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They can find who owns pot in the WH but not who owns Cocaine found in the WH? Oh all the drugs showing up at the WH. It’s just like the good old days when Clinton and Obama were there.
So the Secret Service finds the pot and who owned it, but yet are unable to find anything on the Cocaine user? Who really believes that?
Not saying the Cocaine is Hunter’s, but it’s obvious it belonged to someone higher up.
Nuff Said.
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In a breakout session in a windowless conference room at last weekend’s Moms for Liberty “Joyful Warrior Summit” in Philadelphia, Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party and father of three school-aged daughters, is stiffening spines. Dozens of attendees, mostly women, are nodding and taking notes as Ziegler explains how to work with local news media.
“Your product is parental rights. Your product is protecting children and eliminating indoctrination and the sexualization of children. You’re the grassroots. You’re on the ground. You’re the moms, the grandparents, the families that are impacted. The stories you tell help set a narrative,” Ziegler coaches them.
One story above us, the ballroom floor of the downtown Marriott is groaning under the weight of crowded press risers, where camera crews have set up for the parade of Republican presidential hopefuls coming here to curry favor with the more than 600 Moms for Liberty members attending—and a few thousand more watching the livestream.
Ron DeSantis held forth this morning. Nikki Haley is scheduled to speak at lunch. Donald Trump will close things out later this afternoon. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are on tap for tomorrow.
It’s an astonishing display of political drawing power, considering Moms for Liberty didn’t even exist three years ago. The candidates have all come to pay obeisance to the animating idea that has galvanized these women: that parents—not the government—should be in charge of how their children are raised and educated.
If you want to understand why these politicians have come, you need to go to the breakout sessions, away from the camera’s gaze, where, hour after hour, Moms for Liberty chapter leaders and foot soldiers learn how to run for school boards—and if they win, how to advance their agenda even when in the minority. There are talks on messaging strategies and mining school board minutes for signs of “woke indoctrination.” There are workshops on how to file public records requests and navigate the legal system.
They aren’t messing around. More than half of the 500 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed for local school board elections last year won their races. “School choice moms” provided the margin of victory in DeSantis’ first run for Florida governor in 2018. Democrat Terry McAuliffe was leading the race for Virginia governor in 2021 before his debate remark that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” handed the win to Republican Glenn Youngkin.
Moms for Liberty is the beating heart of this country’s movement of angry parents—and American education has never seen anything quite like it.
Moms for Liberty launched in January 2021 when frustration with pandemic masking rules had reached a boiling point. Requests to form local chapters started coming in almost immediately after co-founder Tina Descovich called in to Glenn Beck’s radio show. Appearances on The Rush Limbaugh Show, Fox News, and Steve Bannon’s War Room quickly followed. Within six months, Megyn Kelly was hosting a fundraiser. Its slogan, emblazoned on thousands of t-shirts, is “We don’t co-parent with the government.”
That message has found an enormous and growing audience. With 120,000 members and nearly 300 chapters in 45 U.S. states, Moms for Liberty is already the most consequential education advocacy organization since Teach For America—but with none of the halo effect that inspired a generation of elite college grads to put off law school and Wall Street to teach in inner cities.
Moms for Liberty is Teach For America’s dark opposite number. They won’t be talked out of their conviction that malign forces in public schools—gender ideology, critical race theory, Marxism, anti-Americanism—have come for their children, and they’re having exactly none of it.
“I think they’re one of the few truly authentic and responsive edu-parental rights groups that has emerged in recent history,” says a prominent parent choice supporter not associated with Moms for Liberty, who would only speak anonymously because of the group’s radioactive reputation in education and philanthropic circles. “They’re not just mouthpieces on social media; they have a real following. If they weren’t effective, and if their message wasn’t resonant, they wouldn’t be so vilified.”
It’s true the group attracts and frequently abides a lunatic fringe, fueling its critics’ counternarrative that the movement is intolerant, racist even.
Just last week, an Indiana Moms for Liberty chapter put a Hitler quote in its newsletter and the story went national. The quote—“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”—was intended to warn parents what happens when a regime targets its children for indoctrination. But when critics are calling you ultra-right wing Christofascists, it’s probably unwise to invoke Hitler in any context.
The local chapter chair apologized, “probably because she hasn’t gone through this” training, Ziegler tells the crowd.
“Frankly, it was bullshit.”
