The details of Biden’s bloated spending package are so damning that even liberal-leaning fact-checkers have no choice but to agree with conservative criticisms.
The budget-busting legislation, sold as emergency COVID response and “stimulus,” passed the Senate over the weekend. But even the liberal-leaning fact-checking website PolitiFact is pointing out that almost all of the bill’s spending is unrelated to the health effects of COVID-19.
“Total spending directly on COVID-19’s health impacts ranges from $100 billion to $160 billion,” fact-checker Jon Greenberg writes. “At the high end, direct COVID-19 spending represents about 8.5% of the bill’s $1.9 trillion cost.”
Of the bill’s nearly $2 trillion in spending, PolitiFact reports that just $14 to $20 billion goes to vaccine distribution and vaccine-related efforts. This is a tiny fraction, a mere 1-2 percent. Overall, the spending that actually goes to health-related matters pales in comparison to the hundreds of billions doled out for partisan priorities.
For example, at least $350 billion goes to bailing out state and local governments—despite most not actually experiencing predicted COVID-19 tax revenue shortfalls. That means Biden’s bill spends more than twice as much lining the pockets of bankrupt blue states than it does actually addressing public health.
State and local budgets are not in crisis.—Bureau of Economic Analysis data show that state and local tax revenues are rising nationwide, not falling. There is no need for more federal aid to the states. https://t.co/NNiUUDzpC2#CatoEcon#CatoCOVIDpic.twitter.com/zEG5nAHvR4
Legislators also included a completely unrelated $86 billion bailout for union pension plans. And the bill pours $128 billion into public education. Despite what advocates claim, it’s not actually money to “reopen schools.” A whopping 95 percent of the money will be spent after 2021.
These are just a few of the big-ticket spending items that are unrelated to COVID-19. But slipped into the bill’s 600+ pages are literally countless smaller allocations of millions in taxpayer money. Many of these carve-outs are for waste like billions for racial justice programs for farmers or politician’s pet projects like $1.5 million for a bridge in New York that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wants built.
It’s not surprising that Republican elected officials are blasting the package as wasteful and bloated.
$45 billion expansion of Obamacare, including new subsidies for people with six figure incomes.
$270 million to the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities.
This isn’t about COVID relief. It’s about using a health crisis as an excuse to ram through a left wing wishlist. pic.twitter.com/6bgmkymuvo
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the inclusion of “All kinds of liberal wish list items that would do nothing to help American families put COVID behind them” in Biden’s bill.
“This isn’t about COVID relief,” Republican Senator Pat Toomey, a long-time fiscal conservative, said. “It’s about using a health crisis as an excuse to ram through a left wing wishlist.”
Indeed, the details of Biden’s bloated spending package are so damning that even liberal-leaning fact-checkers have no choice but to agree with conservative criticisms.
In a 1958 television interview, Aldous Huxley predicted the technological capability to bypass reason and manipulate behavior through subliminal means. Today, social media platforms and search engines use sophisticated artificial-intelligence algorithms to control the information we see.
Story at-a-glance:
Aldous Huxley wrote “Brave New World,” a nightmarish vision of a future society known as the “World State,” ruled by science and efficiency, where emotions and individuality have been eradicated and personal relationships are few.
When Huxley wrote the book, optimism about technological advancements were high and there was widespread belief that technology would solve many of the world’s problems. “Brave New World” demonstrates the naiveté of such hopes by showing what can happen when technology is taken to its extreme.
Huxley predicted the technological capability to bypass reason and manipulate behavior through subliminal means. Today, social media platforms and search engines use sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms to push certain kinds of information in front of us.
Huxley’s ideas appear to have influenced the technocracy’s planning. The World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda includes the strangely ominous dictum that “you will own nothing and be happy.”
Huxley argues that in order to create the dystopian future presented in his book, you have to centralize wealth, power and control. Hence, the way to protect against it is to insist on decentralization.
The video above features a 1958 interview of Aldous Huxley with Mike Wallace. It really is a great glimpse from the past. Wallace was smoking on the set, but that was natural back then, and Rod Serling, who produced the “Twilight Zone,” did the same. Interestingly, they both developed lung cancer.
