Authored by Newt Gingrich via RealClear Wire,

Scott Rasmussen has done America an enormous service. He and his team have identified the driving forces behind the destructive radicalism which is pushing us into a cultural civil war.

While doing their two weekly national surveys, Rasmussen and his team noticed an anomaly. Out of every 1,000 or so respondents, there would always be three or four who were far more radical than everyone else. After several months of finding these unusual responses, Rasmussen realized they all shared three characteristics.

The radical responses came from people who had graduate degrees (not just graduate studies), family incomes above $150,000 a year, and lived in large cities (more than 10,000 people per zip code).

When Rasmussen aggregated the responses from more than 20 surveys, he realized these people made up a unique elite 1 percent.

He then did a national survey of only people with these characteristics – and found some astonishing results. He briefed me and our team on the findings – and joined me on Newt’s World to talk about it further.

When all other voters gave President Joe Biden a 41 percent job approval, the elite 1 percent rated him at 82 percent approval.

The elite 1 percent are surprisingly young. Sixty-seven percent are between 35 and 54 years old. They are 86 percent white. Almost half of them (47 percent) favor “Sanders-like policies.” They are overwhelmingly Democrats (73 percent).

The gap between the elite 1 percent and the rest of America is startling. While 57 percent of all voters say there is not enough individual freedom in America, 47 percent of the elite 1 percent say there is too much freedom. If you ask the section of the group that is politically obsessed (people who talk politics every day), 69 percent say there is too much individual freedom in America.

Given this, it’s not surprising that the elite 1 percent have great faith in government. Some 70 percent trust government to do the right thing most of the time.

Rasmussen said that this project has revealed the scariest single polling number he has seen in nearly 35 years of studying popular opinion. According to his data, 35 percent of the elite 1 percent (and 69 percent of the politically obsessed elite 1 percent) said they would rather cheat than lose a close election. Among average Americans, 93 percent reject cheating and accept defeat in an honest election. Only 7 percent reported they would cheat.

While only 6 percent of most voters have a very favorable opinion of members of Congress, 69 percent of the elite 1 percent have a very favorable view (this is almost unimaginable). While 10 percent of all voters have a favorable view of journalists, the elite 1 percent really like them (71 percent favorable). While 17 percent of all voters have a favorable view of college professors, the elite 1 percent just love them (76 percent). This tracks, because many of the elite 1 percent may be college professors.

To illustrate the scale of the gap between the elite 1 percent and the rest of the country, consider the elite 1 percent’s views on climate issues (and understand that these ideas are opposed by 63 percent to 83 percent of most Americans).

• 77 percent of the elite 1 percent would like to impose strict restrictions and rationing on the private use of gas, meat, and electricity.
• 72 percent of the elite 1 percent favor banning gas powered vehicles.
• 69 percent of the elite 1 percent favor banning gas stoves.
• 58 percent of the elite 1 percent favor of banning sport utility vehicles.
• 55 percent of the elite 1 percent favor banning non-essential air travel.
• 53 percent of the elite 1 percent favor banning private air conditioning.

As Rasmussen noted, the degree to which the elite 1 percent think their views represent those of the average American is astonishing.

According to Rasmussen, the most radical of the elite 1 percent were educated at what he calls the “dirty dozen:” Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, John’s Hopkins, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Cornell, MIT, and the University of Chicago.

The elite 1 percent who graduated from these schools deeply believe in government. Fifty-five percent believe there is too much individual freedom in America and that Americans should obey government and follow government leadership.

Rasmussen’s identification of the elite 1 percent begins to explain the depth of the tension between most Americans and the tiny group of elitists who control what Vladimir Lenin called “the commanding heights,” the elements of power which control the rest.

It is the elite 1 percent who dominate the universities, news media, judiciary, intelligence agencies, giant foundations, and most major corporations. Although they are relatively few, they marry each other, their children go to the same schools, and they hire and promote each other.

Charles Murray in his classic work, “Coming Apart,” analyzed zip codes and proved that graduates from “dirty dozen” universities that Rasmussen described live, work and play in the same zip codes. They are an isolated set and create a “power aristocracy” that has no knowledge of the rest of us – and contempt for most of us. This perfectly explains Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” line.

Scott Rasmussen has done pioneering work. Every American should read “The Elite 1% and the Battle for America’s Soul” to understand what we are fighting to change.

For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com. Also, subscribe to the Newt’s World podcast.

The idiots running Portland, Oregon have declared a 90-day state of emergency over an ongoing fentanyl crisis, just three years after decriminalizing possession of all drugs.

