At its core, when stripped away of all rhetoric and technicalities, the Fed’s QE is just one big bond-buying operation by the so-called Lender (and Buyer) of Last Resort, an operation meant to stabilize the market and restore order and price transparency even if it means creating an artificial market (as the Fed found out the hard way 12 years of QE will do). And if one goes by that simple definition, last night China – which has so far been against replicating the Fed’s repertoire of market intervention amid concerns it would exacerbate the country’s giant debt bubble – quietly  launched QE.

According to Bloomberg, Chinese regulators asked the nation’s biggest insurers to buy bonds being offloaded as retail customers pull their cash from fixed-income investments. At a meeting on Wednesday, Chinese regulators told top insurers to backstop the market and buy bonds sold by wealth management units at banks to prevent further volatility. Some banks also proposed to use their proprietary trading desks to scoop up bonds, one source said.

Of course, in China where virtually every major financial enterprise is a SOE – i.e., state -wned – there is no such thing as “big independent insurers”: they are all essentially government entities, and just one-step removed from official state apparatus to preserve some semblance of a private market (with state characteristics). But at the end of the day, what the regulators just greenlighted is nothing shy of QE, and what’s more, unlike the US where at least there is some pretense of an asset swap as banks exchange bonds for reserves, in China the flow of funds is much simpler: someone, anyone, buys bonds to calm down the market. And since this is a step that is usually taken as a last-ditch resort, one can confidently say that we may have very well seen the bottom in Chinese assets.

The guidance, handed down at a meeting that was also attended by big (state-owned) banks and lenders, comes as Chinese traders and retail investors have been ditching fixed-income assets and pouring money into stocks on growing economic optimism as China rolls back its strict Covid Zero approach. The turmoil last month, which saw large withdrawals from bond-backed wealth management products, earlier also prompted regulators to ask banks to report on their liquidity situation.

According to the report, some insurance firms, whose investment products are less vulnerable to short-term redemptions, have already heeded the call and “purchased bonds on a positive market outlook” even before the latest guidance. The biggest insurance firms include China Life Insurance Co. and Ping An Insurance Group of China. The asset management arms of just those two manage a combined 8.74 trillion yuan ($1.3 trillion), according to their websites. Both are, of course, majority state-owned, and thus all that is taking place, is China’s state now actively buying up bonds to stabilize the market.

Some more background: in an effort to increase transparency of risks and instill more discipline in China’s 29 trillion yuan wealth management market (yes, don’t laugh), authorities had embarked on a multi-year reform to have banks ditch a fixed-return model and move to mark-to-market pricing. However, this spooked investors who for years have been used to steady, guaranteed returns, causing large outflows and forced selling by money managers.

As a result, China’s benchmark bond yields surged the most in six years on Nov. 14 as signs China is loosening its Covid Zero policies caused a rapid shift into stocks. Yields continued to climb since, before easing a bit on Wednesday as news of the unofficial QE spread. China’s one-year government bond yield has risen to near the highest this year at 2.25%, after a spike of more than 50 basis points since November.

And, lo and behold, as always happens central bank/state buying of bonds commences, the market immediately stabilized and Chinese bond futures surged on Thursday, posting their biggest gain in two weeks.  Futures contracts on the 10-year note rose as much as 0.4% to 99.855, the most since Nov. 23. Yields on 10-year and one-year notes both declined after having blown out in the past month alongside repo yields.

Meanwhile, daily redemptions on largely bond-backed wealth management products could have peaked at as much as 200 billion yuan, according to an estimate from Everbright Securities.

In other words, those insurance giants will be busy. Or may not: after all, the mere hint that the state will buy bonds if they drop enough should be sufficient to prevent further selling: we saw just that in March 2020, and we saw it all again in September, when the BOE scrambled to restart QE following the liability-driven investment crash when all fixed income assets were dumped after the mini-budget fiasco.

And if that’s not enough, Beijing slapped even more measures to preserve market stability: Banks and asset managers have also moved to limit redemptions. Bank of China, one of the four big state banks, has set a daily quota on what customers can redeem at 10,000 yuan starting mid-December. Suyin Wealth Management and Bank of Guiyang have also capped real-time redemption on some products at 10,000 yuan per day, according to their latest mandates.