You might recall that Huxley wrote the classic novel “Brave New World,” in which he presents a dystopian vision of a future society known as the “World State,” a society ruled by science and efficiency, where emotions and individuality have been eradicated and personal relationships are few.
Children are cloned and bred in “hatcheries,” where they are conditioned for their role in society from an early age. There are no mothers and fathers as natural procreation is outlawed. There are no family units.
Embryos are sorted and given hormonal treatments based on their destined societal classification, which from highest to lowest are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon. The Alphas are bred and conditioned to be leaders while the Epsilons are designed for menial labor, free of higher intellectual capacities.
At the time Huxley wrote the book in 1931 (it was published the year after), optimism about technological advancements were high and there was widespread belief that technology would solve many of the world’s problems. “Brave New World” demonstrates the naiveté of such hopes by showing what can happen when technocracy is taken to its extreme.
Huxley believed his world of horror was right around the corner and, today, just shy of 60 years later, we’re starting to see Huxley’s “World State” closing in around us in the form of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s transhumanist agenda and the Great Reset, designed to trap us inside a net of constant surveillance and external control.
Enemies of freedom
Huxley also penned a series of essays called “Enemies of Freedom,” which he discusses in the featured interview. The series outlines “impersonal forces” that are “pushing in the direction of progressively less freedom,” and “technological devices” that can be used to accelerate the process by imposing ever greater control of the population.
Huxley points out that as technology becomes more complex and complicated, it becomes increasingly necessary to form more elaborate hierarchical organizations to manage it all.
Technology also allows for more effective propaganda machines that can be managed through those same control hierarchies.
Huxley cites the success of Hitler, noting that aside from Hitler’s effective use of terror and brute force, “he also used a very efficient form of propaganda. He had the radio, which he used to the fullest extent, and was able to impose his will on an immense mass of people.”
With the advent of television, Huxley foresaw how an authoritarian leadership could become a source of “a one-pointed drumming” of a single idea, effectively brainwashing the public.
Beyond that, Huxley predicted the technological capability to “bypass the rational side of man” and manipulate behavior by influencing people on a subconscious level. This is precisely what we’re faced with today.
Google, but also to a large extent Facebook, has been collecting data on you for nearly two decades. They have created massive server farms that are capable of analyzing this data with deep learning and artificial intelligence software to mine information and generate incredibly precise details on just what type of propaganda and narrative is required to surreptitiously manipulate you into the behavior they are seeking.
Huxley also points out the dangers inherent in advertising, especially as it pertains to marketing of political ideas and ideologies:
“Democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest in any given circumstance but …
“There are particular purposes for selling goods, and [what] the dictatorial propagandists are doing is to try to bypass the rational side of men and to appeal directly to these unconscious forces below the surface so that you are in a way making nonsense of the whole democratic procedure, which is based on conscious choice or on rational ground …
“Children are quite clearly much more suggestible than the average grownup and, again, suppose that for one reason or another all the propaganda was in the hands of one or very few agencies, you would have an extraordinarily powerful force playing on these children who are going to grow up and be adults …
“You can read in the trade journal the most critical accounts of how necessary it is to get hold of the children, because then they will be loyal brand buyers later on. Translate this into political terms, the dictator says they will be loyal ideology buyers when they’re grown up.”
Decentralization protects freedom. Centralization robs it.
Huxley argues that in order to create the dystopian future presented in his book, you have to centralize wealth, power and control. Hence, the way to protect against it is to insist on decentralization. It’s surprising that even 60 years ago Huxley was wise enough to understand this profoundly important principle.
I believe that it is the decentralization of the internet that is required to prevent censorship and manipulation in the future. This means that websites and platforms are not stored in one central place that can easily be controlled and manipulated but, rather, widely distributed to thousands, if not millions, of computers all over the world. It would work because if there is no central storage it can’t be removed.
Decentralized platforms allow the majority of power to reside with the individual. Technologies that can be easily misused to control the public narrative must also remain largely decentralized, so that no one person or agency ends up with too much power to manipulate and influence the public. Our modern-day social media monopolies are a perfect example of what Huxley warned us about.
