The Morning Rant – Checks and Balances: What is the “Check” on the Federal Judiciary?

[Buck Throckmorton]

When Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law this past week protecting Floridians from big tech censorship, the conversation immediately pivoted to the near-certainty that it will be overturned by federal courts.

“This is a publicity stunt. It will be struck down in the courts,” said State House Rep. Joe Geller who is a Democrat from Aventura.

All major media cheered on the sentiment of Rep. Geller, while the faux-conservatives of Conservative, Inc. pretended to fret about “if it holds up in court.”

Sadly, we know that it will be overturned, not because of its constitutionality, but because all it will take is one left-wing federal judge doing so for partisan political reasons. The only way this law could possibly survive is if it is appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and they uphold it.

The immediate response from both left and right to any conservative legislative victory is “…if it stands up in court.” Which pretty much never happens. How in our system of “checks and balances” have we reached the point where there is no outside “check” on the power of the Judicial Branch?

Power is intoxicating, and now that activist judges know that they have unlimited powers to implement any decree they want, or throw out any law they disapprove of, they are doing just that.

Some argue that there is a check on their power – from appeals courts. Which is exactly the problem – the only check on rogue jurists lies within the judicial branch.

Others would argue that because judges are appointed by the executive branch and confirmed by the legislative branch, that their confirmation process itself is a check on their power. But that only deals with how judges take office, not their misbehavior while in office. It’s like saying there is no need for any checks on elected officials once in office because their power could have been checked on election day.

Federal judges can be impeached, but only 15 have been impeached in this country’s history, with only 8 convicted. Only one judge has been removed from office in this manner in the past 30 years. Knowing that, why wouldn’t a federal judge grant himself imperial powers? He is untouchable. Other than impeachment, there is apparently nothing the legislative and executive branches can do to stop the rogue judiciary.

Here’s a thought, since judges are required to uphold the Constitution, shouldn’t they be removed from office when their opinions on constitutional matters are routinely overturned?

Since 2007, the 9th Circuit had a reversal rate of 78 percent. That puts it in second place behind the 6th Circuit (79.7 percent).

Seriously, the Supreme Court spends a crazy amount of time reversing the unconstitutional rulings of the Ninth Circuit Court. Yet no one in the Executive or Legislative branches ever does a thing to stop the Ninth Circuit’s incessant unconstitutional rulings. Those judges should be impeached.

Liberal judges have hamstrung the ability of Americans to engage in self-rule. There is a critical need for the impeachment of judges to become just as common as it is to have judges overturn duly created laws. Where to start? How about with whatever judge or court overturns Florida’s new anti-censorship law.

BREAKING

California shooting leaves 'multiple' dead at San Jose rail yard; suspect deceased: authorities

A shooting near a rail yard in San Jose, California early Wednesday resulted in "multiple fatalities" and the suspected gunman is now dead, a Santa Clara County sheriff’s spokesperson confirmed. 

Santa Clara County Sheriff’s spokesman Deputy Russell Davis said he could not specify the number of fatalities and injuries yet. No motive is known for the shooting at this time.

Deputies were on the scene before 7 a.m. local time for "an active shooter investigation" in the area of 100 W. Younger Ave. San Jose Police also responded to the scene of a shooting in the area of Younger Avenue and San Pedro Street.

The sheriff's office tweeted an update before 8:30 a.m. local time that the "shooter is down." Mercury News first reported that "multiple" people are dead as a result of the incident. 

Mayor Sam Licardo wrote on Twitter that the shooting happened at a Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) facility and that several people were being treated, as "the situation is still being assessed." 

"The shooter is no longer a threat, and the facility has been evacuated," he said. "I will update as more information becomes available."

The rail yard is located by sheriff’s headquarters, just two blocks from county buildings, main jail and courthouse.

Authorities warned the public to stay away from the area. 

"This is still an active scene and we ask that everyone stay out of the area while we conduct our investigation," San Jose police wrote earlier on Twitter.

Red Cross on donating blood post mRNA injection

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Eeyore — 1 Comment ↓

In other words, the vaccine actually weakens your immune response to Covid19 if you have already recovered from the disease and therefore have the T cells for it. This is established fact with the CDC. Yet NO ONE is being asked to take a T cell test before getting the mRNA injections despite the high likelihood that most places have a 30% or higher rate of infection and recovery. Especially of children.

