Hackers Tied to China’s Government Steal $20 Mil in U.S. COVID Relief Funds

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Nearly a year after Judicial Watch launched an investigation into the theft of U.S. COVID relief funds by foreign hackers, the Secret Service confirms that cyber criminals connected to China’s government stole $20 million in benefits. This includes Small Business Administration (SBA) loans and unemployment insurance money in multiple states, according to a national news story that identifies the perpetrators as a APT41, a hacking group based in Chengdu. The report cites U.S. law enforcement officials and cybersecurity experts who believe the multi-million-dollar theft of government pandemic funds by the Chinese faction “may just be the tip of the iceberg.”

Back in February Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the SBA as part of an ongoing investigation into the pervasive fraud associated with the government’s COVID-19 cash giveaway. Specifically, Judicial Watch requested memoranda, reports, email communications, investigative reports, and other communications or data concerning the following: COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) deposits originating from a foreign Internet Protocol (IP) address, account holders attempting to transfer funds to foreign accounts of any type and loans approved utilizing a fraudulent social security number. On February 23, the SBA acknowledged via electronic mail that it received Judicial Watch’s FOIA request and issued an official tracking number. So far no records have been provided to Judicial Watch and the SBA is in violation of the federal deadline—20 working days—to produce the information.

Most government agencies practice similar stonewalling tactics and Judicial Watch has repeatedly been forced to file lawsuits to compel the release of records. Our goal as a nonpartisan educational foundation is to promote transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics, and the law. Pandemic relief has been a colossal multi-billion-dollar debacle rife with fraud and corruption. The problem is so bad that the Department of Justice (DOJ) created a COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to “enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud.” The special unit has been quite busy prosecuting a multitude of scams, false statements, and money laundering related to pandemic relief. Earlier this year House Republicans issued a report documenting 500 days of massive waste, fraud, and abuse in the American Rescue Plan. It includes more than $783 million in stimulus checks for convicted prisoners including the Boston Marathon bomber, $40 million to expand libraries in Delaware, $2 million for a Florida golf course and $16 million for electric vehicle charging stations in Maine and $20 million to modernize the state’s fish hatcheries. The list goes on and on.

The SBA got on Judicial Watch’s radar because it has disbursed approximately $390 billion to nearly four million small businesses and nonprofits under its COVID-19 EIDL. The program provides up to $2 million in financial assistance to help small businesses recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic. Like many of the other COVID relief initiatives, the government made it way too easy to obtain cash and failed miserably to implement adequate vetting protocols. Officials cited in the recent news article confirm that other federal investigations of pandemic fraud also seem to point back to foreign state-affiliated hackers. The Secret Service admits there are over 1,000 ongoing investigations involving transnational and domestic criminals defrauding public benefits programs and Chinese hackers are key among them. As if it were not serious enough that Chinese hacks are stealing American taxpayer funds, one senior Justice Department official points out the cybercrimes also have serious national security implications.

Besides the SBA’s EIDL, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, passed by Congress to provide over $2 trillion in “fast and direct economic aid” to Americans negatively impacted by the pandemic, also launched another fraud-infested initiative known as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). In addition to the DOJ’s special task force, federal prosecutors across the nation have charged dozens of individuals with crimes associated with PPP scams. A recent example includes a father and son convicted of illegally obtaining $1.7 in loans. A federal jury in North Carolina convicted the men of money laundering and other offenses with the father sentenced to four years in prison and the son three years. This month the top federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia revealed that in 2022 her office has charged more than 50 defendants in 26 cases of fraud schemes connected to COVID relief that defrauded the government out of nearly $125 million.

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

‘F*cking Insanity’: Massive Congressional Spending Bill Says Border Patrol Can’t Spend Funds On Border Security

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The massive congressional spending bill released Tuesday would bar Customs and Border Protection (CBP) funding from going toward border security as the agency sees record numbers of illegal immigrants.

The bill states that the $1,563,143,000 in funds allocated to CBP for “Operations and Support” can’t be used “to acquire, maintain, or extend border security technology and capabilities, except for technology and capabilities to improve Border Patrol processing.” The bill was introduced in the Senate Tuesday and needs to be passed in order to avert a government shutdown.

Former CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan called the funding restriction “fucking insanity,” in a statement to the DCNF.

“They finally put down in black and white what we’ve been saying for two years- they don’t care about securing our borders or stopping their deadly open border policies. Just throwing money at the crisis to get better and more effective at processing and releasing illegal aliens,” Morgan said.

The lack of funding for border security comes as illegal immigration, drug seizures and encounters of individuals on the terror watchlist are surging at the southern border.

CBP officers encountered a record of more than 2.3 million migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2022. During that time, CBP also caught a record of 98 individuals on the terror watchlist and seized more than 14,000 pounds of illicit fentanyl.

Federal border authorities have also encountered a surge in illegal immigrants of “special interest,” who come from countries of particular national security concern and “possibly have a nexus to terrorism.”

“At this point, they might as well change the name of U.S. Customs and Border Protection to U.S. Customs and Border Processing. Seriously, all the Biden administration wants CBP to do is process migrants or watch them come across with a drone or camera,” Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) Head of Government Relations and Communications RJ Hauman told the DCNF. “Every border security funding stream in a spending bill needs firm conditions to use the money properly, rather than enabling a system that functions as a lawless, greased up turnstile into the United States.”

CBP didn’t respond to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

JENNIE TAER

Investigative reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

U.S. Media Outlet Has Extensive Partnerships, Financial Dealings With Orgs Tied To Chinese Communist Party Influence Operations

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  • Approximately 20 organizations that may be headed by members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or members of alleged Chinese influence operations have sponsored or partnered with The China Project (TCP), a China-focused New York media outlet, the Daily Caller News Foundation determined.
  • TCP recently denied working for or with the CCP after a former employee sent an Oct. 21 declaration to the Department of Justice and Congress accusing the outlet of harboring a pro-CCP bias. 
  • “We must help defend our fellow citizens and lawful permanent residents from pressure — and in many cases, transnational repression up to and including assassination attempts — by the Chinese Communist Party,” New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith told the DCNF.

The China Project (TCP), a New York-based media outlet renowned for its China reporting, has had professional and financial ties with organizations that may have been headed by members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or members of alleged Chinese influence operations, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.

Over 20 organizations that may have been led by such individuals have apparently partnered with or financially sponsored TCP, including the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) and the Confucius Institute, the DCNF found. Both groups apparently began professional relationships with TCP after the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) identified them as CCP influence operations in 2018. Furthermore, the DCNF found that TCP’s “board director,” Clarence Kwan, may have been simultaneously serving as a director of an alleged CCP front group at the time he joined TCP’s board and provided initial equity in the company.

Kwan did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

These revelations come over a month after journalist Shannon Van Sant, a former TCP business editor, delivered a sworn declaration to Congress and the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Oct. 21, alleging TCP fired her in June 2020 for being out of “alignment” with the organization’s alleged pro-CCP bias.

Van Sant’s declaration also stated that after being fired she “conducted open source research and found links between the organization and China’s Communist Party,” however, Van Sant’s declaration did not provide any documentation to substantiate her claim.

“It is important to me to provide transparency and shed light on my experiences,” Van Sant’s declaration stated. “That is why I am doing this disclosure.”

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith — both of whom sit on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China — recently told Semafor that TCP “should be forced to register” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires the disclosure of service to foreign entities.

