Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom has claimed to have lost roughly $50 million in salaries and possible endorsements after his career ended abruptly when he spoke out against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The basketball player made the claims in a hearing on July 11 before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), which is chaired by both Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).

Tuesday’s hearing, titled “Corporate Complicity: Subsidizing the PRC’s Human Rights Violations,” centered on the alleged human rights abuses taking place in China, including genocide, forced organ harvesting, forced labor, internet censorship, and mass surveillance.

It also focused on how international businesses and corporations that seek to operate in China or maintain access to the Chinese market often find themselves at risk of being complicit in such human rights abuses.

“According to my manager, I lost around $50 million dollars, with all the NBA contracts and endorsement deals that I could’ve signed,” the sportsman said.

“I sleep in peace at night knowing that I did the right thing. My only question is: How can the biggest dictatorship in the world, China, control an 100 percent American-made company and fire an American citizen?” he added.

China’s ‘Brutal Dictator’

During Tuesday’s hearing, Mr. Kanter told lawmakers that he has, over the past 11 years, often spoken out about the human rights violations in his home country of Turkey, where he said there were “many innocent people being prosecuted” by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime, including his own relatives.

He later moved into activism toward China following a “simple basketball camp” in New York, during which he was asked by the parent of one child why he had not spoken out about the CCP’s alleged abuses against members of the Uyghur and other Muslim minority groups.

A 2022 report published by the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) found a number of “serious human rights violations” may have been committed against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, China. The United States has also accused the CCP of genocide. China has repeatedly dismissed the claims as a smear campaign.

Mr. Kanter told lawmakers that after being questioned by the parent, he began researching the CCP’s alleged human rights abuses against members of the Uyghur group and others, at one point speaking to a concentration camp survivor who detailed her experience of torture, gang rape, forced sterilization, and abortion methods in such camps.

Social media users have noticed a mysterious “asterisk” in the upper-right-hand corner of Bud Light price tags at various Costco stores. Some users have referred to this asterisk as the “death star,” suggesting that the discount retailer might not replenish its stock once the inventory is depleted.

At Costco this morning, practically giving away Bud Light. pic.twitter.com/tsyymCZjT5

— colleen 🗣 (@plineytheelder) July 1, 2023

COSTCO says… STAR OF DEATH for Bud Light * it will not be restocked. 🍻 pic.twitter.com/hWYTXEckDA

— SHARKINTHEWATER (@s_h_a_r_k_e_y) July 11, 2023

Even Costco is getting out of the game… pic.twitter.com/cUHE0CnPzr

— Brian Henderson (@aztraveldude) July 3, 2023

There are numerous confirmations that the asterisk on price tags at Costco stores is a sign that the particular item won’t be restocked. KrazyCoupon Lady and Marie Clark, editor of the shopping site CostContessa, confirmed this over the years. 

What needs to be confirmed is if the members-only warehouse retail chain is abandoning Bud Light products due to the possibility of collapsing demand and worsening backlash after Bud Light sponsored trans-TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney ‘celebrating’ one year of womanhood in April.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours)

U.S. officials have approved the first over-the-counter birth control pill, which will let people purchase contraceptive drugs from the same store aisles as Tylenol and aspirin as the birth rate in the United States continues to drop.

On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said that it cleared Perrigo’s once-a-day Opill to be sold without a prescription. It’s the first such drug that can be used over-the-counter, and there are no age restrictions.

Hormone-based pills, the most common form of birth control in the United States, have been used by tens of millions of women since the 1960s, with all of them requiring a prescription—until Thursday.

“Today’s approval marks the first time a nonprescription daily oral contraceptive will be an available option for millions of people in the United States,” Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement Wednesday. “When used as directed, daily oral contraception is safe and is expected to be more effective than currently available nonprescription contraceptive methods in preventing unintended pregnancy.”

The pill’s manufacturer, Perrigo, called the FDA action a “milestone” as well as a “giant leap for women’s empowerment” in a statement posted online after the agency’s approval. The firm said that it would make it “accessible and affordable to women and people of all ages.”

“Today’s approval is a groundbreaking expansion for women’s health in the U.S., and a significant milestone towards addressing a key unmet need for contraceptive access,” Frederique Welgryn, a Perrigo official, said in the statement.

