Authored by J.B.Shurk via The Gatestone Institute,

“There comes a time,” Martin Luther King Jr. advised, “when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”

Moral imperative, in other words, outweighs personal security, political correctness, and the psychological comfort of identifying with the crowd. During troubling times of human violence and suffering, it is always the lonely few — either blessed with innate courage or made resolute through private, grinding struggle — who dare to take a stand against encroaching evils tacitly accepted by the many. Such is the power of individual free will when man chooses principle as his guide.

Today is a time for the voices of the few to coalesce. What is at stake is nothing less than individual control over one’s life, liberty, property, privacy, and pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech hangs in the balance, as do freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. That many of these natural rights were recorded together in America’s First Amendment is not accidental. They are intimately interwoven. To weaken any one, weakens them all.

To freeze the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters demanding freedom from unwanted experimental “vaccines,” as was done in Canada, is to threaten speech, assembly, bodily autonomy, religious objection, property rights, and public resistance to government-caused harm.

To forbid a football coach from publicly praying is to force him to sacrifice both his religious freedom and freedom of expression; if the very things that most define us are relegated to the home, then religious identity and freedom of speech do not have far to roam.

Aside from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to create an official “Disinformation Governance Board” to “combat” free speech antithetical to the government’s point of view, reports show that DHS employees have regularly met with Facebook and Twitter to suppress and censor certain facts and opinions in online discussion of numerous issues dominating public debate — including such broad topics as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Covid-19, and “racial justice.”

To hand Western governments the power to decide what may or may not be published on social media deprives the public square of both unfettered free speech (within the bounds of Brandenburg v. Ohio) and a truly free press. To empower government actors with the authority to designate some thoughts as “mis-,” “mal-,” or “dis-” information — in other words, to permit politicians and bureaucrats to arbitrate what is true or false, helpful or harmful, protected opinion or malicious deception — is to abrogate entirely the protections of America’s First Amendment. To use private sector cutouts as the government’s implicit censors is not only a nefarious and cynical workaround — it is also illegal to act as a government agent to enable it to circumvent constitutional prohibitions, in this instance limiting who may participate in the modern-day equivalent of the traditional town square.

To censor dissenting views on experimental, yet coerced, medical treatments, two-tiered economic shutdowns (during which “Big Box” stores are inexplicably “allowed” to operate while economically vulnerable neighborhood shops are not), is mass censorship in the name of public health, shielding from scrutiny monstrous tyranny draped in the false cloak of the “greater” or “common good.”

When governments censor dissenting opinions from public debate, they serve no greater interests than their own. When governments claim to act for the people’s “own good” while banning contrary points of view, they all too often augment their own power at the public’s expense. When governments camouflage their orders behind claims of “good intentions,” then the most atrocious evils can be blissfully undertaken.

If you allow yourself to be blinded by any government’s “good intentions,” your eyes may one day be flooded with the sights of unspeakable harms. Hugo Chávez’s socialist government made many such promises “for the good” of the people of Venezuela, while his government’s endless public betrayals have left that nation’s citizenry suffering immeasurably still today.

This is a pivotal moment in human history, when centuries of steady progress toward human emancipation and individual liberty will either find new, urgent momentum or suffer regrettable retreat. Either freedom means something, or it does not. Either personal agency resides in the hands of every individual, or it disappears behind a view of people as nothing more than parts of collective groups. Either self-government demands each citizen have a voice, or the many must obey the edicts of an ever-expansive government run by the few. Either citizens are uniquely empowered to control the direction of their governments, or legal citizenship and nationality mean nothing at all. These are the simple yet serious stakes we face today. They are clear, unforgiving, and unavoidable.

The reason we are here now at this intersection in the history of liberty is not complex: it is the outcome of human nature. For most people in the West today, war and its painful consequences are unknown or have been distorted by time. Although violence and bloodshed continue uninterrupted in many places around the world, most Westerners have long been spared the horrors of war directly outside their doors. The difficulty for humans to appreciate what they cannot see has made them careless in preventing what they do not intimately know.

Many politicians cavalierly embrace totalitarianism once again. Citizens, once aware of the attendant dangers to peace when large corporations and national governments work hand in glove to push “politically correct” ideas upon society, are apparently so far removed from the twentieth century’s vivid lessons in fascist, communist, and Nazi propaganda that they fail to see the harm in bureaucrats and officeholders dictating to the public what it may believe.

