CDC Grants ‘Permission’ to Unmask
For the government, it’s been about power. For businesses, it’s been about liability. And for socialist/ scumbag/liar-Joe Biden, it’s been about looking consistently ridiculous whether indoors, outdoors, or on a Zoom call. But in any case, yesterday marked the practical end of a yearlong pseudoscientific face-diaper folly.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that people who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 no longer need to wear masks or physically distance — whether indoors or outdoors in most circumstances,” NBC News reports.
“We have all longed for this moment when we can get back to some sense of normalcy,” said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. “Based on the continuing downward trajectory of cases, the scientific data on the performance of our vaccines and our understanding of how the virus spreads, that moment has come for those who are fully vaccinated.”
Good riddance. But what on earth took these dullards so long? The mask guidance should’ve been rescinded last May, concurrent with the firing of Tony Fauci, whose flip-flopping advice has been almost comical. “There is no reason for anyone right now in the United States, with regard to coronavirus, to wear a mask,” the not-so-good doctor said last February. “I think there’s this misperception that wearing a mask, even if you were in an area where there was transmission, is going to absolutely protect you.” That was before he eventually recommended wearing two masks.
The science behind the masking requirement has always been dubious. With the exception of N95 respirators and surgical masks, their effectiveness is somewhat akin to putting up a chain-link fence to keep the mosquitoes away. And for school-age children, who’ve never been at any great risk from COVID-19, the masking requirement has been unnecessarily burdensome from the get-go.
As The Federalist’s Ben Domenech wrote, “When we look at this administration, the way they’ve treated this whole thing has amounted to a huge amount of theater, as opposed to actual science. When the president comes out with a mask over, and over, and over again, he sends the message implicitly that if you get vaccinated, nothing will change.”
As of this writing, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s dithering CDC, which earlier this week was outed for having used bogus statistics to prop up its outdoor masking guidelines, still requires masks for those traveling on buses, trains, and other forms of public transportation. But if it’s not too much trouble, we’d like to see the agency update its guidance on children in school and summer camps most ricky-tick.
Speaking of the CDC, what will be its special guidance to the fully vaccinated socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden? We ask because the president has continued to send mixed messages by wearing at least one mask wherever he goes, indoors or out, even at his own virtual climate summit.
Why does he do it? As the Daily Wire’s Mairead McArdle reports, “White House Senior Advisor for Coronavirus Response Andy Slavitt on Thursday answered a question that has dogged the Biden administration lately, saying President socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden wears a mask indoors ‘because he’s a very important person.’”
Ah, he’s important.
Regardless of what socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden does, though, his statist handlers have a message for the rest of us. They tweeted it yesterday on his behalf, and it sounds a lot like an ultimatum. “The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do. The choice is yours.”
Huh? That’s not a rule, Joe, and it’s not an either/or choice. It’s a bizarre bit of condescension, and it’s unbecoming of a U.S. president.
While socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden practices his heavy-handed statism, one leader is, as usual, ahead of the game. As the New York Post reports, “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will pardon anyone in the Sunshine State charged for not wearing masks or socially distancing — breaking the news live on air to a gym-owning couple who were facing jail time for defying coronavirus safety recommendations.”
Good for Governor DeSantis, and good for Liberty. (This while a New York father is facing 90 days in prison for refusing to wear a mask at his kid’s outdoor baseball game.)
Just over two weeks ago, in a piece that pondered the ridiculousness of the CDC’s masking mandates, our Nate Jackson asked, “When’s the mask burning party?”
Hey, we get results. ~The Patriot Post
‘Fact-Checkers’ Enforce the COVID Narrative
The systemic redlining of Americans’ free speech rights continues apace. The CDC announced yesterday that vaccinated Americans no longer need masks in most situations, but we’ll bet it takes some time for Facebook to stop throttling or outright censoring posts even daring to ask questions about masks. You may not think for yourself, say the Silicon Valley Thought Police. The same is true about the place of origin for the coronavirus itself, which is almost certainly a bio lab in Wuhan, China. You may not say such things, say the Silicon Valley Thought Police.
