5 Things to Know About This Anti-Malaria Drug’s Effect on COVID-19

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The federal government has stockpiled 29 million pills of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as the best known way to treat active cases of COVID-19, and thousands of patients in New York will take it.

But using the Food and Drug Administration-approved drug to treat COVID-19 has sparked an intense political controversy.

President Donald Trump, who has publicly touted hydroxychloroquine since March 19, said of the drug Sunday: “If it does work, it would be a shame if we didn’t do it early. I’ve seen things I sort of like; so what do I know, I’m not a doctor.”

Axios first reported on an internal dispute between White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who is bullish on the drug, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, who is concerned that only “anecdotal evidence” suggests the drug is effective against COVID-19.

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 >>

Ohio state Rep. Tavia Galonski, a Democrat who represents parts of Akron, said she would make a complaint to The Hague that Trump is guilty of crimes against humanity for promoting a drug before all the facts are known.

“I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been to The Hague. I’m making a referral for crimes against humanity tomorrow,” Galonski tweeted Sunday. “Today’s press conference was the last straw. I know the need for a prosecution referral when I see one.”

The Ohio Democrat’s tweet was in response to one from Go-Blue-44, who has fewer than 600 followers, saying: “And an invitation to The Hague for crimes against humanity for pushing a drug that hasn’t been tested for coronavirus patients.”

The Food and Drug Administration has expedited use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 patients; most other countries also allow the drug to be used to treat the new disease.

Aside from political musings, here are some facts to know about hydroxychloroquine.

1. What Do Studies Say?

Studies so far have shown varying degrees of promise in using hydroxychloroquine against the coronavirus, said Dr. Kevin Pham, a medical doctor and contributor to The Daily Signal.

Pham told The Daily Signal that existing studies are “small or poorly controlled.”

“The results are promising, but leave lots of questions,” he said.

One French study found that COVID-19 patients treated with a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin recovered more quickly than others.

However, that study involved only 36 patients, and just 20 took the medicine, considered a small sample.

The French study also didn’t look at patients in intensive care units. Most patients who took the drug improved. However, one patient from the group tested positive after taking the medicine.

A more recent study out of China used a larger but still fairly limited sample of 62 people. Half took the anti-malaria drug, the other half did not.

The 62 patients were treated for five days, their fevers and cough monitored. The study found 25 of the 31 patients who were given the drug improved, versus 17 patients in the control group of 31.

The study’s authors determined that additional research should be done.

Another study out of France, with a larger sample of 80 coronavirus patients, found improvements in all but one patient who used the drug.

2. When Will We Know More?

New York, the hardest hit state in the country, will provide hydroxychloroquine to 4,000 COVID-19 patients. The University of Albany School of Public Health is observing the patients who take the drug.

New York University, meanwhile, is setting up clinical trials, enrolling 2,000 adults at six sites, The New York Post reported.

“Thousands are taking it in New York, and we should know if hydroxychloroquine is effective within about two weeks,” Dr. Lee Gross, a family doctor in Florida, told The Daily Signal. “It doesn’t mean we throw caution to the wind. But we should have a relatively good idea based on New York.”

Gross noted that so far the “data is very limited.”

“In a perfect world, we would do more controlled studies, but you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want,” Gross said. “We are facing a pandemic now. To have all the information we want could take six to eight weeks.”

3. How Do You Take the Drug?

Hydroxychloroquine has been around to fight malaria since the 1950s. It is also used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. So it’s not new on the market.

Individuals usually take a total of 10 pills as part of a four- to 10-day regimen. Typically, the dose is two pills for five days.

This would be followed by taking azithromycin for three days, Gross said.

Gross said he anticipates that one day the drug, if effective against the coronavirus, could become like Tamiflu, an antiviral medicine taken at the earliest signs of the flu for prevention.

“There have been recent articles that this is not effective for the critically ill,” Gross said of hydroxychloroquine. “That might be the case. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore this when it’s in the early stages.”

“In India, health care workers take hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure. I’m assuming, if the data pans out, this may be like Tamiflu, which you have to take 24 to 48 hours after the first symptoms, or it’s useless.”

4. What Are the Side Effects?

“What do we have to lose?” Trump has asked.

For one thing, hydroxychloroquine does have some quite serious side effects.

Those side effects reportedly include fatal heart arrhythmia, vision loss, ear ringing and vomiting, headaches, dizziness, stomach pain, weight loss, and mood changes.

But the medication can be obtained only through prescription, so patients can’t legally access it without medical supervision.

Given that use of hydroxychloroquine is under medical control, the side effects aren’t a major concern. Disappointing the public is a potentially larger problem, Pham said.

“The main downside would be giving people false hope,” Pham said.

5. What Do Respiratory Specialists Say?

Respiratory specialists recommend the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, but with caveats.

The American Thoracic Society, a medical society specializing in respiratory diseases, led an international task force researching treatments for COVID-19 that released guidelines Monday.

One guideline was to prescribe hydroxychloroquine to hospitalized patients who have COVID-19.

This only applies, the report says, when “shared decision-making is possible,” “data can be collected for interim comparisons of patients who received hydroxychloroquine … versus those who did not,” “the illness is sufficiently severe to warrant investigational therapy,” and “the drug is not in short supply.”

Dr. Kevin C. Wilson, chief of guidelines and documents at the American Thoracic Society, said existing research is flawed, but nevertheless worthwhile.

“We suggest that, if the drug is prescribed, that it be done in the context of data collection for research,” Wilson said. “We believe that in urgent situations like a pandemic, we can learn while treating by collecting real-world data. … Thus, the bottom line is, whether hydroxychloroquine …  confer benefits to patients with COVID-19 are unanswered questions.”

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.

Mona Eltahawy and the New Feminist Extremism

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For months, I’ve been wanting to have a conversation about Mona Eltahawy and the new feminist extremism she embodies. There were a number of women’s platforms I could have published this piece on that all cater to women’s issues.

I chose Clarion Project because what I’m about to discuss is not just a niche women’s rights or feminist issue; it’s an issue of extremism.

