The state legislature also passed a measure to send out mail ballots to every registered voter regardless if they asked for one or not.
The California Secretary of State’s Office has made downloading mail ballots from home possible for the recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom. The state legislature also passed a measure to send out mail ballots to every registered voter regardless if they asked for one or not.
The methods being employed by the state add to concerns already raised by a group that brought up potential voter fraud issues during the 2020 general election.
Downloading mail ballots from home is made possible through technology used during the 2020 election, the Secretary of State’s Office reports.
The system includes two options, one for the entire state and one for Los Angeles County. The statewide system is called, “Remote Accessible Vote-By-Mail (RAVBM),” which enables voters to fill out ballots online, print them out themselves, and either put in the mail or drop off at a polling location.
According to the Secretary of State’s office, there were “four certified RAVBM systems” for the November 2020 vote: “Five Cedars Group Alternate Format Ballot v5.2.1, Democracy Live Secure Select 1.2.2, Dominion Voting Systems Dominion ImageCast Remote 5.10A, and Los Angeles County Voting Solution for All People Interactive Sample Ballot 2.5.”
Even though RAVBM was created to be used by voters with disabilities, “any voter” could request to use it in 2020.
The Los Angeles County option, the Interactive Sample Ballot (ISB), enables voters to fill out a sample ballot online, which generates a “poll pass.” The pass can be printed out or voters can download a QR code and then vote using a “Ballot Marking Device” at a polling location.
L.A. County produced instructional videos explaining how to use RAVBM and ISB. It also sent voters a sample ballot stating the ISB system was designed to simplify voting because of the “large number of candidates [43, other than the governor himself] appearing on the ballot” in the recall election.
The Election Integrity Project California (EIPCa), a nonpartisan nonprofit organization advocating for the right of every eligible citizen to vote in California, purchased VoteCal voter registration and voting history files and after auditing them raised concerns about California’s election system. The group published a list of questionable mail ballots sent out during the 2020 general election to deceased Californians and those no longer living in California. It also learned that 13 California counties have more registered voters than eligible citizens.
The group sent a letter to the Secretary of State’s Office last year raising concerns about the number of registered voters compared to the number who voted in the 2020 election. It found that California had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible citizens in the last election, and that nearly 124,000 more votes were counted in California’s 2020 general election than voters recorded as voting in the election.
According to EIPCa’s evaluation, Los Angeles County has 206,728 registrants who have not voted or updated their registrations since November 2008 who are listed as “active” voters and could receive mail ballots in the mail.
EIPCa says it uses precise methods that err on the side of caution and that its findings likely underestimate the state’s election problem.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared frustrated, angry and defiant in a July 29 interview with several California newspapers, at one point flipping out that everyone outside California is complaining about California.
The 60-minute interview, which took place virtually, comes as Newsom faces a recall election on Sept. 14.
During the video conference, Newsom and opinion writers and editors from The Sacramento Bee, The Modesto Bee, The Fresno Bee and The San Luis Obispo Tribune discussed the wildfires and the drought, the crime rates in the state, gun control and several other issues California faces.
Over its course, The Sacramento Bee noted, Newsom “sometimes pounded the table as he spoke. He challenged the premise of more than one question posed to him. He spoke of policy decisions that he predicted would be viewed favorably by history even if voters ‘kicked’ him out in this recall.”
Clips from the interview went viral and were circulated on social media, as Fox News noted.
“It would be nice if our homegrown team would be focusing on what’s right,” Newsom was shown yelling in one such clip shared in a Wednesday post on Twitter. “Everybody outside this state is b****ing about this state.”
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
“Guys, forgive me, I know I am a little pointed today but I’ve been taking a lot from you folks for a lot of months,” Newsom said, gesturing toward the journalists. “I should be able to express myself, too.”
“I’m a future ex-governor,” he said. “It could happen in a few weeks, it could happen in a few years. I love this damn state.”
Throughout the interview, Newsom defended his scandal-ridden time as governor, lashing out at Texas and Florida — two states where people and companies leaving California over its high prices and policies unfriendly to commerce are flocking to — saying “eat your heart out” to the states about the jobs created in California.
Newsom faces strong opposition from several candidates running against him in the recall election. This includes Republican candidates Caitlyn Jenner and Larry Elder.
According to a poll from Emerson College, 48 percent of registered voters surveyed opposed the recall while 46 percent supported recalling Newsom, KPIX-TV reported.
With California being a Democratic state, where there are generally two Democrats for every one Republican, the GOP candidates also face a fierce battle since there are several of them crowding the field, according to Newsweek.
