A St. Louis judge sanctioned St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s office last week for allegedly withholding evidence in a double-murder case, while allowing the suspect out on bond, amid rising criticism about left-wing prosecutors allowing crime to flourish in major U.S. cities.
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner appears at her disciplinary hearing in St. Louis, Mo., on April 11, 2022. (T.L. Witt/Pool via Missouri Lawyers Media/AP Photo)
Alex Heflin, 23, was held without bond since January after he was initially charged with two counts of second-degree murder and armed criminal action, local media reported. But those charges were recently reduced to involuntary and voluntary manslaughter before he was released, while his April 17 trial has been postponed until June 12.
Judge Theresa Counts Burke ruled in favor of Heflin’s lawyers after they filed a motion accusing a prosecutor under Gardner of violating discovery rules. They alleged that her office did not turn over evidence, including a 911 call recording and DNA evidence.
“The court finds that there have been repeated delays by the state in obtaining discovery and providing it to the defense,” Burke wrote, according to local reports.
“There has been a lack of diligence on the part of the state in following up and providing discovery to the defendant in a timely fashion. As a result of the state’s actions and lack of diligence, the court grants defendant’s second motion for sanctions.”
Under Burke’s order, Heflin will have to remain on GPS monitoring. She also ordered the circuit attorney’s office to hand over their list of witnesses within 24 hours, provide DNA test results within 24 hours, or ask a crime lab for the DNA results.
The Epoch Times has contacted Gardner’s office for comment.
In a statement, Gardner said that it is working with police “to bring justice on behalf of the people of the City of St. Louis, victims, and their families.” It added that her office “is dedicated to doing everything in its power to hold the defendant accountable … and will continue to work to ensure justice is served.
While the St. Louis Police Department did not comment on the case and said it is working with Garnder’s office, the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association accused Gardner of misconduct.
“The St. Louis Police Officers’ Association would like to address the unfounded claims made against our members in a recent news article concerning State vs. Heflin. Kim Gardner’s office has once again failed to accept responsibility for the mistakes made within her office and chose instead to blame the hard-working men and women of the St. Louis Police Department,” the statement said.
“These repeated problems are due to the incompetence of the Circuit Attorney’s office, not from the actions of police officers.”
The union added that “in this case, all the evidence had been turned over to the Circuit Attorney’s office for nearly a year prior to trial. Police officers shouldn’t be made scapegoats for an overworked, backlogged, and mismanaged Circuit Attorney’s Office.”
It comes days after Gardner, a Democrat, said she will run for reelection in 2024 – even as she tries to fend off an effort by Missouri’s attorney general to force her out of office. Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey in February filed a lawsuit asking a judge to remove Gardner from office, accusing her of incompetence.
Bailey cited a low rate of convictions in homicide cases, accused Gardner of failing to keep crime victims and their families updated, and said her office is too slow to take up cases brought by police.
Gardner, 47, was elected in 2016 and reelected in 2020. She is among several left-wing Democratic prosecutors across the country who have taken steps such as ending the prosecution of certain crimes and seeking mental health treatment over incarceration for non-violent criminals.
Republicans have accused her of receiving money from groups tied to left-wing billionaire financier George Soros, who was accused of providing funding to left-wing groups during the Black Lives Matter-related unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, nearly 10 years ago. In 2016, she received campaign funding from Soros’s Safety and Justice Committee, according to the Missouri Times, while in 2017, she worked with The Vera Institute of Justice, which itself received $11 million from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, it was reported.
Soros has been accused of providing funding to other left-wing district attorneys, which was highlighted by tech billionaire Elon Musk last month.
“Soros figured out a clever arbitrage opportunity: The many small political contests, such as DAs & judges, have much higher impact per dollar spent than the big races, so it is far easier to sway the outcome,” he wrote in response to claims that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg received Soros cash.
In 2018, the Supreme Court of Missouri ordered Gardner to be disciplined for misconduct in the 2018 prosecution of then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican.
The Biden administration on Friday petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that halted a federal ban on “bump stocks,” with the Justice Department requesting the high court reimpose a ban on the devices until it hears the case.
Bump stocks, which are accessories that let semi-automatic firearms boost firing speed, were banned in 2019 when the Department of Justice (DOJ) amended regulations of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), classifying bump stocks as equivalent to machine guns and making them illegal.