Since 2018, I’ve broadened the subjects I cover from Islamist extremism, which wants to crush the West, to other types of extremism, including:

  • Neo-Nazis, who want to crush non-Eurocentric races
  • Antifa, which wants to crush White Supremacists (and seemingly a lot of others)
  • And now, feminists, who want to crush men

I can’t ignore that a serious branch of feminism has devolved into another form of extremism.

I can’t ignore that feminism, as it’s represented today, is both psychologically (and sometimes physically) violent.

Feminist extremism isn’t just contempt of men, it’s annihilation

The new feminist extremism didn’t pop out of a vacuum. It’s been here for a while, and it’s been building. It found footing over the arc of time across movements in the last century, including most recently when both well-meaning men and women celebrated phrases like, “The future is female.”

What space is there for men in a future paradigm where the notion of equality and freedom for one demographic is rooted in the annihilation of another? When society embraces phrases like this, they’re unconsciously drafting a blueprint that wipes out the reality of another gender altogether.

Just as I and many others have long advocated for the rights of emerging women — little girls — so too will I now speak about what kind of chaotic, gender-oppressive world we’re creating for our boys.

Half the time, depending on where you’re situated, you’re not even allowed to talk about gender anymore. But let’s talk about gender anyway — briefly.

Much of today’s feminism has abandoned the inherent nature of the feminine. Feminist extremism, specifically, has taken the strengths of what it means to be a woman — our ability to connect, create community, our intuition, our ability to nurture  — and distorted it.

The best way to summarize the new feminist extremism is something I overheard today by a liberal woman who described this type of feminism as a “Hulk Smash.” I couldn’t have said it better.

And this brings me to Mona Eltahawy.

Mona is not some flaming-haired goddess of women’s rights. She is brutality embodied

In December 2019, Vice News featured an article titled, “Mona Eltahawy Would Like You to Fuck Right Off With Your Civility Politics.” The subheading quoting Mona, read, “I refuse to allow those who don’t recognize my full humanity to expect politeness of me.”

OK, we’ve heard this before from folks like Linda Sarsour, who happily dehumanizes Israelis in order to champion Palestinians. This is supremacy; a theme that keeps popping up when one group demands a space at the expense of another.

Yet, the opposite of the opposite is still a mirror reflection of the original — meaning, hyper-aggression, rage and hostility toward men (or one’s ideological opponents) is no different than the brutality shown to women throughout history.

True power rests in creating a new paradigm, not just a foil of a broken, old one. True leadership is inclusivity, creating community and  truth … but also grace. These are inherent female strengths, and yet none of these are characteristics of extreme feminists.

Flipping someone off is neither powerful, nor is it leadership.

As much as I’ve tried to ignore all this, I finally couldn’t. Recently I saw Mona’s brand of feminist extremism featured on Fuuse, a publication belonging to Deeyah Khan.

Deeyah has produced documentaries reaching out to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, so clearly she understands extremism. And that is exactly why it’s so baffling to see Fuuse  — an Emmy-winning and twice BAFTA-nominated media company — glorify another form of extremism.

If we’re going to be leaders in preventing or countering extremism, we need to be able to spot patterns.

The world is rapidly evolving, and it’s not going to spell things out for us

The extremism of tomorrow is not necessarily going to be the neatly packaged extremism of yesterday. It is our duty to spot the patterns and connect the dots, to recognize there is an undeniable new form of extremism rooted in gender identities.

Extremism is often rooted in trauma, and feminist extremism is no different. Mona admitted it herself when in her Vice interview above, she shares, “I always say I was traumatized into feminism.”

As we see with Islamists, neo-Nazis, Antifa  members and other extremists, rather than work through their traumas, these people attach themselves to an ideology, often gain platforms and tend to scream louder than everyone else in the room.

Given that in our current media climate the loudest voices get heard, it’s no surprise that the most psychologically violent, hyper-dominant personalities are framed as icons.

We can do better. We need to do better. I don’t expect Mona to change, but we need to get better at seeing what we’re looking at.

COLUMN BY

Shireen Qudosi

Shireen Qudosi is Clarion Project’s National Correspondent.

RELATED STORIES

Linda Sarsour Uses Nazi Tactics to Dehumanize Israelis

Mona Eltahawy Has An Interesting Definition of Free Expression

Feminism, Hijab and Hypocrisy

EDITORS NOTE: This Clarion Project video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Ahead of COVID-19 ‘Peak,’ Trump Touts ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’

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President Donald Trump has warned the week ahead could be the worst yet in the COVID-19 crisis, but he and other administration officials also shared a positive note on Sunday, using terms such as “glimmers of progress” and “light at the end of the tunnel.”

“In the days ahead America will endure the peak of this terrible pandemic,” Trump said. “Our warriors in this life and death battle are the incredible doctors and nurses and healthcare workers on the front line of the fight.”

Last week Trump announced that peak death toll is expected to be reached in the next two weeks.

“Things are happening. We’re starting to see light at the end of the tunnel,” Trump said at the press briefing. “And hopefully in the not-too-distant future, we’ll be very proud of the job we all did.”

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 >>

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, noted data coming from two of the hardest hit countries.

“As you can see from the hopeful signs in Italy and Spain, where we see finally new cases and deaths declining, it’s giving us hope of what our future could be,” Birx said.

She turned to charts showing the number of state cases per 100,000 citizens. Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania are new to jurisdictions where 10% or more are testing positive for the coronavirus.

New York, the hardest hit state, has actually seen a decrease among those testing positive for coronavirus. However, New Jersey is seeing an increase, Birx said.

Other states with high number of cases are Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Connecticut, Washington state, Illinois, and Colorado.

Vice President Mike Pence spoke to governors from New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois, and Louisiana earlier Sunday, and had some positive news.

“We are seeing a trend of some leveling [from] all the governors I spoke to today,” Pence said, later adding:

We are beginning to see the glimmers of progress. The experts will tell me not to jump to any conclusions, and I’m not. But, like your president, I’m an optimistic person and I’m hopeful.

