Was the Uvalde Massacre a Drug Cartel Warning to Border Agents to Back Off?

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“The individual who murdered 19 elementary school children and two of their teachers on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas is responsible for his actions and crimes, as are all the shooters who have attacked the American public in recent years.” – The Soufan Center

Did Salvador Rolando Ramos act alone or did he have a plan, was he on a specific mission and was there a financial sponsor?

On May 24, 2022, 18-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers, and wounded seventeen other people, at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Earlier in the day, he shot his grandmother in the forehead at home, severely wounding her.

QUESTIONS: Who, what, where, when, why and how?

The answers to who, what and where are crystal clear: Salvador Rolando Ramos; Uvalde Massacre; and May 24, 2022.

What isn’t clear is the why and how.

Like us, Steve Bannon on the Uvalde School killer asked, “How’d he get the guns? Where did he get the cash?” Bannon goes on to say that, “this kid was well trained.”

Why and How

As of 2017 (and likely still today), the Sinaloa Cartel is overall the most active drug cartel involved in smuggling illicit drugs into the United States and trafficking them throughout the country.

According to The Border Report:

A federal judge has sentenced a Fort Hancock [Texas] rancher to 38 years in prison for letting Mexican criminals use his property as a smuggling corridor for drugs and unauthorized migrants.

[ … ]

On Aug. 14, 2020, a search warrant was executed at Morales’ ranch. Authorities found four undocumented migrants there and testimony at trial indicated Morales had been involved in migrant smuggling since November 2019.

[ … ]

The search also turned up 11 firearms and 1,833 rounds of assorted ammo. Morales faced the firearm charges because of a 2009 conviction in the Southern District of New York involving a charge of conspiracy with intent to distribute more than 5 kilograms of cocaine. He was sentenced to 50 months in prison (four years and two months) for that.

We know that the Biden administration is not enforcing our border laws and hampering the U.S. Border Patrol from stopping the flow of illegals, drugs and humans being trafficked across our Southern border. We know that drug cartels have become more active since Biden took office and their ability to influence neighborhoods, towns, cities and even states has increased dramatically.

Given where Ramos lived, just 75 miles from the Mexican border it’s possible that he was approached or sponsored by cartel members to carry out the massacre at Robb Elementary School.

The city of Uvalde is largely Hispanic and cartel members may already be in the city. These cartels may have an interest in and may be monitoring the families of Border Patrol agents who live there.

How Did Ramos Afford the guns and ammunition?

According to The Independent, “Salvador Ramos legally bought two AR-15 rifles and 1,657 rounds of ammunition for his 18th birthday.” Ramos’ 18th birthday was May 18th, 2022. Remember the shooting was on May 24th, 2022.

According to Indeed.com the average salary at Wendy’s where Ramos worked as a crew member is $12.66 an hour or $506.40 per week.

Ramos posted pictures of the two rifles he purchased on social media here. One of these two rifles was a DDM4, made by Daniel Defense, which starts at a price of $1,870.00. These rifles are AR-15s retail for $1,870 plus tax—the same amount and model number listed on the receipt Ramos reportedly sent via Yubo. So both rifles cost approximately $3,740 plus tax. One of the rifles has an EOTECH XPS2 Holographic Weapon Sight which on Amazon costs a minimum, depending on the model, of $577.00. Ramos purchased approximately 1,657 rounds of ammunition.  The cost of 1,657 rounds of 5.56 caliber ammunition is approximately $3,144.00.

So let’s break it down:

Two AR-15 rifles = $3,740.00
One EOTECH XPS2 site = $577.oo
Ammunition = $3,144.00

TOTAL = $7,461

So,  Ramos who makes $506.40 a week spent at least $7,461 on these two rifles and ammunition within a three day period. NOTE: This does not include the semiautomatic pistol he carried.

The Bottom Line

We’re wondering if this attack was orchestrated by one of the drug cartels to send a message to all border patrol agents, many who live with their families in Uvalde, not to mess with them by killing their children.

We know that Ramos had two high end weapons plus 30 magazines of 5.56 NATO ammunition worth thousands of dollars. He worked in a minimum wage job at Wendy’s and some part time work with his uncle it’s unlikely he could have saved up enough to pay for the guns and ammunition.

We know that Ramos won two gun battles with law enforcement officers that went on for 12 minutes before he entered the school. The Wall Street Journal reported:

The gunman behind the mass shooting at an elementary school here lingered outside the building for 12 minutes firing shots before walking into the school and barricading in a classroom where he killed 19 children and two teachers, authorities said in a news conference Thursday laying out a new timeline of events.

He had to have had some training to do what he did without remorse.

As we understand it he got into two gun fights before entering the school. In both cases the law enforcement officers were wounded.

We also understand he had a protective vest.

BTW, Cartel members are ruthless and immoral just like Ramos.

Also, how did Ramos know that there was a door open at the school? Did he or someone else recon the school?

There are many questions about Salvador Rolando Ramos and his motive for the Uvalde massacre.

It’s not a secret that the most powerful drug cartels worldwide are based in Mexico. Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel are the two most dominant and dangerous, according to DEA’s reports.

We know Ramos was a loner and did not get along with his classmates and has been characterized as a bully.

In a September 2017 study on Gangs and Children The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry found, “Some children and adolescents are motivated to join a gang for a sense of connection or to define a new sense of who they are. Others are motivated by peer pressure, a need to protect themselves and their family, because a family member also is in a gang, or to make money.”

Some of these conditions apply to Salvador Rolando Ramos. This is what we must be looking at not Ramos’ choice of weapon.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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Rep. Jim Jordan: Hillary Peddled ‘False Info’ About Trump to Media, FBI

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Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s The Faulkner Focus, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) weighed in on the ongoing trial of corrupt, failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s former campaign lawyer, Michael Sussmann, arguing that the Clinton campaign “peddled” “false information” about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in the Steele dossier to the media and FBI because “they were out to get President Trump.”

“I think Sussman lied. I think it is material,” Jordan asserted. “Whether a D.C. jury will convict him, you know, only the good Lord knows. But I think the big takeaway is what we learned a few days back when we learned that Secretary Clinton told Sussman to take information — false information — to the press that was also then taken to the FBI. I mean, step back and think about this. This is the former secretary of state; this is the former first lady; this is the former …  United States Senator from the state of New York and candidate for one of the major parties for President of the United States, and she is encouraging a false narrative to be taken to the press, and, of course, it was also taken to the FBI.”

He added, “I mean, I think that is huge — so much so that the former attorney general called it seditious.”

Seditious, indeed.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

286 Known Connections

Clinton Says “You Cannot Be Civil” With Republicans

In the aftermath of the Democratic Party’s failed attempt, in the fall of 2018, to use specious sexual assault charges to block the confirmation of President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked Mrs. Clinton to comment on various recent instances where leftist protesters had disrupted the Senate’s Kavanaugh hearings, had tried to intimidate Republican senators, and had engaged in acts of lawlessness to vent their rage. Mrs. Clinton replied: “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.”

