and want what’s best for them and want them to get healthy and recover from COVID-19, I think we will consider that a success.

Allen: Olivia, thank you so much for your time today, just really appreciate your perspective and all of the research that you have done and just sharing that information with us today.

Enos: Well, thank you so much for having me on, Virginia.

PODCAST BY

Virginia Allen

Virginia Allen is a news producer for The Daily Signal. She is the co-host of The Daily Signal Podcast and Problematic Women. Send an email to Virginia. Twitter: @Virginia_Allen5.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: The Vortex — What Are We Learning? Actually, a lot.

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TRANSCRIPT

So amidst all the precautions and closures and end-of-the-world-type hysteria, what have we learned, or what are we in fact learning?

Well, actually a lot. Much in fact is being exposed — really exposed — politically, culturally and ecclesiastically. Politically, however deep any of us thought the swamp was, we have learned that we were wrong. It’s actually much deeper than we ever thought.

The “Get Trump” brigades are out in full force, with the Marxist media trying anything they can related to tying Donald Trump to COVID-19. They are trying to dream up nicknames to pin the virus to Trump, calling it “CoronaTrump,” “VirusTrump,” and a bunch of other stupid monikers.

So far, none of them seem to be sticking. But it’s blindingly obvious why they are doing it — so when November comes around, Trump loses. They hate him for being pro-life and, in their incorrect view, they see him as stacking the courts to dump abortion. So let’s blame him for the virus.

Likewise, we see the complete, unrestrained response of the media to help whip up all this hysteria, causing people to run on grocery stores, for example.

No one is saying there isn’t a danger, or that people shouldn’t take reasonable precautions. But to keep broadcasting non-stop the latest death numbers — updating them non-stop — it’s reminiscent of the days of the Vietnam War and the nightly network newscasts.

But for Catholics in particular, what we are learning — or rather, confirming — is what we have seen and known for quite a while: Too few bishops have any supernatural faith, or if they do, it’s only a tiny amount, completely insufficient for the sacred office they hold.

Look, Your Excellencies, either this is the Armageddon experience you are all portraying it as, or it’s not. If it is, where are all your spiritual aids? Why aren’t each of you doing daily livestreaming of praying the Rosary — teaching your flock the Rosary — comforting your sheep by sitting in front of a webcam in a studio and reading something of the lives of the saints?

Shall we go on?

Our guess is while you have shut up nearly all the churches, that you haven’t closed down the legal teams and the bean-counters in your employ. For once, publish a letter saying you’re closing the chanceries and not the churches. Are you using the opportunity to speak to so many of your flock locked up behind closed doors — to teach them the catechism that you have been so neglectful about for the past half-century?

Almost every day in this crisis, Church Militant is sending out a spiritual reinforcement e-mail with various assists to remind people about fortitude and perseverance and prayer. You can easily follow suit, you know, Your Excellencies. It’s not that hard, especially since you don’t really have anything else to do until this comes to an end.

Most of you are old, out-of-shape men with probably a variety of underlying health issues. Are you all self-quarantined?

Have you canceled your meetings with millionaire donors whom you schmooze with? How about the CPAs and the lawyers and the marketing guys running your expensive multi-zillion-dollar fundraising campaigns where you lie to the faithful and fleece the flock? Canceled any of those activities, have you? Yeah, we didn’t think so.

Before the parish doors were barred shut, many of you took the opportunity to forbid Holy Communion on the tongue. At last, many of them thought, here’s a chance to kill that medieval practice and blame it on something out of our control.

None of them have confessed that the practice of receiving in the hand, drinking from the cup and laypeople distributing Holy Communion was smuggled into the Church 500 years ago during the Protestant revolt, precisely as a way to kill belief in the Real Presence.

See, the very first Protestants were actually baptized Catholics, who did at one time believe in the Real Presence. But the Protestant revolutionaries had to knock that belief out of the box. So they started these practices to weaken the faith of those first former Catholics.

And the same thing has happened here in the United States, as well as other parts of the world, with the move by various bishops starting in the 1970s to install the disrespectful practice and embed it in the minds of the faithful.

It’s not a big shock that homosexual satanist Cdl. Joseph Bernardin was the one leading the charge nationally — a topic Church Militant covered extensively in our series, Case Files, one of our Church Militant Premiums programs — where we get into the nitty-gritty of how this all came about. Click on the link to see how it all played out.

[Transcript unavailable]

How many bishops are using the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to bone up on all this — to learn the real history of why their dioceses are falling apart? Seventy percent of Catholics don’t believe in the Real Presence, so all this could be easily viewed as Our Lord withdrawing access to Himself — just saying.

If the New York Times can openly speculate — recklessly — that 270 million Americans are going to be infected, then why can’t we posit a more sober and serious reflection?