Even before the Hitler controversy, media coverage of the group has been harsh. The Nation described Moms for Liberty as “hateful fascist bigots.” The New Republic said the group has “created nightmares for schools across the country.” An article in Vice reported they have ties to the Proud Boys—a claim that co-founder Tiffany Justice strenuously denied to me. A story in The Washington Post led with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s recent designation of Moms for Liberty as an “extremist group” devoted to spreading “messages of anti-inclusion and hate.”
When Ziegler’s wife, Bridget, one of the original Moms for Liberty, started serving on the school board in Sarasota County, Florida, nearly a decade ago, the negative press coverage reduced her to tears. Now, Ziegler tells the room, the couple compares their bad press clips on date nights.
“You actually get to this amazing moment when you realize, ‘Hey, if they attack me, I can go raise money on this. I can get my message out by piggybacking on that attack,’ ” advises Ziegler.
“It’s brutal to be on defense,” he continues. “Always play offense. Never apologize. Never, ever, never,” he insists.
Ziegler, meanwhile, likes this morning’s Washington Post story just fine, even though it details a litany of complaints and criticisms aimed at the group. “Moms for Liberty didn’t exist three years ago. Now,” the paper says, “it’s a GOP kingmaker.”
“Probably the best headline I’ve ever seen,” he grins.
While Moms for Liberty was not mentioned by name, the letter cited several incidents at which members had protested. Since then, 25 state associations have cut ties with NSBA. At the Philadelphia summit, a handful of mothers were proudly wearing “Domestic Terrorist” t-shirts.
Outside the Marriott, protesters from ACT UP Philly and the Young Communist League are registering their displeasure with an all-day “dance party protest”—a strange response to the fascist threat they insist is unfolding four flights up. From beyond barricades several hundred feet away they shout at the hotel and wave signs: “Philly is a Trans City,” “Kancel Klanned Karenhood,” and “Moms for Liberty Go Home!”
But the Moms are unrepentant. They seem almost to revel in the abuse.
On the eve of the Philadelphia Summit, co-founder Tiffany Justice told me, “We are fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.”
A few years ago, if you had to bet on which parent organization could influence the 2024 election, the smart wager would have been on the well-funded National Parents Union (NPU), which calls itself an “authentically parent-led organization,” a label that Moms for Liberty would undoubtedly use to describe itself.
The afternoon before Moms for Liberty kicked off their conference, NPU held a sparsely attended rally in Philadelphia’s Love Park to condemn its “evil and divisive” rival, which, it claimed, seeks school book bans and to whitewash history lessons taught to children. What Moms for Liberty insists are efforts to keep pornography out of school libraries and to combat “indoctrination” about critical race theory and gender fluidity, NPU says are attempts to attack and marginalize children of color and LGBTQ youth.
At the Love Park rally, NPU’s president publicly blasted Moms for Liberty, stating unironically that they’re bankrolled by “big checks from the evils of white supremacy.” NPU, for its part, has raised millions in philanthropic support from the Walton Family Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Charles Koch Institute-backed Vela Fund.
Moms for Liberty’s most recent tax filings from 2021 claim a modest $370,000 of revenue. Descovich says accountants are finalizing Moms for Liberty’s updated Form 990, which “will show that our revenue sources have grown from merchandise sales and small donors to include large donors too.” Justice confirms that she and Descovich now draw full-time salaries for their work. They are two of nine full-time staffers.
Their grassroots appeal is easily observable. At the summit, I ran into a neighbor who last year upended our small town in upstate New York with a failed campaign for school board, pushing back on “government overreach” and demanding a return to “traditional education.”
“What are the chances we’d run into each other here!” he greets me.
“Probably 100 percent,” I reply. I write about education for a living and he’s here with his wife, who’s thinking about launching a local chapter. They are the Moms for Liberty couple from central casting.
Until Moms for Liberty, efforts to organize parents into an effective political counterweight to teachers unions and to impose their will on K–12 education haven’t amounted to very much. Colleen Dippel, the founder of Houston-based Families Empowered, a parent support organization with no connection to the group, says of Moms for Liberty: “They are doing things that other organizations have received millions of dollars to do and haven’t been able to get done. The National Parents Union hasn’t flipped a school board. They haven’t changed a policy that I’m aware of.”
