Why this must never happen again. Hopefully Moore Vs. Harper will fix this. Back in 2020 four states, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin in which the state executive branch (that is, the governor or other executive official) and or the judicial branch (that is, the state supreme court) changed the rules of the election apart from the authority of the state legislature.
The Democrats claim this is illegal gerrymandering. But the Republicans use the Constitution as their reason it’s not. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution tells us who makes the rules regarding national elections: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof. . . .” In other words, the Constitution gives the authority over national elections to the legislatures in each of the states.
With the 2024 elections less than two years away, Giving a Secretary of State or Governor dictorial powers was not what the founding fathers wanted. That’s why the state legislatures were given that power. A group of men and women elected by the people for the people.
The fourth part of the “Twitter Files” series was published Saturday night by journalist Michael Shellenberger, outlining how Twitter executives twisted the platform’s rules with the intention of blacklisting former President Donald Trump on January 7, 2020.
In a recently published thread, journalist Michael Shellenberger outlined the fourth release of the “Twitter Files” series, detailing the internal workings at Twitter and conversations between executives ahead of the banning of former President Donald Trump.
Shellenberger states that following the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Twitter faced immense pressure to ban former President Trump, with many claiming they needed to ban Trump for safety reasons. During this time, then-CEO Jack Dorsey was on vacation and appeared to delegate much of the decision-making to other top executives including Global Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth and Head of Legal, Policy, & Trust Vijaya Gadde, the platform’s censorship queen:
On January 7, Dorsey emailed employees saying that the platform must remain consistent in its policies, including allowing users to return to the platform following temporary bans. Roth reassured an employee that “people who care about this… aren’t happy with where we are.”
Roth later excited DM’d colleagues stating “GUESS WHAT. Jack just approved repeat offender for civic integrity.” This would allow Twiter to create a system where five violations of rules would result in permanent suspension:
Colleagues continued to ask Roth about “incitement to violence,” and on January 8, Twitter announced a permanent ban on Trump’s account due to the “risk of the further incitement of violence.” Twitter said that the ban was based on “specifically how [Trump’s tweets] are being received & interpreted,” but Shellenberger notes that in 2019, Twitter stated that it did “not attempt to determine all potential interpretations of the content or its intent.”
In another discussion, Roth asks a colleague to add “stopthesteal” and “Kraken” to a blacklist of terms to be unamplified. The colleague objects stating that doing so could risk “deamplifying counterspeech” that validated the 2020 election results.
The latest Twitter Files release appears to show a general attempt by Roth and other Twitter employees to justify the banning of Trump and attempts to figure out how current policy could be applied in a way that would explain the permanent suspension.
Shellenberger ends the thread by noting that Facebook’s suspension of former President Trump and its willingness to ignore its own rules put the final nail in the coffin for Trump’s return to Twitter.
Sinema going Independent splits the Arizona party. Sure she’s not very popular there now, but say the Republican candidate does poorly and only gets 40%. That leaves Sinema and the endorsed Democrat to split the other 60%.
Also that hurts the Democrat Presidential candidate in 2024. Here’s what the outgoing vice chair of the Arizona party has to say. Her decision could also make it harder for Democrats to carry Arizona on the presidential level again in two years, if she spends two years attacking her party and splintering its successful coalition.
“It does make things more difficult for Joe Biden, but I don’t think she cares at all.”
A top federal judge denied a request from the justice department to hold Donald Trump’s office in contempt of court for failing to fully comply with a subpoena demanding the return of all documents bearing classified markings, according to sources familiar with proceedings.
The chief US judge for the District of Columbia Beryl Howell told the department during a closed-door hearing on Friday to resolve the matter with the Trump legal team itself because a contempt ruling would not hold, the sources said.
The precise details about the hearing were not clear with the case under seal. But the judge’s move amounts to a victory for Trump as he contends with a criminal investigation into unauthorized retention of national security information at his Mar-a-Lago resort and obstruction of justice.
Federal prosecutors had sought to force Trump to name a custodian of records and certify under oath that all documents with classified markings had been returned to the government – as demanded by the grand jury subpoena issued in May – or otherwise find Trump’s office in contempt.
