PP NewsBrief: 2021-04-05

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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AZ Senate Chooses Independent Team Of Experts For Maricopa Election Audit

"The Senate has for months been vetting forensic auditors. Their mission: to find a respected, experienced, and independent set of experts to settle the question of alleged fraud in the Maricopa County 2020 election. They settled this week on a team consisting of Wake Technology Services Inc., CyFIR, LLC, Digital Discovery, and Cyber Ninjas, Inc. to conduct the audit. Cyber Ninjas will lead the team. As reported by UncoverDC on Feb. 9, a  post-election survey was performed by Liz Harris and her team prior to the audit to perform a door-to-door canvassing of voters to confirm registered voters. The canvass will be part of the information reviewed in the audit because it discovered that many who voted either didn’t live in the county or the addresses were incorrect.

Forensic examination of the controversial Dominion Voting Systems (DVS) machines and software will be part of the audit. According to local news outlet AZCentral, DVS is going after GOP State Chairwoman Kelli Ward and others for defamation, claiming that their voting systems are secure and free of fraud....

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The forensic audit itself will thoroughly scrutinize every step of the voting process, both physical and digital, including but not limited to investigating and reconciling vote tallies, looking at duplicate and invalid votes, physical inspections of ballots, forensic evaluation of the machines, review of tabulators and software, ballot artifacts. Many of the particulars of the actual investigation have not yet been made public. A report should follow in about 60 days, according to the press release. The audit will be completely independent and none of the leadership will be engaged directly in the process."

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Focus Forward

"Traditional America is essentially leaderless. The colors have fallen in battle and no one has picked them up. The colonels and captains are pretending they don’t see it, while the corporals and privates, who fear being overrun, are fixing bayonets.

Ever notice how the politicians who are reportedly “concerned” about your job being offshored are the same ones voting for the bills to offshore your job, outsourcing it to H1-B replacement worker programs, or hosting political fundraisers with offshoring and outsourcing lobbyists? Yeah, strange isn’t it?

Just acknowledge it. Those people you sent to Washington? They’re not going to save your job, protect your children from Marxist indoctrination and race hustling at school, or preserve what’s left of the Bill of Rights. We’ve outsourced our citizen responsibilities to the wrong people, and many are mistakenly still waiting for those same people to ride to the rescue.

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In hindsight, the day the PATRIOT Act passed was the last day America could truthfully consider itself a free nation. Now, nearly half of all Americans are afraid to speak their minds publicly and privately. They self-censor and carefully cultivate their speech because they are concerned they will lose their jobs or their children will be retaliated against by the education Red Guard at their schools. More recently, they have been afraid they will be targeted by the FBI, placed on a no-fly list, or arrested and held without bail over their supposedly First Amendment-protected political beliefs. These are real fears. They are well-grounded in fact and are no longer the fever dreams of paranoid libertarians.

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Let’s face it, in life there is only so much bandwidth to deal with the free citizen’s voracious mortal enemy—the power-hungry, dictatorial tyrant. After working a full day or more, dealing with kids, running a business, and managing an ever-dwindling family budget, most Americans have very little time to analyze politics and governmental issues. Tech companies, with a nudge from the government, compete hard for that sliver of free time with social media and 24/7 entertainment packaged as news and commentary, also known as propaganda.

How are citizens supposed to deal with the authoritarian machinations of our rogue elite while balancing work, life, and crisis-of-the-moment daily drama? Simple—stop playing their game.

Unplug from the constant two-way stream of propaganda-down and surveillance-up. Use the internet, and its delivery mechanisms—smartphone, computer, and TV—just like any other tool. Turn it on when you need it to perform a task, and turn it off when you’ve completed it. Do not plug yourself into their machine with always-on wearables and voice-activated assistants. Don’t let the digital world enumerate every aspect of your daily life and shape your real-world associations and beliefs. Take back that sliver of free time in your life and reallocate it to citizen time—a time to exert your power by building knowledge, fostering local, real-world associations, and making your voice heard in your community.

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The enemy attacks what it fears, and it fears an organized, independent, grassroots political movement. These independent movements are considered dangerous because they are not controlled by the party bosses and corporate donor class.

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The regime doesn’t care about things that aren’t a threat to its power. Consequently, they want you focused on these frivolities that don’t matter—the throwaway issues that distract from their real agenda. If you’re comfortably whining about the latest men-in-girls-bathrooms outrage while ignoring the intelligence community’s assessment on domestic violent extremists, then the regime is winning. If you’re spending your time following Twitter spats and the latest manufactured drama, you’re missing important information on things that can literally kill you.

People should be free to talk about whatever they want to talk about in America, but mindless middle-school arguments and political infotainment are not substitutes for tackling the real problems we face as a nation . . . and formerly free society. When it comes to reengaging and protecting the Constitution, when it comes to resisting authoritarian factions within government and society, we need to be serious—and focus forward on the agenda and actions that will lead to victory and to the restoration of a free constitutional republic. Be the reaper!"

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Why We Need a Civics Alliance

"The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is proud to announce the creation of the Civics Alliance, a new coalition dedicated to defending and restoring true civics education across the United States. The Civics Alliance will unite education reformers, policymakers, and every citizen of the United States who wants to preserve civics education that teaches the founding principles and documents of the United States, the key events of American history, the structure of our self-governing federal republic, the functions of government at all levels, how our governing institutions work, and the spirit of liberty and tolerance that should animate our private interactions with our fellow citizens. Such civics education should teach students to take pride in what they share as Americans—an exceptional heritage of freedom, a republic that has succeeded in making liberty a fundamental principle of our government, and the joyful accomplishments of their common national culture.

By the time students leave high school, they should comprehend the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, elections, elected office, checks and balances, trial by jury, grand juries, civil rights, military service, and many other points in the traditional American civics curriculum. College undergraduates, and especially graduates of education schools, should also learn how these civic fundamentals emerged from Western Civilization, including through developments in Western political theory and American history.