To learn more about Hillary Clinton, click here.

RELATED ARTICLE: Abrams is Board Member, Gov. of #AbolishThePolice Foundation

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

How Bureaucracy May Have Cost Lives in Uvalde

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Rescue delayed can be rescue denied.

Why did they wait?

That question must haunt the families of the nineteen children and two adults who were massacred in Uvalde, TX last week in light of recent revelations about the police response.

Accounts of what happened have been shifting and inconsistent. But, according to a timeline published by the Associated Press, while children were trapped with the killer in two adjoining classrooms, as many as nineteen armed officers waited in the hallway outside for over an hour before a rescue was finally executed.

During that time, some of the trapped children called 911, begging for police to be sent in. On one of those calls, gunshots could be heard.

“Roland Gutierrez,” reports The New York Times, “who represents the area in the State Senate, said the family of one of the children killed told him that their daughter had been struck by a single bullet to the back and had bled to death. ‘It is possible she could have been saved, if they had done their jobs,’ Mr. Gutierrez said.”

Just as “justice delayed is justice denied,” rescue delayed can be rescue denied.

A harrowing video circulating online shows family members desperately pleading (some of them screaming) with officers outside the school to rescue their children. Two officers seem to have one man detained on the ground.

Again, why did they wait? The question has undoubtedly baffled many around the world, especially parents of young children. Such a delay seems unfathomable.

While “why it happened” is even less certain than “what happened,” certain reports about the police response raise important considerations about government delays in general that may be relevant to this troubling question.

It is important to remember that all government law enforcement agencies are bureaucracies. And all bureaucracies have certain behavioral tendencies owing to their institutional structure and the incentives that structure generates.

The great economist Ludwig von Mises analyzed these tendencies and incentives in his 1944 book Bureaucracy.

In that book, Mises identified “slowness and slackness” as among the inherent features of government bureaucracy that no reform can remove.

We have all experienced the “slowness and slackness” of government bureaucracy: with the post office, the DMV, the public school system, etc. That’s why the animated movie Zootopia had sloths working at the DMV and everyone got the joke. And police bureaucracies are no exception to this reputation.

Why is this so? In part, it is due to another indelible feature of bureaucracy: that it is, as Mises wrote, “bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body. The task of the bureaucrat is to perform what these rules and regulations order him to do. His discretion to act according to his own best conviction is seriously restricted by them.”

Sometimes a delay is simply due to the fact that the government employee is too tied up in red tape to respond in a timely manner. The timely response may be outright prohibited by the rules. Or the delay may be owing to Kafkaesque procedural mazes that first must be navigated or chains of command that must be climbed for permission.

This may have been a major factor of the possibly deadly delay in Uvalde. According to The New York Times, command on the scene,

“…fell to the chief of a small police department created only four years ago to help provide security at Uvalde’s eight schools. Its chief, Pedro Arredondo, had ordered the assembled officers to hold off on storming the two adjoining classrooms where the gunman had already fired more than 100 rounds at the walls, the door and the terrified fourth-graders locked inside with him, the state police said. (…)

Officers were told, under Chief Arredondo’s direction, that the situation had evolved from one with an active shooter — which would call for immediately attacking the gunman, even before rescuing other children — to one with a barricaded subject, which would call for a slower approach, officials said.

That appeared to be an incorrect assessment, according to the state police director, Steven McCraw: Gunfire could sporadically be heard inside the rooms, including on continuing 911 calls by the children.”

The Times also reported:

“The degree to which some law enforcement officers on the scene disagreed with the decision to hold back became more apparent on Saturday, as more became known about their frustrations in the protracted chaos of Tuesday’s shooting.

Specially trained agents from the Border Patrol, who arrived more than 40 minutes after the shooting had begun, had yelled for permission to go in and confront the gunman. ‘What is your problem?’ they asked, according to an official briefed on the response.”

If any officer on the scene earlier harbored a similar disagreement, it may not have made a difference, because “his discretion to act according to his own best conviction,” to use Mises’s words, would have been seriously restricted by “pedantic observance of rigid rules and regulations”

Again, Mises considered such features of bureaucracy to be unreformable. Why? He argued that it is the only way that a government bureaucracy can be made at all accountable to the public. A bureaucrat with a free hand is even more dangerous than a bureaucrat with his hands tied.

“If one assigns to the authorities the power to imprison or even to kill people,” Mises wrote, “one must restrict and clearly circumscribe this power. Otherwise the officeholder or judge would turn into an irresponsible despot.”

“Ultimately,” reports the Times, “the police officers assembled outside won permission to enter the classroom. A team of tactical officers from the Border Patrol and local police agencies breached the door and killed the 18-year-old gunman, Salvador Ramos, after he had killed 19 children and two teachers inside.”

The officers who confronted and killed that murderer of children did a magnificently heroic deed. But we have to wonder whether any of those deaths were due in part to bureaucratic delay—to the need for officers on the ground to “win permission” to save lives? We may never know. And even if so, are such delays unavoidable when it comes to responding to crime? Mises seemed to think so, believing that “coercion and compulsion” (including policing) must necessarily be delegated to government, and so is unavoidably bureaucratic.

Whether he was right about that or not, Mises argued that the problem with bureaucracy is not that we have failed to reform it, but that we have overextended it far beyond what he, as a classical liberal like America’s Founders, regarded to be its proper domain of protecting rights.

Instead, bureaucracy has encroached on matters that properly belong in the hands of families and the market: institutional domains that don’t require rigid rules and regulation to stay accountable.

Families tend to be held accountable by human nature: like the familial love that drove Uvalde parents Jacob Albarado and Angeli Rose Gomez to immediately race to successfully rescue their children themselves, at the risk of their own lives and in defiance of the officials.

And in the market, producers are held accountable to consumers by the pursuit of profit and the avoidance of loss: market dynamics that help keep places like amusement parks and retail stores for the most part expeditious and safe.

Governments have recourse to neither familial love nor profit and loss, and so must resort to what Mises called “bureaucratic management,” which is inherently slow and less responsive to its “customers,” even when those “customers” are literally begging for prompt service, like the Uvalde parents who begged for government agents to rescue their children.

Mises characterized the blob-like tendency of modern bureaucracy to absorb more and more of human life as a march toward totalitarianism.

“It is quite correct,” he wrote, “as the opponents of the trend toward totalitarianism say, that the bureaucrats are free to decide according to their own discretion questions of vital importance for the individual citizen’s life. It is true that the officeholders are no longer the servants of the citizenry but irresponsible and arbitrary masters and tyrants. But this is not the fault of bureaucracy. It is the outcome of the new system of government which restricts the individual’s freedom to manage his own affairs and assigns more and more tasks to the government.”

For example, our system of compulsory schooling has assigned educating and securing our children for most of the day to the government. And to the extent that private gun ownership is regulated, we have still further restricted the individual’s freedom to protect his own family and more fully entrusted the security of his children to the government.

Parents should realize that, as the appalling delay in Uvalde may exemplify, bureaucracies are institutionally unworthy of that trust.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

AUTHOR

Dan Sanchez

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in chief of FEE.org.

