Prosecutions in Philadelphia, West Virginia Show Voter Fraud Is Bipartisan

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As the 2020 election cycle continues to unfold despite the coronavirus pandemic, it appears that election fraud also continues to be uncovered and prosecuted, even though Twitter apparently thinks no such fraud occurs.

Two cases—one out of Philadelphia, the other out of West Virginia—highlight the problem of election fraud and the immense amount of responsibility placed on public officials tasked with securing the integrity of the voting process.

Take the latest conviction of an election official in the City of Brotherly Love.

Domenick DeMuro formerly served as the “judge of elections”—a local precinct election official—for the 39th Ward, 36th Division in South Philadelphia. DeMuro was responsible for ensuring the sanctity and security of the election process in his ward.

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Instead, he accepted bribes and cheated, allowing the integrity of the elections under his supervision to be corrupted by a political consultant.

DeMuro was charged by the U.S. Justice Department and pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to deprive voters of their civil rights after he was found to have stuffed ballot boxes in multiple primary elections for multiple candidates.

He was also charged with, and pleaded guilty to, a violation of the federal Travel Act for using a cellphone to solicit bribes.

According to U.S. Attorney William McSwain, “DeMuro fraudulently stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear.”

The scheme between DeMuro and the unidentified political consultant occurred during the 2014, 2015, and 2016 primary elections. Each time, DeMuro was paid from $300 to $5,000 to add the extra votes and authenticate the fraudulent results in his official capacity.

This practice in Philly is known as “ringing up votes.”

The bribes paid to DeMuro ensured not only extra votes for the consultant’s clients—Democratic judicial candidates—but also other Democratic candidates for local, state, and federal office.

In the May 2014 primary election, DeMuro cast 27 bogus ballots out of a total of 118 votes cast at his polling place, 22% of the votes cast there. In the 2015 primary election, he cast 40 fraudulent ballots (15% of the total vote), and in the May 2016 election, he cast 46 fraudulent ballots (17% of the total).

DeMuro is scheduled to be sentenced on June 30. Given that he was bribed by an unidentified political consultant with numerous clients, there are probably more indictments to come.

In this type of conspiracy, the Justice Department usually starts with indictments of the individuals at the bottom of the criminal chain, who are often given plea deals in exchange for testifying against their fellow co-conspirators higher up the chain.

Unfortunately, Philadelphia has a long and notorious history of election fraud—which, sadly, seems to be continuing today.

During a press conference, McSwain stated that the political consultant made payments to other election officials, also unidentified, besides DeMuro, and, of course, we don’t know yet whether the candidates—the clients of the political consultant—knew what the consultant was doing or in any way facilitated the commission of those crimes.

There will obviously be more to this story in the days and weeks ahead.

The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database provides a sampling of cases that demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the electoral process. Currently, the database has 1,285 documented cases of fraud.

While the Philadelphia case involves Democrats, another case out of West Virginia showcases the bipartisan nature of voter fraud.

Although he’s presumed to be innocent at this stage, Thomas Cooper, a postal worker, is currently being prosecuted in state court by the West Virginia attorney general for defrauding the residents of the state out of a fair election by altering absentee ballot requests for a primary election.

According to an affidavit filed May 26 from an investigator in the office of the state attorney general, Cooper obscured, crossed out, or changed at least five absentee ballot requests from Democrat to Republican, which meant they would have been sent a Republican ballot instead of a Democratic ballot for the primary.

The county clerk of Pendleton County became suspicious that the forms were altered because she knew that some of the voters did not affiliate as Republicans.

The clerk alerted the West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office after calling one of the voters and confirming he did request a Democratic ballot using blue ink, and neither he nor anyone else in his family requested a Republican absentee ballot.

The clerk detailed how Cooper tampered with the absentee ballot requests: “The word ‘Republican’ was circled in black ink in such a way as to also mark-out a blue-ink line under the word ‘Democrat,’ and the box beside the word ‘Republican’ was also checked in black ink.”

Cooper admitted to changing the party affiliations on the ballot requests, but claims he only did it as a joke.

The affidavit provides a picture of one of the forms marked up by Cooper, and it’s easy to see why West Virginia officials are treating Cooper’s actions as no laughing matter.

Cooper easily gained access to these absentee ballot requests because of his employment with the U.S. Postal Service.

Regardless of the ultimate outcome in the Cooper case, with the growing push for vote by mail, the public needs to understand the vulnerabilities of absentee ballots and the problems caused by their being handled by those who aren’t election officials in an unsupervised setting.

These two cases demonstrate the bipartisan nature of election fraud. As the introduction to The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database states, “Winning elections leads to political power, and the incentives to take advantage of security vulnerabilities are great.”

That applies to both parties.

As such, it’s important that voters and election officials come together to take reasonable steps to protect the integrity of the elections that are fundamental to self-government.

COMMENTARY BY

Hans von Spakovsky

Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research. Twitter: .

Kaitlynn Samalis-Aldrich

Kaitlynn Samalis-Aldrich is a research assistant in the Meese Center for Judicial and Legal Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

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.

NYC: Lawyers to Be Arraigned Today on Federal Charges after Attack on Police

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One of the lawyers charged with hurling Molotov cocktails at a police cruiser is a 32-year-old Princeton educated lawyer and his partner in (alleged) crime is a 31-year-old “human rights” lawyer and activist who worked on refugee issues in Turkey.

Here is a bit of the news from the NY Post:

Accused Molotov cocktail hurler is Ivy League-educated lawyer, community board member

A Ivy League-educated lawyer and member of a Brooklyn community board was among those arrested for hurling a Molotov cocktail at a marked NYPD vehicle amid George Floyd protests, it was revealed Sunday.

Colinford Mattis, 32, was allegedly behind the wheel of a tan minivan as his passenger, fellow attorney Urooj Rahman, allegedly hurled the incendiary at an empty NYPD vehicle outside the 88th Precinct station house in Fort Greene early on Saturday.

Mattis, a graduate of Princeton University and New York University law school, is an associate at corporate Manhattan firm Pryor Cashman.

[….]

Rahman, 31, meanwhile, is also registered as an attorney in New York state, who was admitted to the bar in June 2019 after graduating from Fordham University School of Law. It was not immediately clear on Sunday whether she was affiliated with any law firm.

It’s unclear how she and Mattis know each other.

The Brooklyn residents are federally charged with causing damage by fire and explosives to a police vehicle, during demonstrations over the death of George Floyd.

Thanks to a reader for a tip! I bet there is so much more to be learned about this pair.

Fordham Law School has this glowing write-up for new American Ms. Rahman:

Urooj Rahman ’15 worked with the Refugee Solidarity Network (RSN) and Refugee Rights Turkey (RTT), which, through their legal work, assist and empower refugees fleeing Turkey. Urooj provided direct services to asylum-seekers at the Center for Refugee Rights in Istanbul. As a foreign lawyer in Turkey, she lent her legal assistance mostly to non-Syrians going through the UNHCR refugee status determination procedure. She also served several months in New York with RSN, using her direct service experience to inform her contribution to international advocacy and awareness-raising initiatives.

I’ll try to come back to this story, but after being away, and then due to a storm losing internet service for days, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do!

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

Don’t Gaslight Us on #BelieveWomen

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Many of us were startled to open The New York Times last week and find ourselves accused of hijacking and weaponizing the phrase “believe all women.”

According to journalist Susan Faludi, the phrase always has been “believe women,” and never has been associated with a demand for automatic and unquestioned belief that those who allege sexual assault are telling the truth.

The “believe all women” line, in Faludi’s telling, is a false narrative perpetuated by what she calls the right wing.

Apparently, the problems long pointed out with the premise of believing all women were, well, problems we—the “right wing”—created as a trap for an otherwise unblemished and unproblematic movement.

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This was particularly shocking to me. I remember the arguments for literally believing all women without question to be so strong that I wrote an article addressing them. Bari Weiss, who hardly could be called a right-winger, also understood this as a primary message of the movement, and was so concerned about its consequences that she publicly pushed back against it.

Could our memories have been so wrong? Could we have misunderstood the basic premise of an entire social movement? Could it be that we trolled ourselves into knocking down a straw man?

No. We’re being gaslighted. And we have the receipts to prove it.

To give credit to Faludi, some feminist voices have warned that #BelieveWomen ought not to mean more than simply taking women seriously instead of immediately dismissing accusations.

But to suggest that the broader #MeToo movement did not ever meaningfully encompass a demand to believe all women, in all accusations? Now that’s just pure revisionism.

Let’s start with the phrase itself. While it was certainly never as popular as the shorter #BelieveWomen, it was embraced unironically by many groups, people, and outlets that are about as far from “right wing” as I am from a communist.

National Public Radio, for example, would have been shocked to discover that “believe all women” was not, in fact, the legitimate “mantra” of the #MeToo movement, as it presumed.

Writers at outlets such as Jezebel, The Guardian, and Bloomberg at various times made clear that “believe all women” was an important underlying norm of #MeToo. One Daily Beast article went so far as to refer to these years as “the era of believe all women.”