The Church is in a state of disrepair, broken down by decades of lying, cheating, greedy, homosexual, cover-up bishops who themselves don’t seem to believe in the Real Presence, judging by their cowardice to deal with heretics on the political scene.

So just as God withdrew Himself from the temple in the Old Testament, who’s to say He isn’t doing something similar right now — trying to send a message this Lent?

Whether the bishops have any supernatural faith left to be able to read the signs of the times, well, many of these men vote for and support the Party of Death. You do the math.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

After Four Years of Democrat Treachery, I Smell a Corona Virus Rat

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Test time boys and girls. Hint…there is only one right answer––if you don’t get it right, you flunk! And so does America!

Which person, foreign or American, predicted three years ago, in 2017, that President Trump would be challenged by a “surprise global-disease outbreak”?

  • Enemy of Trump Cong. Adam Schiff (D-CA)
  • Enemy of Trump House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
  • Crazed enemy of Trump Hillary Clinton

Answer: None of the above. It was Dr. Anthony Fauci!

Which person, foreign or American, said that the collapse of the American capitalist system as a result of the corona virus plague would be “inconvenient”?

  • American adversary Xi Jing Ping, President of China
  • American adversary Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran
  • American adversary Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey

Answer: None of the above. It was Dr. Anthony Fauci!

Which person, foreign or American, said on January 21, 2020, that the corona virus “was not a major threat to the United States” and on January 23rd downplayed the virus’ potential impact on the U.S?

  • U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams
  • TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz
  • The entire staff of the NY Times

Answer: None of the above. It was Dr. Anthony Fauci!

Which person, foreign or American, wrote de facto love letters (actually e-mails) to Hillary Clinton through her lawyer Cheryl Mills, saying that he loved ole Hillary “more than ever”?

MODEL THIS!

I could go on and on, but you get the point, which is that the “experts” are wrong or partisan or biased so often that healthy skepticism is warranted about everything they say.

Examples abound. Here is just a very very small sample:

  • The DES disaster to prevent miscarriages in the 1950s-‘60s that resulted in devastating cancers of the reproductive organs of children.
  • The tragedy of Thalidomide in the ‘60s to calm the nerves, that resulted in grotesque deformities in children born of pregnant mothers who took the pills.
  • The Dalkon Shield intrauterine birth-control devices of the 1970s were taken off the market for causing sterility and pelvic inflammatory disease.
  • Here are some of the drugs taken off the market over the years that caused horrific side effects or death after widespread recommendations by doctors.
  • And let’s not forget Vioxx.

Speaking of the people who occupy the podium with President Trump every day, there is the impressively credentialed Dr. Deborah Birx who apparently thinks she is still in a laboratory with rats on a treadmill and speaking with her research contemporaries instead of the American public when she intones about:

  • “the level of granularity”
  • “triangulation”
  • “a big bolus”
  • “logo-rhythmic bias”
  • “mitigation”

I say to the good doctor the same thing I’ve said to every lawyer I’ve ever consulted: English please!

Like Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx delivers doomsday messages

Like Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx delivers doomsday messages––and graphs––in dulcet tones. While Dr. Fauci predicts 100,000 to 200,000 deaths in the most dispassionate, clinical way, Dr. Birx shows us graphs with terrifying peaks of disease incidences and mortality and then “hopes” they don’t happen.

But in spite of the cozy embrace of Dr. Birx by far-left TV and print media whores like the NY Times, Vanity Fair, the list is endless, questions––unanswered questions––abound.

Is it a coincidence that the model Dr. Birx uses to assess the progress of the virus––the IHME, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation––is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and that she, Dr. Birx, sits on the board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Global Fund and has since 2014.

Is there a hidden agenda about the fact that the IMHE has used the hot spots of New York and New Jersey to project the spread of the virus in the rest of the country, resulting in a shut-down of our economy and massive unemployment?

There is good reason to question the IHME model, to the degree that writer and publisher of CanadaFreePress.com, Judi McLeod, has exhorted President Trump to Save the Western World by booting Dr. Birx off the Corona Virus Task Force! She cites an April 2nd Gateway Pundit story written by Cristina Laila revealing that the model the White House is relying on is “complete garbage.”

  • “It Predicted 121,000 Americans Hospitalized; actual number: 31,142.
  • “It predicted 1,716 people in Texas would be hospitalized; actual number: 196.
  • “It predicted 2,777 people in Georgia would be hospitalized: actual number: 952.
  • In Virginia, predicted 607––actual number 305.
  • In Tennessee, predicted 2,214––actual number 200.
  • In New York, predicted 50,962––actual number 18,368.

