Category: Leftist Virtue(!)

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Like a clock Snopes got it right twice. Did Conservative Justices Lie About Roe v. Wade? Absolutely not.

Image via Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)

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

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

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.

MeidasTouch posted the video on various social media platforms and used it to solicit monetary contributions.

Lying GOP

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

Room, Indoors, Person
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.

The clip of Thomas came from a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Sep. 11, 1991. Readers can watch the exchange in full, or read a full transcript.

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

 

Tie, Accessories, Accessory
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

Tie, Accessories, Accessory
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

Person, Human, Room
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

amy coney barrett opinion supreme court
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.

Barrett Confirmation Hearing, Day 2 Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?476316-1/barrett-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Barrett Confirmation Hearing, Day 2 Part 2 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?476316-4/barrett-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-2. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Becker, Jo, and Charles Babington. “No Right to Abortion, Alito Argued in 1985.” Washington Post, 15 Nov. 2005. www.washingtonpost.com, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/11/15/no-right-to-abortion-alito-argued-in-1985/bcbd4e02-0c2e-4dac-8caf-0d252c5630a0/.

“Exclusive: Supreme Court Has Voted to Overturn Abortion Rights, Draft Opinion Shows.” POLITICO, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473. Accessed 5 May 2022.

GOP Judges EXPOSED as Liars in Megaviral Supercut. www.youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jbHMHN_mfo. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Gorsuch Confirmation Hearing, Day 2, Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?425138-1/supreme-court-nominee-stresses-independence-calls-criticism-judges-disheartening&airingid=61108104. Accessed 5 May 2022.

“Hunting for ‘Super Precedents’ in U.S. Supreme Court Confirmations – National Constitution Center.” National Constitution Center – Constitutioncenter.Org, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/hunting-for-super-precedents-in-u.s-supreme-court-confirmations. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Judiciary, United States Congress Senate Committee on the. Nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to Be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, First Session … U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993.

“Stare Decisis.” LII / Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stare_decisis. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. “Roe Is ‘Settled Law,’ Kavanaugh Tells Collins. Democrats Aren’t Moved.” The New York Times, 21 Aug. 2018. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/us/politics/kavanaugh-collins-abortion.html.

Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearing, Day 2, Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?449705-1/supreme-court-nominee-brett-kavanaugh-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Thomas Confirmation Hearing Day 2, Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?21115-1/thomas-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Categories
Child Abuse Leftist Virtue(!) Life Opinion The Courts

Op-Ed: Goodbye to 50 Years of the Great American Deception

Amazing how fast these PROFESSIONALLY printed signs showed up. Coincidence?

Goodbye to 50 Years of the Great American Deception

 By Rita Joseph  For The Western Journal  June 24, 2022 at 3:54pm

https://uploads.dailydot.com/2022/06/prewrite-roe-v-wade-overturned.jpg?auto=compress&fm=pjpg

By overturning Roe, the court has opened the door for the states to restore the universal protection of two of the most basic constitutional rights

What a well-reasoned and long-awaited Supreme Court decision!

A great wrong has been righted.

Reason and the rule of law have triumphed over the fanatical pro-abortion ideology that refuses to recognize our children in the womb as human beings like ourselves.

Restoration of our duty to protect each new life

By overturning Roe, the court has opened the door for the states to restore the universal protection of two of the most basic constitutional rights — the right to life and the “no property in man” principle — found in the 14th and 13th Amendments, respectively.

Every human being, irrespective of age or size, has an equal and inalienable right to go on living. All human beings are to be treated as persons and never as property.

The Supreme Court has now overturned 50 years of the errant ideological theory that removed all protections from these newest and most vulnerable human beings.

What the court calls “Roe’s abuse of judicial authority” has been exposed: “Roe was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text. It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned.”

The court asserts, “Roe found that the Constitution implicitly conferred a right to obtain an abortion, but it failed to ground its decision in text, history, or precedent. It relied on an erroneous historical narrative. … We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.”

Truth conquers illusion.

As in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes, con-men and swindlers back in 1973 pretended to weave abortion “rights” into existence out of nothing — out of “penumbras.” Without solid legal evidence, they refashioned the killing of the unborn as “women’s rights.”