State, County and City officials declared the ‘tri-government’ fentanyl emergency following recommendations by the governor-established Portland Central City Task Force late last year. As part of the response, the city, state and county will work together to ‘tackle the crisis’ (sure!), which will include the establishment of a “command center” in the central city to coordinate efforts and “refocus existing resources.”

Fentanyl addicts who interact with first responders in downtown Portland over the next 90 days will be triaged in this new command center.

“Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly addictive, and all are grappling with how to respond,” said Gov. Tina Kotek (D).

According to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, “We cannot underestimate the tremendous value of bringing leaders from different disciplines in a room on a daily basis who all account for a different part of the solution.”

Mike Meyers, director of Portland’s Community Safety Division will head up the command team, while deputy police chief Nathan Reynolds of the state’s Office of Resilience and Emergency Management will be the state’s incident commander.

Portland Police will also work with Oregon State Police to jointly patrol downtown streets for fentanyl sales.

As the Epoch Times notes further, the emergency declarations do not provide extra funding for the joint actions, and government agencies will instead rearrange current budgets to cover the costs.

According to U.S. officials, an increasing number of Mexican cartels have been importing fentanyl from China before pressing it into pills or mixing it into other counterfeit pills made to look like Xanax, Adderall, or oxycodone. The drugs are then sold to unaware buyers in the United States

Announcing the tri-government actions, Ms. Kotek noted the ongoing opioid is impacting not just the state but the entire nation, with the deadly synthetic drug fentanyl leading to the deaths of thousands of Americans each year.

From 2016 to 2021, drug overdose deaths involving fentanyl more than tripled across the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In Oregon, health officials saw a 74 percent surge in fentanyl-related deaths from 2019 to 2020, according to the Oregon Department of Education.

“Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly and addictive, and all are grappling with how to respond,” Ms. Kotek said. “The Chair, the Mayor and I recognize the need to act with urgency and unity across our public health and community safety systems to make a dent in this crisis. We are all in this together.”

Ms. Kotek added that the next 90 days will “yield unprecedented collaboration and focused resources targeting fentanyl and provide a roadmap for the next steps.”

Elsewhere, Portland Mayor Wheeler said the joint emergency declarations are “exactly the type of coordinated action needed to make a direct impact and a lasting difference.”

The joint emergency declarations come after U.S. and Chinese officials resumed talks in Beijing on Tuesday regarding how to counter the ongoing illicit trafficking of fentanyl.

The discussions come more than a year after they were put on hold amid rising tensions between Washington and Beijing in the wake of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Wang Xiaohong, China’s public security minister, said his deputy—who attended the closed-door talks with U.S. officials earlier in the day— had reached a “common understanding on the work plan” with officials and hopes the two delegations could “enhance and expand cooperation to provide more positive energy for stable, sound and sustainable China-U.S. relations.”

Senior U.S. officials from the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, State, and Treasury participated in Tuesday’s talks. U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns was also in attendance.

Reuters contributed to this report. 

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

Updated COVID-19 vaccines may cause heart inflammation and severe allergic shock, according to a new study from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Researchers with the FDA, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and companies like CVS looked at health care databases to try to figure out if there were signs the Moderna and Pfizer bivalent COVID-19 vaccines might be linked to any health issues.

They found several safety signals. One signal was for myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, and a related condition called pericarditis following Pfizer vaccination in adults aged 18 to 35. Another was for anaphylaxis, or severe allergic shock, following Moderna and Pfizer vaccination in people aged 18 to 64.

The signals were detected in a database from Carelon Research.

The incidence rate for anaphylaxis was 74.5 cases per 100,000 person-years following Pfizer vaccination and 109.4 cases per 100,000 person-years following Moderna vaccination.

Researchers arrived at an incidence rate of 131.4 cases of myocarditis/pericarditis per 100,000 person-years after a Pfizer shot.

No stratification was done by gender, despite myocarditis, according to many studies, disproportionately affecting males.

Person-years is a measure used in some studies. In this study, all time during post-vaccination periods of time known as risk intervals were included. The risk intervals were different depending on the health outcome. For anaphylaxis, the risk interval was 0 to 1 day; for myocarditis/pericarditis, it was 0 to 7 days or 0 to 21 days.

Additional issues were also identified in the four databases that were analyzed, but none rose to the level of a safety signal, a set criteria that is an indication of a vaccine causing an issue.

The study analyzed data from people aged 6 months and older from August 2022 to July 2023. The bivalent shots were replaced soon after by updated vaccines because their effects, which already started low, were shown to wane in observational studies.

Researchers only included people who were continuously enrolled in an insurance plan and did not suffer health issues during a “clean interval,” or if the health outcome in question did not occur during a certain interval.