But Ireland-based Perrigo did not announce a price. Over-the-counter medicines are generally much cheaper than prescriptions, but they typically aren’t covered by insurance.

Forcing insurers to cover over-the-counter birth control would require a regulatory change by the federal government, which left-wing groups are urging the Biden administration to implement.

Elaborating, the FDA said that it approved the pill, in part, because it may reduce the number of “unintended pregnancies.”

“Nonprescription availability of Opill may reduce barriers to access by allowing individuals to obtain an oral contraceptive without the need to first see a health care provider. Almost half of the 6.1 million pregnancies in the U.S. each year are unintended,” the agency said. “Unintended pregnancies have been linked to negative maternal and perinatal outcomes, including reduced likelihood of receiving early prenatal care and increased risk of preterm delivery, with associated adverse neonatal, developmental and child health outcomes.”

The drug’s availability “may help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and their potential negative impacts,” the FDA added in the statement.

Declining US Birth Rates

Over the year, there have been numerous studies in the United States and other countries suggesting that increased access to contraception such as birth-control pills can lead to a decline in fertility and birth rates. A 2021 study published in JAMA Network found that birth rates among women with employer-given health insurance dropped significantly after the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, eliminated the need for copays and other patient fees for birth control.

“The study results suggest that free, reliable birth control reduced unintended pregnancies, the authors note. About half of all pregnancies in the population at large are unintended, and birth rates from unintended pregnancies are much higher among low-income women than other income groups,” says a UCLA writeup of the JAMA study.

Read more here…

The hype around the GMC Hummer EV is quickly fading. Secondary markets, such as the popular car-selling website Bring A Trailer had people listing these “supertrucks” in early 2022 for lofty premiums versus MSRP. Demand was red hot, and production was limited, which drove up values but more than a year later, prices have tumbled.

On April 1, 2022, months after the Hummer EV was released, a Hummer EV Pickup Edition 1 was sold on Bring A Trailer for a whopping $275,000. Those who locked in reservations bought the EV for around $100,000 MSRP (and the smart ones sold on the secondary market). And in the months ahead, these supertrucks were still being bought for over $200,000 and have sustained prices around $150,000 since. 

The question remains whether secondary prices can hold up at high premiums at a time when GM’s Factory Zero plant in Michigan ramps up production. 

GM Authority has learned that GMC Hummer EV production increased considerably this past April, with more than 3,000 units produced over the course of the 2023 calendar year. –GM Authority

With the production of the 2024 GMC Hummer EV SUV underway, those older models might have trouble commanding such lofty values. 

Yet another sign the EV bubble is deflating. We noted the other day that the “number of unsold electric vehicles at dealers in the second quarter tripled compared to the past year, signaling a weakened demand for the segment.” Sliding demand could be due to high borrowing costs. 

Meanwhile, Tesla appears to be winning the EV price war, forcing competitors to shift prices lower. Those who paid substantial markups to be the first to own the Hummer EV but didn’t have a reservation and bought on the secondary market might regret their purchases at some point as prices will continue to slide.

Just wait until people realize the cost associated with charging a Hummer EV…

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

Is Ukraine still a thing for Americans? Of course, a brutal and tragic war is going on there with momentous geopolitical consequences. But do Americans care?

Attention spans are short, and Americans have already moved on to stories about political scandals, the next election, and the usual celebrity glamour gloss. Outside of the U.S. warmonger elites and a few critics (myself included), Americans don’t seem to care.

That’s a mistake. The war is as hard fought as ever and the geopolitical stakes are even higher than at the start of the war as we keep climbing up the escalation ladder.

Today I’ll look at the military situation, the economic sanctions, the bigger picture of global recession, and the impact of the war on energy prices.

Almost nothing in this report is being covered by The New York Times, the Washington Post or other legacy media. Their coverage consists almost exclusively of lies propagated by the State Department, CIA or MI6 and should not be taken seriously except by counterintelligence experts interested in knowing what the U.S. and UK are lying about.

The Counteroffensive Disaster

On the battlefield, Ukraine is losing badly and is in danger of having its offensive military capacity annihilated. The famous Ukrainian spring counteroffensive has met with disaster and been reduced to a series of impotent pinprick attacks.

The original Ukrainian plan was to punch through Russian defenses with an “iron fist” armored attack, retake the city of Melitopol, and from there reach the Sea of Azov. This would cut Russia’s land bridge (from Rostov-on-Don to Crimea) and divide Russian forces into two groups that could not reinforce each other.

