The Michigan civil rights law was amended to allow the state to dictate who the religious schools hire. Parents from Sacred Heart Academy in Grand Rapids have filed a federal lawsuit against Michigan officials.
Catholics, Jews, and Muslims unite against anti religious Michigan law. Three major religions in America are united as one when it comes to a civil rights law that was amended to go after Conservative religious beliefs.
The lawsuit has gained support from the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty and the Religious Freedom Institute’s Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team, both of which say the legislation will have “an especially deleterious effect” on minority faiths, according to a report from Fox News.
The Michigan Civil Rights Act was amended to cover sexual orientation and gender identity but “provided no protection for religious organizations that believe marriage between one man and one woman and the immutability of sex support human flourishing,” according to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who is representing Sacred Heart.
“The missing protections mean that the change to the law requires Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish and its school, Sacred Heart Academy, to hire faculty and staff who lead lives in direct opposition to the Catholic faith, speak messages that violate Church doctrine, and decline to articulate Catholic beliefs in teaching students and when advertising the school to prospective students or job applicants,” ADF said in a statement.
The Biden-Harris reelection campaign shared a “handy guide for responding to crazy MAGA nonsense” for supporters heading into the holidays with Trump supporting family members.
The guide shared talking points to respond to conservative rhetoric about subjects from immigration to the economy. One slide included responses to when someone claims “Trump secured our border!” to reply with a “No he didn’t,” followed by claims that “All he did was separate families, put children in cages, and leave behind a broken immigration system for Joe Biden to clean up.”
Critics across social media shredded the list of talking points, arguing it takes an especially insufferable kind of person to approach the Thanksgiving table looking forward to an argument rather than eating with family.
“Democrats literally publishing a script of how to be the worst person at Thanksgiving,” Republican digital strategist Alec Sears wrote.
“Imagine needing political talking points for a holiday encounter with loved ones,” podcast host Siraj Hashmi wrote.
“Reminder to all political persuasions: Preparing political talking points to use against family members on Thanksgiving is a form of mental illness,” author John Durant wrote. “Show some maturity, speak with the right tone, or change the subject.”
Other commentators accused Biden-Harris campaign of pushing “propaganda.”
“Biden-Harris putting out propaganda scripts to defend their campaign is… gross,” conservative radio host Jason Rantz wrote.
“All this gaslighting would make North Korean state media blush,” Twitchy’s Doug Powers wrote.
Efforts to Silence Trump Harm All Americans. If you think that these attacks on former President Trump, doesn’t affect you, you’re dead wrong. Be you from all sides of the political spectrum, you will be in danger of government weaponization.
You have judges making decisions before the trial even starts. Judges allowing the prosecution to attack the defense, but stopping the defense from responding and defending themselves.
An attorney for Donald Trump told Newsmax on Friday that efforts to place gag orders on the former president in two court cases not only violate his First Amendment right to free speech, but also the rights of others who wish to hear what he has to say.
Gag orders have been placed on Trump by a judge presiding over his D.C. election interference case and by a judge presiding over his $250 million civil fraud trial in New York. Trump was fined $15,000 by New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron for twice violating that gag order, which was temporarily stayed by a New York appellate court.
“The First Amendment not only protects President Trump’s right to speak freely about what’s happening to him, but it also protects our rights as American citizens to receive information,” Christina Bobb told “Eric Bolling The Balance” guest host Sebastian Gorka. “They’re trying to block us from receiving information from the most popular presidential candidate in the race currently, Republican or Democrat.
“This very much is an effort to try to interfere with our ability to understand what President Trump is doing, what’s going on with him with his policy positions, with his views on this. They’re absolutely trying to prevent him from gaining popularity because everything he does and everything they do to him, he only grows in the polls.”
Bobb said the efforts to silence Trump, whether through gag orders or civil and criminal proceedings, have been a systematic assault on the president and the rights of all Americans, from the Department of Justice (DOJ) on down.
“It absolutely appears coordinated,” she said. “A few years ago, people used to talk about the deep state or the administrative state or the political class. Whatever you want to call it, the political establishment. I think we all kind of thought of it as this thing that didn’t really have form.
“But now I think we can see exactly how coordinated it is and how calculated they communicate with folks. If you look at [DOJ special counsel] Jack Smith all the way down to [Fulton County Prosecutor] Fani Willis. A county DA. I mean, this is a local race. This is a local district attorney in one county in Georgia and then coordinating with the state attorney general in New York [Letitia James]. It’s exceptionally coordinated from the highest levels down to simple county officials.”
