GUESTS AND TOPICS:

JOEL ZINBERG, M.D., J.D.

Joel Zinberg, M.D., J.D., is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and an associate clinical professor of surgery at the Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine in New York. He served as general counsel and senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 to 2019, where he specialized in health policy.

TOPIC: Death By Policy: Mortality statistics show that many people have died from lockdown-related causes, not from Covid-19!

TRISTAN JUSTICE

Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism.

TOPIC: Black Lives Matter Is Not A Peaceful Protest Group!

SLOAN RACHMUTH

Sloan Rachmuth is the Executive Director of Pen & Shield, a nonprofit newsroom focused on covering government corruption, K-12 education, and religious bias in the U.S. She has been featured in the Federalist, the Daily Wire, Washington Examiner, JPost, and in other Conservative publications.

TOPIC: Black Lives Matter In Public Schools Is Turning Kids Into Little Marxists!

Decision: State legislatures should move to protect law enforcement officers and their families by passing laws to provide for significant penalties for those who “dox” police officers.

Reason: U.S. military and law enforcement personnel have been victimized by “doxxing,” which is the deliberate release of personal private information posted online for the purposes of intimidating or directed targeting of an individual. The information has included home addresses, obviously potentially putting law enforcement and military personnel, and their families, at great risk.

Background: Peace officers in recent years have faced a growing threat from the practice known as “doxxing” in which their personal, private information is obtained, usually through legal means, and posted online. In most cases the information posted online included home addresses, obviously putting law enforcement and military personnel, and their families, at great risk.

The latest example occurred in Portland, Or., where the personal information of dozens of federal law enforcement agents was posted online, as part of a larger ongoing attack against law enforcement defending the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse. Portland is hardly an isolated incident. The Department of Homeland Security reports that police in Kentucky, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Boston and New York City have also been doxxed. Several police officers in Chicago also became doxxing victims in June.

The primary suspect for these doxxing events is Antifa, which maintains a robust open-source intelligence capability to identify targets for future intimidation. It has been reported that at violent Antifa protests in Portland, communist insurgents have read law enforcement officers’ personal information aloud over megaphones, and in Seattle Antifa members attempted to target the home of the Seattle Chief of Police.

Some agencies have taken measures to protect law enforcement officers by concealing name tags and using alternative forms of identification, but this has led to threats of legal action from the Antifa-allied National Lawyers Guild, and caused agencies to face substantial negative media attention.

While Antifa groups have played a role in recent doxxing incidents on law enforcement recently, the technique has also been associated with the jihadist terror group the Islamic State (ISIS) in recent years.  In 2016, the FBI reported that ISIS had published a “kill list” of law enforcement officers in Minnesota. ISIS also reportedly penetrated the New Jersey Transit Police system and doxxed 55 police officers, and targeted U.S. military personnel for doxxing as well.

ISIS jihadists have also targeted U.S. military personnel online. Back in 2015, ISIS hackers published the personal information of some 100 current and former members of the U.S. military after finding their information through social media. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security recommended that military personnel review their social media presence for possible security risks.

The most serious threat to military personnel came in 2015 when ISIS released a “kill list” of military personnel which included photographs and home addresses. The list contained military personnel in 55 cities in 23 states.

Such threats to US military personnel from designated foreign terrorist organizations are obviously a national security issue and involve transnational actors that can be dealt with in unique ways that domestic doxxers are largely immune from.

Pushback: Opponents of anti-doxxing legislation are likely to claim that such behavior is first amendment protected and that preventing doxxing would somehow harm legitimate inquiry by a free press and oversight of law enforcement. Others may claim that information used in doxxing is obtained by legal means and so releasing it should likewise be legal. Yet this is a dishonest claim, since there is already a significant body of legislation which prohibits the release of legally obtained personal information related to banking and health-care related issues.

It is highly unlikely that such legislation is currently feasible at the federal level, thanks to very strong anti-law enforcement political currents in the House Democrat majority led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Yet state legislatures can move to enact such laws as soon as they go into session. This is the proper function of the states to provide for the safety and security of everyone by passing laws to severely punish those who threaten and endanger our heroes on the thin blue line.

The Bottom Line:  It may not be possible to prevent doxxing altogether, but what is needed—and what is surely feasible—are laws to punish those who dox police officers and/or participate in the doxxing of police officers.  State lawmakers cannot sit idly by while police officers are victimized by domestic terrorists using doxxing to intimidate and threaten their families and homes.