The truth is we’re starting to see cases, most importantly losses, and hospitalizations beginning to stabilize. But, make no mistake about it, I want to say to the American people, if that holds, if that is happening, it’s because what all of you are doing.

During the press briefing, Trump said the government has purchased and stockpiled 29 million pills of the hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug that has been used in other countries to treat coronavirus, while waiting for a vaccine.

“I’m not looking at it one way or another, but we want to get out of this. If it does work, it would be a shame if we didn’t do it early,” Trump said.

“I’ve seen things I sort of like so what do I know, I’m not a doctor,” he added. But I have common sense. The FDA feels good about it. As you know, they approved it, they gave it a rapid approval.”

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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How Capitalism Is Helping US Defeat COVID-19

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Second Amendment Rights During Coronavirus Pandemic

RELATED VIDEO: Ballmer Says U.S. Virus Data Show ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’

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.

BRUTAL: 5 awful facts about the World Health Organization’s Dr. Tedros Adhanom

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Rebel News published the following video titled BRUTAL: 5 awful facts about the World Health Organization’s Tedros Adhanom on its YouTube channel.

“WHO” the hell is Dr. Tedros Adhanom, the Director General of the World Health Organization, anyway?

© All rights reserved.

EDITORS NOTE: Go to https://www.RebelNews.com for more great Rebel content.

Palm Sunday Without Palms

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David G. Bonagura Jr.: Beginning today, we are bereft of our usual Holy Week celebrations; empty-handed, so to speak. But we do have Christ.

Today, in countless Catholic churches the world over, palms will not be given to the faithful. Many of us will watch piously on our TV screens as priests begin by blessing the palm branches in an action that makes this Mass so distinct, so memorable, and, normally, so tactile.

But not this year. We will not be present to receive our palms, to hold them as the Gospel of Jesus’ triumphal ascent into Jerusalem is read, to make crosses out of them, to thread them through our crucifixes upon returning home. It is a Palm Sunday without palms.

The annual commemoration of our Lord’s passion is not meant to be melancholic. Catholics rightly celebrate the events of Holy Week, knowing that the sorrowful passion is the means of our more glorious redemption. And so we begin Mass on this day with a note of triumph: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the king of Israel. Hosanna in the highest!”

This year, however, our joy is tempered, with the Coronavirus keeping us from reliving these mysteries, as we ought. Ours is an historical religion, and it is through the Holy Week liturgies, above all, that we are mystically transported to the very moments that changed the world – and each of our lives – forever. Now we have to relive our history with our senses and souls deprived of the accessories: smells, sights, and even physical presence at the liturgical celebrations themselves.

Instead, we will find our historical anchor in something that transcends the senses: the deprivation the disciples felt between the passion and the resurrection.

Normally, receiving palm branches is the first act of our paschal celebration, and it points ahead to the end of the story a week hence. Christ enters Jerusalem today hailed by all as the king of the Jews. The palms, explains the liturgist Fr. Pius Parsch, are “symbols of our loyalty to Him and of our willingness to do Him homage.”

This procession was one of the few times in His life that our Lord accepted public honors. He only did so on His own terms, upsetting all our expectations of what we think a king should be. He received gold, the symbol of kingly power, only as a helpless infant. Now, as a man who has manifested unimaginable power, He chooses the meekness prophesized by Zechariah, repeated in today’s Mass: “Tell the daughter of Zion: Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass.” (Matthew 21:5)

“He is the king of peace,” writes Joseph Ratzinger, “and by God’s power, not His own.”

In just a few days, the lauds will turn to sneers: “We have no king but Caesar!” A distressed Pilate puts the question to Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” “My kingdom is not of this world,” He replies. He is Lord not just of a particular people, nor even of “this world.” He transcends all that this world has to offer. He is truth itself, the very foundation upon which the world rests. “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” (John 18:37)

Those who reject the truth send Him to the Cross, the most ironic of thrones for the king to mount. In Palm Sunday’s Gospel, we hear the chief priests ridicule Him: “He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now.” (Matthew 27:42-43)

He does come down – dead. He is buried in a tomb, sealed by a giant stone. His disciples had seen the miracles and had heard the spellbinding discourses. Now they have nothing. They walk away empty-handed.

Today we, too, are empty-handed. We are not holding the palms of victory this year. Unlike the disciples, we know how the greatest story ever told ends, and we draw hope from it. But in that second greatest story, that of each of our lives, we feel the confusion, emptiness, and pain from the coronavirus’s devastating path: lost income, jobs, and loved ones. And the loss of the Mass, the one anchor in an otherwise tumultuous world, makes this all the more painful.

Knowing our need to see and to touch, the Church offers our senses a veritable feast during Holy Week. We do not just revisit the paschal mystery, but feel it, live it. By force this year, we are challenged to take up another spiritual means, that of the greatest saints in our history: the “negative way” of walking in the Dark Night of deprivation and raw faith. The usual aids to belief have been abruptly removed. We instead must follow the declaration in Aquinas’s hymn Pange Lingua, from Holy Thursday’s procession: “Let faith supply for the senses’ defect.” (Præstet fides supplementum/ Sensuum defectui.)

Easter will come, even without public celebration. Even then, we learn through Mary Magdalene that deprivation is part of the life of faith: “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” (John 20:17) We have the victory without the palms, because we have faith in Jesus Christ, victor over death.

COLUMN BY

David G Bonagura, Jr.

David G. Bonagura Jr. teaches at St. Joseph’s Seminary, New York. He is the author of Steadfast in Faith: Catholicism and the Challenges of Secularism (Cluny Media).

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2020 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Florida Gets Full Stock of Medical Supplies, Media Barfs!

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The media continues to vomit all over what’s left of their shredded credibility, criticizing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for doing too little for weeks now because he did not panic and shutdown the state, and now casting nasty aspersions at him for, somehow preparing too well.

It’s despicable and true.

The Florida media has harped incessantly that DeSantis is dawdling in not shutting down the state a la New York, California and others. Actually, he’s continuing to navigate the uncharted seas of requiring the closing of businesses and minimizing the infringement on both liberties and the workers who do not have to stay home — such as those in construction.

