A former congressional campaign volunteer who was recorded on hidden camera saying she could deliver thousands of votes for tens of thousands of dollars, had a series of gift bags that were similar to the one she was recorded giving to an elderly woman, arrest warrants stated.
Raquel Rodriguez (left) faces charges of election fraud, illegal voting, unlawfully assisting people voting by mail, and unlawfully possessing an official ballot, according to a press release from AG Ken Paxton’s office. (Kendall County).
The warrants say that in exchange for $500, Raquel Rodriguez agreed to show a person that posed as a potential client how she could get votes for the candidates of her choice, reported San Antonio Express-News.
She was recorded in October last year by journalists working undercover for Project Veritas.
In the video, Rodriguez visits an elderly woman and appears to assist her in changing her mail ballot from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) to Democrat challenger MJ Hegar.
Rodriguez then gave the 72-year old lady a gift bag that had a shawl. The warrant says the same type of gift bags were found at Rodriguez’s home office.
On Oct. 29, the Texas Attorney General’s office started investigating the Bexar County Elections Office.
ORLANDO, FLORIDA – FEBRUARY 26: James O’Keefe, President, Project Veritas, addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference being held in the Hyatt Regency on February 26, 2021 in Orlando, Florida. Begun in 1974, CPAC brings together conservative organizations, activists, and world leaders to discuss issues important to them. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Rodriguez said in a live stream on the show “Carpenters Apprentice” in October last year that she was just playing along with the undercover reporter.
“I don’t care again what party you are on, I’m non-partisan,” Rodriguez said. “I feel horrible about that because reality is, I lied. I lied about a lot of stuff. Just to make sure I was enticing them enough to find out what the bottom of this was. They asked for a proposal, I gave them a proposal.”
“99 percent was bs to make a sale,” Rodriguez added. “I expect people to believe me now. I’m here telling you my story, I have nothing to hide at this point.”
“It was just conversation, like the bs-ing,” Rodriguez told News4SA. “They were pulling me and I was pulling their strings that’s how I saw it. Little did I know what they were doing but I knew something was wrong and I just went with it.”
In the Project Veritas video, she also indicated she has experience in manipulating votes and boasted about her influence with elected officials in Texas who owe her “favors.”
“First, everybody who knows me directly, they know what I do for the community, they know what I do for people, but I’m not like a monster like they make me out to be,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez was charged with four felonies: election fraud, illegal voting, unlawfully possessing an official ballot, and unlawfully assisting people voting by mail—a practice known as ballot harvesting, the collection and submission mail-in ballots by a third-party rather than direct submission by the voters themselves.
She said in the video she was a “consultant” for GOP congressional candidate Mauro Garza, but was seen in one clip attempting to persuade a voter to cast a straight Democrat ballot.
“This is what you call flipping people!” she was recorded as saying, also noting that she “could go to jail” for what she did.
When Veritas founder James O’Keefe confronted the woman in public with some of the recordings, she said she didn’t want to talk and that she didn’t break any law.
Much of the mainstream media has portrayed the medicalization of gender, some of which has been federally funded, as “life-saving” healthcare for children and teens suffering from gender dysphoria.
This comes amid increased public opposition to allowing boys who identify as transgender to compete in girls’ athletic competitions and the heightened scrutiny of the experimental use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on youth that is sometimes followed by genital mutilation and elective double mastectomies being performed on teens and pre-teens.
Late last year, a U.K. high court ruled that children younger than 16 are incapable of giving informed consent to taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
In an email to The Christian Post Jennifer Bilek, an independent investigative journalist who writes at the 11th Hour Blog and has for several years been tracing the money streams and extensive infrastructure driving transgenderism into law and culture, said that some mass media corporations are tethered to pharmaceutical and medical corporations that are key players in a much larger revenue-generating operation.
“Media conglomerates controlling mainstream media on the political left interface with Big Pharma and have vested interests in lifetime medical patients. The gender identity industry, generating pre-pubescent children to grave clients, provide those patients,” Bilek told CP.
“Desisters, a growing population [of people choosing to re-identify as their birth sex], offer yet more profiteering opportunities for the medical-industrial complex, once young women — the larger market by current standards — have ruined their health with puberty blockers and wrong sex hormones,” she added.