The contempt action is understood to be focused on Trump’s political office because the subpoena sought the return of all documents and writings “in the custody of Donald J Trump and / or the Office of Donald J Trump” bearing classification markings.
In response to the subpoena, Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran turned over a folder of documents to the justice department and asked another Trump lawyer Christina Bobb to sign a certification that she heavily caveated because she had not done the search, the Guardian previously reported.
The letter ultimately said that Bobb was making the attestation “based on the information provided to me” and “to the best of my knowledge”, a fact that she emphasized to the department around the time that prosecutors collected the folder and the certification letter, a person familiar with the matter said.
But after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago on 8 August and found 103 documents marked classified – leading prosecutors to believe the subpoena had not been complied with – the department sought Trump’s lawyers to again certify that no further materials remained.
The Trump legal team has resisted designating a custodian of records and providing a sworn statement, despite repeated requests. That deeply frustrated prosecutors who told the legal team that if they did not provide a second attestation, they would seek judicial enforcement.
Part of the Trump legal team’s reluctance comes because neither they nor any other member of the former president’s office have had custody of all documents marked classified and do not think they could comprehensively answer every question about them, the sources said.
In a statement, a Trump spokesman said the former president and his lawyers would “continue to be transparent and cooperative even in the face of the highly weaponized and corrupt witch-hunt from the Department of ‘Justice’.”
The closed-door court battle between the justice department and Trump’s lawyers comes after it emerged that a search of a storage unit in Florida holding boxes of material belonging to Trump turned up two more documents marked classified, in addition to the 103 found at Mar-a-Lago by the FBI.
It was not clear whether the department initiated the contempt proceeding before or after the two additional documents were found, though the Trump legal team is understood to have turned over the two new documents as soon as they were discovered, the sources said.
By Jeremy Frankel | Thursday, 08 December 2022 09:55 PM EST
Journalist Bari Weiss dropped a second round of “Twitter Files” Thursday.
Following last week’s release by new owner Elon Musk through journalist Matt Taibbi that said it revealed Twitter’s collusion with the Biden 2020 presidential campaign, Weiss revealed “that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.”
Weiss dropped the second batch of files on Thursday in a lengthy Twitter thread, continuing: “Twitter once had a mission ‘to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.’ Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.”
The thread continued with examples, such as Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who was placed on a “Trends Blacklist” after arguing that COVID-19 lockdowns would harm children. The blacklist prevented his tweets from trending.
Conservative radio and TV host Dan Bongino was placed on a “Search Blacklist” at one point, while the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was set to “Do Not Amplify.”
“Twitter denied that it does such things,” Weiss continued. “In 2018, Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: ‘We do not shadow ban.’ They added: ‘And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.'”
“What many people call ‘shadow banning,’ Twitter executives and employees call ‘Visibility Filtering’ or ‘VF.’ Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning,” Weiss continued. “‘Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,’ one senior Twitter employee” said.
“‘VF’ refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the ‘trending’ page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches. All without users’ knowledge,” Weiss said.
A Twitter engineer said, and two other Twitter employees confirmed: “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do.”
Weiss added that the Strategic Response Team-Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET, was the group that made the decision on whether to limit the reach of specific users. This team handled up to 200 “cases” per day.
However, there was also a level that existed beyond official ticketing or following Twitter’s policy on paper, called the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” or “SIP-PES.”
“This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others,” Weiss continued, adding, “This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. ‘Think high follower account, controversial,’ another Twitter employee told us. For these ‘there would be no ticket or anything.'”
One of these accounts was Libs of TikTok (LTT), which was both placed on the Trends Blacklist and designated as “‘Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.'”
Libs of TikTok, which was started by Chaya Raichik in November 2020 and has over 1.4 million followers, received six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik said. “Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against ‘hateful conduct.'” These suspensions each blocked Raichik from posting for up to a week.
However, Weiss continued, “in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that ‘LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.'”
The group internally justified her suspensions by claiming that her posts “encouraged online harassment of ‘hospitals and medical providers’ by insinuating ‘that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.'”