Faludi taunts: “Good luck finding any feminist who thinks we should believe everything all women say—even what they say about sexual assault.” But here is an editor at Bustle demanding just that.

You also can find the hashtag #BelieveAllWomen endorsed by a variety of liberal “Blue Checks” on Twitter, including Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.; the ERA Coalition; comedian Greg Proops; singer Tara Slone; and former Pepsico President Brad Jakeman.

“Believe all women” was, in fact, such an important norm that society forced a prominent comedian to apologize for suggesting it was bad to turn “listen to women” into “believe all women.”

The New York Times itself thought the phrase was so inextricably linked with #MeToo that it suggested the following discussion question in its series on how to teach about the movement: “Should we always ‘believe all women?’ What are the benefits and drawbacks of doing so?”

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that no one outside of right-wing circles ever mentioned the phrase “believe all women” and that it was always, without exceptions, “believe women.” Is this fundamentally any different in its practical effect?

“Believe women” is a categorical, unqualified statement. What else could you reasonably expect it to mean besides “believe all women”?

Moreover, “Believe Women” was used interchangeably with mottos such as “Believe Survivors” and “Believe All Survivors,” which inherently presume that all women who make accusations are survivors, and are, ipso facto, to be believed.

So you’ll have to forgive all of the prominent non-right-wing-hacks who found themselves completely confused and thinking that “believe women” meant “believe all women who make accusations are victims, simply because they made accusations.”

The organizers of the Women’s March clearly believed this was the case, retweeting “We believe women” with an underlying tweet implying that a woman’s words of accusation alone should be sufficient evidence that she is to be believed.

And as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., explained regarding accusations of sexual misconduct leveled at former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “I believe the women, and that means he isn’t telling the truth.”

In other words, she thought the essence of “believing women” was that women who make accusations must be believed, and any defense put forward by the accused must be discredited. Full stop.

This line of argument also was clearly seen in a Vox article about the “Republican response” to sexual assault allegations leveled at Donald Trump. Many of these allegedly “sad” responses were simply that the lawmakers hadn’t yet looked into the allegations.

One of the apparently unacceptable responses, from Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, was precisely the response Faludi now says always has been the epitome of “believe women”—that the accusation should be taken seriously, but vetted.

But to Vox, apparently, it was “predictable and sad” that politicians did not immediately believe the accusations, but rather wanted to look into the facts and assess credibility before forming an opinion.

Finally, whatever moderating influences may have initially fought to separate #BelieveWomen from #BelieveAllWomen, the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh destroyed any lingering pretense that automatic, unwavering belief was not accepted practice within the movement. Here, actions spoke louder than any words.

From the very beginning, prominent Democrats made clear that the accusation alone was enough. Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, went so far as to state, prior to any hearing of the facts, that not only did she believe Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford, but that men should “just shut up” and believe her, too.

Even afterward, when Kavanaugh was hit with allegations of sexual misconduct at Yale by Deborah Ramirez, many prominent Senate Democrats demanded his impeachment based on Ramirez’s accusation alone.

“Believe all women” was never a right-wing trap. It always has been a very real part of the #MeToo movement, even though dissenters—conservative and liberal alike—have cautioned against such an untenable and reductionist approach.

The question isn’t whether the right hijacked a phrase to create unreasonable standards. It didn’t.

The question isn’t even whether the left will continue to abide by the standards it largely accepted and imposed on others when those standards no longer are politically expedient. It won’t—those standards already have been subjected to quick and near-total abandonment for recent accusations against liberal politicians.

The only remaining question is whether this newfound love of due process and fair-mindedness will continue for the next college student, celebrity, or conservative politician accused of misconduct.

One can only hope.

Unfortunately, it’s more than likely that when the pendulum swings back, the past will prove remarkably alterable: “We must ‘believe all women.’ We’ve always said ‘believe all women.’”

COMMENTARY BY

Amy Swearer

Amy Swearer is a senior legal policy analyst at the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Twitter: .

RELATED ARTICLE: #BelieveWomen

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.

Trump On George Floyd Riots: ‘I Will Not Allow Angry Mobs To Dominate’

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President Donald Trump criticized George Floyd protesters who have turned to rioting across the country Saturday, saying he would not allow them to “dominate.”

Trump made the comments at Kennedy Space Center in Florida soon after NASA and SpaceX launched American astronauts into space from American soil for the first time since 2011. While Trump critiqued the “angry mobs,” he said he stands with those who are peacefully protesting against Floyd’s death.

“We support the right of peaceful protests and we hear their pleas, but what we are now seeing on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with the memory of George Floyd. The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups who are terrorizing the innocent, destroying jobs, hurting businesses and burning down buildings,” Trump said.

“I will not allow angry mobs to dominate. It’s not going to happen,” he added.

Trump soon turned his speech back to the return of  Americans to spaceflight, however. He announced that as he was speaking, astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley had arrived safely in low-Earth orbit. Their final destination is the International Space Station.

Trump went on to praise SpaceX founder Elon Musk, calling him a “great brain.” NASA and SpaceX plan to continue their partnership to bring American astronauts back to the moon and eventually be the first to land on Mars.

COLUMN BY

ANDERS HAGSTROM

White House Correspondent.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Jewish Minneapolis Mayor in the Spotlight as Riots Spread

President Trump: Protesters are ‘organized groups’ that ‘have nothing to do with George Floyd’

‘F*** Fox News!’: Protesters Chase Fox News Reporter Outside White House

George Floyd Protests In Washington DC Throw White House Into Brief Lockdown

Some Press Groups Remain Silent About Assault Against Fox News Reporter As Others Condemn It

RELATED VIDEO: Videos Of Protests Nationwide Show Images Of Chaos, Mass Violence

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

The Folly of Twitter’s Fact Check

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No American, not even the president, has an inherent right to a social media account. Tech companies are free to ban any user they see fit.

They’re free to fact-check anyone they want, to create a framework of acceptable speech, and to enforce their policies either consistently or capriciously. They’re free to accuse Donald Trump—and only Trump, if they see fit—of being a liar. They’re free to do all of these things.

Even if they shouldn’t.

Yesterday, after years of pressure from media and Democrats, Twitter labeled two of Trump’s tweets—in which he had claimed that the use of mail-in ballots for large numbers of people would be “substantially fraudulent” and result in a “rigged election”—as “potentially misleading.”

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It’s a mistake for any platform to drop its neutral stance and take on fact-checking duties, a task that’s going to be impossible to accomplish either objectively or effectively. It’s going to corrode trust in the brand, but it won’t change a single mind.

Once Twitter begins tagging some tweets and not others with “what you need to know,” it will be staking out partisan positions. The Trump tweets that precipitated its first fact check are a good example of this.

It would have been far more reasonable for the social media giant to label Trump’s ugly and slanderous tweets about Joe Scarborough as misleading. Instead, Twitter decided to inaugurate its policy by alleging that Trump had dishonestly claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to “a Rigged Election.”

Even if this contention were entirely baseless, it would be as untrue as saying Russia rigged the election—a claim that politicians such as Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi, along with most major media outlets, have been making for years.

But while the president’s rhetoric about voting is debatable, it is also well within the normal parameters of contemporary political discourse.

It’s not exactly “unsubstantiated” to assert that more mail-in ballots “would lead to voter fraud,” as Twitter holds. There are dozens of instances of potential voter fraud investigated every year. The Heritage Foundation has cataloged 1,285 prosecuted cases.

Which is to say that contending that “voter fraud” is a problem is no more misleading than contending tax cuts will hurt the poor or that repealing net neutrality rules will destroy the internet.

In practice, “voter fraud” is no more a conspiracy theory than is “voter suppression.” Both happen on occasion, yet there is no evidence that either has toppled the outcome of any modern election.

The problem is that only one of these two issues will earn a “more information” tag from Twitter, because only one of these two issues offends the sensibilities of the liberals whose concerns Twitter ultimately cares about.

In another tweet, Trump claimed that everyone in California will be mailed a ballot. This is factually untrue. But so is the pinned tweet of former Vice President Joe Biden: “I can’t believe I have to say this, but please don’t drink bleach.”

The president never instructed anyone to drink bleach, yet Biden repeats this incessantly, along with numerous other misleading statements about his record and GOP policies.

Which brings us to the problem: Who will Twitter designate as its judge? Its fact-checking page redirects users to debunkings by CNN, The Washington Post, Vox, HuffPost, and other outlets that often deceive their audiences with far more sophistication than the president. These outlets like to appeal to the authority of experts, but not experts whose conclusions contradict their own.

There is a reason we debate issues rather than appoint “truth magistrates” to hand down verdicts: For the most part, politics is a dispute not over facts but values.

As is often the case, Trump immediately ceded the high ground by threatening to “strongly regulate” or shut down social media platforms. Such threats are nothing new for this president, who has often menaced media with regulations and legal action, although one cannot help but notice a paradox.