The rise of Moms for Liberty as a force in education policy, local elections, and now the 2024 campaign is, if anything, a function of their refusal to follow the playbook common to parent advocacy organizations, which tend to wither and die when their philanthropic support dries up.
“Philanthropists will never be able to control these women,” says Dippel. “Why? Because these women are college educated and they don’t need their money. They also have time, they have skills, and they’re empowered primary voters. The message they send to elected officials is, ‘No, no, no. My kid, my money, you work for me. And if you don’t, I’ll organize all these other women, tell them what’s going on, and kick you out of office, because that’s democracy, right?’ ”
At a private dinner on Friday night after Trump’s speech, pollster Jim McLaughlin presented Moms for Liberty’s leaders and advisers with the results of a survey he conducted of likely voters in the upcoming general election. A clear majority (67 percent) feel that K–12 public education in the U.S. is “on the wrong track,” including half of Democrats, he says. Nearly three-fourths, including independents and Biden voters, think it’s more important for schools to teach children “basics” like reading, writing, and math rather than “issues of social justice, reproductive rights, sex education, and transgender issues.”
Matt Palumbo, a 30-year veteran Republican political adviser who has worked on seven presidential campaigns and attended the briefing said, “I’ve never seen a consensus like this. This is a winning issue.”
Obviously, schools do not choose between teaching reading and gender ideology, but it was hard to miss the narrative taking shape in real time in Philadelphia. The basic thrust of Moms for Liberty’s advocacy—that parents, not the government, should have the ultimate say in what children are taught in public schools—has legs. Not one subgroup in McLaughlin’s crosstabs—Trump or Biden voters; pro-life or pro-choice; black, white, or Hispanic; urban, rural, or suburban—disagrees.
Education is a state issue, not a federal one; schools are ground zero in the country’s culture war, and Moms for Liberty is positioned to be at the center of it through next November. A majority of Americans simply don’t buy the idea that a person can be a gender other than the one “assigned at birth,” and they don’t want their children taught otherwise in public schools. Every presidential contender who came to the summit talked about it in one form or another. And the crowd leapt to its feet every time.
But the passion and energy that has rocketed Moms for Liberty to kingmaker status is also its Achilles heel: some overly zealous members have gone too far.
Members of a local Tennessee chapter last year, for example, sued to remove an outstanding English curriculum, Wit & Wisdom, from their school district, on the grounds that its elementary school texts about civil rights icons Ruby Bridges and Martin Luther King Jr. are too dark and disturbing for children and violate state laws against teaching critical race theory. A New Hampshire chapter offered a $500 bounty “for the person that first successfully catches a public school teacher breaking this [state’s anti-critical race theory] law.” An Arkansas Mom was banned from school grounds after an audio recording captured her saying “if I had any mental issues, [school employees] would all be plowed down by a freaking gun right now.”
Neither are the group’s fanatical elements limited only to local chapters. On Saturday morning at the conference, Moms for Liberty fixture James Lindsay painted a picture of the organization as “war moms” fighting a “Maoist cultural revolution” engineered at the highest levels of government and elite institutions. When Mao came to power, Lindsay claimed, his first step was to close schools and reeducate teachers. “They shut down the schools for two years and came back with a whole new program. Does that sound familiar?”
Lindsay’s conspiracy theory earned him a raucous standing ovation.
Erika Donalds, the wife of Florida Congressman Byron Donalds and another former school board member who was present at the founding (she remains on Moms for Liberty’s board), believes the group is ready for its moment in the national spotlight, but she’s clear-eyed about the potential pitfalls of such a rapid rise. “They’re very intentional about who speaks on behalf of the organization. They train their members on the issues, and they get out in front of things,” she says. “But their biggest risk is some rogue woman wearing a Moms for Liberty shirt at a school board meeting acting like a cuckoo.”
Tiffany Justice acknowledges the risk to the brand but minimizes the downside.
“There is no doubt in my mind that there will be things that chapters do that we may not agree with, or we may not be able to stop in advance,” she tells me. “If it rises to something that’s the level of violating our code of conduct, we have no problem removing a chapter chair or taking the steps to remove a member. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. This work is difficult. And we know that.”
Teach For America, which is now derided by conservatives for its hard left turn into “woke” education, claims that 270 of its alumni serve in elected positions around the country “from state representatives to city council members to school board officials.” Moms for Liberty might have that many or more school board members already, and a multiple of that number weighing a run. Teach For America has been around for 30 years. Moms for Liberty? Thirty months. And the way things are going, their influence is likely to explode in the next few years.