The same goes for economic institutions too. Today, we can see how the role of the central bank (in the U.S. known as the Federal Reserve) — a privately-owned entity with the power to break entire countries apart for profit — is forcing us toward a new global economic system that will impoverish and quite literally enslave everyone, with the exception of the technocratic social bankers themselves and their globalist allies.
Our Orwellian present
A contemporary and student of Huxley was George Orwell (real name Eric Blair), who wrote another dystopian classic — “1984” — published in 1949. The two books — “1984” and “Brave New World” — share the commonality that they both depict a future devoid of the very things that we associate with having a healthy, free, creative, purposeful and enjoyable life.
In “1984,” the context is a society where an all-knowing, all-seeing “Big Brother” rules with an iron fist. Citizens are under constant watch. Privacy is nonexistent, and language is twisted to justify and glorify oppression.
Some of the spectacles of 2020 could have easily been ripped straight out of the pages of “1984,” as riots were described by cheery news anchors as “mostly peaceful protests,” even as city blocks were engulfed in flames behind them and people were bleeding to death in the streets. For those familiar with the book, such scenes were difficult to watch without being reminded of 1984s “double-think.”
Orwell versus Huxley
There are differences between the two works, however. While Orwell foresees people being forcefully enslaved by an external agency, and kept in that state by the same, Huxley’s vision is one in which people have been so thoroughly conditioned that they come to love their servitude. At that point, no external authoritarian ruler is actually required.
If you think about it, I’m sure you will agree that this is clearly the most efficient strategy to take control of the population. Moore’s law and the exponential improvement in computer processing capacity has exponentially accelerated the global elites’ ability to precisely identify how to implement peaceful control that will have the majority virtually begging for tyranny.
In Huxley’s “Brave New World,” people have fallen in love with the very technologies that prevent them from thinking and acting of their free will, so the enslaved maintain their own control structure.
As noted by Neil Postman in his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” in which he compares and contrasts the futures presented by Huxley and Orwell:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
“As Huxley remarked in ‘Brave New World Revisited,’ the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’
“In ‘1984,’ Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In ‘Brave New World,’ they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
The promise of the Great Reset
One can argue about who predicted the future best, Orwell or Huxley, but in the final analysis, I think we’re looking at a mixture of both, although it seems obvious to me that Huxley was more prescient and he was actually Orwell’s mentor. Huxley’s concerns are far more serious as the programming is essentially silent, and it is patently evident that the technocrats have been highly successful in implementing this strategy in the past year.
That said, we’re facing both the threat of externally imposed authoritarianism and control predicted by Orwell, and the subversive, subliminal programming through mindless entertainment and the lure of convenience proposed by Huxley.
Undoubtedly, the combination is a powerful one, and likely far more effective than either control strategy by itself. I’ve already touched on how Orwell’s work is playing out in the real world through the “double-think” mental gymnastics we get from the controlled, tightly centralized mainstream media these days.
For an example of how Huxley’s ideas have influenced the technocracy’s planning, look no further than the globalists’ call to “build back better” and the World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda (below), which includes the strangely ominous dictum that you will own nothing and be happy.
The unstated implication is that the world’s resources will be owned and controlled by the technocratic elite, and you’ll have to pay for the temporary use of absolutely everything. Nothing will actually belong to you. All items and resources are to be used by the collective, while actual ownership is restricted to an upper stratum of social class.
Just how will this imposed serfdom make you happy? Again, the unstated implication is that lack of ownership is a marvelous convenience. Rent a pot and then return it. You don’t need storage space! Imagine the freedom! They even promise the convenience of automatic drone delivery straight to your door.
Artificial intelligence — which is siphoning your data about every aspect of your existence through nearly every piece of technology and appliance you own — will run your life, predicting your every mood and desire, catering to your every whim. Ah, the luxury of not having to make any decisions!
This is the mindset they’re trying to program into you, and for most, it appears to be working. For others who can see the propaganda for what it is, these promises look and feel like proverbial mouse traps. Once you bite the cheese, you’ll be stuck, robbed of your freedom forevermore. And, as Huxley told Wallace, individual freedom is really a prerequisite for a genuinely productive society:
“Life of man is ultimately impossible without a considerable measure of individual freedom. Initiative and creativity — all these things that we value, and I think value properly, are impossible without a large measure of freedom.”