Fox News, which is known for its conservative-leaning tilt, is the mainstream broadcast news outlet that has done the bulk of critical reporting scrutinizing gender identity issues, Bilek said. In contrast to other media company owners, Murdoch doesn’t own a health platform, thus “shoring up the perception that Big Pharma connections dictate what will air and what won’t [on other outlets],” she added.
Here are four examples of how the mainstream media has promoted puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as beneficial to young people despite a growing number of dissenting voices, including Harry Potter series author J.K. Rowling, who, when speaking of transgenderism, now refer to it in terms of an emerging medical scandal.
1. Washington Post article claims puberty blockers are reversible
In June 2018, a Washington Post headline read: “When kids come in saying they are transgender (or no gender), these doctors try to help.”
The national newspaper, which never defined what it means to identify as having “no gender,” reported at the time that endocrinologists assured that experimental puberty blockers were not harmful, had no lasting effects, and were merely used to “buy teenagers some precious time” to allow them to delay a final decision as to whether to proceed with elective surgeries, such as a double mastectomy or other related procedures sought by people who want to look more like the opposite sex.
According to the Post, if children ” … change their minds and become what are called ‘desisters’ — kids who return to their assigned gender at birth — no harm done; their puberty has simply been delayed a year or two. The effects are largely reversible.”
“We recognized that there’s no biological logic to a cutoff of 16,” said Joshua Safer, an endocrinologist at Boston University School of Medicine, who helped revise international guidelines on the subject, said in an interview with the Post at the time.
“There are kids with a clear gender identity out there and there is no reason to make them wait for some legal line when we can already be helping them with their biological reality,” he said.
The paper reported that the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at the University of California San Francisco, has been seeing youth who are seeking “some kind of boutique treatment” such as “just a touch of testosterone” for those who claim a “nonbinary” or “androgynous” identity.
A recent study in the United Kingdom that followed a cohort of youth who were given puberty-blocking drugs found that the use of such blockers in children stunts their bone growth. The hormone suppressants delay the necessary mineral acquisition like calcium, which decreases bone density at a critical stage of development, putting children at risk for diseases like osteoporosis.
While the Post acknowledged this particular risk to the human skeletal system, it did so tepidly, quoting Stephen Rosenthal, the director of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at USCF, who spoke of staying on blockers for too long as a “theoretical harm if you put puberty on hold a long time.”
The Post added that the San Francisco gender clinic staff believe it will one day be possible for males to give birth, reporting that they “anticipate a future in which trans women will be able carry their own babies to term, thanks to medical breakthroughs such as uterine transplantation.”
As the experimental practices of prescribing puberty blockers have come under considerable scrutiny in England, the nation’s National Health Service updated its website last year, which used to claim that their effects were “fully reversible.” The NHS site now states that the long-term effects of puberty blockers remain unknown.
In the United States, hormone blockers like Lupron — a drug often used to treat prostate cancer in men and endometriosis in women — have been FDA-approved for precocious puberty, a condition where children start puberty very early before normal puberty should begin, in order to delay it until an appropriate age.
Such blockers have not been formally approved for gender dysphoria and are prescribed off-label in the dozens of transgender clinics being opened across the country. Lupron has also been used to treat sex offenders.
Accusations of hypocrisy are perhaps the most reliable feature of any political battle. On a routine basis, both political parties will point to the hypocritical statements or actions of their opponents, while presenting themselves as the consistent and ideologically pure alternative.
One such example was demonstrated by the Berkeley Teachers Union president Matt Meyer, after “video surfaced of him taking his two-year-old daughter to an in-person preschool,” despite advocating for a “gold standard” which demands that Berkeley schools remain closed “until all educators and district staff members have been vaccinated and schools agree to enforce social distancing and mask wearing.”
In this example, and countless others, the accusations of hypocrisy are entirely accurate. Meyer advocated for one rule for “us,” and another for “them.” We’ve seen this happen during COVID-19 lockdowns, whether it be politicians ignoring mandates in order to receive hair treatments or dine indoors, and it almost always comes hand-in-hand with an open abuse of power. In simple terms, the powerful see themselves as inherently exempt from the rules they set for the rest of us.
While much of the debate around political hypocrisy descends into one of two camps — either condemning the blatant abuse of power or debating whether such accusations are examples of “whataboutism” — many continue to miss the broader and more dangerous impact of hypocrisy.
