Let's Fix This Country

Yes, Collusion! Government Report Connects the Dots to Russian Intelligence

When Robert Mueller turned in his investigative team’s report to the Justice Department in March of 2019, Attorney General William Barr infamously undercut two years’ work with his hurried four-page review so as to say that Mueller found no conspiracy “despite multiple offers from Russia-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign”. When, two weeks later, he released the report itself, Barr said, “the Special Counsel found no ‘collusion’ by any Americans” with Internet Research Agency, the Russian outfit that interfered with the 2016 election. President Trump was triumphant. “There was no collusion with Russia”, he declared on the tarmac returning from Mar-a-Lago. “No collusion” and “Complete and total exoneration” became Trump’s immediate mantra, repeated endlessly.

The Mueller report was, of course, nowhere near so simplistic. It found that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts”.

We thoroughly digested the Mueller report, footnotes and all, and amidst all the inexplicable contacts with Russians, already reported by
Wanted: Konstantin Kilimnik
a revitalized press, we identified one connection that certainly looked collusive. Just days after the report’s release, we wrote:

“The collusion theory ‘expired in an instant’ with Barr’s letter, said the lead editorial at the Wall Street Journal. One would think that everything and everyone suggestive of collusion had been made to disappear in a puff of smoke, as if everything turned up by the investigative media over the last two years was imaginary. That must mean…that Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, did not hand over polling data that Russia presumably used to interfere with our elections to Konstantin Kilimnic [sic] … thought to have ties to Russian intelligence.”

That says we, and many others, saw collusion at the outset. A presidential campaign’s close-in polling data in battleground states would indicate in which towns and counties there is weakness. With the Russians showing a preference for Trump over Hillary Clinton, and using American social media to influence voters, such granular data would tell the Russians just where to aim their disinformation.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump had chosen Paul Manafort to be his campaign manager beginning in June of 2016. It was an inexplicable choice. Manafort had worked for years in Ukraine.
Paul Manafort
He had as a client Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, paid $10 million a year to promote Russian interests in Europe and the United States. Manafort had also for five years done consulting work for the corrupt and Russia-favoring President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown in the country’s Orange Revolution, fleeing to Russia where he lives in exile.

An FBI search warrant revealed that Manafort had obtained from Deripaska an added $10 million as a loan, which apparently had not been repaid. Conjecture had it that Manafort offered himself as campaign manager — at no change, which surely appealed to Trump — so as to erase the Deripaska debt by passing insider data to him and to Russia, with Kilimnik as the conduit.

When the partly redacted report was released in April 2019, we said:

“The special counsel [Mueller] verifies that Konstantin Kilimnik is assessed ‘to have ties to Russian intelligence’, so when Paul Manafort, while Trump’s campaign manager, ‘had caused internal polling data to be shared with Kilimnik, and the sharing continued for some period of time’, how is that not collusion? That data was not what we are accustomed to seeing — just Trump X.X% vs. Clinton Y.Y%. It would have been scores of tables by state and election district, precisely what Russia was looking for in targeting its election interference. If the defense is that perhaps Manafort was freelancing his way out of debt to a Russian oligarch, Trump is nevertheless responsible for bringing on board a character with such shady dealings with Russian and Ukrainian contacts.”

Barr, accused of being Trump’s private attorney, feigned ignorance of the Manafort-Kilimnik connection as we reported that May in “What Mueller Report? Trump, Putin and Barr Collude to Disappear It”:

“Another presidential aspirant, Sen. Cory Booker, uncovered that Barr, who had said ‘no collusion’ four times in releasing the report, didn’t know about the most flagrant act of collusion of all, Paul Manafort’s repeated passing of the campaign’s own polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, who the report said has ties to Russian intelligence services. ‘What information was shared?’ Barr asked. ‘Polling data was shared, sir,’ Booker replied. ‘It’s in the report. I can cite you the page.’ ‘With who?’, Barr asked. Did Barr read the report on which he passed judgment?”

the senate does itself proud

Last August, the Senate Intelligence Committee turned in its report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, an investigation that took three years and nearly 1,000 pages to report. This was a Republican-led committee, chaired by North Carolina’s Richard Burr, that produced a bipartisan report not at all favorable to President Trump. It established a web of connections in which Trump and 18 of his associates had at least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition. The vocabulary-impaired president called the entire, massive Senate product “a hoax”.