Remember how the emperor’s weavers claimed that their cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office or who was unusually stupid? The inventors of abortion rights used the same tactic.

If you didn’t agree with Roe’s faulty arguments, then the fault was in you personally. Anyone who did not go along with their invention was branded as unfit for office or stupid… or misogynist, patriarchal, sexist or racist.

The tactic worked. For too long, too many Americans lacked the courage to challenge error and speak truth to power by denouncing the officially accepted deception.

The weavers of abortion rights have forged a collective denial that any harm is done in choosing to abort these smallest and most vulnerable human beings in our power and under our care.

Two mistakes in Roe

Roe was wrong. The Constitution is not silent on our duties to our progeny. Our children are guaranteed the same blessings of liberty that we claim for ourselves. The blessings of liberty are promised by the Constitution to ourselves and our posterity — not exclusively to ourselves as women.

That natural entitlement bestowed by the Creator is affirmed as the very first right mentioned in the Constitution, together with the right to life and the pursuit of happiness. Once conceived, every human being is fully and seamlessly engaged in a benign, naturally ordered pursuit of happiness.

Should abortion be banned?
Yes: 91% (62 Votes)
No:     9% (6 Votes)

Nor is the Constitution silent on the injustice at the heart of every elective abortion — the toleration of maternal “ownership” and killing rights in regard to an innocent unborn child flourishing in her or his mother’s womb. Under the 13th Amendment, there can be no such ownership and killing rights over any human being — in utero or ex utero.

There is no self-centered liberty in the Constitution.

The Supreme Court warns that “liberty” is a capacious term.

There is no self-centered liberty in the Constitution. From the beginning of the republic, the Constitution set up equal entitlement across the generations, i.e., equal entitlement to the blessings of liberty for both mothers and their offspring.

Mothers can’t say to their children in the womb, “This is all about my enjoyment of the blessings of liberty, and to ensure my enjoyment, you must be denied the same blessings of liberty. You are not at liberty to go on flourishing as nature’s God intended you to do. You are not a unique and invaluable human being. You are my property. This is all about me. This is about my right to choose, my right to commission your killing.”

So wrong for so long…

Exposing delusion

Finally, wonderfully, the great day has come — Roe’s logical fallacy of treating children in their mothers’ wombs as their mothers’ disposable property has been exposed as make-believe. At last, Roe v. Wade has been formally invalidated, its faulty reasoning revealed.

Self-importance and self-deception shaped the emperor’s refusal to accept the truth about the weavers’ deception. His refusal to accept the truth once it had been revealed signified his detachment from reality.

Having been steeped so long in a fable of his own unchallenged power and authority, he refused to make a critical and objective examination of the facts that would have revealed the duplicity of the weavers’ spin job.

Once error is exposed, we can’t unknow the truth.

Once our eyes are opened, we can’t pretend that they are still closed to the truth. There’s no going back to naivety, to feigning ignorance of the terrible injustice unleashed in Roe.

We can’t recreate a suit of clothes from nothing — from what is not in the Constitution and was never in the Constitution.

One small voice — a common-sense voice, an unintimidated voice — has pierced the illusion.

Justice Samuel Alito has shattered the elaborate deception of Roe.

Common sense has prevailed.

Never again will large numbers of us be manipulated into accepting the illusion that it’s morally defensible for any mother to commission her unborn child to be deliberately killed by an abortionist.

Vale, Roe v. Wade. May your evil never be reinstated!

Categories
Leftist Virtue(!) Opinion

‘Mr. Bean’ Breaks Silence with Message on Cancel Culture: ‘The Job of Comedy Is to Offend’

https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w780/ivvSF7erxJ6g6PHNvglrI6sQmSl.jpg

By Grant Atkinson  June 19, 2022

In recent years, many comedians have come under fire from the left for the subject matter they joke about. One English comic said in a recent interview these attacks demonstrate a misunderstanding of comedy.

“If I have to express myself visually, then I became a version of Mr. Bean.”

While Rowan Atkinson’s comedy is well-known in much of the United Kingdom, he is likely most famous in the United States for his character “Mr. Bean.” In an interview ahead of his new Netflix show, “Man vs. Bee,” he explained the character was the brainchild of himself and his colleague Richard Curtis.