Who will they come for next? Progressives goal to wipe out diversity and social disagreement. Have you noticed that those who claim that diversity is their goal want only those who think like they do?
The target since the Obama age was only single white males, then females, and white married couples were added. Children were the last that were added to the list. And maybe they will achieve their goal when they import the new China virus.
Ann Coulter did a take on a famous poem I’m sure you will recognize. Whites are still the main target, but only the beginning.
First they came for working class whites and I did not speak out— Because I was not a working class white.
Then they came for white police officers and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white police officer.
Then they came for white women who call the police, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a white women who calls the police.
Then they came for the white college applicants, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white college applicant.
Then they came for statues of white male American heroes and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white male American hero.
Then they came for whites applying for jobs with the S&P 100 and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white applying for a job with the S&P 100.
Worked in 2020 will it work in 2024? China sending another medical threat? Tony the Fauch ready to come out of retirement? Yes my friends it looks as it China is at it again. Don’t believe me? just ask the WHO. We have this from NBC.
World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it has requested information from China regarding the increase in cases of respiratory diseases and clusters of pneumonia among children.
But China said not to worry there’s nothing here so go on and leave us alone. Of course the WHO went along with China and said no travel restrictions against our friend China.
Chinese authorities attributed the increase in respiratory disease cases to the end of restrictions imposed to contain COVID-19 and the circulation of known pathogens. You buying that?
Just how scared is the left? Axios did this big article about two weeks ago about the plans for a Trump takeover when and if he wins the 2024 Election. My friends the fear is real. You need to read the whole article, but here’s just a part.
Former President Trump’s allies are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potential foot soldiers, as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024, officials involved in the effort tell Axios.
Why it matters: Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents.
The screening for ready-to-serve loyalists has already begun, driven in part by artificial intelligence from tech giant Oracle, contracted for the project.
We had a fake commission of Pelosi handpicked partisans who voted for impeachment. Now that we have the 44,000 hours of video, let’s have a real commission.
Make it small. 2 Democrats and three Republicans. And open up the hearing with Trumps full statement on a peaceful protest. What say you?
Funny Church Signs That May Make You Chuckle. I’m sure you’ve seen them. The church signs that are used to draw folks in. Many are humorous and if you don’t stop in, I’m sure you read them and tell others. So let’s begin.
You were admitted to Harvard with SAT scores that would have gotten an Asian kid disowned by his parents.
You manage to keep your show at MSNBC with ratings that would get a white person canceled.
People try harder to laugh at your excruciating jokes than they would for a male of any race.
Plus, I have it on good authority that no one at MSNBC has pestered you about touching your hair.
Your brief daytime show on MSNBC made ratings history, garnering only 38,000 viewers in the demo its first day on air — the lowest for the entire network! That inched up to 56,000 viewers two days later, the second lowest for the network. Ronan Farrow’s show debuted the same week. But while he was quickly cashiered for poor ratings, you were promoted, even though he is white and you are black. Dodged a bullet there!
You weren’t prosecuted for making a false FBI report when you claimed that right-wing saboteurs had hacked your blog, planting long, venomous threads about gay people. It seems your go-to attack for celebrities and Republicans is to accuse them of being gay. (For example, you described Dick Cheney “topping off” Sean Hannity — gay slang for oral sex — and repeatedly ran your “Top 5 ‘totally not gay celebrities of the year.'”)
Nor were you fired for your preposterous, and quickly disproved, lies about having been hacked when it was you who mocked people for being gay — including Oprah.
Your many, many blog posts sneering at gays were written just 10 years earlier, when you were an adult and a professional journalist. Meanwhile, teenagers — even white ones! — are being thrown out of college for the stupid things they said on Snapchat when they were 15. But you came through like a champ, without consequence — despite being black!
Indeed, instead of firing you, MSNBC gave you a prime-time show. This is the network that canned Chris Matthews (astonishingly, another white male) for telling girls they’re pretty. And who took the humiliated Matthews’ time slot? YOU DID! Despite the fact that he is white and you are black.
Actually, if you think about it, in a deeply racist, majority-white country, you’ve done pretty well issuing nonstop libels against white people. Here are three recent quotes:
Joy-Ann: “I’ll say it again: People on the right would trade all the tax cuts for the ability to openly say the N-word like in ‘the good old days.’”