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The Civics Education Open Letter and Civics Curriculum Statement emphasize the following principles:

• Civics education should consist of large amounts of required factual knowledge and the study of primary sources.
• Civics education should ban “service-learning,” the essential component of New Civics pedagogy. This ban should be expanded into an explicit ban of “action civics” if necessary.
• Civics education should be subject to external tests, to ensure that teachers actually teach what they are supposed to teach and that students actually learn what they ought to learn in their classes.
• Civics legislation should aim to remove all education bottlenecks where radicals can force New Civics on students, such as curriculum standards, general education requirements, and teacher licensure requirements.
• Civics legislation should seek to use special commissions to create and enforce proper civics standards, so as to bypass predictable sabotage from radical activists within education department bureaucracies.
• Civics legislation should focus on dual-courses, core transfer curriculums, general education requirements, and the mutual recognition of civics courses among states, because they are the essential administrative means to convey civics education.
• Civics education should emphasize the principles of federalism and localism, both to fit civics education to local preferences and so as to avoid creating coercive education systems that New Civics advocates can capture.

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These documents prepare the ground for more detailed political campaigns to come. NAS in particular will build upon this initial statement with several model bills, which will address different aspects of the policies supported in this statement. We expect other members of the Civics Alliance to spearhead their own campaigns. We also expect that policymakers in different states will follow their own paths as they translate the principles of these documents into legal language. The members of the Civics Alliance will support different efforts to restore civics education, confident that they will all lead to roughly the same destination—the preservation of civics education that sustains our republic and our nation.

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I invite every American to sign up as a member of the Civics Alliance, and to pass on word of it to other Americans. We must act together now to restore America’s civics education—and this Open Letter and Curriculum Statement will be only the beginning of a long campaign. The work of the Civics Alliance will be essential for the salvation of our republic."

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Covid Vaccine Nonsense

"The efforts to require every American to be injected with an experimental vaccine for Covid-19 are based on the false notion that vaccination will protect recipients from becoming infected with SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, or protect them from passing along the infection to other people.

The FDA, the CDC, the NIH and the pharmaceutical companies involved have all stated very clearly that there is no evidence to support this idea.

None of the three experimental Covid-19 vaccines now being distributed in the United States have been demonstrated to protect against infection with or transmission of the virus believed to cause Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2), or even prevent symptoms of Covid-19 disease from developing.

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In each of the EUAs, the FDA has been careful to avoid any claim that the vaccines provide protection against infection or transmission of the virus. Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have each publicly stated that the vaccines have NOT been shown to prevent infection or transmission.

All of their regulatory documents and commentary addressing the issue state clearly that there is no evidence that the vaccines affect either infection with or transmission of the virus, nor do they prevent symptoms of Covid-19 from appearing.

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The most important questions about the experimental Covid-19 vaccines were not even asked during the clinical trials: Do these experimental vaccines prevent infection with the virus and do they prevent transmission of that virus? The short answer is No.

The FDA has stated clearly in each of the Covid vaccine Briefing Documents (see Moderna document here, Pfizer here, Janssen here) that the trials were not even designed prove or disprove a hypothesis that the vaccines prevent infection or transmission of the virus, or even prevent symptoms of Covid-19 from developing.

The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for the Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen vaccines on December 11 and December 18, 2020, and on February 27, 2021, respectively.

The EUAs indicate that the vaccines “prevent severe Covid-19,” that is, they don’t prevent infection or development of symptoms after infection, but they may make the illness less severe.

The EUAs explicitly deny any evidence that the Pfizer, Moderna or Janssen vaccines prevent infection, or prevent hospitalization or even death from Covid-19 after vaccination. The highly publicized “success rates” of the vaccines refer only their potential ability to lessen the severity of those symptoms, but there is “no data” that they prevent the infection that could cause those symptoms.

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The FDA granted EUAs for all three experimental vaccines after less than five months of clinical trials, with most of trial data still to be collected. All three vaccines will be in clinical trial status through January 31, 2023.

According to comments from vaccine scientists in September 2020 (prior to the Covid-19 EUA issuances), no vaccine had ever before been distributed on an EUA basis.

“We don’t do EUAs for vaccines,” [Dr. Peter] Hotez said, “It’s a lesser review, it’s a lower-quality review, and when you’re talking about vaccinating a large chunk of the American population, that’s not acceptable.”

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Under EUA status, the government is not permitted to require Covid-19 vaccinations because the vaccines are not FDA-approved and recipients are clinical trial participants. This is why states cannot legally require vaccination, despite suggestions by some legislators to do just that.

Indeed, the US military is barred from mandating the vaccines. This ban on government vaccine mandates explains why some private companies are trying to require vaccination of employees, which makes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidance on this issue potentially relevant.

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The EEOC guidance evaluates the idea of employer Covid-19 vaccine mandates under the Americans with Disabilities Act’s (ADA) “direct threat” analysis:

"The ADA allows an employer to have a qualification standard that includes ‘a requirement that an individual shall not pose a direct threat to the health or safety of individuals in the workplace.’“

But the EEOC’s analysis presupposes that vaccines protect against infection, which is false.

The “direct threat” doctrine is an employer’s potential defense to a claim of disability discrimination under the ADA. According to the EEOC, “A conclusion that there is a direct threat would include a determination that an unvaccinated individual will expose others to the virus at the worksite.”

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The US Supreme Court ruled in Bragdon v Abbott (1988) that the assertion of a direct threat defense must be evaluated “in light of the available medical evidence,” noting that “the views of public health authorities, such as the U.S. Public Health Service, CDC, and the National Institutes of Health, are of special weight and authority.”

Overcoming the long-standing protections of the right to bodily integrity and informed, voluntary consent to medical treatment requires articulation of an actual and imminent, not theoretical, threat presented by an unvaccinated person in the workplace.

The CDC, the National Institutes of Health and numerous other “public health authorities” have all stated that there is no evidence to show that vaccination prevents viral infection or transmission, a fact the EEOC should have presented but did not.

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A far more useful strategy than forcing people to accept an experimental vaccine that does not even protect them from infection would be to instead protect those most vulnerable to serious illness or death as a result of infection. Tens of thousands of renowned doctors and scientists in the U.S. and around the world proposed such a strategy in October 2020.

Unfortunately, the media and Silicon Valley tech monopolies attacked and effectively censored discussion of this common sense approach as “anti-science” and “right wing” by removing discussion of the proposal from nearly all media platforms.

Yet the fake “scientific” approach to herd immunity touted by the WHO, US government agencies and politicians, and media monopolists is blatantly dishonest, and has nothing to do with “science.” The push by private companies to require vaccination and “immunity passports” is similarly based on private financial interests, not scientific research."

