Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake during a rally in Chandler, Ariz., on Oct. 18, 2022. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
“This graphic was never meant to go on air—the numbers were only part of a test.”
The television station that used to employ Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake on Oct. 27 called the race for Lake’s opponent, despite the fact the election won’t be held until November.
A graphic displayed by Fox 10, the TV station, said that Katie Hobbs, the Democrat nominee, won the election with 53 percent of the vote.
The graphic was shown during a newscast at about 5:50 p.m. local time.
Fox 10 acknowledged airing the graphic, blaming what happened on a test gone wrong.
The graphic showed “test results for the upcoming election,” the broadcaster said. “These were generated by the Associated Press which distributes results to clients.”
“This graphic was never meant to go on air—the numbers were only part of a test. The station has taken steps to make sure this cannot happen again,” it added.
Lake said the graphic may have been a retaliatory move because it happened shortly after she held a press conference urging reporters to do their due diligence to check claims by Arizona Democrats that a person who broke into Hobbs’ campaign office was linked to Lake.
State Rep. Jake Hoffman, a Republican, said in response that he would introduce a bill in the future addressing the situation.
“While I understand the need for internal planning by news stations, errors like this that are broadcast live to the public pose a legitimate threat to our Republic and serve only to undermine the confidence that Arizonans have in the integrity of their vote,” Hoffman said in a statement. “What if this had happened on election night of the day before the election? The impact to our democratic process would be devastating.”
The legislation would hold news outlets accountable should they interfere with Arizona’s election and/or disenfranchise Arizona voters like this in the future,” Hoffman said.
The midterm election is slated to take place on Nov. 8.
Early voting has already begun in Arizona.
Lake, 53, has never before held office. She worked for Fox 10, or KSAZ-TV, for 22 years before leaving in March 2021. She launched her campaign several months later.
Hobbs, 52, was elected Arizona secretary of state in 2018. Before that, she was part of the Arizona legislature.
W. Taylor comment, on Epoch Times:
“Either this is a deliberate misinformation campaign to fool people into not going to vote, or mailing in their ballots, or they just gave away the store. They somehow knew by how much the Democratic ballot counting operatives were going to overwhelm Kari Lake. Perhaps the DoJ told them since they’re going to ‘ensure election integrity.’ “
Is it a real news site -- or is it propaganda in disguise instead
Democrat operatives have set up websites disguised as innocent local news to disseminate leftist propaganda and boost blue candidates in swing states ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
As of October, Local Report Inc., an organization formed just last year, created more than 50 websites masquerading as online news media outlets to influence “local” coverage of key races and issues.
A closer look by Axios found that these sites are also associated with and sometimes even manned by writers from The American Independent, a progressive media group founded by the same Democrat operative, David Brock, who created the leftist propaganda machine Media Matters for America.
For those who remember, Media Matters for America trained a large group of individuals to troll and disrupt conservative websites during the runup to the 2016 presidential elections, and David Brock was behind it — TPR
The websites target voters in swing states such as Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin with stories that look like news but are actually designed to boost Democrats’ midterm priorities.
That includes amplifying pro-abortion candidates and their unpopular baby-killing agenda, celebrating Democrats’ embrace of the crisis-plagued Biden Administration, and penning hit pieces that target Republican candidates in tight races.
In some cases, Local Report’s websites went so far as to copy the work of other legitimate news organizations and were still rewarded with the attention of Democrats such as Stacey Abrams.
Not blaming @staceyabrams, but there are some issues here.
1. “The Columbus News/colonews.org” is not a Columbus, GA news source, and this website stole/didn’t properly credit my reporting. It’s also twisting the story a little. #gapolhttps://t.co/4rWDHx41Di
In fact, Axios reports that “Local Report stories have popped up in communications from the Democrat Parties of Georgia and Michigan, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state and independent political groups such as Color of Change and the Democratic Coalition.”
Kemp supports loan forgiveness for himself, but not for hardworking families — he had $38,000 in PPP loans forgiven and has gotten loans from a bank he has special connections to.
Why does Kemp not want working Georgians to get loan relief like he did?https://t.co/dnSgmERHpS
While serving in the state house “in the wake of the Michigan State University gymnastics scandal involving Larry Nassar,” @TudorDixon‘s right hand Shane Hernandez “repeatedly opposed bipartisan efforts to expand protections for sexual assault victims.”https://t.co/a2eMm60JLD
The 2020 election @JocelynBenson oversaw had MI’s highest voting rate in 60 years — largely because she sent absentee ballot applications to all registered voters to make voting safer during COVID-19.
By manufacturing “news” websites to influence voters, Local Report joins the efforts of other Democrat propaganda groups including the George Soros-linked Courier Newsroom, which prides itself on disguising leftist narratives as local news. The supervisor tasked with overseeing the launch of Courier admitted in a 2020 interview with Vice that “it’s more effective to create ‘news content’ than to simply run ads for Democratic causes.”
Seeing as Democrats’ top issues such as abortion and climate change aren’t faring well with voters, who are more concerned about inflation, economic recession, and rising crime, it’s no surprise that they feel the need to hide their shady campaigning behind inconspicuous sites.
Axios calls these actions a “ploy.” Contrast that characterization with a report from Politico, which called GOP efforts to restore the balance in news in the 2018 election cycle “fake” news. Sham fact-checking website Snopes and Harvard’s media arm Nieman Lab used similar framing in the 2020 election cycle when it smeared Republicans for entering the world of media and said their presence was just going to “exacerbate polarization.”
The press is certainly not unfamiliar with harnessing its control of information to influence elections. During the 2020 elections, the corrupt corporate media tried to memory-hole the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell by claiming it was Russian disinformation. Other outlets such as NPR went so far as to pledge not to cover the issue at all. ✪
Former President Donald Trump with Justice Samuel Alito. Alito briefly blocked a lower court order forcing the Biden administration to reinstate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, giving the Supreme Court a few days to consider the case. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
By Michael Washburn for Epoch TimesSeptember 16, 2022
Democrats believe their best hope is to position themselves as the only alternative to Trump
In the coming midterms, Democrats believe their best hope is to position themselves as the only alternative to Trump and his brand of Republicanism, according to political strategists.
Democrat candidates and their supporters, they say, are hoping that the furor around former President Donald Trump’s alleged storing of sensitive documents in Mar-a-Lago, as well as his alleged role in the events of Jan. 6 will not abate even slightly between now and the November midterm elections, and will distract voters from the Democrats’ shortcomings, particularly with regard to the economy.
Even in battleground states where a variety of Republican candidates competed in this week’s primary elections, Democrats are acting as if their best bet is to paint all Republicans as nascent or actual extremists and to capitalize on some voters’ dissatisfaction with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the strategists argue.
President Joe Biden and his party have come in for severe criticism for their handling of the economy and for an inflation report credited with bringing about the stock market’s worst day of 2022 on Sept. 13, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down nearly 1,300 points. Some economists view the highest inflation in four decades as a function of the Biden administration’s expansionist monetary policy, which they argue has led to too much money chasing too few goods. For fiscal year 2022 as a whole, the federal budget deficit is projected to be $1 trillion.