THIS is why people are so willing to accept the esoteric theories about what might be really going on. Because whatever it is really is or is not, it isn’t science or medicine.

video here

Lynyrd Skynyrd

Winterland 1976

0:00:00​ - Cry for The Bad Man 0:05:26​ - Saturday Night Special 0:11:02​ - Searchin' 0:14:55​ - I Got The Same Old Blues 0:19:24​ - Gimme Back My Bullets 0:23:27​ - Tuesday's Gone 0:31:12​ - The Needle And The Spoon 0:35:55​ - Gimme Three Steps 0:40:30​ - Call Me The Breeze 0:45:55​ - Sweet Home Alabama 0:51:22​ - T For Texas 1:01:06​ - Free Bird

NYT: Say, Democrats have gotten mighty quiet about detained "migrant children," huh?

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

They certainly have, although the New York Times has been slow to recognize it. The New York Post reported on this phenomenon two months ago, specifically in relation to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but also more broadly among House and Senate Democrats. Where they once demanded public hearings and manned the barricades at protests over detention of child migrants, Joe Biden’s allies have suddenly discovered the golden-ness of public silence:

House Democrats, who led an angry charge against the Trump administration’s treatment of migrant children, have taken a much quieter tack since concerns began emerging about conditions at some of the emergency shelters set up by the Biden administration to deal with minors at the southern border.

Where once only Twitter assaults and dressing-downs at House hearings would suffice, Democratic lawmakers are voicing worries privately to administration officials and the small staff at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care. If problems persist, the lawmakers say they call again.

Democrats say the contrast is for good reason: former President Donald J. Trump’s immigration policies were deliberately cruel, devised as a deterrent to would-be migrants, while the Biden administration is trying hard to deal with a bad hand.

This is a nonsense argument, although it’s really the only one House Democrats have to cover their hypocrisy. Trump also inherited “a bad hand” on human trafficking across the southern border, thanks to the previous Barack Obama-Joe Biden administration. They refused to set incentives against illegal border crossings and never bothered to press Mexico into action to prevent it. While the family-separation policies were needlessly cruel, the rest of the Trump incentive structure was reasonable for border security — and had been effective at restraining trafficking.

Biden reversed those incentives from the moment he assumed office. His campaign promised to be more “welcoming” to asylum seekers, which touched off expectations of open borders — a point even some of Biden’s allies raised, to no avail. Eliminating the Mexico First policy on housing asylum seekers further raised the incentives to swarm the border. The result has been and still is suffering on an order of magnitude higher than the previous status quo under Trump. After that became too obvious to ignore, the White House tried to declare the border closed and discouraged people from traveling, but they continued to leave the same incentives in place — and incentives are what matter most.

That’s what makes the silence of the Democratic lambs so hypocritical and infuriating. They raised a huge stink over Trump’s policies, supposedly out of humanitarian concerns. Regardless of Biden’s intent, the results of his policies have been a disaster on every level, especially humanitarian — and suddenly Democrats want to hide behind closed doors while assuring everyone they still care. They care, all right — about their own partisan interests. And the media’s belated notice of this point speaks to their own ideological and partisan interests. One cheer to the Gray Lady for finally noticing, but the Democrats’ silence on this stopped being “news” weeks ago.

Mild COVID-19 cases can lead to antibody protection for life

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — It’s never a good day to find out you have COVID-19, but a new study finds there is likely a silver lining to contracting the virus. Researchers say patients with mild cases of coronavirus still have antibodies protecting them from reinfection nearly a year later. In fact, a team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis believes this protection from COVID will likely last for the rest of their lives.

Researchers explain that initial reports claiming COVID antibodies fade away quickly after an infection did not have all the facts. Their findings reveal that although the number of immune cells making antibodies drops once the patient is healthy, they never totally go away.

“Last fall, there were reports that antibodies wane quickly after infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, and mainstream media interpreted that to mean that immunity was not long-lived,” says senior author Ali Ellebedy, PhD, an associate professor of pathology and immunology, medicine, and molecular microbiology, in a university release.