Trump never follows through on his destructive threats to inhibit speech but does follow through on his promise to cram the courts full of judges who have deference for the First Amendment, while those who talk in the loftiest terms about the press tend to pressure tech companies to constrain interactions, to ban accounts, and to “fact check” their partisan foes.

The distress over social media is predicated on the idea that average Americans are too dim to grapple with the messiness of unfettered speech. Many leftists—those who wanted to institute Fairness Doctrines or overturn Citizens United—admit this openly when they suggest that unregulated speech is corroding “democracy.”

Trump is the first president to take advantage of direct, instantaneous access to millions of Americans. Whether this is helpful to his cause is debatable. Certainly, we are blessed that the president’s policies and rhetoric are often disconnected. Whatever the case, though, we have an entire industry that stands ready to challenge the veracity of his statements.

We don’t need Twitter to join in the fact-checking game. Silicon Valley doesn’t have the resources, knowledge, or people to do it correctly.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

COMMENTARY BY

David Harsanyi

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and the author of “First Freedom: A Ride through America’s Enduring History With the Gun, From the Revolution to Today.” Twitter: .

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.

WHERE DOES THE HATE COME FROM? How people use the Internet to vent their rage at Republicans.

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Last week it was pointed out to me that most of the protests over coronavirus shutdowns in Democrat controlled states were by Republicans, particularly in Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Critics thought the protesters were being unreasonable in combating the virus and hateful towards the government. As Democrats have said when they protest, this is nothing more than a First Amendment right of the people to peaceably assemble. Yes, they are upset with the governors in terms of wanting to reopen the state so they can go back to work, but this is far from bring offensive.

What I find particularly hateful and vicious is the discourse from Democrats emanating from Twitter, the popular social media platform. Recently, I discovered several hashtag accounts representing some rather nasty people, to wit:

Republicans are destroying America – one user contended, “Where is the racist group GOP? Oh that’s right, they don’t give a crap cause they agree with and enable a racist, lying, xenophobic, corrupt reality TV figure. Kudos GOP, you are a stain on America.” (And this was one of the nicer entries).

Republicans for Biden – Interestingly, most people in this group fail to identify themselves. I therefore suspect it is a fraud perpetrated by someone else.

Republicans Virus – this is used to blame the GOP for the devastation of the COVID-19 panic.

Republicans Are Killing Us – Another forum to blame Republicans for the virus.

GOP Corruption Over Country – a lot of nasty accusations here.

GOP Genocide – Here, again, the GOP is painted as baby killers.

Trump Lies, People Die – more accusations of incompetence and carelessness.

Not My President – more name calling (including “Deplorables”) and finger pointing.

The hate from these groups is massive and unimaginable. Frankly, I was surprised that nobody was reprimanded by Twitter for their tongue. Interestingly, I earnestly sought Republican counterparts to these groups using words such as those shown above along with others. The closest thing I could find was:

Democrats the Enemy Within – accusations of wrong-doing, but without the venom.

Democrats Hate America – pretty much the same.

This was all I could find in this regard. This either means Republicans are either more civil in their discourse or perhaps this is another instance of censorship by social media to favor Democrats.

Keep in mind, this is but one social media, there are many others also producing such venom.

The hate spewed forward by the Democrats is reckless and scary. However, if they are trying to intimidate the Republicans, I think their rhetoric is backfiring on them as it is forcing Republicans closer together as opposed to scaring them off.

All of this hints at the problems people have with the Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). At first, I thought this to be a joke, but now I’m convinced it is a legitimate problem. How do you know you have TDS, well, to paraphrase comedian Jeff Foxworthy:

“You might have Trump Derangement Syndrome if…”

  • you blame the President for everything.
  • you believe Nancy Pelosi & Chuck Schumer only have the best interests of the country in mind.
  • you see nothing wrong with the shenanigans of Antifa.
  • you believe AOC is a brilliant intellectual.
  • you think it’s time to replace the Constitution with something else.
  • you believe Socialism should supersede Capitalism.
  • you believe you are entitled to a plethora of freebies, including education, housing, etc.
  • you still live in the basement of your parents’ house.

I just wish curing Trump Derangement Syndrome was as simple as giving everyone a dose of saltpeter.

Keep the Faith!

P.S. – Also, I have a NEW book, “Before You Vote: Know How Your Government Works”, What American youth should know about government, available in Printed, PDF and eBook form. DON’T FORGET GRADUATION DAY. This is the perfect gift!

EDITORS NOTE: This Bryce is Right column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All trademarks both marked and unmarked belong to their respective companies.

Born for each other: How family planning and porn keep company

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Partners in the sex business.

You can tell something about a person by the company she keeps, and the same applies to organisations. Marie Stopes International, a high profile British birth control non-profit, was outed in The Mail on Sunday recently for receiving cash and goods worth 7.5 million pounds from American porn tycoon Phil Harvey over the past 15 years.

Harvey himself has been a direct player in the international “reproductive health” game since the 1970s, funding his own and other charities through Adam & Eve, a business that sold 60 million pounds worth of sex toys and pornographic film in 2019.

What does this say about Marie Stopes?

At best that it suffers from poor taste. It also has a strange attitude to women. MSI touts its contraceptive and abortion services as empowering “women and girls all over the world to choose when or whether to have children.” Yet it works hand in glove with an industry that disempowers women by making them sexual playthings, if not facilitating sexual assault and human trafficking.

Harvey’s sex business offers an array of pornographic material including female sex robots which promote the fact “her inflatable body is also practical if you need to store her or take her on journeys.” An huge list of pornographic films is also flaunted on his sex website.

But by peddling contraception and abortion to vulnerable women in developing countries, MSI, like Planned Parenthood and the rest of them, is handmaiden to every man who would sexually exploit a woman. Yet it is blasé about the connection.

Its response to the Mail on Sunday was: “Phil Harvey has spent his life defending sexual and reproductive health rights, and played a significant role in expanding access for women across the world. We are proud that he continues to contribute to the organisation.”

Harvey, 82, is not the only unsavoury mogul to cosy up to the birth control industry. Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, used his magazine to campaign for legalised abortion. Harvey Weinstein apparently posed as a cheerleader of Planned Parenthood. It makes sense: the women they used or encouraged other men to use might need the odd abortion, and it goes down well with the liberal crowd.

However, Phil Harvey’s US$9 million equivalent over a decade or two looks paltry compared to what Marie Stopes gets from other sources every year. The UK government alone gave them £48million last year which helped them deliver around five million abortions and pay its CEO £434,000 – among other things. Harvey’s position as a board member of MSI signals that he is much more important to the organisation than his cash grants.

A profile of him in Mother Jones magazine back in 2002 reveals that the relationship between Harvey and Marie Stopes goes back more than 50 years, to when he was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health, on a Ford Foundation fellowship (Ford being one of the main powerhouses of the population control movement). There he worked with a young British doctor, Tim Black, who went on to rescue the bankrupt Marie Stopes Foundation in 1975 and turn it into a “social business” with its current name.

Both Harvey and Black had spent time in developing countries and were convinced that what the poor of the world needed more than food was fewer babies. As part of their thesis work they came up with a plan to test social marketing of contraceptives in the American marketplace. With a university grant they began a mail order business, running clever ads in college newspapers and selling condoms to students. Next they added other merchandise and eventually struck gold when they threw in sex magazines. This was the genesis of Adam & Eve, which under Harvey surfed the wave of the home video boom in the 1980s and survived efforts to shut it down under the Reagan administration.

But Harvey and Black hadn’t forgotten the poor: perhaps social marketing of condoms would work in the developing world as well. To this end they set up a dual venture: a profit-making arm called Population Planning Associates, and a separate nonprofit, Population Services International (PSI), which by 1975 was running condom-marketing programmes in Kenya and Bangladesh. PSI remains one of the big guns of population control alongside International Planned Parenthood.

Harvey left PSI in the late 1970s and focussed on his porn business, but a few years later he founded another non-profit, DKT International, to take up marketing and supplying cheap condoms to the poor again.

In 2017 DKT launched a “WomanCare” platform “to dramatically increase the use of high-quality contraceptive, safe abortion, and reproductive health products.” In 2019, DKT WomanCare sold 222,123 manual vacuum aspiration abortion kits, 1.8 million cannulae and 1.4 million implants (linked with high rates of HIV in some African countries) in 90 countries. The organisation’s homepage currently features an example of its social marketing in the form of an article headed, “5 People Share Why Their Abortion Was Beautiful”.

This seems to be the real value of Phil Harvey to MSI and the whole international birth control industrial complex. As an entrepreneur he will use some of his own profits from porn to boost the supply of something like manual vacuum aspiration kits where, say, the British foreign aid agency or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or the UN Population Fund might hold back until the product is more acceptable to recipient governments.

Perhaps in somewhere like Kenya, where, although Marie Stopes says it only does abortions where they are legal, it more or less openly flouts the country’s highly restrictive law, and cloaks its activity with the saintly garb of “after abortion care” – that is, cleaning up after illegal abortions, which MSI dramatises (and inflates?) in order to push its abortion rights barrow.