These dismal figures may motivate GOP voters as much as, or more than the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will drive Democrat turnout, strategists predict.
In this context, Democrats are quick to seize on any potentially bad news for Trump as good news for their embattled party. Indeed, for some Democrats, the ongoing investigation of Trump’s alleged legal and financial violations may help cast the midterms as a referendum not only on the current president and his economic performance, but on Trump and those Republicans who, they claim, fit the same mold. Given the severity of Biden’s problems, Democrats will do their best to exploit charges and allegations against Trump to their fullest political advantage whether or not the attacks have merit, strategists say.
“Every day brings the risk of more bad news about Trump, which splashes mud on every Republican. The Dobbs ruling is known and GOP candidates either get on the right side of the issue or shift to the economy, which is a bigger deal for most voters,” Keith Naughton, a political consultant and the director of Germantown, Maryland-based Silent Majority Strategies, told The Epoch Times.
Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower in N.Y. on Aug. 9, 2022, the day after FBI agents raided his Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach home, in Fla. (David ‘Dee’ Delgado/Reuters)
A Double-Edged Sword?
Mark C. Smith, a professor of political science and Director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville University in Ohio, acknowledges Trump’s continuing prominence within the GOP and his popularity with many Republican voters. This has helped make the coming elections, in large part, what some voters in either party would like it to be: a Trump-Biden rematch as much as a spate of House, Senate, and gubernatorial races.
“Unlike other losing presidential candidates, Trump has maintained a strong presence within his party. He is endorsing candidates, raising funds, and holding rallies. This changes the dynamic of the midterm,” Smith told The Epoch Times.
“Interestingly, the Democrats are happy if Trump continues to headline for Republicans. While popular within the GOP, Trump is toxic for independent voters, and he runs poorly with college-educated white voters, as well as suburban women. In light of his recent legal troubles, Democrats are fine with Trump’s expanded role,” Smith said.
But given the severity of the economic problems and other factors, Smith does not believe that the Democrats’ strategy of decrying Trump’s alleged extremism, and that of “Trump-y” candidates in local issues, will succeed.
“If we consider the political climate, this should be a huge election for Republicans. A relatively unpopular president and a struggling economy, in addition to foreign affairs instability, should put the GOP in a strong position,” said Smith.
While the electoral math of midterm contests varies, it is possible to identify a statistical mean when looking at long-term trends, Smith argued.
“On average, the party out of power picks up around 26 House seats, and five or six Senate seats. To the degree this election is normal, it will be good for Republicans and they will take both houses of Congress,” he said.
While turnout in midterm elections is often low compared to presidential elections, Lonny Leitner, vice president of the government affairs firm LS2 Group, which has offices in Iowa and Minnesota, believes that the Mar-a-Lago raid has backfired and that its findings will not dissuade GOP voters.
“I spent a few days out at the Minnesota State Fair, and I can count on one hand how many times someone brought up the fact that they were concerned about the FBI raid, which tells me it is yet another failed attempt by the Democrats to end Trump once and for all. When will they learn?” Leitner told The Epoch Times.
It was far more common for people he encountered at the fair to voice serious concerns over inflation, fuel prices, out-of-control crime, and the crisis at the border with Mexico, Leitner said.
People shop at a supermarket in Montebello, Calif., on Aug. 23, 2022. U.S. shoppers are facing increasingly high prices on everyday goods and services as inflation continues to surge with high prices for groceries, gasoline, and housing. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)
The Case of New Hampshire
To understand the Democrats’ approach, it is useful to look at one state in particular that has been fiercely contested in recent election years, namely New Hampshire, believes Andrew Smith, Director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center and an expert on elections and electoral methodology.
Smith believes that New Hampshire is not as politically conservative as its reputation and famous license plate motto (“Live Free or Die”) might lead some people to believe.
“New Hampshire’s electorate is divided between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats generally have a little bit of an advantage in presidential elections, but it’s not that big an advantage in midterm elections with a Democrat president,” Smith told The Epoch Times.
“It’s also a state with higher levels of education and income than most states, and it’s a suburban state,” he said, noting a large proportion of its population lives in the suburbs surrounding Boston. “In that sense, it’s similar to other suburban areas of the northeast that lean Democrat. It’s not a Republican state, that’s a myth,” he added.
Generalizations
In the GOP primary elections held in New Hampshire on Sept. 13, Karoline Leavitt won the race for the first congressional district against a field of rivals including Matt Mowers, Gail Huff Brown, and Russell Prescott, with 34 percent of the vote compared to 25 percent, 17 percent, and 10 percent respectively. In the second congressional district race, Robert Burns scored a victory with 33 percent of the vote versus 29 percent for George Hansel, 25 percent for Lily Tang Williams, and smaller numbers for other competitors.
In the Senate primary, former military officer Donald Bolduc, who hopes to unseat Democrat Senator Maggie Hassan in November, barely edged out his GOP rival Chuck Morse, winning 37.1 percent of the vote to Morse’s 35.8 percent.
In the GOP gubernatorial primary, incumbent Chris Sununu easily trounced all his rivals, winning 78 percent of the vote.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu speaks during a ceremony in Manchester, N.H., on Sept. 2, 2020. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images for DraftKings)
The winning candidates come from a wide variety of backgrounds and have diverse views and ideologies. Leavitt is a former assistant press secretary in the Trump administration, Burns is an entrepreneur and former treasurer of a New Hampshire county, while Sununu has a reputation as a moderate Republican who helped secure funding for a cause championed by Democrats, namely state funding for full-day kindergarten.
While some in the media may wish to associate Bolduc with Trump, it is important to remember that he lost New Hampshire’s 2020 Senate primary to Trump-endorsed candidate Corky Messner, Smith said.
In spite of the eclecticism of these candidates and the impossibility of categorizing them all as strictly “Trump-y” figures, Smith argued, Democrats will treat the candidates in New Hampshire and other states as Republicans in the Trump mode in the hope of wooing the roughly 42 percent of voters in the state who register as independents. Smith said that the tactic put to use in New Hampshire is a microcosm of a broad political strategy.
“Democrats are going to use all these candidates’ connection with Trump—whether it’s there or not—as arguments to vote against them. But that’s true across the country. Democrats are running as if Trump is still in office,” he commented.
With the tricky position in which Democrats find themselves amid so much bad economic news, they place their hopes in controversies around a figure who remains powerful and influential within the GOP.
“All the Mar-a-Lago stuff, they’re praying that will go on until after the midterm elections, because they’re running at a moment when the president is not very popular, and that’s a difficult place to be, as we saw in 2010 and 2014,” Smith continued.
In the New Hampshire races in November 2010, Republican candidates won both the congressional districts contested in this week’s primaries, though they did not win the governorship, Smith noted. Looking at the 2010 midterm elections nationally, Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives, which they held onto in 2014 in addition to winning majority control of the Senate.