The report didn’t speculate about Mr. Kilimnik; it bluntly stated “Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer”. It elaborated:

“The committee assesses that Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services…Manafort, who was interviewed by the [Special Counsel’s Office] approximately a dozen times, lied consistently to the SCO during these interviews about one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik, the Russian intelligence officer at the center of the Committee’s investigation.”

The report considered the connection between Manafort and Kilimnik “the single most direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.”

Still, while collusion was plainly obvious to all but those who believed covering for President Trump excused treason, evidence was just short of knowing what precisely Kilimnik did with the polling data. After meeting repeatedly with Manafort or his associate Rick Gates in a New York cigar club where they provided the data and insider knowledge of the Trump campaign, a lack of proof has to allow that Kilimnik might have thought the information useless and tossed it in the trash.

A federal arrest warrant for Mr. Kilimnik had been issued back in June, 2018. But something had clearly come to light when this February, the Washington field office of the FBI put up a wanted poster offering $250,000 for information leading to his capture. Suddenly, there seemed to be amplified reason for finding him.

That reason came clear April 15th when the Treasury Department issued new sanctions against Russia for 2020 election interference and the Solar Wind hack. The department said in a news release that…

“During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy. Additionally, Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election”

This was finally a declaratiove statement that Russian intelligence had received the data supplied by Manafort. It closed the circle of collusion — from Trump campaign’s Manafort to Kilimnik to the Kremlin.

Rick Gates issued a statement saying that the Treasury Department had not provided evidence in support of its claim, which, of course, it had not for reasons of protecting sources and methods. Gates, who cooperated with the Mueller investigation in return for a slap on the wrist sentence, said …

“[T]he polling data passed periodically to Kilimnik at Paul Manafort’s direction was simplistic and outdated, never in real time. It was from both public and internal sources. It was not massive binders full of demographics or deep research. It was ‘topline’ numbers and did not contain any strategic plans.”

Mr. Gates was not granted a pardon by President Trump. It is very much in his interest to minimize the polling data. To believe Gates one has to think that Manafort would risk forgiveness of a $10 million obligation held by Deripaska by handing over worthless chaff.

In March of 2019, Paul Manafort was sentenced to 7 1/2 years for multiple federal crimes, a sentence viewed as unduly light. In May of 2020 he was allowed to serve out his sentence at home because of fears he might contract Covid in prison. In December, Trump pardoned him.

The Constitution says “Treason against the United State shall consist … in adhering to their [the states’] Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” While Trump’s campaign chairman, Manafort aided the Russians in their efforts through disinformation and social media to see Donald Trump elected as president. Collusion is the polite word for treason.

Apr 18 2021 | Posted in Investigations | Read More »

Suspicions Rise: Did the Virus Escape from a Wuhan Lab?

A 15-member international contingent from the World Health Organization (WHO) journeyed to Wuhan, China, early this year to seek out the source of the original Covid-19 outbreak that has led to the deaths of close to three million people worldwide. At the end of March, they turned in their report. It did not go over well.

Earlier complaints that the WHO has been too deferential toward China were not eased by the WHO’s member states deciding the
A wet market in Wuhan, China


junket should be a collaboration between Chinese and foreign scientists, not an independent investigation or audit, so the international 15 were joined by a Chinese delegation of equal size. The Chinese were even given the right of approval of who was permitted on the tour; two from the international group were halted in Singapore. And once the group arrived, they were required by Chinese authorities to spend the first two weeks in quarantine, cutting their month-long trip in half.

Under the ground rules China set, they would do the primary investigation and share their findings with WHO’s team. The team saw only what the Chinese government wanted them to see. The report therefore came to no solid conclusions. It drew immediate doubts for its acceptance of what the Chinese told them.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, fresh from a contentious meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage, Alaska, told CNN of his doubts about “the methodology and the process,” and “the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it”. Former National Security Council official Jamie Metzl said in a “60 Minutes” interview, they “did not have the independence or access to carry out a full and unrestricted investigation”.

second thoughts

The most prevalent belief has been that the coronavirus originated in the wet markets of Wuhan where wild animals are sold for food, where SARS-CoV-2 jumped across the animal-man barrier. But at the outset of the pandemic over a year ago, it had been conjectured that the virus might have escaped from a lab. After all, how curious that China’s only level 4 (highest isolation rating) virology institute — the Wuhan Institute of Virology — with probably the world’s largest collection of bat viruses, just happened to be located in the city where the outbreak began. But the lab leak notion died down, perhaps seeming too much a conspiracy theory coming from the right, with the left even shying from politically incorrect terms such as “China virus”.

