☕️ KICK BACK ☙ Thursday, May 23, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Jeffrey Tucker op-ed widens Overton Window; FBI hides behind standard procedure; tempers flaring; baffling Ozzie triple-demic; Biden surrenders in Niger; loan logic; Daszak debarred; lots more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your indispensable roundup of essential news this morning includes: conspiracy-minded op-ed may signal a new phase in covid clarity;  FBI responds to its deadly-force search warrant on Trump’s home; tempers flare in South Florida case where the FBI’s pants just got pulled down; Australia’s triple-demic baffles jab scientists; Biden flees another country in disgrace leaving more military gear behind; Biden admin struggles to explain student loan forgiveness; Daszak de-barred; House Committee hot on Fauci’s insectile trail; and Oregon counties pull away from Portland.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 It is, perhaps, a sign of the times that the Epoch Times published a wildly conspiratorial op-ed by intellectual, prolific writer, and Brownstone Institute director Jeffrey Tucker, headlined “The Great Pandemic Walkback.”

The piece began innocently enough, and regular readers will find nothing new in Jeffrey’s recital of recent narrative-bending events. It began by listing the tardy recognition of vaccine harms by former CDC Director Redfield and former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, former Governor Andrew Cuomo hilariously insistence all his pandemic orders were purely voluntary, and the startling recent Congressional testimony of former NIH Director Francis Collins who, when pressed, admitted that he knew of no science supporting covid’s laughable six-foot-distancing rule.

Jeffrey’s point was that these former officials, having fled official offices and now innocently garbed in civilian clothing, comprise the undercover scouting party for what the author called The Great Pandemic Walkback. Having decamped from their high offices and infiltrated We the People, it’s their job to map out the mental battlefield for winning a glorious new war to restore trust in the so-called institutions that chucked us into the woodchipper at the first sign of trouble.

I’m paraphrasing Jeffrey’s eloquent enumeration of notorious pandemic sins, but you get the idea. Three-quarters of the way through the article, it seemed like another poignant update on the slowly liquifying covid narrative, and then Jeffrey dropped his conspiracy bomb, a theory not quite described in this way anywhere before, a theory that elegantly connects a lot of dots and therefore becomes a fine candidate for a working hypothesis.

Jeffrey Tucker — prominently featured by Epoch — thinks the whole pandemic was a deadly, unimaginably expensive, wasteful, ill-considered put-up job. The government’s desperate goal was to lock us down, mask us up, and keep us separated to “flatten the curve” for one reason and one reason only: to keep us from catching covid and developing antibodies long enough that the mRNA vaccine technologies would have fresh immune systems to do their work on:

He even squeezed mail-in ballots in there. In other words, Jeffery argued that the government’s goal was the reverse opposite of what it claimed. It wanted to stop herd immunity, to interrupt nature and give pharma a chance.

I might be overselling it, but this delightful op-ed seemed to show the covid conversation has moved to a new, more honest level. True, it’s in Epoch, not the New York Times, but Jeffrey’s screed included everything they tried to suppress for years. And he’s still alive. At minimum, the op-ed shows we can at least talk about it now.

At the end of the day, who knows how much of the pandemic disaster was malevolence rather than arrogant incompetence, but it’s a conversation we must have. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

🔥🔥 Yesterday, the FBI — completely missing the point — issued its utterly predictable statement just as I foresaw, claiming there is nothing to see in its Mar-a-Lago search order the agency tried so desperately to conceal. CBS ran the story, headlined “Mar-a-Lago raid followed standard protocol, FBI says.”

Here’s what I said yesterday about this pathetically silly excuse:

The FBI’s “standard procedure” argument stinks. There was nothing standard about the Mar-a-Lago raid. It wasn’t like the FBI was raiding a Harlem crack house. The FBI was raiding a high-end luxury property secured by the Secret Service where the most recent former President lives with no intent to arrest anybody. The FBI knew that people with guns would be there — Secret Service agents — and yet proceeded with its “surprise” raid in undercover clothing.

Under no circumstance should deadly force have ever been authorized. The Secret Service should have been given prior notice. The agents should have been unarmed so there was no chance an accident could happen.