Many Westerners have forgotten that freedom of speech and personal liberty — far from menacing “microaggressions” deserving of sanction — are the surest safety valves for mediating animosities inherent within any society before outright violence is unleashed in their stead. For many people, decades of relative peace have transformed hard-fought Western freedoms into disposable inessentials. Governments and international corporations think little of the risks to social cohesion — and probably do not even care — when they purposefully manipulate populations with mass media propaganda meant to reinforce the elite agendas of the World Economic Forum covering everything from energy use and food production to medical mandates and health passports. The same allure of ultimate power and control that fueled both world wars remains all too enticing.

Governments already acclimated to universal public surveillance and warrantless online tracking see central bank digital currencies, human tracking implants, and the imposition of social credit scores all on the horizon and believe the time for total control over citizens is near, so long as they are the ones doing the controlling.

As always, technology’s liberating benefits are accompanied by its powers to threaten populations and to suppress information that its directors may abhor. Radio and television connected the world as never before, but mass communication also rapidly fueled the rise of dictators and the spread of public indoctrination to new heights. Nuclear energy has provided both abundant power and the potential for apocalyptic destruction. Personal computers, smartphones and the internet have given ordinary individuals megaphones through which to articulate new ideas, yet that same cyberspace has opened up a brand new battlespace for government surveillance, propaganda, and mass manipulation.

Rather than ensuring citizens’ economic security and fostering freer markets, some governments appear to view technology as providing not only more efficient tools for redistributing wealth, limiting personal income, and levying taxes but also the means for creating a technocratic system of total surveillance in which bureaucratic control over what consumers buy and sell and the implementation of social credit scores can both reward “politically correct” behaviors and punish “wrong” points of view.

Technological advancement provides the means for both greater human freedom and absolute human abasement. When governments are allowed to make that choice for us, they will often choose the latter. Their concern is not our personal liberty but their power. For human freedom to flourish, only the people are capable of keeping government power in check.

It is therefore imperative that Westerners not lose sight of the most important battle already raging — one pitting individual freedom against total state control. Every other issue should be scrutinized through this lens. We are, indeed, at an intersection in the history of human liberty. Even if only a small minority comprehend what is now at risk, those few would do well to fight for preserving our individual freedoms against those governments and corporations working diligently to dilute them.

Either the light of liberty is once again rekindled, or it will be extinguished until a later day.

US Army officials are preparing to announce the winner of the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft. The contest comes down to Bell Textron and Lockheed Martin Sikorsky competing for the FLRAA contract to replace the Army’s decades-old Black Hawk.

Bloomberg spoke with the Army assistant secretary for acquisition, Douglas Bush, who said the winner of the FLRAA contest would be announced “this calendar year.” And with only 40 days left until 2023, that decision is imminent. 

Bell Textron has offered the Army a tiltrotor aircraft called the V-280 Valor, while the Sikorsky has produced the Defiant X with coaxial rotors. 

V-280 Valor

Defiant X

Bush said the winner would need to build prototypes in the next fiscal year for flight tests in 2025. The new aircraft will replace the Black Hawk by 2030. 

Besides the Army, the Air Force plans to reveal the B-21 Raider by Dec. 2. There have been rapid modernization efforts by the military as it prepares for possible conflict with either and or China. 

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was not assassinated with three shots from the book depository fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. And almost all of us know it.

In opinion polls going back to November 29th 1963, just a week after the shooting, at least a sixty-percent majority has rejected the official line every single time.

In short, regarding JFK, the “crazy conspiracy theorists” make up two-thirds of the population, and always have done.

This is a good thing. A victory for truth in the face of stark odds, overcoming fifty-nine years of propaganda.

It doesn’t matter what you think of JFK the man – whether you believe he was trying to change things, or hail from the Chomsky school of “he was just like Obama” – the simple facts reflect he was killed by state agencies of his own government.

It was a coup.

We don’t need to go into the details, it has been endlessly written about, on this site and a million others.

Suffice it to say, nothing about the “official story” has ever made sense. You have to leave rationality behind to believe it.

Much like mask-usage and the “safe and effective” vaccines during the “pandemic”, embracing the mainstream story of the “lone gunman” and his “magic bullet” has passed beyond the realm of thoughts and opinions and become a tenet of a modern-day religion.

Blaming Lee Harvey Oswald is now an oath of fealty, a show of faith. A sign you are one of the initiated – the first and most debased commandment in the book of State Orthodoxy.

Question it, and you question everything. Pull on that thread and six decades of carefully crafted narratives unravel in minutes.

This is why – fifty-nine years after the fact – they are still lying about it.

Those truly responsible are more than likely all dead. The vast majority of the people living on the planet weren’t even born when it happened…and yet the deceptions still come.

Pathetic exercises in propaganda passed around by second and third generations of twisted servants of the establishment. Brainwashed children, repeating the lies their parents told them despite being surrounded by evidence of their delusion.

It would be tragic if it wasn’t so insidious. Its only saving grace is its ineptitude. (See this from the New York Post, or this from The Express).