This is the impact repeated hypocrisy has on the psyche of society when it comes to policy. In the case of Meyer, his “gold standard” demands are demonstrably absurd — a position supported by “the science.” His hypocritical dismissal is then taken by critics as proof — using a circular argument — that his policy suggestions are absurd. “See? I told you these lockdowns are stupid, the politicians aren’t even following their own rules!”
Now, while Meyer’s policy suggestion is ineffective, his hypocrisy is unrelated to any logical argument which reaches this conclusion. And this is where the danger lies.
Unfortunately, we have become all too used to politicians ignoring the rules they enforce or demand. During the era of COVID-19, accusations of hypocrisy are plentiful and — usually — accurate. However, such frequent hypocrisy has cemented the viewpoint that hypocrisy alone is evidence of bad policy — an illogical and dangerous conclusion.
As an extreme example, what if a mayor or governor imposed strict punishments for driving on the wrong side of the road, and then proceeded to be caught driving on the wrong side of the road? Yes, the politician is a hypocrite, but this certainly doesn’t reduce the importance of road safety. However, by the currently growing field of logic, evidence of hypocrisy could be interpreted as evidence of bad policy.
In other words, with this mentality and an abundant supply of hypocritical politicians, eventually we’ll find ourselves ignoring rules that actually matter.
We all know and understand that hypocritical politicians undermine their own positions when they act hypocritically. What they need to understand is that they are playing a dangerous game that goes well beyond the usual abuse of power and influence. If we become used to judging the efficacy and importance of policies based on whether or not politicians follow them, what happens when a policy is necessary, and politicians do what they do best?
Unless politicians understand that their hypocrisy has consequences far beyond the immediate, they will be to blame for the damage that will inevitably ensue.
Citing privacy concerns, Google says it won’t use technologies that track individuals across multiple websites.
Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry.
The Alphabet Inc. company said Wednesday that it plans next year to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet.
The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital advertising company, could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators.
Google’s heft means the change could reshape the digital ad business, where many companies rely on tracking individuals to target their ads, measure the ads’ effectiveness and stop fraud. Google accounted for 52% of last year’s global digital ad spending of $292 billion, according to Jounce Media, a digital ad consultancy.
About 40% of the money that flows from advertisers to publishers on the open internet—meaning digital advertising outside of closed systems such as Google Search, YouTube or Facebook—goes through Google’s ad buying tools, according to Jounce.
“If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web,” David Temkin, the Google product manager leading the change, said in a blog post Wednesday.
Google had already announced last year that in 2022 it would remove the most widely used such tracking technology, called third-party cookies. But now the company is saying it won’t build alternative tracking technologies, or use those being developed by other entities, for its own ad buying tools to replace third-party cookies.
Instead, Google says it will use new technologies it has been developing with others in what it calls a “privacy sandbox” to target ads without collecting information about individuals from multiple websites. One such technology analyzes users’ browsing habits on their devices, and allows advertisers to target aggregated groups of users with similar interests, or “cohorts,” rather than individual users. Google said in January that it plans to begin open testing of ad buying using that technology in the second quarter.
Google’s planned change elicited some concerns in the ad world. At the moment, advertisers use the data harvested from people’s browsing across the web to figure out whom to serve ads to, and whether a targeted user went on to buy the advertised product. After Google’s change, advertisers won’t be able to get as detailed a picture of either. Still, other ad industry executives said the change is good for consumers and expressed hope that Google’s new targeting technologies will still help brands achieve their goals in online marketing.
Google’s latest move and the concern about its potential implications underscore tension in the digital ad industry between protecting user privacy and promoting competition. Smaller digital-ad companies that use cross-site tracking have accused Google and Apple Inc. of using privacy as a pretext for changes that hurt competitors.
This week, The New York Times ran a long piece re-reporting a supposed race scandal from Smith College. The scandal, originally reported in midsummer 2018, featured a black student, Oumou Kanoute, who claimed that she was racially profiled while eating in a dormitory lounge. She suggested in a Facebook post that she was confronted by a campus police officer, who might have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” and a janitor, adding: “All I did was be Black. It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”
The janitor was placed on paid leave. The college president issued a campuswide statement explaining, “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”
The incident was reported by establishment media outlets far and wide.
There was only one problem: It was a lie.
A full investigation by an outside law firm found no evidence of bias. Kanoute was eating in a closed dormitory, and the janitor was doing his job. The campus police officer had no weapon.