But now we find that DeSantis has been very aggressive and successful in getting most or all of the medical supplies it appears the state will need for the outbreak. And guess what? Shock of shockers, the media is again hammering him, apparently for being so successful.

In addition to being a Republican, DeSantis is a close ally of President Trump. That alone makes him open season for the Democrat media hounds. But he also seems to be taking a similar tack on handling the disease as the President, not leaping forward too far until the data requires it — if it requires it.

But DeSantis is also like Trump in that he has been successful in his first year and a half as Governor of Florida, getting through a range of issues that the Democrat media hate.

Along these lines, he was quick to order a thorough assessment of the state’s medical needs to deal with COVID-19 and an upcoming hurricane season. Florida requested substantial supplies through Direct Federal Assistance, making a strong case for these needs. It appears as though the state is getting everything it asked for, being stored in a giant, converted warehouse in the centralized city of Orlando, from which the supplies are being distributed throughout the state 24 hours per day.

Here’s the rather impressive list:

  • 5 mobile intensive care units
  • 5,000 ventilators
  • 5,000 hospital beds
  • 50,000 two oz. bottles of hand sanitizer
  • 250,000 coveralls
  • 500,000 gloves
  • 500,000 gowns
  • 500,000 collection kits
  • 100,000 16 oz. bottles of hand sanitizers
  • 150,000 Personal Protective Equipment kits, including coveralls, gowns, and goggles
  • 2 million N95 face masks

In addition, DeSantis and team managed to obtain significant medical supplies from private vendors. They were so successful, infact, that the federal government stepped in and diverted some of those supplies to New York City, whose governor and mayor had not been as successful as DeSantis with the private sector.

(Now however, it appears that some of those private contracts are unfulfilled as distributors from companies such as 3M are profiteering by getting states to bid against each other, or simply not delivering. Florida’s Emergency Management Director called it “chasing ghosts.” There will be a price to pay for that.)

Overall, this all is pretty good news for Floridians, as it suggests the state’s hospitals may not get overwhelmed, despite our large elderly population. Newspapers keep reporting worst-case scenarios and then talking to a nurse somewhere fishing for a quote about how bad it is or could get. But these stories, and model projections that have been shown to be unreliable, frequently don’t comport with underlying actual hard data from the state — such as above.

The Democrat media machine was unable to accept even the blatantly good news that Florida is getting what it asked for from the feds, and spun around to make unsubstantiated insinuations.

This Orlando Weekly headline was one of several I saw around the state, all the same. Headline: “Why did Florida get all the emergency supplies it requested when other states didn’t?” This reporter went so far as to call a hospital in Oklahoma, a state that has received less than requested, to fish for a comment from a nurse saying she was upset because they might not be able to care for their patients. (They will.)

This is the perfect spin because they can malign both President Trump and DeSantis at the same time — the two most hated political figures for the Florida media.

Imagine what these same “reporters” — Democrat operatives with a media platform — would be writing if DeSantis actually failed and got only a fraction of his request and the state was dangerously low on medical supplies. It takes literally no imagination.

Bias partisanship and sensationalism is a toxic combo to media credibility. It’s just not clear they really care anymore.

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

Watch Live: Trump’s Press Briefing on COVID-19

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Do you want to hear directly from President Donald Trump and his advisers about how the fight against COVID-19 is going?

NOTE: President’s COVID-19 briefing begins at the 18:45 mark:

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 >>

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A Bigger Government Wouldn’t Have Prevented Coronavirus. It Would Have Made Things Worse.

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Amid COVID-19 Pandemic, What Daily Life Is Like in Italy Now

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

Idaho Becomes First State to Protect Women’s Sports From Transgender Agenda

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Idaho Gov. Brad Little has given women athletes renewed hope. Faced with a politically correct culture that is denying women the right to a fair playing field in sports, the Republican governor signed into law new protections for them.

Recognizing “inherent differences between men and women,” Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act provides that “athletic teams or sports designated for females, women, or girls shall not be open to students of the male sex.”

The measure, which Little signed into law Monday, applies to all of the state’s interscholastic, intercollegiate, intramural, and club teams at the high school and college levels.

Idaho is the first state to prevail against forces working to stop similar bills across the country that seek to right the wrong girls face when state policies force them to compete in women’s sports against athletes who are biological males.

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 >>

Getting this bill across the finish line wasn’t easy.

Proponents led by state Rep. Barbara Ehardt, a former Division 1 athlete and coach, bucked powerful activists in the business community, including Chobani, Clif Bar & Co., HP Inc., and Micron Technology Inc. But legislators overwhelmingly sided with female athletes and all who support them—moms, dads, coaches, fans, and Idaho citizens, including my parents and extended family.

Little and state legislators rejected the threats of corporate activists who, in the name of “diversity and inclusion,” claim without proof that laws recognizing birth sex as a biological fact will cost the state business.

What big business ignores is the opportunities lost in sports for women and girls. Its social justice agenda drowns out the voices of women who should be protected under sex discrimination laws, not exploited by them.

To their enormous credit, Idaho leaders withstood the pressure and have paved the way for other states to follow.

Proponents should be emboldened by U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who recently intervened in a related federal court case to state emphatically that Title IX prohibits the injustice in women’s sports condoned by corporate activists.

On March 24, the Justice Department filed a Statement of Interest in a Connecticut lawsuit challenging that state’s participation rules in sports.

High school athletes Selina Soule, Chelsea Mitchell, and Alanna Smith have faced the sting of defeat and been denied state titles in girls track because they had to compete with biological males. The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference requires schools to allow athletes to participate in sports according to the “gender” with which they publicly identify.

For the past several seasons, Connecticut has allowed male runners to compete and win as transgender athletes in girls track. In fact, female athletes in every state in the Northeast region have been forced to compete under the same circumstances and under similar rules. Many also have lost their rightful place across the finish line and on the podium.

Congress passed Title IX in 1972 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, in large part to ensure equal opportunities in athletics and education for female students. It extends to programs operated or sponsored by schools receiving federal funding, which includes every K-12 public school and virtually all colleges and universities in the country.