“References for the clean interval could not be located in the literature and are based on clinician input,” the authors said in a footnote.

Pfizer and Moderna, which make COVID-19 shots that utilize modified messenger RNA (mRNA), did not return inquiries.

FDA Response

Patricia Lloyd, an FDA researcher, and her co-authors said the study “supports the safety of these vaccines” and “supports the conclusion that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.”

Asked for evidence to support those conclusions, Ms. Lloyd referred a request for comment to the FDA.

“With over a billion doses of the mRNA vaccines administered, available scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the vaccines are safe and effective. The FDA stands behind its findings of quality, safety, and efficacy for the mRNA vaccines. Additionally, it is simply a fact that millions of lives have been saved because of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, which most Americans undergoing vaccination have received,” an FDA spokesperson claimed.

The agency provided a single citation from the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that used modeling to estimate that through November 2022, the vaccines prevented millions of deaths.

The study was published ahead of peer review on the medRxiv server.

Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist and president of the McCullough Foundation, told The Epoch Times in an email that results from the paper show “cardiovascular and neurological safety events are numerous and unacceptable on a population basis.”

Dr. McCullough, who was not involved with the paper, noted that the study did not analyze COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness.

“The FDA’s conclusion on risk benefit is not valid and reflects agency bias in attempting to promote the unsafe, ineffective products,” he said. “Our regulatory agencies should not be promoting or advertising the products they are charged with regulating.”

The FDA clears vaccines. The agency in 2022 authorized and approved the bivalent vaccines despite there being no clinical trial data available.

Limitations of the new paper included the lack of medical record review. Many authors reported their employment for health care companies as conflicts of interest.

A previous study analyzing the health claims databases detected signals for seizures/convulsions among children aged 2 to 4 after Pfizer vaccination and children aged 2 to 5 following Moderna vaccination. That study analyzed the version of the vaccines that preceded the bivalent shots.

In another new study, co-authored by Dr. McCullough, researchers reported finding a spike in reports of myocarditis in the federally-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System in 2021.

“We found the number of myocarditis reports in VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 was 223 times higher than the average of all vaccines combined for the past 30 years,” the researchers said.

Applying causality principles, the researchers said that COVID-19 vaccination was “strongly associated with a serious adverse safety signal of myocarditis, particularly in children and young adults resulting in hospitalization and death.”

Federal officials have said that the COVID-19 vaccines cause myocarditis, pericarditis, and anaphylaxis, but that the vaccines also provide protection against infection and severe illness, tilting the risk-benefit balance in their favor. They have increasingly cited, in lieu of clinical trials, observational studies from the FDA and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), some of which lack peer review.

Current U.S. recommendations are for essentially all Americans aged 6 months and older to get one of the newest COVID-19 vaccines, introduced in 2023. That contrasts with a number of other countries, such as the United Kingdom, which have stopped offering or no longer recommend COVID-19 vaccination for wide swaths of their populations.

Weeks after the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay over a plagiarism scandal, the university’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, has been accused of doing the same.

According to a Monday complaint filed with the university, as well as an analysis by the Washington Free Beacon‘s Aaron Sibarium, large portions of Charleston’s work very clearly appears to have been lifted from others without so much as quotation marks. She even took credit for her own husband’s work, according to the report.

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Through that sleight of hand, Sherri Ann Charleston effectively took credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, and appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. –Free Beacon

As Sibarium notes on X:

The sleight of hand gave Sherri Charleston credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black comp sci students. pic.twitter.com/jUs2euAz6G

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) January 30, 2024

“The 2014 paper appears to be entirely counterfeit,” said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University.

“This is research fraud pure and simple.”

Prior to joining Harvard in August 2020, Charleston was the chief affirmative action officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After joining Harvard, she served on the staff advisory committee which helped choose Claudine Gay as president in December 2022, the Harvard Crimson reports. Charleston taught gender studies courses at the University of Wisconsin, while her bio describes her as “one of the nation’s leading experts in diversity” whose work involves “translating diversity and inclusion research into practice for students, staff, researchers, postdoctoral fellows and faculty of color.”

It apparently also includes copious use of ‘ctrl-c’ and ‘ctrl-v.’

“Sherri Charleston appears to have used somebody else’s research without proper attribution,” said former Villanova University political theory professor, Steve McGuire, who reviewed two of Charleston’s papers, the Beacon reports.

Papers that omit a few citations or quotation marks rarely receive more than a correction. But when scholars recycle large chunks of a previous study—especially its data or conclusions—without attribution, the duplicate paper is often retracted and can even violate copyright law.