More than 95% of outstanding wealth management products sold by banks and asset managers are marked to market, according to official data as of the end of June. Bonds account for about 68% of the total underlying assets.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

The signs are already present and obvious, but the overall economic picture probably won’t be acknowledged in the mainstream until the situation becomes much worse (as if it’s not bad enough). It’s a problem that arises at the onset of every historic financial crisis – Mainstream economists and commentators lie to the public about the chances of recovery, constantly giving false reassurances and lulling people back to sleep. Even now with price inflation pummeling the average consumer they tell us that there is nothing to worry about. The Federal Reserve’s “soft landing” is on the way.

I remember in 2007 right before the epic derivatives collapse when media pundits were applauding the US housing market and predicting even greater highs in sales and in valuations. I had only been writing economic analysis for about a year, but I remember thinking that the overt display of optimism felt like compensation for something. It seemed as if they were trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public in the hopes that if people just believed hard enough that all was well then the fantasy could be manifested into reality. Unfortunately, that’s not how economics works.

Supply and demand, debt and deficit, money velocity and inflation; these things cannot be ignored. If the system is out of balance, collapse will set its ugly foot down somewhere and there’s nothing anyone including central banks can do about it. In fact, there are times when they deliberately ENGINEER collapse.

This is the situation we are currently in today as 2022 comes to a close. The Fed is in the midst of a rather aggressive rate hike program in a “fight” against the stagflationary crisis that they created through years of fiat stimulus measures. The problem is that the higher interest rates are not bringing prices down, nor are they really slowing stock market speculation. Easy money has been too entrenched for far too long, which means a hard landing is the most likely scenario.

In the early 2000s the Fed had been engaged in artificially low interest rates which inflated the housing and derivatives bubble. In 2004, they shifted into a tightening process. Rates in 2004 were at 1% and by 2006 they rose to over 5%. This is when cracks began to appear in the credit structure, with 4.5% – 5.5% being the magic cutoff point before debt became too expensive for the system to continue the charade. By 2007/2008 the nation witnessed an exponential implosion of credit, setting off the biggest money printing bonanza in US history in order to save the banking sector, at least for a time.

Since nothing was actually fixed by the Fed back then, I will continue to use the 5% funds rate as a marker for when we will see another major contraction. The difference this time is that the central bank does not have the option to flood the economy with more fiat, at least not without immediately triggering a larger stagflationary spiral. I am also operating on the premise that the Fed WANTS a crash at this time.

As I noted in my article ‘The Fed Is Taking The Punch Bowl Away – But The Inflation Crisis Will Continue To Grow’, published in May:

“Mainstream financial commentators want to believe the Fed will capitulate because they desperately want the party in stock markets to continue, but the party is over. Sure, there will be moments when the markets rally based on nothing more than a word or two from a Fed official planting false hopes, but this will become rare. Ultimately, the Fed has taken away the punch bowl and it’s not coming back. They have the perfect excuse to kill the economy and kill markets in the form of a stagflationary disaster THEY CAUSED. Why would they reverse course now?”

My position is that the central bank has a global agenda that eclipses any national loyalty, and that it requires the decline of the American economy in order to expedite the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) linked together through the IMF. So far they are getting exactly what they want and they are perfectly aware of what they are doing.

The Fed is expected to slow rate hikes to 50bps in December, but this is not assured with the jobs market still running hot from $8 trillion in covid stimulus the past two years (mostly lower paying retail and service sector jobs). By the February meeting of 2023 the Fed will be at or very near 5% interest rates, which I believe will help trigger a considerable plunge in markets and mass layoffs.

There are other factors to consider, though. One lesser known issue is the new 1% excise tax on stock buybacks planted within Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The measure, which goes into effect in January of next year, will not reduce prices on goods. That said, stock buybacks are still the primary means by which equities are kept afloat by major corporations. Over the past decade, buybacks have been funded by money borrowed from the Fed at near zero interest – essentially free money. Now, the easy money party is about to end.