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

Green Berets Launch PAC To Put ‘Warrior-Diplomats’ In Congress

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Veterans who served in special operations units announced the formation of a new political-action committee (PAC) to elect fellow “warrior-diplomats” to Congress in the wake of last year’s Monday, Fox News reported Monday.

“It is no coincidence that we are launching on Memorial Day, less than a year after we witnessed the Biden administration’s failed leadership contribute to the loss of American lives in Afghanistan,” Jason Bacon, a former Green Beret and previous congressional candidate said, according to Fox News. “It is imperative that we elect real leaders to Congress with the knowledge and experience to prevent this kind of travesty.”

The political action committee was formed in response to the chaotic withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, during which a bomb attack killed 13 U.S. military personnel, which prompted criticism and calls for the resignations of senior Biden administration military and foreign policy officials, Fox News reported.

Bacon described Green Berets as “warrior-diplomats” who bring an understanding of foreign cultures, language skills and years of experience implementing American foreign policy on the ground, according to Fox News.

“They have a breadth of experience that surpasses that of a typical Congressional candidate,” Bacon said. “We are proud to support these outstanding candidates for Congress.”

The PAC endorsed nine candidates, eight of whom are former Green Berets, including Republican Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida, Joe Kent in Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District and Don Bolduc for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire in the 2022 election cycle, according to its website. The PAC also endorsed former Navy SEAL Eli Crane in Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District.

Green Berets PAC did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

HAROLD HUTCHISON

Reporter. 

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

These 10 States Had The Most Expensive Gas Over Memorial Day Weekend

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As the national average for gasoline rose to a new record high of $4.62 a gallon on Memorial Day, prices varied throughout the country affecting drivers on one of the busiest travel days of the year.

According to AAA, gas prices went up one penny since Sunday and gasoline is now 44 cents more expensive than it was just last month, CNN reported. On Memorial Day of 2021, gas prices averaged $3.05 a gallon, according to AAA. The Biden administration has continued to face criticism over the record-breaking gas prices and has been blaming the increase in price on the war in Ukraine.

AAA also said around 34.9 million people are traveling by car for Memorial Day weekend, which is 4.6% higher than in 2020, CNN noted. (RELATED: Gas Prices Hit Another Record High)

The 10 states that had the most expensive average gas prices over Memorial Day weekend, according to AAA: 

Alaska: $5.20 a gallon

Arizona: $4.95 a gallon

California: $6.15 a gallon

Hawaii: $5.44 a gallon

Illinois: $5.00 a gallon

Maine: $4.77 a gallon

Nevada: $5.30 a gallon

New York: $4.93 a gallon

Oregon: $5.20 a gallon

Washington: $5.23 a gallon

The Hill first reported about the highest prices in the 10 states.

On Thursday, the average price of gas in the U.S. hit its last record, with the average price costing Americans $4.60 a gallon, up more than 92% since President Joe Biden took office.

AUTHOR

HENRY RODGERS

Senior Congressional correspondent.

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

My Streaming Services Have Boycotted ‘2000 Mules’ the Election Fraud Exposé!

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I was speaking with a friend and he brought up that he will be watching the 2020 election fraud exposé “2000 Mules” to try to understand what, if anything, actually happened. I decided to watch it on my streaming services. So I began looking for it on Amazon Prime, Netflix, HBOMax, Hulu, the ROKU Channel, YouTube, Acorn TV, A&E, AMC and Peacock.

Here’s the official trailer to 2020 election fraud exposé “2000 Mules“:

We dropped our membership to Disney+ because of Disney, Inc.’s public efforts to groom underaged children for sex. However, we’re guessing that Disney+ most probably doesn’t carry the exposé “2000 Mules” either.

To my amazement not one of these streaming services carries “2000 Mules.”

QUESTION: Why?

ANSWER: The media and streaming services do not want you to watch the exposé “2000 Mules”

How do we know this?

Another friend sent us a Google News link and search results for the exposé “2000 Mules” here. BTW, Google owns YouTube.

When you click on the Google search link you will find the following articles:

There’s even a Google AD from from the leftist website Jan-6.com titled “2000 Mules Fact Checked – Get the Facts Before Watching.”

Free speech is just that. However, today free speech can and is stifled when streaming services don’t carry exposé’s like “2000 Mules.” If you can’t watch it in theatres, online and everything you read about it is negative you can bet that there’s something there.

So, if you want to watch the exposé “2000 Mules” you may go to their website 2000Mules.com and order the DVD.

We did and we will report the truth about what the film found.

Stay tuned.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

The Monkeypox pix reveal Western media’s double standards

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Africans are outraged by coverage of an outbreak of an exotic disease

There’s an outbreak of monkeypox, a simian relative of smallpox, in western Europe, North America, and Australia. There’s no monkeypox outbreak in Africa. Yet, if all you had to go by were the images initially used to illustrate news articles about the outbreak in the mainstream corporate press, you’d be excused to think that Africa was the blazing epicentre of the outbreak.

From the BBC to the New York Times, the Guardian to Reuters, coverage of the outbreak came with pictures of people of African descent, their exposed skin pocked with festering blisters. Crucially, the pictures were all old file photos, with some being from as far back as the 1990s. The only major news sites that didn’t use these photos were those not based in the West, like Qatari Al Jazeera.

Naturally, many Africans online have been blasting Western media houses for this usage and sharing recent photos of white people suffering from the disease. When the Twitter handle of a Kenyan broadcaster illustrated a post about the disease with one such picture, the comments section erupted in cheers. Even the association of foreign journalists working in Africa weighed in with a formal condemnation.

Following the backlash, many of the offending pictures have been taken down and replaced with electron micrographs of the virus that causes the disease or, in a few cases, pictures of white victims.

Unfortunately, a few articles, like this one from the BBC and this other one by the New York Times, still inexcusably sport photos of Africans suffering from monkeypox.

Why, you may ask, do Africans care so much about this? Isn’t the disease endemic to the continent, after all? Until recently, weren’t most photos depicting the disease taken in African countries, so that they were the only ones available at the outset of the outbreak? And, even if this hadn’t been the case, what’s wrong with using the images? Aren’t there black people in the West?

Well, part of the answer comes from the offending news organisations themselves. Just two years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in Wuhan, these same institutions worked up a whole kerfuffle about keeping their coverage of the disease respectful to the Chinese people. Convinced that it was their duty to spare them the stigma associated with the disease, they contorted themselves into all kinds of shapes and forwent some of the thrills of photojournalism.

Instead of dramatic photos of intubated patients struggling for air, they elected to use images and artistic impressions of the virus in their stories. When the WHO conjured up a clumsy name for the disease that had nothing to do with its place of origin, they fell in line and carried it to all corners of the earth. And when a certain bad orange man insisted on calling it the China virus, they added it to the ledger in support of their allegation that he was a white supremacist.

Why then have they, who acted so sanctimoniously in a case where they would have been excused for using photos of victims (Covid-19 did break out in Wuhan, after all) not only not been as careful, but turned into the perpetrators of an arguably worse offense? Were they even sincere the first time? Or have two years been too long for them to keep up the act?