The ban prompted a lawsuit by Michael Cargill, owner of Central Texas Gun Works in Austin, who was handed a victory when the Fifth Circuit ruled recently to invalidate the ATF prohibition on bump stocks.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its appeal of the Fifth Circuit’s decision that reversed the ban.
“Their appeal—what they call a writ of certiorari—to the Supreme Court, asking the Supreme Court to hear this case, also asks that the lower court in Austin actually do a stay, meaning that keep bump stocks banned until this case is heard in front of the U.S. Supreme Court,” Cargill said in a statement posted on social media in response to the DOJ’s latest action.
The petition for a writ of certiorari—a formal request made to a higher court to review and potentially overturn a lower court decision—was filed with the Supreme Court by Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar on behalf of the DOJ.
“The government maintains only that bump stocks are machineguns under the best interpretation of the statute,” the petition reads (pdf). “The Fifth Circuit erred in holding otherwise, and this Court should grant review and reverse” the lower court’s decision.
That decision “threatens significant harm to public safety,” the DOJ said in the appeal. “Bump stocks allow a shooter to fire hundreds of bullets a minute by a single pull of the trigger. Like other machine guns, rifles modified with bump stocks are exceedingly dangerous.”
Before the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of Cargill, three other federal courts upheld the bump stock ban. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review those cases.
Are ‘Woke’ Companies Sponsoring Golf Pros That Fly Around In Private Jets?
The weather-delayed Masters at Augusta National will resume on Sunday morning. The third round is set to continue at 0830 ET. If there are no further issues, the final round will start around noon. Unpredictable weather, including a falling tree on Friday, disrupted play in recent days.
It is business as usual for pros who have corporate sponsorships stitched all over their golf swag. Companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, to stamp their logo on the shirts, hats, plants, and bags of pros — it’s fantastic advertising since millions tune into one of the greatest golf tournaments in the world.
It is also important to note that major sponsors like ‘woke’ Nike (and there are many others), with their all-important ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) social credit scores, might be sponsoring some players who arrived at Augusta Regional Airport (AGS) by private jet.
Ahead of the tournament, AGS had been transformed into a parking lot for jets. Not all jets are chartered or owned by pros, but there are some.
Companies like Nike, which maintains all sorts of feel-good social credit scores, such as those catering to the LGBTQ+ community, have plowed millions of dollars into virtue-signaling marketing to boost their scores.
Golf pros flying in private jets while sponsored by ‘woke’ companies may not portray a favorable image. So what do these companies need to do?
Quick, give more money to trans-TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney to boost social credit scores…
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers believes the probability of the United States entering a recession has spiked, pointing to tightening credit conditions.
“Recession probabilities are going up at this point,” Summers said in an interview with Bloomberg.
The U.S. economy averaged 345,000 monthly job additions in the first quarter of 2023 while the unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent in March, indicating a robust economy. However, Summers discounted the report, stating that it only reflected the nature of the economy from the first quarter.
Now, the data is less relevant due to the prospects of a credit tightening, he said.
“We’re getting a sense that there is some substantial amount of constriction in credit.”
After the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March, almost $174.5 billion in deposits left the banking system the following week, according to data from the Federal Reserve. Most of the money went into money market funds. The banking crisis triggered by SVB’s collapse has raised concerns about access to credit.
“More problems in financial institutions or other sectors of the economy will eventually result in lending being unavailable or only accessible at exorbitant rates. And that will constitute a credit crunch,” Peter Earle, an economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told The Epoch Times in March.
A credit crunch is one of the factors economists consider when deciding whether it’s an economic recession.
Business activity is indicating a slowdown, adding to worries of recession. In March, the Institute of Supply Management’s manufacturing activity gauge fell to its lowest level since May 2020. This is also the lowest reading since 2009 once the pandemic is excluded.
Bankruptcy filings have spiked across major industries. In March, 42,368 new bankruptcies were filed, up 17 percent from a year back. It was also the third straight month of bankruptcy increases.
Meanwhile, venture capital funding for start-ups declined by 55 percent in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same period a year ago. This is the lowest level in over five years.