It’s all painfully transparent. Exercises in saying, rather than believing.

A common factor in every propaganda narrative is the repetition of “the big lie”. Over and over and over again. In the case of JFK the catechism is a simple one:

Lee Harvey Oswald shot the 35th President in the back and head from the Texas School Book Depository.

The Express even uses that sentence, word for word. Not one part of this mantra has ever been proven. It’s just what you have to say.

Most tellingly it does not even reflect the official position of the US government, with the Church committee having found JFK’s death “a probable conspiracy” forty-six years ago.

As with Covid, when official sources conflict with official “truth” they are written out of the consensus. Rejected by the modern-day Council of Nicea. Left to gather dust in the archives like the gnostic gospels.

In 1992, following the release of Oliver Stone’s simply brilliant film JFK, the US Senate passed a new law, the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.

This law “requires that each assassination record be publicly disclosed in full and be made available in the collection no later than the date that is 25 years [after the law was passed]”.

As of October 2017 both the CIA and FBI are in breach of this law.

Politico has a long article about it, carefully explaining to everyone that it’s definitely not because they have anything to hide and they totally didn’t do it, but also acknowledging that the secrecy does feed into “corrosive conspiracy theories”.

In yet another betrayal of his “anti-establishment” image, The Donald let this slide. Biden is apparently going to pressure them to release something…but that’s just theatre.

Nothing will come of it, save perhaps a few pages of token talking points that subtly reinforce the official story.

Agencies like that won’t ever release real evidence of their own guilt, even supposing it wasn’t shredded, burned and buried next to Jimmy Hoffa decades ago.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter.

We don’t need official documents to corroborate the evidence of our own eyes, and we don’t need official permission before we can acknowledge the truth.

Let the media tell their empty stories to their dwindling readership, let their aging lies echo forever in hollow headlines.

None of us believe them. We all know what really happened, and we always have.

*  *  *

For a deep dive on the JFK assassination, we recommend JFK and the Unspeakable, you should also watch JFK by Oliver Stone which is a wonderfully engaging introduction to the topic. You can read all our past articles on JFK here, and Kit’s long essay on it here.

The Central Intelligence Agency is seeking to tap Russians as potential spies who are “disgusted” with Putin’s war in Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported this week, as part of a new push to bolster its ranks of Russian assets.

The CIA’s deputy director of intelligence David Marlowe, who has been in the post since June 2021, said in a rare speech at George Mason University’s Hayden Center that the CIA is “looking around the world” for Russian who are unhappy with the invasion of Ukraine. It was Marlowe’s first public appearance while at post as deputy director. 

This is “because we’re open for business,” he underscored. The attempt to gain dependable assets is said to include military officers and even oligarchs who are angry at being impacted by Russia’s extreme economic and political isolation on the world stage. 

Offering his assessment on how the war is going for the Russians, Marlowe described, “Putin was at his best moment the day before he invaded.” Speaking of the potential for the Russian leader to put pressure on neighboring Ukraine and NATO before the decision to invade, Marlowe added: “He squandered every single bit of that.”

At that point before the February 24 incursion, President Putin had “all the power that he is ever going to have,” according to the CIA #2 official. 

Some international publications dubbed Marlowe’s speech, which happened last week but was first revealed on Tuesday, a “recruitment pitch”.

“And so, for the director of operations, we’re looking around the world for Russians who are as disgusted with that as we are because we’re open for business,” Marlowe spelled out.

As The Moscow Times wrote: 

Despite wondering aloud if Marlowe’s comments were just an example of “CIA bravado,” The Wall Street Journal noted that the continuing war in Ukraine had unleashed an “intensified spy war” in Europe.

Starting months ago it was widely reported that the CIA had set up a portal on the dark web for disgruntled Russians with government information or access wishing to make contact. 

Below: the full video of the David Marlowe panel…

“We are providing Russian-language instructions on how to safely contact CIA — via our Dark Web site or a reputable VPN — for those who feel compelled to reach us because of the Russian government’s unjust war,” a CIA official told CBS News back in May.

At the time the CIA in the rare public disclosure indicated it is hoping that Russians, including soldiers and civilian officials, would utilize the encrypted methods to submit sensitive information to the US.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A report promoted by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) has been corrected after falsely claiming nearly 50 percent of children aged 12 to 17 who contracted COVID-19 required hospital treatment.

The Rede Group, which created the report for the authority, acknowledged the misinformation in a memorandum obtained by The Epoch Times.