When Wallace challenges Huxley on this by pointing out that the Soviet Union was successfully developing both militarily and artistically, despite being a tightly controlled regime, Huxley counters by saying that those doing that creative work, especially scientists, were also granted far greater personal freedom and prosperity than everyone else.
As long as they kept their noses out of politics, they were brought into the upper echelon and given a great deal of freedom, and without this freedom, they would not have been able to be as creative and inventive, Huxley says.
The threat of the new normal
This anti-human “new normal” that world leaders are now urging us to accept and embrace is the trap of all traps. Unless your most cherished dream is to lie in bed for the rest of your life, your body atrophying away, with a pair of VR goggles permanently strapped to your face, you must resist and oppose the “new normal” every day going forward.
As noted by Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill in his Feb. 5, 2021, article, while the first lockdown was marked by a sense of camaraderie and the promise of it being a temporary measure that we can get through if we just address the problem together, by the third round, all forms of social connection have vanished, as has the anticipation of a return to normality.
“In the first lockdown, the dream of normality was what kept people going; it was actively encouraged by some politicians and even some in the doom-laden media. This time, dreams of normality are treated as ‘dysfunction’, as a species of ‘denial,’” O’Neill writes.
Make no mistake. The media’s rebuke of a return to normalcy as a nonsensical pipedream is dangerous propaganda territory. The reality is we could easily open everything back up and go back to business as usual, and nothing out of the ordinary, in terms of sickness and death, would occur.
People die every year. It’s an inevitable reality of life and, up until the last two weeks of 2020, there actually were no greater number of deaths recorded than the year prior, and the year prior to that, and the one before that.
What’s more, we now have effective prophylactics and treatments that ensure the loss of life due to COVID-19 can be radically minimized. Yet, our leaders don’t want you to think in those terms. They want you to remain fearful because they have a deep appreciation of the value of fear in catalyzing the precise type of capitulation and surrender they need in order to implement the Great Reset.
Tragically, many citizens have so embraced the fear culture, they don’t even need an authoritarian figure to tell them to comply with rules that have no medical benefit anymore. They’ll happily act as the designated COVID police, making sure everyone around them complies.
Hell hath no fury like one caught in the unsound belief that they will die if you don’t wear a mask. This is no way to live. It’s not sane and it’s not healthy, and the prophetic works of Huxley and Orwell illustrate where it will all end if we don’t push back.
Never surrender to the new normal
In closing, I’d like you to ponder some portions from O’Neill’s article, in which he warns us about the threat posed by the culture of fear itself, which is just as dangerous and damaging as any virus:
“[Spiked] argued that COVID-19 … would be refracted through the culture of fear, potentially harming our ability to understand and deal with this novel danger. This has come to pass. The shift from paying lip service to social solidarity to encouraging the populace to think of itself as diseased represents a victory for the degraded view of humanity gifted to us by the culture of fear.
“The government’s early move from encouraging people to take responsibility for limiting their social interactions to using older methods of terror to ensure compliance with lockdown measures confirmed the culture of fear’s reduction of people from citizens to be engaged with problems to be managed.
“The failure to sustain the education of the next generation spoke to the exhaustion of bourgeois confidence, of the state itself, that underpins the culture of fear.
“And the current threat of a New Normal — of a forever post-pandemic dystopia of distanced, masked pseudo-interaction — demonstrates that our future will be shaped at least in part by the ideologies and forces of the culture of fear …
“Yes, the New Normal being talked up by the political and cultural elites will partially be informed by the experience of Covid-19 and the necessity of being prepared for a future virus. But it will also be shaped by … the culture of fear and its attendant anti-human, anti-progress ideologies …
“Soon the practical task of minimizing and managing the impact of Covid-19 will have been largely completed, leaving us with the far larger humanist task of combating this culture and making the case for a freer, more dynamic, dazzling future of growth, knowledge and engagement.