“The odd thing about Mr. Bean is that he wasn’t created, he was just the person I naturally became when I was denied words to express myself,” Atkinson, 67, told The Irish Times. “If I have to express myself visually, then I became a version of Mr. Bean.”

“Mr. Bean” first debuted in the late 1970s, and the character became so popular that he earned his own sitcom in the early 1990s. Atkinson has been widely recognized for his comedic genius in portraying “Mr. Bean” using very few words.

When you’re excited about your sandwich techniques 😂 pic.twitter.com/zOR1GTcGMs

— Mr Bean (@MrBean) June 19, 2022

As a respected comedian, Atkinson has extensive knowledge about the world of comedy. In his interview with the Times, he said the idea of cancel culture threatens the very existence of comedy.

“It does seem to me that the job of comedy is to offend, or have the potential to offend, and it cannot be drained of that potential,” Atkinson said.

While this comment alone is sure to infuriate some progressive leftists, Atkinson went even further.

“Every joke has a victim,” Atkinson said. “That’s the definition of a joke. Someone or something or an idea is made to look ridiculous.”

Atkinson is absolutely correct in this assessment. A joke is meant to poke fun at something, whether it is a person, an object or anything in between.

Do you agree with Atkinson?
Yes: 99% (1772 Votes) No: 1% (12 Votes)

Jokes have had the potential to offend people since the beginning of time, but most people used to be more willing to put aside their differences and recognize comedy for what it is. It is only in recent years that progressive leftists have attempted to tell people who they can and can’t make jokes about.

For example, comedian Dave Chappelle has been attacked — literally — for his jokes about the leftist fascination with transgenderism.

In an October 2021 article for NBC News, writer Michael Crawford wrote that Chappelle’s jokes were “giving narrow-minded people a safe space to deny the existence of trans people and make gays the focus of their taunts.”

“I don’t want Chappelle to be canceled,” Crawford wrote. “I want him to pull out the threads of homophobia and transphobia that run through the quilt of his otherwise brilliant work.”

This line displayed a false idea many progressive leftists have about comedy. They claim they should be allowed to tell comedians what they can and cannot joke about, and Atkinson addressed this problem in his interview.

“I think you’ve got to be very, very careful about saying what you’re allowed to make jokes about,” Atkinson said. “You’ve always got to kick up? Really? What if there’s someone extremely smug, arrogant, aggressive, self-satisfied, who happens to be below in society?

“They’re not all in houses of Parliament or in monarchies. There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”

In addition to this problem, leftists suggesting Chappelle is transphobic because his jokes lead to real world consequences when Chappelle was attacked on-stage.

As the left attempts to attack comedy and remove the very aspects that make Americans laugh — whether in movies, nightclubs, or the privacy of their own homes — this message from Atkinson was more needed than ever.

Categories
Back Door Power Grab COVID Faked news Leftist Virtue(!) Reprints from others.

Reprint: How Masking Did Us Wrong

Mandatory Face mask law and by-law for wearing masks and facial coverings as a regulation for public safety as a medical or hospital legal issues with 3D illustration elements.

By Susan Dunham

The Dark Side of an Easy Ask
The mask experiment showed us just how well we would take to a Lord-of-the-Flies level rewrite of social norms overnight.

As an example of this, I was volunteering at a St. Vincent De Paul thrift store. While bringing in a bag of donated clothing, and not wearing a mask since I had been eating a snack, I was confronted by a retired nurse (who should have known better) who — among other things  — said “Don’t you respect us?!?”

Fortunately for her, I didn’t reply.  But after a couple more incidents with other people (although I’m sure she instigated a confrontation with another person,too). I told one of the supervisors that I was going home and wouldn’t be volunteering there anymore because of the harassment. He sadly agreed about the atmosphere. That was the summer of 2021 –18 MONTHS after the CCP virus has shown up in the states.

Mask up or else!

Categories
Back Door Power Grab Corruption Faked news Leftist Virtue(!) Opinion Politics

This is what hate and jealousy from Progressives brings you.