“Today’s school board members are tomorrow’s state legislators,” said Christian Ziegler, the Florida Republican Party chairman, when I spoke with him a few days after the Philadelphia summit. His wife, Bridget, who is serving what she says will be her last school board term in Sarasota, is leading a new program for school board candidates at the Virginia-based Leadership Institute, which since 1979 has trained 250,000 conservative activists in campaigns, fundraising, and communications.
“And today’s state legislators are tomorrow’s congressmen.”
Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of How the Other Half Learns. Follow him on Twitter at @rpondiscio.
For more about the education culture wars, read Eric Kaufmann’s recent piece “The Indoctrination of the American Mind.”
I have never had a problem with gays or POCs in and of themselves. And I support any who have legitimate grievances. What I DO have a problem with is those who think they are entitled to special treatment because of what they are or claim to be or who DEMAND others bow down in acquiescence to their lifestyle choices. –TPR
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Bitch slapping of the FBI director. Here’s a collection of Wray giving his spin and some outright lies.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1679156142344110080
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TIPP Poll: Half of Dems Say Hunter Got Special Treatment.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans, including 49% of Democrats, believe Hunter Biden received preferential treatment related to tax evasion and gun charges, according to a DailyMail.com/TIPP Poll released on Wednesday.
The nationwide online survey of 1,300 adults, taken July 5-7, showed 61% either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed that President Joe Biden’s son received special treatment from the IRS and Department of Justice. Among Democrats, 49% agreed and only 32% disagreed. The poll had a margin of error of +/- 2.7 percentage points.
Hunter Biden struck a deal with the DOJ in which he would plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax offenses and admit to illegally possessing a weapon after his 2018 purchase of a handgun. As part of that admission, he would enter a diversion program, and if he meets the conditions of the program, the gun charge would be removed from his record.
A majority of every demographic used in the poll believed Hunter Biden received preferential treatment, including Republicans (83%), men (69%), women (54%), Hispanics (57%), and Blacks (55%).
Even among liberals, 44% polled said Hunter Biden received special treatment, compared with 41% who said he didn’t. Among conservatives, 69% said he had preferential treatment.
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The bill, which was introduced in February by Democratic Assembly taxpaying citMember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, was approved by the state Assembly in May and is currently being debated in the state Senate, according to Fox News.
Assembly Bill 852 would add a section to the California Penal Code requiring courts, when they have the power to decide a prison sentence, to take into account how racial minorities have been affected differently than others in order to “rectify racial bias.”
“It is the intent of the Legislature to rectify the racial bias that has historically permeated our criminal justice system as documented by the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” the proposed section reads.
“Whenever the court has discretion to determine the appropriate sentence according to relevant statutes and the sentencing rules of the Judicial Council, the court presiding over a criminal matter shall consider the disparate impact on historically disenfranchised and system-impacted populations.”
The task force, which was created from legislation signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020, published its recommendations in June, Fox News reported. The state legislature will debate whether to implement them.
Jones-Sawyer is a member of the reparations task force, according to NBC News.
Eligible black California residents could receive more than $115,000, or roughly $2,352 per year of residency from 1971 to 2020, in compensation for excessive policing and felony drug arrests, as well as disproportionate incarceration during the alleged war on drugs, Fox News reported.
Jones-Sawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wow. Give criminals money for being caught. What a novel concept!
Answer: YES! (Unless the parties enjoying the preference are non-White, of course.)
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Israeli professor Dr. Gal Luft, a key Biden whistleblower who was “missing” for several weeks, has been indicted by the Department of Justice just days after releasing a video in which he accused the Biden family of accepting bribes and assisting the Chinese government.
Luft has been accused of failing to register as a foreign agent while working to advance the interests of China in the United States. In addition to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the eight-count federal indictment includes charges of arms trafficking, Iranian sanctions violations, and making false statements to federal agents.
“As alleged, Gal Luft, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen and co-head of a Maryland think tank, engaged in multiple, serious criminal schemes. He subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking U.S. Government official; he acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams.
More on the indictment from Fox News:
First, LUFT conspired with others in an effort to act within the United States to advance the interests of the People’s Republic of China (“China”) as agents of China-based principals, without registering as foreign agents as required under U.S. law.