But now, China’s notorious obstruction and secrecy — it took a full year to get this joint Chinese-international team on the ground for the brief visit — has given new life to suspicions that the virus escaped from the institute’s lab. The WHO delegation was allowed only three hours in the laboratories of the institute. And “While they were there they didn’t demand access to the records and samples and key personnel”, once again because of the ground rules China set with the WHO.

“I think the administration has made it pretty clear that, given the lack of Chinese transparency, it is not comfortable eliminating the lab escape theory,” said Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, in an article inNature. The report disclosed what the Chinese had never revealed, that a Wuhan Center for Disease Control lab, a branch of the institute, moved to a new location on December 2, 2019, just before the outbreak. The Chinese assurance that the lab “reported no disruptions or incidents caused by the move” went unchallenged in the WHO document.

contradictions

“The only evidence that people have for a lab leak is that there is a lab in Wuhan,” says Peter Daszak, the sole U.S. representative (Britain born) on the team and president of a non-profit research organization in New York City. He has long collaborated with the
The Wuhan Institute of Virology

Wuhan institute and in interviews endorsed what he had been told. Scientists at the institute told the investigators that no one in the lab had antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, which they say ruled out someone there being infected and spreading the virus to others. Moreover, the lab kept no live virus strains similar to SARS-CoV-2, Wuhan researchers told the team. “There is no record of viruses closely related to [the coronavirus] in any laboratory before December 2019, or genomes that in combination could provide a SARS-CoV-2 genome”, says the report, taking the Wuhan assertions on faith.

That doesn’t square with a U.S. State Department fact sheet from mid-January that reported that lab researchers were sick with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. As for no SARS-CoV-2 in the lab, Matt Pottinger, Deputy National Security Adviser under Trump, said, “There was a direct order from Beijing to destroy all viral samples and they didn’t volunteer to share the genetic sequences”. Jamie Metzl points to the lab’s own reports that it had sent researchers to the bat caves who brought back samples which contained nine viruses, one of them the most closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

Bill Gertz of The Washington Times says that virologists at the Wuhan facility…

“have been conducting massive amounts of virus research. The Wuhan CDC announced last year that they had found 2,000 new viruses. They are obsessed with studying viruses.”

Mr. Daszak is very trusting. In the Nature article, he is quoted saying, “We were allowed to ask whatever questions we wanted, and we got answers”. Asked by “60 Minutes”‘ Leslie Stahl about his interchange with the Chinese, he said,

“We met them and we said, do you audit the lab?, and they said ‘Annually’. Did you audit it after the outbreak? ‘Yes’. Was anything found? ‘No’. Do you test your staff? ‘Yes’.”

Stahl broke in to say, “But you’re just taking their word for it!” to which Daszak replied, ” Well, what else can we do?…We asked them tough questions…and the answers they gave, we found them to be believable and correct and convincing.”

Stahl: “Were there Chinese government minders in the room every time you were asking questions?”

Daszak: “There were Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff in the room throughout our stay. Absolutely. They were there to make sure everything went smoothly from the China side.” A former national security official told “60 Minutes” that the WHO report “has all the credibility of a North Korean evening news broadcast”.

animal farms

The bat caves are over a thousand miles from Wuhan, too distant for them to have directly transported the virus, so how did the bat virus find its way to Wuhan? Daszak’s theory is that a variety of virus-carrying animals are trucked from farms in southern China to the wet markets. In an NPR (National Public Radio) interview Daszak says, “They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity”. If Daszak’s theory is correct, why were there no outbreaks on the farms?

China first ascribed the virus vector to pangolins, a scaled, ant- and termite-eating animal. Then it was civets, sometimes called a type of cat, ultimately bats. Chinese officials said the markets didn’t sell live mammals or illegal wildlife, the report adds, but it cites media reports that it did, as well as photos from 2014 that show animals such as live raccoon dogs in the market. December 2019 records list poultry, badgers, rabbits, giant salamanders, two kinds of crocodile, and more.