However, when Raichik herself was doxxed and a photo of her home and address went up on Twitter, Twitter Support responded: “We reviewed the reported content, and didn’t find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules.” The doxxing tweet is still up, and no action was taken, Weiss said.
“In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects,” Weiss continued.
Roth said in one of these messages to a colleague that “a lot of times, SI has used technicality spam enforcements as a way to solve a problem created by Safety under-enforcing their policies. Which, again isn’t a problem per se — but it keeps us from addressing the root cause of the issue, which is that our Safety policies need some attention.”
Six days later, Roth messaged an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team requesting more research to support expanding “non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering.”
“Roth wrote: ‘The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.'” Weiss said.
Roth added, “We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations — especially for other policy domains.”
“The authors,” who include journalists Abigail Shrier, Michael Shellenberger, Nellie Bowles and Isaac Grafstein, “have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files,” Weiss said. “The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.
“We’re just getting started on our reporting. Documents cannot tell the whole story here. A big thank you to everyone who has spoken to us so far. If you are a current or former Twitter employee, we’d love to hear from you. Please write to: tips@thefp.com,” Weiss said.
Weiss concluded by telling readers to watch journalist Matt Taibbi for the next installment.
When I saw the USA Today about independent baby killing clinics closing, I reacted with joy. But more needs to be done. Planned Parenthood are by far the largest killers of babies. But this is still a win. Part of the USA article is below.
Twice as many independent abortion clinics have closed so far in 2022 compared to the year before as facilities shuttered in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision this year to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to an association for independent abortion care providers.
As of November, 42 independent abortion clinics closed or were forced to stop providing abortion care in 2022 — more than double the 20 closures in 2021, according to a Tuesday report by the Abortion Care Network.
Independent abortion care providers, also called “indies,” are community-based reproductive health clinics not affiliated with a national organization like Planned Parenthood, said ACN Deputy Director Erin Grant.
While indies represent about 24% of all facilities offering abortion care nationwide, they provide 55% of all abortion procedures, according to the report.
ProPublica and Vanity Fair are left wing, but this ProPublica article states something that most folks didn’t even know existed. the origins of COVID-19 released by the Republican oversight staff of a Senate committee. Here’s another shocker. Our examination affirms that the story, and the totality of reporting it marshals, is sound. So please read the complete article.I’ll give my assessment in the comments section.
On Oct. 28, ProPublica and Vanity Fair published a story about an interim report on the origins of COVID-19 released by the Republican oversight staff of a Senate committee. The interim report was the product of a far-reaching investigation into the question of how the pandemic began, and we wanted to give readers an inside view of the team’s work and share independent experts’ views of its findings.
The debate over COVID-19’s origins has been contentious from the start, and the report’s conclusion that the pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident” triggered criticism. Scientists, China observers and others questioned the Senate team’s findings and our reporting about them.
Over the past several weeks, reporters and editors at both publications have taken a hard look at those criticisms.
Our examination affirms that the story, and the totality of reporting it marshals, is sound.
We re-interviewed some of our original sources and reached out to other specialists to address questions that were raised about the work we did to put in context the evidence cited by the interim report. In particular, we took a close look at how Toy Reid, a State Department political officer on loan to the committee, translated a Chinese Communist Party branch dispatch that was cited in both the interim report and in our story as evidence that staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) may have been responding to a biosafety hazard or breach.
We commissioned three Chinese language experts with impeccable credentials who were not involved in the original story to review Reid’s translation. They all agreed that his version was a plausible way to represent the passage, though two also said they would have translated the words to refer to the dangers of day-to-day lab operations. The third produced a translation that was in line with Reid’s. All agreed the passage was ambiguous. We have updated the story to underscore the complexity of interpreting that dispatch.
We have added additional context to the story. We have also identified two factual errors inconsequential to the premise of the story. They have been corrected.
It remains clear that in 2019, the WIV was addressing serious safety issues while scientists there faced pressure to perform. Risky coronavirus research took place in laboratories that lacked the maximum biocontainment safeguards, according to the interim report.
