Authored by Lloyd Billingsley via American Greatness,

The swampy origins and foreign interests of the Epidemic Intelligence Services of the CDC need to be exposed…

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is departing at the end of June and Joe Biden has tapped former North Carolina health boss Dr. Mandy Cohen to replace her. More important than the identity of the CDC director is what goes on behind the scenes, and hints have been emerging. 

In April of 2021, the CDC reassigned Dr. Nancy Messonnier, longtime director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). In a May 7, 2021 White House briefing, Walensky suddenly announced that Messonnier was stepping down.

“Dr. Messonnier has been a true hero,” Walensky told reporters. “And through her career, in terms of public health, she’s been a steward of public health for the nation. Over this pandemic and through a many-decade career, she’s made significant contributions, and she leaves behind a strong, strong force of leadership and courage in all that she’s done.”

Walensky neglected to mention Messonnier’s series of telebriefings in early 2020, conducted on January 17, January 24, January 29, January 30, February 3, February 5, February 12, February 25, and March 10.

In these sessions, not shown to the public, Messonnier warned that a “novel coronavirus” had emerged from the “Wuhan market” and the highly contagious new virus would “gain a foothold” in the United States. According to Messonnier, many people would be infected, and there was “no immunity.” Some reporters were curious about people traveling to the United States from Wuhan.

“That’s something I’m not at liberty to talk about today,” Messonnier said in the February 5 briefing, without revealing why that was so, or who was laying down the rules. On January 24, reporters who asked about China were told, “CDC has a team that’s been in China for many years where we work closely with the Department of Health in China.” There was information “from China” but Messonnier wasn’t giving it out.

“I think we should be clear to compliment the Chinese,” Messonnier said, “on the early recognition of the respiratory outbreak center in the Wuhan market, and how rapidly they were able to identify it as a novel coronavirus.” And so on, a veritable recitation of China’s talking points, but there was more to it.

In May of 2021, Walensky also failed to mention that “true hero” Nancy Messonnier was an officer of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), the CDC’s elite team of “disease detectives,” patrolling the world to prevent epidemics from arriving on American soil.

“EIS officers serve on the front lines of public health, protecting Americans and the global community,” the CDC claims. When diseases and public health threats emerge, “EIS officers investigate, identify the cause, rapidly implement control measures, and collect evidence to recommend preventive actions.”

In practice, as Peter Duesberg noted in Inventing the AIDS Virus, the EIS functions as a “medical CIA,” a support network for the CDC in government, academia, and media. For example, EIS veteran Lawrence Altman became a medical writer for the New York Times and in 2010 rendered a worshipful account of the intelligence service.

In 1995, after completing her residency in internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Nancy Messonnier went straight into the EIS. She shows up in the 2013 EIS conference report as a co-author of two studies on vaccine effectiveness, one in Burkina Faso and one in Washington, “among adolescents vaccinated with acellular pertussis vaccines.”

Messonnier’s Wikipedia profile shows the EIS officer in a jacket emblazoned with medals. According to the site, she was born Nancy Ellen Rosenstein, sister of Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department official who launched the investigation of President Trump for allegedly colluding with Russia. 

Messonnier’s connection to Rosenstein, and her experience with the EIS, did not emerge at the outset of 2020. By October, the EIS did briefly expose itself. 

“We are proud of our training and service in the EIS, promoting CDC’s vital mission to protect the health of the American people,” claims an October 14, 2020 “Open Letter by Epidemic Intelligence Service Officers Past and Present—in Support of CDC.”

As the letter explains, “the US epidemic is sustained by deadly chains of transmission that crisscross the entire country.” 

How the deadly epidemic managed to escape the intrepid EIS, land stateside, and crisscross the entire country the letter does not explain. The signers “express our concern about the ominous politicization and silencing of the nation’s health protection agency during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.” 

In reality, the CDC was anything but silent—except on the EIS connections of Nancy Messonnier, their major mouthpiece on the pandemic. The 2013 conference she attended provides enlightenment on the CDC’s medical CIA. 

“Fifty-seven of the new officers are women (70%), and 12 are citizens of other nations (15%),” explains Douglas H. Hamilton, director of the EIS division of applied science.

“Besides the United States, this year’s officers represent Cambodia, China, Kenya, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, Peru, South Korea, Taiwan, Uganda, and the United Kingdom.” (emphases added) 

The CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service is actually a multinational body that includes “officers” from the People’s Republic of China. Embattled Americans might wonder which nation’s interests the Chinese EIS officers represent, and if any were on the CDC “team” working with China for many years.  

The CDC’s intrepid disease detectives obviously failed to prevent the “novel coronavirus” from arriving in America, crisscrossing the country, and causing untold misery and death. The people have a right to wonder what the EIS officers, including any Chinese nationals, were doing at the time.

Remember, when reporters asked Nancy Messonnier about travel from Wuhan, she wasn’t “at liberty to talk about that.” The “true hero” and outgoing CDC boss Walensky needs to talk about it now, under oath, for as long as it takes.

Embattled Americans have a right to know which government official or politician slapped a gag order on Messonnier. The people also need to know the identities of all EIS officers in China in 2019 and 2020, their activities, travel schedules and a lot more. Biden CDC pick Dr. Mandy Cohen provides another opportunity.