A crowded ballot means the GOP vote is likely to get fragmented, the outlet reported, noting that the optimum strategy for the GOP is to back a single candidate to unify the Republican votes.
Nonetheless, Democrats fear that Republicans might win if there isn’t enough turnout from their supporters in the recall election.
“I see a real scenario where the governor loses if people don’t come out and vote, if Democrats stay home, if Democrats underestimate the power of fake news, you know the power of rumors. We cannot stand still. I think we should have learned that with [former President Donald] Trump,” Democratic California Rep. Norma Torres told The Hill.
“The campaign needs to get going, and it’s good for the governor to hear that, get him out more and start taking this more seriously,” Torres said.
“He just has to focus on turnout. And I think he has to speak to the progressive base,” Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna added. “He’s got to make sure the progressive base really turns out.”
As overreach in classrooms by progressive school administrators, nonprofits and the federal government has reached new heights, parents are stepping up to fight back.
Moms for Liberty, Informed Parents of California, EdFirstNC, NJ Parental Rights, No Left Turn in Education and Parents Against Critical Theory are just a few of the hundreds of new parent groups that have emerged across the country in recent months. Many parents have become education activists because of schools’ failure to bring children back into the classroom or their continued imposition of mask mandates.
Others are engaging because of the content being taught. Whether it’s age-inappropriate sex education, critical race theory, or anti-American history, parents are seeing more of what their children are learning—thanks to COVID’s virtual learning—and they don’t like it. As a result, parents are organizing, speaking out, and pushing back, and they are having a noticeable impact.
Some of the most effective efforts have begun with individual parents who reached a boiling point and decided to speak out. Mom and investigative journalist A.P. Dillon helped expose critical race theory training in Wake County, N.C., public schools. Elana Fishbein was a lone parent in Lower Marion, Pa., who objected to content in her children’s curriculum, which, in her words, “described ‘whiteness’ as an entitlement to steal land, garner riches, and get special treatment on equity and race.” That letter reached a national audience when Tucker Carlson invited her onto his Fox News Channel show.
Andrew Gutmann also made national news when he sent a letter to 650 families criticizing New York City’s Brearley School, which his daughter attended, for its obsession with race and for “desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
Meanwhile, the 11-minute takedown of a Putnam County, N.Y., school board by Tatiana Ibrahim has well over 1 million views on YouTube.
Individual parents speaking out have helped to kick off what is proving to be a rapidly growing parent revolt. They have helped to galvanize others who were either unaware of the bad content or too afraid to speak out. After Elana Fishbein appeared on Carlson’s show, hundreds of parents across the country reached out to her on social media. And today No Left Turn in Education has 35 chapters across the country and is growing.
When Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice finished their terms as school board members in Florida, they decided to form Moms for Liberty to teach parents how to serve as watchdogs of their local schools boards. When they established the organization in January of this year, they had intended it to serve as a statewide entity in Florida. But today, just over six months later, they have 65 chapters nationwide and have more applications for new chapters.
Wherever these parent groups have emerged, they are finding creative ways to challenge the attempted progressive takeover of K-12 education. Sloan Rachmuth, founder of EdFirstNC, has held webinars and in-person events to educate parents on how the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction rewrote the social studies standards for K-12 based on critical race theory. Patti Hidalgo Menders, a mother of five boys in Loudoun County, Va., read aloud to school board members obscene passages from Tiffany D. Jackson’s “Monday’s Not Coming” and Gretchen McNeil’s “#Murder Trending.”
Educating parents is a critical part of the work. As Hannah Smith, a newly elected board member in Texas explained, “There were a lot of people who had, by their own admission, just kind of fallen asleep. They just thought we’ve got these award-winning schools, we’ve got this awesome community, everything’s going well. I don’t need to show up at board meetings. I don’t need to be worried about what’s happening in the schools.”
In addition to raising the alarm about what’s happening in the schools, parent groups are challenging school boards through recalls—for example in Loudoun County and San Francisco—and by actively running candidates for school board, with some notable successes.
When the Carroll, Texas, Independent School District introduced a Cultural Competence Action Plan, which would require “social justice training” and establish a “diversity and inclusion” week, at the cost of $3 million over 10 years, local father Cameron Bryan decided to run for school board and won. As Bob Lubke, from Civitas, has written, “Historically, conservatives have not been as vocal about down-ballot races. That’s a mistake. Education is often the largest expenditure for state and local government. Local school board members not only make budget and policy decisions that impact the day-to-day operations of how our schools are financed and administered but also how our children are educated. Few local positions are as consequential.”