Many commentators have attributed malice and neo-colonialist attitudes to the journalists and editors clearing the use of the images featuring Africans. It fits into a macabre pattern of thought about Africa that Western media organisations just can’t seem to wean themselves off of. Western media, the charge goes, considers Africa to be a backward place filled with sub-human people, whose suffering can be safely ogled at by sympathetic Westerners, who have no dignity to be defended.

Though broad, this accusation isn’t spurious. It’s hard to find other reasons for the tendency of Western media to gravitate to the lens of disaster porn in their treatment of Africa. Not even in their Covid-19 coverage, when they were ostentatious about being respectful everywhere else, could they shake it off.

Instead, they were overly enthusiastic every time it seemed as though Africa was about to take a turn for the worse, and palpably disappointed with every implosion of that expectation.

To give the devil his due, though, maybe we should look for other reasons. After all, no one in the West talks louder about decolonisation, and no one wants to be thought of as an ally of marginalised groups more, than these organisations. Is it possible that Africa is just such a small part of their constituency that they don’t think about it as much, or as carefully, as they do about the rest of their readers, and so are in the dark about Africans’ perception of their attitudes?

Or maybe they do, but this is the only angle for effective storytelling about the continent. Maybe it even comes from a good place, a sympathetic posture towards a continent that’s still bottom of the global healthcare system ranks. Maybe, by using photos of Africans to illustrate a disease outbreak in the West, they are trying to get ahead of the curve, so that when the disease resurges on the continent, the spigots of assistance can flow unimpeded.

If these excuses sound unconvincing, it’s because they are. Try as I might, I cannot find any compelling alternative reasons. In a world where information is so easy to come by, it isn’t reasonable to excuse well-resourced media organisations for being too lazy to use accurate photos for their stories. They are taking photos from a literal warzone in Europe right now, for crying out loud!

And so we are left with the initial accusation. Mainstream Western news organisations have been falling into this pattern in their African coverage for far too long for it to be merely circumstantial. It is inexcusable, even by their own standards, and it’s high time they tried dealing with it.

AUTHOR

Mathew Otieno

Mathew Otieno writes from Kisumu, Kenya. More by Mathew Otieno

RELATED VIDEO: Monkeypox: So a couple of pathogens walk into a Chinese lab…

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

BLM UNHINGED: Policing is Just a ‘White Supremacist Institution’ Rooted in ‘Slave Patrolling’

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Breitbart News reports that the Marxist revolutionary group Black Lives Matter (BLM) railed against the “white supremacist” institution of “policing,” decrying its roots in “racism” and “slave patrolling,” while attacking politicians who support “our killers,” in a series of tweets Thursday.

In the wake of President Biden signing an order to improve accountability in policing, the official BLM Twitter account whined, “Maintaining a white supremacist institution like policing costs Black lives. This continued commitment by politicians to support our killers makes them accessories to our demise.”

“Politicians have been protecting systems of policing as if it could magically abandon its roots of slave patrolling and anti-Black violence,” BLM continued in subsequent tweets. “Banning choke holds and requiring body cameras doesn’t keep us safe. More money for ‘training’ doesn’t keep us safe.”

Fact check: policing does not have roots in “slave patrolling and anti-Black violence.” Policing is a very basic law-and-order measure employed by different cultures going back many, many centuries. Ancient Rome, for example.

But according to the corrupt, racist, neo-Marxist BLM movement, Biden’s executive order “willfully ignores the inherently racist origins of policing & advances the same ideas over and over again as if somehow it will magically make old, outdated approaches work.”

“Halfway measures will not save our people from white supremacy and state violence,” BLM tweeted.

Fact check: white supremacy today has absolutely zero political and cultural power in America. And most black Americans disagree with the BLM radicals about policing — they want more, not less, of a police presence in their communities.

Black Lives Matter (BLM)

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BLM’s D.C. Chapter Objects When Shot Police Officer Is Hailed As “Hero”

After a Metropolitan Police officer was shot and wounded by a barricaded black suspect on the night of January 24, 2022, the Washington, DC chapter of BLM posted a series of tweets asserting that the American public should not “jump to conclusions” reflexively depicting such officers as “heroes.” “Let’s wait till we have all the information (isn’t that what y’all tell us),” the chapter tweeted, condemning “the difference in how people talk and act when an officer is hurt vs when they hurt a Black person.” “This is the point we’ve been making for months,” said a subsequent tweet. “Tear jerker press conferences and proclamations of heroes coming soon. Imagine if people knew these folks’ name. Being black in DC is more dangerous than any job.”

BLM-DC also posted a link to its #StopMPD campaign, which called for an end to “police violence and terror” while rejecting claims that not all officers are “bad” people. “This assertion is almost always coupled with examples of law enforcement officials who step outside of their assigned duties to ‘help’ Black people and champions the belief that we can change systems by changing the individuals who work within this system, but not [changing] the system,” the #StopMPD campaign declared. “We’ve seen time and again that doesn’t work.” The #StopMPD webpage also described the District of Columbia as an “occupied police state” that had always been hostile to nonwhites.

To learn more about Black Lives Matter, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The right to bear arms is “child sacrifice” — and abortion is not?

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As an Australian with conservative values and close family ties to the United States, I find mass shootings like the recent unspeakable tragedy in Texas every shade of confusing.

There is little doubt that ready access to guns in America makes the murderous fantasies of the insane more accessible, tempting, and efficient.

On the other hand, a laser focus on gun laws ignores a whole host of underlying cultural rot that contributes to these nihilistic horrors. Where do we even start? The drug epidemic, mental health, the expulsion of God from public schools, violent video games, social media, and fatherlessness (the latter especially) all play their diabolical part.

And then there’s, you know, the “right” to kill unborn children.

“I think of child sacrifice as a modern phenomenon, a barbaric one that defines this country,” mourns Maureen Dowd in a New York Times piece entitled ‘America’s Human Sacrifices’. “We are sacrificing children, not only the ones who die, but also those who watch and those who fear the future. Children having their tomorrows taken away. Small sacrifice if we can keep our guns.”

Dowd certainly puts her finger on a problem there, but without the slightest trace of irony she continues: “The Republicans are doing everything they can to stop women from having control over their own bodies and doing nothing to stop the carnage against kids; they may as well change the party symbol from an elephant to an AR-15.”

Hang on. If the radical autonomy of “a woman’s right to choose” supersedes a child’s right to not be killed in the womb, why on earth should Americans be prevented from keeping their second amendment rights to bear arms? After all, merely owning a weapon is not the same as ending a life, which is precisely what every abortion achieves.

Dowd is right to invoke abortion, but she has done so for all the wrong reasons. If we’re going to discuss child sacrifice and abortion in the same breath, let’s begin with the 63,872,429 babies killed since the passage of Roe v Wade.

The irony was likewise lost on a slew of leftwing lawmakers who sought to score political points while the news of the Texas tragedy was still fresh.