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The Death of Humor

"Humor is dying all over, for obvious reasons. All comedy is subversive and authoritarianism is the fashion. Comics exist to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously, and we live in an age when people believe they have a constitutional right to be taken seriously, even if — especially if — they’re idiots, repeating thoughts they only just heard for the first time minutes ago. Because humor deflates stupid ideas, humorists are denounced in all cultures that worship stupid ideas, like Spain under the Inquisition, Afghanistan under the Taliban, or today’s United States.

During the Trump era, there was a steep decline of jokes overall, but mockery of a president who’d say things like, “My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart” rose to unprecedented levels. It was not only okay to laugh at Trump, it was mandatory, and the more tasteless the imagery, the better...

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Pundits guffawed...when someone threatened to sue artist Illma Gore for her “Trump’s tiny weiner” pastel, displayed at the Maddox Gallery in London. "It is my art and I stand by it,” Gore said. “Plus anyone who is afraid of a fictional penis is not scary to me.”

People cheered, because of course: anyone who even threatens to hire a lawyer to denounce a drawing has already lost....

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For all that, most of the jokes of the Trump era fell flat, precisely because they were obligatory. Modern humorists must laugh at bad people: racists, sexists, conspiracy theorists, Trump, anyone but themselves or the audience....

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Humorists once made their livings airing out society’s forbidden thoughts, back when it was understood that a) we all had them and b) the things we suppressed and made us the most anxious also tended to be the things that made us laugh the most....

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We’re way past that now, when we’re not supposed to have unwholesome thoughts either in public or in private. In fact, the whole concept of private thoughts has become infamous. Why does anyone need private opinions, in a society where the right opinions on every question are known, and should be safe to say publicly?"

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In Defense of Tribalism

"Of course, when we speak about “tribalism” in highly developed western societies, we are speaking metaphorically; we are using an anthropological concept that typically referred to premodern cultures to describe the political conditions in a much different sort of community. But it is worth noting that there is a contentious debate in anthropology about the definition of a “tribe” and its usefulness as an idea, even when used in the traditional sense. Basically, “tribe” refers to a group of people whose association with one another is rooted in shared cultural traits and history. The people within a tribe usually share a language, a genetic lineage, and a constellation of beliefs, values, and traditions. Tribal membership tends to be premised on the acceptance of a particular structural organization that governs social life, and the common understanding of the tribe assumes that most members exist in relative proximity with one another and that they share an understanding of who is a member and who is not.

In short, shared convention is what makes a tribe visible to outsiders. The characteristics that tribal members share are viewed as different or unique to the external observer. The recognition of these collective manifestations of cultural difference enables an outsider to observe and describe tribal identities—a practice that had been common to anthropology for decades. Of course, the fact that the label of “tribe” is typically one that is attributed to a group of people by an outsider lies at the core of the contemporary criticism of the concept: the defining characteristics and boundaries of the tribe come to be determined on the basis of their unfamiliarity to an observer who carries the biases that extend from his own membership in a different community, which often serves as the normative example of what a culture “ought” to be. This, however, is a criticism of the politics of anthropology more than it is the concept of “tribe.” Tribes and tribal identities exist regardless of any anthropologist’s misgivings.

The reticence about tribalism isn’t limited to these concerns about the colonial attitudes of observers of the tribe. It also extends from the fact that many Americans do not feel as though they belong to a tribe. In large part, they are correct. But this lack of belonging, this cultural homelessness, is actually the cause of the phenomena that critics deplore as “tribalism.” The current cultural fragmentation of the United States is in large part due to multiculturalism, which has encouraged tribal expressions of difference in such a way that we have become a nation of outsiders. The average American now holds few things of meaning in common with other citizens. Instead of the sense of community that the nation used to share, people now retreat to smaller and smaller “affinity groups” that they hope will provide a sense of belonging that a multicultural polity can no longer provide.

Surprisingly, the antidote to this alienation and fragmentation is not a rejection of tribalism. It is a reintegration of the tribe.

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...what do we mean when we say that “tribalism” has taken hold in the United States? A survey of the recent usage of the term shows that it refers to a cultural environment that is prone to unproductive and unnecessary strife. The implied meaning of tribalism, then, is the tendency of a particular society toward internecine conflict. To say that America is becoming mired in tribalism is to say that the bonds that unite the diverse subcultures that make up the nation-state are being weakened; that the “common interest” that Americans had shared is giving way to competing ideological commitments that cannot be reconciled to one another. In short, tribalism is seen as a pathology because it is a threat to the pluralism that lies at the heart of creedal democracy.

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If the core characteristic of the tribe is the endurance of shared values, beliefs, and traditions, it is clear that any society where the central values are diversity, pluralism, and tolerance of difference will necessarily be wary of tribalism. But one might pause here: what if the sacred status of diversity, pluralism, and individual difference themselves constitute the “shared values” that enable a bond among the various groups within the nation-state? This idea—that sharing a high valuation of difference and pluralism is enough to unify otherwise diverse groups of people—is a major component of the American experiment. As Francis Fukuyama explains in his most recent book, this is commonly called “creedal identity” in America. The wager of multiculturalism was implicit at the Founding: that a shared commitment to the belief that a limited government that imposed no ethnic, religious, or cultural limitations on who could lay claim to the national identity would be enough to create one people out of many.

The problem is that these ideas are paradoxical. Americans seek a kind of cultural belonging that was a hallmark of tribal life without subjecting themselves to any of the externally-imposed obligations that secure one’s membership in the tribe. It makes sense, then, that the left is hostile to those promoting the prerequisites of tribal life. Their goal is to overcome the narrowness of the tribe in favor of a cosmopolitan globalism that valorizes the expression of individual differences. They advance diffuse notions of the “common good” that are applied universally without accommodation of divergent local interests and subcultures. As things stand, the dissidents who oppose their efforts must retreat from public culture if they are to secure the benefits of the tribe.

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...since the great cultural revolutions that unfolded across the west in the 1960s, the creedalism that had bound Americans continues to dissolve. The expression of individual difference (the ways that one sets oneself apart from the tribe) replaced the creed as the defining characteristic of American identity. The shared creedal heritage came to be understood as one more infringement of the collective upon individual autonomy. Over the last few decades, the allegiance to the creed has declined in direct proportion to the rise of multiculturalism. Expressing the unique features of who you necessarily emphasize the ways that you significantly differ from the larger community or tribe. This fosters not mere indifference, but hostility toward the creedal devotion that served as the basis of national unity for over a century.

Today, the subordination of creedal identification to personal identity ensures that the American creed is now openly questioned and attacked. This is the function of interventions like the 1619 Project, which paint the creed as a form of intolerance or hatred masquerading as a means of unification....