“Those who underestimate the culture of fear will be ill-prepared for these future battles. They will have a tendency to surrender to the New Normal. The rest of us should stand firm, even in the face of smears and willful misrepresentations, and continue to recognize and confront the real and debilitating consequences that fear has on everyday life and on humanity’s future.”
Who says President Biden isn’t great for the economy?
Sure, he is crippling America’s energy independence with a full-scale assault on domestic oil and gas production. And, yes, he killed thousands of good jobs with a flick of a pen when he nixed the Keystone Pipeline and halted completion of the border wall.
And behind the scenes today, there is no telling the miles and miles of red tape his administration is unrolling to strangle American small businesses and the innovation that will quietly cost our economy billions of dollars for years and decades to come.
But when it comes to human smuggling, these are heady go-go days that Enron could have only dreamed about on Wall Street.
Children! Women! Families! Step right up and meet your local coyote who for a cool $8,000 will take you on an all-expenses-paid Biden excursion through the dangerous deserts of Mexico and across the swift waters of the Rio Grande!
In just the first few months of Mr. Biden’s presidency, he has nearly managed to double the number of migrants thronging our borders. And there is no indication that the increases will slow any time soon.
Not only has Mr. Biden ushered in boom times for the ruthless coyotes who smuggle people across the border, he has single-handedly sparked an industry-wide boom for all the lawless actors in the illegal-immigration industry.
Mr. Biden is making it rain for drug cartels who watch the border, coordinate smuggling and reap massive paydays thanks to lax American border enforcement. Drivers, lookouts and scouts are making a bundle off Mr. Biden, too.
Any examination of the cottage industry booming under Mr. Biden’s lawless border policies would be incomplete without considering who benefits as well inside the United States. Big businesses desperate for cheap labor make out like bandits. So do wealthy Americans seeking cheap landscapers and nannies.
The Americans who pay the steepest price, as always, are America’s poor and working folks. But who cares? They don’t have any annoying lobbyists in Washington.
It’s like the tree that falls in the woods. If an American citizen complains but they don’t have a lobbyist in Washington, do they really have a complaint?
But nobody pays a greater price for Mr. Biden’s human smuggling racket than the poor souls who fall prey to coyote slavery.
President Donald Trump managed to do more in four years to fix the border than any president or any Congress in a half-century. Mr. Biden immediately scrapped everything that was working.
Back is “catch and release,” which automatically guarantees illegals a foothold in the U.S. as soon as they illegally set foot in the county.
Gone are deportations.
Scrapped is Mr. Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum cases, which brought so much order — and deterrence — at the border.
Also back are the cages that were first invented the last time Mr. Biden was in the White House.
Perhaps most insidious of all is that back in Central and South America, the message is clear. America is back open for lawlessness.
That ensures that the waves and waves of migrants making the treacherous trek will continue. And the slavers and coyotes and drug cartels will continue to prosper.
(Reuters) – Shares of GameStop jumped on Tuesday for the fifth straight day, as the meme stock rally that began earlier this year got more juice on news about the video game retailer’s e-commerce strategy and speculation that small investors will pour stimulus check funds into stock markets.
GameStop shares were up 23.5% to $239.80 in early trading, a day after the company entrusted leadership of its online sales efforts to board member and major shareholder Ryan Cohen, co-founder of online pet retailer Chewy Inc.
The resurgent rally lifted other stocks favored by retail investors on forums such as Reddit’s WallStreetBets. Market watchers have cited the U.S. Senate’s passage of a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill including $1,400 direct payments to Americans as one catalyst.
Once the aid bill is finalized and signed into law, the U.S. government should be able to start delivering $1,400 checks quickly, tax experts said.
Since January, GameStop shares have had several wild swings, one of the hottest meme stocks followed on social media.
Shares of AMC Entertainment another popular bet among retail investors, were recently up around 5%, headphone maker Koss Corp climbed 1% and Blackberry Ltd rose by around 2%.
Cohen, a major shareholder who has pushed Gametop’s move away from its brick-and-mortar model, joined the board in January shortly before a social media frenzy drove a meteoric rise in which GameStop shares surged more than 1,600%.