With the growing anger over the indoctrination of their children, parents have become much more engaged in school board elections, and it is having an impact: In 2021, the number of board member recalls has more than doubled from previous years, according to Ballotpedia.
Parents are also initiating lawsuits as an important tool in their fight against overly progressive schools. According to John Murawski at RealClearInvestigations, about a dozen lawsuits and administrative complaints have been filed since 2018. A new wave of lawsuits is being driven by the recent surge of concern among parents over critical race theory and its implementation in schools.
The first lawsuit against CRT was filed on Dec. 22, 2020, in Nevada. Gabrielle Clark and her son William brought the suit on the grounds that the school violated William’s free speech and due process rights. According to the No Left Turn in Education website: “the Sociology of Change teaching in his civic classes required him to publicly reveal his race, gender, religious, and sexual identities, and then attach derogatory labels such as ‘privileged’ or ‘oppressor’ to those identities. Students were then asked to ‘undo’ and ‘unlearn’ their ‘beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that stem from oppression.’ William and his mother objected, and he was punished with a failing grade and his graduation was at risk.”
The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of organizations, led by The Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty, with support from the Southeastern Legal Foundation, Upper Midwest Law Center, Schoolhouserights.org, and others. According to CRT expert Chris Rufo, several more lawsuits are in preparation.
On June 20, Patti Hidalgo Menders, Scott Mineo and several others, represented by the Liberty Justice Center, filed a lawsuit against the Loudoun County School Board (Menders v. Loudoun County School Board). On June 23, 2020, LCPS published its Action Plan to Combat Systemic Racism. The plan included the creation of a Student Ambassador Equity Program, which was only open to “students of color” and those with “a passion for social justice.” The lawsuit also states, “The ‘Share, Speak-up, Speak-out’ meetings in which Student Equity Ambassadors are entitled to take part are not an everyday opportunity for student/faculty engagement. Rather they are part of an explicit initiative to stifle speech under the guise of eliminating ‘bias’.”
While 26 states have introduced or passed bills to reject the teaching of critical race theory, it will likely be the courts that ultimately decide whether it fundamentally violates American principles, and even in that process, the role of parents will be pivotal. As John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, recently said, “I think that what’s going to happen is that there have to be more parents, more communities involved, challenging these kinds of efforts to use race explicitly in the schools or in their local governments, and those will generate the cases that get to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court can make clear, as I think it should, that race is just never to be used in the government and in state and local at all, for whatever reason, whether it’s allegedly benign or it’s for malign reasons.”
The bottom line is that education in America will likely never be the same, thanks to the Great Parent Revolt of 2021, and that’s good news. For decades, many parents have outsourced the raising of their children to the schools, trusting that administrators, school board members, and teachers would share their values. We blindly believed that schools would care about our children as much as we do. We believed that if the teaching went astray, if the books were inappropriate, or if the civics and history were a little un-American, what we did at home would serve as a gentle correction and all would be well. The past two years have taught us how wrong we were.
Thankfully parents are reengaging in their children’s education and reasserting their rightful place in decisions about curriculum and content. The question will be whether their efforts are strong enough and sufficiently sustained to win the battle against the radical tide of educators, nonprofits and federal education bureaucrats who are working to rewrite American history.
Producer prices accelerated at the fastest annual pace on record in July as supply chain disruptions and materials shortages continued to put upward pressure on costs.
The producer price index for final demand increased at a 7.8% pace for the 12 months ended July, according to the Labor Department. The July print was faster than the 7.3% pace recorded in June and ahead of the 7.3% rate that analysts surveyed by Refinitiv were expecting. The reading was the strongest since recordkeeping began in November 2010.
Producer prices rose 1% in July, matching the increase from June. Analysts were anticipating prices would grow at a 0.6% pace.
Nearly three-quarters of the increase was due to the 1.1% rise in prices for final demand services, the largest on record. Almost half of the increase was due to a 1.7% rise in margins for final demand trade services, which measure changes in margins received by wholesalers and retailers.
Approximately 20% of the increase can be attributed to margins for automobiles and automobile parts retailing, which jumped 11.2%. Airline passenger services and hospital outpatient care were among the other indexes that saw gains.
Portfolio management saw a 1.8% decline. Indexes for chemicals and allied products wholesaling and for fuels and lubricants retailing also turned lower.
Prices for final demand goods, meanwhile, rose 0.6%.