The 1% excise tax added on top of a 5% Fed funds rate creates a 6% millstone on any money borrowed to finance future buybacks. This cost is going to be far too high and buybacks will falter. Meaning, stock markets will also stop, and drop. It will likely take two or three months before the tax and the rate hikes create a visible effect on markets. This would put our time frame for contraction around March or April of 2023.

Inflation is not going anywhere anytime soon, however. The underlying problem of energy prices needs to be considered as they contribute to further supply chain stress.

Think about this for a moment: The current reduction in oil prices and energy is artificial and government driven, not supply and demand driven. Oil prices in the US are being kept down by Joe Biden’s constant supply dumps from the strategic reserves. Eventually Biden is going to run out of oil to drop on markets and he will have to replenish those reserves at a much higher cost.

Furthermore, oil and energy prices are being kept down because of China’s suspiciously bizarre Zero Covid policy, which is slowing their economy to a crawl and reducing oil usage to a minimum. With public riots escalating, the CCP will probably seek to ease conditions as a means to placate dissent, playing a game of release the steam valve. A reopening by early next year is on the way, with a number of controls still in place of course.

As soon as China reopens, oil prices will skyrocket once again on the global market.

Then, there is the war in Ukraine and the ongoing sanctions against Russia. Europe is about to face the worst winter in decades with natural gas supplies severely limited and the cost of power for manufacturing no longer tenable. Their only hope is for mild temperatures for the rest of the season. If the current trend continues, production in Europe will be throttled, causing chaos in the global supply chain.

High energy prices and supply chain disruptions will mean ongoing inflated prices in goods and services well into 2023, even with a contraction in jobs markets and stock markets. I will be publishing an article soon with a working theory on how the US could actually stop inflation without crushing the rest of the economy. The model would require cooperation from leaders at the state level, though, along with a number of business interests that focus on necessities. In the meantime, I suggest readers stock provisions whenever possible and organize within their local communities before next April.

*  *  *

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After just within the past week China’s government dramatically pivoted from its ultra-harsh ‘zero Covid’ policy – a policy which had triggered unprecedented widespread protests against communist authorities and health officials as in some instances they barricaded whole neighborhoods into strictly controlled quarantine zones – toward what appears a full embrace of a more lax ‘Swedish model’ type approach, national health authorities are prepping the population for the coming Covid wave, which could impact an estimated 80 to 90% of the Chinese population, according to a fresh projection by Feng Zijian, a former deputy chief at China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

“It’s going to be inevitable for most of us to get infected once, regardless of how the Covid-fighting measures are adjusted,” Feng said Tuesday during a virtual conference discussing the zero Covid offramp at Tsinghua University in Beijing. As a senior health official, Feng is part of the central government’s task force in implementing new policies which has moved away from the ‘one size fits all’ mentality that guided Beijing’s health response since the pandemic began.

“Some 60% of Chinese people may be infected in the first wave, before the curve flattens, Feng predicted,” as cited in Bloomberg. “By comparison, about 58% of the US population had been infected by February this year, according to a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis released in April. That was up from 33.5% in December.”

So it seems two years too late, China is learning the lessons of a number of countries that embraced a more flexible stance based on understanding herd immunity early, also centered on protecting the most vulnerable demographic, the elderly and the infirm, while not shuttering the economy wholesale.

Further, as of Thursday morning in China (local time), health authorities are reporting “more than 20,000 new cases a day at the moment, as outbreaks flare from Beijing to the southern manufacturing hub of Guangzhou. That’s up from less than 100 a day in June, and zero for long periods of 2020.”

But China says it’s ready amid its more localized approach which will seek to prep hospitals, civic authorities, and the citizenry on “proper protective measures” – such as greater deployment of at home rapid antigen test kits. “It is better to direct the flood than block it,” Lu Jiahai, a senior expert at the state drug regulator National Medical Products Administration (NMPA), said.

As for this approach looking more like a Swedish model policy (though don’t expect anyone in Beijing to call it that), Caixin Global recently captured the following quotes which illustrate an astounding about-face in thinking on the pandemic among Chinese officials: 

Although there are challenges in the implementation of home quarantine, the infection risks should not be exaggerated, said University of Hong Kong’s Jin.

