The Damage Done by Democrat Elites to Fly-Over States and Cities

Chris Hedges:

I rage against this demonization of the working class because it’s a very dangerous cop-out. The Democrats had this term to essentially enact the kind of New Deal reforms that might’ve been able to save what’s left of our very anemic democracy. And they didn’t. And why didn’t they? Because figures like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer would not have political power but for their corporate backers. I mean, nobody wants Biden. Nobody wanted Biden in the primaries. It took the Democratic establishment to force everyone else out. The guy’s not even sentient. But they don’t want to lose their positions of privilege and power, and they’re really willing to take the country down because if they pushed for these kinds of reforms, then Goldman Sachs and Raytheon - and let’s not forget the Israeli lobby - wouldn’t fund them. They are creatures of this system, so that’s the problem. They will blame people who don’t rush out and vote for them. The liberal East Coast establishment, the college educated, the quote-unquote “knowledge industry,” they have no contact with these people at all. And that isn’t to excuse some of their opinions. . .

Reagan started it, but Clinton was the Democratic impetus for this, where they talked in that “I feel your pain” language of liberalism but thrust a knife in the back of the working class. So are there irredeemable racists and bigots? Of course there are. But to write off the entire working class like that and essentially blame them for their own, I think, very legitimate rage has been a way for the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment to wash their hands of culpability.

. . . They packed the equipment up and shipped it to Monterey, Mexico. And the plants, they’re just empty lots now, but they’re massive and they’re surrounded by cyclone fencing, weed-choked lots, a kind of painful reminder of the jobs they used to have. What happens in Anderson? Well, it’s completely predictable: opioid crisis, diseases of despair, massive numbers of suicides, and so on.

You can find the full interview of Chris Hedge's (by Matt Taibbi) at Racket News.

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CIA Cutout USAID Denies Funding the Creation of COVID Virus

I'm not a scientist, so I don't claim to know the truth here, but I do know that every corporate media outlet was constantly obsessed with COVID until most of the "conspiracy theories" turned out to be true and until the whole thing started looking worse than shady. I can see enough to know that if "news" media were run by reporters and editors who were naturally curious, they'd be all over this story.

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Majority Democrat Position: The Government Should Decide What is True.

Glenn Loury's introduction to his podcast interview of Dan Shellenberger:

Maybe my least surprising political position is advocacy for free and open discourse. Without free speech as a bedrock principle, democracy would mean little. If we can’t, as private citizens, receive, judge, and debate ideas and information, the decisions we make on the basis of that information cannot themselves be considered “free” in any meaningful sense. If some central authority prevents me from discussing information—or even the possibility of the existence of information—that could change people’s minds about that authority’s course of action, all of our rights have been damaged.

But over the last five years, a whole raft of ideas potentially threatening to dominant media and government narratives have found themselves shut out of “legitimate” discourse. Having concerns about the side effects of COVID vaccines, advocacy for the chosen presidential candidate of the Republican Party, and opposition to funding Ukraine would seem, in another time, like normal positions any person in the US could hold. And yet many legacy media outlets treat those positions as anywhere from delusional to treasonous. Such positions are often labeled as sources of “misinformation,” dangerous ideas to which, we’re told, ordinary First Amendment protections may not apply.

In an age when almost all of us rely, to some degree, on web-based platforms for our information, the line between government censorship and platform terms of service can seem vanishingly thin. In fact, in this week’s episode, the journalist Michael Shellenberger suggests the line may not exist at all. In this clip, he draws my attention to a startling poll that finds a huge increase in the number of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters who want to see the government censor “misinformation” online. But who decides what counts as misinformation? When platforms seek government guidance on that definition, we have good reason to ask whether the apparent freedom they offer is government censorship by another name.

Continue ReadingMajority Democrat Position: The Government Should Decide What is True.

Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz Discuss Lack of Truth Telling by “Journalists” and their Cadre of “Experts”.

Joe Rogan & Andrew Schulz on How Legacy Media 'Experts' Have Been Exposed Over the Past Few Years

“We're just assuming these people are truth tellers. They're not. We're assuming they're even journalists. They're not. Some of them are but most of them are just talking heads. Just pretty people who are good at reading...Not only that, we are sure they are highly motivated by money...And no one is listening, that's what's crazy...And the thing is, if it's not for a few brave people that stand up and tell you the truth...If there's no Peter McCullough, if there's no Robert Malone, if there's no RFK Jr, if there's no Pierre Kory, if there's none of these people that stand up and lose a sizable portion of their income, their careers get destroyed, their reputations get dragged through the mud, hit pieces get written about them, if it wasn't for these people that stand up and do that...It's wild"

https://twitter.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1776742874916286619

Continue ReadingJoe Rogan and Andrew Schulz Discuss Lack of Truth Telling by “Journalists” and their Cadre of “Experts”.

Peter Daszak Invited to Answer Questions in U.S. House of Representatives

The U.S. House has invited Peter Daszak to answer questions in the U.S. House of Representatives. What needs to be discussed? John Leake lays it out at Coureageous Discourse, in an article titled "Why Aren't Daszak and Baric Arrested?" Excerpt:

Especially interesting is Ms. Rocke’s statement: “Hi Ralph: I have a couple of questions about the SARS-CoV spike glycoproteins you are developing with respect to the DARPA grant we are collaborating on.”

Here it is critically important to understand that DARPA chose to pass on Daszak’s DEFUSE grant proposal—which proposed modifying SARS-CoV bat coronaviruses in order to make them infectious to humans—because, in the DARPA reviewer’s estimate, the work proposed was too dangerous.

And yet, as Ms. Rocke plainly states, Professor Baric was already “developing SARS-CoV spike glycoproteins with respect to the DARPA grant.”

This is just one of many glaringly obvious pieces of evidence that Baric, Daszak, and Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were already, in 2018, developing SARS-CoV-2—the infectious agent that began circulating in Wuhan, China less than two years later.

The 2018 DEFUSE proposal also expressly states the plan to insert a furin cleavage site into the "SARS-CoV spike glycoprotein” that Professor Baric was “developing” in 2018.

As I wrote in an earlier post, the U.S. Right to Know reporter, Emily Kopp, wrote an excellent report titled US scientists proposed to make viruses with unique features of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan and published on January 18, 2024. As Ms. Kopp points out, SARS-CoV-2 has multiple features that are expressly proposed in the DEFUSE grant proposal.

See this invitation from the House of Representatives, which details the issues.

If you are looking for any discussion of this memo (or the critically important issues raised by this memo) in the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN or NPR, you will not find any discussion in any of these places. I checked today.

Continue ReadingPeter Daszak Invited to Answer Questions in U.S. House of Representatives