This would open the way for Ukraine to take more territory and possibly retake Crimea itself.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive began on June 4. The iron fist quickly turned into a piñata. From the outset, Ukrainian armor was badly mauled in Russian minefields. Additional damage was done by Russian artillery, missiles and aviation.

Over a month into the offensive. Ukrainians are still fighting in a gray zone short of the first of three Russian fortified lines. If the offensive went according to plan, the Ukrainians would have broken through these forward positions in the first couple of days. But here they are.

They claim to have taken a few villages, but some are no more than a single farmhouse. None are of strategic importance.

The Russians are repelling the Ukrainians, in most cases inflicting high casualties and loss of Ukrainian armored vehicles and tanks. It’s a war of attrition that Ukraine will certainly lose.

Western Duds

What about all those advanced weapons the U.S. and its NATO allies have been sending to Ukraine?

Well, they don’t work as expected, they’re easily destroyed by the Russians, the training periods take too long to be of any short-term use, or that they haven’t yet been manufactured or delivered.

Look at the fancy Patriot air defense systems we sent Ukraine. The Patriot systems cost $1 billion each, but at least two have been destroyed by Russian hypersonic missiles.

And after some initial successes, the HIMARS precision artillery systems we gave Ukraine have proven ineffective because the Russians have successfully jammed the GPS transmissions, so the missiles go off-course. Eventually they’re destroyed by Russian artillery.

In some cases, reportedly, the Russians have actually been able to redirect the projectile back in the direction of where it was launched. Talk about a boomerang!

The bottom line is that while the U.S. military was knocking down mud huts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, Russia was developing high-tech weapons to counter the best weaponry that NATO has on hand. NATO tanks and other armored vehicles have certainly not made much impact.

Kill the Children!

The U.S. is now promising to deliver cluster munitions to the Ukrainians. These are heavy bombs (shells in this case) loaded with hundreds of smaller bomblets that detonate shrapnel in all directions. They’re banned by almost every country in the world because they kill and maim civilians indiscriminately.

A certain percentage of these bomblets fail to detonate initially, but remain active. Civilians come along later, often children, who trigger the explosions. The U.S. will send older cluster munitions, meaning the dud rate will be even higher, leaving behind even more unexploded bomblets that will kill civilians.

But the U.S. still will be sending them to Ukraine on orders from Joe Biden.

The military failures by the U.S. and NATO go beyond losses on the battlefield. By supplying so much equipment to Ukraine, the U.S. has depleted its own arsenals. It’ll take years to retool assembly lines and restock the arsenals.

Shooting Yourself in the Foot

In the meantime, the U.S. will find itself short of weapons and ammunition in case of a war with China or a wider war in Europe.

Meanwhile, the impact of economic sanctions on Russia has been the reverse of what the U.S. intended. I advised my seminar at the U.S. Army War College of this likely outcome over a year ago, and I repeated the warning at my seminar last month.

Russian oil sales are near all-time highs; they have simply shifted their sales from Europe to India and China. Russian financial reserves are at all-time highs also, despite asset freezes by the U.S. The Central Bank of Russia has moved its asset allocation toward physical gold along with Chinese yuan and Indian rupees.

The Russian economy is expected to outperform the U.S. economy in 2023 based on World Bank estimates. The EU and Japan are already in recession and the U.S. is likely entering one, if not there already.

The sanctions have failed badly and have hurt the U.S. economy more than the Russian economy. Since U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen does not understand international economics or the impact of sanctions, one should expect the damage imposed on the U.S. to get worse.

Escalate, Escalate, Escalate

Despite military and economic losses suffered by Ukraine and its Western backers, many want to double down rather than negotiate a possible peace settlement. They simply cannot entertain the possibility of a Russian victory.

This means the greatest danger now is not losing ground, but instead engaging in escalation that might lead to World War III. For example, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute has recommended giving Ukraine tactical nuclear weapons.

Given Russia’s success (at high cost) and U.S. escalation, the short-term prospects for peace talks are low. More likely the war will drag on into late 2023 before actual talks begin.

By then, Russia will have the upper hand because the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be badly depleted, Russia will have taken additional territory and Biden will be looking for a face-saving way out of the fiasco ahead of the presidential elections.