President Joe Biden delivers a primetime speech at Independence National Historical Park Sept. 1, 2022 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Biden described “MAGA Republicans” as being extremists who posed a threat to democracy. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The ‘Extremism’ Charge
Since the spring, when predictions widely favored the GOP in the coming midterms, Democrats have found more opportunities to try to paint Trump and the GOP more broadly as extremist and will rely heavily on this political strategy all the way through the elections, believes David Bateman, a professor of government at Cornell University.***
***According to his own words and published books and articles, Bateman leaves hard left. (Pro-abortion,anti-conservative values, etc) –TPR
This strategy does not come at the expense of, but rather goes hand in hand with, a strong emphasis on the Dobbs ruling and other issues of concern to Democrat voters at the local level, he argued. To a certain extent, voters will decide in accordance with the narratives crafted by the party leadership as Democrat spokespeople try to link congressional and gubernatorial hopefuls to the 45th president.
“Elections are never about one thing, whether that is a referendum on presidential leadership, national economic or other issues, or the local performance and responsiveness of the incumbent. And voters make choices not only on the basis of their priorities, but on the basis of the choices and narratives presented to them by parties. Democrats probably want voters to make a choice on the basis of local issues—which tend to favor incumbents—and then on the extremism of the GOP, as showcased by Trump but as embodied locally by GOP candidates,” Bateman told The Epoch Times.
Though predictions about the likely outcome of the midterms have swung since the spring and do not monochromatically favor GOP candidates as much as before, Democrats still play to what they see as their strengths.
“I expect Democrats’ basic strategy remains the same: have their congressional candidates highlight how they have delivered locally for their districts as well as the extremism of their GOP rivals, while the larger party apparatus and the president emphasize GOP extremism nationally. The abortion decision has helped Democrats a lot, as has the continued attention to Trump,” Bateman said.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the DNC for comment.
Remember that Republican ‘fake electors entering county elections office’ story?
The Washington Post went on an early attack attempting to portray the presence of Jeff Lenberg and other investigators in Coffee County GA as something nefarious. As Jeff details in the podcast, there is much more to the story and the investigation he was conducting was for a very good reason.
Friday on the Conservative Daily podcast, Jeff Lenberg, an expert vulnerability tester, came on to discuss the hit piece articles that have been published by some of the mockingbird media outlets such as the Washington Post, the AP, and CNN. The Washington Post, for example, on Tuesday, ran a piece titled “Election deniers repeatedly visited Ga. county office at center of criminal probe, video shows“.
In this article, they frame “surveillance footage” from Coffee County as if Jeff Lenberg and Cyber Ninjas’ Doug Logan are breaking into this building on a weekend or holiday when no one is “home.”
In reality, they were invited in by the Coffee County Elections Supervisor. You cannot breach an intentionally opened door.
In Pearson v. Kemp, it was stated “defendants’ counsel argued that the secretary of state has no lawful authority over county election officials… Plaintiff could amend their complaint to add the election officials in Cobb…”
If the Secretary of State does not have lawful authority over election officials, and Plaintiff’s counsel agreed, then it should be within the scope of the County Elections Supervisor to ensure their machines are functioning properly. In Coffee County, they were not.
In the fall of 2020, prior to the election, Elections Supervisor Misty Hampton, demonstrated on a YouTube video that she could manipulate ballots any way she would like through adjudication, as long as you had the credentials. You could change a vote in the race that was originally the reason for adjudication , or change a vote on a race that didn’t require adjudication on that same ballot.
Jeff Lenberg also revealed that you can use essentially any type of paper, or even a Xerox copy of a ballot, to run through the machines and they would accept it. By comparison, a vending machine will reject most counterfeit monies. This would imply that a vending machine is safer than our election machines.
On election night, Hampton had problems with the machines consistently running batches of ballots without the machine “choking” on a batch. She became frustrated when the suggested “cleanings” did not solve the problem. Lenberg noted that she said this occurred more frequently on Trump ballots. He later explains the significance of this. One of the election board members called Dominion and said they would give them a half hour to get this machine working or they would call in the news media. The Dominion staff on-site came back inside and asked them to try it one more time. Lenberg notes that, according to Hampton, the Dominion staff were not allowed to touch the equipment. When Hampton tried again and the machine worked “perfectly” from then on, one has to wonder how the machine mysteriously began functioning properly when the Dominion techs returned from their phone call.
The machines in Georgia are not allowed to be networked, however, Lenberg later discovered that, according to the machine’s model number, the motherboard has Bluetooth and wi-fi capabilities built into it. Additionally, it has the ability to “wake up” periodically and “look for a Bluetooth signal.” This is evidenced by the Dominion staff being able to somehow reconfigure that machine so it worked properly without ever touching it.
At this point, I asked Lenberg if there was any investigation into how Dominion staffers were able to “fix” the machine without ever touching it. Of course, there are crickets from anyone who actually has the authority to conduct a criminal investigation and bring about criminal charges. Instead, they want to ensure no one investigates by investigating anyone who does.
Lenberg then talks about the forensic imaging, which he was not a part of. He said that the county election board wanted to have this looked and approved of an outside firm to image the machines safely and by professional standards, including retention of an original copy of the imaging.
Once that was complete, they began testing on the equipment. Lenberg and Logan were both involved in this, however, neither actually touched the machines. That was left up to Misty Hampton, the official in charge of that county office. Lenberg and Logan did help fill out ballots to be used in the testing, but equipment handling was left to the local officials.
The Results
At the end of the testing, both Logan and Lenberg wrote up reports on what they found, which were seemingly ignored by officials outside of of Coffee County.
On the ICP machines, they were “reversing ballots” at a fairly high rate (about 15%) and the reversal was 4 to 1 Trump to Biden ballots.
On the high speed scanners, it was a little more shocking: Lenberg explains that the user interface allows you to change many different scanning parameters like gamma, contrast, sensitivity etc. Lenberg explained: “Well, that’s nuts on its surface. If you have a certified piece of equipment that is counting votes, you don’t want to let an administrator go in and adjust how its going to scan votes. You would never do that!” Yet, one could, even after certification.
Before they began playing with the parameters, Lenberg claims they could run ballots through perfectly with no issues. Thousands of ballots. But when they got to the tenth parameter, that all changed. This parameter allowed the user to “ignore red, blue, green or none”. It was defaulted to “ignore red”. There was no red on any of the ballots they were running. However, when they set that parameter to “none”, the machine would not run Trump ballots properly. They couldn’t run 20 Trump ballots before rejecting a ballot. It would run Biden ballots through no problem, though.
I asked Lenberg at that point if they checked the log files to see what adjustments were done while Dominion was on the phone and “fixed” the machine during the election, but unfortunately, he hadn’t seen those files.
This is the story the mockingbird media won’t tell you. This was a major flaw that was apparent on election day and duplicated during the testing. This should be the investigation. But instead individuals like Jeff Lenberg, who has a well-distinguished career and has held US government clearances, are being investigated and persecuted for pointing out these flaws. He’s being defamed in the mockingbird media while our government officials who likely benefitted from these processes refuse to make our elections transparent to the taxpayers that fund it.
Show us the election. Show us the ballots, Georgia. State law mandates Georgia maintain the 2020 ballots for another two months. And state and federal law mandate the primary ballots still be retained. Show us.
But they won’t. All efforts to see the physical ballots will get stonewalled in the courts after Georgia officials spend hundreds of thousands to fight against transparency. They’ll send in a team of 22 high powered lawyers and spend probably over $100,000 to depose one cyber forensics expert in a civil case and hope that the Fulton Co DA gets something substantive enough to use in her grand jury.