On its home turf in Britain, MSI has had to clean up its own operations after unannounced official inspections. A highly critical Care Quality Commission report found major safety flaws at MSI clinics, with more than 2,600 serious incidents reported in 2015. A follow-up report in 2017 found there were 373 botched abortions in just the first two months of that year. MSI had issues with infection control and staff at one clinic complained of a “cattle market” approach with incentives for putting through as many abortions as possible.

No doubt there was some kind of idealism driving the founders of MSI and PSI/DKT, as there may be among those working for the organisations today – an actual belief that preventing births is a real favour to women and to the world in general. After all, the rich and respected of the world, the Fords, the Hewletts, the Gates and others have thought and continue to think so.

But the pornography connection that has helped so many of their projects along shows the true character of the birth control enterprise. Harvey told Mother Jones in 2002 that in the early days he was “terrified that, because of Adam & Eve, we were going to lose support for some of our programs.” Then he added: “But it never happened. I think part of the reason was that the key people in charge of family planning overseas, even in conservative governments, are not the types who are likely to be upset by sex products. After all, they’re in the sex business themselves.”

Yes, sex boils down to business for the so-called family planning establishment. A business requiring certain products to make it “safe” if not enjoyable for all concerned. And porn is one of those products, nearly as important as the condom itself, and often more effective since it removes the need for any human contact whatsoever. In that way, however, the pornographers could drive MSI and company out of business, ending a beautiful friendship – one as beautiful as abortion.

COLUMN BY

Carolyn Moynihan

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet More by Carolyn Moynihan.

RELATED ARTICLES:

The UN Is Using COVID-19 to Push Abortion. The US Is Rightly Pushing Back.

Nobody’s pawn: the real story of Norma McCorvey

Stepping up the pace of Uyghur forced labour in China

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

VIDEO: She Wrote Fake News for Cosmopolitan and Now Regrets Misleading Women on Feminism

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LANDER, Wyo.—Sue Ellen Browder wrote fake news before “fake news” was ever a thing. Except she prefers not to call it that—not because she’s embarrassed to admit she wrote fake news (although she’s certainly not proud), but because she thinks the term “fake news” is too vague to understand.

Browder, a Cosmopolitan magazine writer for 20 years, describes what she wrote as “propaganda.”

The goal? To sell women on the idea that sexual liberation is the path to the single woman’s personal fulfillment.

“Propaganda is very sophisticated,” Browder tells The Daily Signal. “It’s half-truth, selected truth, and truth out of context.”

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 >>

“Propaganda is used not to sell just products,” she adds. “It’s also used to sell ideas.”

Prior to writing for Cosmopolitan, Browder worked at a small daily newspaper, the South Bay Daily Breeze, just outside Los Angeles. When she and her husband unexpectedly got pregnant, they were far more excited about it than her bosses at the newspaper were.

“They told me I could only work five months into my pregnancy and then I had to quit,” Browder recalls.

That experience turned Browder, who was born and raised in small-town Iowa, into a feminist.

The year was 1969, and getting fired for being pregnant was a wake-up call. The situation made Browder, who graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism, realize that women had quite a bit of work to do.

“Women could not apply for credit in [their] own name. There were ‘help wanted’ ads—help wanted male and help wanted female,” she says. “Women couldn’t go to law school or medical schools in many cases. There was a lot of discrimination going on. And that is why in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, so many women of my generation identified with the feminist movement.”

Being a feminist back then was very different from what it means today, when many perceive the movement as anti-male and pro-abortion.

“The feminist movement was fighting for equal opportunity for women in education and the workforce,” Browder says of its early roots. The sexual revolution, on the other hand, “was fighting for all sorts of sexual freedoms.”

So how did the two become so intertwined? In part, Browder says, through the propaganda she wrote.

Beginning in 1971, Browder worked under the legendary Helen Gurley Brown, who was Cosmopolitan’s editor-in-chief for more than 30 years and author of the bestselling 1962 book “Sex and the Single Girl.”

Taking cues from Playboy magazine, Brown turned the struggling magazine into an international empire. She gave her writers a printed list of rules to follow, which included instructions about how to make up parts of their stories to sound more convincing.

Browder still owns her original copy of the rules today. Flipping through the pages, she reads two examples out loud:

Unless you are a recognized authority on the subject, profound statements must be attributed to somebody appropriate, even if the writer has to invent the authority.   …

Try to locate some of the buildings, restaurants, nightclubs, parks, streets, as well as entire case histories … in cities other than New York, even if you deliberately have to plant them elsewhere. Most writers live in New York, 92% of our readers do not.

By planting salacious stories about women having extravagant affairs in places such as Cleveland and Des Moines, Browder says, “the magazine spread its mores throughout the country and throughout the culture by pretending that they were much more widespread than they actually were.”

One of those Cosmo mores was the idea that abortion was a woman’s “right,” years before the Supreme Court ruled it a constitutionally protected right.

Browder details the story of how a small group of feminists inserted abortion into the agenda of the women’s movement in her 2015 book “Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement.” She documents the disgust of many pro-life feminists.

But from that point on, the narrative was set.

“Essentially, ‘All women want this.’ And that is how propaganda works,” Browder says.

While Browder was married and living a traditional lifestyle quite different from what she was espousing in Cosmopolitan, she, too, was corrupted by its influence. At one point, the ideas in those pages seeped into the most personal decision she and her husband could ever make.

At 27 years old, Browder was happily married with two children at home. When she became pregnant with a third, she and her husband decided to get an abortion. It was 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade.

Browder, who lived in the Los Angeles area and later in two parts of Connecticut for most of her time writing for Cosmo, says she had the abortion in the same hospital where she previously gave birth.

“I did not realize what a traumatic experience that would be later in my life, how much that would haunt me.”

About 20 years later, in 1994, Browder’s last piece appeared in Cosmopolitan. About 10 years after that, she converted to Catholicism and sought the help of the church to heal her from the abortion.

“When you start betraying the truth, it will come back to haunt you,” she says. “It will get you in the end. And that’s why even though I knew we were making up stories, I still got sucked in and thought abortion would be OK.”

Browder’s abortion isn’t the only thing she has sought forgiveness for. In her book, she comes clean about the propaganda she wrote for Cosmopolitan, despite its casting an embarrassing shadow over her career as a journalist.

“I don’t want to take more credit than I deserve for all this evil, but I think that I—I was certainly part of the evil empire, if you will,” she tells The Daily Signal. “And what I would like … for young women today [is] to tell them the truth so they could see how my generation got it wrong, why we got it wrong, and how they can do better. How, how your generation can do better.”

In order to do better, Browder says, pro-life women must reclaim the feminist movement for themselves.

“There is such a thing as pro-life feminism and … in fact, pro-life feminism is the authentic feminism of the 21st century,” she says.

But reclaiming feminism won’t be easy, she adds. It will require girls and young women to reject the ideas being sold to them in the pages of Cosmopolitan and almost everywhere else.

“Why all this hijacking of the women’s movement?” Browder asks. “Money.”

“Why was Cosmo so successful? Because it attracted advertisers. Why did it attract advertisers? Because it worked. When a young woman, an insecure young woman, reads these magazines and thinks that she has to have perfume, cosmetics, hair products, beautiful clothes, singles travel … abortions, contraception, when she thinks she has to have all of these things, she’s going to spend a lot of money.”

Browder adds:

They’re telling you on the one hand, ‘Be yourself;’ on the other hand, they’re saying, ‘You’re not good enough the way you are, buy all this stuff to be beautiful.’ Why aren’t you beautiful just the way you are?

‘Here’s the perfume. Oh yeah, you stink too. Oh, by the way, your hands don’t look very nice either. And your hair color is wrong. Oh, and when you’re tired of hearing about that, have some ice cream and a little booze to go with it, because then you’ll be too fat and then we’ll have to put you on a diet.’

Sitting in her bare apartment without the slightest bit of makeup on, Browder, now 74, giggles at the ridiculousness of the ideas that she once told women were the secret to happiness and success.

But then she turns serious, reflecting on the damage she’s done and the damage such magazines and websites continue to do.

“Now there’s the other side of it. I say we’re all liberated. Are we?” she asks. “On one hand, yes. We can go to college. We can get a degree. We can be doctors, lawyers, engineers. We can do all this stuff. We can make all this money.”

“But,” Browder pauses, looking at the iPhone on her kitchen table, “how liberated are we if our girls have got that in their pockets before they can even think?”

To learn more about Sue Ellen Browder’s story, check out her book “Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement.”

COLUMN BY

Kelsey Bolar

Kelsey Bolar is a senior writer and producer at The Daily Signal and co-host of “Problematic Women,” a podcast. Send an email to Kelsey. Twitter: @kelseybolar.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Game of Truth

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.