A series of WIV patents and procurement notices “suggest that the WIV experienced persistent biosafety problems relevant to the containment of an aerosolized respiratory virus like SARS-CoV-2,” the interim report says. On Nov. 19, 2019, the same day a senior government safety official arrived at the WIV to discuss what a meeting summary described as a “complex and grave situation currently facing [bio]security work,” the WIV sought to procure a costly air incinerator. One expert told us such equipment could be used as a “quick fix” if the HEPA air filtration system had failed in some way. A few weeks after that procurement notice, the WIV filed a patent application for an improved device to contain hazardous gases inside a biological chamber, like ones used to transport infected animals.
The interim report described the WIV’s struggles to find disinfectants that were effective enough to kill dangerous pathogens without corroding metal. In November 2020, with the pandemic well under way, the WIV filed a patent application for a new disinfectant. The patent said existing disinfectants corrode metals in ways that could allow pathogens to escape, “resulting in loss of life and property and serious social problems.”
The director of the WIV’s highest-level biosecurity lab acknowledged in September 2019 that some Chinese facilities researching dangerous viruses had “insufficient operational funds for routine yet vital processes.” Dr. Gerald Parker, a biosecurity health expert and adviser to the interim report, said he found such revelations “a recipe for disaster.” He added: “You further couple that with an authoritarian regime where you could be penalized for reporting safety issues. You are in a doom loop of pressure to produce, and if something goes wrong you may not be incentivized to report.”
We continue to see our story as a measured exploration of the array of questions raised about the WIV’s laboratories. The possibility that a biosecurity breach at the WIV occurred, and sparked the pandemic, remains plausible.
We plan to keep reporting on this issue and expect new evidence to emerge. It is our view that both the natural-spillover and laboratory-accident hypotheses for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic merit continued investigation. Given the human toll, which continues to mount, it is imperative that we continue this work.
For those who want to know more details about our exploration of issues raised, our reporting methodologies and conclusions, we are providing more information below on:
After the Vanity Fair-ProPublica story appeared online, questions began to emerge on social media about Reid’s translation of a key passage of a Chinese Communist Party branch dispatch dated Nov. 12, 2019, on the WIV website. According to Reid’s translation, it begins by pointing out that the lab works with dangerous pathogens and that once the test tubes are opened, “it is just as if having opened Pandora’s Box.” While the lab had “various preventive and protective measures,” it was nonetheless important to “avoid operational errors that give rise to dangers.”
The next phrase was the focus of the criticism. It appeared in bold letters in the interim report:
“Every time this has happened, the members of the Zhengdian Lab [BSL4] Party Branch have always run to the frontline, and they have taken real action to mobilize and motivate other research personnel.”
Our story shared Reid’s thought process. We wrote:
“Reid studied the words intently. Was this a reference to past accidents? An admission of an ongoing crisis? A general recognition of hazardous practices? Or all of the above?”
Reid recognized that there was an ambiguity in the phrase he translated as “Every time this has happened.” Did the word “this” refer to the daily dangers of doing experiments in a lab that handles deadly pathogens? Or did it point to the “operational errors that give rise to dangers”?
Before we published our story, Reid told us he found the passage to have a defensive tone. In the story, we quote Reid as concluding, “They are almost saying they know Beijing is about to come down and scream at them.”
Seven days later, on Nov. 19, a senior Chinese official arrived from Beijing to the WIV for a small, high-level safety training. A meeting summary said that the official had come bearing important oral remarks and written instructions from China’s senior leaders, including General Secretary Xi Jinping, related to “the complex and grave situation currently facing [bio]security work.”
To Reid, the mention of instructions from party leaders and reference to a “complex and grave situation” reinforced that the Nov. 12 dispatch was an attempt by the party branch to deflect criticism for something that had gone awry, as he explained.
We interviewed three experts on Chinese Communist Party communications before publication and shared with them the dispatches as they appeared in Chinese on the WIV website. We conducted the interviews on background to get their candid input. They expressed concerns regarding personal safety, given the sensitivity of the subject matter. All agreed with Reid’s interpretation that the safety training on Nov. 19, 2019, as described in the meeting summary, appeared to be urgent, nonroutine and related to some sort of biosafety emergency.