That comment, like many made by you, seems at variance with the facts and not based in reality. But has your delusional hatred of white Americans held you back? Not so’s you’d notice.
Joy-Ann: “Your kid can’t read certain books or learn about history while their kids get Christian prayer in school and get to hurl the n-word on Twitter with no consequences.”
Did kids “hurl the n-word” at your high school, Joy-Ann? You know, the high school in Denver, Colorado, in the 1980s? My heart wants to believe you, but my head is telling me, “This woman is a lunatic fantasist.”
I’ll tell you why I say that. Just 10 years after you matriculated at Denver’s diverse Montbello High School, a Nation of Islam minister was invited to speak, whereupon he told the assembly (all boys, no girls allowed) that, while blacks were building the Egyptian pyramids, white people “ate their dead” and “slept with animals.” Even you have to admit, THAT wasn’t racist.
Joy-Ann: [Thanksgiving is] “a simplistic fairytale interpretation of a 1621 encounter between Indigenous tribes and English settlers that erases the genocide that followed.”
Wow. People who are actually descended from American slaves — Joy-Ann is not one of them — don’t hate white Americans that much. Yet, strangely, white Americans, despite being white, haven’t held that against you.
Your immigrant parents came here in the late 1960s, settling in Iowa. Perhaps you rank Iowa up there with Denver as a bastion of Jim Crow, but even you would have to concede it was a step up from Guyana and the Congo.
While having zero American slave ancestry, you have managed to elbow aside actual descendants of American slaves (DOAS), gobbling up the benefits earned by their ancestors’ suffering and intended for them. That was a good deal for you!
Finally, notwithstanding the White Power Structure, you have a job that reportedly pays millions of dollarsa year, which is more than 99.9% of Americans make — even several white ones! All in all, that doesn’t sound so bad.
Barack Obama shakes hands with Francis Collins, director of National Institutes of Health, in 2009. Collins said warnings of dangerous genetically engineered viruses were ‘science fiction’ In the last days of the administration, he said at a contentious WH meeting that a DOE threat assessment “reads like a movie script.”
“Delete That Comment”
In late October 2017, a US health official from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a glimpse of an eagerly anticipated work in progress. The WIV, a leading research institute, was putting the finishing touches on China’s first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. Operating with the highest safeguards, the lab would enable scientists to study some of the world’s most lethal pathogens.
The project had support from Western governments seeking a more robust partnership with China’s top scientists. France had helped design the facility. Canada, before long, would send virus samples. And in the US, NIAID was channeling grant dollars through an American organization called EcoHealth Alliance, a controversial research group at the center of the Covid lab leak theory, to help fund the WIV’s cutting-edge coronavirus research.
That funding allowed the NIAID official, who worked out of the US embassy in Beijing, to become one of the first Americans to tour the lab. Her goal was to facilitate cooperation between American and Chinese scientists. Nevertheless, says Asha M. George, executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, a nonprofit that advises the US government on biodefense policy, “If you want to know what’s going on in a closed country, one of the things the US has done is give them grant money.”
The lab — where theFBI believes Covid leaked from — was found to have a ‘serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate’.
The official — who is unnamed due to concerns for her safety — from the NIAID, run by Anthony Fauci at the time, was instructed to erase the safety failures in her report to avoid angering China.
And this wasn’t the first time concerns over engineered viruses were dismissed. A year prior, US officials at the DOE warned the NIAID of the dangers of genetically engineered and altered pathogens. However, longtime head of the NIH, Francis Collins, called the claims ‘science fiction.’
The NIAID official told her superiors what she’d gleaned from the technician who’d served as her guide. The lab, which was not yet fully operational, was struggling to develop enough expertise among its staff—a concern in a setting that had no tolerance for errors. “According to [the technician], being the first P4 [or BSL-4] lab in the country, they have to learn everything from zero,” she wrote. “They rely on those scientists who have worked in P4 labs outside China to train the other scientists how to operate.”
She’d also learned something else “alarming” from the technician, she wrote. Researchers at the WIV intended to study Ebola, but Chinese government restrictions prevented them from importing samples. As a result, they were considering using a technique called reverse genetics to engineer Ebola in the lab.