Data is showing that this may be one great big mistake or hoax

According to writer Lee Cary, in his follow-the-money, must-read exposé of the corona virus and all its players––Fauci, Birx, the Clintons, Bill Gates, et al: “Today, two physicians essentially control the $22 trillion U.S. economy…It is time for President Trump to utilize his uncommon  common sense and put a stop to this China-orchestrated full-scale attack on our country.”

Indeed….as Jim Hoft reports, the total U.S. deaths in March 2020 were actually down 15 percent from the average of the prior four years.

“What is going on?” Hoft asks. “After shutting down the government and killing the greatest economy in the world due to deathly estimates from specialists on the coronavirus, the data is showing that this may be one great big mistake or hoax.”

For perspective:

I CAN HEAR IT NOW….

“How dare you question the integrity and motives of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, or suggest that their associations and political agendas are fishy, or imply that the institutions and experts they cite as unassailable vis-à-vis the coronavirus––the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO)––are themselves tainted by partisan politics?

Well, thanks to the Democrats themselves, the answer to those questions are easy. Now we know that from 2009 to 2016, the man who occupied the Oval Office weaponized and politicized America’s most trusted institutions, not only defiling and disrespecting the Resolute Desk with his dirty shoes, but converting our most trusted institutions from departments dedicated to justice, law enforcement, national security, homeland security and matters of state into far-left operations designed to bring down America. Here is the short list:

THE DOOMSDAY SET

  • Think John Brennan of the Central Intelligence Agency.
  • Think James Comey of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
  • Think Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch of the Justice Department.
  • Think Hillary Clinton of the State Department.

So no surprise that the guy with his feet on the Resolute Desk also contaminated the CDC and further befouled the already putrid cesspool on 1st Avenue in NY City––the United Nations….and its reliably hate-America satellite, WHO.

Speaking of which, looky here: “The CDC openly admits that it is fudging the COVID-19 death figures,” reports Matthew Vadum. Quoting Dr. Annie Bukacek, M.D. and expert on death certificates, “The CDC counts both true COVID-19 cases and speculative guesses of COVID-19 the same…they automatically overestimate the real death numbers, by their own admission.”

Vadum said the same is true of the lying leftists who run New York City and NY State, Mayor Bill Di Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo respectively.

Did you ever see a liberal smile…or laugh out loud? I can actually cite on one hand the times I’ve witnessed such a phenomenon. The reason is that this species seems to have extremely high anxiety levels. They worry about everything and they buy everything that the Chicken Little doomsday purveyors sell.

In 1968, Stanford Univ. Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife Anne wrote “The Population Bomb” which predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation. Liberals bought it.

In the 1970s, the “experts” said that global cooling would soon usher in a new ice age. Liberals bought it.

We all know about the ongoing fetish liberals have with global warming––that made a lot of quacks like Al Gore rich––same as the cooling fetish.

Then there was the scare over running out of food, natural resources like copper, and oil. Liberals bought it.

Now we have liberals––including the experts from Mr. Obama’s CDC and WHO, as well as Drs. Fauci and Birx and the entire leftwing media––wringing their hands and tearing their hair out, absolutely convinced that unless the entire world and all their economies shut down, humanity is doomed.

Well, that’s not the real reason they’re in such visible throes of hysteria. The real reason is because they thought and hoped and chanted to the earth goddess Gaia that if they were able to destroy the best economy and highest employment in world history––among President Trump’s many astounding accomplishments––his reelection would be doomed.

The problem is––liberals are always wrong! They’ve always been wrong! And to their everlasting horror, they were wrong about the presidential election that predicted a Hillary victory right up to 8 p.m. on November 8, 2016.

Then this Democrat cabal of America haters tried to destroy the president with the Russian hoax and the Stormy Daniels hoax and the Ukraine hoax and the impeachment hoax and all of them failed miserably.

So now their nemesis is in power and in charge, driving them even more clinically insane than they are ordinarily.

In mere weeks, President Trump marshals national and international assistance from industry, organizations, political factions, and individuals that would qualify him for Five-Star General status. That is not hyperbole….this is a war, as he says, against an invisible enemy!

He touts the excellent results he’s heard about––which have since been widely affirmed––in treating coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine, in combination with Azithromycin and zinc, and the experts on his task force talk about the constipated process of clinical trials and vaccine development that take years.

He embodies the qualities of an optimist, realistic about the present but genuinely positive about the future, and the doomsday liberals resort to their old standbys––gratuitous insults and popping their anti-depressant and anti-anxiety fixes.

He is presented with the kind of daunting existential challenges the likes of which George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Harry Truman faced, and he addresses them with executive confidence, a lifetime of success, and a burning love for America the Beautiful.

Thank you, Mr. President. With you at the helm, Americans are the luckiest people on the earth!

© All rights reserved.