So, did The Times apologize for its original coverage? Of course not. It turned the story into an investigation of supposed structural biases based on race and class. In one of the more astonishing sentences ever written in a major newspaper, The Times reported, “The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.”
For those who speak English, this sentence translates thusly: The story highlights the tensions between lies and the truth. But for those who speak the wokeabulary, this sentence actually makes equivalence between lies told on behalf of a self-serving victim narrative and factual truth. The two must be balanced against each other, not one dismissed for its patent falsehood.
Congress appears to be passing up an opportunity to address the issue of dark money in politics following past bipartisan attempts.
This comes as tensions appear to be growing on Capitol Hill over sweeping election reform proposed by House Democrats, which is something they said they would do last fall.
“We’re going to have H.R.1 right off the bat,” stated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “This is about cleaner government, so we can reduce the role of big, dark special interest money.”
@SpeakerPelosi has said that House Democrats in the next Congress are going to pass H.R. 1 “right off the bat.” This is great news for our democracy. We have to tackle the voter suppression, gerrymandering and dark money that have corrupted our nation for too long. pic.twitter.com/ajgXCMMqPt
Lawmakers are mostly sparring over provisions that would federalize the election process among other related items.
“The bill would allow the sitting president to effectively appoint a majority at the FEC in his party,” explained David Keating, President of the Institute for Free Speech.
However, the debate is taking attention away from a problem both Democrats and Republicans have previously flagged: dark money.
Part of Democrats’ pitch in favor of election bill H.R.1 notes it shines a light on dark money in politics by enforcing transparency. They said it would boost online political ad disclosure and require organizations to disclose their large donors, but Republicans argue the proposal would push lawmakers to profit off elections.
“Members of Congress are able to funnel campaign contributions into their personal bank accounts by simply hiring their spouses as campaign consultants,” stated Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.). “In fact, one high profile member of the body — this body — exploited this loophole top the tune of $2.8 million in the last election cycle.”
By attaching unrelated items to the legislation, Democrats appear to be killing any chance of bipartisan reform when it comes to election spending. Republican lawmakers and other conservatives said they are doing so at the expense of the First Amendment.
“There’s about half of the bill that would restrict speech about campaigns, would restrict speech about members of Congress, would restrict speech about legislation coming up with in Congress,” Keating explained. “It would also get rid of the internet exception where organizations are allowed to speak to the public using websites like YouTube or social media.”
H.R. 1 allows political campaigns to be funded by federal money, undermines state voter ID laws, and enables ballot harvesting. This is a bad bill, and I oppose it. pic.twitter.com/Nku5ZuphyY
Free speech advocates like Keating have warned that advocacy groups ranging from the Chamber of Commerce to the Sierra Club to pro-gun groups will likely be impacted. It would make their work more difficult. Opponents of H.R.1 are urging Congress against passing the legislation and, instead, consider reworking it to uphold free speech.
Facebook will lift its temporary ban on political advertising in the United States on Thursday, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.
The social media giant has had a months-long freeze on political, electoral and social ads, which it introduced as part of an effort to crack down on misinformation and abuses around the Nov. 3 elections.
Facebook had temporarily lifted its ad pause in Georgia for the state’s January runoff elections but put it back in place.
Alphabet Inc’s Google, which had lifted its own political ad ban in December, later reinstated it following the Jan. 6 siege at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump. Google lifted the ban last week.
Democratic and Republican digital strategists have argued that such bans were overly broad and failed to combat the issue of organic misinformation on the platforms.
Earlier on Wednesday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) issued a statement criticizing Facebook for not committing to a clear date to end the ban, saying the freeze had made it harder for campaigns and organizations to reach voters.
Facebook, which noted in its blog post that its systems do not distinguish between political and electoral ads and “social issue” ads, said it would look in the coming months at what other changes to its ads might be needed.
Parler, a social media app popular among conservatives, filed a new lawsuit accusing Amazon.com Inc of trying to destroy its business following the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump.
The lawsuit seeking a variety of damages, including triple damages for anticompetitive conduct, was filed in Washington state court on Tuesday, two weeks after Parler returned online following a monthlong absence.
Parler went dark when Amazon suspended its web-hosting services following the Capitol attack, saying Parler had failed to effectively moderate violent content on its website.