COLUMN BY

Christopher Holton and Kyle Shideler

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

“The Communists’ chief purpose is to destroy every form of independence—independent work, independent action, independent property, independent thought, an independent mind, or an independent man. Conformity, alikeness, servility, submission and obedience are necessary to establish a Communist slave-state.” – Ayn Rand

“Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.” – Potter Stewart, Supreme Court Justice

“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” – Salman Rushdie

Quite obviously, Hillary loving Dr. Anthony Fauci would prefer to make beaucoup bucks on his Remdesivir which is unproven to cure Covid-19 than promote a 65-year-old drug that has proven to be effective throughout the world in curing the Wuhan virus.  His purely political hatred of those who are promoting Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Azithromycin smacks of monetary prerequisites of his approval.  Despite the fact that his National Institute of Health approved HCQ in 2005 for Covid, his leftist politics refuse to admit that lives all over the world are saved by HCQ and Z-Pacs as so many physicians have testified to.

President Trump is hated for promoting HCQ and for taking it as a preventative, despite physicians who have said it works for both.  Facebook, Google and Twitter have deleted the truth about HCQ.  Even attorney Sidney Powell who retweeted President Trump’s tweet about HCQ was removed from twitter as was Donald Trump Jr.  Free speech is a core of a free society.  So, are we free?  Not hardly.

Silencing truth.

Doctors Back Trump

Physicians in America have taken a stand and are backing the president’s recommendation to use HCQ to treat Coronavirus.  Across America doctors are standing behind the president and announcing that it’s time for America to reopen.  A group of doctors standing before the Supreme Court building in Washington DC, claimed there is no reason to keep the country locked down when we already have a cure for the virus…Hydroxychloroquine.  Dr. Simone Gold, an ER physician in Los Angeles for 20 years, who appeared with several other physicians said, “If you’ve gotten the virus, there is treatment and that’s what we’re here to tell you.”  Dr. Gold said, “The American people aren’t hearing from all the experts across the country.

After this video aired and was viewed millions of times, Dr. Gold was summarily fired from her job.  She has hired attorney L. Lin Wood to defend her.

Americans are being forced to take advice from doctors who have allowed their political bias against Donald Trump to stop them from treating patients they have the ability to cure.  Of course, we’re speaking about the appointed head of the Coronavirus Task Force, VP Pence, whose chosen expert was Dr. Anthony Fauci.

(Koch Dark Money operative, Marc Short is Chief of Staff to VP Pence and he owns stocks that could conflict with Coronavirus response.)

Dr. James Todaro said, “If it seems like there’s an orchestrated attack against HCQ, it’s because there is.  When have you ever heard of a medication generating this degree of controversy? HCQ is a 65-year-old medication that has been listed as the World Health Organization’s (WHO) safest medications for years and it’s over the counter in many countries.  What we’re seeing is a lot of misinformation.”  HCQ has been prescribed to hundreds of millions of people all over the world for over a half a century with no side effects.  It has never been a controversial medicine until President Trump suggested it might be used to help Coronavirus patients and the Deep State went ballistic.

President Trump tweeted a copy of the doctors’ video which went viral with over 14 million views.  Nigerian physician, Stella Immanuel is a primary care physician from Houston, Texas and her video alone reached 20 million on Facebook before it was removed.

BANNED VIDEO Dr Stella Immanuel tells the TRUTH about Covid19 and Hydroxychloroquine https://t.co/DwIY4Y5yl3 #BitChute

— Dr. Rich Swier (@drrichswier) August 1, 2020

Twitter, Google, Facebook and other media giants rushed to delete all traces of these important videos from the internet.  Dr. Simone Gold said, “Our website host, which is Squarespace, has just completely and arbitrarily shut down our website, claiming a violation of their terms of service. This is crazy. We are a group of doctors advocating for a better understanding of COVID-19 and its available treatment options. This is outrageous. We’re not subverting anything. We’re not purposely countering medical ethics. We’re not making anybody sick. We’re advocating for a better understanding of COVID-19. They take us down.”

Silencing truth.

Dr. Gold said, “We implore you to hear this because this message has been silenced. There are many thousands of physicians who have been silenced from telling the American people the good news about the situation, that we can manage the virus, carefully and intelligently, but we cannot live with this spiderweb of fear that is constricting our country.”  She said that doctors are not being allowed to prescribe HCQ, and that if they do, the pharmacists can overrule the physician’s diagnosis and medications.

She is absolutely right, fear is what Fauci, Birx and Redfield have promoted and sold to the American public from the very beginning, and it appears to be purposeful.  Dr. Fauci, WHO and the promoters of Remdesivir decided they wanted their drug to be the cure all for all patients of Covid. Why?  Because they’d make beaucoup bucks off it, but it hasn’t proven to be nearly as effective as the older and cheaper HCQ.