“There was an issue with the numerator for hospitalizations in Figure 40 on page 180. When we calculated the percent hospitalized for each age group, we mistakenly thought the weekly hospitalization data from OHA were unique; they are not,” Danna Drum with the Rede Group told OHA in the memo. “We should have noticed this earlier and apologize for the error. Figure 40 has been corrected in version 1.1 of the report using data provided directly from OHA.”

“Thank you for your attention to the matter and we apologize again for this error,” Drum added.

The old version of the report claimed that 47.4 percent of children aged 12 to 17 who contracted COVID-19 required hospital care.

According to OHA data, that percentage is actually at or below 1 percent.

The report also claimed that the hospitalization rates for all age groups were at or above 30 percent and portrayed the child hospitalization rates as higher than those of the elderly.

The new version of the report (pdf) presents significantly lower rates.

There was no indication in the report that it had been updated besides the addition of “(corrected)” to the graph’s title.

The Epoch Times asked OHA about the false claim, which led to OHA asking the Rede Group to examine the paper.

“The report has been updated with the correct data, and it has been reposted. You can find the new version of the report at the same link as before,” an OHA spokesman told The Epoch Times via email.

The Rede Group did not respond to a request for comment on the correction.

State Sen. Dennis Linthicum, a Republican, told The Epoch Times in an email that the false information showed “poor statistical analysis” and was part of a pattern “of using public money to stir-up vast quantities of statistics, data, and meaningless factoids which veils the malfeasance and parades the contempt which our bureaucratic elites exhibit toward Oregonians, and people in living in the United States.”

State Senator Opposed Bill

A bill passed by state legislators and signed into law by Democrat Gov. Kate Brown in March directed OHA to study how public officials in Oregon responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and produce three reports analyzing the response.

The legislation, Senate Bill 1554 (pdf), allocated approximately $900,000 in taxpayer money to the OHA for the purpose.

Proponents said the legislation would help identify how the public health response could be improved in advance of future crises.

“By beginning the After Action Report work this year, we will be better able to support public health investments and pave the way for future legislative action in the 2023 session. We must use this opportunity to learn meaningfully from this experience through a shared, iterative quality improvement process. We have a lot to learn and we must start now,” state Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation, said in a previous statement.

Linthicum was among the senators voting against the bill.

Linthicum said on the Senate floor that the report should include an assessment of the repercussions for widespread testing, including the testing of people who lacked symptoms, and an examination of how many businesses were closed due to the restrictive measures ordered by top officials.

Linthicum feels the entire first report, which runs 725 pages, was aimed at empowering the state by making it sound like the state did its best during the pandemic.

The report goes along with the storyline “that says, ‘oh, we had some deficiencies, we had some areas that needed improvement, but this was a good investment for Oregonians and we did our best,’” Linthicum said. “And that’s how you when you read the report, and given that insight to what the bill actually demanded of this reporting agency, you realize this is just trying to put lipstick on a pig.”

Read more here…

Authored by Brad Jones via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Guaranteed income programs for transgender residents in San Francisco and Palm Springs have raised the eyebrows of some critics, who say they are a misuse of public funds and discriminatory.

Erin Friday, a co-leader of Our Duty, a group that protests the gender transitioning of minor children and young adults, told The Epoch Times the programs could indirectly promote prostitution and other crimes by prioritizing transgender convicts and sex workers.

“Trans-identified people need mental health assistance, not unrestricted cash,” she said.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced the launch of the Guaranteed Income for Transgender People (GIFT) program on Nov. 16 to provide “economically marginalized transgender people with unrestricted monthly guaranteed income as a way to combat poverty.”

The city and county will provide $1,200 a month in guaranteed income for 18 months to 55 transgender residents at a cost of about $1.2 million.

“The program will prioritize enrollment of Transgender, Non-Binary, Gender Non-Conforming, and Intersex (TGI) people who are also Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC), experiencing homelessness, living with disabilities and chronic illnesses, youth and elders, monolingual Spanish-speakers, and those who are legally vulnerable such as TGI people who are undocumented, engaging in survival sex trades, or are formerly incarcerated,” according to the GIFT website.

Friday, an attorney, said Our Duty is exploring legal challenges to the program, which she says is “both racist and discriminatory on the basis of sex and gender.”

With health insurance providers mandated to provide gender transition treatment to those who seek it, and nonprofit groups such as Planned Parenthood offering cross-sex hormones at a nominal fee, Friday said trans-identified people should not be entitled to more money than other impoverished segments of the population.

The poverty rate in California was estimated at approximately 12 percent in the fall of 2021, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, with 29 percent living near or below the poverty line. The poverty rate for seniors 65 and older was 16 percent, “markedly higher” than younger adults at 12 percent and children at 9 percent.

In addition, public funds should not be spent to promote “an ideology that supports cancer-and-sterility-causing experimental hormones on children and removal of healthy body parts,” Friday said.