BOOK REVIEW: The Powerful Case for Free Market Healthcare

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The power grab from leftists during this pandemic requires an answer. Dr. Julio Gonzalez provides it in his new book, The Case for Free Market Healthcare, that builds the powerful case for free market healthcare to solve our challenges from drug costs to available physicians to lower costs.

An orthopaedic surgeon, attorney, former Florida Representative and author of The Federalist Pages, Dr. Gonzalez draws on his rich and varied background and meticulous style to deliver one of the strongest and convincing cases ever for the free market available.  In this new book, you don’t just get the answers, you get the full background and reasoned case for why the free market is indisputably the best solution for healthcare delivery.  In Dr. Gonzalez’s telling, it is not enough for the reader to know that free market healthcare is the best option, he also wants you to know why in such a way that you can not only understand it, you can use it to convince others.

Personally, I’m hoping that policymakers will take the time to sit down and read this book. My gosh, it would enlighten them and tamp down some terrible ideas being discussed. The timing could hardly be more relevant.

Dr. Gonzalez makes the case for health savings accounts; not the meager program politicians have created, but a robust one that essentially transfers the power over healthcare back to Americans.  Physician shortages, he discusses opening American opportunities to Americans.  High drug prices? The primary reason for them, Gonzalez demonstrates, is the destruction by Medicare of those very forces that naturally work to keep those prices down. Too much government — not too little.

The drug shortages plaguing America’s healthcare providers? If he hadn’t given you citations that you could easily access from your computer, you wouldn’t believe what he reports.  Epinephrine, lidocaine, bicarbonate, and elemental intravenous antibiotics are just a few examples of medications American hospitals struggle to keep in their stocks.  You wouldn’t know about this dire situation unless you’re a hospital pharmacist, maybe a doctor with hospital privileges as Dr. Gonzalez is — or unless you read it in his book. I sure didn’t.

But it’s in the arena of rationing where The Case for Free Market Healthcare really overwhelms. Of course there are the contextual discussions of outright rationing through mandates and prohibitions like you see in Japan and some of Europe.  But did you know the extent to which government-directed rationing takes place in the United States? In meticulous detail, Gonzalez shows you the myriad of market manipulations the federal government is undertaking to steer you in favor or away from certain treatments to the point of making access to some prohibitive. That is rationing, my friends.

This book is a must-read for anyone caring about the country’s healthcare future. By going through the materials, you will be in a much stronger position to ward off the attacks from the big government left and to recognize why their arguments are so hollow.  It is one of the best reads you can undertake during this time of quarantine — and beyond.

EDITORS NOTE: This Revolutionary Act column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Instagram became young girl’s prison of abuse

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Maria* was 13 years old when she first got Instagram on her phone. She had her parent’s permission because Instagram is rated as appropriate for “Ages 12+.”

She loved sharing photos as well as “liking” and commenting on her friend’s images. She posted about being in Girl Scouts, babysitting her younger brother, and going to the lake with her friends.

It wasn’t long before strange men started reaching out to her in direct messages.

She mostly ignored them. But, one day, a direct message came in from someone who looked young and cute in his profile picture and who he said he went to school in the neighboring town. Maria accepted his direct message request and the two began DMing back and forth every day.

He was interested in learning everything about her, which was flattering, and he soon asked her to be his “girlfriend.” Even though she’d never met him in real life, she agreed because he made her feel loved.

It was shortly after that when he started soliciting her to send him sexually explicit images. At first Maria said no, but he kept asking and began making her feel guilty for saying no. Eventually she relented and sent him some sexually explicit images of herself.

And that day changed everything.

Instagram, the social media app that Maria had been so excited to use and share with her friends, became her virtual prison! 

You see, this “young and cute boy” that Maria had sent her sexually explicit images to was not a boy at all. He was an adult man who promptly used these graphic photos to blackmail Maria.  He threatened to send Maria’s sexually explicit photos to her parents and to all her classmates if she didn’t have sex with him and then with others. Maria felt trapped. Before she knew it she was a victim of sex trafficking and was being sold to one stranger after another.

This went on for three months, while she was still living in her parent’s home, until she finally gathered the courage to tell someone and get help.

No child should ever go through that trauma.

Unfortunately, as more children are spending time online while home from school due to the coronavirus pandemic, many are warning (including the FBI) that children are at increased risk of this kind of online sexual exploitation because there is now more “supply” of children to meet the “demand” of predators.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, law enforcement only had the capacity to rescue a few children at a time and safe houses only had a limited number of beds to help those children recover. Meanwhile exploiters have nearly limitless access to children through social media apps and are therefore able to abuse more girls like Maria than we’ll ever know.

But the National Center on Sexual Exploitation has an aggressive strategy to fight this scourge.