Personal attacks on a good man.-MSNBC Photo

What happens when a respected Congressman is cleared by the Capitol Hill Police when he had a group of his constituents on tour the day before the To do about nothing protest?

They make up stuff and drag his good name threw the mud. Based on what? Who knows. But since that mud dragging we’ve seen that the Congressman has been receiving death threats. Please play the video below.

Despite the letter exonerating Rep. Loudermilk, the January 6 Committee on Wednesday released selectively edited video footage of GOP Rep. Barry Loudermilk leading constituents on a tour around the Capitol complex on Jan. 5th.

The sham Jan. 6 Committee did this knowing it was a lie and that Loudermilk had been exonerated.

Categories
Corruption Food Leftist Virtue(!) Life

Largest Pork Company in the US Shuts Down California Plant Due to High Costs

Take that!

Who couldn’t see this coming?

Food processing corporation Smithfield Foods will shut down its Vernon, California, plant and scale back operations in California, Utah and Arizona, the company announced Friday.

Smithfield “will cease all harvest and processing operations in Vernon, California in early 2023 and, at the same time, align its hog production system by reducing its sow herd in its Western region,” the company said in a Friday news release.

“Smithfield is taking these steps due to the escalating cost of doing business in California,” the company said.

“It’s increasingly challenging to operate efficiently there,” Smithfield Foods spokesperson Jim Monroe told the Wall Street Journal. “We’re striving to keep costs down and keep food affordable.”

Owned by Hong-Kong-based conglomerate WH Group, Smithfield is the largest pork processor in the country by volume.

Like other food businesses nationwide, the company was hit by a combination of supply chain and labor shortages,  the ongoing record-high inflation, and the war in Ukraine — a major producer of wheat⁠⁠—which sent grain prices soaring worldwide⁠.

Because grain is a crucial ingredient in livestock feed, the impending grain shortage also spiked livestock feed prices, raising the California plant’s production costs.

Adding salt to economic injury were utility costs in California⁠, which, according to the company’s spokesman, were 3.5 times higher per head than those in the 45 other plants in the country run by Smithfield.

Furthermore, according to Monroe, California’s regulatory environment has made it difficult for the pork processor to do business there.

Do you think we are heading toward a global famine?
Yes: 88% (120 Votes)
No: 12% (17 Votes)

The spokesman pointed to Proposition 12, a 2018 voter-approved rule, which mandated that food processing companies confining pigs and sows must have adequate spaces for the animals to lie down and move around.

The regulation effectively rendered confining such animals in smaller stalls unlawful, to the dismay of food producers, who pointed out that the regulation would raise food costs and push up production costs.

In addition to closing down the Vernon plant, the company said in the Friday news release that it would look at “strategic options to exit its farms in Arizona and California” in addition to scaling back its sow herd in Utah.

“Smithfield is providing transition assistance to all impacted employees, including relocation options to other company facilities and farms as well as retention incentives to ensure business continuity until early next year,” the company said.

Smithfield also said that it had reached an agreement with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the International Union of Operating Engineers on shutting the Vernon facility.

“We are grateful to our team members in the Western region for their dedication and invaluable contributions to our mission. We are committed to providing financial and other transition assistance to employees impacted by this difficult decision,” Smithfield Chief Operating Officer Brady Stewart said.

The closure of the company comes as food prices rise nationwide amidst the ongoing baby formula shortage, growing inflation and soaring gas prices.  Adding to the threats facing the nation’s food security is a looming worldwide fertilizer shortage, from which the U.S. is not exempt.

“We are deeply concerned about the combined impacts of overlapping crises jeopardizing people’s ability to produce and access foods, pushing millions more into extreme levels of acute food insecurity,” United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General Qu Dongyu warned.

“We are in a race against time to help farmers in the most affected countries, including by rapidly increasing potential food production and boosting their resilience in the face of challenges,” Qu said.

Categories
Education Leftist Virtue(!) Reprints from others.

Move over ACLU, FIRE is the New Champion of Free Speech.

The new Freedom of Speech Champion. FIRE CEO and President Greg Lukianoff- Photo TK News.

Article is from TK News by Matt Taibbi.