The Snake Oil of Social Distancing, Face Masks and Contact Tracing

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“The propaganda of communism possesses a language which every people can understand. Its elements are simply hunger, envy, death.” –  Heinrich Heine, German poet

“Scientists do not collect data randomly and utterly comprehensively. The data they collect are only those that they consider *relevant* to some hypothesis or theory.” –  J. David Lewis-Williams, South African archaeologist

“In dealing with the Communists, remember that in their mind what is secret is serious, and what is public is merely propaganda.” –  Charles E. Bohlen, U.S. Diplomat

“Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self-interest.” –  Napoleon Bonaparte

Our entire nation has been shut down by hysteria and fear.  If you think this is all about your health you’re mistaken. It’s all about getting a Democrat back in the White House.

Americans have complied, with wearing masks, social distancing and sheltering at home. Our country is destroyed and our debt is impossible to repay.  Christian churches were not allowed to open, (like China).  People are arrested for not wearing masks, staying 6 feet apart, or opening their businesses in a still locked down state.  That’s not freedom!  That is communism!

In North Carolina a federal judge said unequivocally that, “There is no pandemic exception to the Constitution of the United States or the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.”  Yet throughout the country, we are seeing fascist tactics instituted by those in power.

The only way we get rid of this virus is with immunity.  Only those with compromised immune systems or the elderly should have been sheltered, the rest of the economy, businesses, schools, restaurants, etc. should have remained open.  The media won’t report that 98 percent of those who contract this Chinese bioweapon disease recover, and that cheap drugs are available to Americans who get Covid-19.

Remember, those selling the panic are the same ones selling the vaccine.  Bill Gates, Fauci, Birx and other New World Order globalists all have interests in promoting a vaccine and drugs that will increase their billions and to hell with saving American lives.  Senator Rand Paul rightfully claims Fauci’s policies have emasculated the medical care system and ruined the economy.

Dr. Paul is right.  Fauci and his globalist friends promoted “national suicide” hoping to bring America down to the level of other third world countries.

Anthony Fauci was photographed with a coterie of globalist elites in 2001 at the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy event. The unassuming government bureaucrat was present alongside such titans of globalism as Ted Turner, David Rockefeller, George Soros, and Bill Gates Sr. Records reveal that Gates Sr. was a board member of Planned Parenthood prior to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, and Bill Gates himself said in a video clip that his father was the “head of Planned Parenthood.”

How easily we have snowballed into a full-fledged Marxist/fascist nation, with political dictators releasing criminals from prison and imprisoning those who refuse lockdown orders.

Resistance to Tyranny

A Mississippi church fighting the lockdown order was burned to the ground and a disturbing message was left in the parking lot that made mention of the congregation’s fight to worship freely as the church fought a government-imposed stay-at-home order.  “Bet you stay home now you hypokrits,” the painted message said.

It is reported that at least 60 sheriffs in more than twelve states are publicly opposing unconstitutional orders issued by governors.  That’s not enough, but most Americans are indoctrinated mental cripples who can’t think for themselves.

Of course, you will not see any feature stories about the “resistance” in America. To the contrary, major media and local governments are lambasting all such actions as ludicrous, short-sighted, selfish and harmful…….bah humbug!  What the global governance crowd has accomplished in just a few short weeks is astounding.  And too many fell for it.

Truth and Lies

In an important article by Dr. David Williams, he discusses the truth and lies about Covid-19.  Although there is a central author, it is being written on behalf of multiple physicians in West Alabama and will be distributed through multiple medical offices. It should be read by every American.

LIES:  Covid-19 is more dangerous than influenza.  Yearly flus globally kill far more than Covid-19.  We have slightly over 2 million confirmed Covid-19 cases globally. By comparison, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (Google Influenza Update-NCBI), influenza is responsible for up to a billion infections annually. Flu season is basically from the start of October until April. At the flu’s three-and-a-half-month mark, that works out to 583 million cases globally. Even accounting for the fact COVID-19 is underreported that is a huge difference.

The fact one doesn’t know they have it makes Covid-19 more dangerous. Influenza and other viruses also are infectious while asymptomatic.

We don’t know much about Covid-19.  We vaccinate domestic animals from coronaviruses and there are four types of colds that are coronaviruses and sometimes they are deadly as with SARS and MERS.

Truth: The Chinese bioweapon, Covid-19, is an actual medical disease that will lead to tragic deaths. Respiratory failure is a terrible way to die. That is true if that death is due to asthma, COPD, pneumonia, influenza, and more.  And it’s true that the virus is more dangerous to the elderly and immunocompromised, but everything is more dangerous to these individuals.

It is now almost impossible for anyone in the general public or general medical community to know the actual number of deaths from Covid-19.  Numbers have been purposely inflated.

The media as a whole has grossly misrepresented this disease and used fear to hype the hysteria.  This amounts to psychological warfare.  Media will continue to fight reopening this country by stating “experts” predict a spike in deaths if we do so.

This is not a medical crisis, but a political crisis.  Covid-19 has been treated as a world-ender and it’s not remotely close.  The current policies instituted by our local, state, and national governments are causing greater health problems than the virus ever will.  And that’s the key…the destruction of our economy is only part of it…totalitarian control and vanquishing our God-given civil liberties is the ultimate aim.  (h/t Lucy)

Social Distancing

There’s a reason that “social distancing” wasn’t a buzzword common to the American lexicon prior to 2020.  There’s very little science behind “social distancing” at all.  Sadly only a few Americans had a gut feeling they were being manipulated.

Where in science does it say that keeping a distance of six-foot space between healthy people, even outdoors is based on scientific fact?  It is an arbitrary suggestion and we all hopped to it and did as our totalitarian leaders told us to do.  Stores have markings where you stand…we have been conditioned to accept without evidence.  Some grocery aisles even have arrows that you can only enter one way, so you wouldn’t get close to anyone passing in the other direction!  Yes, we’re programmed sheep.

“It turns out,” Julie Kelly writes at American Greatness, “as I wrote last month, “social distancing” is untested pseudoscience particularly as it relates to halting the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. On its website, the CDC provides no links to any peer-reviewed social distancing studies that bolster its official guidance.”

There’s a reason for the lack of peer-reviewed studies on the CDC website.  She continues, “The alarming reality is that social distancing never has been tested on a massive scale in the modern age; its current formula was conceived during George W. Bush’s administration and met with much-deserved skepticism.”

“People could not believe that the strategy would be effective or even feasible,” one scientist told the New York Times last month. A high school science project—no, I am not joking—added more weight to the concept.

“Social distancing” is very much a newfangled experiment, not settled science.  And, Kelly writes, the results are suggesting that our “Great Social Distancing Experiment of 2020” will be “near the top of the list” of “bad experiments gone horribly wrong.”  The history of science, sadly, is littered with bad experiments gone horribly wrong.

There will be plenty of soul searching after this crisis abates: demanding to know the scientific rationale for keeping us six feet apart when people needed each other most should be at the top of the list.

Face Masks, False Sense of Security?

If you are elderly, ill, or have a compromised immune system you might just want to shelter at home until there is immunity throughout America, just as you would do in flu season.

For others wearing masks, they represent indoctrination and subjugation.  It is also the very elimination of your personhood, or individuality.  The masked faces are making everyone into dehumanized objects…and afraid of everyone else.  You’ve succumbed to control or as Dennis Prager states, “a dress rehearsal for a police state in the name of global warming.”

The lunatic CDC, which Dr. Birx says she doesn’t trust, is telling us that when schools open, every teacher must wear a mask.  Forcing people to breathe their own CO2 is deleterious.  Even the frauds in the WH press corps dump their masks when the cameras stop running.  Sweden believes masks offer a false sense of security.

Dr. Russell Blaylock warns that not only do face masks fail to protect the healthy from getting sick, but they also create serious health risks to the wearer. The bottom line is that if you are not sick, you should not wear a face mask.

We believed that this pandemic (media and government’s name for Covid-19) would act like other respiratory viruses in terms of its spread among communities.  After months of studying the virus and how it behaves, Dr. Blaylock tells us there is little to change this perception.

Surgeon General Jerome Adams has doubled down on his advice against healthy people wearing face masks to protect themselves from coronavirus, saying that wearing one improperly can “actually increase your risk” of getting the disease. But pressure from above told him to change his story.  The false narrative is sickening.  Betsy McCaughey says our homemade masks aren’t doing squat.

Choose your poison, wear a mask or not. For me and mine, we breathe fresh air.

Contact Tracing

Most folks have seen H.R.6666, a perfect number for this despotic pile of dung.  It was introduced by Bobby L. Rush (D-Il) on May 1st, 2020.  (Years back, Rush formed the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party.) His bill calls for $100 billion in funding for 2020, and hiring thousands of government employees as the new “brown shirts.”

Alex Newman’s latest article in the New American regarding Contact Tracing states, “Under the guise of fighting the coronavirus, governments across the United States and beyond are partnering with shady organizations connected to the Clintons and George Soros (Chelsea Clinton sits on the board of Partners in Health) to deploy Orwellian “contact tracing” schemes involving technology and tens of thousands of new government workers to track everyone. Families may be forcibly separated. And military forces and war-like rhetoric are already being used as the effort to shred all vestiges of privacy advances. At least one world leader even suggested putting microchips under children’s skin to track them.”