“But that’s a misinterpretation of the data. It’s normal for antibody levels to go down after acute infection, but they don’t go down to zero; they plateau. Here, we found antibody-producing cells in people 11 months after first symptoms. These cells will live and produce antibodies for the rest of people’s lives. That’s strong evidence for long-lasting immunity.”

Ellebedy adds that COVID antibody production is naturally sky-high while people deal with the virus. After the infection clears, these specialized immune cells (long-lived plasma cells) move to the bone marrow. Once they settle in there, they start churning out low levels of COVID antibodies to help protect against reinfection.

Read the Rest

FBI Launches Investigation After Rand Paul Receives Package With White Powder, Threat Of Violence

The FBI has launched an investigation into a suspicious package that was sent to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Monday that contained a white powder and a message threatening violence.

The package was reportedly a “large envelope” that was sent to Paul’s home in Kentucky from an unknown sender. Outside the envelope was a photo of a beaten-up Paul with what Fox News said was “a gun to his head” and included the message: “I’ll finish what your neighbor started you motherf***er.”

“I take these threats immensely seriously,” Paul wrote on Twitter. “As a repeated target of violence, it is reprehensible that Twitter allows C-list celebrities to encourage violence against me and my family.”

Paul’s remark about “c-list celebrities” appearing to encourage violence is an apparent reference to a tweet from over the weekend.

The Daily Wire reported:

On Sunday, pop singer Richard Marx, who has taken aim at former President Trump in the past, targeted Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) by citing Paul’s neighbor who brutally attacked him, tweeting, “I’ll say it again: If I ever meet Rand Paul’s neighbor I’m going to hug him and buy him as many drinks as he can consume.”

After Marx, who is known for such songs as “Don’t Mean Nothing,” “Satisfied” and “Right Here Waiting,” was criticized for the post, he responded, “You see, Johnny-Bob … unlike your hero/fuhrer now residing down at MaraLoco, I never incited nor even suggested anyone be violent. Certainly not towards the traitor known as Rand Paul. I’m just saying that the fact someone slugged him doesn’t break my heart.”

Paul underwent surgery in 2019 to have part of his lung removed after suffering serious injuries stemming from an attack committed by his Democrat neighbor, Rene Boucher.

“Unfortunately, I will have to limit my August activities. Part of my lung damaged by the 2017 assault had to be removed by surgery this weekend,” Paul said. “The doctors, nurses, [and] staff at Vanderbilt University Medical Center were great. I should be able to return to the Senate in September.”

The Kentucky senator told police that his neighbor “came onto his property and tackled him from behind, forcing him to the ground and causing pain.” The attack left him with six broken ribs, pleural effusion, and, consequently, pneumonia.

Rene Boucher, 59, was arrested in November 2017 after he attacked Paul outside his Bowling Green, Kentucky home. He was reportedly upset after Paul blew some leaves onto his property with his lawnmower. The judge presiding over the case referred to the attack as a “dispute between neighbors” and denied that it was politically motivated.

Paul was threatened with violence in the summer of 2018 when a man called Paul’s office and threatened to kill him and his family.

“Capitol Police have issued an arrest warrant, this man had threatened to kill me and chop up my family with an ax. It’s just horrendous that we have to deal with things like this,” Paul said at the time. “That on top of being attacked personally and having a very serious life-threatening attack on my person and then being shot at, I’ve had a year where it’s becoming more and more aware of we have these real threats out there.”

60 Minutes Runs Explosive Segment Featuring Young Transgender Individuals Who Decided To Reverse Course

On Sunday, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” ran a segment about transgender issues facing today’s young people in America, which featured, in part, transgender individuals who decided to reverse course after taking hormones and undergoing surgery.

The segment featured how transgender activists have pushed back on legislation across the U.S. that aims to protect children from undergoing potentially life-altering medical procedures before they are old enough to understand the ramifications of their decisions. One of the transgender advocates said the fact that so many transgender individuals had decided to de-transition was proof that more resources were needed for trans individuals, not fewer.

Grace Lidinsky-Smith, who decided to transition in her early 20s and later decided to reverse course, said that the amount of questions she was asked by health care professionals prior to her decision to take hormones was minimal.

Lesley Stahl: Did the therapist not question you about how deep the feeling was and what it was stemming from?

Grace Lidinsky-Smith: She didn’t go — really go into what my gender dysphoria might’ve been stemming from. We only did a few sessions.