In evaluating the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference’s policy, the Justice Department concluded:

CIAC’s construction of Title IX as requiring the participation of students on athletic teams that reflect their gender identity would turn the statute on its head. One of Title IX’s core purposes is to ensure that women have an ‘equal athletic opportunity’ to participate in school athletic programs. … Reading Title IX to compel schools to require biological males to compete against biological females in athletic competitions is precisely the type of interpretation that this Court should reject.

The Justice Department’s instruction to the Connecticut federal court carries a warning for all states to heed. Inherent, physiological differences between the sexes still matter. Title IX expressly prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and is being violated by schools and state policies that allow male athletes to compete in women’s sports.

The Justice Department’s action has dignified Little’s bold action to enact the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which will protect equal opportunity in sports for female athletes in Idaho.

Other states have the opportunity, and responsibility, to get on track.

COMMENTARY BY

Doreen Denny

Doreen Denny is vice president of government relations for the Legislative Action Committee of Concerned Women for America.

A Note for our Readers:

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

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

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

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

VIDEO: Socially Distancing from Everyone but God

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If God is trying to get people’s attention, a new Pew poll says He’s succeeding. Turns out, the coronavirus hasn’t just impacted people’s lives, it’s led to a growing outbreak of faith.

Almost everyone agrees that the pandemic is significantly changing how they act. They don’t feel comfortable in crowds, they avoid parties, and they’re trying to stay away from places like restaurants. But it’s what Americans are doing that’s getting a lot of attention. More than half — 55 percent — say they’ve prayed for the virus to end. Now, that shouldn’t surprise us in the faith community, but this new focus on the spiritual is broader than that. People who seldom or never pray (15 percent) are looking to God for answers.

Of course, the president’s coronavirus taskforce made this one of their first priorities — bowing their heads in a public photo that led to a media shellacking. Liberal fanatics like Bernie Sanders and others bashed the administration for trying to “pray the virus away.” But guess what? The majority of Americans agree, especially in times like this, we need to turn to the one true source of help — the Creator himself.

“I’m encouraged by it,” FRC’s David Closson said on “Washington Watch,” “but I’m also not surprised by it. Because what’s true on a national level is also true on a personal level. In our personal lives, when we go through a crisis — whether it’s the death of a loved one, an unexpected diagnosis, sudden loss of a job, whatever it is — it really causes us to reevaluate what matters in life. And I think that’s what a lot of Americans are doing right now. They have all this time on their hands that they didn’t expect to have as… they’re working from home and quarantining. And I think they have time now to wrestle with some of these big worldview questions that you and I talk about a lot, [like] who is God? What does it mean to have a relationship with him? What’s my purpose in life? What’s going to happen to me when I die? And my hope is that they’ll use this opportunity to read their Bibles like they have never done before [and] pray…”

Maybe, for more and more people, this social distancing is creating the extra time and space people need to draw closer to God. Including, as I shared with Fox News’s Shannon Bream, the church. So many congregations are taking this opportunity to think creatively and strategically about how they can spread the Good News — without spreading the virus along with it! Hear how in our conversation Wednesday night.

Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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Media Outlets Look to Cut Off Trump’s Daily Briefings While Publishing China’s Propaganda

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The lack of regular White House press briefings used to be decried as the end of democracy. Now it’s daily White House briefings that represent the end of democracy.

Actress Jane Lynch demanded on Twitter on Monday that President Donald Trump end his daily press briefings and that the media stop covering them.

Lest one think this is just one misguided voice in the dark crevasse that is celebrity Twitter punditry, there’s now a petition by the left-wing activist organization MoveOn.org to get news outlets to stop covering the briefings.

Many in the political punditocracy are hopping aboard this idea.

“I would stop putting those briefings on live TV—not out of spite, but because it’s misinformation,” liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said on her prime-time program.

“Enough is enough. Americans deserve so much better than what this president offers every time he approaches the podium,” wrote Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist. “He needs to give up the daily press briefings, and let the experts take control so that they can use these press conferences to reassure Americans in our time of distress and not cause more fear when we need it least.”

Perhaps worst of all, some major media outlets actually seem to be taking the ending of press briefing coverage seriously.

New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet explained why the Gray Lady doesn’t find the White House briefings worth covering.

“Nowadays, it seems they make little news. We, of course, reserve the right to show them live [via web streaming], if we believe they will actually make news,” Baquet said, according to The Washington Post. “But that hasn’t happened in quite some time.”

That doesn’t seem consistent, however, with his publication’s own reporting.

A March 25 New York Times article suggested that the media stop covering Trump’s press briefings because they are spreading what it calls “misinformation.”

Just as bad, in the Times’ view, the briefings are popular.

The Times piece began with this lead sentence: “President Trump is a ratings hit, and some journalists and public health experts say that could be a dangerous thing.”

Margaret Sullivan, media columnist at The Washington Post, wrote that the press needs to “adjust accordingly” to the press briefings because, in her view, they are more like political rallies and might serve his political ends.

“Trump is doing harm and spreading misinformation while working for his own partisan political benefit—a naked attempt to portray himself as a wartime president, bravely leading the nation through a tumultuous time, the [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] of the 21st century,” Sullivan wrote.

FDR didn’t use fireside chats for his political benefit?

This is basically just saying that the media need to stop covering the White House coronavirus briefings because they might help Trump.

All of this is coming from publications and an industry that formerly fretted over and lambasted the lack of regular White House press briefings before the coronavirus outbreak. Some even called them “an essential part of democracy.”

Now that everyone is watching the White House briefings, the media aren’t so keen on the daily ritual allegedly sustaining the republic. What gives?

The New York Times and other outlets that accuse the White House of spreading misinformation seem to have had no problem publishing literal Chinese propaganda.

In the past week, countless outlets, including the very same New York Times, published stories saying that the total number of U.S. coronavirus cases has surpassed China’s, despite the fact that there’s no reason whatsoever to trust the information coming out of an authoritarian communist regime that has repeatedly lied to its own citizens and to the world, sparking the greatest global pandemic in the past century.