The ace in the hole for Putin will be the coming winter of 2024. Last winter was unusually mild in Europe and the EU muddled through with the energy supplies it could muster. The weather may not be so cooperative next year. Russia may be more ruthless when it comes to actually turning off the natural gas supplies.

The Only Winner in a 1970s-Style Economy

This convergence of factors could lead to much higher energy prices even as the U.S. and EU fall into a severe recession. The combination of weak growth and high prices is called stagflation, last seen in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It could happen again.

This is one of the worst economic outcomes possible. It means losses for stocks (because of recession), losses for government bonds (because of inflation), losses for corporate bonds (because of business failures), and major losses for commercial real estate (because of low occupancy rates and mortgage defaults).

The only winner, as was the case from 1977 to 1980, is gold.

Dr. Kristian Andersen, the virologist who initially told Anthony Fauci that Covid-19 appeared to have been ‘engineered,’ only to flip-flop 72-hours later after Fauci ‘prompted‘ Andersen and other scientists to create a paper arguing against the lab-leak theory, told colleagues that a lab leak was ‘highly likely’ and ‘not some fringe theory.’

Andersen notably appeared before Congress on Tuesday, where he carefully bullshitted his way through a minefield of questions from Republican lawmakers, while Democrats – apparently uninterested in anything except tribal narratives, provided cover.

In advance of Anderson’s testimony, House Republicans published a cache of messages as part of a government report, however the Daily Mail has received several damning Slack messages from February 2, 2020 – the day Twitter banned Zero Hedge for suggesting a lab leak – that weren’t part of that release, in which Andersen told colleagues “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely – it’s not some fringe theory.”

He also admitted that he found it “strange” that Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, China – located hundreds of miles from a cave where the closest strain to COVID-19 was found.

During testimony, Andersen said that ‘facts’ changed his opinion on the lab leak – though he couldn’t point to anything specific.

The question of whether the global outbreak began with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market or leaked out of the Wuhan lab just eight miles across the Yangtze River has given rise to fierce debate. Some studies point to a natural spillover at the Huanan wildlife market. Positive swab samples of floors, cages and counters also track the virus back to stalls in the southwestern corner of the market (bottom left), where animals with the potential to harbour Covid were sold for meat or fur at the time. -Daily Mail

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is notably a 40-minute drive from the Hunan wet market in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged. The city itself is more than 800 miles from the Yunnan cave where Covid-19’s closest relative was found, making natural transmission less likely.

Andersen was a co-author of the Proximal Origin report, which was published days after a conferenced call with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins and others – who had been funding research to manipulate bat Covid to make it more transmissible to humans.

Fauci notably offshored banned gain-of-function research to make bat coronaviruses more transmissible to humans.

Authored by Patricia Tolson via The Epoch Times,

Data shows that the number of homicides in Washington State skyrocketed after Second Amendment Rights were restricted.

According to a report released July 10 (pdf), the rate of murders, violence, and property crimes rose across Washington state in 2022, while the number of law enforcement officers available to respond and protect citizens decreased.

Specifically, the report revealed there were 394 murders in 2022, an increase of 16.6 percent over 2021 and the highest number of murders since the Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs (WASPC) began recording this data in 1980. In addition, homicides increased 96 percent since 2019 and violent crimes increase by 8.9 percent.

During a July 10 press briefing, WASPC Executive Director Steve Strachan said that residents are more concerned about crime because it’s starting to affect them “in a real way in their real life.”

He specifically addressed the rise in homicides, up 16.6 percent, with an all-time high number of 394 people being murdered in 2022.

“With that increase of 16.6 percent, compared to 2021 to that all-time high of 394, that is 96 percent more murders than we had in 2019,” Strachan said.

A slide shown during a media availability session hosted by the Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs on July 10, 2023. (WASPC/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

Strachan also noted that Washington State suffered a net loss of nearly 500 police officers or 4.4 percent of its force in 2021. The per capita loss in officers per 1,000 citizens was down to 1.38, “which was the lowest on record and also the lowest in the nation.”

Things did not improve in 2022.

Strachan said net statewide law enforcement staffing went down by an additional 70 officers, bringing the per capita number down to 1.36 per thousand, “again the lowest on record and again the lowest in the nation.”