“Scientific guidelines should be provided for everyone to follow with a clear accountability mechanism, as there have been many examples that even couples in the same room didn’t infect each other,” said Jin, citing the experience in Hong Kong, where home isolation has been widely adopted after the worst outbreaks hit in the spring.

One resident in Beijing agreed. “I think it is more important to eliminate the irrational fear of being infected, and at the same time learn how to reduce the risk of cross-infection,” Ma Qiao, who has studied preventative medicine, told Caixin.

Some of the new measures from the communist government call for isolating asymptomatic or mild Covid cases at home rather than in quarantine camps or hospitals for seven days. Anyone in contact with the infected would have to quarantine at home for five days instead of eight days at a camp and then at home.

The State Council further disbanded the rule for people to show negative Covid tests before entering public places. As the SCMP summarized of the new approach this week: “The new policy stressed that basic social and medical services need to be provided. People’s movements, work and production should not be restricted in low-risk areas.” 

Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Federal officials forgave $809 million in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans handed out during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to more than 100 of the nation’s top law firms and another $635 million given to hundreds of elite accounting offices, according to a new analysis of government spending to be made public on Dec. 2.

As described by the Department of Treasury, the PPP was established in 2020 to provide “small businesses with the resources they need to maintain their payroll, hire back employees who may have been laid off, and cover applicable overhead.”

The program was administered by the federal Small Business Administration, which made $787 billion in federal loans to companies and firms spanning all industries. The vast majority of the “loans” were subsequently turned into grants, which didn’t require repayment.

An investigation by Open the Books found that hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars went to top law and accounting firms even though most of them didn’t qualify as small businesses and didn’t have to lay off employees.

Open the Books is a nonprofit watchdog that uses public information laws such as the federal Freedom of Information Act to make government spending public, including “every dime online, in real time.”

The Epoch Times obtained an advance copy of the investigative report.

Auditors “found an astonishing $1.4 billion in forgiven PPP loans that flowed to the largest and most successful law and accounting firms across America,” the report stated.

“Today, it is an open question whether many of the firms needed a taxpayer subsidy to ‘save’ any jobs during the Covid-pandemic. Many racked up record revenues while their equity partners made millions of dollars.

“For example, in the years 2020 and 2021, we found equity partners individually received $7 million in profits while their law firms received $10 million in forgiven PPP ‘loans.’ The Guam office of Ernst & Young, a Big Three accounting firm with 365,000 employees, took a $750,000 forgiven loan.

“In 2020, millions of mom and pop businesses on Main Street had to shut down during the forced economic lockdown [occasioned by the pandemic]. So, Congress created the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) to compensate those businesses for their economic losses.

“Firms with 500 employees or fewer met eligibility requirements. However, Congress didn’t anticipate that Biglaw and the largest accounting firms would cash in so profitably.”

Among the biggest winners was Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, the New York City-based law firm of Democratic superlawyer David Boies, which received a forgiven $10.14 million PPP loan.

Boies first came into national prominence in 2000, when he headed Vice President Al Gore’s legal team during the Florida presidential election recount. The election wasn’t decided until the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, which put Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the Oval Office.

Boies also gained national notoriety by representing the Department of Justice in its successful prosecution of Microsoft, and he headed a legal team that challenged California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages. The proposition was approved in 2008 by voters, but the Supreme Court effectively nullified it in a 2013 decision.

His firm’s PPP debt was forgiven in October 2021 under the Biden administration, even though during the period covered by the loan “the firm’s equity partners earned $4.5 million each in profit compensation—receiving $2.219 million (2021) and $2.283 million (2020). The firm billed clients $480 million during this two-year period,” Open the Books found.

The second-biggest law firm beneficiary of PPP loans was the Birmingham, Alabama-based Maynard Cooper & Gale, which received $10.13 million under the pandemic relief program. Even so, the firm’s workforce increased from 247 in 2019 before the pandemic, to 260 in 2020 during the pandemic, and 283 in 2021.

No. 3 among the white-shoe law firms getting tax dollars via the PPP program was the New York-based Kasowitz Benson Torres. The firm’s “revenues grew from $216.8 million (2019), to $219.4 million (2020) and then $238.4 million (2021). In April 2020, the firm received a $10.13 million PPP loan that was forgiven in July 2021—while profit per equity partner averaged $2.418 million (2021),” according to Open the Books.