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) January 30, 2024

Read the rest of Sibarium’s extensive reporting here…

Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Attorneys General of 28 states are demanding that President Joe Biden ignore a request to investigate the Lake City Army Ammunition plant’s policy of selling 5.56 mm rifle ammunition to civilians.

A Jan. 24 letter written by Attorneys General Andrew Bailey of Missouri, Brenna Bird of Iowa, and Todd Rokita of Indiana and signed by 25 other attorneys general, warns that ending sales would harm America’s military readiness and do nothing to prevent crime.

The letter derides a previous missive, dated Jan. 9 and written by New York Attorney General Letitia James and signed by 19 other Attorneys General calling for the investigation, as dangerous and uninformed.

According to the James letter, the Lake City plant in Missouri has flooded communities with “military-grade” ammunition that has been used in a number of mass shootings.

“Compounding the horror, the bullets used in this violence were subsidized by American taxpayers, as the federal government has apparently invested more than $860 million to improve production,” the letter reads.

In their response, Mr. Bailey and his colleagues claim the writers of the Jan. 9 letter either don’t understand or are ignoring the facts.

“The Democrats’ letter contains a litany of errors. These errors demonstrate our colleagues’ outright ignorance of firearms and ammunition,” the Jan. 24 letter reads.

In a statement on his website, Mr. Bailey wrote that shutting down the plant would make Americans less safe, in addition to costing his state hundreds of jobs.

“I will not let Joe Biden sacrifice the rights of law-abiding gun owners and manufacturers on the altar of appeasement to the Radical Left. Lake City Ammunition did nothing wrong,” Mr. Bailey wrote in a statement on his website. “I’m proud to stand in the gap with these like-minded attorneys general to protect Americans’ Second Amendment rights.”

Mr. Rokita agreed. In a statement on the Indiana Attorney General’s website, Mr. Rokia wrote that the principle at play covers more than just military readiness.

“A tyrant’s tactic is to chip away at liberties little by little,” he wrote. “Americans cannot exercise their constitutionally protected right to use their firearms without access to ammunition. That’s why we’re taking a strong stand.”

The Jan. 24 letter points out that the Lake City ammunition sold to civilians is not the same ammunition used by the military. And even if it were, the letter states, that would not be enough reason to ban its sale to civilians.

“The primary cartridge is proprietary to the Army and may not be sold commercially. If the United States military using ammunition precluded that ammunition’s use by civilians, then other widely and commonly available ammunition, including 9mm and 12-gauge shotshells,” the letter reads. “Lake City only sells ammunition to commercial customers that is legal to manufacture. Lake City complies with all the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (“ATF”) requirements.”

They also write that the claim that taxpayers are subsidizing the sales is the opposite of what’s happening.

“They get causality backward. The law-abiding target shooters and gun owners who buy Lake City ammunition are subsidizing national defense and military readiness,” the Jan. 24 letter reads.

The letter from Mr. Bailey and the other pro-Second Amendment attorneys general points out that Lake City began selling ammunition to civilians as a means of maintaining production levels and a trained workforce in the event of war.

The plant had been basically mothballed prior to 1990. With the early 1990s military actions in Iraq, Kuwait, and other areas, the Lake City plant found itself playing catch up, trying to get machinery running and employees trained to meet the surge in demand for ammunition.

The addition of civilian sales to its government contract means the plant continues production and maintains its equipment and trained workforce, ensuring it’s able to meet future surges.

“That section in the Lake City contract was—and remains—a sound policy choice. As we confront an increasingly dangerous world with unpredictable adversaries, now is not the time to undermine our military readiness,” the Jan. 24 letter reads.

Mr. Bailey, Mr. Rokita, and Ms. Bird were joined by attorney generals from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina House of Representatives, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

The Lake City Army Ammunition plant is located in Independence, Missouri, and has provided ammunition for every armed conflict America has been involved in since World War II. According to an information sheet, the facility covers more than 3,000 acres, has 408 buildings, and can produce 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition annually.

In addition to small arms ammunition, the plant produces pyrotechnics, primers for various cartridges, and pyrotechnic and tracer mixes.

Hundreds of thousands dead in Eastern Europe as the Russia-Ukraine war is about to reach a grim 2-year mark… tens of thousands of civilians slain in Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank… Iraq, Syria, and Yemen again sliding into chaos, on the precipice of yet more Western military intervention… no one wins. 

Correction: someone does win….

With all the global geopolitical flashpoints erupting at the same time in the last year, Western defense firms have been raking it in, with US arms exports in particular reaching a record high in fiscal year 2023.