Prices for tobacco products saw a notable 2.7% increase while prices for beef and veal fell 11.6%.
Core producer prices, which exclude food and energy, rose 1% in July, double the 0.5% gain that was expected. Core prices climbed 6.2% annually, compared to the 5.6% increase that was forecast. The year-over-year increase was the largest since the data series began in August 2014.
The annual data has a “base effects” skew as a result of the price decline that occurred at the beginning of the pandemic.
The Federal Reserve has said the recent price increases are “transitory” and that cost pressures will subside as supply chain issues caused by the pandemic are resolved.
The effectiveness of the two most widely used COVID-19 vaccines in the United States dropped significantly in July, a new study found.
The efficacy of shots from Moderna and Pfizer were highly effective in preventing transmission of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, between January and June, researchers with the Mayo Clinic and Massachusetts-based nference discovered.
But the efficacy of Moderna’s jab dropped to 76 percent in July, with Pfizer’s plummeting to 42 percent, researchers said.
The scientists studied health records from the Mayo Clinic to determine the effectiveness in an observational study that was recently published online (pdf) but has not yet been peer reviewed.
At the same time the drop in effectiveness was seen, the Delta variant of the CCP virus became much more prevalent in Minnesota, researchers noted, comprising over 70 percent of the cases in the state.
The researchers also found that alongside the drop in transmission protection, the vaccines remained highly effective against hospitalization.
“Our observational study suggests that while both mRNA COVID-19 vaccines strongly protect against infection and severe disease, there are differences in their real-world effectiveness relative to each other and relative to prior months of the pandemic. Larger studies with more diverse populations are warranted to guide critical pending public and global health decisions, such as the optimal timing for booster doses and which vaccines should be administered to individuals who have not yet received one dose,” they wrote.
Pfizer told The Epoch Times in an email that the company and its partner, BioNTech, “are driven by science to discover the best approaches to protect against COVID-19 and are confident in the protection and safety of the two-dose BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine.”
Moderna did not respond to a request for comment.
Their vaccines are the most widely administered in the United States. Only one other is authorized for emergency use in the country.
But other recent studies suggest the possibility of a much lower efficacy, particularly for Pfizer’s jab.
A study from Qatar, for instance, found Pfizer’s effectiveness just 53.5 percent, while researchers in Israel concluded (pdf) it was just 39 percent effective against infection.
The effectiveness was higher in other research, including a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found Pfizer’s shot was 88 percent effective against the Delta variant.
The recent studies taken together point to an estimate of 50- to 60 percent effectiveness in mRNA vaccines against symptomatic infection, according to Eric Topol, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.
“There needs to be truth-telling about the reduced protection of mRNA vaccines vs symptomatic Delta infections,” he wrote on Twitter. “Why is this important? Because we need to protect the protected, the fully vaccinated. Sure we want to get more people vaccinated, but truth engenders trust. And truth helps guide people to be safe, use masks, distance, ventilation and all the other tools we have and know helps.”
Dr. Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and San Francisco General Hospital, said that so-called breakthrough infections, or infections among the vaccinated, are believed to stem from either the reduced incubation period of the delta variant, which causes higher viral loads, or waning antibody titers.
“Since T cells protect us against severe disease, and they do not wane over time, protection from severe disease can be maintained even as nasal antibodies (and protection from mild breakthroughs) wane,” she told The Epoch Times in an email.
The takeaway from the Mayo Clinic research is that vaccines “remain remarkably effective in protecting us against severe disease but the differences seen in mild breakthrough infections with Moderna and Pfizer are likely real and likely reflect a higher antibody response (which protects you against mild infection) with the Moderna vaccine,” she added.
The waning effectiveness in vaccines is prompting U.S. officials to consider recommending certain populations get a booster shot.
The Food and Drug Administration is reportedly set as soon as Thursday to authorize extra COVID-19 vaccine doses, ahead of an Aug. 13 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel meeting that will discuss whether the boosters are required.
The panel weighed last month whether to recommend boosters, but ultimately decided against making a recommendation at that time.
As a number of politicians push for ‘vaccine passports’ amid fears that a new brand of medical apartheid is coming, a re-surfaced CDC publication advocating internment camps for the ‘high-risk’ has some people fearing the worst.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a paper that floated the totally not suspicious idea of relocating “high-risk” individuals into green zone “camps.” While the proposal didn’t attract much attention at the time, as draconian anti-Covid measures are beginning to ramp up, and basic human rights and liberties are coming under attack, the document has attracted newfound attention. And not without reason, it seems.