Titled TRACE, “Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone,” it officially embeds the snitch culture.  The bill states that the Secretary of Health and Human Services “may award grants to eligible entities to conduct diagnostic testing for Covid–19, to trace and monitor the contacts of infected individuals, and to support the quarantine of such contacts.” The bill goes on to explain that this will be accomplished by mobile health units and “testing individuals and providing individuals with services related to testing and quarantine at their residences.”

H.R.6666 would give government the authority, if a government official suspects that you have been exposed to Covid-19, to place you under house arrest or remove you from your home and place you in indefinite quarantine.

House Bill H.R.6666 and the corresponding Senate Bill S.3624 must be stopped.

The authoritarian police state is already here.  Gov. Abbott of Texas has said he wants a total of 4,000 tracers for his state.  Washington Governor Jay Inslee indicated that people who refuse to cooperate with contact tracers or refuse coronavirus testing won’t be allowed to leave their homes even to go to the grocery store or pharmacy. My so-called Christian conservative Governor Bill Lee is onboard with this insanity and believes he needs to hire 2,000 tracers.

What is your governor doing?

Conclusion

Keeping the economy open would have brought us total immunity throughout the country by now and the virus would be gone.  America is paying heavily, but most politicians don’t care, and they’re now obfuscating the much higher collateral deaths and damage caused by the false narrative of the World Health Organization (WHO).  Dying because of delayed surgeries, suicide because of loss, overwhelmed 911 calls because of domestic abuse, businesses going out-of-business and jobs that will never come back…we’re not “better safe than sorry.”  We’re sorry!

The lockdown was radically ineffective and destructive, and it doubled the deaths of Americans. We must open everything up again and go back to normal, and not a “new normal.” Unfortunately, almost half of the shutdown-induced layoffs will be permanent.

This virus was not only planned and executed to destroy Trump’s economy, but there were ancillary plusses to destroying America and her elderly.  Those elderly knew real freedom, unlike today’s youth whose education has been dumbed down since the 1880s.

Behind the mask of America’s freedom lie millions of Marxist/Leninist politicians.  We’ve been sold the “snake oil” by WHO’s globalist comrades Fauci, Birx and Redfield, appointed by Coronavirus Task Force Chair, VP Mike Pence.

©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Election Judge Pleads Guilty to Ballot Stuffing for Democrats

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A former elected official in Philadelphia who accepted large payments from a political consultant to stuff ballot boxes for Democratic judicial candidates has pleaded guilty as part of a continuing federal investigation.

The Justice Department announced Thursday that Domenick J. DeMuro, 73, who was an election judge in South Philadelphia, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to deprive city voters of their civil rights by fraudulently stuffing ballot boxes in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 primary elections.

DeMuro, a judge for the 39th Ward, 36th Division, also pleaded guilty to violating the Travel Act, which forbids use of any facility in interstate commerce—in this case, cellphones—with the intent to promote certain illegal activity—in this case, bribery.

The Justice Department said the case is part of an ongoing investigation by the FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police.

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 >>

The judge of elections is an elective office and a paid position in Pennsylvania municipalities responsible for supervising the local election process.

“DeMuro fraudulently stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear,” U.S. Attorney William McSwain of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said.

“This is utterly reprehensible conduct,” McSwain said. “The charges announced today do not erase what he did, but they do ensure that he is held to account for those actions.”

During his guilty plea hearing, DeMuro said an unnamed political consultant gave him directions and paid him money to add votes for certain Democrats who were running for judicial office. Their campaigns had hired the consultant.DeMuro also admitted to casting illegal votes for other candidates for federal, state, and local offices at the consultant’s request.Prosecutors said the political consultant solicited monetary payments from his clients in the form of cash or checks as “consulting fees,” then used some of the money to pay election board officials, including DeMuro, to tamper with the election results. DeMuro said payments ranged between $300 to $5,000.In a press release, McSwain said:

Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy. If even one vote is fraudulently rung up, the integrity of that election is compromised. I want the public to know that this investigation is active and ongoing, and my office is taking every possible step that we can to ensure the integrity of the upcoming primary and general elections in the nine counties of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Citizens of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania should be confident of election integrity, said Capt. Leo Hannon, director of the special investigations division of the Pennsylvania State Police.

“As this investigation clearly illustrates, the Pennsylvania State Police will relentlessly pursue any breach of the sacred trust bestowed upon our public officials,” Hannon said in a prepared statement. “Our agency is proud to partner with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Attorney’s Office, and the United States Department of Justice as a whole to root out corruption at any level of our government.”

The probe is a positive step forward in prosecuting voter fraud, said former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an election integrity group.

“Right now, other federal prosecutors are aware of cases of double voting in federal elections as well as noncitizen voting,” Adams said in a written statement, adding:

Attorney General William Barr should prompt those other offices to do their duty and prosecute known election crimes. Those who are considering election crimes should take note of U.S. Attorney McSwain’s work. Now, they have something to fear before they violate federal election laws.

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.

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.

The Betrayal and the Programming behind Covid 19 – A UK Perspective [Part 2]

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To read Part 1 of The Betrayal and the Programming behind Covid 19 – A UK Perspective click here.

(These are my views as a woman living in England, on how the culture and spirit of my country has changed over 50 years.  Why the country does not feel protected or strong any more, how it has lost, and is losing it values and decency, and how we are daily losing our free speech.)

“Eli: You know what’s the good thing about no soap, you can smell a hijacker from a mile away.” – Movie: The Book of Eli, 2010

The Gospel Of SalvationThose Not SavedBeing Saved

Being LostSweet Odours

Some years ago, a friend sent me a clip from an SNL (Saturday Night Live) skit labelled Red Flag perfume by Chanel.  It was an insightful and funny send up of the advertising industry for perfume, but in particular it depicted how people can make fools of themselves and others by attempting to use charm and trickery.

The Red Flag symbolism which is also meant to signal a warning, also reminded me of an article I once wrote called The London Red in which I exposed London red buses being used to advertise and promote LGBT rights and the counter attack by a reparative therapy organization being condemned by the then London mayor, Boris Johnson, who is now our Prime Minister.

Over the years, in my own small way, along with so many others, I have continued to raise my own Red Flags, but it also doesn’t mean to say that sometimes I haven’t fallen victim to some of the charm or the tricks that change agents and seducers can use in order to steal energy or make you subservient to their own particular motives or agenda at times.

During the Covid-19 exercise many flags have been raised which have been well researched and documented.  Sometimes they are called false flags.    However, all flags, both good and bad, can alert us to the very cruel way that innocent or uninformed people can be seduced, divided and conquered, and how clever advertising which also includes fear mongering and very confusing statistics, all mixed together like a very poison perfume can over-ride our sensibilities and our rational view at times.   Somewhere out there is the genuine aroma, a combination of notes and a synergy labelled Truth.

Red Flag

One of the very first flags to be raised in relation to Covid-19, should have been why the UK Government was demonstrating reliance on the predictions of the possible mortality rate forecasted by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College?    Professor Ferguson, who before his resignation had sat on the governments Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, already had a long history of exaggerated predictions in relation to the possible outcomes of an infectious disease.

In 2002, he predicted up to 50,000 people would die from Mad Cow Disease from beef.  (177 died)

In 2005, he predicted up to 200 million people could die from Bird flu (282 people died worldwide)

In 2009, he predicted up to 65,000 UK deaths from Swine flu (457 died).

However, it was in 2001, that the Imperial College team were responsible, due to their forecasts, for the culling of 6 million cattle, pigs and sheep which cost the UK an estimated £10 billion.  It is an issue which was very controversial at the time with farmers asking if the slaughter of all livestock was necessary.   A full report on the Foot and Mouth disease of 2001 can be viewed in the footnotes.

Whilst some people believe that Professor Ferguson has possibly saved lives through his recommendations on the Foot and Mouth disease and our present day Covid-19, there is no scientific data that can prove lives have been saved.    The question remains on why our government will still repeat that it is relying on ‘scientific data’ for its actions?

Red Flag

I suppose another red flag was the Prime Minister initially announcing to the public that they were to wash their hands for 20 seconds to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’.   I did find the instructions quite endearing to start with but only because of his unique personality. I think I might have been fooled.  Had our previous prime minister suggested this, it would almost have certainly been a patronizing order from a parent to a child.   However, the almost innocent way he encouraged this changed quite rapidly.   Why?

From a rational request to wash hands with soap and water more often and more thoroughly, an incessant demand became more apparent as the days passed by.

We now have a country which is becoming paranoid about disinfecting ourselves and every single surface that we touch.   Obsessive Compulsive Disorder may be on the rise.  I believe we may now need a study of the effects that this has had on some of the population which will be funded by the taxpayer.