It was the 13th straight year that Washington State had the lowest police staffing numbers in the country.

A slide shown during a media availability session hosted by the Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs on July 10, 2023, reflecting the decrease in the number of law enforcement officers per capita. (WASPC/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

Assaults on officers went up 20 percent, rising from 1,968 incidents in 2021 to 2,375 incidents in 2022. There was a 5-year trend of increased assaults on law enforcement, going down only slightly (by 59 incidents) during the pandemic lockdowns.

While the total population of Washington State increased by 93,262, the number of law enforcement officers decreased from 10,736 to 10,666 in 2021. This placed Washington in last place nationwide for the number of officers per thousand residents. There were also 2,375 reported cases of officers assaulted in 2022—an increase of 20.7 percent. Two officers were killed on duty.

In the meantime, Seattle’s City Council cut the police budget by nearly 20 percent in 2020, falling short of their goal to gut law enforcement funding by 50 percent. According to reports, “the agency has been in a tailspin ever since.”

‘Backfired’

In a July 10 press release in response to the WASPC report, Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, says the 96 percent increase in homicides since 2019 is “damning proof that billionaire-backed gun control measures were, as we predicted, false pie-in-the-sky promises.”

“Passage of Initiative 594 in 2014 and I-1639 in 2018 have accomplished nothing other than to create massive impairments, which we believe are unconstitutional, for law-abiding Washington citizens,” Gottlieb said further.

Initiative 594 (pdf) imposes background checks on firearms purchasers and mandates that only licensed dealers may sell or transfer firearms to unlicensed persons.

Initiative Measure No. 1639 (pdf), filed on May 2, 2018, places restrictions on the purchase of “semiautomatic assault rifles,” requires the purchaser to have “undergone training within the past five years,” and subjects the purchaser to a waiting time between 10 to 60 business days. The law further mandates that gun dealers may not deliver a pistol to a purchaser “until the purchaser produces a valid concealed pistol license and the dealer has recorded the purchaser’s name, license number, and issuing agency” in “triplicate.”

Gottlieb says the WASPC data proves that all of that has “backfired.”

“These findings really validate everything we’ve said about all of the gun control measures that the State of Washington has passed, either by initiative or legislative process,” Gottlieb asserted, noting how the numbers prove that gun violence and homicides escalated after the state passed measures to restrict gun rights.

“This was the highest homicide rate recorded since 1980,” He said.

“So all of these so-called gun control measures that were going to stop violence in the State of Washington have backfired.”

He also proposed that when Americans are allowed to exercise their Second Amendment Rights freely, crime rates go down, specifically in Constitutional Carry states.

An analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data by the United States Conceal Carry Association and released in October of 2022 showed that states that allow some form of permitless or Constitutional Carry have “fewer total and gun-related homicides.”

Conversely, Gottlieb said crime rates in “Democrat-controlled states” where gun control laws restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens from bearing arms go up dramatically.

“Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, we’re seeing it all over the country,” Gottlieb reflected.

“You are less safe when you do not have a means of self-defense.”

For Gottlieb, one of the primary struggles faced by gun rights advocates is that they are competing against “a legacy media with a gun-control agenda, and they only push one side of the equation.”

“They don’t let our data flow out to the public so the average citizen doesn’t know that all of the gun violence they’re hearing about is happening because gun laws don’t work,” he explained.

“The data doesn’t lie. But you won’t see the Sheriff’s report or our press release in response to the report on the legacy media.”

Gottlieb also discussed how most mass shootings take place in “gun-free” zones.

Data compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center confirmed that 97.8 percent of all mass shootings between 1950 and 2018 occurred in gun-free zones.

Not much has changed.

In May of 2022, the Crime Prevention Research Center reported that 96 percent of mass shootings occurred in gun-free zones.

“These numbers shouldn’t surprise anyone,” Gottlieb said. “They always tell us we’ll see all kinds of carnage without gun control. But we’re not going to see that because we aren’t seeing it in the 26 states that have permitless carry.”

At a moment the relationship between the Biden White House and the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is continuing to deteriorate over what the US admin has called the latter’s ‘extreme’ stances, Republicans have lashed out, charging Biden with ‘anti-Israel’ Policies.

Fourteen Republican US senators are holding up confirmation of State Department officials, they have announced, until the White House reverses its “antisemitic boycott of Israel”.

Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, James Risch, and Tom Cotton penned a letter addressed to Biden and Secretary Blinken which said, “It is untenable for State Department officials to continue testifying to Congress that they support the US-Israel relationship and then – once out of view – to push policies designed to undermine that relationship.”

The Biden administration has recently made moves to in effect boycott Israeli goods and technology which are based in occupied West Bank locations. This as the president and his top officials have denounced Israeli settlement expansion.

Axios reported last month that the Biden administration “notified Israel two weeks ago that it was reimposing a ban that prohibits U.S. taxpayer funding from being used in any research and development or scientific cooperation projects conducted in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, according to three U.S. and Israeli officials.”

Further, Axios described, “The Biden administration’s decision reverses a Trump administration policy from late 2020 that allowed U.S. taxpayer funding to be used for science and technology projects in the settlements for the first time since 1967.”

The White House has also criticized Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul initiative, which Israeli opponents as well as tens of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets say will destroy checks and balances and given the ruling far-right coalition unprecedented power over the judiciary.

The GOP Senators wrote further, “This guidance in particular puts Americans’ safety, security, and prosperity at risk because it politicizes and undermines cooperation on science and technology, including in areas such as defense and medicine where also our Israeli allies have proven themselves critical partners.” 

They are urging for the Biden administration to immediately repeal the policy and restore the Trump-era one.

Authored by Allan Stein via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Jason Nelson, president and CEO of Whole Cows based in Waco, Texas, makes no beef about there being a global war against the cattle industry.

“I would say there is a war not only against beef, there is a war against Americans being healthy,” he said.

As a physically disabled and highly decorated combat veteran who served in two branches of the U.S. military, Mr. Nelson sees the war is being waged by globalists in the name of fighting climate change.

He said the goal of getting people to eat lab-grown beef and insects instead of red meat to reduce the carbon footprint is no longer within the realm of conspiracy theory.

These products are in your supermarket, Mr. Nelson said.

Now, there’s a push by state legislatures to allow companies to inject beef cattle with mRNA vaccines to protect against disease.

At least five states have filed legislation opposed to mRNA in livestock and other consumer products.

A Matter of Principle

Mr. Nelson rejects mRNA technology in beef cattle in both theory and practice.

He has vowed to shutter his business if any of his products contained even a trace of these pharmaceuticals.

“As far as the beef industry itself, it’s under attack from multiple angles,” Mr. Nelson said. “For them to say … all of a sudden … cows are bad—not all animals—just cows—that cows are the ones destroying the climate—it’s a scam.

“They seem to think that’s the way out of whatever imaginary climate crisis they’ve created.”

With his brother Ben Riley, also a highly decorated veteran, and a third business partner, J.D. Rucker, Mr. Nelson, 44, launched Whole Cows more than a year ago, spurred on by his desire to ensure a clean beef supply untouched by Big Pharma.

Mr. Nelson said he has long questioned the safety and efficacy of mRNA technology in humans.

It’s why he left the military after a long career in the Marines and Army, working in the latter branch in psychological operations when the COVID-19 vaccine rollout began in 2021.

Rather than take the vaccine, Mr. Nelson left the Army before the Jan. 31 federal vaccine mandate went into effect, knowing he would lose his retirement benefits.

He later ran for U.S. Congress in the 2022 Texas primary against his Republican opponent Pete Sessions.

No mRNA, Please

Through conversations with his customers, Mr. Nelson learned their top concern is the ingredients in the nation’s meat supply—specifically, mRNA in beef.

“What they’re scared of is what’s in their beef. They don’t know what’s in their food. Every question we get is, ‘Are you sure it doesn’t have mRNA? Are you sure it doesn’t have GMO?’” Mr. Nelson said.

“We know two things are coming down the line. One is there are going to be mRNA mandates for cattle. That is coming,” he said.

Mr. Nelson said he began sourcing beef cattle nearly two years ago with input from ranchers to ensure the animals were mRNA injection-free. He eventually locked in contracts with cattle suppliers in Texas with backup suppliers in other states.

“I noticed a great need in the agrarian sector of our community that needs outlets and Americans who need healthy, wholesome food. It was a no-brainer,” Mr. Nelson told The Epoch Times.

“Freeze-dried food is what people need for long-term.”

“We looked at the supply chain and decided we needed a lock on our supply. Next, we had to lock in our processors,” he said.