Remember, it wasn’t long ago that most major media outlets were publishing stories about how Trump’s move to shut off travel from China was misguided, in part based on recommendations from the World Health Organization.

The problem is, the WHO relied on information provided by China, which turned out to be not only wrong, but likely a product of willful misrepresentation.

It’s good for the media to have a healthy skepticism of those in power. That said, however, one would think that skepticism should be directed most strongly at those in positions of absolute power, as in the case of the Chinese communist government.

Despite this, many in the media still seem more consumed with attacking the Trump administration—even through foreign proxies—than simply getting to the truth.

The bottom line is that neither the reduction, nor the uptick, in White House press conferences signals the end of democracy. Americans are stuck at home en masse, and many more than usual want to hear from the president and the administration in a national crisis.

The administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been far from perfect, but the media have hardly performed without serious and embarrassing fumbles. Cutting off the president now, when so many Americans are tuning in, would be a travesty.

When one reporter asked Trump at Sunday’s coronavirus task force briefing about outlets discontinuing coverage of the daily events, the president gave a reasonable response.

“I think the American public, ultimately, they should be the decider. If they don’t want to watch, they should not watch,” Trump said. “When [the media] don’t want the president of the United States to have a voice, you are not talking about democracy any longer.”

It might be past time, especially amid an international calamity, to hope the media will make a self-correction and restore some of their lost credibility at this time.

Cutting off the president’s microphone hardly restores confidence in a collective institution that seems hopelessly partisan and one-sided.

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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5 Keys to Unlocking Why the World Health Organization Bows to China on COVID-19

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

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

PODCAST: ‘You Cry at the Window Knowing There’s Nothing You Can Do’

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Staying home can be tough, but it’s nothing like the nightmare our health care workers are experiencing. For thousands of brave men and women across country, their office is no longer a hospital or ER — it’s a combat zone. “You spend hours in your [patient’s] room,” nurse Claudia Griffith wrote in an emotional post to the outside world, “gowned up head-to-toe, sweating and not able to breathe. Then you realize… this is it. I can’t save this patient anymore. You sit there and say your goodbyes while they pass without family or loved ones, because nobody is allowed in the hospital for everyone’s safety. You are their only contact and hope.” Nothing, she says soberly, can describe it.Even when they have a chance to sleep, the exhausted staff can’t. “My mind won’t shut off,” one New York City nurse tried to explain. She lays in bed and cries, her mind filled with the faces of patients she lost. The helplessness is brutal, Claudia admits. “You don’t even know how this virus works, but you watch as it kills your patient.” To anyone who hasn’t seen the suffering, she insists, it’s real. And she’s pleading with the country to act like it is. Stay inside, Claudia begs, “as if your life depended on it.”

Theirs already do. And if Americans can’t bring themselves to isolate for their own sakes, then they should do it for the medical teams risking everything. “Take it seriously,” Johns Hopkins’s Dr. Martin Makary told listeners on “Washington Watch, “and take it seriously for the sake of our most vulnerable.” Right now, “our number one at-risk group,” he explained, “the number one profession who is mostly likely to get this infection is health care workers. And what you do in your day-to-day life will actually impact the health of [those] workers you’ve never met.”

“Folks may be going outside right now, saying, ‘It’s a beautiful day… My kids are in the backyard playing. What’s the big deal? I don’t know anyone who’s dying that I’m friends with.'” But the big deal, he said somberly, is that “we’re gearing up for a tsunami that’s going to hit with a massive impact…” With projections topping 200,000 casualties now, Dr. Makary thinks the government was right to limit people’s movements through at the least the end of April. “We want our leaders to… give us spirit and hope. But the reality is, they are all closely following these numbers — not only in the preview that we’re seeing in some countries overseas like Spain, but also locally in New York City…”

The administration is doing the best it can to prepare for the worst. That’s no easy task, Dr. Makary explained, even with all of the metrics and experts they have. Because “when that peak happens, talk to any doctor or nurse. It’s going to be ugly. We are basically at full capacity in some U.S. hospitals with very little room to take care of people that come in from this point forward… We are on track right now to have hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions more cases.”

So when can we expect that peak? “New York is about two weeks away,” Martin believes. “The rest of the United States is probably three to five weeks away depending on where you live. Now, one of the big concerns that many of us have is that some parts of the country were sort of slow to recognize that this is a real threat. Some places immediately took dramatic steps and others [went about] life as usual… even up until recently.” Those are the areas, experts believe, that may be hit hardest. Of course, a lot of things factor into that — like public transit and congestion. But the cities that have been in denial will pay, Dr. Makary warns, “because this infection is seeded everywhere in the United States. We need to abandon the idea that it’s somehow contained.”

Fortunately, there are still things you and your church can do to help. First, take the stay-at-home orders seriously. If not for you, then for someone on the front lines of the coronavirus war. Then, check out the creative ways you can meet the needs of the people in your community. Take a page from Midland, Texas and organize a car prayer chain or fill a truck with food for the hungry. See how you can get involved (from a safe distance!) on our special webpage, FRC.org/church.

Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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

White House Projects 100,000 to 200,000 U.S. Deaths From COVID-19

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Even if Americans follow mitigation guidelines, the United States could see 100,000 to 200,000 deaths as a result of the coronavirus, according to projections explained by health officials Tuesday evening at the White House.

“This is going to be a very, very painful two weeks,” President Donald Trump told reporters of the days to come.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had mentioned before the possibility of more than 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

But the number now is the government’s formal projections.

Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House’s coronavirus task force, explained the numbers in a slide show, noting pronounced increases in the states of New York and New Jersey.

“It’s a projection based on using what’s in Italy and then looking at all the [computer] models,” Birx said, adding:

As you saw on that slide, that was our real number, 100,000 to 200,000 [deaths]. We really believe and hope every day we can do a lot better than that [by saving lives], because that’s not assuming 100% of every American does everything they are supposed to be doing. But I think that’s possible.

Trump announced Sunday that the administration was extending social distancing and related government guidelines to “slow the spread” until April 30.