Among the big accounting firms getting tax dollars, Prager Metis CPAs in New York City received $10.2 million, which was forgiven in June. Revenues for 2021 reached $139 million, an increase from 2020’s total of $123.9 million.

Withum’s of Princeton, New Jersey, was next, getting a PPP loan worth $10.1 million that was forgiven in June 2021. Withum’s revenues were $425.3 million in 2021, up significantly from its 2020 total of $257 million, according to Open the Books.

As Nancy Pelosi and other aged House Democrats seem to be backing away from the political stage, a new crop of Dems are trying to make their mark by one-upping the ideological insanity of their predecessors. 

Incoming House Democrat Whip Katherine Clark claims in a recent interview with NBC that she is politically inspired because she remembers her middle child “waking up with nightmares” about climate change, and her family going to movie theaters with the expectation and fear that a mass shooter would appear.

One’s immediate reaction to these claims, if one has common sense, is to laugh. 

Children don’t have nightmares about climate change or worry about mass shooters unless their parents or other adults have conditioned them to obsess over such things. 

Climate change is a non-issue, with the Earth’s overall temperature increasing by less than 1°C in the past 100 years.

While mass shootings are highly publicized by the media (unless they end up involving an ethnic minority or a member of the LGBT community and then the story disappears), such events make up only 0.4% to 0.8% of all gun related deaths in the US according to RAND Corporation.

This kind of commentary is built on agenda and exaggeration, to be sure, but it tells us a lot about the Democrats in that their political and social policies are rooted in a foundation of irrational fear.  Everything they do is motivated by a need to quell these fears in themselves or to inspire those same fears in the public (and our children) in order to gain more power. 

Clark goes on to suggest that the GOP is going to “take down the economy” by opposing budget initiatives.  She does not explain why a constantly growing federal budget should have anything to do with the overall economy, likely because she does not understand the basics of the issue.  Massive government spending (and Federal Reserve money printing) is in fact a key trigger for the ongoing inflationary crisis. 

The national debt doubled in the eight years Barack Obama was in the White House, with the central bank creating tens of trillions in fiat to artificially prop up “too big to fail” banks.  Inflation in the US today is a direct result of this historic spending blitz, along with the $8 trillion in covid money injected into the system over the past two years.  The Democrat solution to the problem is even more spending.

Another interesting new narrative is also touched on in terms of the DNC being tied up with the FTX scandal, including over $40 million donated to the party in preparation for the 2022 mid-term elections.  The latest argument from Democrats is a direct parallel to the argument used by central banks and globalist institutions, which is that the fall of FTX should be used as a springboard for government regulation of the crypto space (leading to CBDCs).  Clark ignores the fact that money stolen by FTX flooded into Democrat campaign coffers and distracts from the bigger question.

The outgoing Dem House is seeking to pass as many bills as possible before they exit in January, with even more funding for Ukraine and the passage of the NDAA at the top of their list.  The NDAA in particular is about to become a central House issue with Republicans saying they will not provide more military funding until the Pentagon abandons their covid vaccine mandates for soldiers.  The Dems will be a House minority after a number of losses in the mid-terms, making Clark and her cohorts a political footnote for at least the next two years.      

After nearly a week’s delay on the second installment of “THE TWITTER FILES” – Twitter’s internal correspondence surrounding their decision to censor the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story – Journalist Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) has begun releasing more information via Twitter.

The second installment – which was released days after Musk fired former deputy General Counsel James Baker for ‘filtering’ the first release, is titled: “Twitter’s Secret Blacklists“

1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022

2. Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.

3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.

 

4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”

5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.”

 

7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.

 

8. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.

 

9. “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.

 

10. All without users’ knowledge.

 

11. “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.

 

12. The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 “cases” a day.

 

13. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper. That is the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” known as “SIP-PES.”

 

14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.

 

15. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. “Think high follower account, controversial,” another Twitter employee told us. For these “there would be no ticket or anything.”

 

16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was

@libsoftiktok

—an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”

17. The account—which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers—was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.

18. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct.”