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...the current fragmentation of America—our growing “tribalism”—is an organic byproduct of marginalizing a shared culture in favor of multicultural difference. (Here, I do not condemn the virtue of tolerance, but only the core of multiculturalist ideology, which holds that the expression of cultural difference is an inherent good that should be maximized and proliferated in the public sphere). As the multicultural nation-state becomes increasingly unable to perform the cultural unification that humans naturally desire, they begin to form tribes of their own.

This reveals the confusion within the critique of American tribalism: people don’t retreat to communities premised on a shared identity because they are seeking conflict (as the typical narrative suggests). Rather, they organize themselves into smaller groups with shared commitments precisely because they are looking to escape the conflicts that multiply in a society that consists of people who no longer have anything in common. This search for a collective identity rooted in commonalities is a worthy goal. The tribalism that we see today is the means by which people pursue it."

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The Great Unvaxxed

"The vaccine was a resounding success. Yes, there had been a final death rate of 10% among the vaccinated, but this was mostly among the elderly or the already ill, so it was probably not the vaccine’s fault, and if it was, no one could prove it one way or another, and even if they could, well, the vaccine manufacturers were not liable to lawsuits due to the agreements they had made with the various governments.

In any case, the pandemic had ended, that was for sure.

Of course the masks and the lockdown mandates continued to be enforced; the reason was that while the pandemic had most certainly been defeated, the virus still existed in its natural form somewhere out there, and so it was vital to continue with the safety procedures to avoid any possible resurgence of the disease.

So what? People got used to it, as they had gotten used to so many other things before that. And was wearing a mask in the end much worse than wearing a helmet or a safety belt? Was being forced to stay at home for a few months every year much different than being forced to be at the office working for five days out of the seven in the week? Rules are rules, and those were not as bad as others that had been instituted in the past.

But there was something that worried the authorities. While most people had predictably complied with the mandatory vaccination campaign, there were a few groups that had refused them, alleging religious or health reasons, and found refuge in rural communities living off the grid. They had abandoned the use of mobile and network technology and so could not be traced so easily, and, since non-digital cash had been abolished, they appeared to have returned to a form of commerce based in the exchange of physical goods.

At first, the authorities ignored them; most people saw them as a minority of loser hicks, “anti-vaxxers” as they had been called in earlier pre-scientific times, and since it was unlikely that too many among the masses would opt for such a harsh lifestyle away from the comforts of modern urban life, they were not seen as a menace.

But what happened, in the end, was that rumours started to appear, even in the cities, about small communities where no one needed to wear masks, and people were dancing and smiling, and food was delicious and natural and people were even – gasp! – falling in love and procreating in natural ways."

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Scientists discover node in brain closely linked to dysfunctional social behavior

"The researchers pinpointed a specific neuron in the lateral preoptic area of the hypothalamus in the mouse brain which controls the emotional regulation of these high-pitched love ballads.

The hypothalamus is typically associated with regulating behaviours such as hunger, thirst, temperature control and, importantly, the fundamental drivers behind sex and fear.

The emotional aspect of the mouse ballads was found to be generated in this region of the brain, and by tinkering with this and surrounding nodes attached to specific neurons, the researchers could ‘produce’ the male mouse ballads.

For example, when they blocked the nodes, the male mouse would remain silent which, in turn, would create high degrees of anxiety in the female mice who responded by kicking the dumbfounded would-be suitors.

In sharp contrast, when the researchers activated the very next node down, the male mice would emit long, loud ‘screams.’ Equally uncomfortable for a potential mate.

“By finding these neurons, it’s telling us that this part of the brain is doing this emotional scaling and persistence. If you take that away, then you lose all of that affect, all of that emotional range, and the ability to have effective social communication,” Stowers says.

Exploring how exactly emotion scales in common modalities of communication – in this case song, though speech would function similarly – is key to improving our understanding of social dysfunction in humans, especially in people living with autism or depression."

While the text obscures the horrors these procedures are clearly invasive for the melodic mice. I don't find the final paragraph convincing as to why those harms are necessary. I think we need to have better reasons for much of the animal experimentation conducted. Policies like that provide another line of defense against treating humans as guinea pigs...since after all, if guinea pigs are better treated, then so would their human counterparts.

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Hillary Attacks ‘Shameless Gun Worshipers’ Who Are Against ‘Sensible’ Control Legislation

"Clinton proclaimed that “The opportunists on the other side, like Cruz and his ilk, they know better and they are in the position of trying to keep people really riled up and scared that sensible gun legislation like we had in the ‘90s for 10 years will somehow undermine their rights.”

“Well, what about the rights of all the rest of us? The rights of us to go to work, go shopping, go on dates to the movie theater, go to school, for heaven’s sake — what about the rest of us?” she continued."

Clinton and others who agree with this didn't seem too concerned with those rights when it came to lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions.

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‘Fairness is overrated’: NBC’s Lester Holt incites Twitter mob with provocative monologue about ‘journalistic responsibility’

"In the speech he gave while accepting the Edward R. Murrow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism, Holt criticized the notion that journalists must provide equal time to opposing viewpoints on an issue, insisting that some viewpoints are unworthy of airtime.

“I think it’s become clearer that fairness is overrated,” the host of NBC’s Nightly News remarked. “Before you run off and tweet that headline, let me explain a bit. The idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in. That the sun sets in the west is a fact. Any contrary view does not deserve our time or attention.”

He further argued that providing a platform for “misinformation,” especially when discussing issues related to public health and safety, can be dangerous, adding: “Our duty is to be fair to the truth.” Apparently anticipating criticisms of his stance, he stressed that refusing to cover “unsupported arguments” is not proof of some sort of agenda, and, in fact, “just the opposite.”"

Except most controversies aren't of the "Sun sets in the East" or "Earth is Flat" variety. I also suspect Lester would have denounced Galileo for his misinformation about the Earth revolving around the Sun...

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Gender studies professor faces cancel mob after writing blog post about trans ideology

"Professor Donna Hughes, the director of graduate studies in the Gender & Women’s Studies program at the University of Rhode Island, is now facing backlash and calls to resign for a blog post she wrote about the transgender movement.

Professor Hughes published an opinion column on 4W, an “explicitly radical feminist website,” titled: “Fantasy Worlds on the Political Right and Left: QAnon and Trans-Sex Beliefs.”