They’re hoping to kick the can down the road just long enough to make this disappear. Meanwhile, the mockingbird media’s fascination with the surveillance footage is leading their sheeple down another rabbit hole to obfuscate the real fraud. And they sop it up. It’s worth noting that they won’t mention the word “breach” without putting “alleged”, “allegedly” or “allegations of” in front of it. It’s almost as if they “allegedly” don’t want to get their “alleged” asses “allegedly” sued off for “alleging” allegations.
I leave the mockingbird media and Fani Willis, the rogue DA in Fulton County, with these questions that I doubt they can answer:
** What crimes were broken? Specifically.
** Why aren’t you investigating the apparent remote access by Dominion in the middle of an election?
** Why aren’t you investigating what Lenberg and Logan found while observing the county officials’ testing?
It would bar nearly two-thirds of Black adolescents from attending school
By Pierre Kory – – Tuesday, August 23, 2022
OPINION:
While the attention was focused on Mar-a-Lago, Denmark made major news by banning the COVID-19 vaccine for children under age 18. You read that correctly: The Scandinavian nation, often heralded by pro-vaccine liberal politicians as a health model for the United States, issued a policy declaring it “no longer be possible” for young people to get vaccinated, citing the low risk posed by the virus.
Meanwhile, back home, the Biden administration, whose inner circle includes secret consultants for Pfizer, is for the most part letting states move forward with a similar laissez-faire attitude toward vaccination requirements with one notable exception: Washington, D.C., which is requiring all students over the age of 12 receive a vaccine.
The discrepancy between the treatment of children in our nation’s capital and the rest of the country reflects a deeper disconnect ripping our nation apart. It also undermines President Biden’s commitment to racial equity. On the campaign trail, Mr. Biden, who owes his 2020 victory to Black voters in South Carolina, turned heads by declaring, “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump then you ain’t Black.” On Inauguration Day, he signed an executive order outlining his “comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all.”
Yet when Team Biden moved back to Washington, they found a region moving away from its “Chocolate City” roots. In 1977 when Mr. Biden was a first-term senator, D.C. was 77% Black. Today, that number has been cut nearly in half to just 41%.
The city’s gentrification has deepened inequality. Every latte shop or yoga studio in the Navy Yard or Logan Circle pushes lower-income Washingtonians east of the Anacostia River, where Wards 7 and 8 remain nearly 80% Black and with average income less than half its counterparts across the river.
If enforced, Washington’s vaccine mandate would bar nearly two-thirds of Black adolescents from attending school, creating another obstacle for a population government should be empowering. The elite ruling class is happy to plaster “Black Lives Matters” stickers on their Teslas while supporting policies that hold back the next generation mere miles away.
Over socially distanced glasses of chardonnay, well-to-do Beltway residents cling to their COVID-19 narrative where vaccines funded by the big pharmaceutical companies offer the only hope. In their world, no one — not even children — is safe without a vaccine. Anyone who dares deviate from the company line is dismissed as a backwater Trump-supporting conspiracist, even lifelong Democrats like me.
They ignore data that challenges their point of view, including data finding 70% of U.S. public schools reported an increase in students seeking mental health services since the start of the pandemic, or a Harvard University study showing “remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps.”
These districts are not in places where parents can earn their six-figure salaries from Zoom, ordering Uber Eats and enjoying a steady diet of Netflix.
As a medical doctor who has helped more than 700 patients recover from COVID-19 and its complications, I have treated numerous adults and children injured by the vaccine and can assure you that there is a significant cause for concern. I’ve outlined the large and growing body of data on the injury risks of COVID-19 vaccinations — particularly among healthy children — which you can read in a vaccine exemption letter that I provided to concerned parents who wanted to send their children to summer camp without exposing them to these risks.
Consider the large, unexplained rise in U.S. life insurance claims among working Americans of ages 18-64
The true scope of harm is difficult to grasp because our public health agencies refuse to engage in the debate for fear of undermining their preferred narrative. But there are plenty of signals. Consider the large, unexplained rise in U.S. life insurance claims among working Americans of ages 18-64 beginning in early to mid-2021, when the vaccination campaign began. A similar trend is evident in German health insurance claims data — and the CEO of one of the country’s largest health insurance companies was fired for releasing data suggesting the government was concealing the extent of vaccine injuries.
Two years ago, candidate Joe Biden pledged to “shut down the virus.” Now, with more deaths on his watch than his predecessor’s, he and his allies still refuse to change course. Instead, they are clinging to a failed political agenda, sacrificing the next generation at its altar. Washington’s vaccine mandates will hurt Black children the most, undermining Mr. Biden’s equity agenda. In November, let’s hope a reckoning is brewing for those who have suffered the most from a failed public health response. Our children, especially the most underserved, depend on it.
Dr. Pierre Kory is president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.
Anthony Fauci is ending his long and celebrated government career by being widely lauded for getting so much so very wrong on Covid-19.
Now 81 years old, Dr. Fauci has spent 38 years as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. He has been rightly honored for his many contributions over the decades, most notably during the fight against AIDS, for which he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. But to Covid-19 he brought a monomaniacal focus on vanquishing a single virus, whatever the cost—neglecting the damage that can follow when public health loses sight of the public’s health.
As the lead medical authority to two administrations on Covid-19, Dr. Fauci was unwavering in his advocacy for draconian policies. What were the impact of those policies on millions of Americans? And what would the country look like now had our public health experts taken a different approach? As Dr. Fauci is preparing to leave his post, those are a few of the questions worth asking as we consider his various Covid-19 legacies.
Dr. Fauci attends the National AIDS Update Conference in San Francisco on Oct. 12, 1989. (Deanne Fitzmaurice via Getty Images)
On Children:
Very early on in this pandemic, we knew that there was an extremely stratified risk from Covid. The elderly and those with co-morbidities were especially vulnerable, while children were extremely unlikely to get dangerously ill.
Instead of acting on the good news for children—or drawing on the ample experience in Scandinavian and European countries where schools were open and students were without masks—American kids were seen as vectors of disease. Young children were forced to wear masks inside school and out, affecting the language and social development of many. The effects of school closures will play out for decades, but we already know that children suffered major learning loss, and many left school never to return. Throughout the pandemic, Dr. Fauci supported the most oppressive restrictions for children, including school closures and mandatory cloth masking.
Yesterday on Fox Neil Cavuto asked Dr. Fauci whether Covid restrictions “went too far” and if they “forever damaged” the children “who couldn’t go to school except remotely.” Dr. Fauci replied: “I don’t think it’s forever irreparably damaged anyone.”
Parents know otherwise.
A generation is coping with learning loss, and the impact has been the worst in poor and minority communities. According to the Brookings Institute, test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20 percent in math and 15 percent in reading over the pandemic. Meantime, anxiety and depression have hit record highs among young Americans, and the surgeon general has described a youth mental health crisis. Of all of Dr. Fauci’s legacies, this might be the gravest.