Cohen is the lockdown promoter who once strapped on a mask bearing a portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime NIAID boss who claimed “I represent science.” Fauci also funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct the gain-of-function research that makes viruses more lethal and transmissible.

Fauci claims that the COVID virus arose naturally in the wild. By contrast, when former CDC director Robert Redfield found evidence of a laboratory origin, he got death threats. No word of any FBI investigation, but FBI Director Christopher Wray now assesses that “the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

In the confirmation hearing for Dr. Cohen, someone should ask the Biden pick if China, the EIS, Fauci and Messonnier ever said or did anything with which she disagreed. The struggle against white coat supremacy is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

By Ye Xie, Bloomberg markets reporter and analyst

The surprising rate cuts by the People’s Bank of China on Tuesday signaled that policy makers have shifted to stimulus mode after watching the economy languish over the past few months. The magnitude of the potential stimulus package remains to be seen. But as far as the market is concerned, the window of buying the rumor has opened —  at least before reality sets in again.  

Two days before President Xi Jinping’s 70th birthday, the PBOC delivered a gift to investors by unexpectedly lowering the seven-day reverse repurchase rate and the standing lending facility rate. As Bloomberg economist David Qu noted, it’s almost guaranteed that the central bank will follow up by cutting the key rate on the medium-term lending facility on Thursday.

The direct impact of a 10-bp rate cut is minimal, potentially lifting GDP this year by only 0.1 percentage points. More importantly, it’s not the cost of money that is ailing the economy. It’s the lack of demand for money, as private firms and households are pessimistic about the business and income outlook.

That point is highlighted by credit data released late Tuesday. Both total social financing and new bank loans missed already low expectations. Corporate bond issuance took a hit amid renewed concern about local-government financing vehicles, while household borrowing remains sluggish, reflecting low demand for mortgages.

It’s not surprising, then, that investor sentiment is depressed. Bank of America’s global fund-manager survey showed that investors’ expectations on the Chinese economy have drooped to the lowest level since the reopening from the pandemic late last year.

And shorting Chinese equities is considered the second-most crowded trade after “Long Big Tech.” In addition, 13% of investors surveyed considered the Chinese housing market to be the most likely source of global credit risk.

The good news is that Beijing seems to be ready for action. Bloomberg reported that policy makers are considering a broad package of stimulus measures, including supporting the real-estate market.

Strategists at Clocktower Group are turning bullish:

The bottom line is that we expect the material constraints from a burgeoning deflationary spiral to soon outweigh Beijing’s preference to remain patient, implying a potential stimulus announcement around the July politburo meeting. As such, Chinese risk assets are likely very close to, if not have already reached, the bottom in the near-term, especially given the overwhelming pessimism currently priced in the market.

Keep in mind, though, that Beijing is facing significant constraints. Unless the government is willing to unwind some of Xi’s signature policies, including the notion that “housing is not for speculation,” and de-risk local government debt, there’s a good case to be made that any stimulus is likely to be moderate.

When rumor — or “little articles” as Chinese investors call them — is driving market expectations and imaginations, the sky is the limit. The bad news is that when the actual policy initiatives are announced, the market may shift to sell-the-fact mode again.

Authored by Micaela Rocaforte via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Placentia-Yorba Linda School District teacher was placed on leave last month after a video was posted online of her explaining how to sexually stimulate the prostate gland to a high school class.

El Dorado High School anatomy and environmental science teacher Judy Rehburg is seen in the video telling students how the male prostate gland can be stimulated through both external touch and anal penetration.

“That’s why, for male and male, anal sex is still very pleasurable,” Rehburg said in the video.

The teacher also discussed the use of sex toys, telling students such are available at local stores such as Target and CVS.

The teacher has now been placed on paid administrative while district officials investigate the incident, a district spokesperson told The Epoch Times.

The spokesperson said the district trusts employees to adhere to its set of expectations and exercise judgment when discussing sensitive topics.

“Please know that our school district has a very explicit set of expectations for the conduct of our employees,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “District employees are trusted to exercise professional judgment when deciding whether or not a particular issue is suitable for study or discussion. In the classroom, employees act on behalf of the district and are expected to follow the adopted curriculum, and they should not advocate personal opinions or viewpoints.”

Some criticized Rehburg’s lesson as inappropriate for students in a June 6 board meeting.

“What Ms. Rehburg did is sexual harassment,” one parent said at the meeting. “We need to protect our children from this.”

Another parent echoed similar sentiments at the board meeting.

“This was a completely inappropriate, obscene and perverse discussion being had by this teacher with high school students paid for by our tax dollars,” the parent said.

But others said Rehburg was simply doing her job.

“Students asked the question,” said one parent during a June 6 board meeting. “She was answering the question in good faith to try to give that student a complete and well-thought-out answer to keep them from going home and googling it. This is not part of the teachers’ normal curriculum.”

Additionally, a student at the board meeting who is in Rehburg’s anatomy class said the video was taken out of context.

The student said Rehburg gave students a Google survey form for students to anonymously submit questions on reproductive anatomy, and made it clear she would answer such questions only in the context of anatomy.

The student said that in the video, Rehburg was responding to a question a student had submitted about the male prostate, according to the post.