In response, TCP’s attorneys at Boies Schiller Flexner sent a 12-page letter to Semafor on Oct. 31, demanding Semafor retract their piece on Van Sant’s allegations. TCP’s attorneys allege Van Sant had been fired for “poor work performance” and had “an axe to grind.”

“Nothing in Ms. Van Sant’s ‘sworn declaration’ comes close to providing evidence, direct or circumstantial, that TCP is working for or has worked for the Chinese government,” Boies Schiller Flexner wrote to Semafor.

Neither TCP nor their attorneys at Boies Schiller Flexner responded to multiple requests for comment from the DCNF. Van Sant declined the DCNF’s request for comment through her representatives at Whistleblower Aid.

‘A Jewel In The Crown Of China Reporting’

TCP — which until September was known as “SupChina” — is a multimedia group that claims to reach “more than two million people per month” through a variety of platforms including news articles and podcasts. Former Ambassador to China Max Baucus — who recently came under fire for Nov. 11 and 12 meetings with alleged Chinese influence operatives — called TCP “a jewel in the crown of China reporting,” according to the outlet’s website.

The multimedia outlet also runs a nonprofit arm, Serica, which seeks “to educate and cultivate empathy around the issues of Sinophobia and anti-Asian hate,” according to its website. TCP also maintains a “United States Sinophobia Tracker” that’s collected numerous articles on CCP espionage allegations, such as a 2020 NBC News piece about the growing number of FBI counterintelligence cases, which TCP tags on its website as “paranoid rhetoric.”

TCP has also published articles and podcasts critical of the DOJ’s China Initiative — an anti-espionage program launched during the Trump administration which was ultimately terminated in February 2022 after the “civil rights community” expressed concern that the program had “fueled a narrative of intolerance and bias,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said at the time.

China’s United Front

In her declaration to the federal government, Van Sant claims to have discovered links between TCP and the China Overseas Exchange Association (COEA), an organization which billed itself as an “important platform and bridge for people-to-people exchanges,” according to an archived version of COEA’s website.

China intelligence analyst and former senior analyst at the Canberra-based Australian Strategic Policy Institute Alex Joske identified COEA as a “key” United Front Work Department (UFWD) front group that merged with the China Overseas Friendship Association (COFA) in 2019 — an organization which USCC also identified as a UFWD front group.

Joske is the author of “Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World” published in October 2022, which was well-received by the international press.

The UFWD is a Chinese government agency, which oversees CCP influence operations and reports directly to the CCP’s Central Committee, according to USCC. General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly emphasized the importance of the UFWD. He even described the agency as the CCP’s “magic weapon” for “realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” in a 2015 speech.

“The UFWD is essentially an intelligence agency of the CCP tasked with infiltrating different communities and organizations, co-opting and influencing them,” Salih Hudayar, Uyghur prime minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, told the DCNF.

While TCP’s attorneys conceded in their October letter to Semafor that Kwan formerly served as a COEA “director,” they claim his involvement with the group “was limited to participating in two trips to China in 2013 and 2014.” TCP’s attorneys also claimed Kwan’s COEA tenure preceded his joining TCP’s board and his providing nearly 2% of the outlet’s initial equity.

Yet, the DCNF discovered that archived versions of COEA’s website — which was deleted after the organization merged with COFA around 2019 — list Kwan as a “director” for two consecutive four-year terms running from 2013-2017 and 2017-2021. This appears to indicate that Kwan’s time at COEA overlapped with his $150,000 purchase of SupChina First Notes in September 2016, according to Security and Exchange Commission filings. Likewise, this indicates Kwan may have been serving as COEA’s director when he assumed the role of “director” of SupChina — now called TCP — in May 2017.

Kwan is currently listed as an “advisory board member” on TCP’s website.

Additionally, Kwan appears to have also held leadership positions in several companies that have financially sponsored TCP, including KCY Family Office, East West Bank and Piermont Bank, the DCNF found.

The Committee Of 100

TCP also appears to have partnered with, and donated $25,000 to, a New York-based organization called the Committee of 100 (C100) — a nonprofit that claims to seek “constructive dialogue and relationships between the peoples of the United States and Greater China.”

Yet, C100 members appear to have included Chinese government advisers and 10 COEA directors, including Kwan, who, based on the committee’s website, may have served as C100’s chairman while simultaneously serving as COEA’s director.

Moreover, in addition to TCP’s founder, Anla Cheng — a hedge fund manager by trade, who apparently is also a trustee and former C100 director — seven of TCP’s 23 advisory board members appear to belong to C100, including John Long, S. Alice Mong, Frank Wu, Li Cheng, Ted Wang, Janet Yang and Lesley Ma.

TCP’s attorneys accused Semafor’s article of relying on “racial profiling and stereotypes” by citing a C100 report which claimed “Asian defendants are more than twice as likely to be falsely accused of espionage” without acknowledging any financial or personnel ties between the two organizations.

C100 did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

‘CCP Agents Often Target The Chinese Diaspora’

Van Sant also claims in her 11-page declaration that the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) told TCP’s founder, Cheng, in June 2020 about a Chinese scientist whom the U.S. government had charged with espionage, prompting Cheng to direct staff to “protect him.”

CAST is a unit of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which oversees the UFWD, according to USCC. The CPPCC “operates as a way for the CCP to falsely claim that it represents the full breadth of Chinese society,” according to a 2020 report written by Joske, the intel analyst.

“In practice, those organizations are controlled by the CCP,” Joske wrote. “Their leaders are often party members, and, historically, some have been manipulated through inducement and coercion, including blackmail.”

Although TCP’s attorneys did not deny Van Sant’s allegation in their letter to Semafor, they claimed that “protecting a ‘wrongly investigated’ Chinese scientist” did not amount to “evidence of espionage.”

Yet, TCP listed CAST as a “partner organization” on flyers from a 2022 “Women’s Conference,” the DCNF found.

Furthermore, TCP appears to have partnered with around 10 organizations that may be led by members of the CCP or alleged UFWD fronts, the DCNF found. For example, the “About Us” tab on CAST’s website includes a section on “Leading Party Members” and features CAST’s Party Secretary Zhang Yuzhuo and five other Communist Party members.

Likewise, TCP partnered with another organization called NYO China for its 2019 “Women’s Conference.” NYO China appears to be headed by He Mei, vice chairman of the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), which was identified by USCC as a UFWD front back in 2018.

The year before the State Department designated the Confucius Institute as a UFWD “foreign mission” in 2020, TCP also partnered with the Chinese government-run propaganda center to host an event on “China’s Food Revolution.” Li Changchun, former CCP propaganda chief, once called Confucius Institutes “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda setup,” according to the State Department.

“Confucius Institutes are the United Front’s most well-known overseas outreach program,” Helen Raleigh, author of “Backlash: How China’s Aggression Has Backfired,” told the DCNF.

“Confucius Institutes have been noted to present students with only the CCP-sanctioned version of Chinese history, which omits the CCP’s human rights violations, and Chinese teachers at Confucius Institutes are all thoroughly vetted by Beijing,” Raleigh said.

In total, about 10 organizations that appear to have been headed by CCP members or alleged UFWD front members financially sponsored TCP, the DCNF determined. These organizations paid as much as $50,000 to sponsor events hosted by the multimedia outlet, according to various flyers.

Youhe Invest — whose website identifies its chairman Su Jie as a member of the CCP and CPPCC — is listed on TCP’s website as a sponsor of past events. Likewise, the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) sponsored a TCP screening of a documentary on “the history and evolution of Afro-Chinese relations in America” in 2021.

CUSEF is a Hong Kong-based nonprofit registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act that is involved in UFWD “influence operations,” according to USCC.