Hughes argues that “trans-sex fantasy has imagined–and is enacting–a world in which how a man feels is more real than his actual reality. And now the fantasy has the weight of the federal government behind it.”

The gender studies professor says that the “American political left” is getting seeped into its world of “lies and fantasy.”

Hughes said that the trans-sex movement is not like the “imaginary world of QAnon” and that “real children are becoming actual victims.”

Professor Hughes also stated that the biological category of women’s sex was being “smashed.”

“Women and girls are expected to give up their places of privacy such as restrooms, locker rooms, and even prison cells,” wrote Hughes."

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Christopher Lasch vs. the Elites of Our Time

"With the untimely death of Christopher Lasch in 1994 at the age of 61, America was deprived of one of her most articulate and earnestly plangent social critics. By training, Lasch was an historian of 19th- and 20th-century American culture. For some 30- years, he specialized in anatomizing—exaggerating, some would say—certain “odious facts” about American culture.

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Lasch was especially caustic about the hedonistic antics of the so-called New Left. Although he was deeply indebted to such paradigmatically modish cultural radicals as Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, Lasch here insisted that “Cultural radicalism has become so fashionable and so pernicious in the support it unwittingly provides for the status quo, that any criticism of contemporary society that hopes to get beneath the surface has to criticize, at the same time, much of what currently goes under the name of radicalism.”

Naturally, such observations won him many critics, especially on the Left. In the pages of the humanities quarterly Salmagundi he responded to these critics, warning of “our impending economic and ecological crisis—the crisis of uninhibited capitalistic growth,” and summed up the rationale for what we might call his conservative radicalism:

"A “conservative” respect for order and authority has now become an ingredient of any radical movement that seeks to transcend the progressive and socialist pieties of an earlier time. In mindlessly embracing a politics of “cultural revolution,” the American left has played into the hands of the corporations, which find it all too easy to exploit a radicalism that equates liberation with hedonistic self-indulgence and freedom from family ties."

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Lasch understood with laser-like penetration that what presented itself in the lineaments of radical consciousness-raising in the 1960s and 1970s was mostly a blind for moralistic self-indulgence. Promises of liberation and transcendence, he saw, often concealed new forms of tyranny and irresponsibility. In this context, it is interesting to ask what Lasch would have made of the invasion of corporate America by the ideology of wokeness. How would he have reacted to racist  lectures by Coca-Cola about the evils of being white or rancid declarations of solidarity with Black Lives Matter by Brooks Brothers, to say nothing of the dismantling of our educational institutions by the woke warriors of the totalitarian Left? I suspect he would have loathed it all, not just because it represents a thoroughgoing repudiation of free speech but also because it represents the ultimate act of co-optation. Lasch considered himself a radical, but his criticism of contemporary America—parts of it, anyway—sounded a distinctly conservative note. In a section on “Schooling and the New Illiteracy,” for example, he had this to say about the Left’s effort to “democratize” education:

"It has neither improved popular understanding of modern society, raised the quality of popular culture, nor reduced the gap between wealth and poverty, which remains as wide as ever. On the other hand, it has contributed to the decline of critical thought and the erosion of intellectual standards, forcing us to consider the possibility that mass education, as conservatives have argued all along, is intrinsically incompatible with the maintenance of educational standards."

Reading such passages—and they occur frequently in Lasch’s later work—it is sometimes easy to forget that his attack on our cultural “malaise” (a favored Laschian epithet) issued from an unwavering commitment to an astringent if disabused form of anti-capitalist radicalism. However devastating was his exposure of the fatuities of the New Left, the real villains, in his view, were “capitalism,” “mass communications,” and “the corporations”—the usual suspects put forward by the Left. Hence he attacks “welfare liberalism, which absolves individuals of moral responsibility and treats them as victims of social circumstance.” But he places the blame for the shambles not on the questionable policies of the New Deal and the Great Society but on “capitalism” and its “new modes of social control.”

...

...Lasch believed that the commitment to progress, fueled by the free market, denies “limits” and transforms people into insatiable consumers. (“Consumer” is perhaps his most withering term of abuse.) Remnants of the populist tradition that he extolled as an alternative to elite consumer culture lived on, he argued, in the working-class sensibility of the petty-bourgeois, “its moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its skepticism about progress.”

...

There is a lot of moral repugnance and condemnation in Lasch’s last book, a posthumously published collection of thirteen essays that constitute an unsystematic coda to his criticism of American society. Entitled The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995), the book revisits most of the classic Laschian themes. It is not a cheery tale....

...

Lasch was never what one would call an upbeat critic. Words like “optimism,” “progress,” “affluence,” even “happiness” were anathema to him. (At the end of his concluding essay, waxing biblical, he tells his readers that “the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy.”)

But in this final statement, Christopher Lasch seems gloomier than ever. Of course, that might simply be because the realities he describes were more gloomy than they had been in the past. But there is more to it than that. Nor is it enough to observe that Lasch was a dying man when he was completing this book. The pall is more than merely personal. To a large extent, I believe, the unremitting gloominess of Lasch’s late work proceeds from his disappointment that contemporary America was clearly not developing into the rigorous populist society he had always dreamed about.

...

...One cannot but agree with many of Lasch’s observations and criticisms. He was, after all, an astute critic of society, and anyone not smitten with the radical pieties of the 1960s will again and again find himself endorsing this or that piece of cultural anatomization. For example, this statement, taken from his introduction to Revolt of the Elites, ought to be recited daily by all politicians and civil servants: “Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state.” Extra credit would be allotted for reciting this as well: “A misplaced compassion degrades both the victims, who are reduced to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, attainment of which would entitle them to respect.”

...

...Lasch, expatiating on the “moral paralysis of those who value ‘openness’ above all,” observes that democracy means something more than “ ‘openness’ and toleration.” “In the absence of common standards,” he writes, “tolerance becomes indifference” and the ideal of an open mind degenerates into that of an “empty mind.”

"We have become too proficient in making excuses for ourselves—worse, in making excuses for the ‘disadvantaged.’ We are so busy defending our rights (rights conferred, for the most part, by judicial decree) that we give little thought to our responsibilities. We seldom say what we think, for fear of giving offense. We are determined to respect everyone, but we have forgotten that respect has to be earned. Respect is not another word for tolerance or the appreciation of ‘alternative lifestyles and communities.’ This is a tourist’s approach to morality. Respect is what we experience in the presence of admirable achievements, admirably formed characters, natural gifts put to good use. It entails the exercise of discriminating judgment, not indiscriminate acceptance."