19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.” See here:

20. The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of “hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.”

21. Compare this to what happened when Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022. A photo of her home with her address was posted in a tweet that has garnered more than 10,000 likes.

22. When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: “We reviewed the reported content, and didn’t find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules.” No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.

23. In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects. Here’s Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then Global Head of Trust & Safety, in a direct message to a colleague in early 2021:

24. Six days later, in a direct message with an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team, Roth requested more research to support expanding “non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering.”

25. Roth wrote: “The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.”

26. He added: “We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations – especially for other policy domains.”

27. There is more to come on this story, which was reported by @abigailshrier @shellenbergermd  @nelliebowles @isaacgrafstein and the team The Free Press @thefp. Keep up with this unfolding story here and at our brand new website: http://thefp.com.

 

/Fin

And some replies:

Gotta love seeing a “direct messages” tab on this screenshot where I’m assuming any staffer could read your DM’s 🤣🤣

— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) December 9, 2022

I’ll just leave this here @jack @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/49dnI1Ik9h

— TONY™️ (@T0NY_X2) December 9, 2022

Authored by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Texas federal judge has ordered Southwest Airlines to reinstate Charlene Carter, the flight attendant who made headlines after a jury ruled that she was unlawfully fired for expressing pro-life views and for criticizing her union.

In a decision filed on Dec. 5, five months after a jury decided in Carter’s favor, Judge Brantley Starr remarked, “Bags fly free with Southwest. But free speech didn’t fly at all with Southwest in this case.”

Starr granted Carter $300,000 in compensatory and punitive damages from Southwest; $300,000 in compensatory and punitive damages from the flight attendants’ union, Transport Workers Union of America Local 556; $150,000 in back pay, and $60,180.82 in prejudgment interest.

Although the jury voted that Carter deserved more than $5 million, laws and rules limit the amount that can be awarded in such cases.

Is this the hill that leftists have chosen to die on?

Progressives and SJWs claim that there is no LGBT grooming agenda aimed at underage children, but all the evidence suggests otherwise. 

Project Veritas has released another discomforting hidden camera interview that essentially dashes any arguments that leftists have in defense of LGBT propaganda in schools, with blatant sexualization of kids being used in Chicago.

Joseph Bruno, Dean of Students at the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, is caught on camera bragging about inviting representatives from a local LGBT Health Center to the school to talk to students ages 14-18 during pride month. 

He admits that the students were given sex toys to “play with” while teaching the kids about “queer sex”.  Bruno appears excessively excited while talking about the event, and suggests that it’s a “cool part of his job” ostensibly because he doesn’t have to worry about oversight.

The school also engages in drag queen story hour events for very young children. 

While the Parker School is a private school, the Dean hints that parents are not specifically notified of these LGBT sex education events and neither are the trustees.

While drag queen events have been caught on numerous occasions crossing the line of what is legal in terms of child exposure and sexualization, the classes described by Bruno enter a whole other realm of grooming. 

Is it really “bigoted” or “extreme” to argue that this is unacceptable behavior to expose children to in schools?  Can’t we all agree to “leave those kids alone” until they are competent adults?  

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Loudoun County School Board members voted to fire embattled superintendent Scott Ziegler after a special grand jury report said he lied about a rape committed by a transgender student.

The board voted unanimously on Dec. 6 to fire Ziegler without cause, the Virginia school district’s spokesman, Wayde Byard, told The Epoch Times.

The move came after a special grand jury in Loudoun County released a 91-page report on Dec. 5 condemning Ziegler and other school officials for displaying a “stunning lack of openness” about the incidents.

The grand jury, made up of randomly selected Loudoun County residents, said Ziegler lied when he said there were no records of assault occurring in school bathrooms.

ABC7News reported on Dec. 7 that Ziegler will receive 12 months of severance pay per his contract. Byard did not confirm to The Epoch Times whether a severance package had been promised.

The Virginia school district made national headlines last year after a father accused the district at a board meeting of covering up his 15-year-old daughter’s rape by a skirt-wearing biological boy.

While he was speaking, the man was tackled by police, knocked to the ground, dragged out, and charged with disorderly conduct.