Anticipating that this information would set off alarm bells in the US, the official cautioned, “I was shocked to hear what he said [about reverse engineering Ebola]. I also worry the reaction of people in Washington when they read this. I don’t want the information particularly using reverse genetics to create viruses to get out, which would affect the ability for our future information gain,” meaning it would impair the collaboration between NIAID and the WIV. “I don’t feel comfortable for the broader audience within the government circle [to hear this]. It could be very sensitive.”
There was good reason to fear that such a revelation could derail the fledgling partnership. One year earlier, the US Department of Energy had warned other agencies, including NIAID’s parent entity, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that advanced genetic engineering techniques could be misused for malign ends. The Energy Department had developed a classified proposal, reported on here for the first time, to ramp up safeguards against that possibility and develop tools to better detect evidence of genetic engineering. The proposal, which was not implemented in its suggested form, prompted a heated interagency battle.
F. Gray Handley, then NIAID’s associate director for international research affairs, responded to the email agreeing with the official. His response included: “As we discussed. Delete that comment.”
On January 19, 2018, the US embassy in Beijing issued a sensitive but unclassified cable that included details from the NIAID official’s tour. It said that WIV scientists themselves had noted the “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate” the lab, according to an unredacted copy obtained by Vanity Fair. But the cable did not include the information that her NIAID colleagues apparently found most worrying.
For synthetic biologists, the idea of engineering Ebola isn’t seen as particularly unusual. Reverse genetics, using the CRISPR gene editing technology developed roughly a decade ago, is now a widely used laboratory technique. The WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory was designed to safely research Ebola, be it natural or man-made. Some scientists argue that, for research purposes, it can be safer to make a deadly pathogen in-house than to risk transporting it.
However, according to Stanford microbiologist David Relman, the risks of the WIV producing something new or unknown may have driven the government’s concern. “When you are reverse engineering Ebola, you have now established a platform from which you can do [a] million different things with Ebola, or something that you call Ebola,” he says. “It means you can now make any variant or construct that is Ebola-like at will.”
US government warnings about scientific collaborations in autocratic countries predate the pandemic and cut across partisan lines.
Any effort to shield the technician’s Ebola remarks from wider scrutiny within the federal government would be “a dereliction of responsibility,” says Gerald Parker, former commander of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).
Some view ongoing questions about biosafety at the WIV as part of a Republican campaign to discredit Anthony Fauci, who led NIAID for 38 years. But US government warnings about scientific collaborations in autocratic countries predate the pandemic and cut across partisan lines. Concerns flagged in the Obama administration persisted through the Trump administration and are being examined today.
“There’s a dark side” to certain research, says Jason Paragas. “Just because you’re doing it to publish a paper doesn’t mean no one is going to do anything bad.”
Between 2015 and 2023, at least seven US entities supplied NIH grant money to labs in China performing animal experiments, totaling $3,306,061 — that we know about.
“Serious Security Concerns”
Operating out of a sprawling 300-acre campus in Bethesda, Maryland, the National Institutes of Health describes itself as “the federal focal point for health research.” Each year it makes more than 50,000 grants, distributing the majority of its $48 billion budget to researchers in the US and around the world. Among its 27 institutes and centers is NIAID, which distributed $5.3 billion in the 2023 fiscal year alone.
For the NIH and its grantees, global collaboration and transparent data sharing are synonymous with scientific progress. Even a trickle of grant money to a foreign lab can pay dividends. It can give US researchers access to new environments and viruses and help build trust that may elude bickering governments. “It is almost always beneficial to exchange ideas and samples with other countries, particularly those with different climates than our own,” says Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “I don’t see why science funding should be reserved for friendly countries.”
But within the federal government, there is a different world of scientists: those tasked with anticipating threats to national security. In the open exchange of cutting-edge research with scientists in autocratic countries, they see the risk that science that serves the public good could be misappropriated to cause harm—a phenomenon known as dual-use research of concern. Worries about dual-use research have only grown with the easy accessibility of DNA-editing tools. Those technologies have opened the door to miraculous treatments, such as using gene editing to reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease. But “there’s a dark side” to certain research, says Jason Paragas, former director of innovation at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “Just because you’re doing it to publish a paper doesn’t mean no one is going to do anything bad.”
Lawrence Livermore is one of 17 national laboratories overseen by the Department of Energy, a science and technology agency with strong intelligence capabilities, a number of whose scientists regularly review classified threats. “They spend their time in a dark world, faced with the nastiness of what could go on,” says Diane DiEuliis, a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University. Sometimes they flag concerns for scientists who, given their focus on open research, are “not willing to even contemplate what they’re talking about.”