To assess the criticisms of Reid’s work that were raised after the story was published, we commissioned three Chinese translators, each with more than a decade of experience. One has translated for officials at the highest levels of the American and Chinese governments. We wanted their objective view of what the passage said, so we asked them to translate it and did not mention the interim report. After they had done that, we went back and asked them to review Reid’s translation from the report.
All three of their translations were different from one another’s and different from Reid’s. Yet, each agreed that Reid’s translation was one plausible way to translate the passage into English. Our translators looked at the Chinese characters that Reid had translated to read “Every time this has happened” and instead said they read them to mean “on such occasions” or “at every such an occasion.”
Before one of the translators was told what Reid had written, she said she thought the word “occasions” referred to when lab workers make mistakes that lead to hazards — an interpretation that mirrored Reid’s. The two others said they thought “occasions” referred to something more routine: opening test tubes for experiments. The language in Chinese, all three agreed, was ambiguous and could be read either way.
Some readers noted that the Nov. 12, 2019, passage actually appeared in August 2019 in a party publication. The existence of the earlier reference, they argued, proved that its repetition in November meant that it could not refer to a biosecurity emergency at that time.
We took a close look at the August 2019 post and asked our translators and the experts we consulted to do so as well. While the posts were very similar, the version uploaded on the WIV website in November 2019 was slightly different. It included additional language after the sentence that compared opening test tubes of viruses in the lab to opening Pandora’s box. The translator we commissioned who had the most experience rendered the additional language as follows: “These viruses are untraceable both coming and going, and although there are various protective measures, it is still necessary for lab workers to operate very carefully in order to avoid creating dangers through mishandling.” The translator was puzzled by the August post because without the language added in November, “it sounds as if they are leading the charge to open Pandora’s box,” she said. “If I were reading it, I’d be scratching my head.” That additional sentence, she said, “means that they go to the front lines to show everybody to be careful and not to cause errors that would be dangerous.”
One of the experts we consulted before and after publication, a former senior U.S. intelligence official, said the language added in November 2019 gave the post a defensive posture and was consistent with Reid’s analysis that party members were responding to some type of incident. The Chinese idiom that Reid translated as “come without a shadow and leave without a trace,” he said, “is a nice phrase to describe something that sneaked up on you and there was no way to defend against it. They’re basically saying to whoever this is being delivered to: ‘We didn’t see it coming. We did the best that we could to deal with the problem.’”
More on the Corrections and Added Context
There are two sentences in the story that have been corrected.
We reported that a Chinese military vaccinologist who had in the past collaborated with the WIV, Zhou Yusen, was the first to apply for a patent for a vaccine against COVID-19. The interim report stated that Zhou “was the first to patent a COVID-19 vaccine on February 24, 2020.” In fact, other researchers around the world sought patents before Zhou’s Feb. 24, 2020, filing.
However, it was the timing and nature of Zhou’s patent application and subsequent research papers that raised questions for interim report researchers.
In our review of early SARS-CoV-2 vaccine patent filings, the U.S. patent applications we found that predated Zhou’s were provisional applications, a number of which forecast experiments they planned to do in the future. Many of these applications were for vaccine candidates proposing to use a technology like mRNA. Such applications could be filed with the SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence in hand and minimal experiment data.
By contrast, Zhou filed a full patent application for a different kind of vaccine that required more upfront work before its submission. Our story says, “In his patent application and in subsequently published papers, Zhou documented a robust research and development process that included both adapting the virus to wild-type mice and infecting genetically modified ones with humanized lungs.” We have updated the story to make clear why Zhou’s work stood out to the interim report researchers.
In our article, we quoted two independent experts and one adviser to the interim report about when they thought Zhou’s research was likely to have begun. After reviewing the patent and the papers, two said that they thought Zhou would have had to have started this work no later than November 2019. Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, said he believed Zhou’s timetable was feasible since his team had substantial expertise and ongoing work developing similar SARS-related coronavirus vaccines, but only if “everything went right.”
We have also corrected the sentence stating that Gabriel Gras was the last French expert at the WIV. We have learned that at least one other French scientist came to the WIV after Gras left.