The Conference Board Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States fell for the 11th straight month in February, which is the longest slump since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
“While the rate of month-over-month declines in the LEI have moderated in recent months, the leading economic index still points to risk of recession in the US economy,” said Justyna Zabinska-La Monica, senior manager at The Conference Board, according to a March 17 press release.
Fed Rate Decision
The Federal Reserve had raised its benchmark interest rates multiple times in the past year, pushing it up from around 0.5 percent to a range of 4.75 to 5 percent. However, the current banking crisis poses a challenge to this policy of rate hikes.
“I think the Fed’s got very, very difficult decisions ahead of it—with very much two-sided risk,” Summers said. These two-sided risks are a reflection of the consequences of the American economy overheating, he added.
The former Treasury Secretary pointed out that the Fed’s internal models failed to anticipate the rising inflation which kicked off in 2021 as well as risks emerging in the banking system as a result of SVB’s collapse.
“Business as usual at the Fed has not been successful over the last two and a half years.”
Some Fed officials, like St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, are pushing the central bank to continue the policy of rate hikes. Summers is not sure about the Fed continuing such a policy. “What’s pretty clear is that we’re in the very late innings of the current tightening cycle,” he said.
“Whether there’s going to be another move necessary or not, I think that’s a judgment they should be holding off on until the very last kind of moment,” he said about the Fed policymakers.
The upcoming Fed meeting to decide interest rates is scheduled for May 3.
Ports Of Los Angeles And Long Beach Close Due To Widespread Worker Shortages During Contract Talks
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have closed due to widespread worker shortages apparently linked to ongoing contract talks, ABC7 news reported. Unions representing workers at the two ports are in talks for a new contract.
The ILWU Local 13 withheld workers from their shifts starting Thursday evening, according to the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents shipping employers on the West Coast.
“The action by the Union has effectively shut down the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach – the largest gateway for maritime trade in the United States,” the PMA said. The union, however, released a statement making no mention of any formal work action.
The organization said Thursday several thousand members were in attendance at the organization’s regular monthly meeting, at which a new president was sworn in. It said on Friday many members were observing religious holidays with their families.
“On Friday, April 7, 2023, union members who observe religious holidays took the opportunity to celebrate with their families,” read a statement from ILWU. “Cargo operations are ongoing as longshore workers at the Ports remain on the job.”
Port officials and shippers, however, believe the absences are a deliberate, if unspoken, message from the union to put pressure on the talks. The union has been working without a new contract since July.
The closures come as cargo volumes have already dropped from peak levels a year ago.
Trade experts say some shippers have already started diverting cargo traffic away from the two ports.
“A lot of the cargo has been shifted away from the West Coast ports, into the middle of our country and the East Coast,” said Nick Vyas, executive director of the Kendrick Global Supply Chain Institute at the University of Southern California. “So we have a seen a significant drop in volume at our West Coast ports, which is not a good sign.”
He noted that some 40% of the foreign goods arriving to the United States are processed through the two ports.
The Port of Los Angeles released a statement saying it is continuing to communicate with the ILWU and the PMA to support a return to normal operations.
“Resuming cargo operations at America’s busiest port complex is critical to maintaining confidence to our customers and supply chain stakeholders,” Port of Los Angeles officials said.
Port officials remain optimistic that operations will resume Saturday.
Port of Long Beach Executive Director Mario Cordero released a statement: “Four of the Port’s container terminals are closed for the day, today, April 7. Terminal operators at the affected sites said they made the decision to close when workers did not report for their shifts this morning. We have no further information as to the situation, but it is expected that normal, regularly scheduled hours and operations will resume tomorrow.”
On a video podcast the other day, I made reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics.
Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook.
He needs those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business model.
I complied, but I was spooked.
Are we really now in the position that talking about what happened to us is verboten on mainstream venues?
Sadly, that seems to be where we headed. In big and small ways, and throughout the culture and the whole world, we are bit by bit being trained to forget and hence not learn and thus repeat the whole thing.
This makes no sense since nearly every public issue in play today traces to those fateful days and the fallout thereof, including censorship, the entrenchment of industry-government oligarchs, the corruption of media and tech, the educational upheaval, the abuse of courts and law, and the developing financial and banking crisis.
And yet hardly anyone wants to speak about the topic frankly. It is too upsetting.
There is too much at stake. We cannot risk being canceled, the single greatest fear of every aspirational professional in today’s world. Plus too many powerful people were in on it and don’t want to admit it. It would appear that the whole subject is being memoryholed in ways of which they all approve.