“As a nation, we simply cannot allow this to continue. Every single day, children and young people are losing their lives to people who do not value the sanctity of life and take advantage of the unabated presence of firearms in our communities,” pro-abortion Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a statement.

Sanctity of life? If only we were really talking about that!

Abortion advocate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was pining for a tussle with Republicans in the aftermath. “There is no such thing as being ‘pro-life’ while supporting laws that let children be shot in their schools, elders in grocery stores, worshippers in their houses of faith, survivors by abusers, or anyone in a crowded place,” she wrote on Twitter. “It is an idolatry of violence. And it must end.”

The word “projection” springs to mind.

It was a grim spectacle in America last week — one that continued long after the last gunshot rang out. But to make the Uvalde tragedy all about gun laws is an exercise in mostly missing the point. And to weaponise it for political gain is unconscionable.

If every gun in America were confiscated tomorrow, the endemic mass killing of abortion would, if many of the Uvalde mourners had their way, remain.

Sure, let’s talk about gun laws. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that a technocratic tweak can alleviate America’s moral malaise. And may we never speak of child sacrifice again until we make wombs safer than a Texas school.

AUTHOR

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg

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

How to handle Covid-19 bullying

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Could a teenager’s suicide have been prevented with a simple question?

An unbearable yet too-common tragedy resulting from bullying is the suicide of its victims. It is a parent’s worst nightmare. A rash of suicides in the 1970s set Dan Olweus on the path to establishing the field of bullying psychology. Suicides have been a major trigger for anti-bullying campaigns and laws.

Despite the proliferation of anti-bullying programs and laws in the past two decades, bullying continues to be considered an epidemic, with the youth suicide rate skyrocketing during this same period.

The latest high-profile suicide tragedy to hit the national news is that of Nate Bronstein, a 15-year-old student at the exclusive Chicago Catholic prep school, the Latin School. As reported in the Chicago Tribune, the parents are suing the school for no less than $100,000,000–yes, one hundred million dollars–for failing to prevent his death. And the taxpayer–you and I–will end up footing the bill if the parents prevail.

While we tend to think of bullying as serious physical attacks or threats against victims, the great majority of bullying, including the impetus for most suicides, is not physical but verbal. Any characteristic can become the subject of bullying: intelligence, appearance, race or religion, sexual orientation, and even clothing.

An unusual casualty of the war against Covid-19

Nate may be the first case of a suicide stemming from Covid-19 insults. Students falsely accused him of being unvaccinated. Vaccination against Covid-19 has been a top priority for the administration and the appointed leaders of our public health organizations, who intentionally blamed the unvaccinated for the epidemic and encouraged the rest of us to do the same, with many celebrities and pundits answering this “call to duty”.

It is no wonder that in such a climate, a child would get extremely upset by being called unvaccinated. This is the trap that leads individuals to become the victims of non-stop bullying: they get upset because they want the insults to stop. They don’t realize that getting upset is actually what keeps the insults coming their way.

Why aren’t anti-bullying efforts working?

Why, after decades of anti-bullying efforts, laws, and research, do kids continue to be bullied in school? It’s because the prevalent approach to bullying, developed by Olweus and universally enshrined in school anti-bullying policies and laws, is predicated on the school protecting children from each other. Students and their parents are instructed to inform the school when bullying occurs. It then becomes the school’s responsibility to investigate, determine who the guilty parties are, and punish or rehabilitate them.

However, research and plain experience show that this approach does little to stop bullying, and often makes it worse. Informing the school can only work if the schools have a reliable approach to handling bullying. Usually, they don’t. Instead, they follow mandated policies of investigating, judging, and punishing, which tends to cause hostilities to escalate, for no party wants to be accused of wrongdoing. The accused typically insist on their innocence and blame the informer.

Indeed, the Tribune reports, “In November and October alone, [mom] contacted Latin more than 30 times.” While the school allegedly didn’t punish anyone, we can be sure that the kids being investigated were furious with Nate for constantly trying to get them in trouble, spurring them to call him “a terrible person” and telling him to kill himself.

The school’s denial of guilt

As virtually all schools do in response to a bullying lawsuit, the Latin School denied the accusations. The Tribune reports:

In a statement, the school called the claims unfounded. It said it “deeply grieves” the death of one of its students, but it plans to “vigorously defend itself… The allegations of wrongdoing by the school officials are inaccurate and misplaced… The school’s faculty and staff are compassionate people who put students’ interests first, as they did in this instance.”

And the school is probably right. It did attempt to solve the problem. It’s just that the idea spread by the anti-bullying establishment that bullying occurs because the schools do nothing to stop it has no basis in reality.

If you are not sure about this, try this at home, if you have children of your own. Treat the aggression between them the way anti-bullying laws require schools to do it. Investigate every complaint they bring you, conduct interrogations, and punish the wrongdoer. The likely result is that your kids will be fighting more often than ever. They will come to hate each other, and at least one of them (the one you find guilty) will end up hating you, too. Strangely, the very interventions that cause intense sibling rivalry at home are somehow expected to reduce hostilities among students in school.

There is a better way

The prevalent approach to bullying requires large investments of time and effort–which costs money–and still can result in the school being sued for astronomical sums of money for failing to stop the bullying.

All the money in the world will not put an end to bullying. What’s needed is good psychology. The policies required are not those of protecting and policing children, but teaching them how to handle insults and accusations on their own, so that attacks are nipped in the bud and don’t evolve into ongoing bullying relationships. This knowledge can be obtained essentially for free. Any counsellor or staff member can do the following with a student complaining of being bullied for being unvaccinated or any other false accusation. It involves role-playing, conducted in two stages.

Stage One

(It may go as follows):

Counsellor: Accuse me of being unvaccinated, and don’t let me stop you.

Student: You’re unvaccinated!

Counsellor: No, I’m not!

Student: Yes, you are! You are going to get us all sick and make us die!

Counsellor: That’s not true!

Student: Yes, it is!

Counsellor: No, it’s not! Why are you saying that?

Student: Because your parents are anti-vaxxers!

Counsellor: No, they’re not!

Student: Yes, they are!

Counsellor: No, they’re not!

Student: Yes, they are!

After futilely going back and forth for a while…

Counsellor: I give up. I’m not making you stop, am I?

Student: No.

Counsellor: Who’s winning?

Student: I am.

Counsellor: And aren’t you having fun seeing me get upset?

Student: Yes.

Stage Two

Counsellor: Let’s do it again. Accuse me of being unvaccinated, and don’t let me stop you.

Student: You’re unvaccinated!

Counsellor: Is that what you believe?

Student: Yes!

Counsellor: If you want to believe it, I can’t stop you.

Student: No, you can’t.

Counsellor: That’s right. You can believe anything you want.

At this point, the student probably has nothing more to say. Counsellor continues…

Counsellor: Who’s winning this time?

Student: You are.