As part of this scheme, while serving as the co-director of a Maryland-based non-profit think tank, LUFT agreed to covertly recruit and pay, on behalf of principals based in China, a former high-ranking U.S. Government official (“Individual-1”), including in 2016 while the former official was an adviser to the then-President-elect, to publicly support certain policies with respect to China without LUFT or Individual-1 filing a registration statement as an agent of a foreign principal with the Attorney General of the United States, in violation of FARA.
Among other things, in the weeks before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, LUFT and a co-conspirator (“CC-1”), who is a Chinese national and worked for a Chinese nongovernmental organization affiliated with a Chinese energy company, created a written “dialogue” between CC-1 and Individual-1, in which LUFT wrote Individual-1’s responses and included information that was favorable to China.
The dialogue was then published in a Chinese newspaper online and sent to, among others, individuals in the United States, including a journalist and professors at multiple U.S. universities. When LUFT was writing the dialogue, CC-1 told LUFT that “[i]n these articles, we do not want to spill all the beans yet, just enough to let ‘people’ know he [i.e., Individual-1] is in the corridor of power to be. Just broad stroke policy consideration that leaves plenty of room for interpretation and imagination to be filled in later.”
After the purported “conversations” were published, LUFT told CC-1 that certain information, favorable to China, had been “tucked between the lines.” Shortly after the 2016 election, LUFT and CC-1 also discussed possible roles Individual-1 might have in the incoming U.S. administration and discussed Individual-1 taking a “silent trip” to China. LUFT responded that “[w]e are debating about his role in the new admin. There are all kinds of considerations . . .We should talk ftf [i.e., face-to-face] as there can be a supremely unique opportunity for china.”
Last week, Luft uploaded a video from an “undisclosed location” in which he claimed he was being detained in order to prevent his scheduled testimony before the House Oversight Committee. The professor asserts that the Biden family received payments from individuals with alleged ties to Chinese military intelligence, further alleging the existence of an FBI mole who leaked classified information to China-controlled energy company CEFC.
“I, who volunteered to inform the US government about a potential security breach and about compromising information about a man vying to be the next president, am now being hunted by the very same people who I informed — and may have to live on the run for the rest of my life on the run …,” Luft said.
“I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I have no political motive or agenda … I did it out of deep concern that if the Bidens were to come to power, the country would be facing the same traumatic Russia collusion scandal — only this time with China. Sadly, because of the DOJ’s cover-up, this is exactly what happened,” he continued.
House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) recently told Newsmax that Luft was in talks with the committee and would soon be testifying. Comer described Luft as “highly credible,” adding that, “this is a credible witness that the FBI flew all the way to Brussels to interview and sent several agents to interview. This is someone who knew about CEFC in detail long before the laptop ever became public.”
Gee, isn’t it strange how these charges all of a sudden appeared out of left field (pun intended)? An Israeli accused of broking deals with the Iranians — swore enemies of Israel? Really?????
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Federal Judge slaps down Biden witch-hunt again. Yes my friends the Federal Judge again put a hurting to the Biden Cartel. Judge Terry Doughty denied the Biden Administration’s attempt to halt preliminary injunction pending the outcome of appeal in the historic First Amendment case that was reported on Independence Day.
The Cartel wanted the judge to allow them to continue their meetings of misinformation with Social Media. At least until they hopefully could get a favorable ruling from the 5th. Judge said no.
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Does the mainstream media need to bring back the ombudsman to restore credibility and trust? Liberal journalists should acknowledge it’s natural that people wronged by the Bidens would be welcomed by the conservative media, just as Trump-haters (like angry niece Mary Trump) would be celebrated by the liberal media.
In case you didn’t know, the MSM tends to leave out stories and articles that point out the wrong doings of the Biden Administration and their far left allies.
But they don’t pass up an opportunity to report negatively on Conservatives even when they don’t have verification on the articles that they print. How do we correct that?
Here’s parts of an interesting article from The Poynter.
Despite a slight increase since 2016, the public’s low level of trust in the mainstream media is of deep concern for the future of journalism.
Nearly half of people surveyed listed inaccuracies, bias and “fake news” as factors in their low confidence. A general lack of credibility and the perception that reporting is based on opinions was also cited for the loss of trust. But the Gallup poll did offer a glimmer of hope. Nearly 70% of all respondents said they felt trust could be restored somehow.