The new lawsuit came as Parler voluntarily dismissed a federal lawsuit against Amazon over that suspension on Tuesday, the deadline to file an amended complaint.
Parler’s new lawsuit accused Amazon of a slew of contractual violations, and like the original case said Amazon shut it down to benefit a new client, Twitter Inc.
The app said it was worth $1 billion and about to seek funding when Seattle-based Amazon pulled the plug, costing it tens of millions of users and hundreds of millions of dollars of annual ad revenue.
“When companies are this big, it’s easy to be a bully,” Parler said, calling itself “a victim of Amazon’s efforts to destroy an up-and-coming technology company through deceptive, defamatory, anticompetitive, and bad faith conduct.”
An Amazon spokesman said the new claims have no merit, and that it “provides technology and services to customers across the political spectrum.”
Parler has said there was a lack of evidence it helped incite the Capitol riot, but the judge in the federal case on Jan. 21 refused to order Amazon to resume services.
The relaunch effectively mooted Parler’s claim that Amazon put it out of business.
Parler has said its new platform was built on “sustainable, independent technology.”
SkySilk, a Los Angeles-based company, said it was providing private cloud infrastructure.
Google also removed the Parler app from its Play Store and Apple removed it from its App Store.
The Veritas Forum, a nonprofit group that explores truth and life through various disciplines, including religion and science, apologized Monday and canceled a discussion on critical race theory after critics pointed out that one of their featured speakers was not a leading expert on race and Christianity.
Willie James Jennings, an associate professor of systematic theology and Africana studies at Yale Divinity School, and Neil Shenvi, a blogger with a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry, were set to discuss whether a secular worldview like critical race theory can address racism or if Christianity provides a unique response.
The flyer for the canceled Veritas Forum on race and reconciliation. | Facebook/Veritas Forum at the University of Washington
“How does racism manifest itself today? Can a secular worldview provide a grounds for addressing such evils, or does Christianity yield a unique response? Is Critical Theory an epistemically justified and useful tool in the fight against modern injustices?” the promotion for the forum asked. “Leading experts on the topic of race and Christianity Dr. Willie Jennings and Dr. Neil Shenvi will engage in a thought-provoking virtual dialogue at this year’s Veritas Forum.”
The forum, which was sponsored by the University of Washington chapter of Ratio Christi, an apologetics evangelism organization that “builds thoughtful Christians and shares compelling reasons for following Christ at universities,” quickly came under fire from critics, including several academics, for describing Shenvi as a leading expert on the subject matter.
“That’s just flat-out dishonest. @veritasforum, please take that language down. In what world?” Samuel Perry, associate professor in the department of sociology at the University of Oklahoma, whose research areas include religion, culture, families and race, asked in a tweet Monday evening.
“Even if we were to practice the philosophical exercise of hypothesizing what alternate realities ‘could’ exist; in what possible world would Neil be an expert on Race & Christianity @veritasforum? Whatever possible world in which that reality exists, it isn’t in this one,” theologian Kyle J. Howard argued in another tweet.
Several hours later on Monday night, Veritas Forum announced the cancellation of the event, along with a mea culpa in a statement on Twitter.
“We have canceled the Veritas Forum on race and reconciliation that was scheduled to take place on Thursday, March 4,” the group said.
“At Veritas, we value rigor and respect around life’s most important questions, inviting those with opposing worldviews to the table, and expertise as well as honesty and truth. We also value critique, learning, and admitting our mistakes,” they explained. “We failed to live up to our values. We did not pair one scholar with relevant subject-matter expertise with another of equal expertise, and we did not describe their credentials accurately. We also recognize that there are deeper racial dynamics at play, and we lament any pain that we caused. We apologize.”
Shenvi told The Christian Post in an interview Tuesday that while he agrees it “was a mistake” for the forum to promote him as a leading expert on race, he believes the discussion could have continued.
“I’m disappointed. I was looking forward to it, I prepared a bunch, but these things happen. There’s not much I can do,” he said.
“The Veritas Forum did list me as a leading expert on race, which I certainly am not, prof[essor] Jennings certainly is,” he added, while making it clear that there is nothing wrong with a debate between an expert and a non-expert. As long as both parties agree to the debate, he said he did not see it as a problem.
“If they agree to do it, it’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with doing it. The Veritas Forum had other experts of various kinds dialogue with non-experts,” he said.