Counsellor: You see, the kids aren’t calling you “unvaccinated” because they believe that’s what you are. They do it because when you get upset and defend yourself, you automatically lose, they have a good time, and they continue doing it to you. So, instead of defending yourself, turn the tables on them. Make them defend themselves by asking, “Do you believe it?” If they say, “Yes,” you say, “You can believe it if you wish,” and you win. And if they say, “No,” you win even bigger.

One simple question. No bullying. No suicide. No lawsuit.

AUTHOR

Izzy Kalman is the author and creator of the website Bullies2Buddies.com and a critic of the anti-bully movement. More by Izzy Kalman

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

107 Times the Risk, Are ‘Boosters’ Designed to Kill?

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FDA Authorizes Pfizer Boosters for Kids 5 to 11

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • The FDA has authorized the use of a booster COVID-19 shot in children ages 5 to 11; less than one-third — only 28.8% — of U.S. children in this age group have received the first two doses of this experimental gene therapy
  • Effectiveness of COVID-19 shots in children wanes rapidly; a CDC study found that two to four weeks after the second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots, effectiveness was 60.1% among 5- to 11-year-olds, but this fell to just 28.9% by month two
  • There is still no data on whether the booster is effective against COVID-19, and whether the effectiveness will quickly wane, as it has with all previous shots as well as booster doses in adults
  • Artificially inflated antibodies triggered by booster shots signal to your body that you’re always infected, and the resulting immune response could prove to be detrimental to your health
  • COVID-19 shots are associated with liver injury, including liver failure that led to a liver transplant
  • Children are at an extremely low risk of serious illness from COVID-19, and CDC data show that COVID-19 case rates among children who received two COVID-19 shots are now higher than rates in children who did not get the shots

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration amended its emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shot to allow a booster dose for children ages 5 to 11.1 The FDA’s “evaluation of safety” for the booster dose in young children was based on a study of only about 400 children, and no meeting was held with the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

The booster shot is intended to be given at least five months after the primary two-dose series has been completed, but less than one-third — only 28.8% — of U.S. children in this age group have received the first two doses of this experimental gene therapy.2

“[G]iven that these children have the lowest coronavirus vaccination rate of all eligible Americans, [as most parents have wisely avoided giving their child the jab,] public health experts are not expecting a rush for the booster,” The New York Times reported,3 and this is good news, since multiple red flags have risen regarding the use of these shots, particularly among children.

COVID Shots’ Dismal Effectiveness Wanes Rapidly

Booster shots are typically released because the initial shots aren’t working as planned. This is certainly the case with COVID-19 shots, which have been found to have dismally low effectiveness rates of 12%, according to research conducted by the New York State Department of Health.4 In their rationale for why a booster dose is now needed for children, Dr. Peter Marks, Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said:5

“Since authorizing the vaccine for children down to 5 years of age in October 2021, emerging data suggest that vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 wanes after the second dose of the vaccine in all authorized populations.”

From December 13, 2021, to January 24, 2022, the New York State Department of Health researchers analyzed outcomes among 852,384 children aged 12 to 17 years, and 365,502 children aged 5 to 11 years, who had received two doses of the shots. Effectiveness declined rapidly among 5- to 11-year-olds, falling from 68% to just 12%.

Protection against hospitalization also dropped, from 100% to 48%. Among 11-year-olds alone, vaccine effectiveness plunged to 11%.6 The lackluster response was blamed on the dosage discrepancies among the age groups, as 5- to 11-year-olds receive two 10-microgram Pfizer shots, while 12- to 17-year-olds receive 30-microgram shots.7

A CDC study also found that the effectiveness of two doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots against symptomatic COVID-19 infection “was modest and decreased rapidly” from December 2021 to February 2022.8 The study found that two to four weeks after the second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots, effectiveness was 60.1% among 5- to 11-year-olds. This fell to just 28.9% by month 2.

A similar trend was seen among adolescents aged 12 to 15 years. Vaccine effectiveness two to four weeks after the second dose of the shots was 59.5%, and this fell to 16.6% during month two.9 Among adolescents who received a booster dose, effectiveness went back up to 71.1% two to 6.5 weeks later, but it’s not revealed what happened after that.

If data from adults are any indication, the boost in effectiveness from the booster will also be short-lived. Among adults, within four to five months post-booster, protection against emergency department and urgent care visits due to COVID-19 decreased to 66%, then fell to just 31% after five months or more post-booster.10

Children’s Booster Trial Didn’t Test Effectiveness

The FDA’s decision to allow a booster dose for children was based on an ongoing Pfizer trial — the same one that it used to authorize the first set of COVID-19 shots in the 5- to 11-year-old age group.

Antibody responses were evaluated in only 67 subjects who received a booster shot seven to nine months after the two-dose primary series of shots. “The antibody level against the SARS-CoV-2 virus one month after the booster dose was increased compared to before the booster dose,” the FDA noted.11

However, there is still no data on whether the booster is effective against COVID-19, and whether the effectiveness will quickly wane, as it has with all previous shots. The New York Times also reported:12

“In the Pfizer-BioNTech clinical trial, children showed a sixfold increase in antibody levels against the original version of the virus one month after receiving the booster, compared with one month after receiving a second dose …

Laboratory tests of blood samples from a tiny subgroup of 30 children also showed 36 times the level of neutralizing antibodies against the Omicron variant compared with levels after only two doses. The study did not show how long the antibodies last or test effectiveness against Covid-19.”

High, Artificially Elevated Antibodies Come at a Cost

What’s more, the notion that increasing antibodies equates to disease protection and better health is misguided. Artificially inflated antibodies signal to your body that you’re always infected, and the resulting immune response could prove to be detrimental to your health.

Your adaptive immune system, specifically, generates antibodies that are used to fight pathogens that your body has previously encountered.13 During normal infections, your cellular immune system produces high fever and temporary T-cell elevations, along with elevated antibodies to the infection, gradually dissipate.

Ali Ellebedy, Ph.D., an associate professor of pathology & immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, explained, “It’s normal for antibody levels to go down after acute infection, but they don’t go down to zero; they plateau.”14 This is a normal response and isn’t a measure of waning immunity.

On the contrary, repeatedly, artificially inflating antibodies with booster shots comes with a cost and can lead to a “death zone,” accelerating the development of autoimmune conditions such as Parkinson’s, Kawasaki disease and multiple sclerosis, according to tech leader and COVID analyst Marc Girardot, who urges a retreat from the vaccination “death zone” before it’s too late.15

It’s known, for instance, that certain autoimmune diseases are seen alongside high levels of antibodies.16 Further, COVID-19 shots train your body to produce singular antibodies for one spike protein and cannot compare to the protection provided by natural immunity, which occurs after recovery from an illness. Speaking with Daniel Horowitz, pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole explained that natural infection produces broad immunity that can’t be matched by vaccination:17

“A natural infection induces hundreds upon hundreds of antibodies against all proteins of the virus, including the envelope, the membrane, the nucleocapsid, and the spike. Dozens upon dozens of these antibodies neutralize the virus when encountered again.

Additionally, because of the immune system exposure to these numerous proteins (epitomes), our T cells mount a robust memory, as well. Our T cells are the ‘marines’ of the immune system and the first line of defense against pathogens. T cell memory to those infected with SARSCOV1 is at 17 years and running still.”

Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine core platform technology,18 also stated, “When it comes to COVID, public health officials have consistently downplayed and ignored natural immunity among children. Yet 81 research studies19 confirm that natural immunity to COVID is equal or superior to any ‘vaccine immunity.’”20

COVID Shots Cause Liver Failure, Other Serious Adverse Effects

A concerning number of case reports describe the development of immune-mediated and autoimmune hepatitis in the days and weeks following COVID-19 injections.21 A team of researchers collected date from such cases from 18 countries, identifying 87 patients with a median age of 48 years who developed autoimmune hepatitis-like liver injury after a COVID-19 shot.22

Typically, the liver injury was diagnosed 15 days after the shot. Most cases (59%) were attributed to Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot while 23% were linked to the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot and 18% to Moderna’s shot. All of the patients in the study recovered from the liver injury after treatment — except for one. That man developed liver failure and had to have a liver transplant. The researchers concluded:23

“SARS-CoV-2 vaccination can be associated with liver injury. Corticosteroid therapy may be beneficial in those with immune-mediated features or severe hepatitis. Outcome was generally favorable, but vaccine associated liver injury led to fulminant liver failure in one patient.”

Young children are also developing severe hepatitis at an unusually high rate and nobody knows why.24 It’s unclear how many of the children have received COVID-19 shots, but researchers did suggest that mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 infection could have left behind spike protein that’s acting as a “superantigen”25 and triggering the immune system to over-react to other viruses, such as adenovirus-41F, which is causing liver damage.26

If that’s the case, the spike protein that circulates in the body after COVID-19 shots could also be problematic, especially since “mRNA vaccines promote sustained synthesis of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.”27 Other concerning adverse events have also been reported.

One study published in Scientific Reports, for instance, revealed that calls to Israel’s National Emergency Medical Services (EMS) for cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome increased more than 25% among 16- to 39-year-olds from January to May 2021, compared to the same time period in 2019 and 2020.28

COVID-19 Case Rates Higher in Injected Children

Children are at an extremely low risk of serious illness from COVID-19, making the recommendations for COVID-19 shots, and now boosters, among this population highly questionable — even ludicrous.

“Research shows that there is no benefit to children receiving a COVID shot, and in fact, the shots can cause potential harm, adverse effects and death. According to Pfizer’s own study trial data, the chance of death in children from the shot is 107 times higher than death from COVID,” Malone stated.29

The CDC’s own data also show that COVID-19 case rates among children who have received two COVID-19 shots have been higher than rates in children who did not get the shots since February 2022.30

“That’s the first time CDC recorded a higher case rate among fully vaccinated young children since data was first collected in December 2021,” Malone said,31 and perhaps it’s harbinger of things to come. Adding a booster dose to the already dangerous, ineffective and flawed COVID-19 shot recommendations for children will only add more fuel to the fire.

Sources and References

WOKE AND BROKEN MILITARY: Fort Bragg to be renamed Fort Liberty + 8 others!

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Another WOKE MILITARY action to erase U.S. history!

Fort Bragg in North Carolina is currently named after Gen. Braxton Bragg, a senior Confederate Army general. It would be renamed as Fort Liberty, the only one of the bases named after a concept, with eight others being renamed mostly after individuals with ties to Army history.

The other bases to be renamed are Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Rucker in Alabama, Fort Polk in Louisiana, Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia and Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia.

The panel has recommended that Fort Hood, Texas, be renamed after Richard E. Cavazos, the first Latino to reach the rank of a four-star general in the Army.

Fort Gordon, Georgia, will be renamed after Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Army general who led all allied forces in Europe during World War II and later became president.

Fort Bragg to be renamed Fort Liberty among Army bases losing Confederate names

A blue-ribbon commission has recommended new names for nine Army bases named after Confederate leaders, including Fort Bragg, which will be recommended to be renamed Fort Liberty, the panel disclosed Tuesday.

The panel has recommended that another eight Army bases be renamed for a diverse group of individuals with ties to the Army.

ABC News was first to report the full list of recommended names by the Congressional Naming Commission created by Congress to suggest name changes by 2023 for U.S. military installations named after Confederate generals and leaders.

Congress and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin must approve the nine naming recommendations, although it remained unclear if Congress would be able to weigh in with names changes of its own before the list is submitted to Austin for final approval.

In a statement, Austin praised the commission’s recommendations that he said “reflect the courage, values, sacrifices, and diversity of our military men and women” and looked forward to seeing their final report later this year.

Read more.

In a May 24th, 2022 the Star Tribune in an article titled “New names for Fort Bragg, 8 other Army bases recommended” by Lolita C. Baldor from the Associated Press reported,

Fort Bragg would become Fort Liberty. Fort Gordon would be Fort Eisenhower. And, for the first time, Army bases would be named after Black soldiers and women. An independent commission on Tuesday recommended new names for nine Army posts that now commemorate Confederate officers.

The recommendations are the latest step in a broader effort by the military to confront racial injustice, most recently in the aftermath of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

[ … ]

But in the aftermath of the Floyd killing, and the months of racial unrest that followed, Congress ordered a comprehensive plan to rename the military posts and hundreds of other federal assets such as roads, buildings, memorials, signs and landmarks that honored rebel leaders.

The change in the military’s thinking was reflected in congressional testimony by Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a month after Floyd’s death. He said that the current base names could be reminders to Black soldiers that rebel officers fought for an institution that may have enslaved their ancestors.

©Royal A Brown, III. All rights reserved.

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Every Time Biden Drained Strategic Oil Reserves, Prices Ended Up Higher. Here’s The Proof

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  • President Joe Biden has raided the Strategic Petroleum Reserve three times, but the actions have had minimal impact on oil and gasoline prices, data showed.
  • “Today, we’re launching a major effort to moderate the price of oil — an effort that will span the globe in its reach and, ultimately, reach your corner gas station, God willing,” Biden said on Nov. 23, 2021, after the first SPR release.
  • “The action I’m calling for will make a real difference over time,” the president remarked on March 31, 2022, after the third release.

Oil and gasoline prices increased after each of President Joe Biden’s three Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases which were designed to curb consumer costs.

Biden ordered a 50-million-barrel SPR release in November, a 30-million-barrel release on March 1 and a 180-million-barrel release on March 31, saying the “historic” actions would ease pressure felt by Americans at the pump. But marketplace and government data analyzed by The Daily Caller News Foundation paint a different picture.

On Tuesday, the average price of gasoline reached an all-time high of $4.59 per gallon, according to AAA data, while domestic oil prices remained above $110 a barrel, far higher than their 2015-2021 average of $53.15 per barrel and 2021 average of $68.14 a barrel, Federal Reserve data showed.

Release 1: Nov. 23, 2021

Oil price: $76.75 a barrel.

Gasoline price: $3.40 per gallon.

Biden ordered the DOE to accelerate the congressionally-mandated SPR release of 18 million barrels of oil and release an additional 32 million barrels on Nov. 23. The action was taken in conjunction with various nations including China, India, Japan, South Korea and the U.K.