Lesley Stahl (NARRATION): Because she was over 18 and didn’t need parental consent, she says she merely signed an informed consent form at a clinic and got hormone shots.

Grace Lidinsky-Smith: They asked me, “So, why do you wanna go on testosterone?” And I said, “Well, being a woman just isn’t working for me anymore.” And they said, “Okay.”

Lesley Stahl: So, that was that. You got your prescription for testosterone?

Grace Lidinsky-Smith: Uh-huh. Yup.

Lesley Stahl (NARRATION): Just four months after she started testosterone, she says she was approved for a mastectomy, what’s called top surgery, that she told us was traumatic.

Lesley Stahl: You know, I’m kinda surprised because, based on everything you’ve said up to now, I would’ve thought you’d have a great sense of relief.

Grace Lidinsky-Smith: I started to have a really disturbing sense that like a part of my body was missing, almost a ghost limb feeling about being like, there’s something that should be there. And the feeling really surprised me but it was really hard to deny.

Lesley Stahl (NARRATION):And so she detransitioned by going off testosterone and then went back to the clinic and, she says, complained to the doctor that the process didn’t follow the WPATH guidelines.

Grace Lidinsky-Smith: I can’t believe that I transitioned and detransitioned, including hormones and surgery, in the course of, like, less than one year. It’s completely crazy.

Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper, the first psychologist at the first major youth gender clinic in the U.S., said that she was “greatly concern[ed]” with where “the field has been going.”

“I feel like what is happening is unethical and irresponsible in some places,” Dr. Edwards-Leeper said. “Everyone is very scared to speak up because we’re afraid of not being seen as being affirming or being supportive of these young people or doing something to hurt the trans community. But even some of the providers are trans themselves and share these concerns.”

Other young transgender individuals that “60 Minutes” interviewed said that they felt like they “didn’t get enough pushback on transitioning.”

“I went for two appointments and after the second one I had, like, my letter to go get on cross-sex hormones,” an individual named Garrett said. Garrett went from taking hormones to getting his testicles removed in just three months, and later got a breast augmentation and felt significantly worse afterward.

“I had never really been suicidal before until I had my breast augmentation,” Garrett said. “And about a week afterwards I wanted to, like, actually kill myself. Like, I had a plan and I was gonna do it, but I just kept thinking about, like, my family to stop myself. It kind of felt like how am I ever going to feel normal again, like other guys now?”

The Rest Here

The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

By Nicholas Wade

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel.

In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.

By the end of this article, you may have learned a lot about the molecular biology of viruses. I will try to keep this process as painless as possible. But the science cannot be avoided because for now, and probably for a long time hence, it offers the only sure thread through the maze.

The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.

I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.

A tale of two theories. After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market — a place selling wild animals for meat — in Wuhan. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002, in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This time the intermediary host animal was camels.

The decoding of the virus’s genome showed it belonged a viral family known as beta-coronaviruses, to which the SARS1 and MERS viruses also belong. The relationship supported the idea that, like them, it was a natural virus that had managed to jump from bats, via another animal host, to people. The wet market connection, the major point of similarity with the SARS1 and MERS epidemics, was soon broken: Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected shortly.

Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses. So the possibility that the SARS2 virus had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table.

From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.

Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.

It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”

Virologists like Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued that they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.

A second statement that had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.

Unfortunately, this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.

GRTWT

Havana Syndrome: Are U.S. officials under silent attack?

During the final weeks of the Trump Administration, a senior official on the National Security Council sat at his desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across from the West Wing, on the White House grounds. It was mid-November, and he had recently returned from a work trip abroad. At the end of the day, he left the building and headed toward his car, which was parked a few hundred yards away, along the Ellipse, between the White House and the Washington Monument. As he walked, he began to hear a ringing in his ears. His body went numb, and he had trouble controlling the movement of his legs and his fingers. Trying to speak to a passerby, he had difficulty forming words. “It came on very suddenly,” the official recalled later, while describing the experience to a colleague. “In a matter of about seven minutes, I went from feeling completely fine to thinking, Oh, something’s not right, to being very, very worried and actually thinking I was going to die.”