Our economy is in shambles and democratic governors and mayors are purposely keeping businesses shut down because it’s an election year, and to hell with the people they represent.

The physicians all explained that Dr. Fauci is citing flawed studies and the negative reports on HCQ involve treating patients with lethal doses of the drug, something no physician should ever be doing.  The physicians stated that Dr. Fauci has never treated a Covid-19 patient himself.

They added that with a cure like HCQ available, there is no need for social distancing, there’s no need for masks, there’s no need to keep our children home from school (other than keeping them from the common core and BLM rot) and there’s certainly no need to keep our country or the economy locked down.

Dr. Bob Hamilton stated that it was important for all people present during their talks that America’s children are not really the ones who are driving the infection; it is being driven by older individuals.  He believes children can go back to school without fear.  Dr. Hamilton stated, “There has not been one documented case of Covid being transferred from a student to a teacher in the world.”  He explained that teachers’ unions are demanding conditions to return to school, some of which are totally outlandish and unrelated to the virus. In Los Angeles, California, the teacher’s union is demanding more money by defunding the police and calling for Medicare for all.

Doctors have warned that the effects of the lockdown are far worse than the virus, including a 600 percent increase in suicides.

The doctors said the biggest problem for them has been the government blocking doctors from treating patients they have the ability to cure right now.  Dr. Hamilton said, “I think the important thing is we need to not act out of fear.  We need to act out of science, we need to do it and get it done.”

Silencing truth.

Saving Lives

Dr. George Fareed of El Centro, California, a 1970 honors graduate of Harvard, sent a letter to President Trump and the Task Force.  He has used the HCQ, Azithromycin and Zinc cocktail to cure his patients and says it has kept them out of the hospital.  He said, “Not only have I seen outstanding results with this approach, I have not seen any patient exhibit serious side-effects. To be clear — this drug has been used as an anti-malarial and to treat systemic lupus erythematosus as well as rheumatoid arthritis, and has over a 50-year track record for safety. It is shocking that it only now is being characterized as a dangerous drug.”

“Moreover, I am in my seventies, and I (as well as some other older physicians in the hospital) use hydroxychloroquine and zinc as prophylaxis. None of us have contracted the disease despite our high exposure to COVID patients nor have we experienced any side-effects.”

Hydroxychloroquine is the Key

It’s making a comeback from Lancet’s and Fauci’s false reports.  Doctors all over the world are using it and their patients are recovering.  When given early, not one patient dies, when taken as a prophylactic, it prevents physicians from contracting Covid from their patients.  It’s cheap, it’s plentiful and it’s been around for over six decades, and Fauci and his gang don’t like it.  Why?  Because it’s all about money.  The more money he can put in the pockets and his cohorts and himself, the happier he is, and to hell with the many lives that can be saved with the cheap drugs already available.

A Michigan hospital study says: “Treatment with Hydroxychloroquine Cut Death Rate Significantly in COVID-19 Patients.  Treatment with HCQ cut the death rate significantly in sick patients hospitalized with Covid-19, and without heart-related side-effects, according to a new study published by Henry Ford Health System.

“Our analysis shows that using hydroxychloroquine helped saves lives,” said neurosurgeon Dr. Steven Kalkanis, CEO, Henry Ford Medical Group and Senior Vice President and Chief Academic Officer of Henry Ford Health System. “As doctors and scientists, we look to the data for insight. And the data here is clear that there was benefit to using the drug as a treatment for sick, hospitalized patients.”

So why the hatred of this life saving cocktail of drugs?

There are doctors all over the country, who are singing the praises of this drug, but there is a conspiracy of silence. The hydroxychloroquine cocktail, azithromycin, (Z-Pak) and zinc would solve some of the very basic problems that we’re now facing. It’s also a preventative. It would prevent hospitalizations. It keeps hospitals and ICUs from being overrun with Covid-19 patients, and it keeps patients off the deadly ventilators where 90% die after being on a ventilator long term. It apparently can be used early on in hospitalization to prevent patients from requiring ventilators, and reduces the length of a hospital stay.

Yet there’s literally no desire to use this cheap drug.  America has lost 150,000 people to this flu-like virus.  We lost so many during the H1N1 virus that we stopped counting, but we didn’t wear masks everywhere, we didn’t close schools, we didn’t keep six feet apart and we didn’t close the economy, yet more allegedly died in 2009-2010 under the Obama presidency than have died with this Wuhan virus under Donald Trump’s presidency.  The CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million to 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 to 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 to 61,000 deaths annually since 2010, but we never donned masks.

Silencing truth.