If it weren’t so serious, it would be hilarious to note that in order to censor such stories, Facebook is using circular “fact-checks.” In this instance, because the “fact-checkers” said something in April 2020 — before more evidence was uncovered — they’re blocking anyone from acknowledging that growing body of evidence in May 2021. And they’re justifying the censorship with the catch-all label of “missing context.”
As our Douglas Andrews noted earlier this week, there’s plenty of evidence for COVID’s lab origin, more of which was provided by Nicholas Wade, a science reporter for the New York Times. Wade goes into great detail to explain the evidence, and it should be persuasive to anyone still in doubt of what we suspected very early last year.
In other words, Wade is providing context for his argument by systematically presenting the evidence. To the “fact-checkers,” however, that is somehow proof of “missing context.” And the fact that they got it wrong last year is all the substantiation they need for censoring contrary evidence this year. The only explanation Facebook gives is to point to its own COVID policies, which prohibit content claiming that the coronavirus was manufactured or bioengineered.
Can you see why no one should trust the “fact-checkers”? It’s why we put the term itself in scare quotes.
So what, you might say. Well, it’s this kind of redlining that is causing conservative news sources all over the Internet to lose their voices and reach on social media. We here in our humble shop have documented a dramatic drop in our traffic and engagement over the last 12 months. In roughly a dozen “fact-checks” on our content (usually our memes), not one has actually proven an error. Each time, it has been a disagreement over opinion or an algorithmic error that lumps us in with someone else (here’s an example). Worst of all was our “hate speech” strike for a meme arguing that trying to change a kid’s gender is child abuse. All of it has added up to the systemic suppression of our speech.
Facebook acknowledges that it limits the reach of sources whose content is hit with “fact-checks,” though in Facebook’s typically opaque manner, it’s unclear how much or whether this includes posts labeled “missing context.” In any case, as the presidential campaign heated up last summer, we believe Facebook made a concerted and targeted effort to stifle conservative voices on its platform, and it’s primarily using bogus “fact-checks” to do it so there’s a veneer of objectivity and independence to this political suppression. COVID just happens to be one of the issues where The Narrative™ is even more stringently enforced, again often against conservatives daring to object to mandates and obfuscation.
Rather than counter speech with more speech and actually debate the issues and the evidence, leftists only want to silence conservatives and suppress the truth. ~The Patriot Post
What the Left Ignores About Anti-Asian Hate Crime
In his speech before a few joint members of Congress last month, socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden insisted that the greatest terrorist threat our nation faces is “white supremacy.” Then, after asserting that George Floyd’s death presented an opportunity to address the country’s “systemic racism,” socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden praised the Senate for passing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act “to protect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from the vicious hate crimes we’ve seen this past year.” The message is clear: According to socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden and his fellow Democrats, the root problem plaguing the nation is white racism.
However, despite all the pontification and accusations regarding “white supremacy” being the supposed source for the rising number of hate crimes against Asian Americans, neither the media nor Democrat politicians care to genuinely examine the facts or report them. The facts not only fail to support the “white supremacy” narrative, they contradict it.
Ying Ma, author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, notes, “Political leaders, activists, and the media have widely attributed the rise in hate crimes to former President Donald Trump’s controversial use of the terms ‘China virus’ or ‘kung flu’ … [but the] racially motivated violence [is] in heavily Democratic areas and from demographic groups that overwhelmingly opposed him.”
Ying Ma observes that the problem of anti-Asian hate crimes predates Trump. She reports, “A survey conducted by the San Francisco Police Department in 2008 revealed that 85% of the city’s violent crimes were black-on-Asian, a figure officials in this notoriously liberal city confronted with ‘squeamishness.’” The officials’ “squeamishness” was likely due to the data not supporting the Left’s white supremacy narrative that sees racism as a whites-only problem.
And it’s not just San Francisco witnessing this same race dynamic. Other major urban areas like New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle have seen the same.
In an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, Ying Ma noticed something about those most often engaged in attacks against Asian Americans. “They don’t quite look like white supremacists,” she said. “They don’t look like white voters for Trump voters. In fact, many of these attacks have occurred in heavily Democratic cities where they did not vote for Trump in 2020 or 2016.” She adds, “What the Democrats or the far left have done, actually quite effectively, in the past year or so, is to libel former President Trump for something that the Democrats themselves actually are very much guilty of. And what is that? That is their silence and their cowardice before black-on-Asian attacks that often occur in America’s urban areas.”