For nearly two years, or longer, respectable intellectuals knew not to dissent from the prevailing norms and challenge the whole machinery. This was true of Washington think tanks, which went on their merry way from March 2020 either celebrating the “public health response” or just remaining quiet. The same was true of the leadership of major political parties and third parties.
Most religious leaders stayed quiet too, even as their doors were padlocked for as long as 2 holiday seasons. Civic organizations played along. If you thought that the job of the ACLU was to defend civil liberties, you were wrong: they one day decided that lockdowns, mandatory masks, and forced shots were essential to their mission.
So many were compromised over 3 years. These same people now just want the whole subject to go away. We find ourselves in an odd position, having experienced the biggest trauma in our lives and in many generations and yet there is precious little open talk about it. Brownstone was established to fill this void but we’ve become a target as a result.
The search engines have been gamed for the better part of 3 years to keep the science channeled in only one direction. If web platforms step out of line, it is easy enough for search engines and social-media companies to tag them as problematic and thus throttle their reach. But for Substackers – and they are being targeted now too – it would be hard to find out anything other than what the oligarchs want you to believe.
This silent treatment is filtering down to every aspect of our lives and becoming entrenched in the political culture too.
Here is an example from this week.
When Donald Trump returned from his theatrical and ridiculous indictment on nothing in New York, he flew immediately back to Mar-a-Lago where he told his story to people gathered in a pastiche-baroque ballroom. He told of the fake news, the attempted impeachments for Russia and Ukraine, the plots and schemes, and onward to the fake ballots and the FBI raid on his home, and now this preposterous new thing.
It was a solid narrative overall. But his story left out a hugely important detail. He said not one word about Covid lockdowns and Operation Warp Speed that was supposed to be the great fix for the virus but flopped. This was a rather important detail to leave out since it wrecked the economy, the Bill of Rights, education, and led to a massive demographic upheaval in addition to the continuing fallout in terms of culture, economics, and everything else.
It also caused him to lose the presidency, whether because the shock resulted in mass demoralization (this was certainly not a path to making America great again) or because of the mail-in ballots made possible by Covid restrictions, or probably both. However you look at it, it was the most disastrous decision of his presidency or possibly any presidency in history.
How in the world are we just supposed to pretend that this did not happen? And yet he is playing along simply because he does not want to admit error. He thinks it makes him appear weak. Nor does he still slam the successor presidency for mask and shot mandates even though hundreds of millions were affected by them. He would rather not bring up the topic at all, lest doing so raises questions about his own judgment in those fateful days of March 2020.
Meanwhile, the DNC does not want to admit that it celebrated and built on Trump’s biggest disaster while the RNC does not want to discuss that the policies they decry from the DNC actually began under the RNC. And so you have a kind of “mutually assured destruction” pact between them that needs no plot or contract. In silencing all talk about this, each party is only doing what is in its interest.
We can fully expect that these issues will be locked out of the campaign narratives in 2024 just as they were in 2020 and 2022. Everyone seems to agree: the less said the better. And this is precisely why the announced candidacy of Robert Kennedy, Jr., has triggered the usual and expected gaslighting from the mainstream media. The plan is to flog him into marginalization. And if that doesn’t work, they will flog and flog again.
We are seeing a real-time example of how history is really written. The narrative is more self-serving than we knew. If all the power centers in society get something tremendously wrong, an informal conspiracy of silence develops around it, with the hope of just wiping it from the history books.
As Michael Senger has written, “Lockdowns met little resistance in part because they reinforced existing power structures. The rich got richer, the Zoom class got a vacation, workers got stimulus, while some business owners, their employees, and the most vulnerable had to sacrifice everything for this fantasy.”
And we can add to that: government gained vastly more power. In fact, Covid became the template for the biggest expansion of government power over the population in world history, more effective than ancient myths about god-like rulers, heresy trials and witch burnings of the Middle Ages, sedition purges of the 18th and 19th centuries, red scares of the 20th centuries, the Cold War, or even the wars on terror. Fear of infectious disease was more effective than all of them for ratcheting up despotism.
When something works this well for the most powerful people in society, why not just keep quiet about it?
The tellers of tales can write stories but they cannot invent their own realities.