She urged parents in other states to “be on the lookout” for similar policies being implemented in their cities, since others may also be planning similar pilot programs in the hopes of starting a nationwide movement, she said.

Greg Burt with the California Family Council, a religious organization based in Fresno, told The Epoch Times in a Nov. 18 statement the programs are discriminatory and counterproductive.

“It implies transgender poor are more valuable and deserving of help than those who are not,” he said.

Giving money to poor people who identify as transgender with no accountability or limitations on how the money is spent isn’t compassionate because it harms the people it seeks to help, he said.

“The policy is foolish because it will incentivize the poor to identify as transgender to get the $1,200. There is no medical test or visual identifier to know who is transgender,” he said.

Mayors for Guaranteed Income

Aside from the GIFT program, Breed has led two other guaranteed income pilot programs, including the Abundant Birth Project for pregnant women who are black or Pacific Islanders, and a $6 million universal basic income program for local artists affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The initiatives are part of the California Guaranteed Income Pilot Program, which plans to provide grants totaling $35 million for pilot programs across the state. Each program must be funded with at least a 50 percent match by local governments or organizations.

According to the City of Palm Springs, it’s also part of a broader plan by Mayors for Guaranteed Income, an organization founded by former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs in 2020 that now has more than 80 supportive mayors in at least 29 different states. The group includes 23 mayors in California, including San Francisco’s Breed and Palm Springs’ former Mayor Christy Holstege.

“Between the pilots that have already started disbursements and those that are in the works, our coalition will provide more than $200 million in direct, unconditional relief to everyday Americans,” the organization states on its website.

The organization lists as its donors Jack Dorsey’s #startsmall, California Community Foundation, Carol Tolan, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Arrow Impact, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The California Wellness Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and Wells Fargo Foundation.

Palm Springs

The Palm Springs City Council voted unanimously in March to set up a guaranteed income program that would pay transgender and non-binary residents up to $900 a month. The council allocated $200,000 to two organizations, DAP Health and Queer Works, to develop the guaranteed income plan and apply for a share of the state funding.

Mayor Lisa Middleton, who is openly transgender, voted to support the program at a March city council meeting but expressed doubts about whether the city should fund it or not.

“For the record, I strongly support reform of our poverty programs,” Middleton said. “I do not believe that guaranteed income programs as they are currently envisioned will be able to succeed and scale up to the level of the problem that they are attempting to address, nor do I believe that placing income maintenance programs within municipal government broadly is an appropriate public policy step. Notwithstanding that statement, I’m prepared to vote for the $200,000.”

However, Jacob Rostovsky the founder and CEO of Queer Works, indicated the city is expected to provide an additional $1 million to $1.2 million, according to a city staff report. The anticipated state grant and financial support from donors will cover 40 to 50 percent of the $2 million project.

Randy Economy, a Republican who resides in Coachella Valley, told The Epoch Times the mayor and council of Palm Springs have taken the city from “LGBTQ friendly” to a “much more radical place.”

In 2017, Palm Springs became the first city in the nation with an all-LGBT city council.

“Using the transgenderism situation as a political social experiment city by city is absolutely nonsensical and dangerous,” Economy said.

An openly gay man “who happens to be a Republican in California,” Economy said he left the Democratic Party about 20 years ago because of its “bizarre obsession with sexuality and gender.”

“What we’ve seen in cities with predominant majorities from one persuasion or the other, whether it be racially dominant … or in this case, dominated [by] … the LGBTQ community, just because they got elected, they feel they’ve been given a green light to be able to go ahead and promote their agenda, their will, their entire philosophy—on the entire community that they represent,” he said.

Economy played a lead role in the recall effort against California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and he ran unsuccessfully in the June 7 primary election for the District 4 seat on the California State Board of Equalization.

He also opposes subjecting children to gender identity issues inside or outside of the classroom.

“It has gotten to the point where it’s socially acceptable and routine to take a 5-year-old or a 7-year-old and [allow] them to start [gender] transitioning,” he said. “To me, that’s reprehensible. It’s cruelty to the children to put them through such a horrendous situation until their minds mature and develop. I understand the issue because I’ve seen it happen, and kids need to be kids.”

Drag Queen Laureate

The day after San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced the GIFT program, she issued a press release requesting applications for the city’s first drag queen ambassador.

The Drag Laureate program will support a drag performer to promote the city’s “LGBTQ+, arts, nightlife and entertainment communities,” according to the release.

California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) sponsored the program in his prior elected office as a county supervisor.

“San Francisco’s Drag Laureate program is a wonderful celebration of our drag queens,” Wiener said in the release. “Drag performers are an amazing representation of the LGBTQ community and they contribute so much to our city. I’m thrilled about the launch of this program, and excited to see who is crowned Drag Laureate.”