On Research:
Dr. Fauci let basic research questions about the nature of the Covid-19 virus go unanswered. Somehow, despite the NIH’s more than $45 billion budget, only 2 percent of grants went to basic Covid research while billions of federal money was invested in developing vaccines, according to a study conducted by my colleagues at Johns Hopkins and I.
The federal government failed to conduct timely studies on the following: masks; the susceptibility of people in nursing homes; natural immunity; wastewater data; vaccine-induced heart injury in young people; and the optimal interval between the first two vaccine doses.
In short, Dr. Fauci didn’t deliver the basic research we needed so that public policy would be shaped by the best science. Because policymakers lacked good evidence to support their dictates, political opinions filled the void. So Covid-19 became a highly politicized health emergency—to all of our detriment.
On Natural Immunity:
One of the most inexplicable decisions by Dr. Fauci and his team was to ignore natural immunity—that is, the immune response generated by contracting Covid-19. As the evidence mounted that having had the virus was as good as—perhaps even better than—a vaccine, Dr. Fauci and his circle ignored it.
When Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked Dr. Fauci in the Fall of 2021 on CNN: “As we talk about vaccine mandates, I get calls all the time, people say I already had Covid, I’m protected, and now the study says even more protected than the vaccine alone. How do you make the case to them?” Dr. Fauci answered: “I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that.”
Hundreds of studies have now shown that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity and that the level of protection vaccines have against severe disease is at the same level of natural immunity alone.
But Dr. Fauci didn’t talk about it.
Americans had circulating antibodies against the virus, but they were antibodies that Dr. Fauci seemed to ignore. The upshot was that thousands of Americans lost their jobs for their choice not to get vaccinated. Some of those Americans were nurses, pilots, truck drivers, and dock workers central to the American supply chain of food, medication, and other essential products. This summer, more than 60,000 National Guard and Reserve soldiers who refused the Covid-19 vaccine were not allowed to participate in their military duties and lost pay and benefits. All of these people should have their jobs reinstated.
On Dissent:
Any physician who has met Dr. Fauci will agree that he is one of the kindest, most charming human beings you will ever meet. That’s why it was so jarring to witness the way that he and Dr. Francis Collins, his close friend and former director of the NIH, denigrated dissent on Covid-19.
Just ask the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration—the open letter published in October 2020 that called for focused protection of the most vulnerable instead of blanket shutdowns of schools and businesses. It was authored by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard, and it was signed by tens of thousands of doctors and scientists.
Drs. Fauci and Collins never talked to these prominent authors to discuss their differing points of view. Instead, they criticized them.
Four days after the Great Barrington Declaration was published, Dr. Collins sent an email to Dr. Fauci in which he called the authors “fringe epidemiologists.” “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “I don’t see anything like that on line yet—is it underway?” Dr. Fauci replied: “Francis: I am pasting in below a piece from Wired that debunks this theory.” Soon after, big tech platforms like Facebook and Google followed suit, suppressing their ideas and falsely deeming them “misinformation.”
The ultimate irony is that federal officials are now endorsing many of the policies the Great Barrington Declaration authors suggested, insisting schools stay open and quietly ending isolation and quarantine requirements. In the end, Sweden, which adopted many principles in the Great Barrington Declaration, had roughly half the Covid deaths as Michigan, despite having the same population, percent of elderly, and climate.
If dissent had been welcomed from the start—which is what science demands—a lot of suffering could have been avoided.
On Science:
Here’s what Dr. Fauci and other public health authorities could have been saying from the start: We strive to provide you with the best information and recommendations, but in the face of an emergency we will surely make mistakes. We will sometimes change our minds. We may even reverse our guidance. But we will always own up to our mistakes, explain our policy changes and strive to do better. Instead, Dr. Fauci admitted to telling noble lies.
Covid brought us the concept of “The Science.” Dr. Fauci famously said last year: “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” But no person embodies science. To suggest as much betrays a cast of mind that is entirely at odds with science itself.
On Leadership:
George Washington was onto something when he decided to limit his presidency to two terms. New leaders don’t just avoid the risk of too much power concentrated in the hands of one person or group, they also bring new ideas. New perspectives are especially important to accelerating scientific inquiry by challenging deeply held assumptions. In his long tenure, Dr. Fauci made tremendous contributions, but during this crisis we needed someone at the top who took a broad view of how to fight a novel virus, and made recommendations based on weighing the direct and indirect consequences to society.
How to Regain Trust:
We now face the threat of a future pandemic in a country in which a large number of people no longer trust public health authorities. What happens when we have a novel, highly contagious, airborne virus with a much higher fatality rate than that of Covid-19?
We desperately need to rebuild public trust now. That begins by having public health officials apologize for being dogmatic in their pronouncements, when the correct answer should have been: “We don’t know.” One lesson we should all learn from Covid-19 is that we should not put our entire faith and trust in one physician.
Dr. Marty Makary is a public health expert, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the author of the bestselling book The Price We Pay.
His last piece for Common Sense was about top doctors and scientists at the NIH, FDA and CDC who are alarmed at the direction of those institutions. Read it here.
According to the Washington Post (albeit a discredited newspaper but a reliable shill for the Washington political elite), the FBI was looking for nuclear documents in the Presidential collection Donald Trump stored at his Palm Beach estate. This speaks to the frantic desperation of the anti-Trump crowd, especially the corrupt officials that infest the leadership of the FBI and the Department of Justice. They used this ludicrous pretext to obtain a search warrant with the help of a credulous, cretinous Judge, Bruce Reinhart.
The nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago tale was more desperate than usual.
It lasted less than 12 hours.
U.S. federal agents were looking for documents relating to nuclear weapons when they searched former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida this week, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Having failed to produce any evidence that Trump was working with good old Vladimir Putin to destroy America’s democracy with Russiagate 1.0, the anti-Trump crowd apparently has decided to trot out another Russia-tainted meme, the ultimate red herring, to portray Donald Trump as a 21st Century Dr. Strangelove. We now know the truth.
Donald Trump was trying to build a nuclear weapon in his wine cellar at Mar A Lago.
Seriously, the theory was that Trump was building a bomb for Putin, because — you know — Russia is a technologically backward country and needs outside help. Really???
And if you believe that, I have some oceanfront property located just outside Winslow, Arizona for sale. Cash only and small bills.
Maybe we now know why the FBI was pawing through Melania Trump’s lingerie. Did they intercept a text from Trump telling his wife that she looked like a nuclear tipped cruise missile in her red Teddy. Of course, the FBI had to assume that was code word for something far more nefarious. I had to wonder why the FBI spent so much time handling and sniffing Melania’s panties and negligees.
(Maybe they are members of a “J. Edgar Hoover Cross Dressing Club,” and were looking to upgrade their outfits before their next Monkey Pox rave.)
The Deep State-Fake News cabal needs to work harder on their conspiracies.
Scott Adams, the cartoonist and author behind the Dilbert comic strip, posted a list of the most prominent deep state-fake news lies and conspiracies attacking President Donald Trump.
Here is a list of 11 previous fake news conspiracies that fell flat.
