Thursday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

Good morning Deplorables.

The American Media Has Betrayed America

Via American Greatness

For America’s establishment elites, the Chinese coronavirus pandemic is a golden opportunity.

The media’s capital crime, however, is their coverage of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. And if the national media establishment had not already demonstrated repeatedly that they are nothing more than a political action committee attached to the Democratic Party, more people would be fooled.

But as it is, the timing of the virus, the response to the virus, and the reporting on the virus: all of it is suspect. The repercussions of media malpractice are more deaths, destruction of the constitution, and quite possibly an economic depression.

This is not overstating the case. Imagine if the media covered this crisis with honesty. Sure, in the early stages, nobody knew what to make of it. But why were the only voices accorded credibility by the media those who called for a lockdown? Why were virologists and epidemiologists ignored if they suggested that maybe we should quarantine the sick and the at-risk, and allow healthy Americans to acquire herd immunity? Look to Sweden’s experience. That approach is working there.

Worse, why has the media ignored every report or study or journal article or clinical abstract that finds treatment with hydroxychloroquine, zinc sulfate, and azithromycin to be effective? Why have they persistently spread the lie that a seven-day course of hydroxychloroquine is dangerous, when millions of people have used it safely for years on end to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis? Why don’t we ever hear about doctors around the world who are successfully using this treatment to prevent COVID-19 in exposed patients and to cure it in patients who’ve tested positive? Why?

Who is pulling the strings of mainstream media in the United States? Why is the media circus focused on vaccines that may be available sometime next year, and probably will only be partially effective, without offering the slightest concern that vaccines may already be over-prescribed? Everybody knows vaccines are an important tool for maintaining public health, but why has the media painted the issue black and white? Maybe getting as many as 90 vaccines before the age of 18 is too many. Maybe vaccines should be used more judiciously. Maybe people don’t want to be forced into getting a vaccine in order to have an “immunity passport.”

The horrifying constitutional implications of where we’re headed as a nation during this dress rehearsal for martial law are not of interest to the media.

Along with the nauseating, infantile, feel-good, “we’re all in this together” corporate commercials that have rolled out in between the useless television newscasts, the only news coverage available paints people who object to the lockdown as, that’s right, Trump supporters. Or white nationalists. Or “conspiracy theorists.”

Read the entire article HERE.

The Slippery Slope to Despotism: Paved with Lockdowns, Raids and Forced Vaccinations

By John W. Whitehead

“You have no right not to be vaccinated, you have no right not to wear a mask, you have no right to open up your business… And if you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor’s office and plunge a needle into your arm.”—Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor

You have no rights.

That’s the lesson the government wants us to learn from this COVID-19 business.

Well, the government is wrong.

For years now, the powers-that-be—those politicians and bureaucrats who think like tyrants and act like petty dictators regardless of what party they belong to—have attempted to brainwash us into believing that we have no right to think for ourselves, make decisions about our health, protect our homes and families and businesses, act in our best interests, demand accountability and transparency from government, or generally operate as if we are in control of our own lives.

We have every right, and you know why? Because we were born free.

As the Declaration of Independence states, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights—to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness—that no government can take away from us.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped the government from constantly trying to usurp our freedoms at every turn. Indeed, the nature of government is such that it invariably oversteps its limits, abuses its authority, and flexes its totalitarian muscles.

Take this COVID-19 crisis, for example.

What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including our own) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents.

Until now, the police state has been more circumspect in its power grabs, but this latest state of emergency has brought the beast out of the shadows.

We are on a slippery slope to outright despotism.

This road we are traveling is paved with lockdowns, SWAT team raids, mass surveillance and forced vaccinations. It is littered with the debris of our First and Fourth Amendment freedoms.

This is what we have to look forward to in the months and years to come unless we can find some way to regain control over our runaway government.

The government has made no secret of its plans.

Just follow the money trail, and you’ll get a sense of what’s in store: more militarized police, more SWAT team raids, more surveillance, more lockdowns, more strong-armed tactics aimed at suppressing dissent and forcing us to comply with the government’s dictates.

It’s chilling to think about, but it’s not surprising.

We’ve been warned.

Remember that Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command? The one that anticipates the future domestic political and social problems the government is grooming its armed forces to solve through the use of martial law?

The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints a dystopian picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

But here’s the kicker: what they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

This COVID-19 crisis is pushing us that much closer to that dystopian vision becoming a present-day reality.

For starters, let’s talk about the COVID-19 stormtroopers, SWAT team raids and ongoing flare-ups of police brutality.

Read the entire article HERE.

Obama’s Man in China Now Beijing’s Man in Washington

Via The Washington Free Beacon

Former ambassador Baucus appears regularly on Chinese propaganda outlets

As the novel coronavirus wreaks havoc across the world, the Obama administration’s ambassador to China has found a second lease on life as a pro-China talking head on regime propaganda outlets.

Former ambassador Max Baucus has given at least four different interviews to Chinese propaganda outlets in the last two weeks, repeatedly comparing the U.S. rhetoric about China to both the McCarthy era and Nazi Germany.

“Joe McCarthy [and] Adolf Hitler … rallied people up, making people believe things that were really not true,” Baucus said during a May 12 interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN), a regime mouthpiece. “The White House and some in Congress are making statements against China that are so over the top and so hypercritical, they are based not on the fact, or if they are based on fact, sheer demagoguery, and that’s what McCarthy did in the 1950s.”

Since his retirement in 2017, Baucus has been a reliable critic of the Trump administration’s increasingly confrontational China policy—chiefly the decision to wage a trade war with Beijing. He once warned that the White House’s decision to impose additional tariffs was a “slap on the face” to China. But Baucus’s recent comments in the pandemic era have been more sympathetic to China—and critical of the United States—than ever before.