In other words, the “standard protocol” excuse is no excuse at all. They weren’t conducting a “standard” search. Full stop.

🔥🔥 But the FBI’s inexcusably blasé response to accusations of trying to negligently assassinate a president were betrayed by rising tensions in Trump’s South Florida case. That’s the same case where the odious Operations Order was exposed. Politico ran the widely-covered story under the headline, “‘Garbage argument’: Hearing in Trump’s classified docs case gets heated.”

Sparks flew in court hearings yesterday as threadbare tempers flared. At one point, after prosecutor David Harbach, a member of special counsel Jack Smith’s team, heatedly called one of Trump’s lawyer’s arguments “garbage,” Judge Aileen Cannon warned him “I’m going to have to ask that you calm down.” The details they argued about are legally complicated, procedurally heavy, and not super interesting.

But the sniping criticized by the judge exposed the mounting pressure on prosecutors, as the judge’s de-redaction orders continue hauling the government’s dirty laundry onto the political dinner table. I’d bet John Fetterman’s translating device there is more to come.

Things are also heating up for Attorney General Garland, who was held in contempt of Congress last week. Headline, Daily Mail:

💉💉 Uh-oh! Doctors are baffled again. Down under in heavily-jabbed Australia, the Daily Mail ran this disguised vaccine advertisement under the alarming headline:

I’ll save you some time. Of course, the article never actually explained “why everyone in Australia is getting sick at the moment.”

Despite widespread availability of safe and effective vaccines (never mind that little AstraZeneca-clotting speed bump), the numbers of flu, rsv, and covid are rising in the world’s Kangaroo capital. And flu season is getting fatter. According to the Mail, and I am not making this up, not getting the flu is what is making everyone get the flu:

The number of flu cases fell during the pandemic because of lockdowns and measures such as the widespread use of facemasks. 

But this has led to lower immunity and increased susceptibility to the flu.

Traditionally, flu season has run from April to October with a peak in August. However, since 2022, the flu season started earlier in March and peaked in June.  Up until April 30, there were 35,580 flu notifications. This is well up from the same period in 2023, which had 32,480 notifications. 

If you believe it, you may now chalk Australia’s triple-demic up as another catastrophic public health failure.

Scientists are also anguished because, for some reason about which they prefer not to speculate, vaccine uptake has taken a down turn:

Despite being eligible for a free vaccine, the uptake among over 65s has been slow so far this flu season. Usually around 65 percent are vaccinated. But so far this year, only around 35 percent of over-65s have received their flu vaccine.

'Reports indicate that from March 1 to April 28, 16 percent fewer people were vaccinated against the flu compared with the same period last year. While we're still relatively early in the 2024 flu season, only seven percent of children under five have received their flu shot this year so far,' Dr. Seale said. 

It’s free and people still don’t want it. What does that tell you?

But of course, flu panic is as seasonal as, well, flu itself. Headline from Sky News, 2022:

Recycled headline from CNN, 2023:

Back in 2020 and 2021, I regularly reported seasonal flu-panic headlines from 2018 and earlier. Now, it’s impossible to tell whether Australia is suffering from any actual increase or it’s just the annual media template of vaccine adverts.

I won’t mention the possibility of immune suppression, since that’s just a conspiracy theory. Take it away in the comments.

🚀 He’s Bidening it up again. The Hill ran a story yesterday headlined, “US to pull troops out of Niger by mid-September: Pentagon.” We are leaving behind a brand-new, $100 million dollar military base, since the Nigerian government has decided to go with Putin.

Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal from Camp Niger, a clanking echo of his catastrophe of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, is funny-not funny, if you see what I mean. The good news is that most equipment will be airlifted out, unlike last time. Still, the story admitted, “Military infrastructure and some items too large to transport will be left to the Nigerien military.”

Meaning, the most expensive stuff. Why not break it all down? Crush it into powder? If I understand this right, we just gifted a $100 million dollar aid package to a Russian ally, who will probably re-gift our brand-new base and its unnamed “large items” to the Russians to reverse-engineer.