“The United States sold $238 billion worth of weapons to foreign governments in 2023, as many European countries sought to replace stock sent to Ukraine for its defense against invading Russian forces,” Stripes writes. “That sum is a 16% increase from the year before and includes sales by U.S. arms companies and those directly negotiated by Washington, a statement Monday from the State Department said.”

The demand has largely been driven by the war in Ukraine, which has cost the West tens of billions each month to sustain in support of Kiev. More importantly, in the now two-year long effort to keep up the flow of advanced weapons and vital artillery ammo, which is constantly depleted on the stalemated frontlines, European nations have seen their own stockpiles dwindle.

NATO leadership has in response issued a desperate plea for members states to drastically and urgently jump start and ramp up production. The private sector, especially in France in Germany, is also racing to forge partnerships with Kiev.

But meanwhile, standing in the gap remains the major US defense firms, with the biggest companies like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman leading the way. As global instability rises, so do their stock prices…

Arms sales and transfers are viewed as “important U.S. foreign policy tools with potential long-term implications for regional and global security,” the State Department said in a statement.

Sales approved in the year included $10 billion worth of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to Poland, $2.9 billion worth of AIM-120C-8 Advanced Medium-Range Air-To-Air Missiles (AMRAAM) to Germany, and National Advanced Surface to Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) to Ukraine.

NATO’s so-called ‘eastern flank’ has been a big driver, with State Dept. data confirming that Poland is a leading buyer. For a partial list of deals for major military hardware inked between US defense firms and Warsaw in the last year:

• $12 billion worth of Apache helicopters
• $10 billion worth of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS)
• $3.75 billion worth of M1A1 Abrams tanks
• Poland invested $4 billion in integrated air & missile defense command systems

Prime Minister Donald Tusk has lately committed NATO-member Poland to becoming “the most powerful land force in Europe” and he’s building a US-supplied arsenal to make that happen (in continuity with prior Polish administrations). What has helped is the perception advanced in Western media sources that Putin is eyeing expanding the war into Europe, even threatening NATO countries.

In the Pacific region, US arms sales have been boosted by the “China threat”. One report underscores, “Notably, countries outside Europe also participated in the arms market, with South Korea spending USD 5 billion on F-35 fighter jets and Australia investing USD 6.3 billion in C130J-30 Super Hercules aircraft. Japan secured a USD 1 billion contract for E-2D Hawkeye surveillance aircraft.” Of course, weapons have been drasticallyl boosted to Israel amid the Gaza war as well.

But while Biden’s State Department is busy bragging about “the highest annual total of sales and assistance provided to our allies and partners,” the bodies are piling up on blood-soaked soil in various far-flung corners of the globe. Responsible Statecraft asks the apt question here… Tone deaf? Admin brags about 55% hike in foreign arms sales.

What are the approval ratings of world leaders in 2024? 

Morning Consult set out to answer the question, surveying people from 15 major countries around the world, and Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley created the inforgrahic below to show the worst (Germany’s Scholz) and the first (India’s Modi)…

Figures in the dataset are rounded for simplicity. Data was collected from December 13, 2023 to January 2, 2024. Approval ratings are based on a seven-day moving average of adult residents in each country, with sample sizes varying by country.

Which World Leader has the Highest Approval Rating?

As of January 2024, India’s Narendra Modi has the highest percentage of domestic approval, with over two-thirds of Indians approving of his performance.

This is no recent development, as Modi’s popularity has been consistently high for years now.

There were six total world leaders that had the plurality of respondents approve of their performance, including Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. One of the newest leaders, Poland’s Donald Tusk, also came in strong with 50% approval.

Eight countries had heads of state or government with disapproval ratings above 50%, including U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau.

Germany’s Olaf Scholz also finds himself on the low end of the list. Scholz—who succeeded Angela Merkel in 2021—hit a record low in polling at the end of 2023 with 20% approval, tied only with South Korea’s Yook Seok-youl.

And according to Morning Consult, they weren’t the world leaders with the lowest approval ratings. The full dataset of 21 countries shows that the leaders of Japan and the Czech Republic had lower total approval ratings as of the start of 2024.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

An Arizona state GOP lawmaker has introduced a bill that would require schools to teach about the harms of communist regimes, including such ills as poverty, suppression of speech, and systemic lethal violence.

House Bill 2629, which amends parts of the Arizona Revised Statutes to bolster educational programs, includes two key parts: a mandatory classroom instruction on the ills of communism and the establishment of Nov. 7 as a commemorative “Victims of Communism Day” to be observed in Arizona public schools.