“I don’t think an almost 20-year career should be thrown away for a one-minute video that was taken out of context,” the student said.

Following Rehburg’s leave, an anonymous Instagram account @freejudy began posting statements from students who were in the room during the lesson.

In one post, an anonymous student explained that Rehburg was teaching a reproductive anatomy unit, and that parents and students were required to sign off on the class syllabus at the beginning of the year.

“I am more than certain not a single student felt uncomfortable in that class,” the post stated. “She made sure to tell us about the whole curriculum at the beginning of the year, and students and parents were required to sign a syllabus at the beginning of the year.”

Rehburg was not immediately available for comment.

Authored by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag via Public (emphasis ours),

After years of official pronouncements to the contrary, significant new evidence has emerged that strengthens the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.

More than three years after the pandemic’s outbreak, many around the world had given up on learning the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the highly infectious respiratory virus that has killed millions, and the response to which shut down businesses and schools, upended societies, and caused enormous collateral damage.

Public officials in the U.S. and other countries have repeatedly suggested that uncovering the pandemic’s origin may not be possible. “We may never know,” said Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who oversaw pandemic response for two administrations.

Now, answers increasingly look within reach. Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.

As such, not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, but also that they were working with the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it.

When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”

“Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19. Shi is known as “the bat woman of China,” and led the gain-of-function research at the WIV. “He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him.”

Hu and Yu researched the novel lineage of SARS-like viruses from which SARS-CoV-2 hails, and in 2019 coauthored a paper with Shi Zhengli that described SARS-like lineages they had studied over the years.

Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing who raised questions starting in early 2020 about a possible research-related pandemic origin, said, “It’s a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else. That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher in Shi’s lab.”

Sources tell Public and Racket that other news organizations are chasing aspects of this story. On Saturday, The Times of London quoted an anonymous U.S. State Department investigator saying, “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation, and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Public and Racket are the first publications to reveal the names of the three sick WIV workers and place them directly in the lab that collected and experimented with SARS-like viruses poised for human emergence.

Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2.

A bill signed by President Biden earlier this year specifically called for the release of the names and roles of the sick researchers at the WIV, their symptoms and date of symptom onset, and whether these researchers had been involved with or exposed to coronavirus research.

On Dec. 29, 2017, two years before the pandemic began, Chinese state-run television aired a video that includes a scene of Ben Hu watching a lab worker handle specimens. Neither are wearing protective gear. The same video shows WIV scientists hunting for bat viruses with little protective gear. “If they were worried about being infected in the field, they would need full body suits with no gaps” to be safe, said Chan. “That’s the only way.”

The WIV research with live SARS-like viruses was performed at too low of a safety level, “BSL-2,” explains Chan, “When we now know that the pandemic virus is even capable of escaping from a BSL-3 lab and infecting fully vaccinated young lab workers.”

While scientists justify such research as necessary for developing vaccines, President Barack Obama banned federal funding for gain-of-function research of concern in 2014, because experts had come to the consensus that it was too dangerous. However, the National Institute of Health and NIAID headed by Francis Collins and Fauci, and a major U.S. government grantee, EcoHealth Alliance, deemed their work on SARS-like viruses as not falling under the gain-of-function research of concern definitions and funded this project in China and Southeast Asia.

In March 2018, the WIV, the EcoHealth Alliance, and the University of North Carolina applied for a $14 million grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency DARPA to engineer “furin cleavage sites” into SARS-like coronaviruses to study how this affected their ability to grow and cause disease.

Scientists say the key piece of the COVID-19 virus, which made it so transmissible compared to its closest relatives, was its unique furin cleavage site.

DARPA rejected the grant, but it now appears the WIV went forward with the research anyway. The Times of London reported that US collaborators of the WIV had come forward and said the Wuhan scientists had put furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses in 2019.

Hu co-authored multiple papers on coronavirus research, including a 2017 paper on chimeric bat coronaviruses with Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, which was funded in part by the NIH and the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT Program. Data privately shared with the NIH revealed that these chimeric SARS-like viruses grew far more quickly and caused more severe disease in humanized mice in the lab.

When the WIV put out their first paper about the pandemic virus, they failed to point out the novel furin cleavage site despite having had plans to and allegedly putting such gain-of-function features into SARS-like viruses in their lab. “It’s as if these scientists proposed putting horns on horses, but when a unicorn shows up in their city a year later they write a paper describing every part of it except its horn,” said Chan.

Public sent emails and made phone calls to the NIH, WIV, EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak, Hu, and Shi over the last several days and did not hear back.

It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public. “You would expect the country of origin to be defensive,” said Chan, “but you wouldn’t expect a country receiving the virus to be withholding key evidence.”

On January 15, 2021, five days before President Joe Biden took office, the U.S. State Department published a fact sheet that pointed to the likelihood of a lab leak as the cause of a pandemic.

Already, the State Department in 2021 suspected that the WIV had lied to the public. “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. That raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students by SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”

In February of this year, the Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, told a reporter that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

The Times of London reported that State Department investigators “found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019.” As previously reported in Vanity Fair, some of the information State Department investigators found in 2021 was “sitting in the U.S. intelligence community’s own files, unanalyzed.”