Nursing Home Deaths

Governors of five states: Andrew Cuomo of New York, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania put Covid patients in nursing homes and the virus spread rapidly to the elderly population with co-morbidities.

At least 62,000 residents and workers have died from the coronavirus at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities for older adults in the United States, according to a New York Times database.  As of July 30, the virus has infected more than 362,000 people at some 16,000 facilities.  Had they been given the cheap drug as a preventative, perhaps most of these older Americans would not have died alone.

Are these governors guilty of murder?

Conclusion

President Trump was lied to, our economy did not need to be shut down.  Masks are to keep healthcare workers from contaminating open wounds of patients.  They do little to prevent viruses.  Healthy people are never quarantined.  Distancing of six feet apart has no scientific authority whatsoever; it was born in a high school student’s science project. Had we remained open, and sheltered only the vulnerable, most likely we would have had her immunity within 40 to 70 days.

Thousands of Americans have died needlessly, which plays into the United Nations Agenda 2030 of decimating the world’s population.  Yes, China is responsible, but more than China, the collateral damage to Americans from the shutdown is far greater than the damage done by the Wuhan virus.  And that damage, which is still going on, was brought to us by Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, Dr. Redfield and the Democratic Party.

©All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: Brad Johnson discusses the politics around Hydroxychloroquine.

While disappointing, the results are not particularly surprising.

Xenophobia is passé. Now we are being taught anthropophobia, or fear of other people.

Fear is a powerful emotion: it is sometimes rational, but it can cloud our reasoning.

A number of fallacies pervade the Covid-19 debate. One is the fallacy of the missing denominator: we are told that X number of people have died of Covid-19, but we don’t appreciate the size of the population in which these deaths occur. (The population of the United States is 326.7 million.)

Another is the fallacy of the neglected or irrelevant comparison. Senator Bernie Sanders thinks the Covid-19 pandemic is comparable to the Civil War, which killed 620,000 Union and Confederate Soldiers (at last reckoning Covid-19 has killed 92,258 Americans). Deaths from violence are in a different category from deaths from disease. We all die sometime, but not all of us from violence.

A more reasonable comparison than the Civil War is the attacks of September 11, 2011, which killed 2,977 civilians and 19 terrorists and gave birth to a fear of more of the same. The Bush-Cheney Administration used 9/11 to put in place unprecedented measures of surveillance and lead us into an endless (and brutal) War on Terror.

The Obama Administration then set a sinister precedent by authorizing the extrajudicial execution of American citizens. Trump’s signature measure was a wall. The attempted impeachment of Donald Trump was based on an attempt to revive the fears of the Cold War era.

Now we are being carefully taught anthropophobia, or fear of human beings.

We should also compare Covid-19 with deaths from other causes, including the other diseases that contribute to a death set down to Covid-19’s account. The most important causes of death other than Covid-19 for my argument are suicide and deaths of despair. Social isolation is an important contributor to these deaths. Suicide is strictly speaking a death by violence, but it is one that happens only when a person has been reduced to misery.

California, with a population of 39.56 million, was thrown into panic mode by one death from coronavirus. By way of comparison, nearly 4,300 Californians killed themselves in 2016, a 50 percent increase from 2001. Deaths of despair include not only deaths by suicide, but also drug and alcohol poisoning, as well as alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis, to which I would add heart failure where the patient is depressed. The rate of such deaths has been steadily rising.

Such deaths have two social causes, economic insecurity and social isolation. I need not choose between these explanations: both of them are certain to be increased by the measures taken against Covid-19. Hence we see another fallacy at work in the Covid-19 debate: a precautionary principle (better safe than sorry) that neglects the costs of staying safe.

Suicide prevention hotlines are have been kept very busy during the Covid-19 crisis. Domestic violence cases have spiked during the pandemic, as have cases of child abuse. Though the courts are now closed, a surge of divorces is expected when the crisis ends.

Democracy requires a demos, which can gather in places like churches, bowling alleys, and bars to establish solidarity, and peaceably assemble in parks for the redress of their grievances. Social distancing destroys the possibility of such assemblies.

Some comforting myths conceal from us the devastating social effects of the Covid-19 panic.

We are told that staying home and watching Netflix is an act of heroism like that of the soldiers who fought in the invasion on D-Day. We are told that avoiding fellow our human beings (and wearing a mask when you cannot avoid them) is an expression of human solidarity. Even crossing the street to avoid other people, as people did in the past to stigmatized groups, is supposed to be an expression of love. We are told forcing troubled families to spend more time together will improve their harmony.