...

Lasch tells us that our equation of the American Dream with “social mobility” is “sadly impoverished.” But one comes away from this book—as from his other later work—feeling that the alternatives that he allowed himself to contemplate were impoverished, too—sometimes sadly so. One of his main criticisms of Tenured Radicals was that in my attack on relativism I was guilty of “foundationalism,” that is, of believing that knowledge must be grounded in “propositions unassailable by doubt.” Conservatives generally, he complained, think that “either knowledge rests on immutable foundations or men and women are free to think whatever they please.”

Actually, both “unassailable by doubt” and “immutable” are Lasch’s interpolations. The real question is whether we believe there is such a thing as truth that is more than a pragmatic convenience. I would agree that “the impossibility of certainty does not preclude the possibility of reasoned discourse—of assertions that command provisional assent even though they lack unimpeachable foundations and are therefore subject to revision.” But “subject to revision” does not mean “entirely up for grabs.” When Lasch turned to relativists like John Dewey and, even more, Clifford Geertz for an alternative to “foundationalism,” he embraced an alternative that not only denies certainty but also denies the possibility of truth. Seeking to avoid one sort of absolutism, he unwittingly adopted another: the absolutism of the confirmed relativist.

Lasch presented himself as a stern critic of nostalgia, and in some ways he was. But the truth is that a powerful current of nostalgia pulses through his work. It is a nostalgia not only for a simpler time when “local and regional loyalties” were alive and well, but also for a species of mankind that was nobler, more responsible, less materialistic than any found outside the generous imaginings of populists and other utopians. As Lasch himself was quick to point out, one of the liabilities of nostalgia—which might be defined as a kind of metaphysical homesickness—is that it tends to blind its sufferers to various realities. Lasch never tired of railing against “careerism” and the cult of “specialized expertise,” which he described as “the antithesis of democracy.” I thought of this when I read his poignant acknowledgment thanking his wife for teaching him how to use a word processor: “without this helpful machine, which would have remained inaccessible to me without her guidance, this book could not have been completed in the allotted time.” Did he ever consider how much “careerism” and “specialized expertise” went into that little bundle of microchips and software?

...

Lasch takes great pains to encourage us to abandon both pessimism and optimism for the more modest virtue of hope. There is much to recommend this. In any robust sense of the word, optimism involves turning a blind eye to the “odious facts” of the world around us just as pessimism involves a monstrous ingratitude in the face of the unearned blessings we receive. Both involve a culpable distortion of reality.

Yet it is not clear whether Lasch himself ever overcame the temptations of pessimism. Moral passion was doubtless his greatest asset. Addicted to what the historian Herbert Butterfield described as “the luxury and pleasing sensuousness of moral indignation,” he was never less than earnest. He raised central questions, discussed them articulately, yet often failed to persuade. Perhaps this was because his diagnoses were so sweeping and historically one-sided. Perhaps it was because, having discarded one left-wing view after the next, he nevertheless was unable to discard the Left’s animating hatred of the free market. In any event, his attack on progress represents not a triumph of hope but an unusually dour form of populist pessimism (he would, I feel sure, have approved of Kafka’s quip that “there is hope, but not for us”).

But what is perhaps most noteworthy is the way Lasch attempts to salvage some margin of religious commitment from the stern diagnosis he offers. Traditionally, of course, religion has functioned in part as a source of existential consolation. Lasch would have us downplay that aspect of religious teaching, eager, as always, to combat the tendency to “make people feel good about themselves.” For Lasch “the spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion.” A person with “a proper understanding of religion,” he says, would see it not as “a source of intellectual and emotional security,” but as “a challenge to complacency and pride.” There is of course something to this. For pride is assuredly the enemy of religious life. But how touching, how sad, really, that even here, even when it was a matter of life’s ultimate mysteries, we find Lasch arguing against the possibility of consolation or solace."

========

As We Look For Others

"Who will lead the deplorables’ exodus from the bondage that the political-corporate-cultural oligarchy imposes on America? The power that the oligarchy has gathered since 2015 pales by comparison with the resentment it created thereby, and the wave of public opinion that is building against it.

America’s deplorables, clingers, irredeemables, chumps, dregs, neanderthals, etc.—persecuted, increasingly prosecuted for being on the wrong side of the oligarchy—yearn for political leaders to rescue their way of life. Demand is so high because most self-proclaimed conservative leaders talk the voters’ talk, but walk the big donors’ oligarchic walk.

...

Subtracting Americans from the oligarchy’s oppressions requires using one’s powers—as governor, senator, indeed as anyone with access to an audience—to personify and organize any number of tasks, neither minimizing exposure nor mincing words. Standing against the madness of transgenderism, flying in the face of the most objective truths, may well be the easiest of these. Here are some others, in no particular order.

To reject as the political power grab that it is the complex of closures, mask mandates, and lockdowns that continue to be foisted upon Americans ostensibly to protect against the COVID-19 virus; and to reiterate the truth that a virus that has taken root in a population will go through it, quarantines notwithstanding.

To treat the Biden Administration’s plan to impose vaccination passports via cooperation with “the private sector” as the double travesty of American law that it is: because it is unconstitutional, because it would surely grow into a Chinese-style social-credit system, and because it consists of franchising public powers to private entities unaccountable to the voters.

To stop K-12 schools from teaching critical race theory, i.e. that white people are intrinsically bad, and to forbid corporations and government agencies from forcing “training” in that ideology on their employees.

To call out all that is done and said about “white privilege” and “white supremacy” as naked racism and as a cover for privileged persons—mostly white—to guard their personal and class privileges.

To lead Americans to insist that elections be decided only by ballots from duly registered voters, secured from the moment they are cast, and counted transparently. And to reject manipulation of elections in the name of anti-racism.

To lead Americans against the Justice Department’s, the FBI’s, and parts of the armed forces’ campaign of suppression of opposition to the oligarchy; to reject references to shadowy right-wing “seditious” organizations that turn out to be essentially nonexistent (e.g., QAnon) or to be led substantially by federal infiltrators (e.g., the Proud Boys); and to condemn the publicly hyped prosecution of allegedly associated individuals.

...

The point is clear, however. To lead the deplorables is to meet their sociopolitical needs."

========

GOP lawmakers target MLB antitrust immunity following decision to remove All-Star Game from Ga.

"Back in 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that antitrust law did not apply to Major League Baseball, because baseball is not considered interstate commerce.