There will be no restoration of liberty, rights, and truth until we come to terms with what happened, why, and how to prevent it in the future.
Playing along with this conspiracy of silence surrounding a policy that effectively blotted out every advance in human rights since the Magna Carta is a disastrous error that could lead to the entrenchment of a new dark age.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a Stanford-educated ear, nose, and throat doctor, isn’t afraid to voice her beliefs. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she repeatedly used her platform on Twitter and TikTok to question the vaccines, promote ivermectin as a treatment, and call out pharmacists for refusing to dispense it.
But her efforts resulted in significant backlash. On Nov. 7, 2021, Dr. Danielle Jones, an OBGYN who posts under the handle @MamaDoctorJones on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter—and has millions of followers—put out a video accusing Bowden of “grifting,” rejecting science, and profiting from those who questioned the vaccine.
The video received thousands of comments, including from Team Halo members, Dr. Zachary Rubin, a pediatrician, and Christina Kim, an oncology nurse practitioner. Team Halo is a social media influencer campaign formed as part of the United Nations Verified initiative and the Vaccine Confidence Project to increase vaccine uptake.
“That doc is problematic,” Rubin wrote. Kim followed with, “Wow. That ‘doctor’ should have her license revoked.”
On Nov. 12, 2021, five days after the video, Bowden received a text message from the Houston Chronicle, “Hi Dr. Bowden, I’m told you’ve been suspended from Houston Methodist pending further investigation because of your comments on social media. I plan to report that this afternoon but wanted to give you an opportunity to comment.” Stunned, Bowden responded that the text was the first she had heard of the suspension.
The suspension turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. Over the following months, Bowden’s life was thrown into chaos as multiple social media influencers targeted her. However, the most dogged was a pharmacist named Savannah, who posts under the handle @rxOrcist.
“Savannah has over a million followers. She made a video about me because I have been calling out, online, pharmacists that were refusing to dispense ivermectin,” Bowden told The Epoch Times. “The majority of them happen to be Asian. So, she, therefore, concluded that I was racist against Asians and called me a ‘xenophobic, racist [expletive],’ among other things.
“Because she has so many followers, when she makes a video about you, you get an army of people coming after you. A lot of fake people [writing] reviews. That’s one of the biggest things. You can’t get them removed. I’ve tried to get them removed, and I can prove that they’re not my patients.”
Bowden added that she’d been kicked off of TikTok, is on probation on YouTube, had complaints filed against her, and has even had to call security when someone came to her office and threatened her.
In the video, Savannah showed that she reported Bowden to the Texas Medical Board. The board declined to investigate her specific complaints. Still, they are pursuing two other complaints—one filed by Houston Methodist claiming a violation of patient care and one filed by Texas Health Huguley Hospital for prescribing ivermectin.
In the comments of Savannah’s video, Tyler Kuhk, a nurse and previous Team Halo member according to web archives, and who posts under @thatsassynp, stated, “How these loons still have licenses is beyond me. Why is an ENT even treating COVID?”
Savannah is part of a group called Shots Heard, which calls itself a “rapid-response digital cavalry dedicated to protecting the online safety of health care providers and practices.” Kuhk is also a member. Savannah joined Shots Heard on Aug. 6, 2020, and Kuhk joined on Feb. 13, 2021.
According to its website, Shots Heard is an initiative under The Public Good Projects (PGP), a “public health nonprofit specializing in large-scale media monitoring programs, social and behavior change interventions, and cross-sector initiatives.”
Another of PGP’s initiatives is the Public Health Communications Collaborative (PHCC), which sits within the CDC Foundation—a nonprofit arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) established by Congress.
The goal of the communications collaborative, according to PGP, is to decrease misinformation and increase vaccine demand worldwide. And it’s using social media influencers to silence vaccine detractors.
A Tangled Web
PGP is headquartered in New York and was founded in 2013. Its current CEO is Dr. Joe Smyser, who holds a Ph.D. and master’s in public health and completed his postdoctoral training at the CDC.
The Tennessee Department of Health states about Smyser and PGP, “Dr. Smyser has designed some of the United States’ most influential and impactful health campaigns to date in partnership with the CDC, FDA, Kaiser Permanente, Rockefeller, and Humana.”