British feminist Kellie-Jay Keene recently staged a protest against Wiener’s promotion of drag queens at a pumpkin carving contest for families in San Francisco that Mayor Breed attended. Keene, who opposes the transgender movement, was in the city as part of her Let Women Speak U.S. tour.

Wiener is the author of several controversial legislative bills supporting the transgender community and “gender-affirming care.” One of his bills, Senate Bill 107, will shelter parents of trans-identified youth who seek to avoid prosecution for child abuse in other states, making California a trans sanctuary state. Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the partisan bill into law in September despite widespread opposition and no support from Republicans in the legislature.

Transgender and Non-Binary Population

The Williams Institute at the University of California–Los Angeles studied data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and found about 42.7 percent of people in the U.S. who identify as transgender and nonbinary are teenagers or young adults, according to a report released in June 2022.

Youth ages 3 to 17 currently comprise about 18 percent of the transgender-identified population, up from 10 percent in previous estimates.

More than 1.6 million adults (18 years and older) and youth (ages 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States, or 0.6 percent of those ages 13 and older, the institute reports.

In California, about 1.93 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds identify as transgender, compared to 0.7 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds, 0.5 percent of 24- to 64-year-olds, and 0.34 percent of people 65 and older. The number of adult Californians who identify as transgender is 150,000 or 0.49 percent of the total state population.

The Williams Institute research also found the racial composition of people who identify as transgender generally reflects the racial makeup of the general population, though the estimates “mirror prior research that found transgender youth and adults are more likely to report being Latinx and less likely to report being White compared to the U.S. population.”

The mea culpa tour for Sequoia Capital, who lost $150 million in the FTX blowup, continues. 

The venture capital firm reportedly apologized to its fund investors yet again last Thursday in a conference call, vowing “to improve its due diligence process for future investments”, Bloomberg wrote this week, citing people familiar with the matter.

Bloomberg called it a “rare moment of contrition for Sequoia”, who has had a successful track record investing in companies like Apple, Google and Airbnb. 

And what a surprise: the firm said that now, post-FTX blowup, it “would be able to push harder to have even early stage startups’ financial statements audited by one of the Big Four accounting firms”, Bloomberg wrote.

If only someone had thought about due diligence before FTX blew up…

Regardless, recall that back on November 10, we reported Sequoia had written down the entire value of its stake in FTX, a little over $210 million.

“We are in the business of taking risk,” Sequoia wrote in a message to investors seen by Bloomberg. “Some investments will surprise to the upside, and some will surprise to the downside.”

For a larger list of investors that lost money in FTX, consult our November 10, 2022 writeup here. 

Here is the note we sent to our LPs in GGFIII regarding FTX. pic.twitter.com/Cgp1Yxk1pz

— Sequoia Capital (@sequoia) November 10, 2022

Authored by Lorenz Duchamps via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Bill Gates, chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, confirmed that he was moved to an undisclosed location for safety reasons amid security concerns in connection to the 2022 midterm elections.

While speaking on KTAR News 92.3 FM’s “Arizona’s Morning News” on Nov. 21, Gates noted that the condition hasn’t interfered with his work in the state’s election system.

“I’m not in hiding … but I’ll put it this way. When the sheriff suggests that I spend the night somewhere else, I do it,” Arizona’s top election official told the station.

Gates was asked on the show to describe what the incident has done to him and his family emotionally, and also if he’s considering leaving public office following threats of violence.

“I’ve been an elected official since 2009 and here’s the reality: You’re not going to make everyone happy,” he said. “I was elected and was privileged to be reelected by my constituents in 2020 and I’m going to continue to serve.”

Gates said disruption to his family “has been minimal,” adding that the issue has been “blown out of proportion.” He also underscored that the situation did not have any impact on his official duties.

“This isn’t about me at all. I’m going to be fine. My family is going to be fine. This is not impacting me doing my work on the election, or generally, any one of the 50 lines of business that we’re in at Maricopa County,” Gates said.

“Threats of violence should never be normalized, of course, and I am, in particular, more concerned with our elections workers who have been dealing with this … not only here in Maricopa County but, really, nationwide for the past two years,” he added.

Jason Berry, a Maricopa County spokesperson, told CNN that Gates moved locations after there was a specific threat made against him on an undescribed social media platform. He was under the protection of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and stayed at the undisclosed location for just one night.

The incident occurred as the state’s most populous county has been criticized after widespread problems with ballot-tabulation equipment were reported on Election Day at approximately 70 of the county’s 223 voting centers.