This exemption does not apply to other professional sports like the NFL or the NBA.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) agreed with Duncan, saying “it’s time for the federal government to stop granting special privileges to specific, favored corporations. Especially those that punish their political opponents.”

...

Georgia Republicans have even passed an amendment to revoke a tax break on jet fuel for Delta Airlines, after its CEO called the new law “unacceptable.”

Republicans said the law is being misrepresented by Democrats, and businesses are being manipulated into political arguments."

========

Netherlands suspends use of Vaxzevria Covid jab among under-60s ‘as a precaution’ after woman’s death

"The Dutch Health Ministry said it has temporarily halted administering AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, Vaxzevria, to people aged under 60 after a woman who had received one of the shots died.

In a statement on Friday, the ministry said the decision was made “as a precaution” on the heels of reports from Dutch drug monitoring agency Lareb which said it had received news of five blood-clot cases among women who had recently been given a shot of Vaxzevria, the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca.

The women, all aged between 25 and 65, had received the jab about 7 to 10 days beforehand.

“Three [of the five] patients had extensive pulmonary embolisms. One died and one also had a brain haemorrhage," Lareb said. “Another patient had extensive abdominal vein thrombosis. One patient developed a thrombosis of the arteries in the legs.”

The agency noted that within the period concerning the five complaints, around 400,000 people were given the vaccine, and the reports “appear to be comparable to other reports in Europe.”"

========

How conspiracy theorizing may soon get you labelled a ‘Domestic Terrorist’

"If you don’t happen to find yourself among the tinfoil hat-wearing strata of conspiracy theorists waiting in a bunker for aliens to either strike down or save society from the shape shifting lizard people, but are rather contemplating how, in the 1960s, a shadow government took control of society over the dead bodies of many assassinated patriots, then certain conclusions tend to arise.

...

The first conclusion you would likely arrive at is that the United States government was just put through the first coup in over 58 years (yes, what happened in 1963 was a coup).

...

Another conclusion you might come to is that many of the political figures whom you believed were serving those who elected them into office, actually serve the interests of a clique of technocrats and billionaires lusting over the deconstruction of western civilization under something called “a Great Reset”.

...

Lastly, you might notice that your having arrived at these conclusions is itself increasingly becoming a form of thought-crime punishable in a variety of distasteful ways, elaborated by a series of unprecedented new emergency regulations that propose extending the definition of “terrorism”.

...

This should not come as a surprise, as Biden’s new addition to the Department of Homeland Security is a bizarre figure named Cass Sunstein who famously described exactly what this was going to look like in his infamous 2008 report ‘Conspiracy Theories’ (co-authored with Harvard Law School’s Adrien Vermeule).

In this under-appreciated study, the duo foresaw the greatest threat to the ruling elite took the form of “conspiracy theorizing” within the American population using as examples of this delusion: the idea that the government had anything to do with the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, or the planning and execution of 9-11.

Just to be clear, conspiracy literally means ‘two or more people acting together in accord with an agreed-upon idea and intention’.

The fact that Vermeule has made a legal career arguing that laws should be interpreted not by the “intentions” of lawgivers, but rather according to cost-benefit analysis gives us a useful insight into the deranged mind of a technocrat and the delusional reasoning that denies the very thing which has shaped literally ALL of human history.

...

...the pro-active Sunstein laid out five possible strategies which the social engineers managing the population could deploy to defuse this growing threat saying:

1. “Government might ban conspiracy theorizing.”
2. “Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.”
3. “Government might itself engage in counter speech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories.”
4. “Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counter speech.
5. “Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help”.

...

...Sunstein has spent decades trying to model human behavior with computer simulations in an effort to “scientifically manage” such behavior.

As outlined in his book Nudge (co-authored with Nobel Prize winning behaviorist Richard Thaler), Sunstein “discovered” that people tend to organize their behavioral patterns around certain fundamental drives, such as the pursuit of pleasure, avoidance of pain, and certain Darwinian drives for sex, popularity, desire for conformity, desire for novelty, and greed.

One of the key principles of economic behaviorism which is seen repeated in such popular manuals as Freakonomics, Nudge, Predictably Irrational, The Wisdom of Crowds, and Animal Spirits, is that humans are both biologically determined due to their Darwinian impulses, but, unlike other animals, have the fatal flaw of being fundamentally irrational at their core.

Since humans are fundamentally irrational, says the behaviorist, it is requisite that an enlightened elite impose “order” upon society while maintaining the illusion of freedom of choice from below.

...

On a closer inspection of history, we find countless instances where people shape their individual and group behavior around sets of ideas that transcend controllable material impulses. When this happens, those individuals or groups tend to resist adapting to environments created for them.

This incredible phenomenon is witnessed empirically in the form of the American Revolution, Warsaw Ghetto Uprisings, Civil Rights movements, and even some bold manifestations of anti-lockdown protests now underway around the world.

Among the most troublesome of those variables which upset computer models are: “Conscience”, “Truth”, “Intentions”, “Soul”, “Honor”, “God”, “Justice”, “Patriotism”, “Dignity”, and “Freedom”.

...

As witnessed on multiple occasions throughout history, such individuals who value the health of their souls over the intimidating (and extremely malleable) force of popular opinion, will often decide to sacrifice personal comfort and even their lives in order to defend those values which their minds and consciences deem important.

These rare, but invaluable outliers will often resist policies that threaten to undo their freedoms or undermine the basis of their society’s capacity to produce food, and energy for their children and grandchildren.

What is worse, is that their example is often extremely contagious causing other members of the sheep class to believe that they too are human and endowed with unalienable rights which should be defended.

...

If one were to begin an investigation into history without an understanding that ideas and intentions caused the trajectory of history, as is the standard practice among history professors dominant in todays world, then one would become incapable of understanding anything essential about one’s own reality.

It is irrelevant that behaviorists and other fascists wish their victims to believe that history just happens simply because random short-sighted impulses kinetically drive events on a timeline- the truth of my claim exists for any serious truth seeker to discover it for themselves.

...

Today, hundreds of Obama-era behaviorists have streamed back into influential positions of government under the new “scientifically managed”, evidence-based governance coming back to life under Biden promising to undo the dark days of President Trump.

...

...If you think that anything they have done to return to power is unlawful, or antithetical to the principles of the Constitution, then these technocrats want you to know that you are a delusional conspiracy theorist and as such, represent a potential threat to yourself and the society of which you are but a part."