According to its website, the CDC Foundation is “the sole entity created by Congress to mobilize philanthropic and private-sector resources to support the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s critical health protection work.”
Since its creation, the CDC Foundation has launched over 1,300 “health protection programs” and raised over $2 billion in support for the CDC.
One of those health protection programs is PGP partner PHCC, which according to its website, was formed in August 2020 to “provide unbiased communication about the COVID-19 pandemic.” And one of the ways PHCC accomplishes that is by putting out “Misinformation Alerts,” which are powered by PGP.
For example, on March 23, PHCC posted on its website that a “well-known anti-vaccine physician” claimed that COVID-19 vaccines caused an increase in miscarriages and stillbirths. It labeled it a “high-risk alert” and recommended, “directly addressing and debunking the misinformation.”
That “debunking,” according to PHCC, includes using a “strong, robust social mobilization” to amplify messages from the World Health Organization and UNICEF, encouraging social media organizations to flag “misinformation,” and promoting “trusted pro-vaccine voices.”
Enter, Shots Heard.
Shots Heard and Team Halo
On its homepage, Shots Heard states, “If you stand up for vaccine science, we’ll stand up for you.” It includes a link for people to apply to “sign up to defend vaccine advocates.” It also provides a link to “Alert the Shots Heard Cavalry,” plus a link to a members-only Facebook group, which currently has 1,176 members.
An insider in the group who requested to remain anonymous for fear of being kicked out supplied The Epoch Times with screenshots and messages of the Shots Heard Facebook group.
In one “alert,” a Shots Heard member named Bernadine Huff posted, “It’s important for all of us to stop the insanity and to call out other healthcare workers that don’t believe in science.” She encouraged Shots Heard members to “report” a graduate nurse named Megan to the Ohio Nursing Board for providing information on how to get a medical exemption for the COVID-19 vaccine. The replies from numerous Shots Heard members simply state, “reported.”
In another “alert,” Shots Heard group administrator Jeff Sykes posts, “Hey Shots Heard, it’s been brought to our attention that Dr. Scott Jensen has been using his online platforms to spread misinformation about COVID-19. … We need your help reporting him.”
Shots Heard member Marcia Fiamengo posted this alert, “Need help reporting this group,” and linked to a group promoting ivermectin. Among the many who replied was New York’s Suffolk County Department of Health account, which wrote, “Reported.”
Fiamengo also posted on Dec. 29, 2021, “Fantastic news,” and attached a screenshot of Dr. Robert Malone’s suspended Twitter account. Shots Heard member Angie Anderson states in the comments, “Ooooh, I just reported a few of his posts yesterday. So satisfying when you see real results.”
On March 24, 2022, Fiamengo encouraged Shots Heard members to report Bowden. Again, Suffolk County Health responded, this time with “Done.” On May 2, 2022, Fiamengo again made a celebratory post. This time for an American Frontline Doctor being stripped of all state licenses after prescribing ivermectin. “Wooooo!!!! Another one bites the dust!” she said.
Shots Heard doesn’t limit itself to reporting single healthcare practitioners. On Sep. 12, 2021, Shots Heard member Liz Ditz “reported” a preprint by researchers Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, Allison Krug, Josh Stevenson, and Dr. John Mandrola, which found vaccine-induced myocarditis might be worse than COVID-induced myocarditis. Shots Heard members were outraged.
Moreover, Shots Heard doesn’t limit itself to simply “reporting.” When Bowden posted on Twitter, “Are Americans supposed to take this [expletive]? We don’t want your shot, and we especially don’t want it for our kids,” her post was flagged and flooded with Shots Heard member comments.
Such tactics are called “gang stalking,” Nicole Sirotek, a registered nurse in Nevada and the founder of American Frontline Nurses, told The Epoch Times. “[Shots Heard members] make videos about [the offending health care worker] saying they need to be delicensed, then [Shots Heard] followers go and hunt down the nurse and swarm the licensing board.”
Sirotek has been the victim of many such attacks from Shots Heard and Team Halo—the two groups share many of the same members.
For example, in December 2022, Team Halo member Jess, who posts under the TikTok handle @jesss2019, doxed Sirotek on TikTok by revealing a previously court-sealed name change. Jess is a “Featured Influencer” for The Health Influencer Council, another PGP project that includes Shots Heard, and This Is Our Shot — a “diverse coalition of health heroes” who engage on social media to combat misinformation and build vaccine trust, according to its website.