The very first line of the document discusses the implementation of a “shielding approach in humanitarian settings… focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings.” Essentially, and this will be important later on, ‘humanitarian settings’ is just another way of saying ‘camps’. Many people are quick to associate the idea of camps with the containment of refugees, for example, or illegal aliens who have breached the border. Yet the only time the word ‘refugee’ is mentioned in the paper is in reference to a camp in Kenya. At the same time, ‘camp’ and ‘camps’ are referred to about 20 times.
There is another ambiguous thing about this document, and that involves its description of “high-risk” individuals and the “general population.”
The paper reads: “In most humanitarian settings [i.e. camps], older population groups make up a small percentage of the total population. For this reason, the shielding approach suggests physically separating high-risk individuals from the general population to prioritize the use of the limited available resources and avoid implementing long-term containment measures among the general population.”
In other words, the CDC is saying that older people being held in camps (humanitarian settings), because they are in the ‘high-risk’ category, should be separated from the ‘general population’ in these facilities so as to reduce the ‘containment measures’. OK, fine. But the document never explains who makes up the general population inside the camps, and why these ‘low-risk’ individuals are being held in these humanitarian ‘green zones’ in the first place.
Holy shit.
The CDC actually put together a document to discuss putting high risk people into camps to “shield” low risk people from them.
No— this is not a joke, and yes, every single person who has made a reference to 1930’s Germany is vindicated. https://t.co/II6gjGtb5e
Either due to a careless lack of clarity or deliberate deceptiveness on the part of the CDC, it is not difficult to see how some people could interpret the inclusion of high-risk groups into these ‘humanitarian settings’ to mean the unvaccinated. But even if there is no evil intent to intern the anti-vax crowd in camps, the conditions set down for these humanitarian settings leave much to be desired. Indeed, to be avoided at all costs.
In one passage, it is stated that “monitoring includes both adherence to protocols and potential adverse effects or outcomes due to isolation and stigma. It may be necessary to assign someone within the green zone, if feasible, to minimize movement in/out of green zones.”
Would that ‘someone’ by any chance be the local police or even the US military? The document offers no clues. However, several lines later, the CDC advises that “isolation/separation from family members, loss of freedom and personal interactions may require additional psychosocial support structures/systems.”
Admitting that confinement in these settings would entail “the loss of freedom and personal interactions” strongly suggests that these individuals are being held in these facilities against their will. In fact, reading through the document, one might get the impression the CDC is talking about a maximum-security prison for the criminally insane.
Anyone who thinks being detained in one of these facilities for the ‘high-risk’ would be all fun and games may wish to take particular heed from this line, which warns: “this shielding approach may have an important psychological impact and may lead to significant emotional distress, exacerbate existing mental illness or contribute to anxiety, depression, helplessness, grief, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide among those who are separated or have been left behind.”
Left behind? Left behind from what, exactly? The Rapture?
Finally, the authors of this document seem fully aware that their warm and cuddly humanitarian setting, which seems to more resemble a gulag than a health retreat, will not be welcomed by all members of the general population. Gee, I wonder why.
“While the shielding approach is not meant to be coercive, it may appear forced or be misunderstood in humanitarian settings,” advises the CDC, which appears overly concerned about public perceptions. “As with many community interventions meant to decrease COVID-19 morbidity and mortality, compliance and behavior change… are difficult in developed, stable settings; thus, they may be particularly challenging in humanitarian settings which bring their own set of multi-faceted challenges that need to be taken into account.”
WOW.
"A designated shelter/group of shelters (max 5-10 households), within a small camp or area where high-risk members are grouped together. Neighbors “swap” households to accommodate high-risk individuals." pic.twitter.com/bFoHA4xi2w
The CDC paper references heavily from a March 2020 study authored by one Caroline Favas, entitled ‘Guidance for the Prevention of COVID-19 Infections among High-Risk Individuals in Camps and Camp-like Settings.’ Once again, any hope for clarity is dashed, as this paper, which mentions the words ‘camp’ and ‘camps’ 73 times, is written for “the displaced community itself, humanitarian actors and camp coordination/management authorities.” Few details are given as to who the ‘displaced community’ may be.
(Note: The Favas study provides a broad definition of ‘camp’ or ‘camp-like settings’ as “forcibly displaced population, including refugees and internally displaced living in high density formal or unformal settlements, under collective or individual shelters”).