He fell to the ground before he reached his car, and realized that he was in no condition to drive. Instead, he made his way to Constitution Avenue, where he hoped to hail a taxi. He managed to open the Lyft app on his phone, and ordered a driver, who took him to the hospital. When he arrived at the emergency room, the official thought, I’m probably not walking out of here.

He approached the reception desk. “Are you on drugs?” a doctor asked him.

The official shook his head. He was led to an examination room. Hospital staff found his White House identification card in his pocket, and three cell phones, one of which they used to call his wife. They thought he might be having a stroke, but an MRI ruled it out. Blood tests also turned up nothing unusual. The official, who was in his mid-thirties, had no preëxisting conditions. The doctors were at a loss, but told him they suspected that he had suffered a “massive migraine with aura.”

It took about two hours for his speech to begin to return. When he checked out of the hospital, the next day, he still had a pounding headache, but was soon able to go back to work. Several days later, a colleague called him to discuss suspected cases of the Havana Syndrome, a mysterious ailment that had first affected dozens of U.S. officials in Cuba, and which now appeared to be spreading. The N.S.C. official didn’t think that he was suffering from the Havana Syndrome; it seemed outlandish that someone would be struck while on the grounds of the White House. But, as his colleague described some of the more severe cases that had been reported, it occurred to the official that this might be his problem. “Look, this is probably nothing,” he told his colleague, “but what you described sounds kind of like what happened to me.”

Three years ago, my colleague Jon Lee Anderson and I published a piece in The New Yorker about the first Havana Syndrome incidents among C.I.A. and State Department employees. Beginning in December, 2016, officials described being bombarded by waves of pressure in their heads. Some said they heard sounds resembling an immense swarm of cicadas, following them from room to room—but when they opened a door to the outside the sounds abruptly stopped. A few reported feeling as if they were standing in an invisible beam of energy. The aftereffects ranged: debilitating headaches; tinnitus; loss of vision and hearing; vertigo; brain fog; loss of balance and muscle control. For some, the symptoms went away quickly; for others, they have persisted. The experiences have varied to such an extent that government doctors have struggled to form a coherent diagnosis, and many of the patients have been met with skepticism both inside and outside the government.

One of the most convincing early cases involved a senior C.I.A. officer who had flown to Cuba, in secret, to meet with colleagues there. In her room at the Hotel Nacional, in August, 2017, the officer awoke with a start to a low humming noise and a feeling of intense pressure in her head. She asked a colleague who came to her room if he heard anything, but he did not. A few days later, after she returned to C.I.A. headquarters, she began to have trouble with her eyesight and her balance, making it impossible to read or to drive. At the time, the officer was the highest-ranking member of the C.I.A. to become ill with the syndrome. The incident persuaded Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, to shut down the agency’s station in Havana, and Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, followed suit, pulling U.S. diplomats out of the country. Some government employees, who were uninjured and invested in their assignments, considered the withdrawal an overreaction. The result was confusion, division, and anger.

GRTWT

Is the pandemic over in the U.S.?

Nigeria: Muslims raid Christian home, murder a 21-year-old mother and a 19-year-old man

Time for Biden’s handlers to go hunting for more “white supremacists.”

“Young Mother, 19-Year-Old Christian Killed in Central Nigeria,” Morning Star News, May 21, 2021:

JOS, Nigeria, May 21, 2021 (Morning Star News) – Fulani herdsmen killed the wife and nephew of a Christian in Plateau state, Nigeria in an attack on their home on Thursday night (May 20), sources said.

Jeffrey Moses, 26, said he and his wife, 21-year-old Ladi Jeffrey, and nephew Shadrach Zwewhie, 19, were asleep when armed herdsmen attacked their home at about 9:20 p.m. in Jebbu Miango village, Miango District, Bassa County. Ladi Jeffrey was mother to a 16-month-old baby.

Earlier that day, Fulani herdsmen had trespassed on his farm and issued threats, he said. About five herdsmen forced their way into the house that night, each of them armed, Moses said, adding that he was asleep in his room with their baby while his wife slept in another room.

“I heard gun shots. I woke up and was very weak. I tried standing up but was unable to do so,” Moses told Morning Star News. “The herdsmen shot their guns three times before forcing their way into our house.”

Ladi Moses, instantly killed, was a member of a local Roman Catholic church, as is her husband. Zwewhie, a member of the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA), was taken to a medical clinic where he later died, Moses said.