Would the return of ombudsmen improve public trust in the mainstream media? If so, what changes in the traditional ombudsman role would make its use even more effective? Eight former ombudsmen weigh in with their thoughts on the current state of journalism and the role of ombudsmen in the era of online journalism.
“The ombudsman was thought to be an independent, autonomous person, on a level with the editor-in-chief of the paper’s organizational level, but not reporting to anyone in the newspaper,” said Mark Prendergast, who from 2009 to 2012 was the ombudsman at Stars and Stripes.
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DOJ files an appeal. Wishes to continue having Social Media block Conservatives. It looks as if the DOJ is upset that the federal judge put a clamp on their ability to spread false information using Social Media. Well the judge had good reason to do this.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lashed out at the Trump judge for granting a preliminary injunction, blocking the federal government from censoring conservatives online.
The State Department canceled its future meetings with Facebook just one day after US District Court Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee who still honors the US Constitution, accused the Biden Regime of violating the First Amendment by censoring unfavorable views in a blistering 155-page opinion.
So let’s see if it comes out that the government had other secret meetings with other Social Media Venues.
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Walensky’s hypocritical exit from the CDC.
This week, The Wall Street Journal reports that Rochelle Walensky steps down as CDC director and warns the public to be on guard against misinformation and the politicisation of science.
Ironically, this comes after two and a half years of Walensky misinforming the public and politicising the science.
I have documented how Walensky misled Congress on various issues, including covid vaccine effectiveness against viral transmission and on Cochrane’s review of face masks.
Walensky testified that her public statement on MSNBC in March 2021 about how “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, they do not get sick” was accurate. But even today, the FDA states that efficacy against transmission is unproven.
Walensky also said that the summary of Cochrane’s review of face masks had been “retracted.” But it was neither retracted, nor had the authors of the review changed the language in the summary.
A recent, damning study by Krohnert et al, solidifies criticism of the agency. The researchers compiled instances of numerical and statistical errors made by the CDC during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After reviewing CDC publications, press releases, interviews, meetings, and Twitter accounts, they found a total of 25 instances where Walensky’s agency promoted demonstrably false numbers and statistical errors.
The majority (80%) of these instances exaggerated the severity of the COVID-19 situation. For example, on Oct 27, 2021, Walensky said “there have been 745 deaths in children less than 18,” but the National Center for Health Statistics showed it was 558 deaths.
At a White House COVID-19 briefing on Jun 23, 2022, Walensky claimed that COVID-19 was a “top 5 cause of death” in children, which was also untrue.
And in Feb this year, Walensky testified before Congress that there had been “2000 paediatric deaths from COVID-19”, when in fact, it was 1400-1500.
In some cases, the errors were not corrected, or the errors were repeated. Notably, the vast majority of errors (94%) made by the CDC pertained to exaggerated COVID-19 risks to children, which the authors say would have influenced the discussion of pandemic policies.
“The CDC’s errors have likely led the public to believe children’s risks are higher than they truly are,” wrote the authors.
“CDC’s guidance repeatedly called for restrictions being placed on children, including school closures, mask mandates, and strong recommendations for vaccinations and multiple boosters even among children who have recovered from the virus,” they added.
Consequently, the authors suggested that the agency responsible for reporting health statistics should be firewalled from the agency setting health policy – something that would avoid biased statistics or the politicisation of the science.
At the commencement of her tenure at the CDC, Walensky wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times saying she found it “extremely disturbing” hearing reports that White House officials in the Trump administration interfered with official guidance of the CDC.
“I believe in the agency’s mission and commitment to knowledge, statistics and guidance. I will do so by leading with facts, science and integrity and being accountable for them,” wrote Walensky.
But the public has not witnessed any accountability – the opposite in fact. Now that her tenure is over, Walensky remains defiant as she reflects on her time as director.
“We made this world a safer place. I have never been prouder of anything I have done in my professional career,” said Walensky after announcing her resignation.
The Biden administration has since nominated Dr Mandy Cohen, an internal medicine physician and former state health secretary in North Carolina, as the new CDC director to replace Walensky.
But many fear that Cohen will implement more of the same unevidenced, misguided health policies as her predecessor.
Cohen supported forcibly masking children in schools, and promoted cloth masks despite no evidence for their effectiveness at stopping viral spread, which many say, should have been immediately disqualifying for the position.
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