An Inside Look
Tyler Hardy, a previous Team Halo member known as “your favorite field epidemiologist” until he ignited a social media firestorm for lying about some of his credentials, told The Epoch Times he’s seen both sides of the social initiates.
“I joined Team Halo at the beginning of 2022, in January. I was invited by nurse Jess [@jesss2019],” Hardy said. “I wanted to educate, and that was why I thought Team Halo would be good because it would give me the exposure to do that.
“As I got behind the scenes of these big creators, right, these people like Dr. Cat and Dr. Jon, Jess, @thatsassynp, I learned that they were, pardon my French, just [expletive]. And they let that stardom of being part of Team Halo get to their head.”
During his time at Team Halo, Hardy said Team Halo members communicated over a private WhatsApp chat. Anytime a Team Halo member disagreed with someone online, “You just put it in the chat, and then every single person in Team Halo would instantly jump on them. Get them fired,” Hardy said.
Meet The “Woke” Rating Score Prompting Brands Like Nike And Bud To Hire Trans Influencers For Ads
We may finally have an answer to why Budweiser knowingly decided to torch its brand and its customer base by entrusting its marketing and ad strategy to a man in a women’s clothing drinking beer in a bubble bath. Like everyone else, it appears it’s simply to try and appease the “woke” lobby, likely in hopes of preventing them from “turning” on their brand for not being diverse enough.
Now, during the slow ongoing death of ESG – there’s apparently yet another scorecard that companies are striving to abide by in order to make sure they are adhering to society’s expectations as it relates to virtue signaling.
It’s called the Corporate Equality Index — or CEI — score, according to a new report from the NY Post. And it’s the reason that companies like Nike and Anheuser-Busch are committing brand suicide hiring people like trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
As the Post notes, the score is monitored by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ political lobbying group in the world. So, in other words, keep your score high or expect this at the front door of your corporate headquarters…
And of course, the HRC has “received millions from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation”, the report notes. It can award or subtract points for companies based on its rating criteria, which includes “Workforce Protections,” “Inclusive Benefits,” “Supporting an Inclusive Culture,” “Corporate Social Responsibility and Responsible Citizenship.”
The goal is to ascertain the top score of 100 points and earn the coveted (pause for laughter) title of “Best Place To Work For LGBTQ Equality.” 15 of 20 Fortune top ranked companies got 100% ratings last year, the report notes. More than 840 companies total had high CEI scores.
The scores are, of course, based on meeting the “demands” of the HRC, the Post wrote:
A company can lose CEI points if it doesn’t fulfill HRC’s demand for “integration of intersectionality in professional development, skills-based or other training” or if it doesn’t use a “supplier diversity program with demonstrated effort to include certified LGBTQ+ suppliers.”
James Lindsay, a political podcaster who runs a site called New Discourses, told The Post that the Human Rights campaign administers the CEI ranking “like an extortion racket, like the Mafia.
Presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy commented: “The big fund managers like BlackRock all embrace this ESG orthodoxy in how they apply pressure to top corporate management teams and boards and they determine, in many cases, executive compensation and bonuses and who gets re-elected or re-appointed to boards.”
He concluded: “They can make it very difficult for you if you don’t abide by their agendas.”
President Joe Biden on Friday invited the three Tennessee Democrats who faced expulsion for protesting on the state House floor to visit the White House.
After several hours of debate on Thursday, two of three state Democrats were expelled from the Tennessee General Assembly by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
The lawmakers were accused of participating in “disorderly behavior” that brought “disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives,” according to a resolution introduced by Tennessee Republicans.
State Representatives Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis were expelled. Gloria Johnson of Knox County was the sole member to participate in the protest to escape expulsion after eight Republicans crossed the floor to save her.
During a video conference call from Camp David on Friday, Biden thanked the lawmakers for their act of protest. The president also expressed disappointment over their expulsion from the Tennessee Assembly.
“Earlier, I spoke to Reps Jones, Pearson, and Johnson to thank them for their leadership and courage in the face of a blatant disregard of our nation’s democratic values,” Biden wrote on Twitter. “Our country needs to take action on gun violence—to do that we need more voices like theirs speaking out.”