What this whole episode shows us is that Kamala Harris is no longer the dumbest member of the Biden team. Nope. That honor goes to Merrick Garland. He apparently believed that this scheme would discredit Trump and elevate Garland as the Clausewitz of the Biden Presidency. Warner Brothers may file a copyright infringement lawsuit against the mad Attorney General for adopting a Wile E Coyote plot. Garland strapped himself to the tip of the missile before activating the fuze that ignited the rocket. He failed to recognize that he would be riding a political nuclear bomb to his own political demise. Maybe he is just a secret admirer of Slim Pickens and wanted to recreate Pickens’ iconic moment in Dr. Strangelove.
Alright, back to serious. Trump may be right that someone may have planted a document related to nuclear weapons or nuclear technology in the boxes he had locked up. That does not incriminate Trump and is no crime. The prosecutors would have to show that Trump instructed someone on his staff to put such a document in one of the boxes. Trump may be a lot of things, but stupid and reckless are not how he became a billionaire and beat the dickens out of Hillary in 2016. Is there another Alexander Vindman lurking in the shadows keen on helping create a pretext to discredit Trump?
Trump may be a lot of things, but stupid and reckless are not how he became a billionaire and beat the dickens out of Hillary in 2016.
If Trump really was trying to hide such information why would he have instructed his attorneys to negotiate with the National Archives on getting an agreement to return the records to the Feds? In fact, if he had mens rea*, do you really think Trump would keep something so figuratively radioactive on his estate?
[*mens rea Latin, literally ‘guilty mind’; in the law “criminal intent”.]
Merrick Garland, despite his Harvard education, is not a smart man. He signed off on a warrant rather than ask Trump and his lawyers if he had such documents in his possession. Are they going for the old – he lied to me tactic that they used on General Michael Flynn? Lying to Federal Agents is a crime unless you are former FBI Chief Andrew McCabe.
Instead of doing the reasonable, lawyerly thing, Garland chose the nuclear option. It will come back to haunt him.
Trump lawyer Christina Bobb said in interviews Thursday night (8-11) that President Trump and his family in New York watched the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago Monday via closed circuit TV security cameras. Bobb said the FBI had ordered staff at Mar-a-Lago to turn the cameras off but that Trump lawyers had the cameras turned back on. [Now we know why the FBI wanted them turned off. — TPR]
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team is weighing whether to release the search warrant and inventory of material seized at Mar-a-Lago before a federal judge rules on the matter, according to a Florida-based attorney for Trump, Lindsey Halligan.
Earlier Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department had filed a motion to unseal the warrant and related documents, “absent objection from the former president.” Trump has until 3 p.m. Friday to respond.
His legal team is also discussing whether to release video and photos of the search, Halligan said. Two sources familiar with Trump’s legal strategy said that before FBI agents executed the warrant, they asked that Mar-a-Lago’s private security cameras be turned off. Trump’s team refused to comply.
The U.S. Secret Service, which maintains a permanent presence at the former president’s home, was not a party to the dispute over the cameras because the private club owns and controls the cameras, not the government.
It isn’t clear what any video that may have been captured by Mar-a-Lago’s cameras would show. According to Halligan, there were security cameras in Trump’s office, but not in all of the areas that were searched. She also said that there are photos of FBI personnel on the grounds.
Why does the fake news insist on lying to the American public?
Our former President put out an awesome add about what is and what we can expect if he runs again. No 2020 election talk or fake to do about nothing hearing. Just the facts.
More great videos from a man who’s really good and a Trump fanatic.
FILE - President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a rally protesting the electoral college certification of Joe Biden as President in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021. Members of the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 will hold their first prime time hearing Thursday, Jan. 9, to share what they have uncovered about former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, culminating in the deadly storming of the Capitol building. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
WASHINGTON (TND) — A Capitol Police timeline of the days and weeks surrounding Jan. 6 shows former President Donald Trump’s Department of Defense (DOD) offered the National Guard’s assistance in the days leading up to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, validating claims from Trump administration officials that were said to be false by liberal fact-checkers.
What we also know is that President Trump wanted to make sure that the people that came, that there was a safe environment for that kind of assembly,” former President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
And I’ve said that publicly before — the 10,000 National Guard troops that he wanted to make sure that everything was safe and secure,” Meadows said. “Obviously having those National Guards available, actually the reason they were able to respond when they did, was because President Trump had actually put them on alert.
Liberal “fact-checkers” like The Washington Post and PolitiFact argued the claim about National Guard assistance coming from Meadows and other top Trump administration officials was false, but an official timeline of the events leading up to Jan. 6 apparently shows differently.
According to the timeline, a DOD official reached out to Capitol Police Deputy Chief Sean Gallagher four days before the attack on the U.S. Capitol to inquire about whether Capitol Police anticipated they would request National Guard troops be deployed to prepare for Jan. 6.
“Carol Corbin (DOD) texts USCP Deputy Chief Sean Gallagher, Protective Service Bureau, to determine whether USCP is considering a request for National Guard soldiers for January 6, 2021 event,” the timeline reads in an entry listed for Saturday, Jan. 2, 2021.
The next morning, the timeline indicates, “Gallagher replies to DOD via text that a request for National Guard support not forthcoming at this time after consultation with COP Sund.”
However, that initial rejection from Capitol Police came as they were beginning to change their assessment of the potential threats of violence.
Just hours after Gallagher’s rejection of DOD’s offer for troops, Capitol Police issued a new warning to its commanders and executives, as well as to the two congressionally appointed House and Senate Sergeants at Arms responsible for congressional security, the timeline shows.
Due to the tense political environment following the 2020 election, the threat of disruptive actions or violence cannot be ruled out,” stated the new assessment, chronicled in Capitol Police’s Jan. 6 timeline. “Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021 as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent.
Within 24-hours of the new assessment’s circulation, then-chief of the Capitol Police Steve Sund changed course and began requesting permission to deploy National Guard troops from the House and Senate Sergeant at Arms – both of whom report to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer, respectively.
“COP Sund asks Senate Sergeant at Arms (SSAA) Michael Stenger and House Sergeant at Arms (HSAA) Paul Irving for authority to have National Guard to assist with security for the January 6, 2021 event based on briefing with law enforcement partner and revised intelligence Assessment,” the timeline notes. “COP Sund’s request is denied. SSAA and HSAA tell COP Sund to contact General Walker at DC National Guard to discuss the guard’s ability to support a request if needed.”
As Sund’s requests were denied, the Trump administration continued working on getting then-President Trump to formally authorize the deployment of as many as 20,000 National Guard troops to the Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6 rally, according to Just The News, which conducted interviews with then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel.
The Capitol Police timeline shows what we have been saying for the last year — that DOD support via the National Guard was refused by the House and Senate sergeant at arms, who report to Pelosi,” said Patel. “Now we have it in their own writing, days before Jan. 6. And despite the FBI warning of potential for serious disturbance, no perimeter was established, no agents put on the street, and no fence put up.
Furthermore, as word began circulating around Washington of the Capitol Police’s changing stance on the need for National Guard troops on Jan. 6, Democratic Mayor for the District of Columbia, Muriel Bowser, wrote a letter to Miller and other Departments of Defense and Justice officials asking that National Guard troops not be deployed unless the local Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) approved.