The report concluded the Wuhan wet markets were not necessarily the source of the virus, as was believed at first, but may have only been a crowded site for an early outbreak. The earliest case from December 8, 2019, had no link to the markets.

After promoting wildlife farming such that it became a $70 billion a year industry employing 14 million people, a year ago February, just as the Wuhan outbreak receded, the government did a full about-face and abruptly shut down the farms, Daszak reported.

But the WHO report says that in thousands of samples taken there isn’t even evidence that SARS-CoV-2 came from an animal, yet they insist it did not leak from a lab.

a deadlier pandemic?

Exactly a year ago, we published an article titled, “Fox News Says Forget Wet Markets. The Virus Came from Wuhan’s Bio-Lab”. It was Tucker Carlson who featured this theory. Carlson is most often a propagandist fabricating conspiracies, but here and there he comes up with compelling reporting, albeit slanted his way (as do the left-tilted cable shows).

Carlson reported that some had said the Wuhan facility does not operate at level-4. An article in Nature from 2017 said, “Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping”. The U. S. State Department cables a year later voiced the same concern, citing dangerous safety practices at Wuhan.

A guest who follows infectious diseases named Steven Mosher wondered whether the Wuhan lab had been working on the virus with “gain of function” technology whereby one makes an existing virus more infectious. Why do that? Ostensibly, to develop a vaccine or some other antidote to defeat it. Unsaid was the intimation that one’s own population would then be protected, leaving other countries vulnerable. Mosher’s claim is that the laboratory director, Chaoyang Li, “has been using gain of function research for years to create new more deadly coronaviruses”.

That same question arose again after the WHO report was published. Daszak had transferred part of U.S. grant money to the Wuhan lab for “gain of function” research. It was meant, he said, to develop prevention for the next pandemic, unbeknownst to him then that the corornavirus pandemic was about to happen. In the “60 Minutes” interview, Pottinger said they were doing research specifically on coronaviruses that attach to the Ace2 receptors in human lungs, just like the virus causing Covid-19. And he said there is research conducted at the Wuhan virology institute in collaboration with the People’s Liberation Army, a relationship which is not acknowledged by the Chinese government. The Wuhan institute also denies engagement with the PLA. U.S. intelligence discerns that China has a massive biological weapons program even tailored to ethnic groups.

Leslie Stahl said, “The Wuhan lab director published studies about manipulating bat corona viruses in a way that could make them more infectious to humans, and there were reports of lax safety standards at the lab”.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has stated flatly, “This [virus] could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated”.

Dr. Robert Redfield, the last director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Trump, has a sharply different view out of step with the rest of his profession. He said on CNN:

“I think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped. Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out. It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker.”

not even from china

WHO’s 120-page report devotes only two pages to the lab escape stating that it is “extremely unlikely that the virus emerged from the lab” and the organization does not recommend additional research on the lab leak hypothesis. The organization does recommend further study of whether the virus was brought to Wuhan in frozen foods — from America of course, a shameless ploy by China to remove blame from their country and make the U.S. the villain. The report even ranks introduction through the “cold chain” as a “possible pathway” of greater probability than a lab incident. China also proposes that the virus was introduced in the October 2019 Military World Games held in Wuhan — brought by the U.S. delegation, who else? “When will the WHO experts be invited to the United States for a visit on origin-tracing?”, asks Zhao Lijian, a persistently belligerent Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman.

Apr 13 2021 | Posted in World | Read More »

The Race to Vaccinate Runs Up Against States’ Rush to Open

It’s a race between foolishness and time, between states lifting virus restrictions without waiting for vaccinations to make lifting safe, pitted against Biden pleading forbearance because there’ll be enough vaccine for every adult by the end of May. It’s the unending war between left and right. Even a pandemic is political.

Governors and local officials, mostly of red states, are ending the one mandate that health officials and common sense tells us is the most effective practice, the one safeguard that permits near full restoration of the economy and the return of kids to school: the wearing of masks.

That opens an ominous gap, with health experts fretting that we are heading into a fourth surge. That’s what has the new chief of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Rochelle Walensky, expressing “the recurring feeling I have of impending doom”. She pleads that we “just please hold on a little while longer” because “we have so much promise and potential, but right now I’m scared”.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who led the Food and Drug Administration during Trump’s first two years, doesn’t expect a “true” fourth wave of Covid-19 but thinks the country should wait a few weeks longer before easing mitigation efforts.