Based on classified threat assessments, and concerns raised by DOE scientists, Brouillette urged NIAID to use caution in its collaborations with Chinese government scientists
DOE officials issued their most specific warning in mid-2019, just months before the pandemic began. Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette alerted a top Fauci adviser that the coronavirus research the US was helping to fund at the WIV risked being misappropriated for military purposes. Based on classified threat assessments, and concerns raised by DOE scientists, Brouillette urged NIAID to use caution in its collaborations with Chinese government scientists. His warning should have served as a red flag for any research the agency was conducting with China, according to two sources with knowledge of the exchange.
A spokesperson for NIAID said, “We are not aware of this interaction.” A spokesperson for Fauci, who has advised seven presidents on infectious disease policy and [supposedly] championed expanded treatment options for HIV and AIDS, said he was unavailable to respond to questions.
Shi Zhengli – dubbed the ‘Bat Lady’ or ‘Bat Woman’ for her work on bat coronaviruses – “investigated the possibility” Covid could have emerged from her lab back in 2020, according to colleagues. And you thought that little mask protected you?
Though the DOE and the NIH have partnered on historic endeavors, from the Human Genome Project to the Cancer Moonshot, they’ve also battled over what restrictions, if any, should be placed on technologies that allow scientists to synthesize and edit DNA. “We came at it from the point of view, ‘There are serious security concerns,’” says Ernest Moniz, who served as DOE secretary under Obama. “Our view was always, ‘We have to address them in ways that do not unduly restrict basic science.’ But what is the meaning of ‘unduly’? There lies the entire matter.” In meetings during the final months of the Obama administration, the longtime head of the NIH, Francis Collins, dismissed such risks as “science fiction,” according to several people present.
This June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued a declassified report that provided a snapshot of perspectives on the COVID-19 origins question across America’s intelligence agencies. According to the report, the DOE and the FBI believe the pandemic is most likely to have originated with a lab leak. The National Intelligence Council and four other agencies say the virus most likely spilled over from a natural host, and two others, including the CIA, say there isn’t enough evidence to support one conclusion over the other.
All the intelligence agencies agree that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a bioweapon, the report said, and “almost all” agree it “was not genetically engineered.” Three sources said that DOE scientists, using an array of advanced tools and working out of several different labs, including Lawrence Livermore, Argonne, and Oak Ridge, could not rule out the possibility that the virus’s sequence had been engineered.
The ODNI report also found that People’s Liberation Army scientists sometimes worked out of WIV labs and collaborated with its civilian scientists on biosecurity projects and coronavirus research to address public health needs.
The Chinese government encourages such intermingling with a policy called military-civil fusion, which aims to harness civilian scientific innovation to advance military goals.
“This Reads Like a Movie Script”
In 2011, a Dutch virologist named Ron Fouchier announced at a scientific conference that he’d genetically engineered what he’d later describe as “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.” He had altered the H5N1 avian influenza strain to make it transmissible among ferrets, which are genetically closer to humans than mice are. The experiment had been funded, in part, by the NIH.
Fouchier’s announcement triggered an uproar over what’s known today as gain-of-function research of concern—lab work that enhances the virulence or transmissibility of pathogens to help assess their threat to humans and develop countermeasures. Though the NIH has advocated for such research, others in the scientific community organized against it, arguing that creating pathogens that don’t exist in nature runs the risk of unleashing them.
The Dutch government initially blocked Fouchier from publishing his findings, for fear that they could serve as a how-to manual for bioterrorists.
Amid the controversy, the NIH assembled a high-level group, nicknamed the “ferrets committee,” to advise it on the risks of funding such research. As one member of the advisory group recalled, “We were worried we could be in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.”
From 2009 to 2021, the NIH was led by Francis Collins, whose achievements include discovering the gene that causes cystic fibrosis. In March 2012, Collins wrote an email to members of the ferrets committee in which he acknowledged, “I am not familiar with the Biologic and Toxic Weapons Convention. Can our crack legal staff offer any opinions on this question?”
The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, enforced since 1975, is the most significant treaty that governs the development and use of biological agents.
In response, a staffer emailed her supervisor: “I can’t believe he doesn’t know what the BWC is???!!! yikes.” The supervisor replied, “It shows you how different our worlds are.”
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