Read more here…

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The end of affirmative action was inevitable.

The only surprise was that such intentions gone terribly wrong lasted so long.

First, supporters of racial preferences always pushed back the goal posts for the program’s success.

Was institutionalized reverse bias to last 20 years, 60 years, or ad infinitum? Parity became defined as an absolute equality of result. If “equity” was not obtained, then only institutionalized “racism” explained disparities. And only reverse racism was deemed the cure.

Second, affirmative action was imposed on the back end in adult hiring and college admissions.

However, to achieve parity, remediation early at the K-12 school level would have been the only solution. Yet such intervention was made impossible by teachers’ unions, the rise of identity politics and government entitlements. All were opposed to school choice, self-help programs, critiques of cultural impediments, or restrictions on those blanket entitlements,

Third, class, the true barometer of privilege, was rendered meaningless. Surrealism followed.

The truly privileged Barack and Michelle Obama and Meghan Markel lectured the country on its unfairness—as if they had it far rougher than the impoverished “deplorables” of East Palestine, Ohio.

Fourth, affirmative action supporters could never square the circle of proving that racial prejudices didn’t violate the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the text of the Constitution.

What they were left with was the lame argument that because long ago the 90% white majority had violated their own foundational documents, then such past bad unconstitutional bias could legitimately be rectified by present-day “good” unconstitutional bias.

Fifth, supporters never adequately explained why the sins of prior generations fell on their descendants who grew up in the post-Civil Rights era.

Nor could they account for why those who had never experienced institutionalized racism, much less Jim Crow apartheid or slavery, were to be compensated collectively for the suffering of long-dead individuals. No wonder 70% of the American people in many polls favored ending affirmative action including a half of African-Americans.

Sixth, there never was a “rainbow” coalition of shared non-white victimhood—a concept necessary to perpetuate the premise of white privilege, supremacy, and rage, so integral to race-based reverse discrimination. More than a dozen ethnicities earn more per capita than do whites.

Asians have been subject to coerced internment, immigration restrictions and zoning exclusions. Yet on average they do better than whites economically and enjoy lower suicide rates and longer life expectancies. The arguments for affirmative action never explained why Asians and other minorities who faced discrimination outperformed the majority white population. As a result, affirmative action ended up discriminating against Asians on the premise they were too successful!

Seventh, no one ever explained when affirmative action was to apply. Blacks, for example, were vastly “overrepresented” in merit-based professional football and basketball. Yet no one demanded “proportional representation” to address such “disparate impact,” despite underrepresentation of all other demographics.

Yet if blacks were “underrepresented” in baseball, then reparatory measures were supposed to address that fact—even if Latino players were “overrepresented” and whites “underrepresented as well. No one in our race-obsessed culture, of course, objected that white males died at twice their demographics in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Eighth, in our increasingly intermarried mass-immigration society, few could adjudicate who was what, or much less what standard gave one racial preference.

In lunatic fashion, pink, blond Senator Elizabeth Warren became Harvard’s first “Native American” law professor due to her “high cheekbones.” Light-skinned Latinos were considered marginalized while some darker Italians or Greeks were not.

Ninth, an odious wokism absorbed affirmative action and changed it into something even more abhorrent—as the original spirit of the Civil Rights movement was trashed.

So Americans were asked to stomach a return to distasteful segregated dorms, “separate but equal” graduation ceremonies and racially exclusive workshops.

Tenth, and finally, affirmative action was insidiously destroying meritocracy.

That hallmark American value of tribally-blind inclusivity had once explained why the nation outshone the world by discarding the old class prejudices of Europe. But increasingly this value seemed to have been abandoned.

When Stockton Rush, the late captain and inventor of the ill-fated Titan deep-sea explorer was quoted postmortem bragging that his company had no need of “old white guys” with long military expertise in submarining, Americans realized that woke racial discrimination was not just repulsive but could get you killed.

A nation whose pilot training, medical-school admissions, and military high command promotions were increasingly adopting racial, gender, or sexual-orientation essentialism was a country headed for the sort of Third World tribalism characteristic of failed states abroad.

In the end, the court finally stepped in to end this unconstitutional aberration, more like the old Soviet commissariat than our ideals of equality under the law.

The American people concurred. And the only regret seemed to be why not sooner?