Several companies run by individuals from CUSEF’s leadership have also sponsored TCP, such as Wisdom Valley — whose founding director, Victor Fung, is listed as CUSEF’s vice chairman — and Value Partners — whose co-chairman, Cheah Cheng Hye, is one of CUSEF’s “counsellors.”

Rep. Smith told the DCNF that once Republicans take control of the House it will become a priority to investigate Chinese influence operations.

“Beyond national security concerns, we know that CCP agents often target the Chinese diaspora in the United States,” Smith said. “We must help defend our fellow citizens and lawful permanent residents from pressure — and in many cases, transnational repression up to and including assassination attempts — by the Chinese Communist Party.”

AUTHOR

PHILIP LENCZYCKI

Investigative reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: CIA Director’s Former Think Tank Hired Experts From Nonprofits Controlled By Chinese Spy Agencies

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Transgender Agenda Losing Support: Poll

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Although left-wing activists often say they represent “the right side of history,” a well-regarded poll finds that support for a key item of the LGBTQ agenda has collapsed faster than virtually any other issue: Significantly fewer Americans support allowing men to use women’s restrooms in 2022 than in 2016.

“Americans are 17 percentage points more likely to favor” laws requiring the two sexes to use separate restrooms “today than they were in 2016, when the question was first asked,” according to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). “In fact, 2022 saw the sharpest uptick of strong support for requiring transgender people to use bathrooms based on their” sex.

“Typically, opinion does not move so quickly on such issues,” PRRI notes.

Americans of all political views became less supportive of this plank of the LGBTQ agenda over the last six years, with registered independents switching their views completely. “In 2016, most independents opposed” laws respecting female privacy, “but by 2022 a small majority favored these laws,” the polling firm states in an article published on December 15.

Surprisingly, the number of Democrats backing restroom privacy laws has grown by four points in 2022 (31%) over the level in 2016 (27%), according to PRRI’s 2022 American Values Survey.

Support for laws respecting privacy in intimate settings spans all racial and ethnic backgrounds, religions, and nearly all generations. A majority of multiracial (53%), Hispanic (52%), and white Americans (51%), as well as half of black Americans (50%), told PRRI they support legally established zones of privacy where people disrobe. Only college-educated white people, registered Democrats, people not affiliated with any religion, and those under the age of 30 tend to favor sexually mixed restrooms, the poll finds.

One likely reason for the seismic change is increasing public awareness of physical and sexual assaults inflicted by men against women inside restrooms. Last week, details emerged that a male who identifies as female physically attacked two teenage girls in a female restroom inside the Edmond Memorial High School in Edmond, Oklahoma. The nation’s restrooms have been the sight of numerous assaults and acts of voyeurism stretching all the way back to 1999. Recent incidents include:

  • “Two Loudoun County Public School (LCPS) officials have been indicted in Virginia on charges related to attempts to cover up two sexual assaults in a girls’ bathroom and in an empty classroom perpetrated against female students by a male student” who identified as “gender fluid,” The Washington Stand reported last week;
  • In March, an 18-year-old male exposed his genitals to a child inside a gender-neutral restroom in Wisconsin’s Rhinelander High School;
  • A five-year-old girl said a male student who identified as “gender fluid” sexually molested her inside the restroom of Oakhurst Elementary School in Decatur, Georgia, on November 16, 2017. The school district violated Title IX by failing to adequately investigate the incident, according to a 2020 ruling from the Office of Civil Rights in the Trump administration’s Education Department; and
  • Police arrested a man for indecent exposure inside a women’s restroom in Charlotte, North Carolina, in July 2016.

Similar outrages have occurred in intimate facilities other than restrooms:

  • The Daily Mail reported this month that prison authorities transferred convicted child rapist Brett David Sonia, who now identifies as Brooke Lyn Sonia, to Washington Correctional Center for Women, reportedly leaving women “petrified” they will be victimized next;
  • In July 2016, police arrested a man for recording a young girl changing her clothes inside a Target changing room. Sean Patrick Smith, who identified as woman named “Shauna Patricia Smith,” reportedly told police that he exploited Target’s celebrated, transgender-friendly policies to record several young women undressing. Smith entered a guilty plea to one count of video voyeurism in October 2016; and
  • Officials accused voyeurs of recording similar, surreptitious videos in Target’s multi-sex changing rooms in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Texas in 2016 alone.

The real difference on the issue comes down to ideology, not age, PRRI states. The Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X oppose opening restrooms to transgender people. Americans aged 30-49 are evenly split, while those 18-29 support transgender restroom use. But the report notes that Millennials and Gen Z who belong to the Republican Party side with older Republicans in backing restroom privacy legislation.

“Generational divisions, then, are largely attributable to differences in the generations to identify with the Democratic or Republican Party,” says the survey. “If younger cohorts start identifying more with the Republican Party,” support for restroom privacy will increase.

“It is not guaranteed that demographic change means a destiny of victory for LGBTQ equality,” concludes PRRI.

Values play a strong role in how citizens view transgender restrooms. A majority of “members of all religious groups support requiring transgender individuals to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex,” notes PRRI, “including three in four white evangelical Protestants (75%), 64% of other Christians, 58% of white mainline Protestants, 57% of Black Protestants (57%), 53% of white Catholics, 51% of Hispanic Catholics, and 50% of non-Christian religious Americans.” Yet only 34% of the Nones support gender privacy.

Americans who believe there are only two sexes are also three times more likely to support separate restroom and changing spaces than those who believe in gender fluidity (69% vs. 23%).

What’s more, the poll’s results fall to the left of many other surveys; for instance, a 2016 WPA Opinion poll found two-thirds of all Americans oppose transgender restrooms. PRRI’s declining numbers indicate public support has eroded even more than the report lets on. The title of the report announcing these results, “Challenges In Moving Toward A More Inclusive Democracy,” reflects PRRI’s pique.

PRRI also complains that “Americans who most trust far-right news outlets” are “notably more likely to support” restroom privacy (84%), even more than those whose first news choice is Fox News (78%). Americans who “most trust mainstream outlets are much less likely to support” female restroom rights (44%).

Time magazine ran an article in 2016 titled, “Transgender Bathroom: Advocates Say ‘Predator’ is Myth.” A year later, CNN asserted that “there is no evidence” that policies giving males access to female’s intimate spaces “lead to attacks in public facilities.”

Nearly two out of three people who stopped or curbed their viewing of CNN (61%) agreed that “one of the reasons I find myself watching CNN less often is because of its liberal/left-wing bias,” according to a new poll from the Media Research Center.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘The Border Is Not Open,’ Says White House Press Secretary

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Hours before the Supreme Court paused the end of Title 42 (scheduled for Wednesday) until the Tuesday after Christmas, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre achieved new levels of Orwellian Newspeak on Monday for insisting, repeatedly, that the southern border was not “open.” And further, she argued that anyone claiming the border was open was actually aiding the Mexican cartels who commit human trafficking.

“I want to be very clear here,” Jean-Pierre said, “The fact is that the removal of Title 42 does not mean the border is open. Anyone who suggests otherwise is simply doing the work of these smugglers who, again, are spreading misinformation, and which are — which is very dangerous.” And, in case the preposterous comment could be mistaken for a flubbed sentence, she emphatically repeated the point four additional times.