The computer models suggest the number of deaths will peak over the next two weeks, then begin to slowly decline. But deaths will continue into June.

“I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead,” Trump said, adding:

We’re going to go through a very tough two weeks. And then hopefully, as the experts are predicting, as I think a lot of us are predicting, after having studied it so hard, you’re going to start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel. But, this is going to be a very, very painful two weeks.

“They’re shocking numbers,” the president later said. “Even at the low end, they’re shocking.”

Trump explained that he wanted to be positive.

“It’s easy to be negative,” he said. “I’m a cheerleader for this country.”

The president noted models showing that if officials took no mitigation actions, COVID-19 would have killed 2.2 million Americans.

Asked later if it is likely the United States will have 100,000 coronavirus deaths, Fauci said, “The answer is yes.”

“As sobering a number as that is, we should be prepared for it,” Fauci said. “Is it going to be that much? I hope not, and I think the more we push on the mitigation, the less likelihood it would be that number. But to be realistic, we need to prepare ourselves that that is a possibility.”

Fauci also explained that COVID-19 deaths will continue to occur into June.

“Deaths always lag,” he said. “So you will be seeing deaths at a time when, as an epidemic, we are doing really, really well. Because the deaths will lag.”

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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RELATED VIDEO: MyPillow founder responds to media critique of his faith-based speech.

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

1 Million Americans Tested for Coronavirus; Rate Now 100,000 Per Day

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A total of 1 million tests for the coronavirus now have been administered, President Donald Trump announced Monday evening during a Rose Garden press conference.

On a table outside the White House, Trump demonstrated two COVID-19 tests that can be completed within five to 15 minutes.

“Today we reached a historic milestone in our war against the coronavirus. Over 1 million Americans have now been tested, more than any other country by far. Not even close, and tested accurately,” Trump said.

The news comes a day after Trump announced that social distancing and sanitary guidelines that originally were set to lapse today would be extended until April 30 and that the government expects U.S. deaths from the contagious disease to peak in two weeks before declining.

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 >>

“By very vigorously following these guidelines, we could save more than 1 million American lives,” Trump said Monday. “Our future is in our own hands, and the choices and sacrifices we make will determine the fate of this virus and, really, the fate of our victory.”

“We will have a great victory,” he added. “We have no other choice. Every one of us has a role to play in winning this war.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. has 140,904 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 2,405 total deaths.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar thanked the “many American companies, entrepreneurs, and scientists” who made the boost in testing possible.

“We are now testing nearly 100,000 samples a day, also a level that no other country has reached,” Azar said.

Trump asked several corporate CEOs to speak, including from Honeywell International Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., and MyPillow.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said his company has deployed 75% of its employees to produce cotton face masks.

Lindell went on to read remarks that he said he wrote “off the cuff,” lauding Trump’s leadership and calling for the country to use this time of crisis to return to God.

“God had been taken out of our schools and lives. A nation had turned its back on God,” Lindell said. “I encourage you, use this time at home to get back in the word. Read our Bibles and spend time with our families.”

During the press conference, Trump chose to duel with a longtime antagonist, CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta.

“What do you say to Americans who are upset with you over the way you downplayed this crisis over the last couple of months?” Acosta asked, then read a series of Trump quotes from February and early March suggesting that the coronavirus was under control.

Trump said the statements were true and that Acosta was trying to cause panic.

“It will go away. I do want them to stay calm. If you look at those individual statements, they’re all true. Stay calm,” Trump said. “It will go away. You know it is going away. It will go away and we are going to have a great victory.”

Trump continued:

It’s people like you and CNN that say things like that, it’s why people just don’t want to listen to CNN. You could ask a normal question. The statements I made are that I want to keep the country calm. I don’t want panic in the country. I could cause panic, much better than even you. It would make you look like a minor league player.

But you know what, I don’t want to do that. I want to have our country be calm and strong and fight and win. And it will go away. And it is incredible the job that all of these people … are doing. I am very proud of the job they’re doing. …

It’s almost a miracle, and it is, the way it has all come together. Instead of asking a nasty, snarky question like that, you should ask a real question.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

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

RELATED ARTICLES:

How Many Americans Could Die From COVID-19? What the Latest Data, Projections Show

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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.

PODCAST: Tell Them What You Need, Not What You Want

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When a person visits a doctor to complain about an ailment, it is not uncommon for the patient to try and diagnose the problem himself and prescribe a cure. The doctor listens politely but then asks a series of questions aimed at analyzing the patient’s symptoms, for example, “When and where did you first notice this?” “How often does this happen?” “What medication are you currently taking?,” etc. By analyzing the symptoms, the physician is trying to diagnose the problem. If he cannot ascertain the problem through questioning or a basic examination, he may order additional tests, such as an MRI, X-rays, a CAT scan, blood tests, urine samples, etc. The point is, the doctor is more interested in attacking the root cause, not just the symptoms.

We see this same type of phenomenon in Information Technology (I.T.) related projects where the end-user approaches the I.T. manager with a request for service whereby he sincerely believes he knows the right technical solution to solve his business problems. Two things may result from this request: either the I.T. department will treat the users symptoms, and give him what he wants, thereby not really solving his business problem correctly, or; the I.T. department will study the user’s problem more closely, possibly order some tests, and prescribe a solution that properly addresses his problems. Regrettably, this latter approach is rarely performed in companies anymore.

There is still a huge frustration factor between users and I.T. developers. On the one hand, users claim, “They (the I.T. people) don’t understand me,” and on the other hand, the I.T. people contend the users “don’t know what they want.” This void between the two groups is unhealthy and not conducive for solving the company’s problems. Frustrated, I.T. management tells developers not to ask questions, “Just give them what they want.” This scenario is obviously counterproductive, yet commonplace in the corporate world today.