Our strategy is to prevent the abuse of girls like Maria in the first place by demanding and getting critical changes to corporate policies as well as advocating for legislation and best business practices that favor safety above mere profits. We have a long history of success with efforts like these thanks to your generous support, but the rapid advance of technology means our efforts and resources need to expand in kind.

This is your invitation to prevent the abuse and exploitation of a child who is just logging into Instagram for the first time today.

In light of this increased danger for children, we feel emboldened to ask you:

Can you afford a small monthly donation?

Every amount can be used to make a big difference right now. We’ll turn your monthly donation, whatever you can afford, into advocacy with legislators and corporate executives as well as a means for getting crucial information and resources into the hands of parents so they can protect their children.

Will you help children like Maria to survive this crisis?

*Name changed to protect the innocent.

© All rights reserved.

PODCAST: Visit Ground Zero of Virus Response with DHS’s Chad Wolf

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Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf has his hands full with the coronavirus, but there’s one group of people he’s not about to go into disaster relief mode without: clergy. Find out why he made them “essential personnel” as well as the challenges he’s encountered with a full-blown, 50-state emergency.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action podcast is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Can’t Go to Church Amid COVID-19? Faith on Facebook Is Here to Help

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Faith communities all over the world are leveraging technology to stay connected during the coronavirus pandemic. What would have been impossible a decade ago has been made easy today through smartphones and social media platforms.

Facebook recently launched its Faith on Facebook Resource Hub, which is equipped with the tools that pastors, priests, rabbis, and other faith leaders need to connect online with their congregants during the pandemic.

“When this [COVID-19] happened, I realized early on that it was going to be important for us to be really engaged with faith communities, the churches, pastors, and denominations,” Nona Jones, head of faith-based partnerships at Facebook, told The Daily Signal in a recent phone interview.

The Faith on Facebook Resource Hub is designed as a user-friendly toolkit for faith leaders of all ages and backgrounds to learn how to stream church services through Facebook Live; create Groups, where people can share prayer requests or other needs; or create fundraisers for those in need.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

“All of this information was available on our platform, but it was in different places,” Jones said. “What we did is, we just consolidated it into this toolkit. I chose the products that we highlighted because, out of my own experience leading a church and working with other pastors, I realized that those specific products were the ones that would be best-suited to digital discipleship.”

In addition to her job at Facebook, Jones pastors a church with her husband, Tim Jones, called Open Door Ministries in Gainesville, Florida. The resources that appear on the hub are ones that Jones knew would be helpful for most pastors.

She said Facebook hired her about three years ago to lead its faith-based partnerships not “in spite of my faith, but because of it.”

Facebook has long recognized the value faith communities bring to society, Jones explained, adding:

Almost 85% of the world ascribes to a faith tradition. To be a platform that serves almost a third of the world, I think there was just a recognition that in order for us to make sure that people are healthy and whole, we would have to be a place that was enabling them to connect to their faith.

At her own church, Jones and her husband used Facebook recently to host a special prayer week.

“We have a Facebook Group called Open Door Ministries Online. Every morning at about 7 a.m., a post will go up, and it will ask people how we can pray for them. And then at 7 p.m., my husband and I and our children will actually go live, and we will pray for all the requests that were made that day.”

Many other churches and faith groups are using Facebook in similar ways during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Potter’s House of North Dallas in Frisco, Texas, had started a fitness club for their church, Jones said. “When COVID-19 happened, they thought they might have to shut down the fitness classes. But instead, they just started doing them live in their group,” she said.

NewSong Church in Vienna, Virginia, is using Facebook Live not only to stream its service on Sunday, but also to host short times of midday prayer during the week.

“We have seen a tremendous increase in the number of spiritual pages that are going live … sometimes two or three times the increase,” Jones said.

For individuals who might be apprehensive about using the social platform during the coronavirus, Jones said, “I know the idea of using tech can be intimidating but … don’t allow your feelings to keep you from exploring, because it’s actually easier than you might think.”

The many different components of the platform, such as Groups, Facebook Live, and Pages, may sound confusing, but Jones used the analogy of a house to describe how the many components work together to create an effective outreach tool that faith communities can easily begin to leverage.

If you think about Facebook like a house, then you can think of your Page like it’s the front porch of your house. So that is the place where people can see what you are about, what you are up to, but you don’t just want to have a front porch.

You also want to have a living room, the place where people can have conversations, and that is what Facebook Groups is for. You can link up to 250 Groups to your Page.

But between your porch and your living room is a front door, and that is what Facebook Live is. Facebook Live is essentially the door that you open to the living room.

Jones said she has received positive feedback from individuals who have discovered that Facebook is a “way to continue to do what you have always done, and even though you can’t get together in person, you can still be together online.”