========

A Virginia student was suspended over a Snapchat post. Now her case is going to the Supreme Court.

"A high school cheerleader who was suspended from school in 2017 for writing “f**k cheer” on social media will have her case heard by the Supreme Court. The teenager argues that, by punishing her, the school violated her First Amendment free speech rights.

...

Levy later successfully sued the school district arguing she should not have been punished for remarks she made outside of school hours. Her post was made on a weekend. She was allowed back in school and reinstated to the cheerleading squad.

Later, a federal appeals court also sided with the teenager, arguing the school district was wrong for punishing Brandi because her remarks were made out-of-school, and it didn’t matter whether it was in violation of the team’s rules or that other students complained.

...

Now the case, which will be the first of its kind, will be heard by the Supreme Court later this month. The case is important as it will create a precedent on the boundaries of free speech for students , which can be suppressed under the guise of discipline.

In a brief to the Supreme Court, the Mahanoy Area School District, in Virginia, which covers Levy’s school, argued that the federal appeals court ruling in favor of Levy threatened the ability of teachers and coaches to discipline students countrywide.

...

The case will determine whether the regulation of on-campus speech also applies to off-campus speech. The Supreme Court’s decision in the 1969 landmark Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District, set a precedent that school’s are allowed to regulate disruptive on-campus speech.

The 1969 case involved Mary Beth Tinker, then 13, who was suspended in 1965 after she and her friends wore black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. The school district said they could only return to school after they stopped wearing the armbands.

But the Supreme Court ruled that the black armbands were not disruptive, and wearing them was a free expression, which is protected under the First Amendment."

Schools in many places have for years now been encroaching on students' free speech rights outside of the school property. But just because they now can much more easily access a record of student conduct off-campus than in the past doesn't mean they have the right to. You can maybe make an argument for a "virtual campus" applying to any online tools provided by the school, meaning any conduct on there could be seen as actionable.

========

‘We’re so stupid following our politicians’: NBA legend Charles Barkley says Dems & GOP allied in dividing and conquering America

"“I truly believe in my heart most white people and black people are awesome people, but we’re so stupid following our politicians, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats,” he said.

He described what he believes to be the thinking behind the divide-and-conquer strategy: “Hey, let’s make these people not like each other. We don’t live in their neighborhoods, we all got money, let’s make the whites and blacks not like each other, let’s make rich people and poor people not like each other, let’s scramble the middle class.”"

========

More People Died from Vaccines in the Last Three Months than in the Last Decade, Official Data Shows

"Official data from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that so far in 2021, 1,755 people died from the Chinese virus vaccine, a figure that well exceeds the 994 people who died in the last 10 years as a result of vaccination.

The data was released by the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a database that contains “information on unverified reports of adverse events (illnesses, health problems, and/or symptoms) following immunization with vaccines licensed in the U.S.”

Of the 1,755 deaths, 1,431 were reported in persons older than 65 years of age.

...

Although the number of deaths represents only 0.003% of the total number of people vaccinated, it is 71 times more compared to the number of deaths in the last 10 years."

========

NBC streaming service Peacock is working to censor WWE archives

"NBC Universal (NBCU) is censoring some of the “controversial” content from old WWE shows, much to the disappointment of wrestling fans.

NBCU recently acquired the WWE Network, including its library of old TV shows, which are now available on NBC’s streaming service Peacock.

Most of the recent WWE programming has paled in comparison to the classic era, but its older content – that brought WWE to great prominence – would cause tensions in the current social climate of cancel mobs and decreased tolerance, and major networks such as NBC are quick to cave."

========

Lawmakers Renew Call for Investigation Into Zuckerberg-Funded Green Bay, WI Election Grant

"Republican state lawmakers in Wisconsin, led by Sen. Roger Roth (R-Appleton), are again calling for an investigation into how Green Bay managed the November election. Additionally, Roth is calling for the city’s mayor, Eric Genrich, to resign. The renewed effort comes after hundreds of pages of documents and emails obtained by the Wisconsin Spotlight expose that $6.3 million in grant money, largely funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, resulted in Democrat activists infiltrating the November presidential election in Wisconsin’s five largest cities—Green Bay, Milwaukee, Madison, Kenosha, and Racine—aka “the Wisconsin 5.”

...

But the grants came with strings. Recipients had to consent to specific conditions, or they would have to return the money. Eric Kaardal, attorney for the Wisconsin Voters Alliance, which has challenged the outside groups’ involvement in election administration across the country, alleges that is the point where CTCL allowed its liberal partners’ entry to run the show. The Wisconsin 5 were instructed to bring in groups like the National Vote at Home Institute. Green Bay’s mayor and staff appeared more than happy to give the liberal groups wide-ranging access.

...

The Wisconsin Spotlight’s investigation into the emails found:

• A former Democratic operative, Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, the Wisconsin state leader for the National Vote at Home Institute, served as a de facto elections administrator and had access to Green Bay’s absentee ballots days before the election.
• Spitzer-Rubenstein asked Green Bay’s clerk if he and his team members could help correct or “cure” absentee ballots as they did in Milwaukee.
• Green Bay’s clerk grew increasingly frustrated with her department’s takeover by the Democrat Mayor’s staff and outside groups.
• Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno said the contract stipulated that Spitzer-Rubenstein would have four of the five keys to the KI Center ballroom where ballots were stored and counted.
• Brown County’s clerk said the city of Green Bay “went rogue.”
• Election law experts said the city illegally gave left-leaning groups authority over the election.

...

...Trent Jameson, director of Event Technology at the hotel, wrote to Spitzer-Rubenstein in an Oct. 27 email:

“I’ll have my team create two separate SSID’s for you. One SSID will be hidden and it’s: 2020vote. There will be no password or splash page for this one and it should only be used for the sensitive machines that need to be connected to the internet. The other SSID will be: gbvote and that one can be seen in the settings app of your phone or laptop under ‘networks’ and should be used for the poll workers who need internet.”

...

An Election Day procedures plan shows Spitzer-Rubenstein overseeing several areas at Central Count, including the portable dropbox, printer, a list of assignments, and training materials, among other duties. It also seems to confirm that he was in charge of supervision and check-in.

Green Bay elections observer Andrew Kloster, who served on behalf of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, wrote in a sworn affidavit that Spitzer-Rubenstein was ordering around poll workers, handling absentee ballots, and making life miserable for election observers."

Hiding an SSID isn't a security measure.