Elsewhere, we’ve clarified language. Our story said that party officials at the WIV’s top biosafety lab “repeatedly lamented” the problem of “the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber].” We found two references to this concept in party branch dispatches on the WIV website in 2019. These Chinese Communist Party dispatches, we reported, “are often couched in a narrative of heroism — a focus on problems overcome and challenges met, against daunting odds.” We have updated the story to clarify that authors of those posts referred to the “three ‘nos’” as a recounting of problems from early in the lab’s construction that they said had been overcome, rather than a reference to ongoing struggles.
However, one of the experts on party communications we consulted saw the inclusion of the “three ‘nos’” in WIV dispatches as a telling sign that these serious problems from the beginning were “part of the DNA of this lab.”
On Whether the Lab Leak Is a Question Worthy of Exploration
Our story and the interim report pointed to a pair of oft-cited scientific analyses of COVID-19’s origins, one of which concludes that the pandemic was likely the result of multiple zoonotic events in which “two distinct viral lineages” of SARS-CoV-2 that had been circulating among animals at a Wuhan market infected people there.
Michael Worobey, an author on both papers, undoubtedly speaks for many when he says that natural spillover is “the only plausible scenario for the origin of the pandemic.” We repeatedly heard the perspective that the scientific case on the origins of COVID-19 is closed and that exploring the possibility that the coronavirus could have leaked from a Chinese laboratory is something no news organization or government official should take seriously.
We believe the opposite, that it remains an essential avenue for exploration to prevent future pandemics. And as interviews with other scientists before and after publication have made clear, the question is far from resolved. In their view, there is not enough evidence to establish how the virus first reached the now-infamous Wuhan market or to assert that zoonotic spillover is the sole possible explanation for the pandemic’s origin.
Bloom, the virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, is among those scientists. “I’ve never seen anything as controversial as this in my field,” he said. “The amount of toxicity is out of control. Each side feels uniquely wronged. To me, it remains an open question.”
The story noted that the interim report also left this question open: “The authors of the interim report do not claim to have definitively solved the mystery of COVID-19’s origin.” And the story also said the interim report is “no likelier” than studies of a zoonotic origin to “close the book on the origins debate, nor does it attempt to.”
Bloom believes the findings of the interim report and the story reinforce a need to continue to explore all possible causes of the pandemic. At the same time, he recognizes that the reactions to these investigations underscore the difficulty of having a dispassionate conversation about these questions. “Right now, this whole topic is so politically fraught, it’s hard for people to give objective assessments,” he said. “We may need an independent commission to get to the bottom of this.”
I found this in my local newspaper and right away I thought of Popeye’s number one customer and fan. I lovingly admire him for his ability to put down that fried chicken.
Louisiana is known for delivering food with big, bold flavor. The same can be said for the founder of the Popeyes fried chicken empire, who put spicy chicken, red beans and dirty rice on the national map and whose story is outlined in a new book, “Secrets of a Tastemaker: Al Copeland, The Cookbook.”
Copeland’s son Al Copeland Jr. said he and authors Chris Rose and Kit Wohl tried to capture the “real life and times of Al Copeland” in the book released last month.
Popeyes founder Al Copeland in New Orleans in 1979. (AP Photo, File)
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This photo provided by Foxglove Communications shows Al Copeland Jr. with his cookbook “Secrets of a Tastemaker: Al Copeland, The Cookbook.” (Sam Hanna/Foxglove Communications via AP)
Popeyes founder Al Copeland in New Orleans in 1979. (AP Photo, File)
The elder Copeland, who died in 2008, made his mark in business with his restaurants, but was also known for philanthropic endeavors — including “Secret Santa” missions to thousands of children in metro New Orleans and the extravagant Christmas light display at his home. For a time, he even had a successful offshore powerboat racing career.
“Some people thought he was flashy and flamboyant, and he was,” his son said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But what they didn’t know was that everything that was his was yours — whether that was a Lamborghini or just welcoming you into his home. He was very much a man who enjoyed seeing people happy.”
Copeland built — and eventually lost — the Popeyes fried chicken empire. His first restaurant opened 50 years ago, in 1972, in the New Orleans suburb of Arabi. The “Love That Chicken” jingle, still used in commercials today, debuted in 1980.