COLUMN BY

Virginia Allen

Virginia Allen is a news producer for The Daily Signal. She is the co-host of The Daily Signal Podcast and Problematic Women. Send an email to Virginia. Twitter: @Virginia_Allen5

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Majority of Americans Agree With Trump’s Calling COVID-19 ‘Chinese Virus’

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A majority of American adults agree with using the term “Chinese virus” to describe the coronavirus, despite media members pillorying President Donald Trump for using that term, three polls showed.

Three consecutive national surveys by the Harris Poll found that more than 50% of Americans said they somewhat or strongly agree with Trump using the term “Chinese virus.”

The poll results make for a stark contrast with the national media’s reaction to the term “Chinese virus.”

MSNBC anchor John Heilemann said on air in March that Trump’s use of the term “Chinese virus” is “nakedly racist and obviously racist and blatantly racist.”

CNN opinion writer Jill Filipovic similarly argued that using the term “Chinese virus” was “xenophobic racism,” and compared it to scapegoating European Jews for the Black Death.

Other journalists, from Vox writers to The New York Times editorial board, have denounced the president’s use of the term.

But the American public seems to disagree.

The three Harris polls, all of which are from late March or early April, showed 52%, 54% and 52% of Americans agreeing with Trump.

The most recent Harris poll, which surveyed 1,993 adults between April 3 and 5, also found that an overwhelming majority of Americans hold the Chinese government responsible for the virus’ spread. That’s in line with scientific research on the subject.

One study found that up to 95% of COVID-19’s spread could have been prevented if the Chinese government had acted three weeks sooner than they did.

A majority of Americans, 58%, agree that China should “be required to pay other countries for the spread of the virus,” the most recent Harris poll found.

COLUMN BY

Peter Hasson

Peter J. Hasson is a reporter for The Daily Caller. Twitter: @peterjhasson.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Where have all the heart attacks gone? Time we call BS on the ‘scientific-technological elite’!

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“[ It is] time we call BS on the ‘scientific-technological elite.’” – Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review

Daniel Horowitz is one of an increasing number of conservative commentators who are asking questions about the draconian policies that are crippling America based on models and scary numbers of supposed COVID-19 deaths daily reported by our scientific elite.

The political fallout is going to be massive (that is an understatement) if the general public begins to feel duped by politicians who are not letting a crisis go to waste and thus pushing America to the socialist Left.

From Conservative Review (hat tip: George):

Horowitz: Dr. Birx: ‘We’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality’

Why would our governing elites be so motivated to overstate the impact of COVID-19 and scare people beyond the unprecedented levels of panic that are already pervasive in this country?

Believe it or not, the coronavirus epidemic does not stop deaths from other causes. While the politicians are shutting down other medical care in this country, they fail to recognize that life and even death go on. Many of us have been concerned that they have been conflating deaths due to coronavirus with deaths of those who have coronavirus but ultimately succumb to other illnesses. In their quest to continue this degree of fascism, plus in the motivation of some hospitals to get more federal relief funds, there is every incentive to code as many deaths as possible as related to COVID-19.

Yesterday, Dr. Deborah Birx finally let the secret out during the daily press conference in response to a reporter’s question. “I think in this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality,” said Dr. Birx, who along with Dr. Anthony Fauci has become the face of this push for a national lockdown.

“There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU [intensive care unit] and then have a heart or kidney problem. Some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.”

“The intent is if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death,” concluded Birx.

I just snipped a bit of Horowitz’s hypothesis.  Read it all here and see what cardiologists are saying.

It was posted a few days ago, and if you saw the reports last evening about how the projections for worst case scenarios just may not be coming true, you too might be smelling a rat!

RELATED ARTICLE: Israeli COVID-19 treatment shows 100% survival rate – preliminary data – The Jerusalem Post

EDITORS NOTE: This Frauds, Crooks and Criminals column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Coronavirus Commission Offers 5-Phase Plan for Getting America Back to Normal

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National-Coronavirus-Response-a-Road-Map-to-Recovering

The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission announced a five-phase plan to get the American economy and public health “back to normal” after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 17-member commission established by The Heritage Foundation had its first formal and virtual meeting Thursday.

“Americans want to ensure their families are kept safe and healthy,” said commission Chairwoman Kay C. James, president of The Heritage Foundation.

The five phases outlined by the commission are:

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

  1. Return to a more normal level of business activity at the regional level based on scientific data.
  2. Slow the spread of the coronavirus while expanding testing, reporting, and contact tracing.
  3. Continue to build the science.
  4. Establish U.S. leadership in leading the free world in economic recovery.
  5. Reduce future risks of pandemics.