“I believe those who attacked my family are Fulani herdsmen, because they’ve been responsible for the incessant attacks on our people,” Moses said. “Earlier that day at about 4 p.m., the Fulani had trespassed on our farm, destroying our crops, and threatened to attack us afterwards. We did not take their threat seriously, and we never knew they would attack us that same day.”

Moses, married in April 2019, said police did not arrive until about an hour after the attack and thus could not pursue the assailants.

“The sad thing is that there are soldiers stationed close to our village, but they did nothing to stop the herdsmen,” he said. “The government has not been able to address this issue, and each time we try defending ourselves, soldiers will stop us.”…

Biden Brings in Islamic Activists to Investigate U.S. Military for 'Extremism'

A decade ago, Hina Shamsi was fighting on behalf of the Holy Land Foundation whose leaders had been convicted of providing material support to Hamas.

As the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project, Shamsi, a Pakistani citizen, had fought fiercely for the Islamic terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. “We all must pledge — not one person more in Guantanamo, not in our names,” she recently declared.

But now the Pakistani advocate for Islamic terrorists has a new job: going after our soldiers.

Shamsi (pictured above left) is one of the terror lawyers who appears on a list of partners for the Biden administration's crackdown on "extremism" in the military. The only kind of extremism that Shamsi appears to be an expert on is the Islamic kind and her expertise has been in denying it.

Furthermore, at least as of 2017, Shamsi had described herself as a Pakistan citizen with permanent legal residency in America.

She’s not the only apparent Pakistani citizen tasked by Biden to go after our troops.

Take Faiza Patel, another Pakistani immigrant, who co-wrote an article arguing against designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization. The article claimed that "the Muslim Brotherhood is a religious organization, a political party, and a social service provider" and that it had "disavowed violence decades ago."

That would come as news to Hamas and its other active Jihadist network members.

In another co-written article, Faiza Patel claimed that laws against Sharia were Islamophobic.

Patel has worked for international organizations in Europe, including the International Criminal Tribunal, and was a member of a UN Human Rights Council working group which listed her as a member from Pakistan, not the United States, raising questions about her citizenship.

And yet Shamsi and Patel aren’t the worst of the list of partners for the Biden administration’s Countering Extremism Working Group (CEWG) published by OANN correspondent Jack Posobiec

While Biden's Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had announced the CEWG group to counter supposed "extremism" in the military, the list of CEWG partners contains a lot of Muslim lawyers and activists. In addition to Shamsi, there’s fellow Pakistani ACLU activist: Manar Waheed.

The list includes Wael Alzayat in his role as the CEO of Emgage. The national co-chair and founding member of the Islamic group is Khurrum Wahid who has been described as one of the country’s most prominent terror lawyers and whose clients include an Al Qaeda operative who plotted to kill President George W. Bush and Sami al-Arian who was linked to Islamic Jihad.

Wahid had been placed on a terrorist watch list and Emgage, as counterterrorism researcher Joe Kaufman noted, "holds events at terror-linked mosques”: including one founded by al-Arian.

Emgage's board includes Dhabah ‘Debbie’ Almontaser who was forced out of her old job over t-shirts reading “Intifada NYC”. Nada al Hanooti, Emgage's Executive Director for Michigan, is the daughter of Muthanna al Hanooti, a former CAIR leader who was accused of working for Saddam Hussein and Iraq's intelligence agency.

Is that the kind of extremism expertise that the Department of Defense really needs?

Also on the list of Biden's CEWG partners is Iman Boukadou:, the staff attorney for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).

The ADC has a long history of defending and excusing Islamic terrorism. "I know many people in Hamas. They are very respectable," its former president Hamzi Moghrabi had said. Former ADC president Hussein Ibish called Hezbollah “a disciplined and responsible liberation force” whose members “conducted themselves in an exemplary manner.”

Boukadoum was most recently hard at work fighting for Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who had been convicted of obstruction of justice in a case involving the flow of money to Hamas.

Ashqar ran for president of the Palestinian Authority while awaiting trial in the United States. He had argued that the evidence against him had come from a time when “Hamas was not designated as a terrorist organisation” and boasted that, “they wanted me to testify against my people. I said I'd rather die than betray my commitment to freedom and justice for Palestine."