Something like a door is open when it is possible to pass through. Something is closed when it isn’t possible to pass through. Border Patrol is encountering around 200,000 migrants per month (2.2 million in Fiscal Year 2022). They apprehend them (except for criminals, the migrants usually surrender themselves), process them, and then release them into the U.S. Over the weekend of December 9-11, border patrol encountered more than 7,000 migrants in the El Paso sector alone, and was forced to release hundreds into the streets of El Paso to clear out room in the processing facility for new arrivals. For these migrants, passing through the border (from the Mexico side to the U.S. side) was possible. For these migrants the border was open.

The Biden administration doesn’t deny that migrants cross the border. As the state attorneys general, who requested a stay from the Supreme Court, wrote in their filing, “DHS [The Department of Homeland Security] estimates that daily illegal crossings may more than double from around 7,000/day to 15,000/day once Title 42 is terminated.” DHS divisions such as Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collect and respond to real-time data proving that the border is open.

I don’t know for certain what Jean-Pierre meant by saying, “the border is not open,” as she never explained what she meant by the term. Based on the context, Jean-Pierre seems to argue 1) if potential migrants hear that the border is open, they will be more likely to come; 2) if migrants come, smugglers are likely to exploit them; therefore 3) migrants must not hear that the border is open. She never argues that calling the border open is factually incorrect. Rather, she claims that calling the border open is morally wrong because it will put migrants in harm’s way.

Jean-Pierre’s claim that “the border is not open” is based upon a worldview assumption that telling the truth can sometimes be wrong if it leads to bad effects.

That same assumption underlies much of the rationale for “transgender-affirming” care. The oft-repeated argument goes, persons questioning their biological sex should be affirmed in making the transition because if they experience opposition or “hate” (any form of non-affirmation or less-than-effusive affirmation) they will be driven to commit suicide. But that claim is unsubstantiated, and frequent repetition is not proof.

Similarly, Jean-Pierre’s effects-based argument for lying about the border does a poor job calculating the effects. One might ask, why do potential migrants hear that the border is open? Because, in fact, it is. This is confirmed by all sorts of official and media reporting, first- and second-hand experiences, and the various effects an open border causes (the opioid epidemic, for example). We live in the information age and have a free press, after all. If the border were closed, would potential migrants hear that it is open? Perhaps smugglers might spread such misinformation, as Jean-Pierre suggests. But those reports would lack credibility in the absence of corroborating evidence. Reports about the openness of the border rely on the underlying facts of the situation.

In other words, the best way to persuade migrants that “the border is not open” is to close the border. Trying to shame everyone into pretending something is true that isn’t won’t accomplish anything.

Christians should be cautious about ever rationalizing a lie because of the effects it produces. If “on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak” (Matthew 12:36), how much more weighty are the lies we are tempted to tell? God always tells the truth. In fact, “it is impossible for God to lie” (Hebrews 6:18), whereas the devil “is a liar and the father of lies,” and those who lie are his children (John 8:44). Our corrupted hearts might deceive us into believing that a lie is justified because it might get us out of a scrape, or sooth another’s feelings, or otherwise produce a good effect. But Jesus tells those who are truly his disciples, “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

So, if the Biden administration wants us to say that “the border is not open,” they should make it so.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The FBI’s Twitter Censorship an ‘Apparent Violation of the Law’: Expert

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The federal government made an “apparent violation of the law” by pressuring social media outlets to ban or suppress American citizens’ accounts, or to ban the Hunter Biden laptop story as a foreign intelligence operation, an expert has said. Meanwhile, the federal government exploited the same online platforms to spread U.S. government propaganda, new disclosures from Twitter have revealed.

The seventh and eighth batches of the “Twitter Files” focused on the FBI’s suppression of the explosive contents of Biden’s laptop, which threatened to link 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to a murky web of foreign influence-peddling, as well as military intelligence campaigns using fake accounts to echo the Pentagon’s party line. Previous accounts showed how the FBI established a one-way portal to Twitter to request officials place certain accounts under a “shadow ban” or remove whole posts altogether — requests often received, and honored, by a plethora of former FBI agents and other government officials burrowed deeply into every level of the platform.

“The FBI was abusing its authority to target and abuse the First Amendment rights of American citizens and seems to me an apparent violation of the law,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm on Tuesday. “When you have collusion to suppress the civil rights of U.S. citizens” between the government and the private sector, “that violates federal law.”

The FBI paid Twitter more than $3.4 million in taxpayer funds as reimbursements for processing its ban requests. “We have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” wrote a Twitter official in early 2021. That means “American taxpayers paid Twitter via the FBI to censor themselves and help Joe Biden win” the 2020 election, noted Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.

Social media officials engaged in “surveilling, sharing information about the typically constitutionally protected activities of U.S. citizens, and then censoring U.S. citizens at the behest of the FBI,” said Fitton. “If you get paid to do things like that, it sounds to me like you’re operating as an FBI informant or asset.” Freedom of speech is “a God-given right, and the FBI just can’t go in and ask someone to suppress it,” Fitton told Backholm.

Yet the effort has not lightened. In a January 2020 email from Carlos Monje Jr., Twitter director of Policy and Philanthropy, he stated, “a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our” policies, “including by whispering to congressional staff.”

That coordination is par for the course for the Left, former FBI Special agent Jonathan Gilliam told Backholm on Monday’s “Washington Watch.” “The Democrat Party and the leftist socialists in this nation are very oppressive; they want to make people think the way they do, and they want to block people from spreading information that they don’t agree with.” FBI officials “moved from an observation platform to actually telling social media platforms what they would like to be pulled off. In effect, they were dictating [to] these social media platforms — and it’s not just Twitter.”

“Twitter [has] the same ideological stance as these leftists in the government [who] were basically doing the government’s bidding to oppress the First Amendment and to censor free speech,” he said.

Journalist Michael Schellenberger focused on the federal government’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story across social media platforms, beginning when the FBI intercepted the computer from repair store owner John Paul Mac Isaac on December 9, 2019. Arrests and prosecution did not follow bur rather “an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms,” he wrote. “[D]uring all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed [high-ranking Twitter official] Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation.”

The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies held weekly meetings with Twitter, Roth revealed in December 2020, where “federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.” U.S. officials claimed the misinformation would be the work of APT28, a Russian intelligence unit. These alleged forthcoming foreign leaks were “discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” Nor were the FBI “warnings” limited to one social media platform. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the intelligence community similarly “warned” his security team of a coming “dump.”

The FBI also surveilled Rudy Giuliani, who had received a copy of its contents and prepared to publish them before the 2020 election.

Just one month before the New York Post’s publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the feds had Roth and other social media figures take part in a “tabletop exercise” about a potential foreign intelligence agency’s “Hack-and-Dump” operation related to Hunter Biden. Formerly confidential documents about the exercise, run by the Aspen Institute, show social media agents reacted to a theoretical dump of documents from “Bidencrimes.info” implicating Joe Biden in illegal activity related to his son’s employment by Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. The scenario shows the forces of the intelligence community, MSNBC, NPR, and social media squaring off against a misinformation campaign emanating from Rudy Giuliani, Fox News, and Mike Pompeo.

When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in October, Yoel Roth said it “set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leak campaign alarm bells.”

Internal documents show Roth admitted the New York Post story isn’t “clearly in violation of anything” in Twitter’s policy. But, he said, the platform came to believe the “suggestion from experts” of an elaborate conspiracy theory: “there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware.”

On that basis, they suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, likely changing the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. “So on top of the suppression of civil rights, you have potential election interference,” Fitton told Backholm. Enough Biden voters in swing states say they would have voted for another candidate had they known about the laptop story that it would have reelected President Donald Trump to a second term, according to a Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics poll.