His post-retirement public statements praising China have coincided with his burgeoning overseas investments. In 2017, he founded the Baucus Group, a consulting firm that advises both American and Chinese businesses, according to his U.S. Chamber of Commerce biography. He also sits on the board of directors for Ingram Micro, a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, as well as the board of advisers for Alibaba Group, one of China’s largest tech companies.

Walter Lohman, director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, said that it was “inappropriate” for a former ambassador to speak ill about his own government on a foreign propaganda outlet.

“It’s like going to China and … talking about your own government that way in meetings. I think that would be pretty inappropriate,” Lohman said. “So it would be inappropriate speaking on state media.”

Baucus’s public statements have received considerable attention from Beijing’s propaganda outlets. When the former ambassador compared President Donald Trump’s criticism of China to rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler and Joe McCarthy during a May 6 interview with CNN, Chinese propaganda outlets quickly amplified Baucus’s comments about how Trump was “a little bit like Hitler in the ’30s” and that Americans were worried about “getting their heads chopped off” if they voice their disagreement with the U.S. government’s China policy. Xinhua News Agency, a state-owned outlet, extensively cited Baucus’s attacks in a May 8 article, using it as evidence that the Trump administration is attempting to “deflect criticisms about their blunders by blaming China.” The article was syndicated in party-controlled mouthpieces such as Global Times and People’s Daily, according to the Investigative Research Center.

Read the entire article HERE.

Liberal Group Tracked Cell Phones of Anti-Lockdown Protesters in 5 States

Via PJ Media

A liberal health care advocacy group tracked the cell phones of protesters at anti-lockdown demonstrations in 5 states, according to a story in the New York Post.

The Committee to Protect Medicare used data collected from from opt-in cellphone apps and data scientists at the firm VoteMap. The company specializes in mobile phone political advertising, mostly for left wing candidates. Votemap used that data to track the movements of protesters in April and May in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Colorado and Florida.

They created visualizations that tracked the movements up to 48 hours after the protests ended, and Jeremy Fair, executive vice president of VoteMap, told the newspaper that many of the cellphones reached the state borders and some even crossed them.

Following rallies opposing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s lockdown orders in Lansing, Mich., on April 30, the devices fanned out to all parts of the state — from Detroit to towns in the northern part of the state.

Some crossed into Indiana.

The information was anonymous so the Committee to Protect Medicare wasn’t tracking specific, named individuals. But it appears the liberal group cared more about the politics of the protests than they did about trying to “protect Medicare.”

The Guardian:

In the 48 hours following a 19 April “Operation Gridlock” protest in Denver, devices reached the borders of neighboring states including Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Utah.

In Florida on 18 April, devices returned to all parts of the peninsula and up to the Georgia border. In Wisconsin on 24 April, devices returned to smaller towns like Green Bay and Wausau, and the borders of Minnesota and Illinois.

Dr. Rob Davidson, executive director of the Committee to Protect Medicare, said, “it’s hard to draw a straight line between devices, individuals at these protests, and cases.” In fact, it’s impossible to reliably connect the dots. But Davidson, who once ran for Congress as a Democrat, says, “The behavior we’re seeing at protests carries a high risk of infection. We can see protesters are going from a highly concentrated event and then dispersing widely.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Andrew Cuomo is no hero. He’s to blame for New York’s coronavirus catastrophe

Via The Guardian

Andrew Cuomo may be the most popular politician in the country. His approval ratings have hit all-time highs thanks to his Covid-19 response. Some Democrats have discussed him as a possible replacement for Joe Biden, due to Biden’s perceived weakness as a nominee. And there have even been some unfortunate tributes to Cuomo’s alleged sex appeal.

All of which is bizarre, because Cuomo should be one of the most loathed officials in America right now. ProPublica recently released a report outlining catastrophic missteps by Cuomo and the New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, which probably resulted in many thousands of needless coronavirus cases. ProPublica offers some appalling numbers contrasting what happened in New York with the outbreak in California. By mid-May, New York City alone had almost 20,000 deaths, while in San Francisco there had been only 35, and New York state as a whole suffered 10 times as many deaths as California.

Federal failures played a role, of course, but this tragedy was absolutely due, in part, to decisions by the governor. Cuomo initially “reacted to De Blasio’s idea for closing down New York City with derision”, saying it “was dangerous” and “served only to scare people”. He said the “seasonal flu was a graver worry”. A spokesperson for Cuomo “refused to say if the governor had ever read the state’s pandemic plan”. Later, Cuomo would blame the press, including the New York Times for failing to say “Be careful, there’s a virus in China that may be in the United States?” even though the Times wrote nearly 500 stories on the virus before the state acted. Experts told ProPublica that “had New York imposed its extreme social distancing measures a week or two earlier, the death toll might have been cut by half or more”.

But delay was not the only screw-up. Elderly prisoners have died of coronavirus because New York has failed to act on their medical parole requests. As Business Insider documented:

“Testing was slow. Nonprofit social-service agencies that serve the most vulnerable couldn’t get answers either. And medical experts like the former CDC director Tom Frieden said ‘so many deaths could have been prevented’ had New York issued its stay-at-home order just ‘days earlier’ than it did. On March 19, when New York’s schools had already been closed, Cuomo said ‘in many ways, the fear is more dangerous than the virus.’”

The governor has failed to take responsibility for the obvious failures, consistently blaming others and at one point even saying “governors don’t do pandemics”. (Actually, some governors just don’t read their state’s pandemic plans.) But much of the press has ignored this, focusing instead on Cuomo’s aesthetic presentation: his poise during press conferences, his dramatic statements about “taking responsibility” (even when he obviously hasn’t), and his invisible good looks.

Read the entire article HERE.

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