What follows in the Favas study, which was published by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, occasionally comes off as one of those jargon-riddled medical tracts that are almost as painful to read as a doctor’s handwritten medical prescription. Yet, just as with the CDC paper, the Favas study is crystal clear when it acknowledges that these camps will be viewed negatively by many members of the population.
“Conversely, it is likely that the approach will not be successful if it is perceived as coercive, misunderstood or used by authorities as a pretext for forms of oppression.”
So, who will get to determine who is at high risk of Covid infection and who is not? On this tricky point, Favas, as well as the CDC, wash their hands of the process, leaving it up to ‘community members’ to decide who should be detained in these ‘humanitarian settings’.
“Identification of high-risk community members should be a community-led process, which supports and promotes community ownership of the approach,” Favas avers. “The purpose of the shielding approach and the inclusion criteria should be clearly communicated and explained to the community, so that each household can identify who among them is at risk and should be shielded, on a voluntary basis.”
Favas provides some options for how the detainees could be isolated from their families and communities, none of them terribly comforting. The first involves providing a green zone at the household level. While it may not seem so bad keeping grandma confined to a back room, the author describes the “household shelter” as either a “single shelter” or a “multi-shelter compound.”
The next type of facility is a group of shelters (with maximum 5-10 households), within a small camp area.
Finally, there are the full blown “sector” camps that would accommodate 15,000 or more people. It would be difficult to imagine a camp of such scale that would not require a high police presence, as well as virtually all of the rules and regulations of a prison.
Many people would probably scoff at the thought of Covid camps, dismissing them as the fever dream of a ‘conspiracy theorist’. And perhaps they would be right. After all, just last month, the Associated Press debunked the claim floated in a satirical publication that Joe Biden was planning to send the unvaccinated to quarantine camps until they agreed to take the shot. Yet the increasingly befuddled US leader has made false claims in the past, like promising that Americans would be free from their mask bondage if they agreed to be vaccinated. That promise evaporated last month as the CDC backtracked, mandating mask wearing in places experiencing spikes in Covid levels, even among the vaccinated.
While some may find it irrelevant to discuss a paper that was released by the CDC last year, they may want to ask why the CDC and Caroline Favas were already discussing the possibility of ‘humanitarian settings’, i.e. camps for high-risk individuals, in early 2020, when the outbreak was still in its early stages. Some might say that was jumping the gun.
In any case, now that the CDC document has made a splash one year after its release, it would be a good time for an explanation regarding some of its more ambiguous and even outrageous suggestions. At a time when a feeling of general distrust and even paranoia of Covid measures is sweeping the globe, people need assurances that their real enemy is not the very people they elected to protect them.
All 73 members of Tennessee’s House Republican caucus signed on to a letter to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee requesting that he call a special session of the state legislature so lawmakers can pushback against local coronavirus-related rules.
“We write today to request that you call an extraordinary session of the General Assembly in order for the legislature to convene and address misdirected and mandated responses to COVID-19 by local entities and officials,” the letter declares. “It is of the utmost urgency to move quickly due to the potential of significant harm to Tennesseans.
“We believe there is a need to curtail the overreach by independent health boards and officials, confirm a parent’s right to make decisions that impact the mental and physical health of their children, provide support and direction to schools to ensure educators are properly compensated for COVID-19 leave, and protect all Tennesseans from misdirected mandates designed to limit their ability to make their own decisions,” the letter declares.
The Tennessean noted that even if the Republican governor declines to call a special session, the state legislature could still call one if two-thirds of both chambers backed the move.
“We are reviewing the request,” Lee spokesperson Casey Black noted in a statement on Wednesday, according to the outlet.
Schools in some parts of the state are subject to some sort of mask mandate, according to The Tennessean.
For instance, the Williamson County Schools Board of Education votedon Tuesday to mandate masks indoors and on buses at the elementary school level.
School masking requirements have proven to be highly polarizing throughout the U.S.
“We believe there is much debate needed and action around the appropriate balance of parents’ right to make healthcare decisions for their children and the government’s ability to mandate healthcare decisions upon them. Finally, in addition to the debate needed around continued COVID-19 mandates, the General Assembly needs to evaluate the ongoing discrimination of Tennesseans by prohibiting their access to buildings due only to their vaccination status.”
The United States Senate reportedly saved the Hyde Amendment by one vote after it narrowly blocked taxpayer funding for abortions.
According to the Christian Headlines, the vote of one senator from the Democratic Party on Tuesday saved the federal law that prohibits taxpayer funding of abortions also known as the Hyde Amendment. With that one vote were 49 other from the Republicans that enabled the Hyde Amendment to be added to the Senate’s budget resolution of $3.5 trillion. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin saved the Hyde Amendment that previously had full bipartisan support since the 1970s.