The flurry of buying drove hedge funds that had bet against the stock to unwind their short positions, a situation known as a “short squeeze.” GameStop pared most of those gains the following month.
Some analysts believe another short squeeze may be adding to the recent gains. Short interest in GameStop was valued at $2.58 billion, or 24.3% of the stock’s float on Tuesday, compared to $1.80 billion, 32.6% in late February, according to data from financial analytics firm S3 Partners.
The number of shares sold short has dropped by about 25% since February 26 to 13.3 million shares, data from S3 Partners showed.
In Washington, the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee planned a remote hearing titled “Who Wins on Wall Street? GameStop, Robinhood, and the State of Retail Investing.”
In an official statement, Donald J. Trump voiced his support for the Republican Party while slamming fake Republicans: “it is not their right to use my likeness or image to raise funds.”
Read the full statement below:
‘RINO’ is an acrostic that stands for “Republican In Name Only.” It is used as a pejorative label for Republicans who do not consistently represent Republican Party values.
Trump immediately followed up with another statement in which he criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the crisis at the U.S. southern border:
The 8-1 Supreme Court decision on March 8 requiring accountability for public officials violating individuals’ constitutional rights has huge significance beyond the college campus where the case originated, according to one of the plaintiff’s attorneys.
With only Chief Justice John Roberts dissenting, the high court held in a case brought by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) on behalf of former Gwinnett College student Chike Uzuegbunam that school officials violated his First Amendment rights by barring him from sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a free speech zone on the campus.
“Campus policy at that time prohibited using the free speech zone to say anything that ‘disturbs the peace and/or comfort of person(s).’” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority in describing the policy challenged in the case. The case is known as “Uzuegbunam et. al. v. Precczewski et. al.”
When Gwinnett officials backed off their policy, they then argued in federal court that Uzuegbunam no longer had standing to claim damages because his rights were no longer being violated.
But the Court disagreed, saying, “Uzuegbunam experienced a completed violation of his constitutional rights when respondents enforced their speech policies against him. Nominal damages can redress Uzuegbunam’s injury even if he cannot or chooses not to quantify that harm in economic terms.”
The Court further noted that “an award of nominal damages constitutes relief on the merits.”
In other words, if a constitutional violation is documented, the offending official or institution must be held accountable, even if there is no demonstration of measurable injury deserving of more than nominal damages.
And the accountability requirement goes beyond colleges violating students’ free speech rights, according to ADF Vice-President Kristen Waggoner.
“So, this ensures that it’s not just discriminatory student speech policies, it’s discriminatory stop-and-frisk, denial of Kosher meals in prison, you can easily think of a variety of constitutional violations that would benefit from this,” Waggoner told reporters Monday in response to a question from The Epoch Times during a telephone news conference.
“It sure ought to. Alliance Defending Freedom has had over 400 victories in this space, in terms of public universities. Nobody litigates more of these cases than we do,” said Waggoner, who has argued multiple cases filed by ADF before the Supreme Court.
“We believe this is a significant victory because we see time and time again where government officials will censor speech unconstitutionally, students will muster the courage to stand and say, ‘this is a violation of my constitutional rights,’ and then college officials will quickly change the policy and walk away.
“The irony in this case is that the Georgia officials received a letter years’ earlier from ADF warning them that their policy was unconstitutional, and they did nothing until Chike sued them and that is consistent with what we see across the country.”
Waggoner’s contention that the case has big implications for situations involving alleged violations of constitutional rights in other arenas drew agreement from multiple legal experts interviewed March 9 by The Epoch Times.
Zack Smith, Senior Fellow in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, said “this case does have wide-ranging implications” because it will severely limit a tactic that violators have long used to avoid facing a full court review of the merits or demerits of their actions.
Smith said “the problem in these cases where there is an alleged violation of a constitutional right is exactly what happened in this case. A governmental entity will change their policy and try to boot out the case, get it dismissed.
“You see this in the First Amendment context like here, you could see it in the stop-and-frisk context, or really any context where there is a policy that is alleged to violate someone’s constitutional rights, whether that violation is based on the Fourth Amendment, the Eighth Amendment, the First Amendment or whatever.