“Beginning in the 2024-2025 school year any American government course required for graduation from high school must include at least forty-five minutes of instruction on the history of communist regimes around the world and the prevalence of poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence and suppression of speech under communist regimes,” the bill’s text reads.

State Rep. Ben Toma introduced the bill on Jan. 23 in the Arizona State Legislature, where it’s scheduled for a Jan. 31 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Toma told Arizona Capital Times in an interview that being compassionate and helping the downtrodden is good, but he said communism pushes redistribution of resources at the point of a gun, a kind of “forced charity” that he said leads to slaughter.

“And, secondly, it doesn’t work in the real world,” he insisted. “It doesn’t work anywhere.”

Evils of Communism in Curriculum

The bill’s text indicates that “Victims of Communism Day” would not be a legal holiday, meaning no time off. Rather, it would be observed in schools, which would provide instruction on that day (or an alternate one if school isn’t in session on that day) on the harms of communism.

A curriculum would be developed, which would include such components as instruction on former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution in China. Under the CCP’s rule, it is estimated that between 60 million and 80 million people were killed, exceeding the total number of casualties in both World Wars combined.

Other possible choices for instruction on that day would be about Nicolás Maduro and the Chavismo movement, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet system, or Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution.

The issue is personal for Mr. Toma, whose family fled then-communist Romania when he was a child.

“It’s not just my background,” he told Arizona Capitol Times. “It’s the background of many other people including currently in China, in North Korea, Vietnam, places like that that still have communism, that still have to deal with it.

“Not to mention the amount of damage and, again, the millions or hundreds of millions that have lost their lives, or more,” he added.

A chapter on the CCP’s history of killing—which is part of a broader publication by The Epoch Times on the harms of communism, titled “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party”—discusses how killing in communist regimes has both practical and ideological roots.

“Mass murders during the Cultural Revolution established, culturally and politically, the CCP’s absolute leadership,” the publication states.

“The Tiananmen Square massacre was used to prevent political crisis and squelch democratic demands. The persecution of Falun Gong is meant to resolve the issues of belief and traditional healing,” it continues.

Communist persecution of Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa—a peaceful spiritual practice—has involved various inhumane tactics, including torture, sexual abuse, and the widely condemned practice of forced organ harvesting, as outlined in a recent report.

Other Anti-Communist Efforts

Besides Mr. Toma’s bill, there have been other legislative efforts to expose the harms of communism or oppose its spread in the United States.

In October 2023, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill aimed at preventing the Chinese regime from influencing the State Department.

The bill, called the No CCP Consultants Act, would prohibit the secretary of state from entering into, renewing, or extending contracts relating to “advisory and assistance services” with certain entities, including the governments of China and Russia.

“We must guard against the Chinese Communist Party and its web of espionage,” Mr. Green said in a statement to The Epoch Times on Oct. 31.

In March 2023, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill to punish communist China for its forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.

H.R. 1154, dubbed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, passed by a vote of 413–2. It would sanction anyone involved in the act and require annual government reporting on such activities taking place in foreign countries.

It would also punish those found to be involved in forced organ harvesting: a civil penalty of up to $250,000 and a criminal penalty of up to $1 million and 20 years in prison.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the principal sponsor of the bill, told The Epoch Times ahead of the floor vote that the measure’s “got real teeth” and that he hoped it would become law.

“This is an atrocity, this is a crime against humanity, and it’s a war crime, because this is a war on innocent people in China, and [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping is directly responsible. Those who willingly engage in this will be held responsible,” he said of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.

Mr. Smith said the bill could cover anyone who participates in forced organ harvesting, including patients who receive the organs.

“If there’s willful knowledge that is being stolen from a Falun Gong practitioner, or anyone else, then they could be held criminally and civilly liable,” he said.

“How do you know on a certain date you’re going to have a liver all ready to go? That’s because they kill the individual in order to get that. They murdered them,” he added, referring to cases of Chinese hospitals promising to deliver vital organs on a specified date, a process that experts have said is impossible under voluntary organ donor programs.

Israel, Taiwan, Italy, and Spain have banned organ transplant tourism.

Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) were among more than a dozen lawmakers leading the measure’s companion version in the Senate.

Both measures were referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations, where they remain.

Bill Boosts US-China Spending Transparency

Earlier this month, Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Ted Budd (R-N.C.), and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) introduced legislation calling for increased transparency from the federal government regarding funds flowing to companies in China.

The bill, titled “Our Money in China Transparency Act,” requires the Office of Management and Budget and other agencies to submit annual, detailed reports regarding taxpayers’ money spent on any federal program, project, or activity related to institutions or entities associated with the Chinese regime.