The expansion of the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education marks the end of an era, when free speech issues were the sole province of American liberalism

 

After years of planning, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, better known as FIRE, announced a major expansion Monday, moving “beyond college campuses to protect free speech — for all Americans.”

FIRE was the brainchild of University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate, who co-authored the 1999 book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. To the modern reader the book reads like a collection of eccentric cases of students and teachers caught up in speech code issues, most (but not all) being conservative.

To take just one of countless nut-bar examples, Kors and Silverglate told the story of a professor in San Bernardino reprimanded for violating sexual harassment policies because, among other things, “he assigns provocative essays such as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal,” as the court case later put it. This was apparently the “cannibalism” portion of the accusation that he delved into such subjects as “obscenity, cannibalism, and consensual sex with children.”

The book triggered such an overwhelming number of responses from other faculty members and students that the pair decided to set up an organization to defend people who found themselves in tricky speech controversies on campuses. They soon found they had plenty of work and, by 2022, enough of a mandate to expand beyond colleges and universities into America at large. According to FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff, as quoted in a Politico story, the group has already raised over $28 million toward a $75 million “litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values.”

As noted in another story I put out today, FIRE will be doing a lot of stepping into a role semi-vacated by the American Civil Liberties Union. I spoke with Nico Perrino of FIRE, producer and co-director of the excellent documentary about former ACLU chief Ira Glasser (see review here), to ask what the expansion would entail:

Matt: What was the genesis of FIRE and how has it evolved?

Nico: FIRE was founded in 1999 by two Princeton classmates Harvey Silverglate, a left-leaning, civil liberties attorney out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a conservative-leaning professor, Alan Charles Kors, who teaches the Enlightenment, or taught the Enlightenment, at the University of Pennsylvania. They enjoyed their college experience, but were dismayed by the rise of speech codes in the 1980s and ‘90s, so they wrote a book called The Shadow University.

After they published that book, they were flooded with requests from students and faculty members for help to help defend their free speech, due process, and free assembly rights.

The first case was at the University of Pennsylvania. This was even before FIRE was founded, but it’s the case that inspired The Shadow University and therefore inspired FIRE. There was a student, named Eden Jacobowitz, who was studying in his dorm room at the University of Pennsylvania. There was a group of students outside making loud noises, it was dark out, and he screamed out his window, “Shut up, you Water Buffalo!” It became known as the Water Buffalo case. The students outside ended up being black students, and the accusation against Eden was that he was shouting a racial slur. It turns out that he was Israeli, or devoutly Jewish, and “water buffalo” was a translation of a word, behayma, which in Hebrew means a loud or unruly person. Kors, our co-founder, came to his defense and became a cause célèbre across the United States and vindicating the rights. That set the stage for what we were going to do at FIRE more generally.

Over the years, we’ve defended all sorts of speakers. As you can imagine, popular speakers don’t need free speech protections, so we often defended speakers at the margins. People like Ward Churchill, for example. [Editor’s Note: Churchill wrote a book, Some People Push Back, that described the 9/11 hijackings as “counterattacks” to “genocide,” the victims being “little Eichmanns.”]

We defended a student at Valdosta State University, for example, who criticized his University president’s effort to build a parking garage on campus. A Buddhist environmentalist student who thought the president shouldn’t be encouraging more parking on campus, or more driving on campus, and should invest rather in public transportation. He created a collage that described a “Ronald Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage.” Well, Zaccari was the name of the president, who thought it was a threat, the idea being that the “Memorial” in the collage meant that he was going to die.

Matt: He thought “Memorial” was referencing his future non-existence?

Nico: Yes.

Matt: Amazing.

Nico: He placed an expulsion note under Hayden Barnes’ dorm room door, and told him he needed to be out of the dorms. If you think someone’s actually a threat, you probably don’t slip a note under their door. We ended up defending Hayden Barnes, this is 2007, and taking his case to court and winning a $900,000 judgment in that case.

Matt: Didn’t you also do that crazy case in Indiana, about the janitor reading the book about Notre Dame and the Klan?