Bowser cited an earlier event from the summer of 2020, when National Guard troops were deployed to Lafayette Park outside the White House amid social justice protests that took place in the nation’s capital, spurred by the death of George Floyd. Bowser argued the deployment “caused confusion” and could have led to “a national security threat with no way for MPD and federal law enforcement to decipher armed groups.”
“To be clear, the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without immediate notification to and consultation with MPD, if such plans are underway,” Bowser wrote in her letter, adding that MPD was “well trained and prepared to lead the way” on ensuring safety during the rally in the nation’s capital on Jan. 6.
Snopes usually doesn’t get it right, but I know of two occasions that they did. One was about Thomas and the aborted fetus.
In a June 2022 dissenting opinion, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asserted a debunked claim about the use of aborted fetal cells in COVID-19 vaccines.
Rating
False
This is the second one.
Five conservative Supreme Court justices dishonestly suggested, in Senate confirmation hearings, that they thought Roe v. Wade was beyond overturning.
Rating
False
Fact Check
In May 2022, after news leaked that the U.S. Supreme Court had provisionally voted to overturn the abortion protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade, the left-wing political action committee MeidasTouch briefly caused “#LyingGOP” to trend on Twitter, with a video that accused five Republican-appointed justices of lying about their intentions to overturn the landmark ruling.
However, the creators of the video badly misrepresented the full scope of relevant facts in two important ways, and we are issuing a rating of “False.”
First, they engaged in highly selective editing of much longer and more nuanced archival clips of future justices during their U.S. Senate confirmation hearings, in order to grossly misrepresent the substance of what they said.
Second, they appeared to misunderstand or misrepresent the meaning of a Supreme Court precedent. In brief, describing a ruling as an important precedent is not tantamount to giving a commitment not to overturn that ruling, or indicating you believe that ruling cannot be overruled. Therefore, the sweeping allegations of premeditated dishonesty on the part of GOP-appointed justices were as poorly supported by evidence as they were wrongheaded.
The following is our breakdown of what the MeidasTouch “megaviral supercut” video claimed, lined up against what the factual record shows.
Justice Clarence Thomas
File photo of Clarence Thomas during his 1991 U.S. Senate confirmation hearings. Source: Bettmann / Getty Images.
The following is how Meidas Touch presented Thomas’s remarks:
Clarence Thomas: I believe the constitution protects the right to privacy. And I have no reason or agenda to prejudge the issue.
Caption: HE LIED
In this section of the video, MeidasTouch mutilated a 1991 quotation from then-Supreme Court nominee Thomas, and grossly misrepresented the substance and meaning of his remarks. In reality, Thomas absolutely did not provide any assurances on how he might rule on the specific case of Roe v. Wade, nor on the question of abortion rights.
U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio, had been attempting to pin down Thomas’s views on whether the U.S. Constitution protects abortion rights, and had highlighted what he presented as discrepancies in Thomas’s past pronouncements.
In particular, Metzenbaum asked Thomas to resolve an apparent gap between his putative support for a constitutionally-enshrined right to privacy, more broadly, and abortion rights in particular. Metzenbaum put it to Thomas that:
I fear that you, like other nominees before the committee, could assure us that you support a fundamental right to privacy, but could also decline to find that a woman’s right to choose is protected by the constitution.
At the culmination of his remarks, Metzenbaum asked Thomas:
I must ask you to tell us here and now whether you believe that the constitution protects a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy, and I am not asking you as to how you would vote in connection with any case before the court.
In response, Thomas prevaricated, as so many judicial nominees have in recent decades:
I am afraid though, on your final question, Senator, that it is important for any of us who are judges, in areas that are very deeply contested…I think that to take a position would undermine my ability to be impartial…
I am afraid that to begin to answer questions about what my specific position is in these contested areas would greatly — or leave the impression that I prejudged this issue.
When Metzenbaum again attempted to pin down the nominee, Thomas again prevaricated, providing the quotation that would be mutilated and misrepresented by MeidasTouch in their video:
Senator, as I noted yesterday, and I think we all feel strongly in this country about our privacy — I do — I believe the constitution protects the right to privacy. And I have no reason or agenda to prejudge the issue or to predispose to rule one way or the other on the issue of abortion, which is a difficult issue. [Emphasis is added].
As the transcript makes clear, MeidasTouch cut off the second half of Thomas’s sentence, in which he stipulated that he had “no reason…to prejudge” or “to predispose to rule one way or the other on the issue of abortion.”
In reality, Thomas was repeatedly urged and asked to make pronouncements on abortion rights, and refused to do so. The notion, therefore, that in this exchange he somehow gave an assurance that he would not ever vote to overturn Roe v. Wade is utterly without basis in fact.
Justice Samuel Alito
WASHINGTON – JANUARY 10: U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito answers questions before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the second day of his confirmation hearings January 10, 2006 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
The following is how MeidasTouch presented Alito’s remarks:
Alito: Roe v Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It was decided in 1973. It has been challenged on a number of occasions and the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the decision. When a decision is challenged and it is reaffirmed, that strengthens its value.
Caption: HE LIED
Once again, this presentation gives the grossly misleading impression that, in his confirmation hearings, Alito indicated he would not vote to overturn Roe v Wade. In reality, the full scope of his remarks clearly shows that — like most judicial nominees — Alito very carefully avoided giving any assurances about how he might vote on that precedent.
The clip in question came from Alito’s hearings on Jan. 11, 2006. Readers can examine a full transcript of the relevant exchange, or watch a video of it.
Ironically, the starting point for the exchange was the concern expressed by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that Alito had “decided to create categories of cases that have been decided by the Court that you will concede have constitutional protection, but you have left in question the future of Roe v. Wade.”
In other words, Durbin was concerned that Alito had not stated, for the record, that Roe v. Wade was no longer open to overturning, and indeed had in the past asserted that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”
So while MeidasTouch presented Alito’s remarks as proof that he thought Roe v. Wade was beyond overturning — “Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court” — what those remarks actually constituted was Alito’s careful avoidance of describing the ruling as such. Here’s the key exchange:
Durbin: Do you believe [Roe v Wade] is the settled law of the land? Alito: Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It was decided in 1973, so it has been on the books for a long time. It has been challenged on a number of occasions, and I discussed those yesterday, and the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the decision, sometimes on the merits, sometimes [as] in Casey based on stare decisis, and I think that when a decision is challenged and it is reaffirmed that strengthens its value as stare decisis… Durbin: Is it the settled law of the land? Alito: It is a — if settled means that it can’t be re-examined, then that’s one thing. If settled means that it is a precedent that is entitled to respect as stare decisis, and all of the factors that I’ve mentioned come into play, including the reaffirmation and all of that, then it is a precedent that is protected, entitled to respect under the doctrine of stare decisis, in that way.
What Alito is saying here is that Roe v. Wade is clearly a precedent whose conclusions have been repeatedly reaffirmed by the court, and would not lightly be overturned, taking into account the doctrine of stare decisis — the legal principle of deference to precedent expressed in the Latin phrase, which means “let stand what has been decided.”
What Alito is not saying — indeed, what he is scrupulously avoiding saying, despite Durbin’s best efforts — is that Roe v Wade is beyond overturning, like various other landmark precedents he had mentioned elsewhere in the hearings, such as Brown v. the Board of Education.