American military personnel are being put at the mercy of advocates for their worst enemies.

Biden’s DOD radicals have assembled a list of activists who have absolutely no credibility when it comes to extremism. Multiple “partners” for Biden’s Countering Extremism Working Group have appeared at events for CAIR, ICNA, and other terror-linked organizations. Some have appeared at events featuring advocates for Islamic terrorism, sharia, and violence against non-Muslims. They’re the extremists that Americans should be concerned about.

It was not surprising that Biden's CEWG partner list would include multiple personnel from the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center including Heidi Beirich, formerly of the SPLC, currently running her own organization, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which barely has a website.

Or that the only conservative on the list is the First Liberty Institute. FLI's Michael Berry also appears to be the only person on Biden’s list who is qualified for this role as a Lt. Colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve who works as FLI's Director of Military Affairs.

But to Biden, defending Al Qaeda and Hamas terrorists, is the only qualification needed for going after American soldiers. That tells us everything we need to know about Biden’s goals.

Biden's Secretary of Defense Austin falsely claimed that, "this is not about politics or political views." His list of partners makes it abundantly clear that this is entirely about politics.

The list consists almost entirely of organizations and individuals who supported Biden.

And that makes this look even more like a political purge of the military by a radical administration that began its time in office by abusing the military for political purposes, and has made it clear that it intends to eliminate any opposition within the military to its political views.

But it’s striking that a third of Biden’s CEWG partners are Muslim. Especially since the Biden administration isn’t looking for another Nidal Hasan in the hopes of averting another Fort Hood Massacre, but is instead trying to rewrite history to pretend that the greatest threat to our national security comes from Biden’s political opponents rather than from his Islamist backers.

The Obama administration infamously dismantled our counterterrorism programs and replaced them with Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). Biden is dismantling CVE and siccing Islamist activists and their lawyers on the military to implement a ruthless purge of American soldiers.

Witnessing Gitmo lawyers licking their lips at the prospect of bringing the Jihad into the heart of the military against soldiers who bravely served our country but have no defense against being betrayed by their own government is as disheartening to us as it must be to them.

“Did we lose a war?” the ordinary American confronted with this reversal of terror may wonder.

And the answer is, “Yes, we did.”

DeSantis Signs Bill To Fine Social-Media Companies That Censor Politicians

Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill Monday to penalize social media companies that suspend the accounts of politicians or censor certain political content.

“This session, we took action to ensure that ‘We the People’ — real Floridians across the Sunshine State — are guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites,” said DeSantis. “Many in our state have experienced censorship and other tyrannical behavior firsthand in Cuba and Venezuela. If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable.”

“What we’ve been seeing across the U.S. is an effort to silence, intimidate, and wipe out dissenting voices by the leftist media and big corporations. Today, by signing SB 7072 into law, Florida is taking back the virtual public square as a place where information and ideas can flow freely,” Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez said.The law empowers Florida’s election commission to punish tech companies that engage in censorship with financial penalties. It imposes a maximum fine of up to $250,000-per-day fine for “deplatforming” any candidate for statewide office and a $25,000-per-day fine for deplatforming candidates for non-statewide offices. It also allows Floridians the right to file lawsuits against companies that violate the policy and earn compensation for damages.

DeSantis enacted the bill SB 7072 into law after the Florida House passed it 77-38 and the Florida Senate passed it 23-17.

“If social media platforms are found to have violated antitrust law, they will be restricted from contracting with any public entity. That ‘antitrust violator’ blacklist imposes real consequences for Big Tech oligopolies’ bottom line,” a news release from the governor’s office read.

The legislation comes after former President Donald Trump was permanently removed from a number of social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, after he was accused of inciting the Capitol riot in January partially through the use of inflammatory rhetoric on the internet.

In response to social media targeting of conservative speech, new platforms have emerged in the public square and tech marketplace. Parler, which was temporarily banned from the Apple and Google app stores following the Capitol incident, has returned as an increasingly popular alternative to Twitter. Duck Duck Go is an alternative web search browser to Google that purportedly better protects users’ privacy and data. YouTube, which is known to flag or delete videos it deems politically incorrect, has lost some market share to competitor Rumble.