Red Flag

Another red flag to be raised has almost certainly been the social distancing which everyone has been expected to carry out in order to ‘save lives’.  A more appropriate term would have been physical distancing.    However, more importantly is how the actions from the term ‘Lockdown’ which was invented in a Californian prison system in 1973, has been so readily accepted!

In regards to the actions of a lockdown in a prison situation or a terrorist/shooter attack, lockdowns may be acceptable, but to enforce lockdowns under the possibility of a virus which may or may not harm someone based on low numbers of people who die from Covid-19 has more serious consequences and should have been questioned beforehand based on any scientific data that could have been provided which proves its effectiveness on locking down healthy people in relation to quarantining ill and vulnerable people instead.  No such science was presented.   No statistics were provided beforehand on the economic damage to a country.

According to some mental health research, which has pointed out the obvious, almost a quarter of adults have felt severe loneliness during the time of enforced lockdown and according to a leading psychiatrist and president of the Royal Society of Medicine Sir Simon Wessely:

“Some people will develop psychiatric conditions, mental health conditions. There will be a rise in depression. For some people, there will be specific stressors — the anxiety of either believing that you might be infecting the people you’ve been quarantined with — or been infected yourself”.

Whilst TV programming promotes happy family gatherings through the use of the latest technology, it is reported that the World Health Organization has reported they are ‘deeply troubled’ by the spike in domestic violence towards women and children during lockdown.   I do not know if they are at all concerned about the abuse towards men, but the question should be why are ‘experts’ concerned after an event which should have been thought through more carefully before implementing a lockdown?

Red Flag

The rapid removal of many you tube interviews and face-book accounts, together with any relevant information which researchers may want to listen to or read about in order to further their knowledge on infectious diseases has raised yet another red flag.

Interviews which have included the research carried out by many eminent doctors and scientists in relation to Covid-19 have not been exempt from this attack.

Not only is there an army of companies collecting consumer behaviour and predictive analytics ever day but there are also forces deciding what you can watch or listen to on very basic information which is not obscene in any way, but only contrary to another organization’s view.  This is an attack on free speech.

It has also been reported at the UK Government briefing by Defence Staff General Sir Nick Carter that the 77th Brigade has been countering misinformation online relating to Corona virus.

The 77th Brigade are a combined regular and reserve unit of the British Army.   Their website states:

“77th Brigade is an agent of change; through targeted Information Activity and Outreach we contribute to the success of military objectives in support of Commanders, whilst reducing the cost in casualties and resources”.

Their website also states that they specialise in non-lethal forms of psychological warfare, using social media including face book and twitter to fight with information in response to external factors, like Russian misinformation.

Unfortunately, the mis-information that our own government has received and given out has not created any confidence that they possess the correct information.

Too many Red Flags

The conclusions that result from so many red flags too numerous to mention can sadly only result in one conclusion and outcome.

My views are that a quick return to normal and not a ‘new normal’ would be needed. However, sadly, even then there would never be the same trust.   Civilizations are usually completely broken down so that they can be built up in a different way and too much damage has been done.    The whole exercise has hit at the heart of every person who has smelled the dodgy synthetic perfume of deceivers.    Who is who and what is what has been a game in which only God knows the outcome.  We should listen to Him more.

The incentive to start afresh, to be creative individuals and independent and to provide for ourselves and our families need not be lost.   Rise up, watch, wait and listen.

“For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.” – 2 Corinthians 2:15

©All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: Unmasking The Science You Aren’t Hearing On TV | COVID-19 Facts from the Frontline | Tony Robbins

Having Problems at Facebook, Twitter and Google? Thank the Southern Poverty Law Center!

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“The SPLC routinely smears conservatives and other critics of left-wing identity politics because that’s how the group makes money.” – Author Peter Hasson

Most of you know that, but just in case, the Capital Research Center posted a nice little update story of where thing stands with the Southern Poverty Law Center after it was forced to give the boot to its longtime leader Morris Dees.

(See my SPLC files here, and at RRW here.)

The article features Peter Hasson’s new book with the great cover—The Manipulators—about how Big Tech often uses the SPLC to police speech.

Embarrassment About SPLC Should Be Shared by Others (II)

After the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Ala., fired its founder Morris Dees and publicly admitted that he mistreated people—reportedly on the basis of race and sex—we wrote last June about how some embarrassment surrounding that which occurred there should probably be shared by other organizations who relied on the discredited group’s work for longer than they should have. At the time, these groups included GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and the Amalgamated Foundation—which purport to provide information that can be used to evaluate the quality of nonprofits, like SPLC.

Daily Caller News Foundation senior investigative reporter Peter J. Hasson’s new The Manipulators: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Big Tech’s War on Conservatives reminds us of yet others who should perhaps share in the embarrassment, as well.

For many years, as Hasson overviews, the high-profile SPLC has liberally used its “hate-group” and “extremist” designations to unfairly label conservative groups and individuals, as it was engaging in questionable financial practices and fundraising tactics. After Dees’ departure, public scrutiny was more widely brought to bear on its behavior.

As part of that scrutiny, more than a few former SPLC employees and journalists from the Montgomery Advertiser reported that SPLC’s longtime tacit acceptance of Dees’ behavior was always something of an open secret.

After the scandal, SPLC retained attorney and onetime Michelle Obama chief of staff Tina Tchen, to conduct an investigation into what had been going on there. The work of Tchen—who many believe tried to influence the Cook County (Ill.) State’s Attorney earlier last year to drop 16 felony charges of disorderly conduct against Jussie Smollett for his fraudulent allegation of a racist, anti-gay attack—has not been open. There has been no “Tchen report” (or summary of one) released by SPLC, at least as of this writing.

“The SPLC is a once-respected discrimination watchdog that has long since devolved into a smear-mongering fundraising mill,” according to Hasson, and now often assists Big Tech campaigns to police speech.

“The SPLC routinely smears conservatives and other critics of left-wing identity politics because that’s how the group makes money,” he observes. “Ultra-wealthy leftists write massive checks to the SPLC to demonstrate their wokeness because the SPLC is to identity politics what Planned Parenthood is to abortion.” In fact, “SPLC’s fear-mongering is a lucrative operation, and one that’s tax-exempt to boot. The SPLC has more than $400 million in assets, including a cool $90 million stashed in offshore funds”—a number that The Washington Free Beacon reports is now $162 million.

Read it all.

This post is filed in my Charity Fraud category.

RELATED VIDEO: Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the SPLC.

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

Conservatives Ask Amazon to End SPLC’s Role as ‘Hate Group’ Sheriff

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A conservative free-market group hopes to convince Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, not to rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center as a gatekeeper for its philanthropic giving.

The scandal-plagued SPLC, a left-wing advocacy organization, routinely labels mainstream center-right organizations as “hate groups” on a list that includes actual hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis.

“Amazon likes to inoculate themselves from criticism. That’s what our proposal is trying to do is pierce that inoculation,” Justin Danhof, director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

At issue is the AmazonSmile program, in which online buyers may contribute a small percentage of purchase prices to the charity of their choice, whether it’s their church or a nonprofit such as the Red Cross. To the chagrin of conservatives, Amazon allows the Southern Poverty Law Center to decide whether the chosen charity is appropriate.

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 >>

“Amazon can say, ‘We’re not deciding that the Family Research Council can’t be in the Smile program. Someone else does that. Go yell at them,’” Danhof said in the interview.

“We are piercing that veil with our resolution, making it clear with the tens of thousands who have signed the petition to the [Amazon] board of directors and investor relations: We are holding you accountable for the SPLC being the gatekeeper because you gave them the keys to the gate to keep,” added Danhof, also general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research.

The National Center for Public Policy Research is leading a shareholder resolution on viewpoint discrimination to be voted on at the Amazon shareholder meeting next Wednesday.

“Amazon’s implementation of viewpoint-discriminatory policies in the Smile Program itself stems from a reliance on viewpoint-discriminatory, partisan, and discredited sources,” the shareholder resolution says, using a footnote on a news article about SPLC and adding:

The shareholders should be aware of the extent to which discrimination against social, political, or religious views by Amazon in its partnerships, content policies, and options for customer-selected charitable donations may jeopardize Amazon’s current market-dominance and may negatively affect important social dynamics beyond Amazon’s immediate business impact. …

We therefore ask and recommend that the report called for include, among other issues at board and management discretion: 1. Risks associated with relying on a partisan and external source to determine eligibility for charitable support from third party customers. 2. Risks associated with regulating content on the platform based on its social, political, or religious viewpoint. 3. A full evaluation of viewpoint bias and associated risks to ensure that Amazon is making balanced decisions and that it is acting consistent with its commitment to diversity.

AmazonSmile, the nonprofit charitable arm of Amazon, has relied on SPLC’s “hate group” list in dropping certain groups from eligibility for receiving donations, Danhof and other critics say.

Amazon’s board of directors has recommended that shareholders reject the resolution targeting the use of SPLC.