So the full scope of Alito’s remarks, when viewed objectively and in context, actually show the opposite of what the brief clip, strategically cut away by MeidasTouch, appeared to show.
Justice Neil Gorsuch
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 22: Judge Neil Gorsuch testifies during the third day of his Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, March 22, 2017 in Washington. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The following is how Meidas Touch presented Gorsuch’s remarks.
Gorsuch: Roe v Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the United States Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the United States Supreme Court, worthy [of] treatment [as] precedent, like any other.
Caption: HE LIED
MeidasTouch badly misrepresented Gorsuch’s remarks in the same way as it did Alito’s. In reality, by describing Roe v. Wade as a precedent “worthy of treatment as precedent,” Gorsuch was assiduously avoiding going any further or categorizing it as beyond overturning.
The pattern should be familiar by now. Gorsuch’s remarks came during a Senate confirmation hearing on March 21, 2017, and can be read and viewed in their proper context.
During his questioning of the Trump nominee, Judiciary committee chairman U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked Gorsuch whether he thought DC v. Heller, a landmark 2008 decision in which the court reaffirmed the Second Amendment right to bear arms, had been correctly decided. Gorsuch said:
Senator, I would respectfully respond that it [DC v Heller] is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court, and as a good judge, you do not approach that question anew, as if it had never been decided. That would be a wrong way to approach it. My personal views, I would also tell you, Mr. Chairman, belong over here. I leave those at home…Part of being a good judge is coming in and taking precedent as it stands, and your personal views about the precedent have absolutely nothing to do with the good job of a judge.
Gorsuch then effectively reiterated the same response in relation to several other landmark precedents, including Citizens United, Hosanna-Tabor, Gideon v. Wainwright and Roe v. Wade. On the latter case, Gorsuch said:
Senator, again, I would tell you that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. The reliance interest considerations are important there, and all of the other factors that go into analyzing precedent have to be considered. It is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992 and in several other cases. So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy [of] treatment [as] precedent like any other.
Did Gorsuch indicate that Roe v Wade was particularly or unusually vulnerable to being overturned? No. Did he suggest it was immune to overturning? Absolutely not.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh
Brett Kavanaugh speaks at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, USA, 27 September 2018. (Photo: Pool / Getty Images).
The following is how MeidasTouch presented Kavanaugh’s remarks.
Kavanaugh: As a judge, it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. By “it” I mean Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey. Been reaffirmed many times. Casey is precedent on precedent.
Caption: HE LIED
The clip in question came from Kavanaugh’s Senate judiciary committee hearing on Sep. 5, 2018, during questioning by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Readers can consult the relevant transcript and video.
Feinstein had been attempting to pin down Kavanaugh about his views on the status of Roe v. Wade as a precedent, and whether it “could be overturned.” Kavanaugh, stating the obvious, acknowledged Roe was a precedent and described Planned Parenthood v. Casey as “precedent on precedent” but declined to go further, despite repeated invitations by Feinstein.
Feinstein: …It has been reported that you have said that Roe is now settled law. The first question I have of you is what do you mean by “settled law”? I tried to ask earlier do you believe it is correct law? Have your views on whether Roe is settled precedent or could be overturned, and has your views changed since you were in the Bush White House?
Kavanaugh: Senator, I said that it is settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court, entitled the respect under principles of stare decisis. And one of the important things to keep in mind about Roe v. Wade is that it has been reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years, as you know, and most prominently, most importantly, reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992.
Feinstein followed up one last time, asking “What would you say your position today is on a woman’s right to choose?” and Kavanaugh again prevaricated on the future sustainability of Roe v Wade:
As a judge, it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. By “it,” I mean Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. They have been reaffirmed many times. Casey is precedent on precedent, which itself is an important factor to remember.
As we have pointed out in other cases, acknowledging that a ruling is a precedent, or even “precedent on precedent,” is not the same as saying you would never overturn it.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett
In this Oct. 14, 2020 file photo, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett speaks during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool)
The following is how MeidasTouch presented Barrett’s remarks.
Barrett: Roe is not a superprecedent because calls for its overruling have never ceased, but that doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled.
Caption: THEY ALL LIED
This is perhaps the most egregious example of all, and comes from the second day of Barrett’s Senate confirmation hearing, Oct. 13, 2020. An official transcript was not readily available in this case, but readers can consult video footage.
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was questioning Barrett about various Supreme Court landmarks, and the concept of the “superprecedent” — a somewhat ambiguous term coined by former Sen. Arlen Specter.
In a 2013 paper, Barrett wrote “Superprecedents are cases that no justice would overrule, even if she disagrees with the interpretive premises from which the precedent proceeds,” and included the following more detailed explanation from law professor Michael Gerhardt:
[T]he point at which a well-settled practice becomes, by virtue of being well-settled, practically immune to reconsideration is the point at which that precedent has become a superprecedent. Nothing becomes a superprecedent, at least in my judgment, unless it has been widely and uniformly accepted by public authorities generally, including the Court, the President, and Congress.
In that 2013 paper, Barrett also explicitly listed a handful of Supreme Court cases — including Brown v. the Board of Education — which were typically cited as superprecedents.
Earlier in her confirmation hearing, during questioning by judiciary committee chairman U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Barrett had said that, in the context of legal scholarship, a superprecedent was a “precedent that is so well established that it would be unthinkable that it would ever be overruled” and Barrett would also similarly tell Klobuchar that the term described a precedent that was “so widely-established and agreed-upon by everyone [that] calls for its overruling simply don’t exist.”
That was the background against which Klobuchar asked Barrett whether Roe v. Wade was a superprecedent, and Barrett explicitly excluded Roe v. Wade from the small handful of cases to which that term applies. She said:
The way that [“superprecedent”] is used in the scholarship, and the way that I was using it in the article that you’re reading from was to define cases that are so well settled that no political actors and no people seriously push for their overruling. And I’m answering a lot of questions about Roe, which I think indicates that Roe doesn’t fall in that category. And scholars across the spectrum say that doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled, but descriptively it does mean that it’s not a case that everyone has accepted and doesn’t call for its overruling.
…As Richard Fallon from Harvard said, Roe is not superprecedent because calls for its overruling have never ceased, but that doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled. It just means that it doesn’t fall on the small handful of cases like Marbury v Madison and Brown v the Board, that noone questions any more.
Reading Barrett’s remarks in their proper context clearly demonstrates that she directly and explicitly exploded the frankly laughable claim, made by MeidasTouch, that she had indicated Roe v. Wade was immune to overruling. In fact, she did just the opposite.
Sources:
– CONFIRMATION HEARING ON THE NOMINATION OF HON. BRETT M. KAVANAUGH TO BE AN ASSOCIATE JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-115shrg32765/html/CHRG-115shrg32765.htm. Accessed 5 May 2022.
Alito Confirmation Hearing, Day 3 Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?190503-1/alito-confirmation-hearing-day-3-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.
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“Either this is a deliberate misinformation campaign to fool people into not going to vote, or mailing in their ballots, or they just gave away the store. They somehow knew by how much the Democratic ballot counting operatives were going to overwhelm Kari Lake. Perhaps the DoJ told them since they’re going to ‘ensure election integrity.’ “