Finally, Ying Ma rightly contends, “America must not only inquire but engage in a long overdue, honest conversation about the prevalence of black crime and the existence of racism among nonwhite Americans. The goal is not to vilify an entire race for the crimes of individuals, nor is it to absolve individuals of other races who commit racist acts.”
Individuals need to be held accountable for their actions, not the ethnic group from which they come. A high or low melanin count is not a metric for measuring morality. ~The Patriot Post
Forced ‘Diversity’ Can Only Hurt STEM Fields
You’d have to be living in a cave to miss the current national fervor over “whiteness” and all the baggage that comes along with being white in this country. In a range of fields and industries, the number one concern is that they’re too white. “White privilege,” indeed.
Now there’s a whiteness problem in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), apparently, and there’s a big push to make sure that changes.
For example, according to a survey at MachineDesign, “Our 2015 Salary Survey highlights the current work environment of our engineering readers. It shows that our engineering workforce is dominated by white males age 50 and over. One of the major concerns expressed by a majority of our responding engineers was the ability to find qualified engineering talent. One solution to this issue is to encourage diversity among future engineers and promote STEM education among women and minorities.”
So the only way to find more STEM talent is to make sure they’re less white? For a variety of reasons, that doesn’t seem right. But with every other segment of society jumping on the diversity bandwagon to appease the race hustlers, it’s fitting that STEM is already on board.
After all, what’s more important than diversity in fields that deal with all aspects of public life, including science and medicine?
The push for more diversity in STEM is serious business. Just this week, Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg Philanthropies announced the “launch of a $150 million effort to directly address historic underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and math fields, and to prepare a new, more diverse generation of researchers and scholars to assume leading roles in tackling some of the world’s great challenges.”
That’s quite a statement. There’s nothing wrong with institutions looking for more “underrepresented” students to enroll in their programs, but shouldn’t schools be looking for the best students regardless of their skin color or ethnicity?
We can assume that not a penny of that cool $150 million will help any poor white kid in Dubuque, Iowa, who dreams of a job as an engineer. Good luck, kid. Whites need not apply for the Hopkins-Bloomberg initiative.
Back in the world of common sense, shouldn’t employers and government offices be filled with those who actually have the talent and experience to fill those positions, regardless of their skin color? If new STEM students or STEM graduates are black, Hispanic, or Asian, God bless them. But the obsession over diversity doesn’t come without serious problems.
Researcher Heather Mac Donald writes, “President Joe Biden has now taken the push for ‘diversity’ in STEM to a new level. His candidate to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific administrator.”
Mac Donald adds, “[Asmeret Asefaw] Berhe would be the first black woman to head the $7 billion office, and that is reason enough, according to the diversity mantra, why she should oversee X-ray synchrotrons, the development of nuclear weapons, and ongoing research on nuclear fusion. Her nomination requires Senate confirmation; if Berhe will not commit to hiring and grantmaking on the basis of scientific expertise alone, irrespective of race and sex, senators should vote her appointment down.”
Good point. At least someone thinks scientific knowledge and experience should be part of the conversation. If Berhe were green or red, it wouldn’t matter to anyone if she had the background to back up her diversity.
This is just one of many examples of people being hired to please the diversity crowd instead of their background, education, and experience.
Those factors are out the window, but you can bet your last dollar that America’s competitors aren’t playing the diversity game when it comes to making sure they dominate STEM fields in the 21st century.
~The Patriot Post
DAVID LIMBAUGH
GOP: Seek Not Phony Bipartisanship. Save the Nation
Riddle me this: Why would Republicans fall for the Democrats’ age-old ploy of pressuring them into working on “bipartisan” legislation that will only advance the Democratic agenda and damage the nation?
Indeed, what’s the point in the GOP puffing up its chest about ousting Liz Cheney from her House leadership position if they’re just going to turn around and behave like never-Trumpers by caving on President socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden’s agenda? Why would they play footsie with the most militantly leftist party in American history? That can’t possibly be good for America, nor can it be good for their political fortunes, as voters don’t want them to be spineless wimps.