One good effect of the crisis has been the reduction of air pollution. To sustain this result, we will need to rely far more heavily on public transportation. But the mentality of anthropophobia which invites us to view our fellow human beings as sources of contagion until they prove otherwise can only make us more unwilling to share vehicles with strangers.

The process of returning to normal, or some imitation of it, will be awkward and conflict-ridden. The phobic mentality that supports the War on Terror and xenophobic immigration policies has been extended to the whole human race.

We should not neglect reasonable precautions, but we should take into account their costs as well as their benefits. An 85-year-old woman a nursing home might reasonably risk her life to see her grandchildren.

We must cultivate a sceptical attitude toward people who urge us to distrust one another, play upon our fears like a violin, and exude contempt and condescension to those people who do not accept their models. Staying sheltered in place is not conducive to democracy.

COLUMN BY

Philip Devine

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EDITORS NOTE:  This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Republish this article for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons licence. Most, but not all articles on MercatorNet are Creative Commons.

“No idea.” That was the only answer state and local officials had.

When a federal elections commission started asking questions, not one person had any explanation for the 28.3 million mail-in ballots that have gone missing since 2012. As far as they’re concerned, 1 in 5 absentee votes just vanished.

No one knows if it’s fraud, system failure, general ineptitude, or a combination of all three. What we do know is that Democrats want us to trust this same process—on a national scale—this November. Thank you, but no thank you.

Four elections. At least 7 million missing votes each.

By way of comparison, Mark Hemingway at RealClearInvestigations points out, Hillary Clinton won the 2016 popular vote by 2.8 million. “But nearly six million unaccounted mail-in ballots were never counted in 2016—more than twice her margin in the popular vote.”

If that doesn’t rattle you, consider this: according to the federal Election Assistance Commission, these are all low-ball estimates.

For starters, the 28.3 million missing ballots doesn’t include the number that were “spoiled, undeliverable, or came back for any reason.”

Making matters worse, not every area of the country reported back with their statistics—including major cities like Chicago. In other words, this is just the tip of the malfunctioning iceberg.

And these problems, analyst Logan Churchwell shakes his head, aren’t getting much attention. First of all, they’re embarrassing for election officials—and secondly, “people just aren’t paying attention.” But they’d better start.

With Democrats trying to use the coronavirus to push America toward its endgame of universal mail-in ballots, voters need to wake up to the gamble they’d be taking with democracy.

Already, two liberal senators, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Ron Wyden of Oregon, are trying to capitalize on people’s fears with what they call the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020. But frankly, Americans ought to be more afraid of the chance they’d be taking with their vote.

On “Washington Watch,” Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who worked as an election official for two decades, said he has plenty of concerns about the idea—not the least of which is the incredibly short timetable to get a new process up and running.

One is just a very practical reason that adjusting from whatever system you have to a system with big changes is hard to do. It’s hard to do in any election, [but] it’s particularly hard to do in a presidential election. And two is, while I think ultimately how a state conducts its elections should be left to the state, not the federal government, I have concerns if you don’t have real safeguards on who gets to cast that ballot, and who actually receives the ballot, and who collects the ballot.

Democrats, he goes on, are talking about a system with no witnesses, no voter ID, no certainty that your vote would even be delivered. “These are things that any rational person should be concerned about.”

Now, obviously, the traditional absentee ballot is fine for people who are physically incapable of going to the polls because of illness or military service, etc. “But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about people getting ballots without even asking for them. Or two, asking for them and getting them without any accountability as to whether they come back or not.”

Those are the scenarios, we know from ballot harvesting in more lenient states, that are ripe for abuse.

In California, anyone can “walk into an elections office and hand over truckloads of vote-by-mail envelopes with ballots inside,” Townhall explains—”no questions asked, no verified records kept.”

In 2018, there were stories of Democrats all across the state knocking on doors to either “help” people vote or pick up their ballots for supposed delivery. What’s to stop someone from trashing those ballots? Or, as officials in Texas discovered, vote for you?

“The harvesters sit around and fill these out by the hundreds, often by the thousands,” said one political consultant.

The reality is, Democrats are only forcing this issue because they think it’ll help them win.

As the Family Research Council’s Ken Blackwell points out, it opens the door to “voter fraud and coercion … [and gives] partisan activists absolute control over physical ballots.”

Does a mail-in balloting system guarantee your vote won’t count? No. But even The New York Times admits that the possibility for fraud “is vastly more prevalent than in-person voting … “

We cannot let anyone exploit this crisis, Blackwell argues, to take away the integrity of our elections. “This pandemic may seem like it’s changed everything, but it has not changed the rules of our constitutional republic. Let’s keep it that way.”

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