“We serve diverse customer sets, operate in diverse communities, and rely on a diverse workforce,” the Amazon board says in its recommendation to shareholders, adding:

The policies and procedures we have in place for our employees, sellers, and customers are intended to foster diversity and inclusion and promote respect for all people. We maintain these policies to facilitate a welcoming environment for our global customers and selling partners while offering the widest selection of items on earth.

AmazonSmile has disallowed donations to SPLC-flagged conservative organizations such as Alliance Defending Freedom, a leading Christian legal aid group, and Family Research Council, which advocates traditional values.

At the same time, AmazonSmile allows giving to far-left organizations such as SPLC, Planned Parenthood, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, according to the National Center for Public Policy Research.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been besieged by scandal and resignations over the past year regarding allegations of racial and gender discrimination and of widespread sexual harassment.

Critics say Amazon’s reputation is harmed among many consumers by its partnership with SPLC.

The Southern Poverty Law Center did not respond to phone and email inquiries for comment.

Amazon customers so far have donated more than $160 million to nonprofits through AmazonSmile, giving $44 million in fiscal year 2018 alone, according to the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Customers gave $37,739 to SPLC through AmazonSmile in fiscal 2018.

Amazon also has removed content based on political concerns from its sales pages, according to Alliance Defending Freedom.

Pointing to Amazon’s stated leadership principles, the Christian legal organization notes that Amazon’s reliance on SPLC falls short of its goal to “seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.”

As the 33rd-largest recipient of AmazonSmile funds, SPLC  apparently has a conflict of interest in also being the gatekeeper determining what groups are eligible, Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel and vice president of U.S. advocacy and administration for Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Daily Signal.

While his organization backs the shareholder resolution, Tedesco is quick to acknowledge that it won’t get enough votes to be adopted.

“It’s almost impossible to get 51%. You don’t win your shareholder resolution. What you do is raise awareness about an issue that the corporation should be paying attention to,” Tedesco said in a phone interview.

“We certainly want to raise awareness and make sure that shareholders of Amazon and the general public understand that they are irresponsibly outsourcing decisions over what charities can participate in the AmazonSmile program to this completely discredited, far-left advocacy organization that attempts to smear its ideological opponents.”

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.

Sen. Lindsey Graham Demands ‘Unmasking’ Records on Trump, Members of His Family and Campaign

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Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham requested records Tuesday of Obama administration officials who made so-called unmasking requests for information on President Donald Trump, as well as members of his family and campaign.

Graham’s request, submitted to Attorney General William Barr and Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, is a follow-up to the release of a list on May 13 of 39 Obama-era officials who submitted requests that unmasked the identity of Michael Flynn in government intelligence reports.

The list showed that officials like former Vice President Joe Biden, former FBI Director James Comey, and former CIA Director John Brennan made Flynn-related requests.

Graham is seeking similar documents related to requests for information on Trump and members of his family, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner.

He is also seeking unmasking records for documents related to Trump campaign aides Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Chris Christie, Carter Page, and George Papadopoulos.

“Given the extensive number of requests for the unmasking of General Flynn’s name during this short time period, it raises the question of whether these or other officials sought the unmasking of the identities of other individuals associated with the Trump campaign or transition team,” Graham wrote Barr and Grenell on Tuesday.

Graham, a South Carolina Republican closely allied with Trump, is also seeking documents that explain the reason for the individual requests.

While U.S. government officials commonly submit unmasking requests, Republicans have accused Obama administration officials of abusing the process by making politically-motivated requests for information on Trump administration officials.

Republicans have focused on the unmasking issue to figure out who leaked classified information regarding a phone call that Flynn had in late December 2016 with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Details of that call were leaked to The Washington Post for a column published on Jan. 12, 2017.

The list released May 13 did not contain an unmasking record that explained a request for documents related to Flynn’s call with Kislyak.

Graham is also asking Barr and Grenell to provide an explanation for why the list released last week did not show a request for records related to the Flynn-Kislyak call.

Graham has made an aggressive push in recent weeks to declassify documents central to the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. He has published transcripts of FBI informants’ conversations with Page and Papadopoulos. He also published less-declassified versions of the four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications that the FBI obtained against Page.

Graham said Monday he will hold a vote on June 4 to subpoena 53 individuals involved in the investigations of the Trump campaign.

COLUMN BY

Chuck Ross

Chuck Ross is a reporter for The Daily Caller News Foundation. Twitter: @ChuckRossDC.

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 for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The Media’s Double Standard on States’ Different Approaches to COVID-19

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America’s economy is in the early stages of “reopening” after dealing with the coronavirus pandemic for months. It’s a process that won’t be easy, simple, or without hiccups.

Meanwhile, many in the mainstream media are being true to form in making it a game of ensuring conservatives and Republicans look like reckless, heartless monsters for wanting to reopen the economy sooner rather than later.

That might sound like an exaggeration, but it’s hard to come to any other conclusion when viewing the media’s coverage of the various states and their divergent approaches to controlling the coronavirus and plans for reopening their economies.

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 >>

Consider, for example, how the media have treated Georgia, with its Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and Colorado, with its Democrat governor, Jared Polis. Both states have moved forward with aggressive reopening plans, but only one has received a torrent of criticism from legacy media outlets.

Can you guess which one?

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote a piece in April that carried the headline, “Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination.”

“Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is proposing to offer a new nonstop service to the Great Beyond,” he wrote. “He has a bold plan to turn his state into the [emphasis in original] place to die.”

And Milbank wasn’t alone. Countless other articles, both straight news stories and commentaries, were published suggesting pretty much the same thing. One writer in the Atlantic called Georgia’s approach an “experiment in human sacrifice.”

But there was hardly any criticism directed at Polis and Colorado for embracing a similar reopening plan.

But perhaps the most egregious example of the phenomenon is the disparity in the treatment of Florida versus New York.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has been regularly attacked by many in the media for his state’s initial approach to the coronavirus pandemic and for its early reopening, while New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has been widely praised.

“The Sunshine State has a bigger population than New York and arguably is just as international. It has a disproportionately vulnerable and older population. Yet Florida’s COVID-19 deaths per capita are less than one-tenth of New York’s,” noted an editorial in the Washington Examiner. “DeSantis’s state has not only avoided the fate of Italy, but it has done better than Germany, Denmark, and other European countries that have received lavish praise for limiting the human cost of the coronavirus.”

My colleague, Fred Lucas, reported Monday on the starkly different outcomes in New York and Florida.

“New York has had about 348,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 28,000 deaths as of May 17, according to the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)],” Lucas wrote. “Florida, meanwhile, had about 46,000 cases and 2,000 deaths. The population of New York state is 19.5 million, while Florida is home to 21.5 million.”

In some respects, the circumstances that led to the outcomes in those states might be comparing apples and oranges, but in terms of population, as Lucas noted, Florida and New York are comparable in size.

While Cuomo has often struck the right tone and certainly dealt with a massive challenge as New York was rocked by COVID-19, his leadership and decisions have been far from perfect.

There was a delay in shutting down the New York City subway system for a deep cleaning and nightly sterilizations, which could have occurred much sooner. Perhaps even more consequentially for the state’s COVID-19 fatality rates, Cuomo’s administration forced nursing homes to take in sick coronavirus patients, which led to many deaths and furthered the spread of the pandemic.

Cuomo has partially admitted to this mistake, but one does wonder whether, if he were the governor of another state and a member of another party, we would be seeing articles calling him unfit to lead the state.

It should be noted, too, that while DeSantis took heavy criticism for Florida’s open beaches, he also actually took early steps to ensure that sick coronavirus patients did not return to nursing homes, where there were far more vulnerable populations.

DeSantis laid out his approach to the coronavirus pandemic in a superb interview with National Review’s Rich Lowry, in which he explained how he gave counties latitude to pursue the policies that work best for their specific conditions.

“I said from the beginning,” DeSantis said in the interview, “we’re a big, diverse state. The epidemic is not going to affect this state uniformly, and what’s appropriate in Miami and Broward may not be appropriate for Jacksonville or the Panhandle. And that’s pretty much the way we did it.”

On Wednesday, DeSantis torched the mainstream media over their coverage of his approach to the coronavirus pandemic and the positive data coming out of his state.

“You’ve got a lot of people in your profession who waxed poetically for weeks and weeks about how Florida was going to be just like New York,” he told reporters.

Well said.

Though American government has centralized dramatically over the past century, our system continues to retain a fair amount of federalism. States around the country have pursued their own policies, and that’s a good aspect of our system.

After all, the geography, population, and circumstances of, say, Wyoming, are far different from those of New York or California. It would make sense that states would have different strategies with respect to how they seek to contain the pandemic and how they approach their reopening.

Unfortunately, all too many in the media want to make this complicated process a mindless game of blaming conservatives and Republicans for bad things that happen and praising Democrats and progressives for things that go well (or simply remain silent when they don’t).

It would be nice if our national media committed to an evenhanded treatment of the pandemic and the states’ divergent plans for reopening, but that appears to be too much to ask for.

COMMENTARY BY

Jarrett Stepman

Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. Send an email to Jarrett. He is also the author of the new book, “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Twitter: .

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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.