Make it make sense.

In its final sentence, the Hill remembered to mention that, oh yeah, neighboring Chad is kicking us out, too. Biden’s foreign policy, if you can call it that, is working better than ever.

🔥 Enjoy this clip. Yesterday, ABC’s Peter Alexander asked Biden’s ultra-diverse press secretary to explain exactly why it makes sense to give college graduates a $35K hand with their student loans, but not financially massage plumbers, mechanics, welders, and other student-aged people who didn’t go to college? The predictable result was more word salad:

CLIP: Jean-Pierre struggles to have a coherent thought (0:52).

If I understand her right, and I’m not sure I do, it’s because students are having a hard time, whereas plumbers are doing fine. It’s definitely not to buy votes or anything.

💉💉 They sent it to him by certified mail, which makes it official. It couldn’t have happened to a better grifter, either. Finally, Peter Daszak and his spooky EcoHealth Alliance have been recommended for a permanent ban from future government largesse:

The most enteraining line was, “You lack the present responsibility to participate in the federal procurement and nonprocurement process.” No kidding. In other words, Peter, you’re out.

Don’t worry, I’m sure Peter will land on his claws somewhere. Next, we should look harder at that weasel Ralph Baric.

🪳🪳 Speaking of Peter Daszak, the Covid Select Committee is slowly but inexorably closing in on that human cockroach, Fauci. This week saw new revelations of Fauci’s staff discussing their “secret”, illegal, off-the-books communications channels used to confound annoying public records requests.

Dr. David Morens was Fauci’s Senior Advisor. David probably needed someone advising him. He has a big mouth. In this email to Peter Daszak, for example, David mentioned “our secret back channel.” Oops.

The emails uncovered by the Committee suggested the existence of an even larger conspiracy in the NIH’s offices to defeat FOIA. In this email, Morens explained he was “taught” by “Marg Moore” in the NIH FOIA Office the “tricks” of how to scrub his emails:

David really isn’t too bright. Here he is in an official government email account bragging about how he learned to make emails disappear after getting a FOIA request but before complying with the search:

In this one, David labeled his gmail account “safe,” and encouraged a Boston University researcher and Peter Daszak to use his “safe” gmail account instead of his government email:

In this hilarious exchange with Daszak, right after another grant for EcoHealth was approved, David fantastically inquired whether he’d get a kick-back since “there too much f—ing money!!”

Daszak, who may have been joking, replied “of course there’s a kick-back,” but then, not joking, said he hoped it all doesn’t end in a prison sentence:

But we hope it does end in a prison sentence.

If you follow this story closely, here’s the House Oversight Committee’s full Memo on David Moren’s Misdeeds.

🔥 In more good news for sane Oregon, in other words not Porland, the UK Daily Mail ran a story yesterday headlined, “THIRTEEN conservative counties in Oregon approve ballot measures for SECESSION vote that would see them join non-woke Idaho - as they issue list of demands.”

Thirteen Oregon counties — out of 36 counties total, so more than one third of the state — have taken the initial step in a long process to formally secede from Oregon and join Idaho. The latest one, Crook County, approved starting the secession process on Tuesday.

The movement’s organizers want to put Oregon on a drastic diet by expanding the border of Idaho two hundred miles into Oregon, making it into something like a rump state:

It’s not clear how realistic this might be anytime soon, since both state governments and the federal government must first agree, but the citizens obviously are fired up and have momentum on their side.

It reminds me, a little, of the wild story of how West Virginia was formed. When Virginia seceded into the Confederacy, citizens in the western side of the state were outraged. They met and angrily declared Virginia’s state government null and void. They resolved to form a new state. Despite much media wailing about how unconstitutional it all was, Lincoln recognized the new state of West Virginia anyway, and in 1863 it was admitted as our 35th state. After the Civil War, Virginia sued to reclaim its lost territory, but the Supreme Court sided with the plucky new West Virginians.

In other words, you never know how these things will shake out. And after all, it is 2024. Buh bye, Portlandia.

Have a tremendous Thursday! And resolve to return tomorrow morning for another delicious free refill of Coffee & Covid.

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