“Ever since I put out my [May 2020] preprint [research paper] saying that an accidental lab origin was possible, I was criticized as a conspiracy theorist,” said Chan. “If this info had been made public in May of 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market.”

Identifying the first COVID-19 case as a Wuhan Institute scientist overseeing gain-of-function research has significant ramifications for investigators in search of a motive for a cover-up.

Politicians, scientists, journalists, and amateur researchers for years now have zeroed in on the possibility that Covid-19 may have resulted from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research conducted in China.

Publications ranging from the Washington Post to the Intercept to the Wall Street Journal have uncovered suggestive details, including the fact that the NIH awarded funding for at least 18 gain-of-function research projects between 2012 and 2020, and NIH scientists in 2016 expressing concern about supposedly paused hybrid “chimera” virus research.

Had the information come out earlier, governments may have responded to the pandemic differently. After Public shared the information with Chan, she said, “I feel vindicated, but I’m frustrated. If you knew that this was likely a lab-enhanced pathogen, there are so many things you could have done differently. This whole pandemic could have been reshaped.”

Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Supreme Court limited the reach of the federal Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act, unanimously rebuffing the Biden administration’s efforts to prosecute a man already convicted of Medicaid fraud with a separate charge of aggravated identity theft arising out of the same fraud case.

The 9–0 opinion (pdf) in Dubin v. United States (court file 22-10) was issued on June 8 and authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Neil Gorsuch filed a separate concurring opinion.

The Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act mandates a two-year prison sentence for violations.

When then-President George W. Bush signed the law in 2004 he said it established the federal “offense of aggravated identity theft” to ensure someone convicted of that crime would receive jail time “for stealing a person’s good name.”

“These punishments will come on top of any punishment for crimes that proceed from identity theft,” the 43rd president said at the time.

The act, Bush added, “raises the standard of conduct for people who have access to personal records through their work at banks, government agencies, insurance companies, and other storehouses of financial data.”

But the Supreme Court disagreed with the U.S. Department of Justice’s argument that petitioner David Fox Dubin was automatically guilty under the act because a fraudulent Medicaid billing form include the patient’s Medicaid reimbursement number as a “means of identification.”

Dubin worked as a managing partner for PARTS, a company in Austin, Texas, created by his father, licensed psychologist William Dubin.

Both men were convicted by a U.S. district court for a scheme to defraud Texas’s Medicaid program.

Medicaid is a joint federal-state program that serves low-income people of all ages and varies from state to state. It is run by state and local governments within federal guidelines. Each state sets its own rules about eligibility and services.

Bound by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit precedent, the U.S. district court allowed Dubin’s conviction for aggravated identity theft to stand even though the district court believed the crux of the case was fraudulent billing, as opposed to identity theft. A divided 5th Circuit upheld the conviction in March 2022 despite its acknowledgment that according to the government’s interpretation of the act, “the elements of [the] offense are not captured or even fairly described by the words ‘identity theft.’”

Dubin’s attorney, Jeffrey L. Fisher, a professor at Stanford Law School, said he was pleased with the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“We’re grateful for the Court’s decision for Mr. Dubin’s sake and are pleased in general that the Court has reigned in the prosecutorial overreaching the statute allowed,” Fisher told The Epoch Times by email.

The case goes back to 2013 when David Fox Dubin filed a claim with Medicaid for $540 for services provided to someone identified as Patient L. The government did not dispute that the psychological examination practice treated the patient or had the authority to use the patient’s name in the billing process, according to Dubin’s petition (pdf) that was filed with the Supreme Court in June 2022.

“Instead, the government’s theory was that [the] petitioner overbilled Medicaid for the services provided,” which was sufficient for a conviction for health care fraud.

“But the government was not content with that conviction. It also indicted [the] petitioner for aggravated identity theft,” the petition stated. The government’s position was that Dubin violated the identity theft law because he placed Patient L’s “identifying information on the fraudulent Medicaid claim form.”

Justices pushed back against the government’s arguments that were presented by U.S. Department of Justice attorney Vivek Suri at a hearing on Feb. 27.

Read more here…

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

The largest Catholic health system in the nation has allegedly funded and performed transgender surgeries and other “gender-affirming” medical interventions, defying traditional Catholic teachings, according to an investigative report released to The Epoch Times.

The report by the Lepanto Institute, a Catholic research and education organization, released on June 12, exposes CommonSpirit Health, a Catholic entity, for its alleged performance and funding of transgender surgeries and therapies,” including prescribing and providing cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers to patients.

A promotional video accompanying the report asserts: “The transgender craze has seized the world by the throat and is choking the life out of the bedrock of civilization: the family. And this is happening right under the nose of the Vatican.”

In the 64-page exposé, “CommonSpirit and the Sex-Change Industry,” author Michael Hichborn, founder and president of the Lepanto Institute, explains the connections within the Catholic health network in the United States and its direct ties to the Vatican.

Hichborn, a self-described lifelong Catholic, said he is both “saddened” and “horrified” by the moral decline within factions of the Catholic Church, and wants “to make sure that Catholics are Catholics and that those who operate in the name of the Catholic Church do so in line with all of her teachings.”