“They were grooming Twitter employees throughout the autumn of 2020 to immediately recognize our story … Russian disinformation, hacked material,” New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, author of “The Laptop from Hell,” told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday night. “And they sweetened the pie by giving Twitter $3.4 million of taxpayer money.” The federal government set up “an entire censorship regime … to ensure no derogatory material about Joe Biden from the laptop would ever see the light of day before the election. It was strangled at birth.”

“Unfortunately, half of the country believes that, because their media organs of choice have completely ignored the Twitter files,” Devine said. Legacy media outlets instead “peddled lies from the intelligence community from the very beginning of the Trump campaign, the Russian collusion lies that just now blended into these lies about the Hunter Biden laptop also being Russian disinformation. And it all helps one side of politics, which is the Democrats.”

Twitter Files #8, released on Tuesday by Lee Fang, revealed the U.S. government used a “vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda” to promote official U.S. policy, and possibly spread misinformation about its enemies, on Twitter and other social media platforms. Twitter “whitelisted” a handful of accounts, which military officials in time presented as legitimate accounts of people living in the Middle East, not intelligence assets recycling propaganda. Twitter officials were “well aware” of at least 157 such accounts, many of which it “discovered” on its own. A separate investigation found the network extended beyond Twitter onto other social media platforms, where phony accounts, complete with artificially generated photos accused Iran of “threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,” and other war atrocities propaganda.

Gilliam sees little hope for change on social media at large, “as long as the leftists are in charge” of the government and social media platforms. “And the Republican Party is full of careerists that don’t do anything.”

Yet Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) promised that the incoming Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee will investigate the FBI’s actions thoroughly. “Thankfully, we now have evidence and facts to be able to bring in these individuals and depose them,” Congressman Steube told Backholm Monday. “And we’re looking forward to doing that.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: LinkedIn Joins the Social Media ‘Cabal’ Censoring the Truth about 2020 Election, Covid Vaccines and Biden 

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

LinkedIn Joins the Social Media ‘Cabal’ Censoring the Truth about the 2020 Election, Covid Vaccines and Biden

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Just when you thought that the thought police, no pun intended, couldn’t get more draconian we are learning that sharing the truth is now absolutely verboten on LinkedIn.

Our LinkedIn account was “restricted” due to “multiple violations of LinkedIn’s User Agreement and Professional Community Policies” against “sharing content that contains misleading or inaccurate information”.

Here are the content links we shared on LinkedIn that got us restricted (i.e. shadow banned, blacklisted):

  1. Content Creation Time: Wed, 09 Dec 2020 13:32:05 GMT, shared – ELECTION UPDATE: Chances of Biden winning PA, MI, GA, WI Independently after Trump ’s early lead is less than 1 in a quadrillion: – Dr. Rich Swier
  2. Content Creation Time: Sat, 07 Nov 2020 11:54:11 GMT, shared – a picture which said “We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” – Joe Biden, October 24, 2020
  3. Content Creation Time: Fri, 23 Apr 2021 14:17:27 GMT, shared – Covid Vax: Largest Human Biological Experiment in World History with Unknown Long-term Consequences – Dr. Rich Swier

Item #2 is most interesting in that we posted a picture of Biden based upon a statement on Twitter by Biden on voter fraud. Here’s the video:

Here is a list of “misleading or inaccurate information” posted on Twitter by the White House.

We wonder if LinkedIn fact checked this information?

The Bottom Line

Twitter is now the go to free speech platform since it was acquired by Elon Musk. Since taking over Elon has released what have become know as the “Twitter Files.”

The most recent release, Twitter File #7, exposed the following:

  • The FBI requested take action on what it determined to be misinformation, which included jokes from small Twitter accounts about voting dates.
  • FBI e-mails to Twitter asking for assessment of terms of service violations and “location information” about accounts that allegedly “spread misinformation about the upcoming election.” Some of those accounts were permanently suspended.
  • How the 2016 “Russian election interference” hoax influenced the FBI’s 2020 operations into reviewing American social media posts.

This pattern of determining “misinformation” appears to be the basis of our restriction on LinkedIn by their internal thought police (FBI handlers?).

Sadly, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms, are anything but free speech platforms. Rather they resemble the efforts of INGSOC to restrict and eliminate language that conflicts with the Democrat party’s and Biden White House’s narratives.

LinkedIn is now a part and parcel of the Biden’s “Ministry of Truth”, that is their truth and not the real truth.

Will there be a LinkedIn whistleblower who will bring out the truth on who is behind this? We certainly hope so.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

VAERS Shows a 4070% Increase in Miscarriages and Stillbirths Since mRNA Roll-out

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The horror. The Democrats new form of birth control and abortion.

VAERS Shows a 4070% Increase in Miscarriages and Stillbirths Since mRNA Roll-out

By Brian Lupo, Gateway Pundit, December 19, 2022:

The vaccine is “safe and effective” according to our very own CDC, FDA and Federal government.

Nothing to see here.  Pay no attention to the 4,070% increase in miscarriages and stillbirths, as reported by the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS).  The VAERS system is the federal government’s method of monitoring vaccine injuries through real-time reporting.  As reported through OpenVAERS.com:

But what’s not getting a lot of attention is the unbelievable spike in miscarriages and stillbirths.  The following charts show the dramatic increases according to OpenVAERS:

CLICK HERE TO VIEW REPORTS OF MISCARRIAGE POST COVID VACCINE CHARTS

Miscarriages as a result of a non-Covid vaccine seemed to spike in 2008 around the HPV vaccine.  That number was just over 160 cases (165).  In 2021 and 2022, we have seen 3,379 and 1,445, respectively, related to the COVID vaccines.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW REPORST OF MISCARRIAGE POST COVID VACCINE CHARTS.

Miscarriages as a result of a non-Covid vaccine seemed to spike in 2008 around the HPV vaccine. That number was just over 160 cases (165). In 2021 and 2022, we have seen 3,379 and 1,445, respectively, related to the COVID vaccines.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW NON-COVID REPORTS OF MISCARRIAGE AND STILLBIRTH 2005-2021 CHART

It is worth mentioning that it is estimated by a Harvard study that only a small percentage of actual VAERS injuries get reported. The process is cumbersome for doctors and nurses and there are whistleblowers who have claimed they are “discouraged” for lack of a better term, from writing VAERS reports. The actual number is likely significantly higher.

Remember that anomaly in the number of injuries reported as well as the discouragement when you consider the increase in myocarditis cases as well as deaths:

Go, read the rest…..

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: 15 More UK Doctors From Many Fields Come Out Publicly Against The Vaxx

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Trans-Identifying HHS Official Admits Gender Transition Procedures Can Cause Sterility

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Rachel Levine, a biologically male senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who identifies as a transgender woman, recently stated publicly that he was happy to have undergone gender transition procedures later in life because it allowed him to have children. Experts, however, are pointing out that the policies promoted by Levine favor allowing minors to undergo gender transition procedures despite the fact that such procedures can lead to permanent sterility.

At a recent public event, Levine stated, “If I had transitioned when I was young, I wouldn’t have my children. I can’t imagine a life without my children.”

Levine expressed relief about having not undergone gender transition procedures such as receiving puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones as a minor, which can cause irreversible, permanent sterility. Notably, however, Levine publicly advocated for minors to in fact be able to undergo such treatment in July. “We really want to base our treatment and to affirm and to support and to empower these youth not to limit their participation in activities and sports, and even limit their ability to get gender affirmation treatment in their state,” he said.