After a steady decline in cases, the U.S. is now topping 60,000 new cases a day and over a thousand deaths. We just hit an astounding four million vaccinations in a single day after averaging 3.1 million daily for a week, but we are coming up against some 40% of Republicans who say they will refuse vaccination, preferring either to let others attain herd immunity for them rather than they doing their part, or preferring to let Covid-19 live on.

So Michigan, a state with an abundance of militias who eschew mask wearing and prefer kidnapping their governor in protest over lockdowns, is confronting the country’s biggest Covid surge. The positivity rate just hit 12% with over 7,000 new cases a day. State officials have identified five variants of the coronavirus in Michigan, including the first instance in this country of the Brazilian P.1 mutation, with the B.1.1.7 variant first found in the United Kingdom causing the most illness.

A fourth surge over the next couple of months could allow the several foreign variants to take hold — a race between vaccines and variants — possibly giving the virus an opening to develop further mutations that could render current vaccines ineffective.

And yet governors are opening wide. Across the lake from Michigan, Governor Tony Evers is responsible for public health, but Wisconsin’s supreme court just struck down his mask mandate saying he had exceeded his authority.

Massachusetts ended restaurant capacity limits. South Carolina ended its limits on mass gatherings. Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared the state entirely open with Mississippi following suit, prompting President Biden to call it “Neanderthal thinking…everything’s fine, take off your mask and forget it”.


No distance, no masks at Miami street party over spring break

With Florida and Texas fully lifting restrictions at the beginning of March, the young poured in for spring break revelry, heedless of caution. Showing remarkable irresponsibility, The Wall Sreet Journal ran an op-ed titled “Come Back to Florida for Spring Break”. Aside from it being a blatant commercial, the writer straightway shows his politics over health, referring to “Covid panic” and saying the media depicts college students as “marauding fools” — which they indeed turned out to be, packing the streets, dancing on top of cars, causing Miami to declare a state of emergency and an 8:00 P.M. curfew, and provoking over a thousand arrests, a third of them felonies.

this land of liberty

The other element perpetuating Covid-19 is those across the land who refuse to wear a mask because they think that testifies to their masculinity, even though the foe is an invisible and infinitesimal wisp measuring a thousandth the width of a human hair. They insist on their “liberty” — constitutional liberty, of course — the “freedom” to do as they please. Their immorality is striking. They risk getting ill and falling upon the hospitals across the land where we worry about those doctors and nurses, emotionally wrung out, suffering from daily seeing people dying, emotionally distraught over helplessness in stopping this contagion, even suffering from feelings of guilt in the belief that they have failed, and 3,600 of them dead from caring for us.

We worry that they will decide they have had enough and finally quit to preserve what’s left of their sanity. For those proud imbeciles who intend to shun responsible measures such as mask-wearing and vaccination, who will themselves then add to the burden of an exhausted health system, exposing health care professionals to the sickness they bring, for them can’t there be a special place in Hell reserved?

setting the example

Of course, foolhardy exposure to the coronavirus is nothing new. There were the examples all last year of President Trump drawing unmasked crowds to rallies across the country. After his own illness from the virus, he went on a blitz of superspreader events leading up to the election — 15 in September alone — with few in the audience wearing face coverings. In August, he celebrated his re-nomination before a closely-seated, mask-free assemblage at night on the South Lawn of the White House (a flagrant violation of the Hatch Act with no consequences, by the way). In September, he held a gathering in the White House Rose Garden to announce judge Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination, with guests packed tightly in folding chairs and again nary a mask in sight. For one’s loyalty to Trump to be noticed, one needed to do as Trump did, when he decided about masks, “I don’t see it for myself, I just don’t”. That recklessness was documented in our, “Has Trump Created a Death Cult?” last fall.

The Journal made excuses for Trump’s contracting the virus after his refusing to wear a mask. It “really isn’t all that surprising” said an editorial in October, “He’s running a government and running for re-election [which] requires by necessity contact with numerous people, and it’s simply not realistic to think he can do his job and not come into contact with infected individuals”. Then however did always-masked Joe Biden make it to the White House and is now doing that job without contracting Covid-19?

infighting

The virus is Fauci’s fault. Just ask Peter Navarro, Trump’s adviser on trade with China. On Fox News, a clip had just aired in which Dr. Anthony Fauci says that in January a year ago he made what he boasts was his best decision, to proceed full-speed with a vaccine. Navarro launched a tirade:.