He claims that these medical interventions are happening in “gross defiance” of official values held by the Catholic Church, which has traditionally rejected transgenderism, homosexuality, abortions, and contraception—all of which the report alleges CommonSpirit is promoting at dozens of hospitals and medical facilities in the U.S.

“In addition to performing sex-change operations, CommonSpirit provides employee benefits that cover sex-change operations, transgender hormone treatments, and even puberty blockers for kids,” according to the report.

While it’s not known if CommonSpirit Health has performed transgender surgeries on children, the use of puberty blockers suggests it is treating minors for gender dysphoria in some capacity, Hichborn told The Epoch Times.

“The horrifying thing when you start getting into the science of the puberty blockers and the transitional hormones, is they do permanent damage to these kids. They talk about how puberty blockers just kind of put a pause on puberty or pubertal development, and that’s a lie,” he said. “It doesn’t put a pause on it; it actually damages these kids to the point that many of them wind up being sterile.”

CommonSpirit Health derives its Catholic identity from the Catholic Health Care Federation whose authority is granted by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life in Rome, the report states.

“The only authority in the church that has the ability to judge the actions of CommonSpirit is the Vatican,” Hichborn told The Epoch Times. “Because CommonSpirit is a subsidiary of the Catholic Health Care Federation, it is subject only to the Pope and the Pope’s governing bodies in Rome.”

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 forms not only confirm that CommonSpirit Health benefits from religious exemption tax breaks, but that the organization is part of the Catholic Church, Hichborn said.

CommonSpirit has allegedly promoted the LGBT agenda including transgender ideology and transitioning children in its podcasts and at its conferences, has raised funds for sex-change surgical equipment, performed surgical sterilizations, and at least one of its hospitals has reportedly performed elective abortions, the report indicates.

Read more here…

In rare, detailed remarks on the state of how the war is going in neighboring Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is failing, stating that Kiev has at this point lost a total of 25 to 30 percent of the military vehicles which had been supplied by the West, including tanks.

Putin further affirmed that the counteroffensive began on June 4 and has “not been successful in any area” – and claimed that casualties on the Ukrainian side are ten times greater than Russia’s.

The comments came the same day the Russian Defense Ministry released video showing damaged and abandoned NATO-supplied armored vehicles, including a German Leopard 2 tank and American Bradley infantry vehicles. 

The New York Times seems to somewhat agree with the Kremlin’s assessment that no serious gains have been made by Ukrainian forces, with its headline, “Ukraine Claims More Small Advances in Counteroffensive, but No Breakthroughs”…

Ukraine claimed small advances on Monday in its counteroffensive in the southeast of the country, hunting for a place to drive a wedge through Russian defenses, a key to its hopes for recapturing wide swaths of territory lost to the Russian invasion last year.

After a week of fierce combat with infantry, artillery and tanks, across a mostly agricultural landscape, Ukrainian forces, newly armed and trained by Western allies, have retaken seven small villages and settlements, Hannah Malyar, a deputy defense minister, wrote on the messaging platform Telegram, including one that the military said it had captured on Monday.

The deepest advance was about 4 miles, and “the area of territory taken under control is 90 square kilometers,” about 35 square miles, she wrote.

NYT adds a couple of the following admissions: 

Progress is measured in yards, or at most a mile or so, the Ukrainian gains have involved tiny farming villages, and there has been no sign so far of a significant break in the Russian occupiers’ dense network of defenses.

Horrific scenes of close-up combat, including trench warfare reminiscent of WWI, continue to emerge:

War up close: Russian units assault an AFU trench.
-> These trench up close battles terrify me … I hope that stops soon. pic.twitter.com/DfpY3yuBvt

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) June 13, 2023

And tellingly:

Ukraine has not disclosed losses, but its attacks against Russian trenches, bunkers, minefields and gun emplacements are likely to be taking a heavy toll on its forces, analysts say, and there have been some confirmed losses of both troops and advanced weaponry newly donated by allies.

Thus in this rarest of moments, in seems that Putin and the NY Times agree on something.

Putin additionally commented on the UN-backed grain deal on Tuesday, saying Russia is seriously considering withdrawing from the agreement. He stressed Moscow has been “cheated” regarding its own exports.

“Probably, for the guys who are fighting, it’s not clear why we are letting the grain through. I understand,” Putin told journalists, while explaining that the deal asymmetrically benefits Ukraine and its ability to keep selling primarily to Europe. “We do it not for Ukraine, but for the friendly countries in Africa and Latin America. Because grain should go first and foremost to the poorest countries in the world.”

That’s when he confirmed: “We are now thinking about whether to leave the grain deal,” also given the persistent Kremlin accusation that Ukraine is using the grain corridor “to launch maritime drones” against Russian naval assets.

The historic, unprecedented self-sabotage at Tranheuser-Busch at the hands of woke, underqualified, virtue-signaling idiot, just refuses stop.

Ten weeks after the attention-starved Dylan Mulvaney posted an April 1 video on his Instagram account to promote Bud LIght, which was promptly led to a boycott by tens of millions of warm-blooded Americans (and foreigners) who have had it up to here with the tranny lobby shoving itself down everyone’s throat – both literally and metaphorically – (Tr)anheuser-Busch InBev’s Bud Light brand continued to see steepening volume declines, Citi reports, citing the latest weekly US Nielsen data through June 3.