A judge in Maricopa County who was asked to adjudicate an emergency motion (pdf) filed by the Republican National Committee (RNC), as well as GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, said that the GOP did not “have evidence there was a voter who was precluded the right to vote” in connection to the tabulation problems.

Arizona AG Investigation

Lake, a candidate backed by former President Donald Trump, criticized the way Maricopa County ran the Nov. 8 elections, proclaiming on Nov. 19 that she will become governor after the office of Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich demanded explanations about Election Day problems in the county.

Meanwhile, Republican Arizona Attorney General candidate Abe Hamadeh is suing his opponent and a slew of election officials over what he alleges were widespread “errors and inaccuracies.”

Officials in at least 15 counties have “caused the unlawful denial of the franchise to certain qualified electors, erroneously tallied certain ballots, and included for tabulation in the canvass certain illegal votes in connection with the election for the office of Arizona Attorney General,” Abe Hamadeh, the candidate, said in the complaint.

That includes Maricopa County officials improperly disqualifying ballots cast by people who, as a direct result of poll worker errors, were incorrectly listed as voting previously in the midterm election, Hamadeh added.

“Immediate judicial intervention is necessary to secure the accuracy of the results of the November 8, 2022 general election, and to ensure that candidate who received the highest number of lawful votes is declared the next Arizona Attorney General,” the complaint states.

The filing was lodged in Maricopa County court.

The Arizona attorney general race is headed to a recount, according to Katie Hobbs, the state’s secretary of state, due to the slim margin separating Hamadeh from Democrat candidate Kris Mayes.

Mayes is leading by just 510 votes out of more than 2.5 million cast, according to an unofficial tally from Hobbs’s office.

Mayes and Hobbs, who were named as defendants in the new suit, did not respond to requests for comment. A Maricopa County spokesperson did not immediately return an inquiry.

Problems

Maricopa County officials have acknowledged problems with tabulation equipment, saying the problem affected 30 percent of all voting centers in the county and an estimated 17,000 ballots.

On election day the officials said that voters could place their ballots in a secure box to be counted later. Other options included “checking out” of the poll site and casting a ballot at another location, or utilizing an early ballot if one was possessed.

Both of the latter options required poll workers to properly list the voter as checking out, or leaving the site without casting a ballot, but some workers “were unaware of the process,” the new complaint alleges.

“This pervasive and systematic error directly and proximately resulted in three recurring scenarios in which qualified electors were unlawfully and unconstitutionally disenfranchised,” it added.

Hamadeh and the Republican National Committee, which joined in the legal action, say that at least 146 voters who should have been checked out and who later went to another location were required to vote using provisional ballots, which they say will not be counted because the voter was erroneously listed as having already voted.

At least 273 other voters who should have been checked out utilized early ballots but those ballots will not count because of the same issue, the Republicans said.

Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican, failed to outline the steps voters had to take if they left the sites at which there were problems in a widely-viewed Election Day video that featured officials acknowledging for the first time the issues with tabulators, the complaint noted. He did not mention checking out but merely said people could “go to a nearby voting center.”

“Chairman Gates’s instructions foreseeably resulted in the disenfranchisement of a significant number of qualified electors who followed his instructions,” it says. “By inducing voters to leave polling locations and then denying-through a consistent and erroneous practice of failing to properly implement ‘check-out’ procedures-these qualified electors their right to duly cast a ballot for tabulation, the Maricopa County Defendants engaged (through their election boards) in cognizable ‘misconduct,’ and wrongfully excluded valid and legally sufficient votes from the canvass line the race for Arizona Attorney General.”

Other Issues

Other issues include officials allegedly violating the law when they sought to verify early ballot signatures.

Officials must, when receiving a mail-in ballot, compare the signature on the envelope containing the ballot with the signature of the voter on record. If the signatures don’t match, the ballot is invalid unless the voter “cures” the problem within three to five days, depending on the type of election.

A number of the ballot envelopes had mismatched signatures but were still counted because county officials determined the signature matched the signature on a different document other than the registration record, which violates state law, the complaint alleges.

The issue happened across multiple counties, the Republicans say.

They also alleged that in the duplication process—triggered when a ballot is too defective to be read by a tabulator—officials incorrectly transcribed some of the selections in the attorney general race, which led to an inaccurate vote count.

“Arizonans demand answers and deserve transparency about the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the General Election by certain election officials. I will not stop fighting until ALL voters receive justice. See you in court,” Hamadeh said in a statement.

Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said that the committee was “proud to join in this legal action.”

“Maricopa County’s election failures disenfranchised Arizonans,” she said. “We’re going to court to get the answers voters deserve.”

Authored by Katie Spence via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Nov. 19 acknowledged “underwhelming performances” by Republicans in the midterm elections and contrasted the losses elsewhere with what he called a “true Republican landslide” in Florida.