The book recounts Copeland’s boldness in cooking, and includes recipes — though not those associated with Popeyes, his son said. Readers can get a glimpse, he said, into the kind of food Al Copeland used in Copeland’s, the casual dining restaurant chain venture he started in 1983.
The book includes dishes served at the Copeland family table, including corn and crab bisque, crawfish bread, ricochet catfish, crawfish eggplant au gratin, and pork tenderloin CP3, named for then-New Orleans Hornets star guard Chris Paul.
“What runs throughout the book … is the story of the American dream,” Copeland Jr. said. “This book is about a guy who didn’t have much of anything, not much of an education and he was living in a world that wouldn’t give him much of a shot.”
By 1989, there were 700 Popeyes franchises in the United States and abroad, and Copeland leveraged those assets to buy the Church’s Fried Chicken chain. That move gave him control over 2,000 chicken restaurants. But the success was short-lived: A little more than two years later, the merged company had amassed more than $400 million in debt and, in 1991, Copeland filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for Al Copeland Enterprises.
In May 1992, the bankruptcy court awarded Copeland’s creditors total control of his chicken empire under a new name, America’s Favorite Chicken Company. Copeland did retain ownership of the Popeyes recipes and the manufacturing company that made the seasonings, according to the book.
“Although he was not operating Popeyes, the company could not operate — not even exist — without him,” the book reads. “That ruling reinforced Al’s longtime belief that he should always have a back door, an alternative plan for change.”
In 2017, Restaurant Brands International Inc. acquired Popeyes.
“He has done almost more than any other chef to get the city’s most authentic flavors to people everywhere,” she said. “I think of him as an ambassador for New Orleans … because wherever there’s a Popeyes, then you have the chance to get a piece of New Orleans.”
The September book launch helped mark the 50th anniversary of Popeyes. Copeland Jr. said the fried chicken franchise was founded when he was 9 years old so he’s had a “chance to experience the whole ride from the poorer times to the exciting times.”
“This project is bringing back a lifetime of memories and it’s a way for my father’s legacy to live on,” he said.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? One potential answer is that the chicken was first, and the egg was in it. So it is with our current dilemma: which came first, the corruption of science or the censoring of speech?
It appears they’ve walked hand-in-hand for quite some time, becoming all the more apparent with the consolidation of social media power and the collective efforts of federal bureaucrats who wish to control not only what you think but especially what you say. During no time in human history was this more obvious than during the COVID-19 crisis where social engineering tactics were used against the American public, not to limit your exposure to a virus, but to limit your exposure to information that did not fit within a government sanctioned narrative.
Throughout the pandemic, doctors, scientists, patients, and families were censored, shadow-banned, blocked, and punished for having views, opinions, and research findings disfavored by the government and their chosen gatekeepers. Hard fast truths that have become indisputable over time, ranging from the effectiveness of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine to the potential dangers of Remdesivir and the failures of the vaccine were labeled as “disinformation” and “misinformation.”
This was done in direct collusion with social media companies, allowing the federal government and its senior officials to effectively silence legitimate debate in the modern public square. And just as George Washington warned in 1783, “dumb and silent” many of us were “led, like sheep, to the slaughter.” Still the government’s message remained clear: trust the science and believe Dr. Anthony Fauci.
However, science is not belief; a scientist is not supposed to believe anything. It is the role of the scientist to question, debate, refute, and demonstrate with evidence – not blindly accept ideas based on a set of beliefs. Yet over time, classical, evidence-based science has been usurped by hyper-monetized and hyper-propagandized institutions still hiding behind the mask of what it used to be.
For example, Fauci, who believes he represents science itself, has a long history of silencing dissent, neutralizing debate, and destroying the career of any scientist who disagrees with him by ensuring their research is never funded, published, or taken seriously. Many a scientist over the past fifty years has been vilified, ridiculed, and sacrificed at this altar of Fauci-ism and the profits that come with it. As a result, he has never been forced to debate or prove anything over his 54 years with the NIH. Yet he argues in the documentary FAUCI, “I’m the bad guy to an entire subset of people because I represent something that is uncomfortable to them. It’s called the truth.”