“We know that Communist China does its best to hide the finances of its government and businesses from Americans,” Mr. Scott said in a statement.

The legislation also tracks federal spending on federal-funded entities, including American universities’ China-based campuses.

Aaron Pan, Eva Fu, and Andrew Moran contributed to this report.

Today in ‘automation is better’ news, a contractor in Atlanta is facing a $30,000 water bill for a lot that doesn’t even have a connection to a water line.

Jeff Raw, president and CEO of Revive Construction Group said he hadn’t even started construction yet on a site in Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood when he received huge bills from Atlanta Watershed Management. 

He tried to get his bill adjusted and even went to the utility company’s appeals board, but was denied the chance to change the bill, a report from Yahoo Finance, citing a FOX 5 Atlanta investigation, said. 

“I feel like it’s extortion,” he said. “This is criminal.”

Atlanta Watershed Management set up a standalone water meter on an undeveloped plot in October 2022. Within a month, Revive Construction received a bill for $8,899, allegedly for using 305,184 gallons of water, far exceeding the EPA’s average household usage of 9,000 gallons per month.

Over five months, bills totaled $29,669.43 for over a million gallons of water, which the construction company appealed. The Atlanta Watershed Management appeals board suggested the water was used, leaked, or stolen. Raw, from Revive Construction, criticized the board, feeling accused of stealing. 

Initially, the utility company acknowledged a leak and reduced the bill to $219.29, but then reverted to the original $30,000 charge. Raw’s appeal against this decision failed, even though a senior utility employee supported his case.

As the article notes, if you’re faced with an unexpectedly high water bill, don’t rush to pay it. Instead, take steps to confirm your actual water use and address any discrepancies.

Start by comparing your water meter reading with the one on your bill. A mismatch can serve as proof in seeking a bill adjustment. If the bill is accurate, your next step is to check for leaks. Turn off all water sources and monitor the meter. If it continues to move, you likely have a leak, often found in toilets.

Prompt action is crucial in case of leaks to avoid extensive water damage and potential insurance claims, adding to your financial burden. Hiring a plumber for leak detection and repair is advisable. Keep detailed records, like the plumber’s report, to substantiate your case for a bill correction.

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClear Wire,

The jig is up, as the bad guys used to say in the movies.

When Rachel Maddow told her MSNBC audience on the night of the Iowa Republican caucuses that she would not be showing the victory speech by decisive winner Donald Trump, I started writing this column in my head.

What arrogance, I thought. Whether MSNBC likes Trump or not, if they claim to be journalists, they can’t refuse to air obviously newsworthy events merely because it makes them unhappy. That’s not how actual journalists even think. But of course, that’s exactly what they have been doing for two decades, and CNN right alongside them. They have been the self-appointed “Gatekeepers” of news and information for their millions of viewers.

Maddow claimed that her network’s decision was not out of spite, but instead was the network not wanting to be broadcasting “untrue things” that Trump might say (and remember, he hadn’t said anything yet). But the Gatekeepers are only concerned about protecting the public from certain kinds of viewpoints. You know, the views of Republicans. They freely allow misstatements by Democrats to go unchallenged.

One blatant example occurred on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Jan. 21 when Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas said in 2020, “You had the president telling the country to inject itself with bleach to fight COVID.” Wrong! Absurd and defamatory! But the Gatekeepers allowed it to air unchallenged.

On the same program, host Dana Bash twice ruled Trump’s questioning of Nikki Haley’s constitutional eligibility to run for president to be out of bounds.

“He suggested she is ineligible to be president, even though she is. She was born in your home state of South Carolina,” she told Sen. Tim Scott, but neglected to mention that both of Haley’s immigrant parents were not citizens yet.

That “suggests” that Bash doesn’t know the difference between “native born” and “natural born,” – or that Constitutional scholars debate as to why that might (or might not) be significant – and isn’t interested in learning about it. If the Framers had wanted to say that the president must be born in the United States, they could have done so by saying it directly. Instead, they said only a “natural born” citizen was eligible to be president. A few minutes’ research on the Internet will confirm that the phrase “natural born” carried a very distinct meaning when the Constitution was written – namely, someone who was born within a nation after their parents were already citizens. No court has ever resolved the meaning of the phrase as used in the Constitution, but CNN doesn’t want you to know about this debate when it can instead simply dismiss Trump as a racist or a xenophobe.

Likewise, that same morning, Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” said Trump is “spreading false birther conspiracy theories about whether she’s eligible to run, and of course she is.” The AP put out a fact check that said Haley is a natural born citizen because she is a natural born citizen. No, literally. But what none of those reports by the Gatekeepers did was actually look at the Constitution or the arguments made about why Haley is not a “natural born citizen.”