The Biden administration has backed statements like this up with policies. In July, Biden’s HHS proposed a rule that revised Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to include “sexual orientation and gender identity” and “reproductive health care services” including “pregnancy termination” to existing “protections against discrimination on the basis of sex.” Critics say the rule would have forced conscientious-objecting health care workers to violate their religious beliefs, not only through having to carry out abortions but also having to carry out gender transition surgeries to remove healthy organs and administer puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones. In December, a federal appeals court agreed, ruling that the proposed rule violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The administration has also endorsed gender transition procedures for minors in a series of documents, and administration officials have endorsed using taxpayer dollars to fund these procedures.

Meanwhile, a number of individuals who have detransitioned out of the transgender lifestyle after having undergone irreversible procedures as minors have expressed disillusionment and regret at the prospect of how it will affect their future families. Chloe Cole says she was pushed into undergoing a double mastectomy at age 15, and is heartbroken that she will be unable to breastfeed her future children. “Adrian” has similarly been left “despairing and sterile.” Other examples of those who were pushed into transition procedures and have come to regret them abound.

Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, the director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council, noted the disparity between what studies show and the actions of the Biden administration.

“Levine’s comments are illustrative of a psychological disconnect that is embedded in the approach and the implementation of transgenderism,” she told The Washington Stand. “Every front that you look at with the transgender ideology, you see this disconnect between science and the practice, the ethics and the practice, the knowledge of what we know about development and the practice. It is the most disassociated ideology.”

She continued, “Here we have from the very top someone who is illustrating this very dynamic by saying, ‘In my personal life, I’m so grateful that I didn’t transition as a child so that I was able to have what I wanted, but let me impose this on everyone else.’ It’s distressing and at the same time not surprising because it is such an apropos representation of an ideology that promotes disassociation — the right hand literally does not know what the left hand is doing.”

Bauwens, who formerly worked as a clinician providing trauma-focused treatment to children, pointed to a seemingly willful ignorance of science on the part of the Biden administration.

“For someone who is in Health and Human Services and isn’t aware of the studies that are going on in other government agencies that have clearly shown that most brains aren’t even developed until 25 — disregarding all of that knowledge and imposing your own view, which isn’t even your own experience,” she observed. “This approach is not rooted in science, so there’s no grounding in the scientific method onto practice, and everything we know about scientific ethics and protecting vulnerable classes of people — which children are included in that class — that’s just thrown by the wayside.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Republican Cracks Down on Trans Bathroom Policies After High School Restroom Assault

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The top education official in a heavily Republican state is cleaning house, demanding that all public school districts and charter school have policies respecting the privacy of female students, after a male who identifies as female allegedly beat up two teenage girls in a high school restroom.

No media outlet covered the altercation, which took place on October 26, until the website Reduxx got a copy of the police report on December 12. According to police, a teenage boy became enraged when a teenage girl ignored him when he initiated conversation inside the girl’s restroom of Edmond Memorial High School in Edmond, Oklahoma. The boy then asked if she “wanted to fight” and came at her with clenched fists, pulled her hair, and threw her to the ground. the police report says. The girl said she was too weak to fight back. An eyewitness said the boy then “kicked her in the head and the back 2 times,” then punched her repeatedly. Another female said she intervened to stop the fight, because the attacker “is a man,” but said the boy punched her in the face twice; the police report described the second girl as having sustained a “possible concussion.”

“This is unacceptable and will not be tolerated in the state of Oklahoma,” said Oklahoma Secretary of Education Ryan Walters (R) in an online video. Walters said he would launch a state-level investigation into Edmond Public Schools — but he would also require all Oklahoma public school districts to notify parents of their restroom policies and submit them to Walters for review. “Our legislature and governor passed and signed a bill that says boys cannot go into girls’ restrooms for this precise reason,” said Walters. “We will not allow the radical Left’s Woke ideology to endanger our girls by having boys in the girls’ restrooms, where assaults like this can happen.”

Walters previously critiqued public schools in Stillwater after outraged parents complained that administrators opened restrooms to teenagers of both sexes. “You have chosen radicals over your students, ideology over biology, and ‘wokeness’ over safety,” Walters wrote to Stillwater education officials on April 8. “Today I am asking you to work with your fellow board members to make it so that your students only use the bathroom of their God-given natural sex. Biological males should not receive unrestricted access to women’s restrooms, leaving our young girls uncomfortable and afraid to enter them during school.”

“It’s wonderful to see Oklahoma’s Education Secretary Ryan Walters prioritizing the safety of girls over the desires of boys to be accepted as girls,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand.

A month after Walters’s letter to Stillwater, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (R) signed S.B. 615, which requires schools to designate all restrooms or changing areas used by more than one person for the “exclusive use” of one sex. Schools must make a “reasonable accommodation” by providing a single-use restroom or changing area to students who do not wish to comply. Any school district that refuses to implement this policy would lose 5% of state funding in the next year, and parents would have a “cause of action” to sue noncompliant schools.

Three students, represented by the ACLU and Lambda Legal, sued the state Department of Education this fall, alleging in court filings that people who identify as transgender are “being singled out for discriminatory unequal treatment.”

“Education officials in school districts across the country have been pressured by outside agitators like the ACLU, SPLC, GLSEN, and the Human Rights Campaign to adopt progressive and dangerous policies that undermine children’s safety and learning. In the face of this relentless pressure, it takes leadership to restate the commonsense values that parents expect and under which all children can thrive,” Kilgannon told TWS.

Walters also criticized the legacy media for refusing to cover the story of the alleged transgender physical assault for nearly two months. A Google search found that, as of this writing, the Edmond transgender restroom assault had not been reported by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Reuters, Axios, or Vice News.

Local media also suppressed the story of the transgender restroom attack. “I don’t think it meets the threshold to be ‘news,’” wrote Wendy Suares, a reporter for the area’s Fox affiliate, KOKH. The incident came as Virginia’s Loudoun County public school officials found themselves embroiled in controversy — and ultimately indicted — for denying that a male student who identifies as “gender fluid” sexually assaulted a teenage girl in a school restroom. Instead, officials had the girl’s outraged father arrested at a school board meeting, after quietly transferring the student to another school, where he reportedly molested another female student.

“Schools are for educating children, not ‘fixing them,’ promoting politics, or virtue signaling,” Kilgannon told TWS. “Thanks to Secretary Walters for this effort.”

Edmond Public School Superintendent Angela Grunewald responded in an oddly upbeat video that the school did not know the alleged perpetrator was a male, because his birth certificate did not mark his gender. Grunewald said her school district follows all applicable state laws and punished the male for fighting, as well as using the restroom facilities of the opposite sex.

Walters, who is running to become State Superintendent for Education, has promised to thoroughly review all state schools for compliance with the law — and, most importantly, to protect the safety and privacy of underage girls.

Walters’s “review of school policies just might reveal additional work to be done in 2023,” Kilgannon told TWS. “Something tells me he’s ready to do whatever it takes to protect all the children in his charge.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Trans-Identifying HHS Official Admits Gender Transition Procedures Can Cause Sterility

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

The FBI’s Sick Culture of Nondisclosure

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The seventh release of the Twitter files on Monday showed the FBI and intelligence agencies worked at media outlets and social media companies to discredit true information about Hunter Biden’s laptop.  Unfortunately, this story is the latest in a long line of stories showing indisputably that the FBI has developed a sick culture of nondisclosure over time.