According to Citi Analyst Simon Hales, the latest weekly US Nielsen data through to 3rd Jun shows that Bud Light volume declines accelerated last week to -29.9% vs -26.1% in the week ending 27th May, and sales worsened to -27.0% from -23.3%.

On a relative share basis, volume share was down -342bps vs -316bps in the previous week and value share was down -280bps vs -263bps implying an acceleration in share losses vs recent weeks.

Moreover, there continues to be contagion to the wider ABInBev brand portfolio, with Budweiser, Busch and Michelob all weaker again. According to Citi, Busch volumes are down by -13.8% vs -12.2% and Stella Artois volumes down -9.9% vs -10.1%

Meanwhile, Coors Light saw its recent market share gains accelerate over the last two weeks.

The latest data shows little sign that consumers are moving on from the Bud Light controversy and Citi concludes that “aAs such, we expect the Bud Light controversy is likely to continue to dominate news flow and weigh on short-term investor sentiment.”

More in the full Cit report available to pro subs.

The Pentagon revealed late Monday that on Sunday a major helicopter accident resulted in a large group of US military personnel being injured in northeast Syria. 

While US Central Command is downplaying it as an aviation “mishap”, there were twenty-two US service members injured in the incident. Importantly, US Central command confirmed in a statement that “no enemy fire was reported.” 

Ten of the wounded had injuries serious enough to be evacuated to hospitals outside of the region, presumably in neighboring Iraq where US personnel have a precent in Irbil in the north.

The nearly two dozen personnel had “various degrees” of injuries, officials said. It’s unclear whether the presumed crash involved one or more helicopters.

In April there had been a Department of Defense 24-hour stan-down of all aviation units after a string of deadly accidents, including two deadly mid-air helicopter collisions within a single month time frame.

“The safety of our aviators is our top priority, and this stand-down is an important step to make certain we are doing everything possible to prevent accidents and protect our personnel,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said at the time.

Sunday’s incident over Syria is believed to be a mechanical failure or pilot error, according to some reports. Meanwhile, some are questioning what American troops are still doing in Syria in the first place…

28 Americans Wounded or Killed in Syria over last two months.

What for? https://t.co/l3Wjwn96kt

— Joshua Landis (@joshua_landis) June 13, 2023

At least 900 US troops (plus an unknown amount of State Dept personnel, contractors, and intelligence personnel) have occupied northeast Syria for years at this point. They control all of Syria’s main oil and gas fields, which were vital for meeting the population’s energy needs. 

There have been recent reports of US soldiers and the Pentagon’s Kurdish SDF proxies “looting” Syrian oil, driving it across the border into Iraq. Sporadic drone and rocket attacks on US bases in Syria have resulted in dead and wounded US personnel over the past year, a trend which recently increased.

Despite a ‘cease and desist’ order from Fox News, Tucker Carlson is back tonight with the 3rd episode of his ‘Tucker on Twitter’ show. After over 115 million views on his first and almost 60 million on his second, tonight’s discussion of the indictment of former president Trump is sure to be the most widely viewed news of the day (despite CNN/MSNBC’s euphoria at the day’s events).

Reflecting on the day’s events in Miami, Carlson noted that “cable news carried every moment of it… but they weren’t shocked… anybody who’s been paying attention knew this was coming…”

But, as he continues, “what just happened was always going to happen, it has been inevitable since February 16, 2016… that’s the day that Donald Trump may a blood enemy of the largest and most powerful organization in human history – the US federal government.”

How did he make that force an enemy? It wasn’t rapists from Mexico or trade with China – the stories that dominated the news at the time…

“…what matters to ‘permanent Washington’ then and now is foreign policy – the invasions, the occupations, and proxy wars… the policies that come with trillion-dollar price tags”

At 2:56, Carlson shows the exact moment that “permanent Washington” decided to send Donald Trump to prison – its from the Republican Candidates’ Debate …

“we should have never been in Iraq, we have destabilized The Middle East… “

But it was this line that doomed Trump to today’s arrest…

“...they lied…they said there were weapons of mass destruction, there was none.. and they knew there were none.“

That sealed his fate because:

“That was the one thing you were not allowed to say because it implicated too many people on both sides…”

He accuses politicians from both parties, including Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pompeo, of betraying Trump’s agenda and working against him from within.

“…they were all guilty of it… they all knew and they all lied and to a person they hated Donald Trump for exposing them.”

Carlson notes that Trump’s prosecution is seen as both political and ideological, aimed at disqualifying those who criticize wars, criticizing the Washington establishment for prioritizing global interventions and military actions over domestic concerns, and highlighting the disparity between the vast amount of government spending and the deteriorating state of public infrastructure across the country.

Carlson crescendos with the following…

“Trump is the only one who dissents from Washington’s long-standing pointless war agenda… and for that, that one fact, they are trying to take Trump out before you can vote for him…

…and that should upset you more than anything that has happened in American politics in your lifetime...

…Yes, Donald Trump is a flawed man; but his sins are minor compared to those of his persecutors.”

The spectacle of Trump’s prosecution reveals the powerlessness of voters in America, and as Carlson concludes by urging people to preserve democracy: “America’s principles are at stake.”