“Any time a policy is violating or alleged to violate someone’s constitutional rights, this decision would essentially allow the case to move forward even if the governmental entity changes their policy and tries to get it dismissed.”
Similarly, Will Creeley, Legal Director for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which filed an Amicus Curiae brief in the case, said of Waggoner that “she is 100 percent correct, that is a prediction I would confidently share as well.
“The opinion deals with the nominal damages that are possible in cases involving violations of rights that aren’t easy to put a price tag on, and that’s not just expressive rights, but it can also be civil rights, privacy rights, a wide variety of possible constitutional infringements that defy quantification,” Creeley said.
Ilya Shapiro, Director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, agreed, saying, “Justice Thomas was right for the near-unanimous Court to hold that government officials can’t escape liability for violations of constitutional rights just by changing their policies, and that citizens can get their day in court even if they only ask for nominal damages.”
Shapiro noted that the decision was the “first-ever solo dissent” by Chief Justice Roberts in his more than 15 years on the bench, which “continues his crusade against an engaged judiciary that would make it easier for civil rights plaintiffs to hold state actors to account.”
Cato also filed an Amicus Curiae brief in the case.
When BuzzFeed announced last year that it would buy HuffPost, it was expected that cost-cutting would follow the completion of the deal. On Tuesday, less than a month after the acquisition went through, BuzzFeed laid off 47 workers at HuffPost and closed the publication’s Canadian edition.
At a virtual company meeting, BuzzFeed’s chief executive, Jonah Peretti, said the layoffs were meant to stem losses at HuffPost. HuffPost, which was previously owned by Verizon Media, lost more than $20 million last year and was on track to lose the same amount this year, Mr. Peretti told the staff according to an account of the meeting provided by BuzzFeed.
Employees were given a password to enter the meeting — “spr!ngisH3r3,” a variation on the phrase “spring is here.” The staff members were then informed that if they did not receive an email by 1 p.m., their jobs were safe. The website Defector first reported on the password and other details of the meeting, which were confirmed by two people who attended the meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. A BuzzFeed spokesman told The New York Times that the company regretted the password’s tone.
The HuffPost Union, which is affiliated with the Writers Guild of America East, said in a statement that the layoffs had affected 33 of its members, nearly a third of the local union. “We are devastated and infuriated, particularly after an exhausting year of covering a pandemic and working from home,” the union said in a statement.
As part of the cutbacks, BuzzFeed closed HuffPost Canada and announced plans to decrease the size of its operations in Australia and Britain, the BuzzFeed spokesman said. At the end of the austerity measures, HuffPost would still have a larger newsroom than BuzzFeed News, the spokesman added.
In the meeting, Mr. Peretti said that HuffPost’s executive editor, Hillary Frey, and its international executive editor, Louise Roug, had decided to leave the company. HuffPost has been without an editor in chief since Lydia Polgreen departed a year ago to become the head of content at Gimlet Media, a Spotify-owned podcasting company. Mr. Peretti said he expected to announce Ms. Polgreen’s successor in the coming weeks.
Whoever takes the job will report to Mark Schoofs, BuzzFeed News’s editor in chief. At the meeting, Mr. Peretti reiterated that BuzzFeed and HuffPost would remain distinct from each other, with separate editorial staffs.
A whistleblower sitting on the COVID-19 task force is warning the world about the dangers of inoculating pregnant women with the experimental mRNA vaccine.
Reaching out to Abortion Free New Mexico, the source revealed, “We’re up to 35 adverse pregnancy outcomes (preterm birth, miscarriage, spontaneous abortion) related to the ‘vaccine’ and 25 ‘birth defects’. There have been 925 deaths reported overall with about 300 of them within 2 days of getting the shot. These are just short term effects! There are also reports of ‘permanent disability.’”
The COVID-19 task force member warns side-effects from the vaccines will continue to harm people in the future, saying, “This is VERY VERY bad and so many people have already been vaccinated. Many will develop severe autoimmune diseases like MS, infertility, & prion diseases, thrombocytopenia, alzheimers, nonspecific brain damage, lung immunopathology, multiple organ failure.”