I’ve documented this culture in my Freedom of Information Act case against the FBI which is currently in federal court.  The case is more than four years old – still relatively young by FOIA standards – but one of the things I learned recently is that the FBI’s main database – the Sentinel system – is effectively off limits to FOIA researchers.  Sentinel contains millions of documents but can only be searched one word at a time, the FBI told the court in my case.  The FBI does not have the capability to combine search terms to narrow results, or so it claims.  So, if you put in a word like ‘mosque’, you get a million hits and the FBI says it has no duty to wade through a million records to look for anything specific FOIA researchers might be after.  The FBI’s refusal to acquire simple combination search technology makes a mockery of the Freedom of Information Act, as I’ve argued to the court.

My first pleading in the case documented the FBI’s sick culture of nondisclosure going back to Waco, where the FBI hid evidence and destroyed the crime scene so its actions could not be examined.  The sick culture continues to this day, with the FBI initially claiming it had no records regarding Seth Rich only to admit later it had 20,000 pages and his laptop.  In October, the FBI asked for 66 years to release the information, like the murder of Seth Rich was the JFK assassination or something.

The FBI’s sick culture of nondisclosure was transmitted to Twitter when the social media company was under Jack Dorsey.  Twitter employed a dozen former FBI officials in such positions as senior director of product trust.  That’s on top of previous revelations about Twitter deputy general counsel James Baker, a former FBI lawyer who recently got fired by Elon Musk for – you guessed it – hiding information.  There were so many former FBI officials at Twitter they formed their own Slack channel to communicate with each other.

The Twitter files show deep ties and weekly meetings between the FBI and Twitter executives designed to suppress true information in the run-up to the 2020 election.  Some of the information was about the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Twitter went on to censor.  The FBI also pressured Twitter to take down specific accounts to silence bothersome individuals.

The sixth release of the Twitter files, plus supplementary material, shows an FBI making so many demands on Twitter for censorship a Twitter executive was becoming uncomfortable with the arrangement.

But there’s nothing like a little cash to soothe doubts.  We now know the FBI paid Twitter millions of dollars to suppress information and keep it from the public.  It was all carried on through emails and back channel reporting platforms, all of which have now been exposed.

The FBI had 80 agents working on this and says they were just after bad foreign actors and subversive or criminal conduct.  But the Bureau’s words don’t match its actions, starting with the Hunter Biden laptop story.  We need look no further than the seventh release of the Twitter files which shows the FBI worked with Twitter to discredit “factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.”  That information was embarrassing to Joe Biden and could conceivably have cost the Big Guy the election.  It was embarrassing to a political favorite and that’s why the FBI wanted it suppressed.

My FOIA case has been pending for more than four years.  The FBI won’t tell me what it’s up to regarding the questions I’ve asked.  But they’re going to have to take subpoenas from the House Republicans more seriously.  The Republicans will be investigating the Bureau’s collaboration with Twitter to suppress information.  There are more files – secret files which the FBI doesn’t want to release – that the Republicans know about and will be demanding.  The Republicans believe the FBI’s claims about foreign actors are just a pretext and a full-blown censorship operation against the American people was underway.  They’ve threatened to use the power of the purse to get answers.  I will be watching closely as the FBI’s sick culture of nondisclosure is held up to the cold light of day.  The FBI is supposed to be working for us and it shouldn’t have to take 66 years – or even four years, as in my case – for it to tell us what it’s up to.  The day of reckoning is coming.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

RELATED ARTICLE: One Month Before Hunter Biden Laptop Story, Twitter Execs And Journalists War-Gamed An Eerily Similar Scenario

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Analysis of RNC Spending Since 2017 Shows Millions Were Spent on Private Jets, Limousines, Luxury Retreats, Broadway Shows

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This is disgusting. All while the Republican Party loses elections due to a lack of funding and weak ground games for it’s candidates. Ronna McDaniel needs to be removed as RNC Chair ASAP. President Trump never should have endorsed her. The Republican Party leadership is killing the Republican Party, because they are alienating the Trump-base with corruption like this. This is just the latest example.

Breakdown is below.

EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of RNC Spending Since 2017 Shows Millions Were Spent on Private Jets, Limousines, Luxury Retreats, Broadway Shows

By The Right Scoop, Dec 19, 2022

Back in 2010, RNC Chair Michael Steele was heavily criticized and eventually lost his position because donors were angry about what they believed was luxurious spending on private jets, floral arrangements, chauffeur services, and member meetings in expensive tropical locales. Donors were used to frugality from the RNC under the George W. Bush administration, when “Karl Rove would bitch if there were flowers on the tables” and staff holiday parties were catered by Chick-fil-A.

Despite Joe Biden’s economy and three straight cycles of election losses, the RNC’s big-spending days are back with a vengeance.

Perhaps because of these losses both RNC donors and committee members are intensely interested in the committee’s finances, particularly the spending. Late last week, RedState was provided a report dated October 7, 2022 that examined RNC’s 2021-22 spending. It calculated more than $500,000 in private jet expenses, $64,000 at clothing retailers, and $321,000 in floral arrangements.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE BREAKDOWN OF RNC SPENDING BY CATEGORY

To determine how that compared with the rest of Ronna McDaniel’s tenure, RedState examined RNC expenditures from 2017 through 2022. In addition to a review of Federal Elections Commission (FEC) data, RedState spoke with current vendors, state party officials familiar with the workings, former staffers (some from McDaniel’s tenure, and some who worked for prior chairs), and several current RNC members to verify numbers and dates. Most were only willing to discuss the matters on background, and all were promised anonymity to avoid potential retaliation.

AUTHOR

Geller Report Staff

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

TWITTER FILES 7: FBI Was Directly Working As An Asset For The Biden Crime Family

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This is treason. This is an insurrection.

Techno Fog sums up:

More Twitter Files: Intelligence Community Pressure Campaign against Twitter

By Techno Fog

Michael Shellenberger has just published the latest batch of what has come to be known as the Twitter Files. It’s a follow-up to Matt Taibbi’s recent Twitter Files release concerning FBI’s pressure campaign against Twitter to remove content the agency found objectionable.

Today’s release provides more details on the relationship between Twitter and the FBI, the suppression and removal of the Hunter Biden story from Twitter the FBI’s desire for Twitter to confirm a “foreign interference” narrative that didn’t exist, and how the FBI sought user location information for tweets that weren’t remotely criminal.

For a refresher, here are the highlights from the one of the most recent releases from Taibbi, who has done excellent work on this continuing story:

  • The FBI requested take action on what it determined to be misinformation, which included jokes from small Twitter accounts about voting dates.
  • FBI e-mails to Twitter asking for assessment of terms of service violations and “location information” about accounts that allegedly “spread misinformation about the upcoming election.” Some of those accounts were permanently suspended.
  • How the 2016 “Russian election interference” hoax influenced the FBI’s 2020 operations into reviewing American social media posts.

Today’s thread by Shellenberger expands on what we have learned.

Some findings of note:

  • The FBI continued its requests of location and VPN IP data from Twitter users, done without a warrant and without a subpoena: “would Twitter be open to sharing which service provider(s) those VPN IP addresses resolved to?” To its credit, Twitter pushed back on this request.
  • In one case, the FBI requested user data for an account that was critical of BLM and the Democrats. Twitter responded by confirming “the account in question is domestic in origin.”
  • The US intelligence community was pushing Twitter to “share more information” and change its user privacy settings.
  • Approximately 6 weeks before the 2020 election, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force requested a classified briefing for Twitter general counsel James Baker (who, as you might recall, was involved in the FBI’s “botched” Russian collusion investigation).