“We added four new Republican Congressmen to the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of Florida,” DeSantis told attendees at the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas on Saturday.

“We secured supermajorities in the Florida legislature—the most Republicans we have ever had in Florida’s history.”

At a time when Republicans are questioning what happened to the promised midterm elections’ “red wave” and what to do going forward, DeSantis clearly and elegantly stated that in Florida, Republicans are appealing to freedom, fighting against the “woke mind virus,” and implementing common-sense legislation. As a result, Republicans, Independents, and Democrats voted for a red wave in Florida.

“We won, by double digits, Miami-Dade County!” DeSantis said of his Republican win in the previously Democrat stronghold.

He added that if Republicans want to win future elections, they must follow his example in Florida.

Blueprint to Win

According to DeSantis, Republicans were successful in Florida’s midterm elections because “Florida really has a blueprint for success.” Specifically, he explained that his “blueprint” includes exercising authentic leadership that doesn’t bend to the shifting whims of society.

“The job of a leader is not to stick your finger in the wind and try to contort yourself to wherever public opinion may be trending at any given moment. No, the job of a leader is to set out a vision. To execute that vision. To show people that it’s the right vision, and to deliver concrete results. And when you do that, the people respond,” DeSantis stated.

He continued by giving the example that Florida has millions more people than New York, but New York’s budget is “over twice the size of our budget in Florida.” Despite that, DeSantis claimed that when New Yorkers move to Florida, they remark on Florida’s much better roads, services, and infrastructure.

DeSantis added that in Florida, K-12 schools are performing better than in New York, Florida has a record budget surplus—and it does all of that without a state income tax and one of the lowest tax burdens in the country. He said that the government wants people to succeed in Florida, and they adopt legislation to make that possible and attract people to the state.

Plus, DeSantis said, in Florida they don’t let red tape and bureaucracy prevent them from getting the job done.

A Return to Sanity

Expanding on why he thinks Republicans in his state did well in the midterms, DeSantis said Florida “stood out as the free state” over the past few years. He stated that during the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, his administration refused to “descend into some type of Faucian dystopia” and instead respected people’s rights.

That included refusing to force people to close their businesses, keeping schools open, and standing against vaccine mandates. DeSantis added that those decisions resulted in attacks from the mainstream media and government officials worldwide, but his administration stood firm.

DeSantis went on to say that leadership requires standing against such attacks and said he was happy to take those “arrows” to protect his constituents. He said when people witnessed that, it drew them to Florida because it was a “refuge of sanity.”

As part of that “refuge of sanity,” DeSantis said Florida chose law and order over rioting and disorder. He said that when riots broke out in 2020, he immediately called out the National Guard to quash them. Then he moved to enact legislation protecting the police and their funding and said that anyone who riots in Florida isn’t getting a “slap on the wrist” but instead gets the “inside of a jail cell.”

DeSantis added that if any prosecutors try to pick and choose which laws to enforce, he immediately removes them from their posts.

Further, DeSantis said to resounding applause that Florida has chosen “education over indoctrination” and noted that Florida protects parental rights over their children. He said his administration believes parents have a fundamental role in raising their children and, as a result, he’s expanded school scholarships, so parents have more choices in education.

Pointedly, DeSantis stated that schools are not a place for “ideology” and said Florida banned Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools. He added that in Florida, they don’t teach children to hate themselves or each other and instead teach the history of the United States and what it means to “be an American.” The governor said he wouldn’t allow inappropriate content in elementary school, referencing the gender ideology curriculum.

All of this, DeSantis said in conclusion, is his administration’s willingness to stand against the “woke mind virus” that’s destroying society. He said people see the insanity of “woke ideology,” his administration’s appeal and return to common sense, and his “courage to lead,” and that’s why Florida experienced a red wave.

“Guess what? When you stand up for what’s right, when you show people you’re willing to fight for them, they will walk over broken glass barefoot to come vote for you. And that’s exactly what they did for me on Nov. 8 in record numbers,” DeSantis said.

He finished by saying that people respond to “strong leadership,” and if Republicans want to win going forward, they need to remember that to attract voters from across the political sphere.

Lost Red Wave

Before the Nov. 8 election, many political models estimated a red wave of up to 45 House seats because of President Joe Biden’s unpopularity, the struggling economy, and the past precedent of the majority party losing seats in a midterm. That didn’t pan out, however.

Instead, while Republicans managed to eke out a slim majority in the House, they lost at least one seat in the Senate—the Senate runoff results in Georgia could exacerbate that or return the Senate to a 50-50 split. Consequently, the 2022 midterms were considered a decisive win for Biden and his administration.

Read more here…