“If I ended up having bad arguments, I think that would have been exposed in the dialogue. The aim of these dialogues is to get to truth, to hear both sides. Both before and after the event was canceled, people talked to me and expressed disappointment because they wanted to hear that dialogue,” he added.
Jennings did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CP on Tuesday, but The Veritas Forum received mixed reactions for canceling the discussion between the race scholar and Shenvi.
“Well done. Have the debates, but don’t disrespect a world-class black scholar by pairing him with a Blogger who has already demonstrated ineptitude in understanding both sociology & theology, and in late their credentials. Thanks @veritasforum,” wrote Howard on Twitter.
Eric Reed, pastor of the Journey Church in Tennessee, called the cancellation “weak.”
“This is weak. There’s a reason why Veritas Forum invited Neil to participate in the event, but progressive Twitter got angry. If he’s so unqualified, let him get up there and get humiliated by his lack of knowledge … if that’s really the issue. We’re becoming such pansies,” Reed wrote on Twitter.
Critical race theory, as explained by Purdue University, “is a theoretical and interpretive mode that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression.” Through this framework, scholars seek to “understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice.”
The subject matter has been controversial, especially in evangelical circles in recent years. In summer 2019, the Southern Baptist Convention passed Resolution 9, “On Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality,” with much dissent.
It notes in part that while “critical race theory and intersectionality alone are insufficient to diagnose and redress the root causes of the social ills that they identify, which result from sin…these analytical tools can aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences.”
In recent months in the wake of racial protests, Southern Baptists like Texas Pastor Dwight McKissic Sr. have argued there is a growing movement to rescind it.
Christopher Lee Bolt, a pastor-teacher at Elkton Baptist Church in Tennessee and head of theology at Legacy Bible College, said Tuesday that the arguments against Shenvi speaking at the Veritas Forum is evidence of why he believes SBC Resolution 9 should not have been adopted.
“The arguments against Neil Shenvi speaking at something like the Veritas Forum because he is said to lack the proper expertise in the area of Critical Race Theory is the main reason I now believe Resolution 9 should have never come to the floor at the Southern Baptist Convention,” he said.
Shenvi told CP on Tuesday that he had been planning to use respected professor of sociology at Baylor University, George Yancey’s model of mutual accountability for the discussion.
He then quoted the closing line of the opening statement he had planned to deliver at the forum.
“We need to talk to each other rather than yell at each other. We need to call each other brother and sister rather than call each other racist and Marxist. So let’s reject unbiblical approaches to fighting racism and embrace a better one,” he said.
Beijing insists the procedure is more accurate than other methods.
China has decided to require international travelers entering the country to undergo anal swab procedures to test for COVID-19, a method the communist nation insists is more accurate than other on-the-spot mechanisms for detecting the disease.
The Times out of the UK reported Wednesday that China has now made the tests “compulsory,” in a move the newspaper says deepened “a row with other countries over a practice many have described as humiliating.”
What are the details?
According to the New York Post, the Times claims that “as part of the new travel requirement, there will be testing hubs in Beijing and Shanghai airports.” The Sun reported that “the procedure involved inserting a cotton swab about three to five centimeters into the anus and gently rotating it.”
Beijing insists that anal swabs are more accurate than nasal or throat swab tests.
Li Tongzeng, a Chinese respiratory and infectious disease expert, explained to the media last month that the anal swabbing can “avoid missing infections as virus traces are detectable for a longer time than the more common COVID tests used in the mouth and nose.”
As TheBlaze previously reported, Li insisted at the time “that the tests were only necessary for certain populations, such as those under quarantine orders.”
But the news of the widespread mandate comes after the United States and Japan issued separate complaints to China after diplomats from both nations were forced to provide fecal samples via the invasive method.
American diplomats cry foul
Last week, the U.S. State Department protested to China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs after American diplomats cried foul over being subjected to anal swab tests, which “Washington has slammed as ‘undignified,’ according to The Sun.
The Chinese Communist Party has denied that it subjected American diplomats to rectal probing, but then Japan complained this week that the anal swabs were conducted on their diplomats upon entry to China.
Katsunobu Kato, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, said during a news conference, “Some Japanese reported to our embassy in China that they received anal swab tests, which caused a great psychological pain.”
However, Chinese physician Lu Hongzhou suggested on state-run media that foreigners do have an alternative to the swab test upon arrival in the country: providing a stool sample.