“The Hyde Amendment has been SAVED and added to the latest Senate budget because of DFLA Endorsed Pro-Life Democrat Senator Joe Manchin! Thank you @Sen_JoeManchin for standing up for LIFE!” Democrats for life tweeted on Wednesday.
“Thank you for standing tall to defend life & pro-life Americans,” the Susan B. Anthony List highlighted in their statement.
Susan B. Anthony List National President Marjorie Dannenfelser added that Manchin was different from other Senate Democrats known to “have no problem ignoring their constituents” who majorly oppose taxpayer funding of abortion. Dannenfelser encouraged Manchin to continue his stand “for the unborn.”
“But Senator Manchin has proven himself to be the notable exception by standing up for unborn children, their mothers, and pro-life American taxpayers last night with three strong pro-life votes. West Virginia is a deeply pro-life state, and Senator Manchin’s courageous votes have not gone unnoticed. We encourage him to continue standing tall for the unborn and the pro-life Americans of the Mountain State,” Dannenfelser stressed.
Oklahoma Senator James Lankford was said to have introduced an amendment to the budget resolution of the Democrats by prioritizing the protection of the unborn, specifically by prohibiting the use of taxpayer funds for abortion and discrimination related to abortion. The said amendment was designed to “comply” with the Hyde Amendment and the Weldon Amendment, which gives health care providers protection from discrimination should they refuse to participate in abortion.
“We should all be able to agree-no American should be forced to pay for an abortion through taxpayer dollars. Just because a child is inside the womb does not mean they should be treated any differently by law,” Lankford stressed.
“My amendment restates the long-term agreement that no taxpayer dollars fund an abortion, and no American should be punished for refusing to participate in an abortion. That should not be controversial,” he added.
In June, a group of 22 attorney generals pointed out to Congressmen the importance of the Hyde Amendment in saving the lives of more than two million unborn babies since it was signed 40 years ago. The said attorney generals sent a letter to Congress to express their disappointment that the budget conspiciously omits the Hyde Amendment as directed by President Joe Biden.
Conservative documentarian reveals credit card company is teaching employees that “capitalism is fundamentally racist.”
QUICK FACTS:
Christopher Rufo is a conservative writer, filmmaker, and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
On Wednesday, Rufo tweeted images of an American Express Corp. training program promoting fundamental principles of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
The program asks employees “to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities” and “rank themselves on a hierarchy of ‘privilege.'”
The training also promotes ideas such as “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “intersectionality.”
AmEx employees are also instructed to “deconstruct” personal attributes like “race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity, [and] citizenship.”
WATCH RUFO ON FOX NEWS:
As I told @IngrahamAngle: American corporations are now promoting critical race theory and claiming that capitalism is fundamentally racist. It's a fake ideology, promoted by fake corporate marketing campaigns, seeking to divide, shame, and control the American people. pic.twitter.com/wKgad8lSZD
SCOOP: American Express Corp. has launched a critical race theory training program that teaches employees capitalism is fundamentally racist and asks them to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then rank themselves on a hierarchy of "privilege."
According to whistleblower documents, AmEx executives created an internal "Anti-Racism Initiative" that subjects employees to an extensive training program based on the core tenets of critical race theory, including "systemic racism," "white privilege," and "intersectionality." pic.twitter.com/pnpFkLYK8R
First, an outside firm teaches employees to deconstruct their "race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity, [and] citizenship" onto an official company worksheet—then determine where they stand on a hierarchy of "privilege." pic.twitter.com/NK6op1dex4
AmEx then instructs employees to change their behavior in the office based on their relative position on the racial and sexual hierarchy. For example, if a member of a subordinate group is present, employees should practice "intersectional allyship" and defer to them. pic.twitter.com/qu6P8nqnAd
In another handout, the instructions for white employees are more explicit: "identify the privileges or advantages you have"; "don't speak over members of the Black and African-American community"; "it's not about your intent, it's about the impact you have on your colleague." pic.twitter.com/iyLp8aqQf5
White employees are told not to utter common phrases such as "I don't see color," "we are all human beings," and "everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough," or they will be considered "microaggressors" against their black colleagues. pic.twitter.com/WcOT6wYJsm
Next, AmEx invited Dr. Khalil Muhammad—great-grandson of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad—to lecture on "race in corporate America." Muhammad argued that the system of capitalism is fundamentally racist and based on "racist logics and forms of domination." pic.twitter.com/llIEOUQiR9
Muhammad said the company should reduce credit standards for black customers and sacrifice profits in the interest of race-based reparations. "If you want to do good, then you’re going to have to set up products and [product] lines that don’t maximize profit," he said. pic.twitter.com/OZGDqu5MYl
Finally, AmEx recommends a series of resources for employees to dedicate themselves "to the lifelong task of overcoming our country’s racist heritage." These materials endorse "prison abolition," race-based reparations, and the idea that white children are racist. pic.twitter.com/mjI3kX1OhA
P.S. I'm working on an investigative series exposing critical race theory in America's Fortune 100 companies. If you want to support this work, please consider making a monthly contribution here.https://t.co/GpeTTG6wV4
Effectiveness of Some COVID-19 Vaccines Has Dropped Significantly
The effectiveness of the two most widely used COVID-19 vaccines in the United States dropped significantly in July, a new study found.