Watch the full show here:

Ep. 3 America’s principles are at stake pic.twitter.com/eJNSUVvvqY

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 13, 2023

Full Transcript…

(00:00) hey it’s Tucker Carlson the Biden Administration arrested Donald Trump this afternoon they had him arraigned and fingerprinted in a Miami Courthouse like the accused felon he now technically is these were the first steps in a process that is designed to put Donald Trump behind bars for the rest of his life cable news carried every moment of it live it’s unprecedented they told us with what looked like shock but they weren’t shocked they knew this was coming everyone who’s paid attention knew it was what just happened was

(00:32) always going to happen it’s been inevitable since February 16 2016. that’s the day Donald Trump made a blood enemy of the largest and most powerful organization in human history which would be the federal government despite what you may remember it wasn’t anything that Trump had said about immigration or trade with China or rapists from Mexico those are the stories that dominated the headlines that year Trump’s a racist they scream stop him but inside Washington that was just noise none of it really raided identity

(01:05) politics doesn’t mean much to permanent Washington what matters then and now is foreign policy the invasions and occupations and proxy wars the decisions that determine which global populations will Thrive and which will die the policies that come with trillion dollar price tags the ones that over time have made the counties around DC the richest suburbs in the world in Washington that’s what actually matters and it’s obvious when you look carefully when there’s a debate about anything else for example the debt

(01:37) ceiling both sides take their assigned positions and they start yelling but when Congress decides to start a war no matter how foolish or counterproductive or obviously disconnected from America’s core interests that war may be when that happens the leaders of both parties automatically jump behind it like circus clowns and then they stay there sometimes for decades they defend that war relentlessly against all evidence until somebody finally Rings the all clear Bell and they can begin to admit that actually maybe it wasn’t such a

(02:08) great idea we meant well but it just didn’t work out the good news is we’ve learned a lot of important lessons in the end they usually do say something like that but only after emotions have cooled and the damning details have begun to fade from Collective memory it’s an apology that’s not actually an apology much less repentance and it’s years too late to matter in any case but until then that’s all you’re getting until then no dissent is allowed that’s the first rule of Washington but somehow

(02:38) Trump didn’t bother to follow it he is from out of town so maybe he didn’t know it was a rule or maybe he just didn’t care either way seven and a half years later we can point to the precise moment that permanent Washington decided to send Donald Trump to prison here it is it’s from the Republican candidates debate in Greenville South Carolina we should have never been in Iraq we have destabilized the Middle East they lied okay they said there were weapons of mass destruction there were none and they knew there were none there

(03:08) were no weapons of mass okay all right we should never have been in Iraq Trump said we destabilized the Middle East now by the time Trump said that a lot of Republican primary voters were starting to reach the same conclusion how could they not but it was the next line that doomed Trump to today’s arrest they lied he said there were no weapons of mass destruction and they knew there were none now when he said that a few in the crowd booed most just sat there and silenced stunned can he say that well he said it

(03:39) anyway and by saying that he sealed his fate that was the one thing you were not allowed to say because it implicated too many people on both sides which on this topic is really just one side Hillary Clinton was guilty of it but so was Paul Ryan all of them were guilty they all knew they all lied and to a person they hated Donald Trump for exposing them after that it was pretty clear that even if he did get elected president Trump was going to have a very hard time controlling the federal government he was supposed to be in charge of most of

(04:12) permanent Washington decided that thwarting Trump was the single most important mission in their lives everything depended on him many of them said so publicly but others didn’t say so publicly in fact the stealthier ones took another path they ran toward Trump not away from him they sucked up to him they ingratiated themselves the man they intuitively understood was susceptible to flattery which Trump is and they did this in order to subvert his new Administration from the inside there were a number of these and you

(04:42) could spot them immediately they were flatterers invariably the ones who flattered Trump the most hated him the most and disagreed the most strongly with his views you saw them in the hallways of the White House and at press conferences they were there slobbering over their boss with elaborate self-abasement as if they were addressing a monarch or a God it was a scene from the ottoman Court it was filthy and decadent and it was false Mike Pence Nikki Haley Mike Pompeo Lindsey Graham in the Congress they all called Trump a Visionary genius up until

(05:14) the moment he lost power and then they unsheathed their real agenda as always the neocon war agenda and they piled on with maximum Force here’s Mike Pompeo for example on Fox news this morning president Trump had classified documents where he shouldn’t have had them and then when given the opportunity to return to me he chose not to do that for whatever reason when somebody identifies that you got to turn them in so that’s just that’s inconsistent with protecting America’s soldiers Sailors Airmen and Marines and

(05:41) if the allegations are true some of these were pretty serious important documents so that’s wrong May future historians hoping to unlock the mysteries of late Empire Washington study that clip because it will reveal everything that very same Mike Pompeo the one who’s sneering at Donald Trump on TV this morning that guy served Donald Trump as both CIA director and as Secretary of State those are the two most powerful jobs in the federal government and as he worked in those jobs Pompeo promised in fact he swore to support the

(06:14) president’s agenda why because that’s the way a democracy works you vote for a candidate in the belief that his appointees will carry out the policies that you voted for it’s not about the president it’s about you the voter but Pompeo didn’t do that he didn’t even try to do that in fact he undermined Trump’s often stated commitment to peace and non-intervention abroad at every turn his every waking hour was devoted to fomenting war in some Far Away foreign country or other Iran Syria