Nico: Yes. We defended the case of Keith John Sampson, a janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, who was reading a book called Notre Dame vs. the Klan during his lunch break. He was working his way through school as a janitor. Someone saw, on the cover of the book, burning crosses and reported him to the University administration who found him guilty of racial harassment. The book, of course, was about how Notre Dame defeated the Klan when they marched on the campus. The Klan, people often forget, also hated Catholics, in addition to hating blacks. Someone literally judged the book by its cover. The University found him guilty of racial harassment for reading it. Funny thing is — well, the maybe not so funny thing is — the book was found in the University’s own library.

Matt: Functionally, what is this change going to mean?

Nico: Functionally, we’re getting a lot bigger. This is a $75 million expansion into off campus programming. We’ve already raised $28.5 million of that through a three year fundraising effort. We will be litigating and finding cases off campus. Some of those first cases should be coming down the pipe here shortly. Right now, as of this morning, people will start seeing ads defending a culture of free expression on television. You watch CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, you’ll see our ads start running with a high degree of regularity. We’re requesting $10 million in ads through the remainder of the year. Also, there will be billboards across the country in major cities. You’ll see free speech messaging out there. The big thing that we haven’t seen is people out there advocating for a culture of free expression in a visible way. We want to create an organization that people can rally around when threats to free speech exists.

That’s what this effort is about and we want to do so in an unapologetic way. Too often, there’s a lot of throat-clearing before for the defense of free speech. A lot of apologies, it almost comes off as apology for free expression. We’re genuflecting before other values before we can say anything about what we believe is a fundamental human right. FIRE doesn’t take a position on the content of speech. You won’t see us condemn speakers, even the most vile, racist, or offensive of them. For us, it’s enough that the speech is protected or should be protected. We’ll defend it. We’ll argue on first principles. That’s what’s necessary to win.

Matt: This question may be a little uncomfortable: isn’t that what the ACLU is for? Don’t we already have an ACLU?

Nico: The ACLU has 19 different issues in values and defense. It’s necessarily going to be a little bit more difficult for them to determine how they prioritize their work and where it directs its limited resources. Ben Wizner, who runs the ACLU’s Free Speech Project, acknowledged as much in Michael Powell’s New York Times article last year. He said, “FIRE does not have the same tensions.” He said that for the ACLU, free speech is one of 12 or 15 different values.

We don’t have a racial justice program. We don’t have a reproductive rights program. We don’t have a trans rights program. We have a free speech program. We’re not having to deal with the tensions that may or may not exist with free speech and other values. FIRE believes fundamentally that free speech is supportive of all those values, so we’ll make those arguments where necessary, but no, there’s no other values that we have to defend, which makes our work a little bit easier and more focused.

Matt: Last question. Thirty or forty years ago, when George H. W. Bush pointed at Mike Dukakis and called him a card-carrying member of the ACLU, it was pretty firmly understood that speech was primarily a left liberal concern. Is that still true? And if not, is there a perception now that this has become a conservative fixation?

Nico: My sense is that freedom of expression should be core to every political belief. Our ability to express our political beliefs, whole stop, is the thing that makes debate and discussion about all these other issues possible.

I was in a debate with a professor at George Washington University recently, and he was arguing essentially that free speech, all the conversations that you’re seeing in the media about free speech: that speech doesn’t rate when you have, as he was putting it, abortion rights being restricted all over the country, crackdowns on immigration, things of that nature. I said to him, “The only reason those other issues can rate is because we have our free speech right to discuss them.” So freedom of speech is the first right. It’s the matrix. It’s the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom.

As far as whether liberals have retreated from the idea? To a certain extent, yes. I think that’s apparent. All you need to do is look at who’s going after Dave Chappelle. Look at the response to Elon Musk’s decision to purchase Twitter. Netflix CEO, Ted Sarandos, I think, told the New York Times recently, that it’s an interesting time that we live in because free speech used to be a very liberal value, but that was when the censorship was coming from conservatives against Black Panthers, against Lenny Bruce, against anti-war protestors, against civil rights marchers, against —

Nico: Ruth Bader Ginsburg said America is nothing if not a pendulum. When it swings one direction, it always has a tendency to swing back. For a lot of America’s history in the 20th century, it was liberals who were being censored, so they care deeply about free speech. Now conservatives see that they’re being censored or at least feel like they can’t speak. So they are more vocal in support of free expression.