The White House said in a statement that the trio of Democrats thanked the president for his “leadership in seeking to ban assault weapons and standing up for our democratic values” and for his support as they faced “unprecedented attacks” over their actions.
No official date was given for the White House visit.
The two expelled Democrats can be appointed to their seats by officials in their respective counties. Both members represent Democrat strongholds in Nashville and Memphis. They cannot be expelled again for the same offenses, members said during debate Thursday.
Gun Restriction Protest
In a further statement released by the White House, Biden claimed most Americans want tighter gun control.
“Today’s expulsion of lawmakers who engaged in peaceful protest is shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent,” Biden said in the statement. “Rather than debating the merits of the issue, these Republican lawmakers have chosen to punish, silence, and expel duly-elected representatives of the people of Tennessee.”
Biden also took to Twitter to express his support for the lawmakers.
“Our country needs to take action on gun violence—to do that we need more voices like theirs speaking out,” Biden wrote. He further condemned the expulsion of the lawmakers as “shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent.”
Only two other Tennessee state lawmakers have been similarly expelled since the Civil War. However, those votes were largely bipartisan, while the vote on Thursday was mostly along party lines.
Jones, Pearson, and Johnson had been officially censured for their protest and stripped of their committee appointments on April 3. This came after hundreds of chanting demonstrators crowded the state Capitol and its gallery on March 30.
The protesters called for tighter restrictions on gun rights in the wake of The Covenant School shooting in Nashville, where Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, who police said identified as transgender, opened fire at the school, shooting dead three 9-year-old children and three adults.
The three Democrats defied convention by moving to the front of the House chamber with a bullhorn, where they cheered on the crowd in the gallery and led chants, marking a breach of chamber rules as they hadn’t been recognized to speak.
In his statement, Biden urged Congress to ban “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines, require safe storage of firearms, eliminate gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability, and require background checks for all gun sales. He also called on state officials to do the same.
The president argued that most Americans want lawmakers to enact more restrictions on gun rights and accused Republican officials across America of doubling down on bills that he said make schools, places of worship, and communities less safe.
Led By “Fat Activists”, New York Considering Bill To Ban Weight Discrimination
As if being overweight wasn’t already enough of a virtue in the United States nowadays, New York will soon be looking to approve a bill that would ban “weight discrimination in hiring and housing”.
Victoria Abraham, referred to multiple times as a “fat activist” by the New York Times, who reported the story, says her cause isn’t to lose weight – but rather to make sure people don’t get the wrong perception about fat people.
A proponent for the legislation, she told the Times: “There is a perception that you’re lazy or unable to do the work. People don’t even realize that they have that bias.”
She said she proudly displays her body on her LinkedIn profile, so “prospective employers know whom they are considering hiring.”
The bill will add weight to the list of protected groups, which also includes race, gender, religion and disability, the report notes, stating that obesity rates are up over the last 2 decades and accelerated during lockdowns, when people were forced to stay home. More than 40% of Americans are obese, the Times writes.
We have to ask, though: if that number breaches 50%, can’t obese people no longer be considered a minority? We digress.
Abraham testified on behalf of the bill, which could be approved as soon as May. “We should never treat people differently because of their weight,” Mayor Eric Adams, who famously lost 35 pounds on a plant based diet (and wrote a book about it), said about the bill.
“Even when I was heavier, I was still a good-looking guy,” the Mayor joked last week.
While the nation continues its incessant and never-ending fight against all types of discrimination – gender, race, sex, etc. – weight has now been added to the discussion. Michigan and Washington State already have similar bills enacted and New Jersey and Massachusetts are considering it.
The councilman sponsoring the bill, Shaun Abreu, said he gained 40 pounds during the pandemic and “noticed a change in how people treated him”.
“What you look like should not impact your ability to get a job. We should embrace body positivity and inclusion. It’s so important for people to feel comfortable,” he told the Times.
Not everyone is sold on the idea, however. Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, said: “This is another mandate where enforcement will be primarily through litigation, which imposes a burden on employers, regulators and the courts.”
Joseph Borelli, the City Council’s minority leader and a Republican who has documented his weight loss online, said it would “empower people to sue anyone and everything.”
He concluded: “I’m overweight, but I’m not a victim. No one should feel bad for me except for my struggling shirt buttons.”