(06:45) Russia North Korea the list goes on but rather than telling Trump that he disagree with his ideas as a man would Pompeo toted up to Trump a man he despised in the oiliest most over-the-top way imaginable ask anyone who worked in that white house at the time who is the appointee most likely to tell Donald Trump on a daily basis that he was handsome virile sleek and Powerful Mike Pompeo that will be the consensus answer those of us who saw firsthand pompeo’s Relentless cow Towing will never forget it it was indelibly repulsive no one

(07:21) with self-respect could do something like that but Mike Pompeo did it effortlessly with relish and Verve now this same person is telling Fox News viewers that he fears for the safety of our military our soldiers Sailors Airmen and Marines in the approved phrase because Donald Trump took some classified documents home and didn’t immediately return them to the National Archives what a lie that is Mike Pompeo knows that’s a lie he spent his entire life in Washington Washington is a city where internal memos about Labor Day are

(07:54) classified because everything is classified your government has classified more than a billion Federal documents most of them boring and pointless and a danger to no one and lock them away in secret you can’t see them because you may be an American citizen but not really and therefore you don’t have the necessary clearances to know what’s going on and by the way none of this is done in order to make America safer any more than coveted restrictions were designed to keep you healthy no it’s a caste

(08:21) system that’s the point and you’re the Untouchable in this hierarchy Mike Pompeo knows that everybody who works in Washington knows that how many secret documents do you think Dick Cheney took home with him while he was running the Iraq War how many did his wife read she never had a clearance we’ll never know the answer because there is no chance Dick Cheney will ever be investigated or staffers will be told to wear wires in his presence he will never be indicted for this of course not Dick Cheney is a neocon Donald Trump is

(08:53) not Dick Cheney supports war with Russia Trump does not that’s the difference the rest is just a distraction the prosecution of Donald Trump is transparently political he’s literally Joe Biden’s main political opponent he’s pulling over 60 percent among Republican voters right now so Joe Biden is doing what no president has ever dared to do he’s using law enforcement to lock up his chief rival that’s happening right now anyone who denies it’s happening is lying to you but actually it’s worse than that

(09:23) Trump’s prosecution isn’t just political it’s ideological nobody with Trump’s views is allowed to have power in this country criticize our Wars and you’re disqualified if you keep it up we’ll send you to prison that’s the message Washington is sending not just the Democratic party is sending but both parties are sending like so many Republicans for example the supposedly conservative governor of Texas Greg Abbott spent yesterday totally ignoring the destruction of the American justice system

(09:52) instead he signed a highly important bill called the crown act which according to the celebratory tweet Abbott sent commemorating it will quote prohibit discrimination based on Textures and hairstyles historically associated with race in other words in Texas cornrows are now protected by law having unapproved views about Ukraine is not that’s fine with most elected Republicans they find Trump tiresome and embarrassing their donors hate him they will not be sad if he dies in jail but what about voters what are they

(10:24) learning from this spectacle well mostly they’re learning that they have no power at all because nobody cares about them but they already knew that unlike so many of our elected leaders they have been to America recently they know what it looks like have you seen it if you’ve got a few days this summer find out take a road trip and see for yourself Drive 500 miles in any direction and then come home how are things looking well they should look great the federal government spent six and a half trillion dollars last

(10:52) year that’s more than any government has ever spent ever so at the very least you would expect pristine public roads oh no that’s not what you see when you drive around this country there are potholes and Jersey barriers everywhere looks like Tegucigalpa before the Chinese decided to rebuild the infrastructure of Honduras we don’t have China buying our roads so they’re falling apart you’d think the people you would pass on your road trip would look happy and prosperous again this is a very rich country but a lot of

(11:20) them don’t quite a few appear to be strung out on drugs you see them shuffling by shuttered storefronts in small towns and you wonder as you see all of this where did all the money go it’s certainly not here well it’s in Washington it’s in Fairfax in Loudoun counties and in leafy perfectly manicured Northwest D.

(11:40) C and of course a huge chunk of it went to Ukraine to zielinski and his friends not because you voted for that you didn’t vote to give it to them you never would but because Joe Biden and his many allies from Chuck Schumer to Mitch McConnell to Paul Ryan and every single news anchor on all of Television all of them believe that Ukraine its borders its future its infrastructure are all more important than the town that you live in they sincerely think that and it’s obvious everyone in power thinks that except for

(12:09) Donald Trump whatever else you say about him Trump is the one guy with an actual shot of becoming president who dissents from Washington’s long-standing pointless War agenda and for that that one fact they are trying to take Trump out before you can vote for him and that should upset you more than anything that’s happened in American politics in your lifetime even if you don’t plan to vote for Donald Trump even if you would die before voting for Donald Trump which is you’re right and a lot of good people feel that way even

(12:38) still the destruction of our democracy which is the right of Voters to support any candidate they want even candidates who don’t want war with Russia the destruction of that should keep you up at night yes Donald Trump was a flawed man but his sins are minor compared to those of his persecutors in this life we don’t get to choose our Martyrs we can only choose our principles and Americas are at stake here people say the news live in Canada’s motorcade