Now, whether they’re consistently supportive of the principle is another discussion, as we’ve seen with what’s happened in Republican legislatures across the country. I think the suggestion is they’re supportive of the principle when it’s convenient for them, but that’s why we need a nonpartisan free speech advocate in this country. An organization that is going to, as Norman Siegel, who was featured in my documentary Mighty Ira, once said, “If I’m going to have anything tattooed on my chest, it’s going to be ‘neutral principles.’” That’s really what we’re advocating for here, that freedom of speech is an insurance policy for us. If we don’t defend the rights of speakers with whom we disagree with, how can we expect our rights to be protected?

Matt: Excellent. Congratulations and good luck.

Nico: Thank you.

Categories
Elections Leftist Virtue(!) Politics

HUGE: Otero County New Mexico Votes to Remove Dominion Voting Systems, Zuckerberg Drop Boxes, and Other Election Machines!

The Gateway Pundit is GP

By Joe Hoft for TGP June 9, 2022 at 6:07pm

(Above Otero County Commission at the beginning of the day making the pledge of allegiance.)

The Otero County Commission had a long day of discussions and reports today and then they landed upon the issues with the 2020 Election.  They voted to eliminate voting machines in the county!

TGP reported this morning on today’s petition to eliminate using voting machines in the county.

After a day of discussions, the Otero Commission voted on the three following items.

The commission voted to pass all three of the above motions.

These commissioners were fearless.  The more flack they got the more they knew they were over the target.  They wanted every legal vote to count.

“We do all want the same thing.  We all want a fair election”

“If we don’t find out what’s going on, we’ll never know.”

Wow, these commissioners were great.

Here is the actual vote by the commissioners:

Major hat tips to Attorney David Clements and his wife Erin Clements and all those in New Mexico who helped make free and fair elections a thing of the future in this county.

Categories
Corruption COVID Faked news Leftist Virtue(!) MSM Politics

Big Surprise: DeSantis Vindicated of COVID Cover-up After Media Darling, ‘Whistleblower’ Ends Up in Complete Disgrace

What a surprise: Rebekah Jones, once hailed as a “whistleblower” for claiming Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis had fudged the state’s COVID-19 numbers, has been revealed as a complete fraud.
Rebekah Jones “data scientist” that WAS the left’s darling in FLA.

A report released last week by the Florida Department of Health Office of Inspector General exonerated DeSantis on the allegations and found nothing to back up Jones’ allegations that she’d been pressured to alter COVID-19 case and death counts. In fact, the people the inspector general’s office talked to couldn’t even make sense out of the allegations, considering Jones didn’t have access to the raw coronavirus data.

(In spite of this, the mainstream media is hardly handling the report with the same breathlessness they handled the accusations against DeSantis — and for obvious reasons.

According to an editorial published Friday by The Wall Street Journal, (!) the inspector general found no evidence to support Jones’ claims.

“Based upon an analysis of the available evidence, there is insufficient evidence to clearly support a violation of a law, rule, or policy, as described by the complainant,” the report stated.

The governor’s office argued that Jones was fired from her job for “insubordination” and “unilateral decisions to modify the Department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.”

Jones’ original allegations were that she had been ordered to tidy up COVID numbers to support the state’s reopening in the spring of 2020. In addition, she claimed the governor had retaliated against her by having the Florida Department of Law Enforcement execute a search warrant against her in December 2020, arguing DeSantis had “sent the Gestapo” to keep her quiet.

Police say the raid involved a data breach that was traced back to Jones’ home IP address. She’s been hit with a felony charge for downloading confidential health department data. She has pleaded innocent.

According to the Journal, the inspector general’s office talked to over a dozen individuals who worked with Jones as part of its investigation, including her superiors — and not a single one supported her allegations of fudged data.

While she told some of her co-workers that she was told to alter COVID data in the system, the report said they didn’t buy her allegations. That wasn’t just because of her inherent unreliability but because of the fact she didn’t have access to the pertinent data. Instead, she was in charge of handling the state’s online dashboard, not the raw data.