“I guess most of the doctors don’t understand the science. I can’t believe more aren’t fighting this,” the individual noted. “It’s against the Nuremberg code and a horrible crime against humanity. Since the embryo/fetus is so quickly developing they’re a good indicator of toxicity.”
Pressure from politicians is allegedly a driving factor in the silence of scientists.
“The other scientists on my team seem ‘afraid’ to say anything and everything we put out is filtered through the politicians before THEY decide what gets told to the public,” according to the source.
The evidence is “clear and convincing” that China’s government is committing genocide against the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the country’s Xinjiang province, experts in international law, war crimes, and human rights allege in a new independent report.
The findings, released Tuesday by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a Washington, D.C., think-tank, said the experts concluded that the Chinese Communist Party bears responsibility for its government having breached “each and every act” that is prohibited under the UN Genocide Convention, reports Axios.
The report marks the first time a non-government group performed an independent legal analysis of the allegations and Beijing’s responsibility for the alleged crimes, reports CNN, after having first obtained a copy of the report.
China’s government has denied that the rights of the Uyghurs and other Muslims have been violated, at a time when up to 2 million Uyghurs are detained in the Xinjiang mass internment camps.
The report states that China’s policies and practices of the Uyghurs in the region “must be viewed in their totality, which amounts to an intent to destroy the Uyghurs as a group, in whole or in part.”
It found that people detained in the camps are “systematically tortured, subjected to sexual violence, including rape, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment, deprived of their basic human needs, and severely humiliated.”
Further, the report said the detainees are “severely humiliated and subjected to inhumane treatment or punishment, including solitary confinement without food for prolonged periods,” according to the report.
“Suicides have become so pervasive that detainees must wear ‘suicide safe’ uniforms and are denied access to materials susceptible to causing self-harm,” the report further noted.
Last December, the International Criminal Court (ICC) declined to investigate allegations of genocide against Uyghurs, but the file was left open so more evidence could be submitted and an investigation could be opened.
Vice President Kamala Harris has been playing a major role in shaping the White House’s foreign policy, and the media is taking note.
The Washington Post’s Daily 202′ edition titled “Kamala Harris is playing an unusually large role in shaping Biden’s foreign policy,” highlights how it is unprecedented for any vice president to take on such an active role in foreign affairs.
While The Washington Post notes that this is peculiar, it should not come as a surprise.
The Biden campaign’s search for a vice-presidential contender got a lot of media attention, as everybody knew the executive branch would run like a partnership.
It is unclear if the 78-year-old Democrat will want to seek a second term, and Harris taking over certain foreign policy aspects of the administration is a good segway to a potential Harris presidency, if she decides to run.
Biden is reportedly planning on running for re-election in 2024 while in his early eighties, but there is a long way to go for things to change before then.
A key part of the presidency is building relationships with foreign leaders in order to solve global challenges, making it clear that the White House views Harris as a better ambassador for the United States than Biden.
She has taken calls with world leaders and major American allies such as French President Emmanuel Macron and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Glad we had this first talk @VP Kamala Harris! Let's move forward together on all the challenges we face: climate, gender equality, regional crises, and our space cooperation with (hopefully) a new step this Thursday with Perseverance’s landing on Mars! https://t.co/5Qb1T8Pkqp
The Biden administration has argued that their foreign policy is a return to “normal,” suggesting that former President Donald Trump was not a great representation for the United States on the world stage.
During the vice-presidential debate last year, Harris accused Trump of “betray[ing] our friends and embrac[ing] dictators.”
Trump notably held negotiation summits with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un throughout his presidency, which were seen as a major turning point or a slap in the face to the rest of the world, depending upon who was asked.
While the new administration wants to come across as peacemakers, they are not doing anything to indicate such a claim.
The United States launched an airstrike against an Iranian-backed militia last month, showing that hawkish foreign policy in the Middle East has no signs of stopping.
BREAKING: President Joe Biden orders airstrike against Iran-backed militia in Syria following rocket attacks against US forces in Iraq, AP reports https://t.co/y1V8QqbBg7pic.twitter.com/ZET1iKWfoP