When I am asked how to deal with this situation, I emphasize the doctor-patient analogy as mentioned above. First, the I.T. people have to learn to ask more questions and differentiate symptoms from problems. In other words, let’s not be in such a hurry to program a solution before we truly understand the problem. I.T. has a horrible track record in this regard. The idea of specifying user information requirements is the Achilles’ Heel of every development project. If it is performed superficially, the wrong solution will inevitably be delivered. Second, the user should play the role of a patient, meaning don’t try to prescribe a solution but concentrate on what you truly need and let the doctor (the I.T. department) prescribe a suitable solution. After all, who has more training in this regard, the doctor or the patient? Let the I.T. people do what they’re trained to do (and are paid for).

As long as we know our roles and do not try to do the other person’s job, we’ll get along just fine. Now turn your head and cough.

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 podcast is republished with permission. © All rights reserved. All trademarks both marked and unmarked belong to their respective companies.

VIDEO: The Vortex — A Virus by Any Other Name — Still comes from the Commies.

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TRANSCRIPT

It’s pay-up time for the commies in China — seriously.

You need to look at the association — the relationships — between all these various Marxist outfits, including the U.S. media and various departments at the Vatican, in addition to the killers in the Forbidden Palace.

This virus began in Wuhan, period. And after a mid-level commie bureaucrat tried to pin that on the U.S. Army, a higher-ranking Chinese Communist Party official finally denied the claim a couple days ago. It began in Wuhan, period. Sorry commies, but that’s the reality. Calling it the Wuhan virus — like CNN and other Marxist media outfits did originally — is no more racist than calling enchiladas Mexican food.

But there is a disinformation game being played here. And it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that it all began in the Vatican — not specifically about the Wuhan virus, but the presentation to the world that the commie killers who run China and terrorize their own citizens, are perfectly normal. More on that in a moment.

First, there’s this insanity that identifying the killer virus with China, but more specifically Wuhan, is racist. It’s not racist in the slightest, any more than President Trump was being racist getting out ahead of the whole scene by closing the U.S. borders to Chinese travelers. Funny how when Trudeau in Canada, as well as Mexico and Spain and Italy and so on, all closed their borders, the idiots on CNN and MSNBC didn’t call them racists. Virtually every major disease outbreak is named after either the person who first died of it, the scientists who discovered it or the geographic location where it first appeared.

But in the case of the Wuhan virus, Tedros Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, announced on Tuesday, Feb. 11, that the name would be COVID-19. His reason? Naming it after a location would be “stigmatizing.” Give me a break. No, it would be truthful and accurate. But of course, in this case, it is much more than PC, even PC on steroids. It’s deflection. This virus has engulfed the world and killed thousands precisely because of where it came from — a communist regime which attacks and brutalizes its own people, routinely, as a matter of state policy.

There’s a lot of debate whether the virus originated in a lab as part of a larger bioweapon strategy or in the so-called wet markets where raw, exotic animals are eaten, often still-living. In either case, this nightmare scenario was brought to you by the Chinese Communist Party — emphasis on communists — either engineering a killer virus to control populations, or creating an environment where people are so deprived that eating raw, sometimes live animals, is a necessity.

Then, the commie killers lied to the world about it and murdered people in an attempt to keep it quiet. But the enormity of their crimes cannot be called out without at the same time pointing out their enablers — political and religious.

In the political world, phony Catholic Joe Biden has been the leading enabler of making the communists in China seem respectable. Biden was perhaps the leading force behind getting and maintaining the “most favored nation” trade status for China during his time in the U.S. Senate. The commies used that status to suck millions of jobs out of America, luring greedy corporate chieftains to the never-ending supply of cheap labor in communist sweatshops. The United States’ as well as other countries’ corporations have to pay a hefty sum to the commies to gain access to those slave laborers. And there was Joe, every step of the way, leading the charge.

The Chinese communists grew rich. The nation became an economic world power and created trillions of dollars in trade imbalance between us and them — the so-called unlevel playing field that Trump has gone about leveling, no thanks to Joe and the Dems. But Joe couldn’t care less. No wonder the commies in Beijing were happy to fork over a billion bucks to his son Hunter when Biden was faking his way through the U.S. vice presidency under sellout Obama. What’s a billion dollars here or there when you’ve unfairly ripped off trillions over the years?

But for Catholics, perhaps the greatest betrayal has been the Vatican elevating China to some vaunted position on the world stage of respectability — being depicted as the most caring nation. And no, that’s not a joke. Two years ago, the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences praised the commie government in China — actually praised them — for demonstrating moral leadership on a global level in defense of human dignity. Precisely, he stated: “At this moment, those who best realize the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese.”

Well, if the social doctrine of the Church calls for aborting female babies, aborting the second conceived child regardless of sex, having a concentration camp system that is the envy of dictators all over the world, running sweatshops for global corporate fatcats to get rich, brutalizing the populace and pouring vasts sums of money into biolgocal weapons to kill innocent civilians, then, yes — score!

The unbelievable comments came from Bp. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, an Argentinian, who went on to say, the communist Chinese have “defended the dignity of the human person.” Has pot been legalized in the Vatican? He added that “China is evolving very well” and that China is not the same as it once was. They care about climate change. Well, thank goodness for things evolving, right?

Sorondo last month gave Holy Communion in the Vatican to Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández, a rabid abortion supporter. And if that wasn’t enough, Fernández — again, the nation’s president — is shacked up with a concubine, and of course the first — ahem, “lady” received as well, at the hands of Sorondo.

So if someone ever tells you the Church isn’t with the times, you laugh at them and say, “Not only are we with the times, we are actually leading the charge.” We praise communist torturers who unleash pandemics on humanity, distribute the body and blood of Jesus Christ to child-killing presidents and their whores, and wouldn’t think of lifting a finger to prevent the leading Democrat in the race for the White House from preventing sacrilege.

What could possibly go wrong?

Yes, the communists in China are bad — real bad — but hats off to those who vaulted them into their world leadership role — the Marxists in America joined by the Marxists in the Vatican. And did we mention pervert Ted McCarrick? Remember him? He crafted the deal for the Vatican and China which has led to the selling-out of Chinese Catholics.

But of course, in the face of all that, let’s keep our priorities. No matter what you do, never, ever call it “the Wuhan virus.” That would be “stigmatizing.”

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