“The commission agrees that it is critically important to build the American people’s confidence that we can safely return to some semblance of normal soon,” James said, adding:

The way to build that confidence is to adopt a phased approach that mitigates the spread of the coronavirus, vastly improves testing, expands our capabilities to quickly find treatments and possibly a cure, and then allows Americans to gradually return to work. We must also look at ways to ensure we are better prepared to confront future pandemics.

For the first phase, Americans’ gradual return to the workplace would be done only after stabilizing the health care system; establishing enhanced testing, reporting, and contact tracing; and continuing to follow guidelines on mitigation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

During a conference call Wednesday with reporters, Dr. Bill Frist, a physician and former Senate majority leader who is on the commission, said the return to former work habits and places would be “community by community, not state by state.”

Slowing the spread, the second phase, is achieved by following the guidelines for hand-washing, social distancing, and other precautions set by the Trump administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The third phase would increase and expedite the availability of new diagnostic tests while supporting acceleration of proven therapeutics and vaccines.

The fourth, establishing U.S. leadership, will involve implementing “risk-informed measures to reestablish international travel while limiting threat of reinfection,” according to the commission.

The commission also suggests partnering with key strategic allies, including Western Europe and the Indo-Pacific, empowering economic freedom and partnerships in free markets.

The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission proposes to reduce future risks of pandemics by investing in national and state stockpiles, reforming supply chains, developing the supply of antiviral agents, seeking to develop vaccines for coronaviruses, and investing in an international biosurveillance network to detect and contain emerging infectious diseases through coordination and cooperation.

The commission, which is set to meet again April 20, is accepting suggestions from the public at CoronavirusCommission.com.

The Heritage Foundation established the commission—which includes experts from government, public health, disaster response and relief, academia and education, business, and the faith community—to provide policymakers and the public with recommendations on steps needed to move prudently toward recovery from the pandemic.

The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

A Physician Investigates: Should You Take Hydroxychloroquine?

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A controversy has arisen regarding the utility of using chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

On the one hand, there are the purists who maintain that these medications ought not be employed until the proof of their benefits has been established. On the other, some advocate for the aggressive and immediate deployment of these medications. With these two very valid competing arguments proffered by sophisticated scientists and healthcare providers, the question for the rest of us mere mortals is what should we do?

The first step in addressing this question is to evaluate the state of the literature on the topic. An early indication that hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine in combination with azithromycin could be helpful in the treatment of CORVID-19 infection comes from a randomly controlled study from France involving 40 patients with early infection.  All patients in the experimental group improved and did better than those in the placebo group, except for one who was 86 years old and received the medicines in an “advanced form” of the disease.

But the study suffered from its small size and lack of a peer review process.

Other studies seemed to support the French conclusion.  In the laboratory, evidence demonstrates that chloroquine helps defeat the virus by increasing a cell’s internal pH and interfering with the penetration of the virus into the cell. Another study, this time out of China, showed the effectiveness of chloroquine and another medication, Remdesevir, against the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the COVID-19 virus) in Vero E6 cells taken from African green monkeys. Yet another preliminary study out of Wuhan showed that the time to clinical recovery, body temperature recovery time, and cough remission time were shorter in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine than in untreated controls.

There’s also experiential evidence suggesting that people who take chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine in low doses may be prevented from even developing the disease.  Additionally, informally reported observations find that patients who regularly take these medications for other conditions such as lupus are generally not contracting COVID-19.

But conflicting scientific information has also emerged. One study suggests no benefit to the administration of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in patients with severe infection. The severe nature of the infections in these patients is notable, as it appears that the damage to the body goes beyond what an antibiotic can improve.

In light of all this emerging information regarding the potential benefits of administering the drugs it is tempting to conclude that we should treat all COVID-19 patients with these medications.  But what about the potential harm? Here, there is extensive evidence of the safety of taking chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. Yes, either medication can cause retinopathy and changes in heart electrophysiology, but these effects are exceedingly rare and take place in patients who consume the medication at higher doses and for much more protracted periods of time.  In reality, the use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine in the recommended doses and projected administration times for COVID-19 is very safe.

So should we be taking chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine?  Well, the answer actually comes in three packets.

  • First, with the data available, those patients in respiratory failure ought definitely be treated with a regimen of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.  They should also be placed on Remdesevir. These patients, of course, are generally being treated in the intensive care unit setting, and the optimal management controversy does not apply to the general public.
  • Second, for those patients who are not in respiratory failure, but are nevertheless infected with COVID-19, the more proper approach is one of drug administration.  Although treatment should be undertaken under physician supervision, there is little question that the balance between risk and benefit strongly lands in favor of benefit, especially when one considers the potential imminence of patient demise.
  • Third, there is the question of preventive treatment or prophylaxis. Here again, there is a strong suggestion of benefit and a very remote risk of harm particularly when one considers the exceedingly low doses required for prevention.  The conflict here lies in supply. Do we have enough chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to meet the demands from such a broad swath of the population? Ideally, it would be preferable that everyone takes one of these medications, but in light of supply limitations, at the very least, those coming into frequent contact with COVID-19 patients and elderly persons should be on a prophylactic dose.