The efficacy of shots from Moderna and Pfizer were highly effective in preventing transmission of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, between January and June, researchers with the Mayo Clinic and Massachusetts-based nference discovered.
But the efficacy of Moderna’s jab dropped to 76 percent in July, with Pfizer’s plummeting to 42 percent, researchers said.
The scientists studied health records from the Mayo Clinic to determine the effectiveness in an observational study that was recently published online (pdf) but has not yet been peer reviewed.
At the same time the drop in effectiveness was seen, the Delta variant of the CCP virus became much more prevalent in Minnesota, researchers noted, comprising over 70 percent of the cases in the state.
The researchers also found that alongside the drop in transmission protection, the vaccines remained highly effective against hospitalization.
“Our observational study suggests that while both mRNA COVID-19 vaccines strongly protect against infection and severe disease, there are differences in their real-world effectiveness relative to each other and relative to prior months of the pandemic. Larger studies with more diverse populations are warranted to guide critical pending public and global health decisions, such as the optimal timing for booster doses and which vaccines should be administered to individuals who have not yet received one dose,” they wrote.
Pfizer told The Epoch Times in an email that the company and its partner, BioNTech, “are driven by science to discover the best approaches to protect against COVID-19 and are confident in the protection and safety of the two-dose BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine.”
Moderna did not respond to a request for comment.
Their vaccines are the most widely administered in the United States. Only one other is authorized for emergency use in the country.
The companies recently reported waning effectiveness for the vaccines against transmission, with Moderna’s dropping to 93 percent efficacy after six months and Pfizer’s declining to 84 percent effectiveness.
But other recent studies suggest the possibility of a much lower efficacy, particularly for Pfizer’s jab.
A study from Qatar, for instance, found Pfizer’s effectiveness just 53.5 percent, while researchers in Israel concluded (pdf) it was just 39 percent effective against infection.
The effectiveness was higher in other research, including a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found Pfizer’s shot was 88 percent effective against the Delta variant.
The recent studies taken together point to an estimate of 50- to 60 percent effectiveness in mRNA vaccines against symptomatic infection, according to Eric Topol, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.
“There needs to be truth-telling about the reduced protection of mRNA vaccines vs symptomatic Delta infections,” he wrote on Twitter. “Why is this important? Because we need to protect the protected, the fully vaccinated. Sure we want to get more people vaccinated, but truth engenders trust. And truth helps guide people to be safe, use masks, distance, ventilation and all the other tools we have and know helps.”
Dr. Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and San Francisco General Hospital, said that so-called breakthrough infections, or infections among the vaccinated, are believed to stem from either the reduced incubation period of the delta variant, which causes higher viral loads, or waning antibody titers.
“Since T cells protect us against severe disease, and they do not wane over time, protection from severe disease can be maintained even as nasal antibodies (and protection from mild breakthroughs) wane,” she told The Epoch Times in an email.
The takeaway from the Mayo Clinic research is that vaccines “remain remarkably effective in protecting us against severe disease but the differences seen in mild breakthrough infections with Moderna and Pfizer are likely real and likely reflect a higher antibody response (which protects you against mild infection) with the Moderna vaccine,” she added.
The waning effectiveness in vaccines is prompting U.S. officials to consider recommending certain populations get a booster shot.
The Food and Drug Administration is reportedly set as soon as Thursday to authorize extra COVID-19 vaccine doses, ahead of an Aug. 13 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel meeting that will discuss whether the boosters are required.
The panel weighed last month whether to recommend boosters, but ultimately decided against making a recommendation at that time.