Republicans need to do more than just talk. They must summon all of their power to block socialist/scumbag/liar- Biden’s disastrous agenda — not for the sake of partisan obstructionism but for the sake of the nation.
People likely to vote for Republicans don’t elect their representatives to engage in self-congratulatory bipartisan soirees; they elect them to advance beneficial policies and thwart destructive ones. They mustn’t appease the canceled culture mobs. The left will demonize Republicans no matter what they do and no matter whether they rally around former President Donald Trump, so how about they just do what is right and aggressively pursue their supporters’ policy preferences?
Why am I bringing all this up? Well, because several recent news stories describe Biden’s meeting with congressional leaders over the so-called “infrastructure” bill. My alarms went off when I read that socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden was “encouraged” about the deal after meeting with Senate Majority Leader Chuck scumbag/liar-Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker scumbag/liar-Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Given socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s radical agenda, his encouragement means my discouragement — unless he is misreading or being deceptive about McConnell and McCarthy’s position.
socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden said: “But I want to make it clear to you: I’m encouraged not just because of one solid meeting with the Republican leader in the House and with Sen. McConnell. … I’ve been meeting with bipartisan leaders for a long time now. So, generically, I’m encouraged that there’s room to have a compromise on a bipartisan bill that’s solid and significant and a means by which to pay for it without dropping all of the burden on middle class and working-class people.” By that, socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden surely means he senses Republicans might be open to his intention to pay for the bill through a hike in the corporate tax rate.
socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden wants to repeal Trump’s corporate tax rate cut, which put America more in line with the rest of the advanced world and helped spur economic growth. But corporate tax increases pass through to individual taxpayers. It’s false that the wealthy pay less than the middle class. socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s schemes will further retard economic growth, which will disproportionately harm the middle class and the poor. So I’m not particularly thrilled with Republicans kowtowing to this demagoguery just to appear bipartisan.
Let’s review some other socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden statements that illustrate his professed commitment to bipartisanship is disingenuous. In an MSNBC interview, he said: “I want to get a bipartisan deal on as much as we can get a bipartisan deal on. … I’m not going to give up on a whole range of things that go to the question of productivity, of increasing jobs, increasing employment, increasing revenues. I’m not willing to give up on that. So we’re going to fight those out. … Let’s see if we can get an agreement to kick-start this and then fight over what’s left and see if I can get it done without Republicans if need be.”
Do you hear him? Don’t start demanding bipartisanship from Republicans when the Democratic president is openly admitting he only intends to be bipartisan on those matters on which Republicans will agree. He expects Republicans to cave on many items, and on all others, he’ll railroad them right through via the reconciliation process. He has shown no willingness to compromise his positions. What a great deal for Biden — “Heads I win. Tails you lose.”
Making matters worse, all of socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s proposed solutions are backasswards. You don’t increase productivity and jobs by injecting play money into the economy and continuing to pay unemployment benefits that disincentivize people from returning to work, a reality he cynically denies.
A watchdog press would be lambasting socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden for his partisanship, not cajoling Republicans to be bipartisan in the face of such an uncompromising president. But that’s a fantasy.
We are already witnessing the poisonous fruits of socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s programs: inflation; an overrun border that threatens America’s sovereignty and security; a constant stirring of racial resentment; foreign policy weakness and a betrayal of our ally Israel; gas hikes partially caused by a war on domestic energy; a war on cops; a war on free, fair and honest elections; a perversion of our national security by preposterously identifying white supremacy as the greatest security threat; a weakened military obsessed with identity politics; a never-ending climate of fear over the pandemic that keeps schools and businesses shut down; rampant cancel culture; and our academic, cultural and digital institutions suppressing speech, demanding conformity and smothering academic inquiry.
Note to Republicans: Don’t fall for this sham for the thousandth time. Democrats will promote their agenda zealously, without compromise, and with or without your support. Please surprise us and block them at every turn. You should not set your sights on crossing the aisle for a phony photo-op but on saving the country.
~The Patriot Post
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