” Fauci is a sociopath and a liar. He had nothing to do with the vaccine. The father of the vaccine is Donald J. Trump….Fauci is the father of the actual virus. This virus…came from the Wuhan lab and basically we had Fauci not only funding that lab with American taxpayer dollars,…He allowed the Chinese Communist Party, the Peoples’ Liberation Army, to genetically engineer a virus using gain of function. I call it the Fauci virus now….he’s the father of the virus that’s killed over a half a million Americans”.

The Fox News host agreed that “there are a lot of questions out there”. The failure to challenge fit the Fox News lesson plan. Laura Ingraham, host at the 10 o’clock hour, sneered at “mask-mania” and said “there is zero hard evidence of benefit” from mask-wearing, which told her audience to risk a ghastly death until hard evidence showed up some day. When the new variants appeared, there was the suggestion that we wear two masks. That got a laugh out of Fox’s Martha MacCallum who suggested why not wear ten? Prominent Fox News hosts such as Ainsley Earhardt and Jeanine Pirro were mocked on social media for wearing masks. “Take off the masks,” read one insult. “You are way too smart for that!!!”. Other hosts have guests like Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, who said that every American adhering to a mask mandate “has been turned into a walking billboard of fear.” Fox News host Tomi Lahren labeled an Instagram video #BURNTHEMASKS, calls them “face diapers”, government mandates “tyranny”, and said Biden “might as well carry a purse with that mask”. Choosing these quotes is “cherry-picking”, says Fox.

il suo passaporto, per favore

Surely, anyone who has been vaccinated wants a document to prove it, tantalized by dreams of traveling again. Not to be believed, but that’s given rise to the latest Big Brother conspiracy on the right. Immediately labeled “vaccine passports”, they will produce a caste system, is the argument, with those who choose not to be vaccinated — 40% of Republicans say they will be holdouts — becoming a second class.

The Miami Heat basketball franchise has created special sections for sports fans who are fully vaccinated and there are assumption that movie chains, restaurants, and companies like Disney will do the same, the revival of their businesses depending on getting rid of social distancing. But Majorie Taylor Greene, unsure which is which, says, “It’s still fascism. Or communism…corporate communism”. It’s corporations saying we will need “the mark of the beast” to gain admission. David Frum at the Atlantic, a former speechwriter for and special assistant to George W. Bush, let’s remember, counters with, “A sizable minority of Americans want to use airplanes belonging to others, theme parks belonging to others, sports stadiums belonging to others—without concession to the health of others or the property rights of owners.” Exercise of property rights is now communism.

Glenn Greenwald, once of the left — he was sought out by Edward Snowden as the one most reliable to expose the National Security Agency’s spying on Americans, but now shifted well to the right — appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to protest that “Coercing citizens to put a substance into their body that they don’t want” is “a pretty grave invasion of bodily autonomy”, siding with the anti-vaxxers who have, after decades of successful vaccination of kids against rubella-mumps-chickenpox, decided public health measures are Orwellian and science is the enemy.

Vaccinations are nothing new. To visit certain countries we have to get vaccinated against certain diseases such as dengue fever. We are vaccinated annually against flu, occasionally to prevent pneumonia, tetanus, shingles. All are voluntary. So are shots to fend off Covid. The holdouts want others to attain herd immunity for them without their help. So they get to watch the Miami Heat from the distanced sections.

And if failure to vaccinate prevents them from travelling abroad, they can’t blame our government. Other countries don’t want them. Japan, Denmark, China have already introduced vaccine passports. Greenwald thinks that…

“Gathering a new database that can track people in terms of their health…can easily be expanded as government programs often do into a whole variety of other uses…They always promise that it’s going to be temporary that it’s only going to be for a specific problem.

. Glenn, all they are gathering is that we’ve been vaccinated. Yet he compares it to the Patriot Act against terrorism, which we never think to eliminate any more.

“It’s a political winner,” says Ford O’Connell, a Florida-based Republican strategist, “an all-out assault on personal freedoms and the Constitution”. Republicans think this will play big for recapturing control of Congress in 2022.

How many more ways will America decide to become unhinged?

Apr 10 2021 | Posted in Healthcare | Read More »