“If the complainant or other DOH staff were to have falsified COVID-19 data on the dashboard, the dashboard would then not have matched the data in the corresponding final daily report,” the report said.

“Such a discrepancy would have been detectable by [Bureau of Epidemiology] staff conducting data quality assurance, as well as other parties, both within and outside the DOH, including but not limited to [county health departments], local governments, researchers, the press/media, and the general public.”

Instead, the report stated the inspector general’s office “found no evidence that the DOH misrepresented or otherwise misled the public regarding how positivity rates were calculated,” according to the report.

“The definitions for overall and new case positivity were provided on the Data Definition sheet and Health Metrics Overview, which were both linked to the dashboard, and were consistent with testimonial evidence obtained by the OIG.”

The report appeared last week to nary a peep in the same media outlets that loved her back in the febrile days of the early pandemic.

As The Daily Caller noted, Jones was a frequent guest on Joy Reid’s MSNBC’s show and made at least five appearances on former CNN host Chris Cuomo’s old show. (No lack of sad irony there; Cuomo’s brother Andrew, the erstwhile governor of New York, was forced out of office over sexual harassment allegations, but also faced accusations of covering up COVID deaths in the state’s nursing homes.)

The headlines in liberal media outlets were similarly effusive — calling Jones a “scientist” to buttress her standing, like Jones was filling test tubes with potential coronavirus vaccines when she wasn’t trying to expose fraud in the Florida government. But even CNN has been honest enough to qualify that as “data scientist.”

NPR, May 19, 2020: “Florida Dismisses A Scientist For Her Refusal To Manipulate State’s Coronavirus Data.” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Dec. 10, 2020: “FDLE raid dramatizes Florida’s COVID-19 coverup.” HuffPo, Dec. 17, 2020: “Florida Scientist Vows To Speak COVID-19 ‘Truth To Power’ Despite Police Raid.” Cosmopolitan, March 11, 2021: “Rebekah Jones Tried To Warn Us About COVID-19. How Her Freedom Is On The Line.”

No evidence for any of it. None. Goose egg. Zero-point-zero.

Rebekah Jones was a darling of the mainstream media if just because her wild-eyed conspiracy theories about covering up COVID data could be wielded as a cudgel against Ron DeSantis and others considered a threat to progressives.

As always, the allegations appear on page one; the truth on page 17 — if it appears at all. She’s served her purpose.

Categories
Economy Leftist Virtue(!) Opinion Politics Reprints from others.

Biden Backer Cardi B Asks: When They Going to Announce We Going Into a Recession

A loon asking for more pain. Youtube Photo.

This article first appeared on Breitbart.

The left’s stupidity never ceases to amaze me. See below.

Rapper and Joe Biden supporter Cardi B took to Twitter on Sunday to ask when “they going to announce” that the United States is “going into a recession.”

“When y’all think they going to announce that we going into a recession?” Cardi B wrote Sunday in a tweet, which has since garnered more than 120,000 likes, and over 16,000 retweets.

Cardi B’s tweet also received thousands of replies, including many Twitter users who reminded the rapper that she had encouraged her fans to vote for President Joe Biden.

Indeed, Joe Biden sat down for an Elle magazine interview with rap star Cardi B jut months before the 2020 presidential election.

Watch below:

“Thanks for helping elect Joe Biden,” another quipped.

Another Twitter user responded to those retorting, “But didn’t you vote for Biden?” saying, “Y’all realize literally MILLIONS of people regret voting for Biden right?”

“You don’t need ‘them’ to tell you anything you can see for yourself,” another tweeted.

A host of other Twitter users took to the comment section to claim that the U.S. is not in a recession.

“Inflation doesn’t mean recession,” one wrote.

“A recession is defined as 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, so we’d only know we are in a recession after it’s already started, and after the economic data comes in for those 2 quarters,” another tweeted.

A strong majority of Americans, however, believe that the U.S. economy is experiencing a recession, according to a recent poll from the Economist and YouGov.

This is bad news for Biden, who just last week declared that a record high number of Americans were comfortable. Moreover, the president’s approval ratings have tanked, as citizens have overwhelming rejected the Biden administration’s handling of gas prices, inflation, and the economy.