This is all based on the Fake News template that turned Trump into a criminal because he dared to question the election results in 2020. It didn’t matter how much evidence there was of election interference and unconstitutional changes in election rules in individual states. The Gatekeepers just declared claims of election fraud “the Big Lie” and almost proudly vowed never to look at the evidence. By shaming Trump and millions of others for questioning the election, they actually made it more likely that cheating will happen in future elections. After all, election challenges are now “anti-democracy” scams.

When Fox News settled a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems for three-quarters of a billion dollars, the other major media scolded Fox for having dared to question Dominion’s legitimacy and ran the story for days as a warning to others, “Stay behind the gate! Electronic voting is inviolate – because we say so.”

And the Gatekeepers are still trying desperately to hold on to power. That’s why virtually no one in the mainstream media reported on the lawsuit in Georgia where a professor of computer science was able to change the vote tally on a Dominion voting machine with the use of a simple household pen. If the Georgia secretary of state loses that lawsuit, then no one should be able to utter the phrase the Big Lie again unless they are referring to the assurances of the mainstream media that the 2020 election was the most secure in history.

Of course, the thorough trouncing of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley by former President Trump indicates that a large swath of Americans have already turned their back on the Gatekeepers. They gravitate toward Trump specifically because he rejects the Gatekeepers – and the Gatekeepers have noticed. There is even evidence that they know they have gone too far – that you can’t label half the population of the country as an anti-democracy, pro-authoritarian cult without eventually facing a backlash.

Thus at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the unofficial capital of the global elites, there was a warning shot fired against the Gatekeepers by one of their own. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, told CNBC that Democrats and President Joe Biden ought to be “more respectful” of Trump supporters (otherwise known as MAGA voters because of Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”).

“I wish the Democrats would think a little more carefully when they talk about MAGA. … I think this negative talk about MAGA is going to hurt Biden’s election campaign,” Dimon told the progressive swells in Davos.

Dimon did what most of the Gatekeepers refuse to do. He gave the MAGA voters credit for understanding policies and voting for Trump because they agree with his results, not because they are members of a cult.

“Take a step back, be honest. He was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade tax reform worked. He was right about some of China,” Dimon said. “He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues, and that’s why they voted for him.”

Hallelujah, but don’t expect either Biden or his allies in the media to take a step back and reassess their hostile, insulting approach to Trump voters. The Gatekeepers see everyone who voted for Trump as the barbarians at the gate, and they will do anything to crush them.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just turn on “Morning Joe” any weekday from 6 to 10 a.m. Eastern Time and watch Joe Scarborough distort reality in a rear-guard action to protect the nation from a second Trump presidency. According to Scarborough, Trump desperately wants the economy to crash. According to Scarborough, Trump wants the border to stay open because it’s good politics. According to Scarborough, Trump wants to shoot his enemies on the street. And just in case you thought Joe might be making all this up, there is a panel of like-thinking leftists on the MSNBC set nodding their heads in unison and assuring Joe he’s quite the savant.

But he isn’t. He is a Deep State apparatchik who is the poster boy for the Gatekeepers. He will say anything to protect the nation from Donald Trump because he knows that Trump speaks for millions of people who are sick and tired of being told that their values, their principles, their patriotism are a danger to the country. Yes, Scarborough goes after Trump directly, but he also attacks Trump voters, as he did on Jan. 25. “If you take a step back, just looking at this politically, I just am baffled by just how stupid – baffled, baffled every day by how stupid Republicans are,” Scarborough said.

This “say-anything, fact-check-nothing” approach to bashing Trump may be the Gatekeepers’ worst nightmare as the 2024 election approaches. Because it will inflame the MAGA base to rise up and vote in record numbers to protect Trump from the attacks against him. The latest fake report is that Trump is trying to stop the toughest border security bill in history, but what “Morning Joe” and the Democrats won’t tell you is that there is no bill. The text of the supposed bill was never released during this tumult of criticism. We were just supposed to believe the Gatekeepers and shut up about it.

In conclusion, let’s turn again to Davos, where Emma Tucker, editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal, told a panel at the World Economic Forum that the people are too sophisticated in the 21st century to just accept at face value hollow accusations such as those tossed around by Scarborough.

“If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well,” Tucker said. “If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news, and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying.”

That, of course, is a good thing. It’s too bad the global elites and their Gatekeepers don’t understand that.

Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His newest book, “What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends,” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Gettr @HeartlandDiary.