What about those on chronic regimens of these medications?  Should they be kept from accessing chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine as many in the media claim is taking place?  They shouldn’t. But even in light of temporary shortages, the prophylactic use of these medications should still be considered.

Let’s face it.  We are looking at a massive pandemic that is devastating the national economy and able to take some victims with great haste.  A short-term interruption of treatment on chronic patients is generally not going to result in their rapid demise, but the contraction of COVID-19 may.  Here, urgency considerations definitely fall on the side of the COVID-19 patient and its prevention.

In the end, these are prescription medications so the decisions for administration or not lie with the physician.  Ultimately, each physician is going to have to make up his or her mind. However, although there is still some room for debate, the answer presently is falling on the side of administering rather than withholding these potentially life-saving medicines.

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Covid-19 and Easter Hope

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These are very trying times. There is an enemy out there at the microscopic level, wreaking all kinds of havoc in people’s hearts and minds and lives. The economic consequences alone of the coronavirus could possibly be felt for years to come.

The big problem in life, of course, is the threat of death.

But the coronavirus is not going to cancel Easter—though it may cancel our traditional celebrations of it. But Easter hope defangs the threat of the coronavirus because Jesus has taken the sting out of death.

After a bee stung a boy one day, his young brother was frightened as the insect continued hovering around him. But his father told him not to worry—there was only one stinger in that bee, and his older brother had already received it.

Jesus is our older brother, and He has taken the sting of death upon Himself. As the Apostle Paul would say, “Oh death, where is thy sting?”

Easter hope is not just a pious sentiment. There is ample reason to believe that Jesus bodily rose from the dead, historically.

For Christian television, I once interviewed Dr. Dana Harris of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the Chicago area. She told me, “Christianity rests on the historical proclamation that Jesus rose from the dead.”

Harris added, “I would say that it’s virtually impossible to maintain the idea that we can separate religious truths from historical facts and it has to do with the nature of Christianity. Christianity is fundamentally dependent on historical truths. In other words, if Jesus is not resurrected from the dead, then we don’t have Christianity.”

But what about the idea, promoted by skeptics, that perhaps this was just a legend from the ancient world? One man has an interesting take on that. Lee Strobel, former legal affairs editor for The Chicago Tribune, received his legal training at Yale Law School.

When his wife started going to church, he worked hard to disprove the faith, so he could reclaim her, and the two could live happily ever after, as agnostics.

But his quest to disprove Christianity had an unexpected result: He became a believer in the very thing he tried to falsify. He wrote all this up in his classic book, since made into a motion picture, The Case for Christ.

In an interview for D. James Kennedy Ministries, Strobel noted, “One very powerful evidence is that we have a report to the resurrection of Jesus that has been dated back by scholars to within months of His death. So, what we have is, in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, starting in verse 3, a creed, a report of the early church that says, Jesus died—why? For our sins, He was buried, and the third day He rose from the dead. And then it mentions specific individuals and groups to whom He appeared.”

Strobel adds, “And if that creed developed so early, the beliefs that make up that creed go back even earlier. Probably, one of the greatest classical historians who ever lived, A.N. Sherwin- White of Oxford, studied the rate at which legend grew up in the ancient world. And he determined that the passage of two generations of time is not even enough for a legend to grow up and wipe out a solid core of historical truth.” With the Christian reports of the resurrection, notes Strobel, “We’ve got a ‘news flash from ancient history.’ So that is a very powerful bit of evidence.”

The interesting thing about the resurrection of Jesus is that the earliest skeptics of the event were the disciples themselves. They were only convinced because Jesus appeared to them over and over. Then they became so convinced, they went out and became unstoppable in their proclamation—in some cases, even when it meant they would be put to death for their testimony.

As Lee Strobel puts it, “We have nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament confirming and corroborating  that the conviction of the disciples is that they encountered the resurrected Jesus. That is an avalanche of historical data. When you consider most of what we know from ancient history is from one or two sources, but nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament [corroborating the disciples’ conviction], that is a convincing amount of evidence that convinced me that the disciples encountered the resurrected Jesus. It changed their lives, it changed everything about them.”

Covid-19 may have set the world’s teeth at edge. And ultimately it is a reminder of our mortality. We are not going to escape this world alive. But thank God for Jesus, the elder brother, who has taken the sting out of death for those who believe.

Nothing, including Covid-19, will ever cancel Easter.

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