“The bottom line: Today, we’re launching a major effort to moderate the price of oil — an effort that will span the globe in its reach and, ultimately, reach your corner gas station, God willing,” Biden remarked after he took the action.

The West Texas Intermediate (WTI) index, the U.S. oil benchmark, ticked up from $76.75 a barrel to $78.50 a barrel between Nov. 22-23, according to market data. The domestic benchmark then dipped throughout December before bursting past $80 a barrel in early January.

Similarly, the average price of gasoline nationwide, which stood at $3.40 per gallon on Nov. 22, fell about 10 cents before increasing to $3.61 a gallon by late February, federal data showed.

Release 2: March 1, 2022

Oil price: $95.72 a barrel.

Gasoline price: $3.61 per gallon.

The White House announced a second SPR release on March 1 in conjunction with 30 other International Energy Agency member nations. The U.S. agreed to release 30 million barrels of oil as part of the 60-million-barrel global release in an effort to “protect American businesses and consumers, including from rising prices at the pump,” former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.

“These steps will help blunt gas prices here at home,” Biden said during his State of the Union address that evening. “And I know the news about what’s happening can seem alarming. But I want you to know that we are going to be okay.”

The WTI benchmark, though, surged from $95.72 a barrel on Feb. 28 to $103.41 per barrel on March 1 and $123.70 a barrel a week later on March 8, market data showed. The March 8 figure marked the highest oil price since the 2008 recession.

The average price of gasoline rose from $3.61 a gallon on Feb. 28 to $4.32 per gallon two weeks later, according to the Energy Information Administration. It hasn’t dipped below $4 a gallon since the March 1 release.

Release 3: March 31, 2022

Oil price: $107.82 a barrel.

Gasoline price: $4.23 per gallon.

Finally, Biden announced the largest release to date on March 31, ordering the DOE to release 180 million barrels of oil from the SPR between April-September. The president said the move would provide a “historic amount of supply for a historic amount of time” and act as a “six-month bridge” to the fall.

“The action I’m calling for will make a real difference over time,” he said during remarks titled “Actions to Lower Gas Prices at the Pump for American Families.”

Biden then predicted gas prices would fall 10-35 cents a gallon.

However, the price of oil declined substantially from $107.82 a barrel on March 30 to $100.28 per barrel on March 31. Oil prices remained near that level through April and early May before increasing again and hitting $114.20 per barrel on May 16.

Gasoline prices followed a similar trajectory as oil prices, declining through April before skyrocketing in mid May and hitting multiple all-time highs.

AUTHOR

THOMAS CATENACCI

Energy and environment reporter. Follow Thomas on Twitter.

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Elon Musk Says ‘Happiness Is A Choice’

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Elon Musk shared some great tweets for his fans Sunday night.

The Tesla founder has been in the news nonstop ever since he started his attempt to buy Twitter, and there’s been plenty of negativity thrown his way.

However, he reminded people that every day is a fresh start, and you can always choose to be happy.

“Tomorrow will be the first sunrise of the rest of ur life – make it what u want,” Musk tweeted to his 95.7 million followers Sunday night.

He followed that thought up with, “And remember that happiness is a choice.”

Believe it or not, this is some great advice from Musk, and given the insane hostility in our country right now, there’s no better time to remember it.

Every day you wake up in America, you’re already better off than the rest of the world. Don’t waste it. There are billions of people who would gladly trade places with you.

Furthermore, happiness is truly a choice, and if you’re not happy, find a way to fix it. Find some hobbies, get a different job, add a few friends or just crack a few beers.

Whatever it is that puts a smile on your face, chase it.

Let us know your thoughts on Musk’s tweet in the comments below.

AUTHOR

DAVID HOOKSTEAD

Sports and entertainment editor. Follow David Hookstead on Twitter and Instagram

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The UK’s Single-Payer Healthcare System Has Become a State Religion—and It’s Failing

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The National Health Service has become a heavily bureaucratic and inefficient state monopoly.

The NHS (National Health Service) is known to be the closest thing to a state religion in the UK. During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, households around the country clapped outside their front doors in order to thank the NHS for its service.

The British healthcare system is “our” NHS and is claimed to be one of the best things about the UK. However, in reality the collectivism which nationalized healthcare promotes denies individuals their autonomy and places their healthcare in the hands of the heavily bureaucratic and inefficient state monopoly.

Due to the almost theocratic attitude that the British public has of the NHS, criticism is highly frowned upon and NHS failures are often excused. One of the biggest excuses of NHS failure is the claim that it is underfunded. For one, this is not true as NHS spending has continued to increase, especially throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. However, this accusation leads to a bigger question for the collectivists: considering a general election is bound to happen every five years in the UK, why are you potentially putting healthcare in the hands of a party you believe will underfund it?

The political process is subject to mood swings and political parties have different focuses. Individuals are forced to pay however much the current government dictates. This means that during economic turmoil, a healthy household which is struggling to put food on the table will still have to pay national insurance, despite rarely using it. Individuals should have control over what is prioritized financially in their household. There’s no point having expensive subscriptions to services you don’t use when you need other services more. Under a free market system, if an individual’s financial situation is tough they would be able to choose cheaper healthcare insurance.

In addition, under a single-payer healthcare system, patients get what they’re given and do not have much choice over it.

For example, in the UK during the Covid pandemic, 25,000 patients were discharged from the hospital to care homes without testing or isolation arrangements. This contributed significantly to 20,000 people in care homes dying after testing positive between March and June 2020. It’s clear that care home patients were an afterthought when it came to the NHS’s Covid response. They were not treated as consumers which a business would attempt to appeal and cater to. Instead, the country’s elderly were treated as pawns in the NHS’s strategy to deal with the pandemic.

Furthermore, those who want better quality healthcare don’t have much choice unless they want to go private. If an elderly person wants better healthcare, they don’t have much control other than getting what the state decides they should receive. Under a free market system, they would be able to have more choice over their healthcare. However, even if the state does decide to spend more on healthcare, national insurance increases probably won’t specifically target the needs of the patient since national insurance is standardised to the taxpayer.

If an individual does want to pay for private healthcare, they still have to pay for national insurance on top of that. This means that private healthcare isn’t realistically accessible to working-class people, making them dependent on state healthcare which is extremely inefficient and uncomfortable for many in the UK. The NHS is not a safety net, but a trap for working-class Britons which they cannot escape if they find the quality of care inadequate.

With increases in waiting times, both for A&E and GP appointments, it seems that having a healthcare system that is “free to the point of use” is pointless if those who need it can’t use it due to being on endless waiting lists. Single-payer healthcare sacrifices choice for “free” healthcare. Instead, the UK should focus on affordable healthcare through the free market. This would provide patients with genuine choice, making the healthcare system more comfortable, accessible and efficient.

AUTHOR

Jess Gill

Jess Gill is a British libertarian content creator. She is the host of Reasoned UK where she makes daily videos on British politics through a libertarian perspective.

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