After the incident, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin asked the state’s attorney general, Jason Miyares, to conduct a full investigation into the school district following accusations a transgender student sexually assaulted two different girls.

The 15-year-old victim’s family and officials said a “gender-fluid” boy sexually assaulted her on May 28, 2021 at Stone Bridge High School in the girls’ restroom.

Five months later, the same transgender student was accused of assaulting a second female student on Oct. 6, 2021, at Broad Run High School, after the district transferred him there.

In that incident, the transgender student was accused of forcing a female student into an empty classroom, holding her against her will, and touching her inappropriately.

In October of 2021, a Virginia judge found the transgender student guilty of sexual assault charges involving the 15-year-old.

The following month, the transgender student pleaded no contest to sexual battery in the second incident. He was sentenced to probation at a residential treatment facility until his 18th birthday in June 2024.

As part of the sentence, he was ordered to register as a sex offender, but a judge reversed that decision.

In their report, the special grand jury said Ziegler denied the first sexual assault during a school board meeting in June 2021.

At the meeting, according to the report, a board member asked Ziegler, “Do we have assaults in our bathrooms or in our locker rooms, regularly? I would hope not but I’d like clarification.”

The superintendent responded that there were no records of assault occurring in the school bathrooms, the report said.

Another witness testified the superintendent’s statement was a “bald-faced lie.” In response to that testimony, the grand jury wrote in the report, “We agree.”

The report also noted that Stone Bridge High School principal Tim Flynn failed to mention the first sexual assault in an email to the school community on the day it happened. Ziegler signed off on the email, the report indicated.

Ziegler said at the time he misunderstood the question from the board member.

He said that he had interpreted the question to be about whether the school had records of assaults happening in restrooms involving transgender and gender-fluid students, according to the report.

The report said there were several “decision points” for senior school administrators—up to and including the superintendent—to be “transparent” and step in and alter the sequence of events leading up to the second sexual assault on Oct. 6.

“They failed at every juncture,” the report said.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Monday announced that the Florida Disaster Fund has raised $59.2 million for Hurricane Ian emergency relief, after claiming that the Biden administration denied funding assistance.

$25 million came from the state of Florida, while donors provided $35.2 million, DeSantis’ office said in a press release. The state funds will be used to acquire building materials, while donations will enable “verified nonprofit organizations to conduct critical temporary repairs on homes damaged by Hurricane Ian,” according to the press release, and reported by the Daily Caller.

With the support of First Lady @CaseyDeSantis, the Florida Disaster Fund has raised more than $59 million, and her announcement of $10.2 million for 17 non-profits to help meet the needs of Floridians with building supplies, food, and shelter will continue to help those in need. https://t.co/9GXy79kWvN

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) December 6, 2022

The disaster funding will also address “unmet needs such as transportation, food assistance, housing aid, clothing, and household goods,” according to the release.

“We are providing building materials and supporting nonprofit organizations to provide repairs so impacted residents can move back into their own homes,” said DeSantis, adding “Floridians are resilient, and the state stands by them every step of the way as they continue their recovery.

Biden admin denied?

On Monday, DeSantis said that Florida was denied $25 million in emergency funds by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

(Perhaps Florida should change its name to Ukraine?)

Following the FEMA denial, DeSantis said “we’re not going to take no for an answer,” adding “we want to cut bureaucracy.”

“We’re not just gonna sit there and take no for an answer […] We’re gonna figure out what we can do […] We wanna cut through bureaucracy.” pic.twitter.com/NmgwV9RGnc

— Florida’s Voice (@FLVoiceNews) December 5, 2022

According to the Caller:

FEMA denied the request because of its “limited authority” and “our inability to confirm that authorizing this policy expansion would achieve the intended outcomes for disaster survivors,” the agency said in a letter to Kevin Guthrie, Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. 

The agency has provided $3.3 billion in federal support to Florida and households for Hurricane Ian relief, according to a Monday press release.

FEMA and the White House both did not immediately respond to requests for comment by the Daily Caller. Gov. DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment as well.

The Florida Disaster Fund – spearheaded by First Lady Casey DeSantis is the state’s private fund, which was established to provide financial assistance to communities throughout the state during emergencies.