In that same film, Susan Rice waxed poetic about Fauci’s “fact-based, evidence-based leadership” while Bill Gates called him “a rockstar” for the truth. Indeed, the man who has graced everything from prayer candles to the covers of InStyle and People magazine has been touted as a symbol of consistency, integrity, and truth. And in collusion with social media, he became the curator of supposedly scientifically-based, evidence-based speech. Anything that did not meet that uniquely Fauci standard, whether on Facebook, Twitter, or even Pinterest, had to be destroyed faster than SARS-CoV-2 itself.
So, over our seven-hour deposition, what did Fauci have to say about the “science” he supposedly represents? What evidence did he have to support his unquestionable beliefs, from aggressive mask mandates to lockdowns? Why did he attempt to hide his work with Dr. Peter Daszak on gain-of-function research and attempt to kill the highly likely lab-leak theory?
And if the mRNA vaccines his NIH actively developed over the past decade are so effective, why did the multi-jabbed Fauci glare at the court reporter who happened to sneeze, then have her wear a mask because he “didn’t want to catch COVID?” Instead of providing us with answers, this supposed beacon of truth said “I don’t recall” 174 times, all while evading questions, trying to run out the clock, and insisting he’s a very busy man (with his signature condescension).
But the fact is, Fauci was never too busy to have Mark Zuckerberg and others actively censor those who did know, who were right, and who might have saved lives during this recent pandemic. Of course, Fauci insists another one is right around the corner; but thanks to this lawsuit, such censorship of voices in the name of pseudoscience should never happen again.
That is our goal moving forward – to ensure that your First Amendment rights are not only protected but also enforced. Hopefully then real science can return to its rightful place in our society as an evidence-based pursuit of Truth, because anything less is simply Newspeak.
A Texas federal judge has ordered Southwest Airlines to reinstate Charlene Carter, the flight attendant who made headlines after a jury ruled that she was unlawfully fired for expressing pro-life views and for criticizing her union.
In a decision filed on Dec. 5, five months after a jury decided in Carter’s favor, Judge Brantley Starr remarked, “Bags fly free with Southwest. But free speech didn’t fly at all with Southwest in this case.”
Starr granted Carter $300,000 in compensatory and punitive damages from Southwest; $300,000 in compensatory and punitive damages from the flight attendants’ union, Transport Workers Union of America Local 556; $150,000 in back pay, and $60,180.82 in prejudgment interest.
Although the jury voted that Carter deserved more than $5 million, laws and rules limit the amount that can be awarded in such cases.
“The jury also awarded front [or future] pay, but Carter would rather have her job back,” the judge wrote. “The Court reinstates Carter to her former position … If the Court opted for front pay over reinstatement, the court would complete Southwest’s unlawful scheme. Reinstatement is appropriate.”
Further, the judge explicitly ordered Southwest and Local 556 to share the jury’s verdict and Starr’s decision with all members of the union via email and to post the documents in conspicuous places for a 60-day period.
Starr’s order also forbids both the company and the union “from discriminating against Southwest flight attendants for their religious practices and beliefs, including—but not limited to—those expressed on social media and those concerning abortion.”
Southwest and Local 556 are required to inform employees that federal law prohibits such discrimination.
Both entities also must “reasonably accommodate Southwest flight attendants’ sincerely held religious beliefs, practices, and observances,” Starr wrote.
The judge’s rulings and rationale are contained in three documents totaling 43 pages in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division.
Carter, who now lives in Colorado, fought for five years after she was fired. As The Epoch Times previously reported, Carter had become an outspoken opponent of abortion after she suffered physical and emotional effects from terminating a pregnancy years earlier, when she was 19.
In 2017, Carter sent private Facebook messages to Audrey Stone, then president of Local 556, railing against the union’s participation in the national Women’s March.
It was an event sponsored, in part, by Planned Parenthood, a pro-abortion group.
Stone complained to Southwest about Carter’s messages. Soon thereafter, the airline fired Carter from the job she had held for two decades.