Baker, who was recently fired by Elon Musk, will come to be an important player in the Hunter Biden laptop saga, telling his Twitter colleagues the laptop materials were potentially hacked. Interestingly, on the day the Hunter Biden story was published, James Baker would have a telephone call with FBI general counsel Matthew Perry.

“The unnecessary FBI briefing provided the Democrats and liberal media the vehicle to spread their false narrative that our work advanced Russian disinformation.”

Read more.

TWITTER FILES: PART 7

The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop

How the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Biden Reinstates Security Clearance of Physicist Who Passed Nuke Secrets to USSR

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“Without the intelligence contribution, there could have been no Soviet bomb that quickly.”

You’ve got to give the Left credit. It has an extensive agenda, a long memory and when it seizes power, it rolls as many of its agenda items, even the ancient ones, through the gate. Compare that to how little conservatives get done when in office. And how little of the things the Left does they reverse.

This is a seemingly unimportant example, but also a reminder of how comprehensive the Left’s agenda is, how it encompasses the past, present and the future. Lefties never let anything go.

And never pass up an opportunity to rewrite history.

The Biden administration has reversed a decades-old decision to revoke the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist called the father of the atomic bomb for his leading role in World War II’s Manhattan Project.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the 1954 decision by the Atomic Energy Commission was made using a “flawed process” that violated the commission’s own regulations.

“As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed,” Granholm said in a statement on Friday.

The actual evidence that came out was that Oppenheimer did it.

A Soviet spy chief’s memoirs published here today claim that the late J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the U.S. atomic bomb project during and after World War II, passed nuclear secrets to Soviet agents.

The allegations were made by Gen. Pavel Sudoplatov, who was in charge of efforts to obtain atomic secrets from the West, and excerpts of them ran in the Sunday Telegraph. Time magazine will print excerpts in today’s issue.

The memoirs charge that Oppenheimer, a University of California physicist known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condoned and assisted in the flow of vital nuclear secrets.

Sudoplatov charges that Elizabeth Zarubina, wife of the Soviet intelligence head in Washington, cultivated Oppenheimer socially.

Zarubina persuaded Oppenheimer to share atomic secrets with “anti-fascists of German origin,” Sudoplatov says.

The memoir, “Special Tasks,” declares: “We received reports on the Manhattan Project from Oppenheimer and his friends in oral form, through comments and asides, and from documents transferred through clandestine methods with their full knowledge that the information they were sharing would be passed on.

“In all there were five classified reports made available by Oppenheimer describing the progress of work on the atomic bomb.”

The Russians also received photos of the facilities at Oak Ridge, the book says.

“The Soviet bomb was constructed in three years,” Sudoplatov says. “Without the intelligence contribution, there could have been no Soviet bomb that quickly.”

Oppenheimer’s actions could have led to the deaths of millions of people and eventually far more than that.

Long before that, Edward Teller put his career on the line to denounce Oppenheimer. That helped marginalize Teller, the father of the H-bomb, and made him a pariah among lefties to whom the highest possible honor was helping the USSR and the highest possible disgrace was informing on Communists.

And then there’s the Merkulov letter which also revealed Oppenheimer’s complicity with the USSR.

In short, all of the “new evidence” actually makes it clear that Oppenheimer was collaborating with the USSR.

And all of this will also be ignored by the Biden administration and the media who don’t actually know any of the history or care.

And watch for some media fact checkers to issue a ruling of ‘false’ or ‘lacks context’ on this post to block it from Facebook and Google.

We live in a new leftist empire. An empire of lies.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

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

All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Breasts

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All I want for Christmas is my two front breasts.  You see, I dabbled in political transgenderism.  I believed what the communist transgender activists told me, in what the doctors and psychologists were selling me so they could line their own pockets, and in what my supposedly supportive school counselors were pushing me to do even though I wasn’t sure.  But now I regret it – big time.  It’s the worst mistake I’ve ever made and I’ve screwed up my life.

I was 13 when it started.  I started thinking maybe I was in the wrong body.  “If you don’t like your body, that’s a sign you’re trans,” social media influencers said.  I thought transitioning would help me with my depression and suicidal thoughts.  Change my name and pronouns and all my troubles would disappear.  Lots of girls around me were transitioning, it was contagious.  One visit to Planned Parenthood was all it took.  They acted like they had the answer to my every problem even though they didn’t even know me from Adam or Eve.  I started taking testosterone and it was like some monster took over my life.  I was irritable.  I wanted to hurt people.  I hurt myself, instead, and ended up in the emergency room.  I started to grow a beard.  My voice changed into a squeak.  I didn’t go out socially, anymore.  I stopped taking testosterone 18 months later and this whole cycle stopped, but not one adult tied my personality changes to the testosterone in all that time.  They just told me I had ‘internalized transphobia’.  What a crock.

I had my breasts removed.  I remember feeling awful when I looked down and saw the gashes on my chest.  But I believed once I was a boy, I would have the self-confidence I had always craved.  The drugs, the surgery – none of this was really making me a man.  I was just kidding myself.  I was living a lie.  I was trying to pass as male but was scared to death every moment I would be found out, that my new genitalia was just a prosthetic.  I considered surgery for a real one, but then I would have ended up with urinary problems and loss of all sexual feeling.  And it still wouldn’t have been real, just a piece of my arm muscle relocated down south.

The trans community lied to me.  They told me feeling uncomfortable in my own body was about transgenderism when it was just a normal part of growing up.  They didn’t tell me the damage I was doing to myself was irreversible.  They told me my family didn’t understand me so they were my family now, just like a cult.  The trans influencers on YouTube looked really cool.  They told me top surgery would bring me so much joy.  So I was meeting all these attractive, confident transitioners online but felt lonelier than ever.  They kept me from making real friends and finding other ways to cope with the feelings I was having.  The path they laid out for me was really very confusing.  My attraction to men didn’t go away, so what was I going to be – a gay trans guy?  I was more confused than ever.  I was in such a broken place.  But the doctors and mental health professionals told my parents that, unless I were affirmed in transitioning and in finding my true ‘gender identity’, my ‘authentic self’, I would kill myself.  I hear pushy professionals like that are starting to get sued for malpractice and for ruining young lives for their own profit.  Good.  It’s about time.

And when I started to question my transitioning, all my supposed friends became toxic and turned against me.  Now that I’m detransitioning, they just call me a bigot.  I see now they never did care about me.  They only cared about burning up people like me to build their political movement.  I wasn’t a person; I was a battleground.  I’ve reached out to a couple of people I knew from those days, but they’ve shunned me entirely.

I’d like to have children, someday.  I don’t know if that will be possible.  I certainly won’t be breast-feeding them, that hope burned up in a medical waste incinerator.  Breast implants make my clothes fit better.  I might have reconstructive surgery, I don’t know.  But what is better now is that I accept myself as myself.  I am what I am.  I found a community of detransitioners, and that’s helped.

Santa, I destroyed my life.  I’m not going to tell you I’m a victim.  I did this to myself, but I did have help.  I got used by a lot of people for their own agendas – the activists, the social media influencers, the profiteers, all of them.  They knew exactly what they were doing and they manipulated me every step of the way.  Tell a psychologist you’re a tomboy and they say right back, ‘Oh, you’re transgender’ and put you on hormones the next day.  It’s not right, telling children that right off the bat.  It’s sick.  People need to wake up.  This whole communist political transgenderism trip is intended to tear society apart and it’s doing a good job of it.

Santa, I know you can’t give me my life or even my breasts back.  But you can warn people political transgenderism is about the worst lump of coal they could ever wish on anybody.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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